So in writing my previous post about eBay’s trademark bidding, I noticed something interesting: eBay does not rank as highly as one would expect for auction-related keywords in Google. To me, this is somewhat shocking. eBay is synonymous with auctions, even used as a verb (“just eBay that!”), and yet, by looking at Google’s search results, one would now know this. Here are some of eBay’s rankings “online auctions” – #6 “computer auctions” – #9 “auction” – #6 “auctions” – #71 Granted, being on the first page for “online auctions” is nothing to scoff at, but this is eBay! They *are* online auctions. uBid is #1 for this term, though most users have never heard of or used uBid I would imagine. I would guess that eBay is expending no effort at SEO, and uBid is making a major push. However, this points to the vulnerability of Google’s ranking algorithm. I don’t think that anyone would argue that uBid is a more relevant or respected resource than eBay for “online auctions”, which is the fundamental basis for how Google’s algorithm ranks sites: relevance and respect. For the keyword “auctions”, for which eBay ranks on the 7th page, this is nothing less than incorrect, and I cannot fathom how Google’s algorithm is computing that result. Altogether it boils down to the fact that SEO is not dead (despite cries around the web over the years that this is the case), and that eBay, in what might have been misplaced trust in Continue reading…

Save this Post!

Companies suing Google for allowing competitors to place ads triggered by their trademarked keywords is nothing new; Geico famously did so in 2004, followed by Rescuecom, JTS Tax, Jews for Jesus, Cash ‘n Go among others. Some were settled out of court, but generally the judges have ruled in favor of Google. Google’s trademark policy is that competitors may bid on trademark keywords, but they may not use the trademark in their ad creatives. Coke can bid on the keyword Pepsi, HP can bid on the keyword Thinkpad, etc. The argument is that this is analogous to a pizza joint standing out front of another pizza joint down the street handing out coupons on the sidewalk; adversarial, but not illegal, and nobody is confusing the two pizza places or purporting to be the other. If you do a Google search for “wpromote” you will see a handful of competitors all bidding on our trademark. Trademark holders don’t like this for several reasons: They have spent time and money establishing their brand, sometimes decades and many billions of dollars. So in the well-publicized Geico lawsuit, they were not happy at all that they would spend millions on TV ads, only to have people use Google to find the Geico website and potentially end up losing the client to a competitor who would just advertise on Google under the “geico” keyword. To help combat users going to a competitors site (or even a shopping comparison site, or a retailer’s, for example), companies Continue reading…

Save this Post!

Last week, Google announced a change to their AdRank formula pertaining to “top placement” positions (i.e. the banner text spots at the top of the search results page, versus the links down the right side of the page. Not surprisingly, these premium spots above the organic results receive higher click-thru rates and considerably more traffic — albeit at a higher cost — than the links in on the right column of the page. Many users do not even differentiate between the paid and organic results in these spots and simply associate the “ads on the right” with paid links. Anyhow, the change, as announced on Google’s Inside Adwords blog, is a bit cryptic and we received little additional information from our reps over at the Googleplex. This has sparked a bit of debate internally at Wpromote about what exactly will be the net result of these changes. Google’s ambiguous explanation: “The key change to the formula will be how we consider price. Today’s formula considers an ad’s Quality Score and actual cost-per-click (CPC). The improved formula will still heavily weight Quality Score, but instead of actual CPC, it will consider an ad’s maximum CPC.” Here is what we know. Presently, there is a combination of quality score and your CPC that determines whether or not a particular keyword and ad combination is “banner-worthy” as we call it here. This CPC that you pay is a penny more than the cost that it would take to outrank the next highest advertiser. Continue reading…

Save this Post!

In one of my earlier postings attempting to detail my read on how specifically Google so thoroughly has beaten Yahoo! in the business of search, I touched on the power of Google’s broad match technology. Today we look again on this topic. First a little background. “Broad match” is one of the three primary “match types” (the other two are exact match and phrase match) that are used to create Google advertising campaigns. Broad match is very effective in allowing basic keywords to be matched to a wide variety of user search queries, giving advertisers easy access to reach a bigger audience. Sounds great, right? Well, historically it has been pretty darn effective, especially for less sophisticated advertisers that do not have the ability to generate super-comprehensive keyword lists for their campaigns. Originally, broad match worked by helping to match a keyword to related keywords, fixing misspellings, pluralization and other helpful devices. So your keyword “los angeles lawyer” would be triggered by user queries such as “best los angeles lawyer”, “los angeles lawyers”, “lawyers in los angeles”, and other closely related keywords. Last year, Google starting expanding the scope of broad match, using it’s massive knowledge of how users search the web. Continuing the previous example, this meant Google may link you to synonyms such as “attorney” or abbreviations such as “LA”. This is intriguing because a search for “LA attorney” would trigger your keyword “los angeles lawyer” even though at this point there were no overlapping words from the Continue reading…

Save this Post!

Last week, we stumbled upon what appears to be a quietly rolled out development in the Google Adwords ranking algorithm. If you are one of the thousands of Adwords advertisers that regularly do Google searches to confirm your ad’s positioning on key search terms, you may notice some very strange things going on, as our most involved clients and acute account executives found in the last week. Several days ago, I was checking our ad positioning on a small handful of top spending keywords for our internal marketing efforts, such as “online advertising”, “search engine advertising” and “ppc management”. Expecting to see us in the top 1-3 results in the banner as usual, I was shocked to find us in considerably lower positioning, 7-8 in most cases. Quickly logging into our accounts, I saw that our average position that day was what I would expect, around 1-2 in all of the tested keywords. Why would I be seeing such dramatically different results? While I was waiting to hear back from one of our terrific Google Agency Team reps, I tried a few things, including clearing my cookies. I tried the searches again, and we are back at the top where we should have been. What does this mean? Basically, if you repeatedly do the same searches on Google — within the same cookie session or while logged onto a Google account — without clicking on the links coming up top, Google assumes that you aren’t getting search results in the Continue reading…

Save this Post!