Kikabink News

Google has introduced the Search-based Keyword Tool (currently in beta). The tool suggests keywords for you to target in your Google Adwords campaign, based on their relevance to your website.

According to Google, you can benefit from the Search-based Keyword Tool in two main ways. Firstly, if you are running a campaign the tool will suggest keywords that are highly relevant to your website, but are not currently part of your AdWords campaign.

Secondly, even if you aren’t currently advertising in Adwords, you can use the tool to discover nuances about your target market. The tool essentially generates keywords often used in association with the keywords you have chosen to target.

Right now, the Search-based Keyword Tool is available to advertisers in the U.S. and U.K., with additional languages and countries to follow in the near future.

Check it out here: http://www.google.com/sktool

Source: Trevor Claiborne, “Announcing the Search-based Keyword Tool”, Inside AdWords, November 18, 2008

As reported in The ClickZ Network, data from Efficient Frontier indicates that average click costs in some general categories were substantially down, while others were up, in September 2008.

The average cost-per-click (CPC) for finance related keywords declined by 22 percent from August to September, reaching $2.06.

Meanwhile, the average CPC of retail related words was up by 13.6 percent to $0.50. Other terms were either up or down by less significant percentages. For example, the average CPC for mortgage related words was up by 7.8 percent to $2.89, while the average CPC for dating related keywords was marginally up. It increased just one cent from $0.43 to $0.44 - a 2.3 percent increase.

Source: The ClickZ Network, “Average Search CPC Data by Category for September 2008″, The ClickZ Network, October 16, 2008

In a recent Search Engine Watch article, David Szetela provides invaluable advice for organizing the keywords in your pay-per-click (PPC) campaign.

If you’re involved in PPC advertising, David’s articles (and all his articles) are a must-read. In summary, his three (3) tips are as follows:

1. If a keyword has received more than 500 impressions, but no clicks, pause or delete it. It is adversely affecting the relevant ad group’s quality score.
2. If a keyword has had 150-200 clicks but no conversions, pause or delete it. It’s not converting and is undermining your return on investment (ROI).
3. If a keyword gets just one conversion, keep it. If, after generating 30 or more conversions, the cost-per-conversion is still too high, lower the bid price. BUT if the cost per conversion is lower than your target, you might find that raising the bid price is worth it because you should see even more conversions.

Source: David Szetela, “Judging PPC Performance: Focus on Conversions, Part 2″, Search Engine Watch, October 6, 2008

Undoubtedly in response to numerous questions from concerned and confused Google Adwords advertisers, Google has posted an explanation of its Quality Score changes on its Adwords blog.

In short, here are Google’s responses to the main three issues on advertisers’ minds:

1. How will Quality Score be calculated?

Google will STILL consider (a) the historic performance of you account, evaluating the clickthrough rate (CTR) of all the ads and keywords in that account; and (b) your landing page quality. However, although Google will evaluate your overall Quality Score at the time of each search query, it will evaluate landing page quality less frequently.

2. What’s the impact of the removal of ‘Inactive for Search Status’?

Google believes that by making all keywords active it will better be able to evaluate keywords for any query where they may be relevant. The company has acknowledged that keywords previously marked as ‘inactive for search’ would otherwise never show ads on Google.com, even where they might have been a high quality match for certain queries. Now it’s giving such keywords a chance.

3. What’s the difference between ‘first page bid estimates’ and the old ‘minimum bids’?

Google says that for queries that don’t have much advertiser competition, the first page bid estimate should be relatively close to your existing minimum bid. However, queries with lots of advertiser competition may have much higher first page bid estimates. This is because you’ll probably need to bid above the old minimum bid to rank higher than the competition and show on the first page of paid search results.

Source: Trevor Claiborne, “Quality Score improvements to go live in coming days”, Inside Adwords, September 15, 2008

Interesting article by Patrick Altoft - he reckons Google may have reduced the weighting it gives to anchor text in its search engine algorithm.

Anchor text is the text that appears in website links. In other words, instead of simply displaying the URL of a given website, you might provide some descriptive text - this is known as anchor text. As an example, “http://www.kikabink.com/news/” is the straight URL of the home page of Kikabink News. But if I wanted this link to appear as “Internet marketing newsletter” I would write “Internet marketing newsletter” as the descriptive or anchor text.

According to Mr Altoft, anchor text is the “biggest flaw” in the Google algorithm. He believes that anchor text has no relation to trust for most queries.

“Just because a site has 5 million links with the anchor text ‘loans’ doesn’t mean its a good search result for the query ‘loans’. Currently there are two types of sites ranking for commercial queries - ones that rank due to the TrustRank of their incoming links (links from newspaper websites and quality blogs) and ones that rank because they have thousands of paid links with keywords in the anchor text.”

At this stage, the under-weighting of anchor text is just a theory… but certainly an interesting, and possibly valid, one.

Source: Patrick Altoft , “Google Changes Algorithm - Anchor Text Less Important”, BlogStorm, August 22, 2008