The ever increasing list of features and changes to Google AdWords doesn’t look like it’ll get shorter anytime soon with the recent release of a “related to” section in the sponsored search results.

When certain broad phrases are used in the search engine, not only do adverts from the websites bidding on those keywords appear, but below them other adverts that Google believes are related to the search are now also being shown:

What does this mean to Pay Per Click advertisers? If you don’t bid on broad match keywords then not much, other than more competitors will now appear within the results. According to Google the adverts are being served on “relevant broad match keywords”, so make use of your negative keywords if you don’t want your ads to show within the “related to” section.

Google has built its success on providing people with relevant results to specific keywords that they search with. While this experiment may at first seem like a ittle change, it's another step away from Google being a search engine and another where it tries to interpret what person really mean. With these new "related to" AdWords enhancements and other recent changes at Google, we are in for an interesting time.

If you run a Pay Per Click account and would like an experienced Pay Per Click consultant to go over these changes with you then call Liberty on 029 2076 6467. 

It looks like Google has listened to recent feedback that many Pay Per Click account managers, including ourselves, have passed on regarding the quality of broad match in AdWords. For a while now we have been concerned with the way Google uses broad match keywords as many clients have been appearing for totally unrelated terms, due to Google believing the words were related. An example being a Solicitor client of ours bidding on the broad match keywords “immigration lawyer” and appearing for the search query “homeoffice”.

In the interest of only exposing clients to traffic that is relevant, we have started shying away from broad match and sticking more with “phrase” and [exact] match terms. Either that or spend half our time adding in scores of negative keywords. This might not be needed now, as Google has announced the introduction of ‘modified broad match’ on its blog, here.

By placing a + sign in front of the words, you can now tell AdWords to only show your advert for very closely related searches. The blog post states that “close variants include misspellings, singular/plural forms, abbreviations and acronyms, and stemmings (like “floor” and “flooring”). Synonyms (like “quick” and “fast”) and related searches (like “flowers” and “tulips”) aren't considered close variants”.

This is a big step in the right direction and something we look forward to working with.

A client of ours just received an email with the subject "Google AdWords: Ads stopped running", which looked like it was a warning from Google:

In case the picture is hard to see, the message within the email is:

Hello,

Your Google Adwords Account has stopped running this morning.

Some of the ads have stopped running today (Monday, 12 April 2010).

If you want to get your ad back up and running you need to optimize the campaign to improve the CTR. The link below has some helpful tips, but, in a nutshell, you need to look at your keywords and your ad text. Make sure your keywords are jighly relevant and then make sure that each keyword in the ad group makes sense in terms of the ad text associated with this ad group (usually this means you need to create more ad groups with a smaller number of keywords). Having a tight connection between keywords and ad text helps improve CTR, which should fix your problem. 

Click here to get your ads back up.

Please note: if you do not verify the status of your account and notify us if your ads do not appear online, we cannot help you.

The spelling errors and grammatical issues didn’t really convince us that this was Google and after a few seconds of investigation we were right. When the mouse hovered over the link it tried sending us to adwords.google-rs.com.

Whilst phishing emails like this one certainly aren’t new, they aren’t that common in the Pay Per Click world and this is one to watch out for. This particular client had their account temporarily suspended by Google last week due to “potential unauthorised access to this account”! A coincidence?

TimberTech Products Ltd, a composite garden decking supplier, approached their new website developer in late 2009, seeking assistance with their Google AdWords campaign.

The Pay Per Click advertising was being managed by another company but TimberTech wanted to improve the return on investment. The website developer brought in Liberty to assist in setting up the campaign.

Within a few hours of the Pay Per Click ads being re-worked, the levels of traffic showed a dramatic improvement. In fact, for the exact same daily spend, traffic was up over 50% and the quality of traffic was noticeable improved.

The changes meant that the number of sales enquiries saw a real jump and Liberty was brought in to help manage the campaigns each month to keep the adverts working as hard as they can.

The business has attributed its impressive recent growth to the Google Adverts and is currently seeing a large uplift in monthly sales!

“We would like to say thanks to the team at Liberty for their advice and assistance. Our website enquiries have grown significantly and we are enjoying more sales than ever before. We are more than happy to recommend them to any business needing Pay Per Click advertising management and SEO advice.”

 - Jason Cole, Managing Director, Timbertech Products Ltd

Outsourced Pay Per Click management from only £99 a month

If you run Pay Per Click advertising or outsource this to another agency then why not speak to Liberty? We can reconfigure your campaigns so that they work a lot harder and manage them each month so that your site enjoys the maximum traffic for the minimum spend.

We have a track record in running hugely successful  Pay Per Click advertising campaigns on the Google AdWords and Microsoft Adcenter systems. With our fees starting at only £99 per month (plus VAT) there really is no need to manage your adverts in-house.

Twitter, the popular micro-blog, will soon be introducing an advertising system that allows businesses to place sponsored messages amongst Twitter search results.

Following the very profitable example that Google set with its AdWords system, Twitter will allow third-party advertisers to buy their way into the search results, via a 140 character advert.

According to an article on All Things Digital, from the Wall Street Journal, the social media website will launch the new advertising platform within the first half of 2010.

The report states that “Ads will be tied to Twitter searches, in the same way that Google's original ads were. So a search for, say, 'laptop', may generate an ad for Dell. The ads will only show up in search results, which means users who don't search for something won't see them in their regular Twitterstreams.”

Initially, the advertising will be sold through agencies, while Twitter works on creating a self-serving model. Eventually, the plan is one where anyone with a website can purchase an ad, just like they can on AdWords.

Twitter has long sought a revenue model, especially since becoming one of the most popular websites on the web. Over 50 million tweets are being written every day, yet the business has received criticism as it has been unable to create a profit from this popularity. It is no surprise that they turned to Google for inspiration, as the majority of the multi-billion-dollar revenue that the search engine receives is from the sponsored listings served through its AdWords system.

JW Civils, a leading driveway and patio business in Cardiff, came to Liberty in late January looking for someone to set-up and manage Google AdWords pay per click adverts. The company wanted more enquiries for concrete and tarmac driveways throughout South Wales and believed that advertising on Google could be a cost effective way of getting them.

After setting up a few adverts for the company we checked with them and found out that within a fortnight, they’d already won new business in excess of £10,000! What makes this more impressive is the fact that the amount spent on clicks was yet to break £40! In fact, the return on the investment is currently running at 280:1.

The huge return has meant that the business is now looking to advertise more online and try and get their website to rise in the natural rankings of the search engines too. “I am delighted” commented owner, Jason Wilcock.

Competitively priced, professionally managed Pay Per Click advertising

These types of results aren't that rare. Pay per click advertising can bring in instant traffic and enquiries for very little investment, though to generate a ROI as high as this, they should be managed by a company that understands the system.

You can outsourced the hassle of creating and running PPC campaigns from only £99 (+ VAT) a month. Using Liberty Marketing means your account will be run by an experienced online advertiser who holds the Qualified Google Advertising Professional certificate.

Interested in exploring Google AdWords? Then call us on 029 2076 6467 to find out more

Even though the website for My Branded Merchandise was launched only four weeks ago, it has already issued quotes in excess of £130,000 and started making thousands of pounds worth of sales. These figures are amazing when you consider the amount spent on clicks has yet to break the £100 mark!

This exceptional return on investment has been due to the Pay Per Click advertising campaigns that we set up on the Google Adwords system. We created and now manage a number of targeted adverts that bring in a lot of high quality traffic to the site for a very small investment.

Instant, low-cost, high-quality traffic

Within hours of the site being launched, it started receiving visitors and within a day it started to receive enquiries and requests for quotations.

A few of the enquiries so far have included:

- A central London advertising agency that wanted branded slippers for a client
- A pharmaceutical company that needed branded mugs
- A council that needed their logo on USB memory sticks
- A software company that wanted branded pens to hand out at a conference

My Branded Merchandise is rare in the promotional products industry, as it is a website that can take orders and process payments online. Most competing websites are unable to do this due to the complexities of the order and personalisation process.

Click here to visit the website.

Outsourced Pay Per Click management from only £99 a month

If you are interested in Pay Per Click advertising, then speak to us about setting up and managing campaigns on your behalf. Your account will be run by an experienced online advertiser that holds the Qualified Google Advertising Professional certificate. Our services start at only £99 per month (plus VAT) so there really is no need for you to spend lots of time and energy learning Pay Per Click and running campaigns in-house.

The Lincoln House Hotel is a stylish and well respected bed and breakfast on the outskirts of Cardiff city centre. The management of the hotel approached Liberty Marketing in early 2009 looking to increase the number of enquiries and bookings, which had been falling since the start of the economic downturn. Together we agreed on an online marketing and search engine optimisation strategy which could be rolled out over the course of the year.
 
How did we improve their online marketing?
 
SEO advice & copywriting - The hotel was having a new website designed so we helped by advising on keywords to target and re-wrote elements of their site so that the chosen keywords were used in a stronger way.
 
Pay Per Click advertising - A small Pay Per Click advertising campaign was set up on the Google Adwords system to bring in quick traffic and enquiries at a low cost, while the SEO elements were being worked on.
 
Advertising advice & link building - We started reviewing other websites in the travel and accommodation industry to see which were worth advertising on and which would be useful to seek inbound links from. This was done so that the search engines take the site more seriously as well as to bring in quality traffic.

How has this helped the Lincoln House Hotel?
 
Online marketing has now become a core part of the hotel's marketing strategy. The search engines are paying attention to the site a lot more than before, with Google now showing it on the first page for keywords such as "bed and breakfast Cardiff", which it used to be on the 3rd page for. This has meant that website traffic has been rising month on month and the site now receives a few thousand visitors each month.
 
"We would like to take this opportunity to thank the staff at Liberty Marketing Ltd for all the work you have done promoting our web site. During the deepest recession this country has ever had we have had an increase in enquiries and bookings and have maintained our turnover of previous years" - Kathy Howard, Lincoln House Hotel

Here are five tricks used by the more unscrupulous internet marketing firms. Swindles such as these have been going on since the dawn of the internet and while some of them are just a cheeky way of getting a few pounds out of your marketing budget, some of them could cost you thousands and potentially cause long-term harm to your website.

Each of these is a scam in use today and is one that businesses we deal with have been caught out on in the past. We are highlighting them here so that you can see the types of tricks that exist and can hopefully spot them before handing over your cash.

Scam #1 - “We’ll put you top of Google for 10 of your keywords for only £200 a month”

This is a pay per click scam that has become pretty popular over the past couple of years, with a number of businesses we know falling for it, to their later regret. On the face of it, the offer seems like a good one: A company calls you saying they will put your website in the sponsored listings on Google and guarantees that your site will appear on the first page for only £200 a month. What they don’t tell you is that the search terms are ones that are rarely used so are cheap to bid on. For example, if you were an IFA that works nationally then bidding on the keyword “pension advice” would be expensive, but bidding on “independent pension advice in South Wales” wouldn’t be. These pay per click companies will bid on keywords like the latter so that not that many clicks happen, and when they do, the cost is minimal. Out of the £200, you may only receive a few pounds worth of clicks, with the company pocketing the other £190 or so as a monthly management fee.

We have also seen one company that doesn’t stop there. They will charge you an additional £50 set-up fee which they say is mandatory as it’s charged by Google. Whilst it is true that Google does charge an Adwords set-up fee, it is actually only £5, and it gets refunded out of your first few clicks anyway.

How can you avoid this scam? If anyone cold calls you offering pay per click advertising then perhaps it’s better not to sign up over the phone. Instead, take their details, stick them into a search engine, and have a look to see if they are associated with this type of con. If it looks genuine then find out whether they let you bid on the more competitive keywords or whether they just let you choose from low level ones.

Scam #2 - “We’ll submit your site to hundreds of search engines for only £10”

One of the oldest online marketing scams and one of the most pointless. The first thing you should be aware of is that there are only three main search engines (Google, Yahoo! and Bing) and they take up over 95% of all search queries made in the UK. Submitting a website to any others is a worthless exercise.

The next thing you need to know is that submitting a site to a search engine can potentially do more harm than good. For a long time it has been widely accepted within the online marketing world that search engines prefer to find websites via inbound links. It is believed that search engines will sooner show a website they find on their own, via another website, than one they are force fed through a submission.

If you have a new site then to get indexed, all you need is one link from a website that is popular with the search engines and your site will start showing in results pages within a matter of days or weeks.

There is a variation on this scam where companies try to get on-going money out of you by offering to re-submit your site regularly. Even if the above wasn’t true then this additional service is a complete waste of time as once the search engines know your site exists and have crawled it, they place you within their database, something they don’t need to be asked to do over and over again.

Scam #3 - “We guarantee to get you #1 on Google”

No-one can promise you the first position on Google. There are hundreds of factors that search engines use to determine the search results, many of which aren’t known to people outside of Google. If someone is making guarantees then it is highly likely that one of two things are happening. They may be offering to optimise your site for keywords that are of a very low competition level (much as the pay per click scam, above), or, more worryingly, there may be something dodgy going on.

Black hat techniques, such as cloaking and keyword stuffing, are used by some SEO companies to trick search engines into ranking a website. Whilst these often work in the short term, they can actually damage your website in the long-term. When the search engines discover that these techniques have been used they can penalise, and even ban your website from the search results. Don’t think it can’t happen to you either, as BMW once had their website disappear from Google thanks to some black hat work, and if it can happen to a company of that size, then it can happen to anyone.

Scam #4 - “We will give you 1000 links for only £9.99”

Whilst inbound link building is an important part of search engine optimisation, the links do need to come from quality, relevant websites. Buying links in bulk, through companies that have automated link submission systems will never bring in links from good websites in relevant fields.

The links will most likely come from spammy directories that no person and no search engine is ever going to bother with. Not only will the links be completely worthless but they could highlight to the search engines that something dodgy is going on and pose harm to your existing rankings.

Scam #5 - “We will build you a high ranking sales page on our site”

Whilst micro sites and separate sales pages can work for businesses there is one fairly common trick that should be avoided. The company offers to build a one-off page, branded with your logo, optimised for your keywords, and hosted on their business directory site. This sounds good as there are no hosting or web development fees for you, but what it lacks is control. The page is a part of their site, not yours, so your monthly fee is paying them to work on improving the ranking of a website that doesn’t belong to you.

If you ever decide that you no longer want the page then you are left with nothing, and they are left with a valuable asset that they can easily sell to one of your competitors. If you decide that coming up high on the search engines is a goal for your business then it is probably wiser to work on improving your site rather than someone else’s.

This week Microsoft has decided to do something about click fraud and has filed a lawsuit claiming $750,000 in damages. The defendants are a Canadian family who are alleged to have run a scam which led to a large number of false clicks being placed across the Microsoft Pay Per Click advertising network.

The fraud used automated programs which entered search terms onto the Microsoft search engine (formerly Live Search, now Bing). These programs then clicked on the highest paying ads so that the daily budgets were run down and the adverts would soon stop showing. This allowed the lower paying adverts (used by the fraudsters) to rise up to the top.

Whilst $750,000 is petty cash for a company the size of Microsoft, the software firm hopes that the lawsuit will make a statement and show the price of click fraud, warning off other would-be scammers.

In an interview with the New York Times, Tim Cranton, associate general counsel for Microsoft, said “We have decided to become more active in the commercial fraud area on the enforcement side. The theory is you can change the economics around crime or fraud by making it more expensive.”

The investigation started after Microsoft received several complaints from car insurance advertisers saying that they had seen unusual increases in traffic from their Pay Per Click ads. Keywords such as "auto insurance quote" were being searched far more frequently and the adverts were receiving much higher click through rates.

Microsoft claims that Eric Lam, one of the three people named in the lawsuit, had his own Pay Per Click advertising in place for the insurance keywords, directing traffic through to his site where he would collect a visitors info in order to sell it on to insurance companies. Microsoft believes that Lam made around $250,000 from the scam, while it had to refund $1.5m to advertisers that received the false clicks.

Other search engines that offer Pay Per Click advertising have also noticed problems with click fraud, and have often fought back. In 2004, Google filed a successful suit that won the company $75,000 from a webmaster who was using fake traffic to increase his Adsense earnings.