Mike Blumenthal received a screenshot that seems to show a test of a new presentation of Google local/geotargeted AdWords. Mike suggests this may be an expression of AdWords local extensions:

This is AdWords and not Local Listing Ads, but the presentation (with the blue pushpin) is similar, signifying a local business or a physical location. Here is an example of Local Listing Ads:

Postscript: Here’s another image from a Chicago result sent to me by Jason Normoyle:

Back in October I reported on Google mass banning AdWords advertisers, unfortunately then, the feedback from Google on the reason was very limited. Today, I spoke with Nick Fox, Google’s Business Product Management Director for AdWords, about new changes taking place today and tomorrow related to advertiser bans.

Starting tonight, Google will begin permanently banning advertisers at an increased rate. The bans will not be at the site level, but rather the account level. In the past, Google banned specific sites from advertising in AdWords. Now, if an advertiser is permanently banned, their account and any new account will be banned from participating in AdWords. How does Google know if an advertiser is banned and just sets up a brand new account? Fox told me they have pretty good ways to detect this, but would not give me those details.

The increased rate of account bans did start back in October, Fox told me. He said, expect to see more account bans tonight and tomorrow. But this time, the bans will differ in two ways:

(1) They are permanent account bans, as explained above. (2) The communication process will be much clearer.

Google will begin to notify advertisers that they have been permanently banned. They will receive an email with details of this ban and the email will explain how to appeal the ban. I am told that banned advertisers can reply to the email to start the “appeals process.” Every reply should get a response from a dedicated Google representative.

Over the course of the next day or so, many new advertisers will be banned and I am told to expect to hear some vocal disgruntled advertisers. I asked Nick Fox how many advertisers are we talking about, he declined to answer that but he did say it is a “tiny minority” of their customers.

Why is Google stepping this up now? I believe that there are more online scams and frauds taking place now, than ever before. Google has been getting better at detecting these types of scams both algorithmically and by human detection since 2005 and they are now able to offer better enforcement and more comprehensive enforcement of their existing policies.

Again, expect a new wave of complaints from advertisers over the next day or two.

What about those who were banned back in October through today? I asked Fox if they will be getting emails with how they can appeal those account bans? Fox told me he is not sure, but he will get back to me on if they will be sending those advertisers emails.

Just when you thought paid inclusion was finally dead with holdout Yahoo getting out of the space, it’s come back from the most unlikeliest of sources: Google. Below, a look at the experiment plus reexamining the FTC’s guidelines about disclosing paid ads. Does saying “Promoted Videos” on YouTube rather than “Sponsored Videos” meet these?

For those unfamiliar with paid inclusion, it is where advertisers pay to have their listings included within editorial results, rather than being listed separately from them as paid placement search ads. In paid inclusion, there’s also no guarantee that the ads will show in a particular position.

Paid inclusion is a dinosaur left over from the days when you had companies that would sell a search partner only editorial results, leaving it to that partner to outsource with someone else for paid listings. For example, Microsoft once had its search engine using editorial results from Inktomi and paid results from Overture. It is also a remnant from before the days when search ads generated so much revenue that there was no need to deal with “messy” paid inclusion.

Messy? Sure. Yahoo would tell the world how fresh and complete its index was. Yet to site owners, it would pitch paid inclusion as a way to ensure that your pages were getting regularly visited by its spider or not overlooked entirely. It’s also messy to explain to searchers that these paid listings integrated into editorial results aren’t “ads” simply because they weren’t guaranteed to rank.

Paid inclusion is so messy that Google’s founders took an extraordinary step of speaking out against it in their IPO registration document of April 2004 several times. I’ll come back to those statements, but let’s look at what’s happening on Google now

The folks over at Range Online Media spotted new ads that are integrated directly within shopping results. Below are some screenshots they also provided me:

The arrow points to the ads. Here’s another example:

Here’s a close-up of the ad integration:

I can’t see these, when I look at the same pages, such as here. That’s because it’s an experiment that Google confirmed to me is being shown only to a small number of people. These are also separate from the other Google Product Ads rolled out this month to everyone.

I asked about these being paid inclusion. In response, I was sent:

At Google, ads are always labeled to indicate that the information is sponsored. We’re currently running a test in which Product Listing Ads appear on the Google Product Search page when a user clicks to ‘Compare Prices.’ Like the product listings, these ads provide information such as prices and ratings, so when a user sorts the information, the list changes the order of both the listings and the ads. As always, the ads are labeled as advertisements, and this experiment is intended to help us understand whether this is a useful experience for our users. This feature is currently in a limited beta with a small number of U.S.-based advertisers, and as with all tests, we may make changes to our current experiment in the future.

Wow. That made me feel more than ever this was paid inclusion. See, even though there’s an ad label attached to the listings, the fact that they are integrated within editorial results themselves rather than being segregated from them is one sign. In addition, if you can sort the results, then the ads have no guaranteed placement, which again is a core element of paid inclusion.

Now let’s go back to what Google’s founders said about the practice in the IPO papers (I’ve bolded key parts):

Our search results are the best we know how to produce. They are unbiased and objective, and we do not accept payment for them or for inclusion or more frequent updating.

And:

We will do our best to provide the most relevant and useful search results possible, independent of financial incentives. Our search results will be objective and we will not accept payment for inclusion or ranking in them.

And:

Objectivity. We believe it is very important that the results users get from Google are produced with only their interests in mind. We do not accept money for search result ranking or inclusion. We do accept fees for advertising, but it does not influence how we generate our search results. The advertising is clearly marked and separated. This is similar to a newspaper, where the articles are independent of the advertising. Some of our competitors charge web sites for inclusion in their indices or for more frequent updating of pages. Inclusion and frequent updating in our index are open to all sites free of charge. We apply these principles to each of our products and services. We believe it is important for users to have access to the best available information and research, not just the information that someone pays for them to see.

And:

Froogle [the name for Google Product Search back then] enables people to easily find products for sale online…. Most online merchants are also automatically included in Froogle’s index of shopping sites. Because we do not charge merchants for inclusion in Froogle, our users can browse product categories or conduct product searches with confidence that the results we provide are relevant and unbiased. As with many of our products, Froogle displays relevant advertising separately from search results.

At best, Google could excuse the current experiment from being paid inclusion by saying that these advertisers are not being charged to be included. That if they want to be in those listings, that’s free if they put in product feeds. But paid inclusion overall was rarely pitched as a way only to be included. It was pitched as a way to guarantee fast inclusion and constant updates. And the unspoken benefit was that it put you right in the mix of the regular results.

When I spoke further with Google about the move, the company stressed that the ads all have ad disclaimers and that the testing will also look at putting the ads outside the regular results and also may not allow for sorting. What you see above isn’t final, by any measure.

Certainly the ad disclaimer helps, but as long as they’re integrated right in the regular results, with sorting, that’s paid inclusion in my book. It’s also paid inclusion according to the Federal Trade Commission, from its definition in 2002 (again, I’ve bolded the key part):

Paid inclusion can take many forms. Examples of paid inclusion include programs where the only sites listed are those that have paid; where paid sites are intermingled among non-paid sites; and where companies pay to have their Web sites or URLs reviewed more quickly, or for more frequent spidering of their Web sites or URLs, or for the review or inclusion of deeper levels of their Web sites, than is the case with non-paid sites….

In a related matter, I asked why YouTube’s “Promoted Videos” aren’t called “Sponsored Videos,” as they once were. “Sponsored” has been the search industry’s term-of-choice when it comes to indicating what’s an ad. It’s used by Google, Yahoo and Bing, and it was a word the FTC particularly seemed to like when it issued guidelines.

Google emailed me:

Whenever a Promoted Video appears on YouTube, it is marked as a ‘Promoted Video’ to indicate that it is an advertisement. This label is hyperlinked to the YouTube Glossary, which offers more information about the Promoted Videos advertising program.

OK, I knew that. But these were called “Promoted Videos” originally, then changed to “Sponsored Videos,” then changed back to Promoted, which to my ear doesn’t sound as ad-like. So why were they changed?

To that, Google noted a blog post from March saying:

We think “Promoted Videos” more accurately describes this program than “Sponsored Videos,” the original name.

I was also told that “Promoted” was determined to be more descriptive and appropriate.

Determined how? Google wouldn’t share that. So maybe there was some testing done to see if users understood that “Promoted” better explained that these are ads. Or maybe a product team decided “Promoted” got a better clickthrough than “Sponsored” because people did NOT realize these were ads.

Google has massively ramped up where and how it shows ads over the past year. As the company continues to grow, it also has people without a firm history of knowing why ads are separated from search results and why certain words have been used to indicate what’s an ad and what’s not. Calling something “Promoted” that’s an ad in one part of Google while it’s “Sponsored” in another isn’t consistent and generates confusion. Mixing ads into editorial results also potentially generates confusion. Neither makes me feel particular good, but hey, maybe that’s just me.

As a search agency we see many different styles of PPC campaign design, from in-house teams, other agencies, and occasionally running across those from the search engines themselves. Broadly speaking, campaigns can fit into one of two categories:

1. Those heavy on keywords or phrases made up of low number of fairly generic terms (for the purpose of this article, referred to as “shorter keywords”)
2. Those using a high number of terms ranging from generic to improbable (or “longer keywords”)

Our approach has always been to go for broke with the number of terms we use in our campaigns. So, we’re better aligned with option two and I know we are not alone.

As spelled out in Convert More New Users Using Advanced Segments, I’m a huge fan of the new advanced segments feature in Google Analytics. This article offers another example of how advanced segments can help us chop up our data into more digestible morsels. My aim here is to show the workings of this type of segmenting and combine it with a custom report to analyze keyword data more efficiently. I finish with a note on applying similar filters and the many possibilities that follow. The goal? To demonstrate that there is now an easy way to measure the reward for the effort of building those keyword lists.

A common misconception

I know some of you are thinking “why not just use “long tail” and “head” instead of saying “shorter” and “longer.” I can hear a lot of experienced search marketers and analysts replying “because they aren’t the same thing!” But then there are some slightly quieter murmurs coming from an unnamed corner of the SEM population. This sounds more like “erm, well, yeah, they are. Aren’t they?”

To clear things up, the “long tail” refers to the hundreds or thousands of keywords sending users to your site which, individually have few visits but collectively form a substantial chunk of your total traffic. The length or number of words in the keyword in this definition is irrelevant.

To make the second group feel better about this situation, I would like to point out that the long-tail often is full of keywords containing 3 or more words. To compound this, we also don’t really have a collective term for these long, ungainly but highly profitable terms. If we did it might prevent this misconception.

Defining “longer keywords” & “shorter keywords”

In the example below, the obvious starting point for defining a “longer keyword” is four words or more because from this point onward, the sum total of all the bars in the chart is less than the total of the previous (three words) bar alone. By that mark, keywords with three words or less become my “shorter keywords.” As a general rule, your “longer keywords” will be between 3+ and 5+ terms. Either go with that or your own analysis.

Create the segments

I doff my cap to the Google Analytics Twitter team for publishing this screenshot of a regular expression (regex) filter and to my colleague James Carswell who took the Google regex and made it even shinier.

Now that you have your definitions, add the below regular expressions as in the images. Think about whether there are any other terms or traffic types you might want to exclude at this point.

The longer keywords segment

I have used this segment to specify that we want to see keywords which contain at least three spaces and therefore have four words or more (\s|\+).*(\s|\+).*(\s|\+) (we altered the original Google regex to take into account the fact that occasionally words are separated by “+” signs instead of spaces in Google Analytics).

The shorter keywords segment

Use this segment or copy from the below image to create a segment which only shows keywords containing three words or less.

Build a custom report

This example is taken from an ecommerce website so I have included revenue data. You can equally use goal conversion data or bounce rate and average time on site. I have included source and medium here so that the data is available should you want to take it to the next level.

After applying both the custom report and advanced segment to a keyword report you can start to play.

A small tip here: the maximum number of keywords you can view in one report in Google Analytics is 500. However, when viewing a keyword report you can change the limit by appending “&limit=n” to the url in your browser. Where “n” is the number of keywords you would like to see data for—I believe the maximum value is 20,000. You won’t see any change in the interface but when you download the report as a .csv file you should have all the data you wish.

Go out and play with your segments

There are so many ways we can apply variations of this segment to suit different job roles and business needs. Also, the results really will be different for everybody. Here are some different ways of looking at interpreting the data for this segment.

Value of short vs. long keywords. Try comparing the data for the two above segments. What do you see? Is it worth bidding on those big generic terms anymore?

SEO value. Try charting the rise of visits of your “longer keywords.” Is the situation improving? As above compare the segment with the shorter keyword segment. Are they both going in the same direction?

Campaign cross-pollination. You may be able to segment by paid search, and in turn use the data to inform and help guide your SEO work. Similarly, are there some nice long terms you haven’t got in your paid campaign which are working for SEO?

AdWords optimization. What is the relative CPC of the longer vs. shorter terms? Do you need to come up with different bid strategies for each?

Google ad position. Combine these two segments with a custom report showing overall data for the different ad slots. Do longer terms perform better?

Sussing out the true value of the head vs. the long tail. If you really must define things by long tail and head status then try adding a number of visits quantifier to each segment. A great use for this is to see the shorter terms which are effectively in the long tail in terms of volume. They can often give you great ideas for a whole new array of terms.

Compare the engines. Look at the relative performance of Google, Yahoo! and Bing, segmented by longer and shorter keywords. Which one is doing a better job of bringing in the traffic on longer keywords? How does that affect your strategy on these terms?

Above all, experiment! You might not know something is useful until you try it.

Google announced they are expanding the product ads within the AdWords listing that they have been testing for a while.

Google said, in the U.S., searchers should see them more frequently. It is however still a beta but Google will continue to expand it over time.

Here are the key features:

• Pay only for results: Product Listing Ads are charged on a cost-per-action (CPA) basis, which means that you only pay when a user clicks on your ad and completes a purchase on your site. Because Product Listing Ads is charged on a CPA basis, it offers a risk-free way for you to reach a larger audience on Google.com.
• List your entire inventory: Product Listing Ads requires no keywords or additional ad text. Whenever a user enters a search query relevant to an item in your Google Merchant Center account, Google will automatically show the most relevant products along with the associated image, price and product name. Product Listing Ads makes it easy for you to promote your entire product inventory on Google.com.

Harvard’s Nieman Journalism Lab reminds people of an old PR strategy: buying AdWords to combat negative reporting in the press. The article highlights how a trade organization (the New Zealand Seafood Industry Council) combatted a negative story in the NY Times about over fishing. When people searched on selected keywords associated with the story, trade group’s AdWords campaign appeared:

The New York Times reported on its front page in September that hoki, an unattractive sea creature best known as the primary ingredient in the Filet-O-Fish, is at risk of depletion. Naturally, the New Zealand companies that farm hoki by the metric ton weren’t pleased by the article, which pointed to “ominous signs of overfishing” . . .

[T]he New Zealand Seafood Industry Council took an approach I hadn’t seen before: buying Google ads for keywords like new zealand hoki and hoki new york times.

The ads sought to target people discussing or searching for more information about the story . . .

The landing page in this case was a rebuttal of the NY Times’ story. The PR agency behind the campaign has previously used aggressive tactics, including using reporters names in AdWords copy:

But the larger tactic is certainly valid: using AdWords as a counterpoint to negative publicity and stories that will appear in organic search results. 

Google AdWords announced two updates including new alerts and place pages in performance reports, let me explain both in more detail.

The new alerts are designed to help you stay on top of your campaigns. In addition to the billing alerts, they added alerts for new keyword and budget ideas in the Opportunities tab. Also, for those that use conversion tracking, you can now create custom alerts for changes in conversion volume, conversion rate, and cost per conversion. These two new alerts are not yet available for those who have My Client Center (MCC) accounts, but Google hopes to add them soon.

A little over a month ago, Google launched Place Pages for Google Maps. On those pages are contextual ads powered by Google’s content network. Advertisers can now see how well those ads are performing via the placement performance reports. Google added:

With this update, you can more closely monitor and optimize your clients’ campaigns. While placement targeting is not available for Google Maps, you can increase the likelihood of appearing on Place Pages by increasing bids on high-performing keywords or by creating ad groups with highly specific keywords to target Place Pages relevant to your clients’ products or businesses.

Google has acquired AdMob (www.admob.com), a popular mobile display ad company, for $750 million.

Google has already built their own platform for AdSense on Mobile devices, but this acquisition gives Google access to AdMob’s more than 15,000 mobile Web sites and applications.

There are more details about this acquisition at google.com/press/admob.

Here is the email AdMob sent their publishers and advertisers:

Google to Acquire AdMob November 2009 Today we announced that AdMob has signed a definitive agreement to be acquired by Google for $750 million. We are extremely excited about this new partnership and what it means for our advertiser, developer and publisher partners.

AdMob’s people, products and tools will continue to work to deliver successful campaigns for you and to effectively monetize your mobile traffic – no interruptions. Our product and engineering teams will keep building great products for our customers. Our sales team will keep working with our thousands of advertisers to deliver successful campaigns. Our business development team will keep working to maximize ad revenue for the more than 15,000 mobile Web sites and applications that make up AdMob’s publisher network.

After our deal closes, AdMob will work with Google to accelerate the pace of innovation in mobile and do an even better job for you. We believe this deal will benefit our advertisers, developers and publishers by:

*Increasing our investment in building innovative and engaging ad units across platforms and to further improve targeting and tracking.

*Building even more powerful relevance and optimization capabilities, and more powerful technology and tools to monetize mobile traffic.

*Increasing the effectiveness of display advertising on mobile devices by leveraging Google sales team, infrastructure and relationships.

*Improving the already high level of service and support we deliver to our advertisers, developers and publishers.

You can read more about this deal at www.admob.com/google.

Omar

Postscript from Greg: I was able to speak to Google and AdMob CEO Omar Hamoui briefly today. The acquisition puts Google at the forefront of mobile display advertising and instantly brings Google a great deal of sophistication in the segment that it previously did not have. In fact that’s one of the things that Google emphasized in the discussion: they get a team that has been working the space and thinking about mobile display for four (or more) years.

Google also alluded to a potential for “holistic” approaches to display advertising when I asked explicitly about whether there was going to be some future cross-platform ad buying capability.

Though perhaps the most visible, AdMob is not the largest mobile ad network. According to an August compilation of Nielsen data by Mobile Marketer, here’s the reach of each of the top mobile ad networks (monthly unique users):

1. Millennial Media: 45.6 million
2. Yahoo!: 36.1 million
3. Google: 31.9 million
4. AOL/Platform-A’s Third Screen Media: 28.6 million
5. AdMob: 25.7 million
6. Microsoft: 25.4 million (doesn’t include the new Verizon deal)
7. Jumptap: 23.4 million
8. Quattro Wireless: 23 million

I asked Nielsen to confirm these figures and they declined to do so. But if they’re correct it would make Google the largest of the mobile ad networks, when combined with AdMob’s reach. In the $750 million all-stock deal, UBS analysts estimate that Google “could have paid 8-12x 2011 revenue for AdMob.”

Google has a bidding methodology called Budget Optimizer that attempts to maximize the traffic you receive for the keywords in a campaign. This is useful for early buying cycle keywords. However, every keyword should be reaching some goal regardless of where it falls into the buying cycle. It was difficult to track the effectiveness of these campaigns until recently when Google made some changes to Google Analytics.

Now you can more effectively bid on early buying cycle keywords, or keywords that you want exposure for, but do not have direct returns by combining the new Google Analytics goals with a budget optimizer campaign.

Google Analytics changes explained

Google Analytics expanded the number of goals you can track from four to 20. However, it looks a bit different as you now have “goal sets.” Where each goal set has 4 goals, and you can have 5 sets per profile.

Second, Google added two additional goals:

• Page views per visit
• Time on site

Please remember with Google Analytics, time on site actually means time on site minus the last page visited, as Google analytics only tracks data when there is a click. For instance, if your site visitor exhibited this behavior:

• Page 1: Time 5:00
• Page 2: Time 2:00
• Page 3: Time 1:00
• Exit via closing the browser window

In this example, Google does not know the browser window was closed and that they should stop tracking time on site. Therefore, Google Analytics would report 3 page views and 7 minutes on site for this user.

Using goals to measure branded or early buying funnel keywords

I’m a fan of bucketing keywords by where they fall in the buying cycle. If someone is in the learning phase of the buying cycle they need an informational page. If they are in the buy section of the funnel you need to monetize the click by encouraging them to buy.

This creates situations where keywords (and often display or content ads) reach a user who is at a different point in the funnel than the ads you’re displaying and you might not be able to monetize the user—at least for now.

For instance, the keyword “plasma vs LCD TV” is a learning cycle keyword. Buying a high-end electronic device is expensive, and takes thought and time before even beginning initial searches, much less actual purchases. Therefore, this keyword will rarely lead to a purchase as its a research oriented search. However, that does not mean it’s a bad keyword. When you have keywords that describe your products or services, but cannot be directly monetized, you have three options:

• Set a different conversion goal for the keyword, such as a newsletter subscription; and then set a value for what a newsletter subscription is worth
• Use an attribution management bid system
• Use a budget optimizer campaign

Use budget optimizer campaigns to increase your exposure

The budget optimizer works by your giving control of your bidding to Google in an attempt to maximize the traffic you receive. The optimizer does not care which keywords get clicks, it just cares that your budget is spent and that it gets you the most clicks possible.

The benefits for a publisher who measure RPV (revenue per visitor) are obvious. As long as your RPV is higher than your CPC, you want as much traffic as possible on those keywords. However, for those who sell a product or service, there is a unique way of using the budget optimizer to maximize your company’s exposure.

If you set ROI or profit based bids by keyword then do not use budget optimizer.

If you consider words to have unique values, then do not put those words into a budget optimizer campaign.

However, if you have keywords that, are early in the buying cycle and do not directly lead to revenue, describe your industry and products well but are hard to monetize and you want exposure on because they are words in the news, branded terms or for other reasons then putting these keywords into a budget optimizer campaign can be a useful way to maximize your exposure on non-direct ROI keywords. With the budget optimizer campaign, set a “branding or exposure” budget. The goal of this campaign is to move searchers into your buying funnel so you can monetize them at a later date.

However, you still need to make sure that these keywords are helping you reach goals.

Setting goals for budget optimizer campaigns

If you set a goal for these keywords such as a newsletter subscription or contact, then you should be able to determine what those conversions are worth and then set keyword bids. Therefore, words that lead to those types of conversions should not necessarily be in a budget optimizer campaign.

A few metrics for measuring budget optimizer campaign keywords are:

• Page views per visit
• Time on site
• Video views
• Bounce rate
• Send to a friend
• Bookmark
• Print this page
• Tweet This (or other social actions)
• Download product specs

The above goals do not directly lead to revenue; they lead to exposure and show levels of consumer engagement.

It just so happens that the new analytics goals will let you measure these items much more easily. Follow these easy steps to be able to measure the effectiveness of these early buying cycle keywords:

1. Set goals for the budget optimizer keywords, such as 3 page views per visitor.
2. In Google Analytics, set goals for time on site, page views per visitor, or use one of the expanded goal sets to track the social sharing items.
3. Add early buying funnel keywords to a budget optimizer campaign.
4. Let the budget optimizer campaign send you traffic. It may take up to two weeks for budget optimizer to really get going; have a little patience here.
5. Examine your analytics to optimize your budget optimizer campaign
   • If a keyword is not meeting your goals – delete it
   • If a keyword is meeting other goals (such as newsletter subscriptions) then move it to your normal max CPC or conversion optimizer campaign
   • If a keyword is meeting your budget optimizer goals, but no other goals, then leave it where it is
6. The last step is to measure if your overall revenue is higher while the budget optimizer campaign is running. If yes, then as long as the increased revenue is higher than the money you are spending in the budget optimizer campaign, then you are in good shape. If not, then lower the budget optimizer”s budget.

Every keyword, ad copy and landing page should increase revenue. If it does not, it needs to go away. However, you cannot always measure direct revenue for every keyword or traffic source.

Therefore, you should set appropriate goals for a keyword regardless of where it falls in the buying funnel to make sure your entire budget is working toward turning a searcher into a customer.

Engage consumers early in the buying cycle, so when they are ready to buy your company has already been part of the conversation. However, do not just spend money to receive clicks. Make sure every single click is helping to increase your overall profits.

The Google AdWords blog announced they have made it easier for advertisers to add and track the conversions for their search ads. Google has added to the AdWords interface sections for (1) Conversions, (2) Webpages, and (3) Code.

The Conversion page shows you the conversion actions you’re tracking. Web pages shows the web pages you are getting conversions for. Finally, Code is where you get the code to add to your web pages. You can learn more details about tracking conversions over here.

Here are some pictures of these pages: