This could be down to two main reasons.  Firstly that whomever is doing the PPC for Confused.com has not ensured a high enough CPC bid on their brand terms and is effectively being outbid.  Personally if I were running their account I would set an overly high Max CPC on the brand terms and also ensure positional preferencing is set to number 1.  This should help to ensure that this scenario does not happen.  A company’s brand term will almost always be their best converting keyword and the one that all their marketing efforts are focused on driving through search.  It is not healthy at all to have a competitor appear higher than you for your brand in the sponsored listings.

Assuming Confused.com have taken the above action there could be another reason why they are in position two for their own brand term.  Take a look at this screenshot below from the rival site which is appearing in the number one sponsored spot, Gocompare.com

As you can see from the highlighted areas they have tried to optimise the page with copy relating to Confused.com.  The reason they have done this is to gain a better quality score and thus drive down the average CPC - it appears to be working!  They have even used “Confused.com” in the H1 tag…

The question is, is this foul play or simply ingenuinity on the part of Gocompare?  With Google already in hot water with Louis Vuitton this week, will practises like this only serve to aggravate companies which spend such vast sums of money with the search giant?

They categorise these two sets of keywords into “search” words and “care” (onpage) words.  If the research is correct it is very important in terms of which types of words you should use for search copy, either description tags or PPC Adtext copy, and what you should use once this visitor is one the landing page.  It is logical that most popular search keywords will be most concise.  But once the user is on the site, then  it comes down to which words market the product / service the best.

I guess the best tactic is to A/B test ad copy and also A/B on site copy with Google Website Optimiser.

As with campaigns that overlap offline and online, it is interesting to see how the TV commercials affect search traffic.  With the success that has been undoubtedly been achieved in this instance, searches for “compare the market” and without question for “compare the meerket” will have increased.  When doing a search for “compare the meerkat” I found the microsite #1 in the natural SERPS and also a PPC ad from Comparethemarket, not related to the promotion it must be added.  I then queried the term “Meerkats” to see if they had covered more generic terms in the PPC account.  As you can see I found some other well known comparison sites trying to capitalise on the meerkats campaign…

You would think that it would be beneficial for Comparethemarket.com to display a PPC adtext as well or failing that, at the very least, a sponsored link to the Comparethemeerkat site?  No doubt the quality score and conversion rate would be low here, but equally so would the Cost Per Click?  And knowing how much clicks relating to financial and insurance related keyterms cost, this could be a cheap way of trying to drive some qualified (ish) traffic to the Comparethemarket.com website, after all it is they who are running the Meerkats campaign itself!

Automatic Matching is a method Google uses to add qualified traffic to your account from keywords you did not include in your campaign.  The new queries will only apply spend if the account’s daily budget is not being depleted.  It aims to generate an average CPC inline with that of the relevant adgroup.  It also only applies to Google’s search and search partners, not the content network.

I recently examined a PPC account that is being run inhouse, and it is apparent that Google automatically opts you in to this service. (Surprise huh?).  Initial results were mixed  - in some adgroups the automatic matching had yielded a better CPA, in some it was worse.  However some bloggers have warned users away from using this feature.

Personally, I think the tool could be useful for those doing PPC themselves without the aid of an SEM agency.  But to find out which search queries are being generated you have to run a search query report, something an Adwords novice may not be aware of.  For agencies, it could be a useful, although I really think this is a lazy and potentially costly way of find new keywords. Better to use the keyword tool and possibly an ontology tool.

There have been several upgrades of Adwords editor since it’s inception, Google did what Yahoo failed to do - listen to it’s user base.  Here I have listed some *possible* further improvements…

1. Improve Geo-targeting to allow for exact targeting of co ordinates, area (s). Currently you can only target down to towns and cities, but not bespoke areas e/g 30 mile radius of “X”

2. Change the default campaign target country to the UK not the US.  I am sure a lot of people have come unstuck with this?

3. Import some basic analytic metrics - such as “bounce rate” and “exit rate” at keyword level.  That way you would be able to tell easily that a problem could relate to a landing page not a keyword/CPC bid/adtext.

4. Flag duplicate account wide keywords automatically

5. Allow Ad scheduling features such as accelerated bid and day parting.

6. Create a dashboard similar to Adwords - this would allow for top level data analysis whilst not online.

Yahoo have gone one step further than manipulating the SERPS to encourage greater PPC spend.  Instead they consider the easiest way is to get their current advertisers to spend more on PPC is to log into existing PPC accounts and increase the CPC’s and add more keywords.  Obviously some bright spark at Yahoo must have thought this was some sort of masterstroke but it has been roundly condemned by those who have had the misfortune of a Yahoo “pro active optimisation”.   As Patricio Robles  from E-consultancy put it…

“Yahoo has reserved for itself the right to proactively ‘optimize‘ Sponsored Search and Content Match campaigns as it sees fit. And it’s a bit of a worry, for some people.”

One advertiser, John Wieber, was allegedly lumbered with an additional $4,000 in click charges as a result of the meddling. Yahoo are allowed to modify client accounts because of a change in their T and C’s made in the middle of 2008.  Andrew Girdwood of bigmouthmedia said that many Yahoo accounts were badly set up as they have been constructed by media planners (presumably as opposed to search specialists).  He went on to say that…

“Yahoo is daft for so bluntly announcing that they would ‘fix’ accounts whether the account holder wanted them ‘fixed’ or not. All Yahoo has managed to do is further endanger the trust and fragile confidence search marketers may still have in the engine.”

In short, these “pro active optimisations” are a PR disaster for a company that already has a dwindling market share of sponsored search advertising.

January is traditionally a quiet time for the overwhleming majority of search advertisers, and this has been made more apparent by the impact of the credit crunch. Ominously for Microsoft and Yahoo, Google.co.uk plus Google.com in tandem accounted for 90% of all UK searches for the first 4 weeks of December.  Yahoo! now have a 2.76% market share with Live Search on 2.0% - that’s according to data from Hitwise.

With regards to how suggest might impact upon PPC the main concern is that traffic and CPC’s would increase for the generic phrases as has been mentioned above for SEO.  In the example below you can see that the phrase “compare gas and electricity prices” has many more possible results than “compare gas and electricity rates” and so is likely to have a higher CPC.  The user that queried this search term may have been intending to query “compare gas and electricity rates” but might pick the first suggested result as they in essence mean that same thing.  Bad news for those seeking to maximise ROI from the long tail?

Another development that has come to light is that Google is now serving PPC ads before the user has even chosen a result (see below).

So what is this all about, improving the user experience or more profiteering by Google?  According to their representative on the matter…

“This is another example of search becoming more dynamic and Google getting users to the correct results as fast as possible,”

Johanna Wright, director of product management at Google.

Hmm…I think having the ads at the top is too intrusive in that the PPC ad is emphasised more than the suggested alternative queries - the lack of an H1 and H2 description ala the conventional SERP’s means that the user could be drawn more heavily towards the PPC ad - Good news for Google!

Now it seems that the big G is using Universal search results to push natural listings down the page in an attempt to encourage / force those at the bottom into spending on PPC.  Now you might think these blended search results are an important part of offering users a selection of results e/g video, news, images, local business listings which is correct of course.  If I type in “Titanic” I might want a Wikipedia result, an image and/or a video about the vessel.  But if I query “loans” am I really looking for news about “loans”?

And in anycase if I wanted financial news, would I type in “Loans” surely I would look either on Google news, bloomberg, forbes etc etc.  This looks like a blatent attempt to cajole companies into PPC?  With these results positions 4 and 5 are below the fold on a standard browser.

Using this technology the clever people at semenvironment have created a Google Adwords PPC Management toolbar that works with the same principle.  Simply download the software and submit your adwords login plus API details and you will soon be able to see basic Adwords metrics from within your browser, see the following screenshot.

I havn’t tested it yet but from all accounts it seems to work very well.  Of course for those running an MCC account it may not be suitable as you can only seen one account at a time, but this is still a  GREAT piece of technology all the same.  It could be particulary useful if you want to keep an eye on one major account while you do something else or if the PPC spend gets depleted quickly during the day.