Have You Built Your Extension Yet

First this month l want to talk to you about the Google triangle, (kinda like the Bermuda triangle but I guess more people get lost in the Google AdWords triangle).
adwords-triangle
Google wants to provide the best search engine experience in the world, and to do this it has to serve its clients very well (there’s a lesson for us all here). When we search on Google (there are 1.2 trillion searches a year) we are, at that point in time, a client of Google and Google wants us, ‘The Searcher’ to get the best answer to our search query as quickly, and precisely as possible from ‘The Advertiser’. So Google really has two types of clients and it wants both to be happy. To be certain ‘The Searcher’ gets a great experience from ‘The Advertiser’, Google looks for a high degree of relevancy betweeen The Searcher’s query and The Advertiser’s ad and landing page. (There we go, only into the second paragraph and the “R” word has been mentioned again). It’s no accident that I mention the “R” word at every opportunity. Relevancy is that important for AdWords success.
Before 2005 AdWords was quite different. The average cost per click was a lot less than it is today and the playing field wasn’t that level, because whoever had the most money got the best position for their ads, regardless of how good or bad their overall AdWords campaign structure was. So Google come up with a way to stop the people with deep pockets serving poor ads and landing pages to ‘The Searcher’; they introduced a concept called Quality Score.
I’m sure you already know that this is a score (out of 10) that Google gives to each and every keyword in your campaigns based upon how relevant your keyword, ad and landing page are to ‘The Searcher’s’ original search query. And all this is cleverly linked by Google.
You see, the greater your relevancy, the greater your Quality Score. The greater your Quality Score the higher position your ad appears on the search results page.
Google uses a complex equation for this, which, simply stated, is the maximum amount of money you are prepared to pay per click multiplied by your Quality Score that determines where you appear on the results page. And since the top three ads on the left of the page get 50% of all the clicks, then I know where I want my ads and our Members’ ads to be. This was a smart move by Google because this new system rewarded ‘The Advertiser’ who was prepared to spend a lot of time and effort creating relevancy and it also rewarded ‘The Searcher’ because they now see a much more relevant ad and landing page. Win-win for everybody.
In fact this is what makes it easy for small businesses like yours and mine to compete with much larger organisations. I love competing against large outfits as, generally speaking, they are pretty poor at all this AdWords stuff, as they think it’s all about throwing chunks of money at it; they simply just don’t take the time to get smart at AdWords.
Our own family business, The Scottish Shutter Company, competes with two large national companies who each turn over in excess of £1m a year, yet, we appear in the number one position in the search results when we want to – and that bit is important too – for a lot less than they are paying to be in lower positions: that to me is AdWords ecstasy.
But Google is nothing if not dynamic, and recently it added a little more spice to the position-ont-he-page equation by introducing a third factor – called Ad Extensions – extra tools that really smart Google Advertisers can use to make their ads much larger (up to two times larger) than their competitors. But you can only do this if you have already done a lot of work on your relevancy, because the only place you can make your ads much bigger is if you are in the top three positions anyway.
So what are Ad Extensions? Well, there are a whole bunch of them, but the most important of which are Site Links, Call Extensions (this is the only way Google will allow you to have your telephone number in your ad), Call Out Extensions and Location Extensions (although if you’ve won any awards in the last year the Award Extensions are worth a look too). I set up a campaign for EC Member Ray Capeling for his wonderful luxury guest house and restaurant in the Yorkshire Dales.
Within two hours of the campaign going live Ray’s ad was in the No1 position much wider and deeper than his competitors and with a full set of Ad Extensions showing, for the search term “hotels with hot tubs”. Clearly, Hottubmaster in position three needs my help (clue: they’re not using negative keywords!).
‘till next time.
david-browne