Google Adwords Broad Match Modifier

If you are using Google Adwords you should be aware that there are different match types available for you use to try and filter, or refine the searches which your ads get shown on. The four being -

Broad match
Phrase match
Exact Match
Negative Match

Recently Google have introduced the Broad Match modifier, its use is defined by Google below  -

Broad match modifier allows you to create keywords that have greater reach than phrase match and more control than broad match.

Adding modified broad match keywords to your campaign can help you get more clicks and conversions at an attractive ROI, especially if you mainly use exact and phrase match keywords today.

Just put a plus symbol (+)with no spaces directly in front of one or more words in a broad match keyword.

Your ad will show to users who search for close variants of the modified term. Close variants include misspellings, singular/plural forms, abbreviations and acronyms, and stemmings (like “floor”and “flooring”).

Here's the example they provide -

Broad: dress shoes Also matches*: classic brogues, formal footwear, lace-up wingtips…
Phrase: "dress shoes" Also matches*: black dress shoes, men’s dress shoes…
Exact: [dress shoes]Matches: dress shoes:

Using the broad match modifier -

Modified Broad: dress +shoes Also matches*: evening shoes, square-toe formal shoes…
Modified Broad: +dress +shoes Also matches*: dress shoes, men’s shoes

Need to track Adwords keyword clicks to telephone calls?

Anyone working with Google AdWords will tell you that the number one goal is to accurately track the ROI (Return on investment) of your AdWords spend. This is, after all the beauty of Adwords - it allows a level of tracking which other forms of marketing (including some other online activities) cannot match.

Of course it is always easiest to track e-commerce activity - simply enabling the e-commerce module within Google Analytics and adding a piece of code to post payment pages takes care of that. Lead generation via form capture can also be fairly simply tracked using the goals features within Google Analytics.

One scenario which has always proven difficult to track though has been lead generation, such as telephone calls. Someone clicks on an ad, visits your site then makes a call to you - how do you know what ad they clicked on? Without that data, making sense of your AdWords spend and formulating an ROI is very difficult.

There are products on the market such as the excellent Clarity from Adinsight which can answer this question though. Using sophisticated telephone routing and server querying software they can accurately track the source of a call to your business.

Source calls can be split between PPC and SEO generated traffic and data can be generated to keyword level providing the caller is still on the site at the point they call you. Using this information it is possible to build an accurate ROI model over time.

Google Adwords Certification

I'll be honest, I've had more fun on a Saturday. But after a mere 240 questions and 3 hours of answering them I've renewed my Google AdWords certification.

I even got a certificate this time around - how completely exciting. No doubt I'm probably not supposed to use it as a promotional item, but here it is for now.

Google Adwords - What are you bidding for?

When advertising on Google AdWords it isn't always possible to measure directly the outcome of the advertising, beyond a visitor reaching your site. It may be that you don't have an e-commerce site, or are selling business to business and a purchase requires a phone call, a meeting or more. It may also be that you view the campaigns as brand awareness and don't intend to measure directly the outcome.

If this is the case, then consider using the budget maximiser setting within the relevant campaigns - 

This feature controls your CPC settings for all adgroups and keywords within the campaign and quite simply extracts as many clicks as possible for the budget you set. This saves time monitoring or "optimising" the campaign aand can prove very effective at lowering your CPC across a campaign.

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.

New Adwords link to Google Places means you need to be top 3 or nowhere

Recently I posted about how Google Local Places was revamped giving a larger share of screen space to those listings which had optimised their local listings. One of the results of this was that the local places map image was moved to the right of the Google screen, causing Adwords ads from positions 4 onwards to be moved downwards and quite likely resulting in a lower CTR.

This week has seen the upgrading of the link between Adwords ads and the local map - as seen in the image above the number one listing has a blue balloon next to it which is also shown on the map. No doubt this prominent link will cause even highest CTRs for the well optimsed ad(s) within the first three positions. This will also create a further gap in performance between positions three and four- i,e pre and post map making competition for those first three spots more intense..

SEO Consultants Cheltenham ? The best search phrase for the best SEO consultants in Cheltenham : Click Insight

The SEO friendly versus reader friendly balance of text is an ongoing challenge for any ‘SEO consultant’ such as yours truly from Cheltenham. Any prospective client needs to be aware of this before engaging with an SEO consultant (or SEO company) , for it is likely that they (the SEO Company) will create text with a bias to its search engine friendliness rather than a style which the reader finds engaging. This is virtually always true as it makes their job easier.

The inherent problem being that what people type as a search has now developed and become more sophisticated, often being shortened to the point where it is no longer useable in a sentence. This is where the example SEO Cheltenham comes into the debate. All the local companies which proffer SEO services want to be found in this search, as it seems that when someone now requires a service they simply type “service” plus “location” equals result. I know this, as I’ve engaged in this very competition. But actually the two words don’t really fit into a sentence very cleanly together, they really should read ...blah blah blah offer SEO services from its location in Cheltenham, or ....blah blah blah is an SEO Company based in Cheltenham. Not, blah blah blah is an SEO Cheltenham Company – it just isn’t correct grammatically.

Most clients of course aren’t that concerned as to how their text is perceived on the SERPS (search engine results) pages and whether text works grammatically. But my eyes were opened a while back by a client who refused to play this game - for them their brand was the most important aspect. They would not compromise on how anything was written, whether that be the meta-titles, meta-descriptions or even the alt tags. This made the search engine optimisation work more difficult, but not impossible. In fact it actually made the whole process more rewarding and I think we got the balance right.

So it’s important to remember this balance whichever search engine optimisation company you do engage with. Ask lots of questions and ensure you fully understand the implications of any changes they make on-site, or off. Question everything and don’t assume anything.