Google’s feature set continues to expand with the roll out of the Bid Simulator, We’ve seen this in testing but it’s now being rolled out across accounts so you may see it in yours already, it’s just a small arrow to the right of the bids at keyword level,  here’s what it looks like when one is clicked  :

The calculations in this example are based on a 3 day time window but we’ve seen up to six days in other accounts.

Whilst nothing earth shattering (and of course google have a disclaimer right there saying no guarantees) it does give you some guidance on how changing the bid could potentially affect your traffic volume and costs, although a rocket science degree isn’t needed to see the more you bid, the more traffic you get, the more it costs overall.

It’s a case of knowing what your max viable cost per acquisition is and working to that but at least with this insight you get more transparency on “what if” scenarios than just blindly upping your bid and hoping for the best.

One more tool in the war I guess although some novice users will no doubt be feeling AdWords is slipping away from them in terms of functionality and how to make the best of it as it increases the  options and features on an ongoing basis.

We’ve been busy PPC bees this month, following on from our Free Adwords Health Check site launch last month we have now launched PPC Management on PPC-Mangement.co.uk as a our dedicated pay per click site.

We wanted a design that had go faster stripes but settled on some raging flames, one could say it’s dynamic and represents the ever changing nature of PPC management but I personally like the flames as they symbolise the oodles of cash being burned on a daily basis by those people who don’t have anyone experienced doing effective PPC Management for them!

Even though we’ve been involved in PPC management since 2001 we still enjoy it, we live, breathe and think pay per click management and still love to roll our sleeves up on new account and get stuck into it and make those big, small and even very subtle changes that bring on money saving and revenue boosting results.

From what we have seen over the years in clients accounts when they first come to us it’s clear that most accounts are initially set up with poor targeting, adcopy, keyword selection and matching, which when coupled with a lack of negative keywords and poor bid management often leaves adgroups performing well below what they could do, we look at all these factors and many more on an ongoing basis when managing pay per click accounts.

Once again we are offering free ppc account reviews without any obligation, an experienced pay per click specialist will take a look at the account (making no changes whatsoever) and give feedback based on our years of experience in Pay Per Click Management, you can choose to ignore those suggestions, implement them yourself or ask us to give a price for doing this work.

Get your no obligation pay per click review at our new PPC Management site now.

We have just launched a new service and site called Free Adwords Health Check which as the name would imply offers a free Google Adwords account health check! (we like to keep things simple!)

Over the years we have been in hundreds of accounts and seen the same fundamental mistakes on a regular basis, we’ve seen pretty much everything you can imagine, Google adwords accounts spending a couple of thousands of pounds per day on broad match terms without a single negative keyword, accounts set up for big blue chip companies by huge international agencies with dedicated pay per click departments that have every mistake possible and yet at the other end of the spectrum we’ve been in accounts set up by sole traders which are flawless, so even if you have a pay per click management agency running your account already are you really sure they are working hard for you or just treading water? well now you can find out totally free!

We have devised a pay per click “success template” which we work from when optimising accounts and it’s this template that we are now using to give a free adwords account health check. We look at everything from the account structure to keyword selection, use of broad, phrase, exact match and negative terms, adcopy relevancy, ad positioning, landing page selection and many more key points that make up a successful adwords campaign.

The question most people have asked is why are we offering this free adwords review service. The answer is simply that we are confident that you’ll like the depth and detail of the free report and realise just how well we understand adwords and PPC management and as a result some of you will ask us to make those changes for them and perhaps ask us to do pay per click management on an ongoing basis, if you choose not to then there are no hard feelings, you are free to implement the changes yourself and you don’t owe us a penny.

There is nothing to lose and only money to save and extra sales to gain so no matter whether you are working out of your bedroom or the director of a FTSE 100 company we are happy to take a look at your adwords account and give it a free health check without any obligation whatsoever!

Get your Free Adwords Health Check now

I’m happy to announce my involvement with www.AffiliateDoctors.com

Affiliate Doctors was conceived by Steve Kenny who contacted well respected members of the affiliate community with a view to creating a site where people could ask questions of experienced “doctors” with knowledge in specialist areas of online marketing from SEO, to domains, to blogging, PPC etc.

The site basically runs via two channels, The Clinic is for general questions and the Surgery is for in depth assessment of a site with advice given on all relevant factors.

The Clinic :

The concept is simple, anyone can ask any of the doctors questions about their site and/or affiliate/online marketing strategy etc. and get an in depth reply from someone with several years of experience in that particular area.

The Surgery :

If someone would like their site reviewed with honest, targeted and relevant feedback then they can use the Surgery to have the doctors look over their site and give guidance on factors such as design, copy, linking, SEO, layout etc.

I’ve known some of the doctors for years such as Kieron, Chris and John, others I’ve known of by reputation but haven’t met yet but I look forward to working with everyone on this site, it should be an interesting project that benefits everyone involved.

Please take a look at Affiliate Doctors and feel free to submit a question or site for any of the doctors to answer or advise on.

I’ve been using AdWords since 2001, just a few weeks after the UK launch and in that time I’ve seen the product expand greatly from it’s humble beginnings into an environment where lack of knowledge costs users greatly, It’s no longer the place to add 2000 keywords to an adgroup with one generic advert and leave it a week to see how it does, users need useful data and they need it quickly to ascertain what is working, what isn’t, and why so with that in mind Google bought existing technology, developed it further and launched Google Analytics in 2005.

Google Analytics has also evolved (and continues to do so!) greatly over the years and despite using it daily we figured it was time to brush up on the latest and greatest/best practices so we (myself and Faaiz, our head of search) booked a place on the Google Analytics Seminar held in Amsterdam on the second and third of March.

The seminar was a two day event, first day being simple and the second day ninja level advanced!, the first day covered the very basics from the interface layout to figuring out where visitors came from, paid or organic, site search then goals and funnels, all pretty basic stuff but around 250 PowerPoint screens to crunch through so it was brisk but well covered.

The first positive for me was Justin from Epik One (epikone.com), I’ve sat through a lot of training sessions over the years and I have to say most have been pretty bland, some have been bearable, others I even stayed awake during but Justin is a top notch presenter, he actually manages to make analytics interesting and engages the audience fantastically, he even managed to make American jokes funny in Holland so that’s no small feat and a good example of his skills.

Secondly there were not one but two Google guys in attendance which added further weight to the esteem that Justin and EpikOne are held in, they added they voice on some of the wider questions and some of the more advanced/unique ones too, that’s not to say Justin’s knowledge wasn’t on a Jedi level, but some questions were very specific and orientated to a unique set of circumstances and just as with anything to do with Google there is some ambiguity between what should be and what actually is so they were able to nod or shake their head and confirm/deny/explain some questions that Justin would have to have followed up on at a later date had they not been there.

The second day was more advanced, much more advanced! there were around 225 PowerPoint screens to sit through but once again Justin made every single one of them interesting and educational, the content was heavier for sure but still easily absorbed as Justin explained it until everyone understood it even if he had to cover it a few different ways until it sank in.

There are a lot of custom filters you can create in analytics to drill down your data into tailored usable reports and I’m guessing that only a very small percentage of users actually even know this is possible let alone do anything about it so I would suggest you take a closer look at analytics regardless of if you are an affiliate or merchant as you really could save a lot of money by making use of some of the more advanced features in there.

I can’t emphasise enough (especially in the current climate where every pound/dollar really does count) the need to crunch analytics data and use it to identify areas such as excessive cost, low conversion, actual keywords driving traffic (custom filter) rather than those being bid on (analytics default information) so you can target them further, but it all starts with getting analytics set up correctly, especially so if you have a checkout on site as you need to be recording actual basket data etc.

Being aware of how hard it can be for those who simply don’t understand it all (most people on day one of the seminar worked for big companies and had no clue what it was about before attending yet were in charge of as many as 150 websites!) we are offering help with integration of the analytics at very reasonable rates, so if you aren’t sure if it’s installed or recording correctly or would like some custom filtering set up then get in touch via the contact details/form here and we’ll check it and give you price for integration including any custom coding for basket checkout integration and custom reporting views you’d like creating.

If you are fancing a tinker yourself then I can recommend the seminar, you can find out more here although it means hopping on a plane if you aren’t in the states, but it’s well worth it!

Google are continually evolving the functionality  and depth of AdWords (one could say in an effort to squeeze every dime as most changes seem to justify charging more) but it’s now nice to see that they’ve been busy working on the bodywork instead of just the engine with the announcement today that they are soon to begin beta testing a new interface in the UK.

Upon first impressions it more like Google analytics crossed with AdWords Editor than it is the traditional Google AdWords interface but that’s no bad thing :

The main points to note are the navigation bar instead of the current tabs and the “tree view” campaign navigation structure, this will be familiar for AdWords Editor users (if you aren’t using editor then why not.. it saves so much time and is super quick to learn!)
When the new interface is released you will have more flexibility when working in your account, sorting keywords, ads, adgroups and campaigns. When viewing a campaign you will be able to see  tabs for ad groups, Keywords, and Networks (Networks  is basically the new name for placements).

When in the campaign view if you click Networks, ads, keywords etc. it will display all the keywords, placements and ads for that campaign in one table to help sort through everything in one place and aid identification of what is performing well and not so well. e.g. the “Keywords” tab lets you sort all of your ads by conversion rate and see which are performing well for you across all ad groups, you can  then possibly modify things based on this data.

Another feature of AdWords Editor has been the ability to search and create filters, basically in AdWords Editor you can search your account very quickly for any keyword/adcopy/number/url etc. and even create searches based on more than one criteria such as word x with less/more than x impressions/clicks etc. Its a great feature and it’s good to see the Google boffins bring some of those excellent features online now :

As if that wasn’t enough!, Reports are now integrated so that you have far easier access to detailed information on where your ads are showing, On the keywords tab you can click “show query report” to view a report of any keywords of your choice and see the search queries (one can only hope they also show “xxx other unique search queries” as is currently the case) that have triggered your ads, or you can check the “automatic placements” on the “Networks” tab to see the URLs in the content network where ads have been displaying.

There are a few more features but the main one was the work-flow feature, in the past when not using AdWords Editor (noticing a theme yet !? .. AdWords Editor Rocks!) you have had to create new adgroups how Google wants you to but with the release of the new interface you will be able to do what you want and when as you can create ads, add keywords and set bids in any order you like and there’s the flexibility to create adgroups via a one page set up process :

Testing on the new interface starts in the UK next week so it shouldn’t be too long before the successfully adopted features are rolled out into the mainstream.

It’s a positive thing to see some hard work go into something other than pure revenue generation and justification for click cost escalation as has been the case with most of the work over the last couple of years with Google.

In adwords it’s been the case for some time that there can be only one instance of a display URL in use on the listings at any one time and that traffic clicking your advert should (regardless of tracking link hops) end up on the same domain as the display URL of your advert.

Some people have been legitimately (and not so legitimately) using alternate destination URLs for individual keywords, these have often been totally different domains to the display URL of the advert and it seems Google has had enough, So coming sometime in mid February Google will be making changes to ensure this is no longer allowed so it’d be wise to start reviewing your accounts to ensure that all individual keyword URLs are pointing to the same domain as your ads.

Excerpts from Google’s Notification :

“As you are aware, we require that your ad’s display URL match its destination URL (the URL of your landing page). Keyword URLs are also considered your Destination URL. We do not allow ads with display URLs that redirect to different destination URLs.”

The above is fine and established practice now.

“Keywords will be disapproved if they bring users to pages that are different to your Display URL.”

But above where it says “pages” it could be taken that traffic cannot even be sent to different pages on the same site depending on your display URL folder names !? and how you interpret the wording, for example your display could be “domainx.co.uk/Special-Offers” yet a keyword such as “blue blah offers” may have a URL that goes to “domainx.co.uk/Blue-Special-Offers” .. which would be a different page to the display URL ..

I’m thinking that Google will say this is fine and that I’m just being pedantic but I’ve emailed for clarification to be sure. *Update* In response to my questions our very nice Google rep replied with “As long as the domain is the same for your keyword destination URLs there will be no issue. So, the examples you give would be totally acceptable”

“Going forward, all display URLs within an ad group must be for the same top-level domain.”

This is going to affect some people, Two different sites could be 100% relevant to the keywords in an adgroup I guess so I don’t see the reasoning behind this for a change to be made unless it’s a quality score issue and Google doesn’t want to or can’t score two or more sites being sent traffic from the same adgroup and apply a median costing if the scores are different !?

“Additionally, in an effort to provide more relevant results and a higher quality experience for our users, we have made the decision to no longer allow multiple domains within a single ad group.”

Most people’s adgroups will already focus on one domain but for those who send traffic to different domains via two or more ads or by using the keyword URL feature you will now need a separate adgroup for each destination domain. I don’t see how this affects relevancy, an advert is shown in isolation to the user they don’t know whether it’s just a single advert in an adgroup or one of ten, they do the search and that search triggers the ad, the user sees the advert and clicks it and goes to site..

I really don’t see what difference to the user does it make if they go to site A or site B !?.. as long as they go where they expect to and the destination matches the display URL it makes no difference to the user.

Google are now saying you can still run the ads but not in the same adgroup, so you’ll now have to have two (or more!)adgroups with the same keywords but different ads, display and destination URLs… this seems a step backwards to me, it will be more work for advertisers and more server space for Google, however no doubt some new pricing differential will kick in and we’ll be paying handsomely for the privilege of two or more lots of the same keywords in an account.

“Please note that this amendment to our policy applies to all advertisers, regardless of previous exceptions or acceptability of any campaigns. While we understand there are legitimate use-cases for multiple domains within one ad group, we ask that separate ad groups are created for any given domain.”

Basically this is no exceptions regardless of past history or present needs however legitimate so we are all going to in the same boat! It’s early days so no doubt further clarification will come but for now there are a few weeks to trawl accounts and identify occurrences and get ready to make the changes.

AffiliateProgramAdvice.com and E-Consultancy are collating data for the 2009 affiliate census and would like (and REALLY appreciate) your input on the industry’s most comprehensive survey.

So it’s spill the beans time and be quick about it.. there’s only a few days left now (closes 27th Jan) and it only takes ten minutes 

UK based affiliates can fill a survey in here

USA based affiliates can fill a survey in here

If you’re not US or UK based but promote UK merchants then fill that survey in, likewise choose US if you do US merchants.

You may be thinking why should you share your info, well from knowledge comes greater understanding and from that the industry has the opportunity to evolve and adapt so personally I see the sharing of information as being key to moving forward, it’s 100% confidential so take just 10 minutes to contribute to and help shape the affiliate industry now.

You can read more about the census at AffiliateProgramAdvice.com  

I’ve only just recovered from the new year’s eve party (and subsequent manflu) to be able to blog about it. The credit crunch bit hard towards the end of last year so despite doing 2007 in Shanghai and initially planning for Bali for 2008 we all ended up partying in London instead of somewhere exotic.

I do like London but in a cold December it’s not my favorite place in the world so it’s just as well the company was excellent as usual. Shak organised the evening with his typical fusion of eye to detail, pure class choice of restaurant and club venues, combined with military timing to ensure everything went smoothly, Palms were greased, heads nodded, ropes lifted and entry gained without waiting in the cold, why Shak dabbles in internet stuff I don’t know.. he would do very well at event organising nights out for sheiks etc.

We all met up at Nobu Japanese restaurant and the party was from a mixture of backgrounds such as internet entrepreneurs like Shak, Myself, Champagne Jimmy and also Daniel Ek of Spotify, Josh from e-conversions and two great guys who are social dynamics/dating coaches (like Hitch but so much better and more fun) as if that wasn’t an eclectic enough group for a night of stimulating conversation Shak had invited six Norwegian ladies (Cindy, Rafea, Kine, Camilla, Anne and Helle) with diverse backgrounds from commodity brokerage to marketing so to say the conversation was widespread and very interesting is an understatement.

I’m no big fan of Japanese food or sushi but Nobu is just something else entirely and proved that I’d just had bad quality sushi before as the food is simply amazing, I’ve never tasted such a fusion of flavours and textures in one sitting, words are useless, in fact it was the first time all night that the ladies were quiet ! .. you just have to eat there to experience it. The food was washed down with hot saki, which flows easily but is deadly, I had a wobble on after just a couple.

We left Nobu and headed to Home House, a private members club in Portman Square, for a drink at their new years eve fancy dress party, they’d put some effort in for sure, loads of staff in quality outfits and no shortage of members making a good effort, free champagne and nibbles and DJ’s in various rooms etc. all very well done and I’m tempted to join myself as it’s a cool place to hang out when in London rather than have meetings in the hotel lobby or dingy meeting rooms.

The hour or so passed quickly and it was time to be convoyed over to Jalouse, this is a swish members only night club (I think Shak is quite connected of late lol) that the likes of Britney and Paris etc. frequent when in London although it looked more like a Ferrari dealership outside it than a club so whilst the credit crunch may be biting hard it’s not affecting everyone, tables in the club were pricey with a minimum spend of a few thousand yet one can only imagine the Ferrari drivers were partying on soft drinks .. so a few thousand to drink cola seems excessive for the sake of being able to let the italian horses loose at 4am when leaving but hey ho .. each to their own.

As the clock ticked towards midnight the table was cleared and the Krug arrived, at 12 fireworks went off, bells were rung and we let in the new year with a toast, everyone was still partying in fine style at 3am when I slipped into a drink induced coma, I left around 4am having enjoyed myself a little too much.

It was good to hear that despite the economic slowdown that everyone is still doing well online and whilst we all agreed that 2009 will be challenging nobody is putting the storm shutters out and hiding in the bunker, Daniel’s Spotify is rocking (how can it not.. it’s simply awesome!) Shak’s new venture CardSmart is about to launch, the PPC arena is opening up this year due to the end of best practice funding so I’m sure more opportunities for PPC management will come there and the dating coaches are very busy, it’s still exploding both online and offline for them so they have a very busy year ahead of them for sure. I think that regardless of the climate that switched on people will continue to find opportunities and do well from them.

It was great to catch up with the usual suspects, and a pleasure to meet new faces, Thanks again to Shak for organising .. it was a very memorable and enjoyable night but very cold so suggestions are welcome for the 2009 annual internet new year’s eve party locations.. the only criteria is that it MUST be above 20 degrees centigrade, sunny all day long and a party town, current suggestions are Buenos Aires, Bali and Punta Del Este so please feel free to suggest where else is worth looking at.

Following on from my previous post about inspiration sources I’m in a contemplative mood, it’s almost 2009 and looking back over the last year (or even ten) I’m thinking about goals for the year ahead, both personal and business ones, it’s evident to me that when I’ve used goals I’ve achieved things, when I haven’t I have just ambled along treading water so now I’m pretty goal orientated.

I first used goals when I was a shop fittings salesman almost 20 years ago and then I eventually ended up working at Whitbread’s in 1990 for just over 10 years and bumbled along with a steady job without much happening but by 2000 I was £25k in debt, working in a fairly well paid job but living on a spiral of credit card doom like many have done for the last few years and I was sick of the cycle so looked around for ways to make more cash and get out of it.

Having been tinkering online since 1999 I decided to take a closer look at how I could make money via the Internet, I had a few ideas, worked hard at them then sat down and set some goals in place, My initial goals were quite vague such as within two years I’ll be debt free, quit working 6 am to 5 pm for someone else and work when I wanted to, and to be able to travel where and when I wanted, then finally a bit of a day dream goal to buy (insure, maintain and run) a Porsche 911, Looking back they were not very specific goals but still better than nothing.

Despite them being a bit vague I achieved them, well all except the last one but I got to the point where I could afford to buy a 911 but didn’t, (blue collar background means I have a hard time binning huge wedges of cash on things) although I finally did sort that final one a few weeks ago hence my current goal setting mind frame for the year head.

My goal setting has evolved over the last few years, they are now S.M.A.R.T goals (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic and Timed) So instead of “I want to pay off £25k and be debt free in two years” I would now say I want to earn an extra £1,000 per month over the next 24 months, this way I know each month if I’m on track to get there, you could break it down further into £250 per week or even to £34 per day, this sounds far more manageable than “in two years I’ll pay off £25,000″.

The setting of goals is only part of the process, you have to break then down into smaller steps to achieve them (and frequently manage other people to make those steps happen) and over the years I’ve gone from being a frantic scribbler of goals and steps to a more organised online based list kind of guy and I’ve found a few useful tools for goal, project and work-flow management that help to get things organised, monitored and eventually completed so I’ll share a few of my favorites below:

My first tool is blist, this in an online list manager with a quality web 2.0 interface and some flexible features, you can share your lists with one or more people (great for creating to-do lists for staff and monitoring their progress) and you can borrow other people’s templates (if they choose to share them), edit and customise them or simply build your own from scratch, the main thing I like is that it’s not location specific as I work on my macbook at home, desktop in the office and even iPhone when mobile and I can access blist and see what’s going on anywhere, For simple one line to-do things I use Toodledo to create quick to-do items that will sync via widgets across my PC, Mac and also iPhone via an app called “todo”.

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My second goal and productivity tool is Evernote, this is a document storage and manipulation system, you can create to-do’s, save images, web pages, business cards etc. and then access and send to others via an iPhone or any mac or pc you wish to access Evernote via, the best two things for me are A) images are searchable for text and it will recognise handwriting !! and B) you can send anyone any document on your Evernote account via iPhone, if it’s on my mac or pc then it’s in my Evernote account and I simply have to select it from the free iPhone application and send it and the recipient gets the full document which means I can even get work done when not in the office!

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My third tool has been around a while, Basecamp is a tool to manage projects etc., It’s ideal from one user as a unified project management console to multiple users from around the world working on one or more projects. We use it for in-house projects as well as external ones as we can give a coder/designer etc. access to a single project and set them to-do’s and milestones etc. and then remove their access once their part of the project is completed etc. It’s an ideal tool to get things done and I use it in conjunction with an iPhone app called Minivan which allows you to access your Bascamp account via the iPhone. 

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The next tool isn’t a goal tool, it’s a productivity one for faster, trouble free invoicing, it helps you get the cash in to pay for the financial orientated goals and it’s frees up time for other work to be done, it’s called FreshBooks. It’s a flexible system where you can set up recurring invoices each month for fixed billing as well as create a new invoice in a couple of clicks or edit existing ones, You can download them as PDF’s and email them or send then online straight from FreshBooks, Clients can pay online via PayPal too if they choose. FreshBooks is a great tool for keeping track of what’s been paid and what money is due and is an aid to monitoring financial goals are achieved (and paid) on time. 

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Another tool worthy of note is a great file orientated one called DropBox, this is a simple application to centralise files for use on multiple machines, you could do it with Evernote too but I’ve found this is simpler for larger files and folders that you may need on multiple machines but don’t necessarily need to search or send them to others, it saves time emailing yourself documents and files, you can simply drag and drop them into the Dropbox application and it will upload them (encrypted) and then when you start any other PC or Mac tied to your Dropbox acount it will automatically synch and download the files or any changes so they are ready to use, it’s also a good way to avoid the risk of losing files as you’ll have them on one or more computers and online encrypted in Dropbox too.

I’m sure the year ahead will be full of challenges but also new opportunities so good luck navigating through them, if you at least know where you wish to end up you can start planning how to get there so sit down and plan those goals out over the next week or two and work towards them, with focus you’ll find the journey easier as obstacles seem much smaller if you know where you are heading.