Diamond Geezer’s Adwords Fail
October 10th, 2008 § 1 Comment
I’ve long wanted to do a post on Diamond Geezer of Dragon’s Den fame – a critique of their website. It’s certainly old – I was browsing through some stock photography cd’s a while ago and happened across the old man on their homepage – alongside some pictures of bbc computers and brick-sized mobile phones. Quite frankly it surprises me that a company so set on being an internet business has such a dated design.
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?
Today’s Tip – Don’t Show Competitors Ads On Your Website
September 16th, 2008 § 3 Comments
I was checking one of my clients’ Analytics package today to see how their traffic was doing – most of the traffic comes from natural search, with an ad campaign bringing in visits for something they don’t rank for. So far so normal. There was one referring site that puzzled me – I followed the link and imagine my surprise when I saw my client’s advert right on the product page of one of their main competitors!
I didn’t set up their ad campaign – normally I opt out of the content network, but the client was opted in so Google had chosen a ‘relevant website’ to show ads on. This just so happened to be the competitor – what’s more, the click-through rate was over 6% and the conversion rate was over 8%! The competitor obviously hadn’t seen this:
There’s a lesson here somewhere…as a website owner it may seem like a good idea to earn a bit of money from Adsense, but please please please if you sell a product, filter your competitors out!
Adwords Tries To Drive Up Keyword Bids
August 31st, 2008 § Leave a Comment
In the most recent Agency Update, Adwords released a couple of interesting updates:
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?