Author Archives: Kate Falconer

Google Earth Place Pages

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An addition to Google Maps as of this fall, Place Pages display expanded details about businesses and places people may come across during a map search.  Ever user-centric Google created Place Pages to provide the most relevant content, including pictures, reviews, and more.  If you are the owner of a business, however, Place Pages may be beneficial to you, as well.  You have the control to edit your business’s information, such as contact information and hours.  Now these Place Pages will be even more available as they are also being shown in Google Earth.

You can see these Place Pages when looking through Google Earth by clicking on a business or place and then clicking on “View More Information.”  This will bring up the Place Page with the extended information, pictures and more.

You will also notice Adsense ads are shown here.  The delivery of ads on this desktop application is an anomaly with Google, who has heretofore shown Adsense Ads solely on web-based applications.  There has been no word as to whether or not this policy will change.

Google Ad Sitelinks

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Last week, Google announced the launch of a new product called Ad Sitelinks, which is not available for all advertisers yet.  This is usually how they release new products, commencing a preliminary run with a select few advertisers before the product is even widely discussed.  Then they start expanding the reach more and more before it is eventually available to all advertisers through their normal AdWords interface.

This new product allows your AdWords paid search ads to include more links that can go deeper into your content, beyond your landing page.  It would look like the example above.

Advertisers may add up to ten links, although Google will only display up to four.  Google thus recommends that advertisers list their most important links first.

To employ this new feature, it is not necessary to write new ads.  Instead, Google will simply add these new Sitelinks to your current ads.  If you are eligible to participate, you will see the option in your Campaign Settings.  Right after the demographic and language targeting, you should see a section called Networks, Devices, and Extensions.  Within this section there are a few options, one of which being to edit your Ad Extensions.  If you do not see this edit option, then this is likely not available to you yet.

Ad Sitelinks Edit Option

This could prove to be very helpful for some advertisers, allowing more options to consumers.  Google recommends taking advantage of this during the holidays as an easy way to update seasonal promotions.

‘Tis the Season for PPC

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Are you in the holiday spirit?  Well, if you have a product or service to be promoted this holiday season, you better get in it fast.  Hopefully, you’ve already thought about how you would like to go about your holiday promotions.  It’s important to get an early start on your holiday campaigns.  In fact, according to the Google Retail Blog, consumers are getting an earlier start on holiday shopping this year than ever before; this includes the researching and purchasing phase.  Here’s a chart to show expected holiday purchasing.  As you can see, there are many consumers to catch from now through Thanksgiving weekend.

Google Retail Holiday 2009 Chart

Early planning is essential.  It’s usually recommended to start planning in August or September at the latest, which will give you time for testing, expansion, and any necessary adjustments.  What’s more, your paid search ads and keywords can run for a bit to improve their quality score.  Ultimately, your campaign will be primed and ready to go for current holiday searches.

Some important dates to remember are…

  • November 27th – Black Friday
  • November 30th – Cyber Monday

Even Christmas Day is a big shopping day.  However, I believe that in-store purchasing this day is more substantial than online.

If you haven’t started your holiday campaigns yet, it’s time to get on the ball.

Photo: ‘Tis the Season courtesy of  bensonkua.

Paid Search Site Targeting and Exclusion

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As mentioned in my last blog post, Microsoft adCenter Placement Reports, MSN commenced transparency, via specialized reports, of where your ads display within the content and search networks; namely, the Publisher Placement Performance report.  Since that post, Yahoo Search Marketing began sharing this same information, as well.  Their report is named the Ad Delivery Report.  Google’s original version, available since June of 2007, is called the Placement Performance Report.

These reports are very helpful when viewing performance of your campaigns.  To take this information to the next level, you’ll want to use it in managing your campaigns.  In these reports, you can view which sites are working well and then target them with higher bids to try for better placement in Google AdWords.  This does not seem to be an option at this point in Yahoo or MSN.  Conversely, in all three of the engines, you can see which sites are more costly with no return (conversions) and you can choose to block them.

In Google, you can adjust bids per site and exclude sites within the campaign or ad group.  In the new AdWords interface, you can view this information under the Networks tab.  You must choose to show the Automatic Placements to view all sites and you can choose any of interest for managed bidding or exclusion.  You can also exclude sites through their Site and Category Exclusion tool.

In Yahoo, you may submit sites in their Blocked Domain tool.  This can be found in the General Account Information under the Administration tab.  When blocking sites in MSN, you can do so under the Campaign or Ad Group Settings under Website Exclusions.

These are great tools to use when managing your Paid Search accounts.  Hopefully Yahoo and MSN will continue to improve these features to make them more robust.  Google has been working on this longer and has more functionality.  I encourage everyone to take advantage of these reports and use them wisely.

Photo courtesy of lorello.

Microsoft adCenter Placement Reports

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If you are a fan of Google’s Placement Performance reports, you may be interested in MSN’s version.  While running reports in Microsoft adCenter, I ran into this report that I had not before seen.  They call it the Publisher Placement Performance report.

Microsoft adCenter Publisher Placement Report

This report is very similar to the Placement Performance report that is available in Google AdWords.  This report allows you to see on what sites within their network your ads are showing.  This capability makes the content network advertising more manageable because it allows for more transparency.  This report breaks it down by Search and Content network.  In the content network results, I see my ads were showing on sites such as moneycentral.msn.com and online.wsj.com.  Under the search results, there are sites such as bing.com and ivillage.com listed.  iVillage.com is listed because they use MSN listings as part of their search feature.  There are many different sites listed under each network type.

While running this report in one of our accounts, it allowed me to go back to May 13, 2009 to retrieve data for this report.  It was unable to gather any data before this time.

I highly recommend using this report to your advantage to see where your ads are showing, because this is a crucial component to the overall success of your campaign.  It offers an understanding as to which sites perform well and which ones fail to bring any conversions.

In my next post, I’ll discuss what to do with this information once you start running these reports.

Photo courtesy of isriya.