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 … Continue reading →

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: … Continue reading →

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 … Continue reading →

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 … Continue reading →

I wrote several weeks ago about the similarities between Google and Microsoft from a power and market share perspective, and this terrific business week article digs deeper into Google and the immense power they have over the Internet and the way that people ultimately find information. Reading it reminds me once again how amazing Google’s growth has been. A couple of highlights, all from this article: 400 million people per day search at Google Google generated $10.6 billion last year, virtually all from little text ads that are inserted alongside search results Google’s $144 billion market value tops that of Time Warner, Viacom, CBS, ad agency giant Publicis Groupe, and the New York Times Co. combined This quote really drives home my point a few weeks ago: “ If this talk of corporate dominance sounds vaguely familiar, it should. As firmly as IBM ruled mainframe computing and Microsoft the personal … Continue reading →