Our friends from Google stopped by the JumpFly offices yesterday and we had a long discussion on the AdWords Quality Score process. So, this information is straight from the source. I’m only addressing the Quality Score and Landing Page relationship today, and will leave the other important aspects of Quality Score for other articles. Trust me, there is a lot to know when it comes to learning about Google AdWords Quality Score.

First, it is important to understand that there are actually two separate Google AdWords Quality Scores: QS1 & QS2

The first Quality Score, QS1, is the score to see if the keyword is even qualified to show. In the Q1 score, the quality of the landing page is factored into this algorithm. The biggest factors being relevant and original content, how you intend to use a visitor’s personal information, and navigability. Mostly, Google is trying to eliminate the type of poor quality websites that have shown a history of consistently providing a poor user experience from advertising on AdWords.

Once the Q1 score is factored and the keyword is able to enter the auction, the process moves along to the Q2 score.

The 2nd Quality Score (QS2) determines AdRank and CPC. I could go into great detail on all of the aspects of this very important Quality Score, however for this topic it is important to note that landing page quality is absolutely NOT a factor in QS2.

This was sure news to us, and I’m sure many of you might also find this to be unbelievable, however it is true. We spent a great deal of time talking about this and even watched a nice PowerPoint presentation to back it all up.

Of course, this new information directly contradicts some of Google’s online help documents. For example, on the Landing Page and Site Quality Guidelines page it says:

Furthermore, following our site guidelines will help improve your landing page quality score. As a component of your keywords’ overall Quality Scores, a high landing page quality score can affect your AdWords account in three ways:

Decrease your keywords’ cost-per-clicks (CPCs)
Increase your keyword-targeted ads’ position on the content network
Improve the chances that your placement-targeted ads will win a position on your targeted placement

So, what does this all really mean?

Well, it doesn’t change the fact that a well optimized webpage that is focused on a particular keyword will definitely help convert that visitor. It doesn’t change the fact that a landing page that falls short of Google’s initial Landing Page Quality guidelines might not even trigger the keyword.

It does mean that no matter how many times you stuff your keyword into a webpage, or change the keyword density, it will not help lower your cost per click for that keyword at Google AdWords. That, I’m afraid, is determined by other factors involved in QS2.

The bottom line here is that a well designed and focused landing page is a very useful and much needed aspect of any Sponsored Search campaign. Nothing will change that fact. All this simply means is that your groovy new landing page is not going to influence the price you pay per click for that keyword.

The Keyword Tool at Google AdWords

I use Google’s Keyword Tool for a large majority of keyword research now.  Yes, services like Keyword Discovery or Word Butler will give us a longer list of long-tail keywords, but according to Google, bigger is not always better in a new campaign.

Google’s Keyword Tool has been improved greatly over the last few months.  We now get very detailed search volume numbers - be sure to change the match type of your results to “Exact” before taking those numbers seriously.

They have also fixed a problem they were having a couple of months ago where they were randomly presenting terms that were not as relevant (called “Additional Keywords to Consider”) before the relevant terms.  That has been fixed and we now see the Related Keywords first on every search.  They have also fixed little annoyances like the scrolling and the ability to download all the terms at once.

So, how is the new Search-based Keyword Tool different?

It’s main difference is that instead of taking your suggested words, Google will now go look at your website and provide suggested keywords based on its content. 

There are  a few new features that make this tool an interesting addition to our arsenal of research tools here at JumpFly:

1. A magnifying glass icon takes you straight to Google Insights for that term.

2. Ad/Search Share tells you how your ad is showing up for that search term

3. We can filter the results by search volume, competition and suggested bid.

I am disappointed that the search volume numbers are apparently from the broad match search volume - not nearly as useful as the existing keyword tool that allows you to change that to exact match for more accuracy.  I also feel that I get a much larger and comprehensive list when I use the Google Keyword Tool.  However, if we are looking for a single term or set of terms, this tool lets us narrow things down quite a bit and may help uncover some valuable new keywords.

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1. Researching Starts Early: 31% of consumers planned to start shopping before Halloween, and 57% are researching right now, before Thanksgiving.

2. Research is Increased Due to Economy: 43% of consumers say they plan to spend more time this year shopping and researching gifts because of the state of the economy.

3. Online Research is King:54% of people go online to research than go to the store to buy, 49% research online and purchase online and another 28% research online, go to the store to check out the products and then go back online to actually buy the products.

4. The Internet is Key Influencer of Holiday Purchases: 86% of users will use the Internet to plan their holiday shopping and 63% of users plan on paying attention to advertising while planning or doing holiday shopping.

5. Post Holiday Sales Are Important: 63% of consumers say they plan on taking advantage of holiday sales.

A few other key nuggets of information, online shopping will gear up right on Cyber Monday, which is the first Monday after Thanksgiving, or December 1st for 2008. It continues to climb until right before Christmas.

And what are consumers looking for when they are online? 86% of users are looking for and plan on taking advantage of price discounts and sales, while another 75% of consumers are looking to taking advantage of free shipping. What does that mean for you? Unless you are the only player in your market, you better be offering some kind of special like a discount or free shipping or you are going to miss out on customers, plain and simple. Now is a great time to adjust your pay-per-click (PPC) advertising ad copy to reflect any available incentives.

The holidays are coming, so be ready. Plan now because waiting even a bit longer will be too late.

About Nikki

Wikipedia defines Cost Per Conversion as an advertising and marketing term, describing the cost of acquiring a customer, typically calculated by dividing the total cost of an advertising campaign by the number of conversions. The definition of “conversion” varies depending upon the situation; it is sometimes considered to be a lead, a sale, or a purchase.

What is a Good Cost Per Conversion?

One question that will typically arise when talking about cost per conversion is: what is a good cost per conversion? Is it $5? Is it $10? Is it 20$? Or perhaps a good conversion is measured by a percentage of spend as it relates to your average sale value — so is 5% a good ratio between pay-per-click (PPC) advertising spend and revenue generated? Is 10%? Or perhaps even 20%? There is no real hard and fast answer to this, but many of our clients here at JumpFly like to use 10% as a solid measuring stick, in case you were looking for a typical ratio. So if you know your average order value is $100, you would look to get your conversion costs around $10 per order.

However, there are other factors that you should consider before deciding upon an acceptable cost per conversion. For example, how much is a new customer actually worth? How many times does a customer order from you within a year? If you know that most of your customers just order from you once and they rarely, if ever, order from you again, then you can use a flat 10% of average order value as a good benchmark for your conversion cost goal. But if you know the average customer orders from you 3 times a year, 5 times a year, or even more, then you really should factor that in to your cost per conversion goals. You may be short-changing your growth if you don’t consider what the total true value of a new customer is worth. You may be willing to push that conversion cost ratio to 20% of average order value, for example, if you know the average new customer orders at least twice from you within a year.

What is the Value of a New Customer? 

The value of a new customer is different for everyone, so you should look at your own average order value and the average number of purchases made by a typical customer before you make that final decision on what your cost per conversion goals are.

What is a new customer worth, especially in these tough economic times? Only you can decide for your business, but they might just be more valuable than you think.

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There is definitely no shortage of cool tools designed to make Internet Marketing easier, and our friends at Google AdWords certainly have their own fair share of these tools available for your use. Two of these tools that I find myself using more and more are Google Trends and Google Insights for Search.

Google Trends has the ability to show you historical search data for keywords, as well as the popularity for these terms across geographic regions, cities, and languages. It’s quick, it’s easy, and it provides a nice way to see seasonality and other trending factors for your search terms.

Google Trends for Websites, announced last week, not only provides traffic data for popular websites, it also compares and ranks site visitation across different regions, and related websites and searches. I have found this tool useful for evaluating potential websites for placement targeting, as well as finding other optional websites and search terms related to the websites users. Unfortunately, less popular websites with low traffic volume and those that have chosen to not be indexed by Google through the use of the robots.txt exclusion file, simply do not provide enough data to make this tool very useful and will result in the message: “Your websites - do not have data to display”.

Google Insights for Search provides a little more flexibility and functionality than Trends, along with some interesting additional features. For example, Google Insights for Search not only provides volume patterns over time, it also provides top related and rising searches. You can compare this data by different locations, time ranges, and search terms. You can even see a map of your selected regions with hot spots showing search activity in those areas. I prefer to use this tool over Google Trends for search, since it provides much more detailed information.

For example, I have a client who does “basement waterproofing.” By doing a quick search in trends, I was able to see that historically during the 4th quarter search volume for this phrase drops dramatically. Since I can see the trend going back as far as 4 years, it is safe to say that he will experience the same drop in traffic during this time period.

On the same note, I was able to determine that this particular search phrase generates a substantial increase in search volume during the 2nd quarter of each year. With this in mind, we can anticipate this spike in traffic and consider its effect when developing pay-per-click (PPC) advertising strategies.

Since my client’s Google AdWords campaign is regionally targeted, I used Google Insights to compared the trending on “basement Waterproofing” in his location to the rest of the United States. Also, by selecting his region in the drop down, I was then able to see hot spots indicating higher search volumes on the local map.

Google Trends and Google Insights for Search are just two of the many tools that JumpFly PPC Account Managers use to help optimize ROI. A well thought out keyword strategy is just one of the many skills a qualified PPC account manager brings to the table. Contact a professional PPC Management Company today about how these tools can be used to benefit your next campaign.

In this article, I am addressing the Quality Score used during a Google Search. 

Google’s AdWords Quality Score is used to determine how relevant your ad is to a visitor searching on a given term.  Google has developed, over time, algorithms to help them present the most relevant results to visitors based on many historical performance factors and on existing relevance factors.

In their quest to present the most relevant results to their visitors, Google rewards high quality ad / keyword combinations with higher positions and lower costs.

When a search query is performed there are two steps. 

1. The first page bid + your keyword (including match type) are used to determine if you are eligible to be shown on a particular search phrase.  In other words – “Are you In the Game?” 
   • The “first page bid” is an estimated metric that exists in your account with each keyword and is only displayed if your particular bid does not equal or exceed the bid estimate.  When Quality Score is used to calculate the first page bid, it does not consider your ad copy or the search query itself. 
2. Once you are eligible, your Quality Score + your Max CPC are used to determine where your ad will be positioned on the page – “Ad Rank” and how much you will be charged for the click – “Actual Cost Per Click (CPC)”.

Quality score is calculated at the Keyword level and is affected by:

• The relevance of the keyword and the ad copy to the search phrase
• The Historical Click Through Rate (CTR)
  • CTR in your current account
  • CTR of the keyword throughout all accounts
  • CTR of any account using your URL in the ads
  • CTR in your account in the geographic region you are targeting
• The Quality of your Landing Page

The algorithm takes into consideration the effect ad position has on CTR and adjusts the importance accordingly.

It is important to note that quality score is used differently within placements on the content network and we will discuss that next week.

If you’d like more information on the Quality Score, check out Google’s Improvements to Ads Quality Post or contact a professional PPC Management Company.

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How did this happen and how can you prevent it from happening to you?

While we’re not 100% positive how exactly the perpetrators got a hold of the client’s Google AdWords login and password in this particular case, here’s how you can protect yourself:

1. Don’t Get Caught by Phishing Emails (three examples of Phishing emails are at the bottom of this Blog): if you get an email that looks like it’s from Google, and requests that you click a link within the email to login, DO NOT click the link. Phishing emails are emails that are web forgery designed to trick you into sharing logins, passwords, personal or financial information. They look official, but are devious. As a general rule, you should never click a link within an email and login to your account. Always open a browser window and type in the desired URL or use bookmarks.

2. Change your password: if you’ve never changed your password before, now is a great time. I know it’s difficult to remember all those passwords, but it’s a better alternative to getting scammed. We’ve started changing our passwords here at JumpFly on a monthly basis.

3. Hire an Experienced PPC Management Company: then you can forward any emails that look like they are from Google AdWords, Yahoo Search Marketing or Microsoft adCenter to your account manager and not have to deal with it at all.

Three Google Phishing Emails that are making the rounds:

~~~~~~ Phishing Scam Email #1 - Start ~~~~~~
From: adwords-noreply@google.com
Subject: Your AdWords Google Account is stopped

This message was sent from a notification-only email address that does not accept incoming email. Please do not reply to this message.

Dear Google AdWords Customer,

Please sign in to your account at http://adwords.google.com/select/login , and update your billing information.

Your account will be reactivated as soon as you update your payment information.

Your ads will show immediately if you decide to pay for clicks via credit or debit card. If you decide to pay by direct debit, we may need to receive your signed debit authorization before your ads start running, depending on your location.

If you choose bank transfer, your ads will show as soon as we receive your first payment.

We look forward to providing you with the most effective advertising available.

Sincerely,

The Google AdWords Team
~~~~~ Phishing Scam Email #1 - End ~~~~~

~~~~~ Phishing Scam Email #2 - Start ~~~~~

From: reactivation@google.com
Subject: The Google AdWords Team request you to update your
billing information

Dear Google AdWords Customer,

Your ads have stopped running because we were unable to process your billing information. We will reactivate you account after you update your billing information. In order to reactivate your account, please sign it to your account at http://adwordsgoogle.com/select/login, and update your billing information. Once your account is reactivated and your billing information has been processed, any your ads and campaigns can begin running immediately on Google.

You will not be asked to submit your billing information every time you create a new ad or campaign. If your payment has been declined and you’d like to resubmit the same credit card information, you may also do so by clicking the Retry card button on your Billing Preferences page. After updating your credit card information (regardless of whether or not you use a different card), it can take up to 24 hours before your ads start running again. You also have the option of providing a backup credit card to help ensure that your ads run continuously in the case that your primary payment method fails.

Sincerely,

The Google AdWords Team
~~~~~ Phishing Scam Email #2 - End ~~~~~

~~~~~ Phishing Scam Email #3 - Start ~~~~~
From: reactivation@google.com
Subject: Our programme terms have changed.

Dear AdWords Customer,

As part of our ongoing efforts to improve the Google AdWords programme for advertisers and users, we have updated our Terms and Conditions.

Please review the new Terms and Conditions below, then indicate your acceptance.

Yes, I accept the Terms and Conditions. [LINK]

This message was sent from a notification-only email address that does not accept incoming email. Please do not reply to this message.

~~~~~ Phishing Scam Email #3 - End ~~~~~

More about Nikki

More from Google about avoiding phishing

Or you can run a PPC campaign with Google AdWords, or Yahoo Search Marketing, or MSN AdCenter, and show your ads to precisely those people who are already looking for your product or service! Obviously, there are other reasons why you wan to run newspaper ads or television campaigns, but PPC advertising really should be a part of your marketing efforts. Yes, there is an expense involved, but that’s true of any type of advertising, and I’m hard-pressed to find any other type of advertising that is more directly focused on the exact type of customer you want for a business. By putting a keyord term or search phrase into a search box, these folks are looking for you so you should be doing whatever you can to help them find you — and that means running an online pay per click campaign.

Of course, at JumpFly we have a vested interest in pay-per-click advertising because our business is to help others manage their ppc campaigns, but we also run our own PPC campaigns because we believe in the value of it and we have seen excellent new partnerships and clients result directly from our own use of pay-per-click marketing. We’re always looking for new customers, too. If you’ve been hesitant or unsure about using pay per click marketing for your business, I encourage you go give it a try. Even if you don’t want or need JumpFly’s services, we have seen such incredible results with other business owners that I encourage you to at least give it a try. Your holiday sales figures might turn out much better than you hoped for if you do.

Learn more about Jack

The blog states, “… after four months of review, including discussions of various possible changes to the agreement, it’s clear that government regulators and some advertisers continue to have concerns about the agreement. Pressing ahead risked not only a protracted legal battle but also damage to relationships with valued partners. That wouldn’t have been in the long-term interests of Google or our users, so we have decided to end the agreement.”

In response, Yahoo! said it was disappointed by Google’s decision and maintained that the abandoned partnership would have been beneficial for everyone. Yahoo! just lost out on hundreds of millions of dollars in additional annual revenue that would have resulted from the deal. Yahoo!’s statement also said that they are, “disappointed that Google has elected to withdraw from the agreement rather than defend it in court.”

Several analysts speculate that losing the Google deal will make Yahoo! more likely to revisit a possible deal with, or outright buyout from Microsoft. Details of the Google-Yahoo! partnership put up significant barriers to a Microsoft buyout - barriers that no longer remain. Yahoo!’s stock price finished up today despite the DOW plunging 486 points, likely due to investor speculation and hopes for renewed buyout potential. We’ll see how this plays out, but I’m confident that Microsoft execs are talking about this situation as I type. Tic toc. Tic toc. Time will tell if Microsoft will come back to the table. In the meantime, Google continues to expand their search dominance.

Learn about Brad

As you might know, click through rate (CTR) is arguably the most significant component of Quality Score, and ads in higher positions tend to earn better CTR than ads that display in lower positions. Google decided that to accurately calculate the Quality Scores, the “influence of ad position on CTR be taken into account and removed from the Quality Score.”

As a result, Google has now updated the portion of the Quality Score algorithm that accounted for ad position. It is their belief that this new adjustment will result in a more accurate Quality Score and ensure that ads compete fairly for position based on their quality and bid, while rewarding high-quality advertisers with better ad positions.

In the past, here at JumpFly, we have certainly seen the advantage of placing some clients’ new keywords in prominent positions to start, and then pull them down later based on performance. The advantage of the increased CTR from the higher initial positioning would work to their advantage down the road. From the sound of this latest update, this particular strategy may no longer be necessary. It will be interesting to see.

The second update going live today is an “improvement” in the way Google determines which ads show in the prominent yellow region directly above the search results. Google believes that given the prominence of these positions that it is especially important for ads to be high quality. Therefore, to appear above the search results, ads must meet a certain quality threshold.

You may have noticed that sometimes Google chooses not to display any ads in this position. Previously, if the ad with the highest Ad Rank did not meet the necessary quality threshold, they would not show any ads in these positions. With the new update, Google will now allow an ad that meets the quality threshold to actually jump over an ad in a higher position and be displayed in this prominent position. Again, quality plays a very important roll in being able to show in higher positions.

There is no doubt that these new algorithm changes by Google will cause some ads to experience a change in position, spend, and/or performance. Changes in Google’s ranking algorithms can affect even the most stable Google AdWords PPC account. Talk to a professional PPC Management Company today about how this recent update might affect your Google AdWords account.

What is Click Fraud & Why Does it Exist?

Click fraud is a scheme that takes advantage of PPC advertising programs like Google AdWords, Yahoo! Search Marketing and Microsoft adCenter. One of the more common scams involves a company developing a fraudulent website and then participating in programs like Google’s AdSense. Criminals often use software “hitbots” or employ boiler-rooms of low-wage employees from other countries to generate clicks on their own ads, and then collect commission from PPC advertising providers.

Click Forensics Research Indicates Ongoing Click Fraud

• The overall industry average click fraud rate was 16% for Q3 2008. However, the click fraud rate among top-tier search-sites like Google and Yahoo was lower.

• The average click fraud rate of PPC advertisements appearing on search engine content networks, including Google AdSense and the Yahoo Publisher Network, was 27%.

• The greatest percentage of click fraud originating from countries outside North America came from Russia (5%), France (5%) and the U.K. (4%).

What is Google Doing about Click Fraud?

I frequently focus on Google AdWords, as they are the PPC leader and the main concern of most PPC advertisers. Google already has powerful prevention techniques in place to detect invalid clicks and they will not charge advertisers for these clicks. Click here to learn how Google detects invalid clicks.

In fact, Google AdWords advertisers can run a Campaign Performance or Account Performance report to see the number and percentage of clicks that have been classified as invalid and automatically filtered from their accounts. This information is fairly interesting. When viewing this data for our JumpFly Google AdWords Account, I can see that Google identified 13% of our overall traffic from last month as fraudulent. The majority of invalid clicks were detected from our exposure to image ads on the content network, where Google identified 46% of the traffic as invalid.

Click fraud represents a reasonable concern for PPC advertisers, but Google and Yahoo are already doing a great deal to prevent fraudulent activity and refund advertisers when applicable. Additionally, using free tools provided by Google AdWords or 3rd party software can greatly assist advertisers in further identifying and eliminating potentially invalid clicks, a topic that I will further explore next time.

View common click fraud related concerns addressed by Google.

Learn more about Brad

Yahoo Minimum Bids Increasing

Yahoo has been periodically raising minimum pay-per-click (PPC) bids on various keywords, and to me, there is no rhyme or reason. Some minimums are only being raised a small amount, like ten cents. But some of the increases are ridiculous including increases of thirty, fifty, even seventy-five cents. Supposedly the minimums are determined by competition - the more competitors, the higher your minimum bid must be (which sounds like a nice way for Yahoo to make more money). It’s also supposed to be determined by how relevant searchers find your ads. The better your CTR versus your competitors, the lower your minimum bid should be.

This doesn’t happen very often, where we have two clients with the same search terms, but I have one situation where this has happened. I have two clients with the same term, and in the last round of changes back in September, both of them were required to increase their minimum bids. Both had a CTR of well over 3%. When I emailed my Yahoo rep to find out about why, I was told that it was probably because of too much competition. Now when I checked, there was a total of four advertisers on the term. And the minimum bid wasn’t a minor increase, but a really major increase. For one of my clients it went from $.29 to $1.12. The other one was required to go from $.29 to $.86. And now, there’s one lonely (and probably happy) advertiser on this term.

Here’s another instance that really burns me up. I have a client who is advertising on their own URL, which is something we recommend doing. Yahoo wants them to increase their minimum bid from .93 to 1.56. On their own URL.

Another annoyance - we get Minimum Bid Increase notices on keywords in old campaigns that haven’t run for a long time and are paused. It would be nice if Yahoo would take into consideration that paused campaigns don’t need to have notices sent. The only thing to do to stop the notices is to delete the keywords or campaigns, because Yahoo doesn’t care if the search terms themselves are paused.

I don’t know if Yahoo has noticed an actual decrease in revenue, but a lot of the bid increases that Yahoo is making are souring my clients on Yahoo even more than they have been in the past. Most of them are spending LESS on Yahoo than before, because some of the bid minimums are so ludicrious that it doesn’t make advertising on them worth it. They should take a look at what Google is doing - they’re doing AWAY with inactive bids, and Google keeps gaining share, not losing it.

Something else to keep in mind: just because you’ve gone through a round of bid minimum changes in the past doesn’t mean you won’t get them this time. Make sure to keep an eye out for the email, and continue to check your Yahoo account for them, because there’s no rhyme or reason on when and what keywords might get flagged. And once they’re flagged, you need to determine the ROI on the increase so you can decide if you’re willing to pay the price or respectfully decline by deleting the keyword.

Learn more about Nikki

Yes, MSN does indeed have a search engine.  I’ll be the first to admit that the volume isn’t huge and the management interface for their PPC platform can be quite tedious to work with, but it can deliver some incremental traffic for your business. 

One valuable change they just made in the Microsft Avertising adCenter is that they now allow you to pause keywords or ad copy (learn how here).  Prior to this change, you had to actually delete keywords or ads to stop them from running.  This made it difficult to keep track of which keywords or ads you had tried that were not working as well as you had hoped they would.  Before this change, you had to go in and delete the keyword itself instead of just pausing it.  This would also remove any history that the keyword might have had in the account from the keyword tab screen.

The biggest advantage of all this is just the increased flexibility you now have in how you can manage your keywords and ads in adCenter.  To me, that’s the best part about this.  Sure, you will always be deleting keywords and ads that you don’t want, but it’s nice to have the flexibility to pause keywords or ads that are seasonal or might see the light of day in the future.  You might run a new sale perhaps, or revise a landing page to make it a stronger converter.  Again, it’s just nice to have more flexibility in your PPC advertising strategies than to always have to use the final axe chop.

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What is Impression Share?

Impression Share is the amount your ads are showing as a percentage of the total available impressions. 

Why Should You Care?

It reflects your exposure in your marketplace.

In other words, are your ads showing up as often as they can be?

Understanding your impression share will give you some insight into steps you can take to increase your exposure in your market.

The first key figure is Lost IS (Budget).  This tells you how much traffic you are losing (as a percentage of total impressions) because your budget is too low.  Google automatically stops showing your ad if it will exceed your budget.  You can select whether Google should periodically shows your ad over the day or if they show it constantly until you run out of budget.

If you are losing a lot of traffic due to your budget, you need to make changes and it should depend on your business goals. You could:

• Reduce your bid and position your ad lower
• Decrease the targeted region
• Increase your budget - Only if the conversion rate justifies it!

The other figure to consider is Lost IS (Rank).  This reflects how much impression share you are losing due to poor ranking on the page.  In other words, your Ad Rank, which is the CPC bid x Quality Score, is reducing your impression share.

So, what can you do to solve poor Ad Rank?

• Improve Ad Quality
• Adjust Match Type
• Increase Your Bid (again . . . only if the conversion rate justifies it)

One last figure is the Impression Share Exact Match.  This reflects how a keyword would perform if it were set to Exact match.  This can help you determine if you should consider changing the match type to improve impression share.  If you see that the exact match percentage is significantly higher than the actual impression share, you can safely assume that you should test different match types to improve impression share.

You can read more from Google about the Impression Share Report at Inside AdWords.

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Today’s article is way off topic for me, but covers a subject matter that is potentially significant to a great deal of homeowners.

Recent housing data indicates that each day from July through September, more than 2,700 Americans lost their homes due to foreclosure. That number is up from 1,200 a day a year ago and may continue to rise. An additional 4 million homeowners with a mortgage were at least one month behind at the end of June. Meanwhile, housing values continue to deteriorate at an alarming rate.

The far-reaching impact of the housing crisis is now extending to homeowners that have a Home Equity Line of Credit (HELOC) with unused credit available, but may not have access to that credit for long. A few months back, Countrywide Financial led the way by suspending 122,000 borrowers from accessing their home equity lines, and since then Washington Mutual (WAMU), Bank of America, IndyMacBank and Wells Fargo have frozen hundred’s of thousands of HELOCs, preventing home owners access to money they thought was available.

Many People are Likely Unaware that Home Equity Lines can be Frozen

Banks usually have the right to rescind credit lines at any time under the terms of the contracts used with borrowers. As home prices have tumbled, already battered banks are trying to protect themselves from exposure to additional losses. The biggest home lenders are revisiting how much their borrowers owe in relation to declining housing values, as well as examining any deterioration in their customers’ credit scores or payment habits.

If you have a line of credit against your property, and you think you may need or want to tap into that equity any time soon, you might want to take it out now. This assures you access to it if needed - an emergency fund. Borrowers are subject to interest payments, but they are relatively minor for the degree of financial security provided in case of a real emergency. Lenders can’t demand repayment of money already borrowed, but they can keep you from accessing any additional funds from your HELOC. Plan accordingly.

More about Brad

So what’s an online advertiser to do? I say, get ready.

Now, I’m not saying that you have to slash your prices right now, but instead take this time to get ready and plan your online marketing and pay-per-click (PPC) advertising strategies. The competition will be fierce this year and people, now more than ever, will be looking for the best deals. Do your homework and decide your plan of attack - unless you have a niche product, people online will expect sale prices, free shipping, free gifts with purchase or other incentives. The greatest thing for shoppers (and the bane of ecommerce) is the fact that it’s so easy to price shop - you can check out five or six websites and see who has the best price or offers the best deal before you buy.

Use this time wisely to decide your offer and what’s economically feasible for you, when and how you’ll showcase it on your website, when to start advertising it in your PPC ads, and what your cut-off date is. Make sure you have a clear, mapped out strategy, but be ready to deviate as necessary. Something else you’ll need to consider is your PPC budget - are you able to increase what you’re willing to spend in order to make sure you capture all impressions? What about your position? Are you willing to spend more to be in the top three if you know you are competitive?

I also just did a quick totally unscientific poll of some staff members here at JumpFly: of the 10 people I asked, a few are going to be spending less this year, one will be spending more, and most will be spending the same, but the key thing is that more of them will be using the Internet to find the best deals when they know what it is they want. And several of them have already started shopping so they don’t end up spending lots of money all at once.

So this is the time to get ready, because it’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas and when it arrives, you don’t want to be left alone in the cold.

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From the Google AdWords Blog - Retailer tips and tools for maximizing holiday sales

To access this new tool, simply go to your content campaign. You do have separate campaigns for content don’t you? Then click the “Ad Variations” tab. Next to “Create new ad:” you will find the usual selections of: Text ad, Image ad, Local business ad, Mobile ad, Click-to-play video ad and the new Display Ad Builder. You really can’t miss it since it has NEW! in large red letters right next to it.

Once inside the Display Ad Builder Tool you will find dozens of unique animated templates to use as your starting point. There are several pre-designed ad formats based on different industries like; travel, finance, automotive, ecommerce, etc. These all make excellent starting points for your new display ad, and Google promises to be releasing many more as the feature moves out of beta.

After you pick your new template you will be taken to the page that allows you to customize the ad with all of your own information. There are text fields for headlines and descriptions, and you can easily change the font colors if you wish. As you proceed, there is a button labeled “update preview” located underneath the ad, and you will want to periodically click this button to see the results of your modifications.

Tip* Depending on the template, you may need to have some custom logos and product images available. If your logo’s file size is too large, you may need to reduce it to the maximum size shown. Usually this is about 50k. If this seems too daunting of a task, simply choose one of the other templates that does not display a logo. There are plenty to choose from.

So, you have customized your new display ad. The next step is to click “Continue” located at the bottom of the page.

You are now on the preview and ad variations page. As you will see, the Display Ad Builder Tool automatically generates your new ad into several of the common sizes including medium and large rectangles, leader boards, as well as the popular skyscraper formats. Different templates are automatically converted to different sizes, so depending on the template you have chosen, you may or may not see all of the formats mentioned.

If something doesn’t look correct, you will want to click back and adjust as needed. If it looks good, click “save ad” and you now have impressive new animated display ads running in your content campaign.

Many AdSense websites do not have layouts that accommodate these display ad formats, so you will always want to have text ad versions available in your campaign. I have found that in some of the AdWords accounts that I manage, display ads perform very well with higher CTRs than the text ads. In some of my accounts they simply do not see enough volume. Give the Display Ad Builder a try and see how it works for you. You may want to monitor results using Placement Performance Reports.

Creating Google AdWords Content Network Campaigns requires a unique strategy and keyword list. Contact a qualified PPC Account Manager to discuss your content campaign.

You may have noticed some new choices you now have on the Google AdWords Campaign Summary screen.  On the right side of the summary screen, there are numerous new options you have in the Statistics drop down box.  You can now view your pay-per-click (PPC) traffic data in several different ways.  You can isolate Google search traffic from the rest of the Google search partner network, giving you an immediate insight into where you are getting the best/most converting traffic.  Some of these search partners include AOL, Earthlink, Shopping.com, AT&T Worldnet and Ask.com

I’m happy to report that the Google search partner network is indeed delivering some very solid converting traffic.  Some of our clients here at JumpFly have expressed skepticism about the value of the traffic from those non-Google sites and have chosen to run on Google only, but throughout all the accounts I have looked at recently I am definitely seeing tremendous value in the search partner network.  Some of the search partner data is revealing that they can sometimes outperform Google itself.  If you have not tried running on the search partner network due to concerns about its value, now is the time for you to include those partners and give them a chance. 

One thing you cannot do, however, is bid separately for Google and the search partner network.  Keywords and Ad Groups still retain the same bid regardless of this new insight into how each is performing.  So, you may see that the search partner network is delivering conversions at twice the cost of Google but you will not be able to adjust bids for just the search partner network.  Conversely, you might see that the search partner network is delivering conversions at half the cost but you cannot get more aggressive on just the search partners because your bid is still tied to both Google and the search partners.  I’m pretty certain this will change in the future, but for now you can just look at the data and hope that change comes sooner rather than later.

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In the Campaign Summary and AdGroup view you will see a new drop down menu labeled “Statistics.”  There are several combinations of views including the summary view, split views, and individual views. For example, if you were to choose “Split: Google search/search partners/content network,” you will now see three rows of data representing the different performance metrics from all 3 sources of traffic.

When it comes to PPC management, I love data, and this new data from the search partners is a welcome addition to the AdWords interface.

Comparing this data among the different accounts that I manage has shown a wide variation of results; with some accounts generating substantially lower cost per conversions from the search partner network and others doing just the opposite. None of my accounts have shown horrible results from the search partners; certainly I haven’t seen any red flags.

The biggest problem here is that there really isn’t much you can do with this data other than to use it to help decide to turn on or off the search partners. At this time, it is still impossible to realistically separate the budgets and bids between Google and the search partners. Just like your first high school party, if you want to go, big brother has to tag along.

While this new data is a definite step forward, I would still love to be able to separate my budgets and bids between Google and the search partners. There are a lot of good reasons to do so, and this new data supports this rationality even further. Let’s face it, you don’t always want big brother to tag along to the party.

Yesterday, Yahoo, Inc (NASDAQ: YHOO) reported that revenues were $1.7 billion for the third quarter of 2008, a 1% increase compared to the same period of 2007 (view press release). As the stock price hovers near $12 today, investors can only fantasize about revisiting the recently missed opportunity Yahoo rejected to sell to Microsoft for $47.5 billion, or just about $33 per share. One might think that Microsoft could yet be interested. If they liked Yahoo at $47.5 billion, then the current market capitalization of $17.5 billion must look like a steal! There are plenty of articles out there examining the overall earnings numbers, but I want to focus specifically on what these numbers mean to the pay-per-click (PPC) advertising industry.

Deeper Investigation Reveals Strength in PPC Search Engine Advertising

Search generated revenues from Yahoo’s owned and operated websites (O & O) were $438 million for the third quarter of 2008, a 16% increase compared to $375 million for the same period of 2007 (view report provided by Yahoo). This number is significant because it verifies ongoing strength in the PPC advertising industry. Yahoo was able to pull off this revenue increase despite a decreased year-over-year search query volume. This seems to indicate an increase in what PPC advertisers are spending per click, an increase in the number of advertisers, or both. Though Yahoo showed little or even negative growth in many areas, the demand for PPC advertising at strong brand names like Yahoo and Google clearly remains quite strong and increasing.

Just last week, Google announced a 26% year-over-year increase in earnings. In regards to their paid click revenue, Google said that the number of paid clicks rose 18% compared with the same period a year earlier.

Other Interesting Yahoo Earnings Notes

Yahoo announced a cost-reduction strategy that includes eliminating at least 10% of its roughly 15,000-member workforce. Refer to the Alley Insider for a copy of the actual memo sent to Yahoo staff members. 

Display advertising revenues increased 3% compared to same time period a year earlier but decreased compared to the prior quarter.

Revenue generated from Yahoo’s distribution network decreased from the previous quarter and compared to the same quarter at this time last year.

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