Knowledge is the Foundation To Success  

If you’ve never heard of Twitter, you might have been hiding under a rock the last few years as the media has been inundating us with it left and right.  You don’t have to work in the technology industry to have seen and heard that Twitter has been growing in leaps and bounds recently.  Twitter has evolved from a small, underground community of social media gurus to one of the best places to go for real-time information provided by millions of people all over the world.  The twinfluence of Twitter has become so great that, earlier this year, Google began including the tweets from Twitter users into its search results.

In my humble opinion, one of Twitters best features is the fact that it helps businesses connect with their customers on a personal level.  Customers can use Twitter as a platform to inform a company about their experiences with that company’s products or services, whether good or bad.  This one-on-one customer interaction should ultimately help businesses provide a better customer experience to the people who have to power to make their companies successful.  Twitter also allows businesses to keep people informed on industry happenings, tips, tricks and so much more.

So, JumpFly has bitten the bullet and has joined the Twitterverse!  We may not have gathered as many followers as Kanye West (@KanyeWest), but we hope to be able to provide interesting and relevant content to our Twitter followers.  JumpFly has been ranked as TopSEO’s #1 PPC Management Company for the last two years and now it is time to share our wealth of information with our tweeps.  We hope to build our twibe of followers by providing useful, inspirational, interesting and compelling information about Pay-Per-Click Advertising on Google, Yahoo and MSN’s Bing.

If you are on Twitter, please take a moment to follow @JumpFly – we are confident that you will find our content relevant and informational.  Hopefully we will become Twitter’s PPC Management Authority.  Stay tuned to see what we have to offer!

In the past few weeks, quite a few JumpFly clients who advertise on Google AdWords have been reaching out to ask about the seller star ratings that are now showing up in sponsored link ads shown on Google.  So, we did a little digging to answer the question:

How can I show my Google AdWords ads with Seller Ratings Extensions?

Here is what we found out: Only certain ads are eligible to appear with the new Seller Ratings Extensions and none of the current account settings need to be changed in order to be eligible.  Once a Google AdWords advertiser meets the criteria listed below, the distribution of their ads with the Seller Ratings Extensions is automatic.  This means that the ads are automatically opted in to showing seller ratings with the ads on Google Product Search.

Here are the criteria:

* Advertiser’s campaign must be opted in to Google search.

* Advertiser’s campaign must be targeted to the United States ONLY.

* Advertiser’s business must have at least 30 unique reviews and a rating of four stars or higher on Google Product Search.

* Advertisers do NOT have to have a Google Merchant Center account to be eligible to have their ads shown with the Seller Ratings Extensions.

* Advertisers will only be charged if the headline of the ad is clicked on.  Clicks on the review link are free.

While this is a wonderful extension to Google’s ever growing list of product extensions designed to help merchants provide their potential customers with highly targeted and relevant information when searching, some merchants may not be too keen on the idea.  To opt out of this extension, the merchant will need to complete a form requesting that Google disable the Seller Rating Extensions in their ads.  Google does not recommend this as the Seller Rating Extensions “is likely to increase the amount of qualified traffic” to their website from their ads.

Personally, I think this is a marvelous addition to Google arsenal of Ad Extensions.  With the internet FULL of sites like Yelp, Ripoff Report, Consumer Reports, Trip Advisor, Epinions, etc. it’s blatantly obvious that reviews and ratings matter to the average consumer.  This is Google’s way of inching one step closer to the ideal, perfectly targeted and extremely relevant PPC ad. If you think that your business could benefit from a professional PPC Management Company, please feel free to contact Jumpfly.  PPC is all we do.

A big thank you to whoever at Google came up with the idea for the Broad Match Modifier. You made my day.

The broad match modifier is a new keyword targeting option. (The existing match types are broad, exact and phrase.) I’m a firm believer in using exact and phrase match terms in an account, but am very leery of using broad match. Broad match allows Google to show on searches that they think are related to your keywords. I use this example when I’m explaining broad match to clients: you are a fruit seller and all you sell is apples, so you advertise on the keyword apples. Google decides that an apple is a fruit, therefore they could show you on searches for oranges or bananas. Not a good use of your advertising dollars.

A couple other examples from my clients at JumpFly: how about finding out one of your clients ads is showing on the term “nudist camp?” (My client runs a kids summer camp.) Or how about a moving company spending thousands of dollars on what turned out to be the term “movie” because Google was mapping to the word “moving.”

So broad match has not been my favorite match type, unless a client has a large budget and wants huge amounts of traffic.

But with the new broad match modifier, I can try more broad match terms for my clients because it gives me more control. Basically, when I put a plus sign in front of a keyword, Google will know that that particular term has to be in the search or will match on close variants. (Close variants include misspellings, singular/plural forms, abbreviations and acronyms, and rood words, like “floor” and “flooring”.) Here’s an example: if the term is +golf +shoes, your ad will show for “gulf shoes” or “golf sport shoes”.

Broad match modifier just came out of beta testing in the UK and Canada. I’m looking forward to seeing how it works for my clients, as I’m doing my own beta testing for a few clients. If it works, I’ll start adding it to more of my clients accounts. If you are interested in seeing how the broad match modifier might be able to work for your business, contact a professional PPC Management Company.