Does Google Ever Give A Quality Score of 8 For UK Campaigns?

I’ve been using an internal EF tool that gives quick, top-level data on quality score for an account (e.g. 100 keywords with 10, 150 keywords with 9 etc). Something that struck me after looking at a few accounts: no keywords ever had a quality score of 8.
Weird, I thought, must be something wrong with [...]

Don’t Not Bid on Keywords You Don’t Want

Yes, that double negative in the title of this post is confusing, so let me explain.
One of the biggest challenges any Adwords advertiser faces is controlling how Google serves ads against queries. Google gives us four match types (broad, phrase, exact and negative) to control the ad serving. It’s broad match which is [...]

Google Updates My Change History

Here’s another one of those, “When did they do that?” posts. Looks like Google have made a great improvement to the My Change History tool.

Maps embedded in AdWords

How long have Google been doing this?

Google Updates Sponsored Links Search

The eagle-eyed search experts here in Efficient Frontier's London nerve centre alerted me to an update on Google's Search Sponsored Links feature. 
A link from the main SERPs underneath the right hand column allows you to browse just the ads for a particular search term. 
Previously, that link just sent you to a page like this [...]

Trademarks: the Calm After the Storm

My ugly mug featured in this week's NMA in a follow-up article by Will Cooper about trademark bidding on Google.  It would seem that the hysteria is finally dying down as common-sense returns to the situation.
There has been quite a few, how shall I say, ill-thought-out statements about this whole thing.

Google Trademark Change: First Thoughts

So the unthinkable is finally upon us and Uncle Google has stopped protecting our trademarks.  I have a few thoughts to share on this, based on what I've observed so far.

Google Removes Restrictions on Trademarked Keywords

On Friday Google announced (via email) that it is going to remove advertising restrictions on trademarked keywords as of May 5th in the UK and Ireland.  Many advertisers are concerned that the consequences of this will hurt their AdWords campaigns, so I've put together some thoughts on what the likely result of this will be.

Nasty example of Google Extended Broad Match

Here's a really horrid example of Google's Extended Broad Match that I caught last month.  Check out the first ad on the right-hand side for the new Apple laptop on a search for 'flights'.  Eurgh. 

AdWords Editor 5 released

I got upgraded to AdWords Editor 5.0.0 today.  The main change seems to be that you can now edit Local Business Ads.  The 'Sites' tab has also been renamed to 'Placements'.

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