Google Instant Preview is switched on for AdWords PPC Ads

In the last few days Google instant preview has finished being tested and switched on for AdWords PPC Ads. Its too early to say what effect this may have on account stats, but its fair to surmise that with searchers being offered a sneak preview of the landing page prior to clicking thru, this should increase the quality of traffic whilst also decreasing the volume of traffic.

No doubt Google see this as a win-win situation for both searcher and advertiser. More to follow.

Adwords PPC & Google Merchant Center link

Google Merchant Center is the latest incarnation of what was formerly known as Google Base. This was a service whereby e-commerce merchants selling products could supply a product feed to Google. When an appropriate search was made, Google would supply product, price & merchant results collectively known as Shopping results in addition to all its other results - below is an example for an iPod Nano  -

Google has recently taken this a step further though and allowed merchants to link their product feed to their PPC Adwords results. There appears to be little control over an optimisation of this link, but in practice it will certainly lift your CTR for any ads getting this assistance. Heres an example below -

To enable this link (assuming you have a Google Merchant Center account) simply navigate to the following section, add your Merchant ID and enable.

Time to reconsider Yahoo and Bing PPC ?

We're often asked by smaller business's whether or not they should be advertising on the Yahoo and Bing PPC platforms alongside Google. Our standard answer for some time has been that yes, both these networks historically have offered higher conversion data than Google. However, the extra administration time and costs of running ads across three networks make outweigh any conversions you may receive.


This advice is changing though, with the news that the Microsoft (Bing) and Yahoo merger has been given the go ahead.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/microsoft/7266252/Microsoft-and-Yahoo-search-deal-given-green-light.html

With the likelyhood being that conversion stats will remain higher than the Google platform, at least in the short term, the reduced administration cost of running over two rather than three platforms now make it worthwhile for small business to start planning a Bing/Yahoo Paid Search strategy in our opinion.