If we had to choose, most would choose Not to have to drive the base trim of a four door sedan if they could also choose a custom sports car.

or

We are a nation that loves to tweak the products in our life.  The vehicles we drive, our homes, our clothes.  We take the basic products we own and personalize them to fit our personalities and needs and often times we make those products better.  We also have no shame about taking a good idea about a customization that someone else made and doing the same with our own products.  Even great original and innovative products like the iPhone or Tivo have websites devoted to “Jailbreaking” them in order to customize them.  We are a world of tinkerers – despite the voiding of warranties.

Some technologies like software acknowledge that they are merely version 1 and use open source code that allows users to “crowd source” better ways to use it.  Other online software technologies use APIs (Application Programing Interfaces) that allow users to use other software (usually custom software) to use the software the way that works best for them.

The same thought processes that went into making a custom chopper can also be used in our online lives (more…)

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Short Cuts.  Sometimes they pay off, sometimes they don’t.  Quite often when I use my car’s GPS the “short” way seems to the most congested and slowest way.  The same can also be true in search marketing.

We have discovered a couple of instances of how abbreviations have been a problem for some of our clients in the last couple of weeks, both in PPC and SEO. (more…)

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Image from "Google Ad Innovation: Enhanced CPC" Video

Last week, AdWords released a new automatic bidding feature called Enhanced CPC which…

“…dynamically raises or lowers your Max. CPC bids to acquire more conversions at or below your current CPA.”

The fact that Enhanced CPC automatically raises and lowers bids in order to improve conversion data led to some initial confusion between this new feature and the AdWords Conversion Optimizer.

In a recent post, I detailed all the similarities and differences between Enhanced CPC and the CPA model.  One of the similarities is that both systems take into account certain “likelihood of converting” metrics for each individual search query.  And one such metric is the relevance of a particular broad-matched search query to the account keyword.

Although Enhanced CPC does sound like a useful tool that offers a bit more control than the Conversion Optimizer, the release of this new feature sparks a broader question for Google: Why not go a step further? Why not bring the “likelihood of converting” metric for broad-matched search queries into the main campaigns settings section for all advertisers?

(more…)

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Last week, there was some buzz in the SEM industry about the new AdWords bidding feature called Enhanced CPC.  Enhanced CPC is defined by Google as a new automatic bidding system that…

“…dynamically raises or lowers your Max. CPC bids to acquire more conversions at or below your current CPA. If it estimates a particular auction is more likely to convert than the average auction for that keyword, it increases the Max. CPC bid. Conversely, if it estimates a particular auction has a relatively low chance of resulting in a conversion, it lowers the bid to reduce the cost of a potential click from that auction.”

This description (specifically the part about automatically raising and lowering maximum bids with the ultimate goal of improving conversion data) sounds really familiar.  Isn’t this what the Conversion Optimizer (CPA) feature does?

(more…)

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Originally rolled out in May 2010 only to advertisers in the UK and Canada, the Google AdWords broad match type modifier capability was finally made available globally in July.  And now I am completely ready to fully welcome it into the “match type” family.

Historically, there have only been three main match types: broad, phrase, and exact.  In 2006, Google came out with a variation on the broad match type (called the “expanded broad match”) which was basically a way to expand the reach of broad match keywords to include all sorts of random phrases that Google claimed were “synonyms.”

The way to protect against the dangers of untargeted broad-matched search queries was to make SERIOUS use of negative keywords to restrict certain streams of unwanted traffic.  However, with the modified broad match type, Google gives us another tool to manage our broad match keywords.

Here’s how it works: (more…)

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