We had clarification from Google today on a topic that has always caused much discussion amongst the SearchXplorers…

How best to use run Content campaigns on You Tube.

Google clarified for us that the Search results pages within You Tube is part of the search partners network whereas the actual video pages are part of the Content Network.

A little confusing we admit. It means in order for you to capture all the possible (and cheapest traffic) in You Tube you will need to have your one campaign opted into both or two separate campaigns targeting both Content and Search in the future.

Thanks for sorting out that SearchXplorers argument for us Google!

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We recently attended an event at Google regarding the developments for their API for the upcoming quarters.

We thought we'd share with you what they had planned...

Google Timeline:

Google Developments:

Good to see that they have remarketing, sitelinks and view-through conversion metrics in the pipeline.

Brought to you by the SearchXplorers.

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Google AdWords accounts come as standard with 25 campaigns that you are allowed to upload too. You can contact your Google Account Manager and have your Google account extended to allow upto 100 campaigns into the account.

However, we have known for a while that uploading an AdWords account with 100 campaigns and millions of keywords does cause the account to slow down. We have never had any explanation of why this happens but we have had confirmation from Google that uploading a large number of campaigns and keywords will definitely slow down your Google account.

Google response:

Please be aware that adding a large number of keywords and campaigns may
place a strain on your account and slow the creation of reports for your
account. I would encourage you to take this opportunity to delete any
unwanted or poorly performing keywords.

Slowing down the account as we have seen causes:

1. Upload and download time to Google Editor causes Google Editor to crash.

2. The account takes ages to build up it's history and you see a slower number of impressions as Google's back end system has difficulty serving your ad's from such a big account.

So what is the right amount of campaign to put into a Google AdWords account?

We have no official answer from this from Google, but we find that if you have around 50-60 campaigns within an AdWords account then the account works fine. Anything more that 60 campaigns and you start to see the effects of the account slowing down.

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We found this really useful little tool the other day for checking how well your site is doing for SEO. We have seen plenty of these tools in the past, but this free tool we thought was really good.

Check out http://lite.seoautomatic.com/‏ to access the tool. All you have to do is enter in your website URL and it will give you a report on your site’s SEO performance.

Thanks for this tool from the SearchXplorers, helped us out on a couple of things we’d missed on some of our sites this week

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We discovered this week that Google has recently updated it's Max CPC bids. Google's Max CPC bids have always been £70 in the UK, but we found this week that this has now been updated so you can now have a Max CPC bid of £700!

So what does this mean?

1. Google is trying to generate more revenue for itself by increasing the Max CPC bids.

2. Affiliate Bidding Wars take on a whole new meaning! As reported in our previous post Affiliate PPC Bidding Wars: Part 1 – The Background affiliates bid at the max CPC of £70 in order to ensure that their ad appears for a certain keyword. However, it is easy to push an advertisers price, but the stakes have been raised with this new limit of Max CPC. Affiliate's wont be able to afford to lose £700 per click if they are having their prices pushed.

As described in our previous post Google Click Fraud you can get away with clicking on an advertisers ad upto 3 times per day before Google Click Fraud comes into play. As a result this could mean a whopping £2100 spent on terms each day (and this can happen in the space of seconds without you being able to react to it.)

Agencies beware! If you are an agency and have your clients brand term at the max bid to ensure that no other ad will show, you could be lose £63,000 a month if you are not aware of what is happening. That is a lot of a clients budget gone with no return...good luck explaining that one.

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We recently stumbled on Google's new beta programme, Google Ace...

http://www.google.com/ads/innovations/ace.html 

It’s a new tool that is in Beta from Google that allows you to run two separate PPC campaigns alongside eachother so you can see the real time effects of the optimisation work that you are putting in. It looks really interesting to us and flies in the face of Google's concern that 'over optimisation' of PPC accounts is an issue that Google is facing.

It's in beta in the USA at the moment and we are currently in the process of having some of our PPC accounts approved for the beta test. We will let keep you updated with our progress. If anyone is already using Google Ace, we'd be interested to hear your thoughts on this latest innovation from Google.

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Remarketing is the 'new kid on the block' when it comes to Search Marketing and has given display ad's a new meaning with these more targeted ad's resulting in higher click thru rates.. The ability to provide an ad on another website from a website that you have already visited is becoming more and more wide spread - as ad's 'haunt' you as you surf the internet :-)

For those of you who are new to remarketing, there are 3 main ways to set up campaigns to capture users as they surf the net.

1. You can use Google's Remarketing tool which allows you to target sites in the Google Content Network.

2. You can use Yahoo's Remarketing service which is tied in to Yahoo's Direct Response offering. The difference here is that it also acts as a display ad in Yahoo's network (yahoo mail, yahoo answers, etc)

3. Use a 3rd party remarketing supplier to capture traffic across all networks with the exception of Google, and only where Yahoo allows them to buy space on their network...which is not their prime sites in their network.

As with all remarketing you are required to tag up your landing and conversion pages, but rather than adding scripts from each form of remarketing, you can use container tags and drop all three tracking scripts into one pixel to help you with your page load times.

But what about optimising for Remarketing Campaigns?

With Yahoo and 3rd party providers, they do the optimisation for you. Not ideal, but they aren't going to give you the details of the sites that are working so you can cut them out of the loop...so fair enough!

With Google Remarketing you can optimise the campaigns yourself. Here are some tips when it comes of optimising...

1. Your Google Remarketing campaigns and Google Content campaigns compete for the same places so think of negative
matching the audience you are targeting in the Content Campaign with your Remarketing Campaign.

2. If the Content and Remarketing ads both have the same Quality Score then that the ad with the highest bid will win.

3. The option in Google for having Remarketing Ad's targeted above the fold on websites doesn't work as yet. There is a bug in Google's system which they are working on...we'll let you know if we hear any updates.

These tips were brought to you by The SearchXplorers.

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We saw this recently and thought it was worth mentioning. Google Analytics has recently been updated to allow you to track calls through a website.

http://www.google.com/analytics/apps/about?app_id=56001

This is a very easy way for a site without an an online checkout to make money through a call centre...or even just for those enterpreneurs who have started a site but dont have an online payment system yet. You can publish a phone number on your site and take payments over the phone and by using Google Analytics to track calls, you'll be able to optimise your online marketing efforts.

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Following on from our earlier article relating to 'Google Analytics Ban in Germany?' - we thought we'd share with you a handy little add-on which allows you to block Google Analytics from tracking you.

The add-on is called 'OptimizeGoogle' and you can download the link here...

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/52498/

A way of keeping under the radar when visiting websites.

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We've been speaking with our German friends recently about the never ending cookie debate and the proposed ban on cookie's being dropped by websites when they are not disclosing this to users, as it is an invasion of users privacy.

This cookie debate has been around for a while and cookies were banned for affiliates out in the States earlier in the year (in one US state anyway.) However, recent reports say that in Germany they are proposing a fine of up to 50,000 euro's for website owners who drop cookies and do not disclose this to users.

What does this mean? We'll the majority of sites out there are using Google Analytics to track activity in on websites, but Google does not disclose this as part of it's Google Analytics service. So this would mean that every site in Germany with Google Analytics could be facing this fine. Whilst talking to our German friends they have not heard of any fines being proposed as yet, the legislation is still a 'grey area' apparently.

The response we have had from Google on this matter...

I spoke to my colleague on the German agency team on this as to what we
can and cannot comment on and I'm afraid she hasn't heard of this 50K
fine. It's not really regarded as 'illegal', more a 'recommendation'
that the law gave recently. She stated that a lot of her agencies use
Analytics in DE.

Do German website owners need to be worried? Not as yet it seems, but this could be the first step in trying to ban the use of cookies, which could be a very real threat to the affiliate marketing industry.

We have also heard on the grape vine (that old thing!) That Google are looking into this matter. We know that the Search Engine giant does wield great power in the industry and would not be happy with having Google Analytics banned in Germany and possibly other territories in the future.

So what are Google doing about it? We cannot confirm, but we have heard that Google will be asked to 'police' the internet in future in order for them to have the abilities to drop cookies and collecting people's data (as they have more data on people than anyone else, as far as we can tell.) The other alternative Google has come up with is that they are currently building their own version of the internet...a scary thought indeed!

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We know that being an affiliate is an underground industy and we know that the art of black hat ppc is all about finding ways of getting around the 'normal' ways of doing PPC. However, we also want to make you aware of unreputable affiliate sites that are offering 'get rich quick scheme's' and charging you the priviledge of signing up for some guide / ebook.

Whilst there may well be some reputable good services out there, we have found many that aren't. Some quick tips on what to look for in a unreputable affiliate site...

1. One page website.

2. The page is extremely long and packed with content...this is done for SEO purposes.

3. They are asking you to pay for something there and then.

An example of one of these style pages (disclaimer: we are not saying this is an unreputable scheme, we haven't tried it) can be found here...

http://affiliateblackbook.com/may-special.php

If you are looking for tips on Black Hat PPC, then you know there is only one place to go - www.blackhatppc.co.uk

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One of the greatest tools that affiliate's have is the ability to mask their affiliate links. This gives more credibility to users to click on the link (as they don't see lots of affiliate tracking codes in the links) whilst still giving the affiliate the cookie.

There are many ways to mask affiliate links, but one of the best is by using Tiny URL's. Simply visit http://tiny.cc/ and type your affiliate link in and get your custom URL as a result.

Why is this useful? If you wanted to promote a video ad on You Tube, you can put in an affiliate link in the description and get users to click on it for free. If you can create a good video it's a very easy and cost efficient way of getting free traffic!

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Have a website? Want to get mobile traffic to it as well? But you dont know how to go about doing it?

Well here is a handy tool that can be used to check your websites 'mobile readiness' and then gives you recommendations on how to make your site ready to be displayed on mobile phones...

http://validator.w3.org/mobile/

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Ever since the introduction of site links on PPC ad's in late 2009, search marketeers have been getting more and more inventive with their site links in trying to get users to click on their ad's. Recently we have seen many PPC ad's using symbols in their site links to help improve their Click Thru Rate...however, we have also seen site links taken away from advertisers for excessive use of symbols in their site links.

So for clarification on what you are allowed to do in regards to symbols in site links, we asked Google. Here's their response...

I just wanted to get back to you about the issue of the symbols in
sitelinks. The official stance of the policy team is that this is not
allowed. Obviously a lot of advertisers slipped through the net but they
are more aware of it now.

If you really want, you could try and include them but you do risk having
the links disapproved if the policy team notice!

So it looks like gone are the days of search marketers getting more and more creative with their site links. We have seen many site links in the past few months, but we give our vote to the best use to site links to the ad below, nice work...

.

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Ok this is great! A site builder has used the Facebook API (which gives full access to all Facebook data to API users, whether your data is blocked or not...) and slapped it onto a site. Search recent statuses, no matter what your privacy setting...

 We’ve tried to find old statuses with no luck , we think the search system is a bit ropey (or it only find the last status you have added). Still, everyone is in there.

 http://youropenbook.org 

We suspect it won’t be there too long, (domain was only registered on the 14^th May 2010) but we reckon this may have future implications on the Facebook API and the people who are allowed to use it...

Here is the original article, and a few examples of the potential disaster this can cause for individuals.

http://www.bitterwallet.com/why-your-life-is-an-open-book-on-facebook/29978

However, here is the nice thing for us (if i were sneakily minded!) that we can search for a keyword in someones status, for example if we type in ‘Antivirus’ into openbook and find out who has got problems with their antivirus on their PC. We can then click on their profile and message them directly with a message saying something like ‘We’ve heard you were having trouble with your antivirus...try this out it works really well...some antivirus soluion.com‘ which we could easily turn into a Tiny URL and put an affiliate link.

What does that mean? Free traffic to target people with problems that you can hide affiliate links in. Agreed, it may be a time consuming way to make affiliate earnings, but if you were targeting a high end product it wouldn't be long before you started seeing the money come in!

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Nice to see that Google uses it's AdWords platform for it's own advantage. See the ad below for You Tube...excessive amounts of bolding!

Brough to you by The SearchXplorers.

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  Our Question:

We want to target Polish people who are physically in the UK, who are entering Polish keywords into Google.pl or Google.co.uk.

So we can currently target people based in the UK searching in Polish in Google.co.uk, but as far as we're aware, the ads won't appear in Google.pl unless we select Poland as a geo-targeting option.

  Is this true?

Google's Response:

 I understand you are enquiring about targeting Polish people who are physically in the UK, using the Polish language.

You currently target people based in the UK searching in Polish via Google.co.uk.

Unfortunately to target individuals that are physically in the UK but choose to use www.google.pl you would need to target the country of Poland because when an international user uses a foreign domain they simulate being physically in that country.

In summary with AdWords, you can target your ads to countries or territories, or to specific regions and cities. When someone enters your keyword on Google, the AdWords system uses several factors to determine whether to show your ad:

1. We consider the Google domain being used (.pl, .co.uk etc). If a user visits www.google.pl, the Google domain for Poland, she'll see ads targeted to Poland, regardless of her current location.

2. We analyze the actual search term the user submits on Google to determine when to show ads targeted to a specific region or city. If someone enters a search query that contains a recognizable city or region, we may show appropriate regional or custom-targeted ads. For example, if someone searches for 'Polish Newspaper' we may show relevant ads targeted to Poland, regardless of the user's physical location.

3. When possible, we determine the user's general physical location based upon their computer's Internet Protocol (IP) address. An IP address is a unique number assigned by Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to each computer connected to the Internet.
Any ads shown on Google.com: While country-specific Google domains (such as Google.fr) don't use IP address to target ads, Google.com does. For example, if a user with an UK IP address visits Google.com, we'll display ads targeted to UK, even though the user isn't accessing Google.co.uk.

Additionally, a user's language setting will determine which ads they can see. The 'Preferences' link on the Google homepage lets users choose the language in which they want to search. When the user sets the language preference, Google only displays ads that are targeted to the chosen language. For example, users who choose Polish as their language preference see ads targeted to Polish speakers.

Therefore just as you suspected, unfortunately the ads won’t appear in Google.pl unless you select Poland under geo-targeting.

___________________

  I hope that explains it for everyone...the interesting part for us was to see how Google.com reacts differently in regards to geo-targeting than other Google domains such as google.co.uk and google.pl.

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Google's Previous Homepage
 

 Google's Current Interface

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Ad Copy 2 - Ad Copy without keyword 

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