Slides designed by the fantastical Floating Frog.

The code to dynamically insert a keyword is {keyword:defaultphrase}

Not, as one advertiser thought:

No matter how careful you are you can still make mistakes, but this is a great argument for always checking your ads!

If you can’t read this just click to make it bigger.

You can see the bizarre page here.

So far so good. What baffles me is the negative effect position preference has on the ad’s performance.

An old client of mine wanted to spend a bit less on his Adwords since no-one’s buying much at the moment, but wanted his ads to keep showing. With his current bids he averaged position 1-2, so I set his position preference at 4-5. The idea was that his ads would show lower down the page and therefore gather less clicks.

He rang me this morning thinking he’d done something to his account and accidentally turned his ads off. I did a few searched and they appeared nowhere in the search results. Imagine my surprise when I had a look in his account and saw the error message to the left.

Now, his bids were exactly the same as before, but I wanted the ads to show lower. Surely by the Laws of Adwords this meant clicks would cost less? After all, the quality score would remain the same….right? So the maximum bid would get position 4-5 at least some of the time – I don’t see any excuse for the adverts to be turned off.

I know that a lot of factors could come into play here – a changed quality score, different bidding by competitors, etc etc, but what makes me think it’s a load of bullsh*t is when I turned position preference off:

The ads started showing again in position 1. Obviously nothing wrong with the bid then!

The trouble with Adwords, and I’ve said it before, is that the features allow clashes and bugger-ups, and the error messages are woefully inadequate. For a paid service I think it’s pretty unforgiveable – it’s got to the point when you need to hire an expert to manage it not because it’s inherently complicated, but because it’s been made complicated.

Recently I’ve noticed Thomson Local showing up in the search results – much like eBay they seem to be bidding on random goods and services. At first I thought ‘oh that’s good, they’re providing some clicks for their advertisers’. Then I realised that they haven’t quite got the ‘local’ thing worked out yet.

In case you’re wondering, I’m in Harrogate.

Traditional directories like Thomson Local must be struggling at the moment. On the one hand I applaud them for embracing Pay Per Click – it’s something they can offer to keep themselves afloat. On the other hand, their inability to do it properly could be just another nail in the coffin.

Anyway, a few days ago I came across their Adwords campaign in the search results and I couldn’t resist posting it up here. It certainly matches in with the personality of the company!

I don’t know who does their Adwords – perhaps they do it themselves. There are a few things wrong with this advert though, not least the lack of capitals and the really, really clunky text. Not very compelling you’ll agree, and does “seen on Dragon’s Den” really make you think high quality?

Now this is meant to be an Adwords update, so why would I want to know about the Google news archive, Google Reader and Blogger Following (not to mention the US Elections!). Call me sceptical, but I imagine that a lot of Adwords users haven’t even heard of these other Google properties, which means this newsletter is acting as free advertising to a captive audience. Adwords users might think Google Reader is relevant to them – after all, Google are telling them about it in a special update!

With the launch of Chrome on their homepage it’s pretty clear Google aren’t afraid of pushing their products. Adwords updates are just the latest victim and I’m sure they won’t be the last.

Whereas before you bid to get your Ad shown and watched the resulting average position, you’ll now bid to get your Ad shown on the first page. Keywords that might have fallen foul of the Quality Score and become inactive will now show regardless, only they won’t make the first page of results.

This shake-up in the bidding system makes it easier for crappy adverts to show, but what I’m most concerned with is the fact that Google are making the first page a goal. Everyone wants to be on the first page, but before the bidding system meant that we had to work to get there. Under these changes advertisers will know from the start what they have to bid to get the best spots and I’d be willing to wager this will drive bids up.

I wonder just how Google will calculate the minimum bid – will it change every day? Will Quality Score still have something to do with it or will it simply become a matter of the ten richest companies snapping up the places?

I’ve always been sceptical of the content network and Ad Planner hasn’t yet changed my mind. In the UK the websites available are very limited – Adwords is still US-dominated and the content network isn’t yet suitable for the wider UK market.

One side effect of Ad Planner I do like is the update to the campaign management screen:

A new tab for ‘Placements’ has been added (in case you’ve started using the Ad Planner!) and there are now little messages making it clear exactly where your Ads are showing. In this screenshot it tells me that my keywords trigger ads on search only, that the content network is turned off. This is a neat new feature that will help advertisers make sense of their campaigns and maybe even their figures. I’ve had clients ask why they got thousands of impressions, not realising that they were opted into the content network (by default).

So thumbs up to Adwords for being more clear about where your adverts show. I’ll wait until Ad Planner lets you target better UK sites before I trash it completely

A Google search brought a few suggestions – lower the CPC, increase the daily budget, etc etc, but nothing worked. I thought it might be the billing information so left it over the weekend to see what would happen. Monday morning came and the ads still wouldn’t show!

Luckily we have a Google Rep on hand to help – a quick email got a response within the hour. The account was ‘under review’ and would be active shortly. Sure enough the ads were running the same afternoon.

It’s great that our Google Rep got things sorted so quickly, but they didn’t seem to know the account was under review until I told them. Also, the error message in the account had nothing to do with a review! For someone new to Adwords it would be really confusing – lots of people on the message boards that I read were having the same problem, only they didn’t have the advantage of a representative at Google.

I’ve never had an account under review before – I wonder if Google have started to do this more. If that’s the case they should let advertisers know to expect delays.