Category: adwords

Google Trademark Policy Change

On Wednesday Google announced separate trademark policy changes in that affect the UK, Ireland and Canada and the rest of Europe differently.

Reading about the changes on the web, I’m really surprised how many articles have got this one wrong. Mostly it seems to stem from an inability to distinguish that different policies have applied, and will apply, between UK and Ireland, and the rest of Europe. (Google has a helpful list of which countries it considers to be in Europe. To add to the confusion, some places on the list are in South America or the Antartic.)

Anyway, here’s a couple of charts that hopefully explain what’s changing.

Policy before September 14th 2010

Policy after September 14th 2010

The change happening to Europe (excluding UK and Ireland) happened in the UK in May 2008. Chaos was predicted, but failed to materialise. I wrote about it before the change and made some observations after it was implemented. I think the comments I made then still stand.

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 the tool. So I downloaded some of the accounts into Adwords Editor for a closer look. Still no 8s. After a going over a good number of accounts, here’s what I found:

  • Campaigns targeted to the UK and bought in GBP never have live keywords with a quality score of 8.
  • The only 8s I found were paused – either at the keyword, adgroup or campaign level.
  • One account that is targeted to the UK but bought in USD has 8s a plenty.
  • Campaigns targeted anywhere else (continental Europe, US, you name it) have 8s.

I’ve asked a couple of friends who run campaigns to check too, and they see the same. So what’s going on here? Just a bug I suppose. But are we at any advantage or disadvantage? Are there 7s that should be 8s, or 9s that should be 8s? Let me know your thoughts!

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 the most difficult and perhaps the least understood. Continue reading →

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 but now it's quite different: Continue reading →

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. Continue reading →