The event will be hosted and generously sponsored by bSeen – the specialist in Search Marketing.

The main theme will be about “applied customer segmentation & targeting” with great case-studies and demonstration. Have a look at the agenda:

Agenda:
18:00: Venue opens & welcome
18:35: Introduction & updates on the WA Belgian community (M. Notté, WAA Country manager for Belgium)
18:45: “Targeting customers and optimizing lead generation @ Volvo” (J. Milgrom from Boondoggle & Netmining)
19:15: Tool/vendor demonstration – segmentation features (To be confirmed)
19:30: “Practical customer segmentation: basic ideas with great results – Isotrie.be & Combell.com” (S. De Veirman from bSeen)
20:00: Networking and free drinks offered by bSeen

Register NOW!
It is a 100% free event and it has an exciting agenda, so what are you waiting for?

Register here on the official worldwide Web Analytics Wednesday page. You can find all details about the event (agenda, address, location map) on the bSeen WAW page.

AdWordsPro Sarah who posted the tip first recommended trying to utilize the content network. She said the content network saying, you “have an understanding of the type of people you are targeting, and like all of the types of advertising, you find a place they are bound to visit and place an ad there.”

But what about tips for those low traffic keywords in the search network? She offers three useful and important tips. Let me quote them:

1. Start Small. The knee jerk reaction is to throw a million keywords at the wall and see what sticks. The problem with this is that it is hard to manage this many keywords. A keyword may have terrible performance, but it gets lost in the crowd and you may never notice. Its fine to use the ‘throw and stick’ method, but I like to throw small batches of keywords at the wall so I can carefully monitor their performance.
2. Delete Delete Delete. If you test a large number of keywords and they don’t perform well, they start to drag down your account Quality Score. And, to make matter worse, having a low account Quality Score, makes it harder to introduce new keywords (they tend to start with a lower Quality Score in a low Quality account). To avoid this, I recommend that low performing keywords be deleted immediately. If you have 100-200 impressions and no clicks, its time to think about deleting. If you have 200-300, it really is time. Advertisers tend to think if they wait just a little longer, a click will come. However, while they wait, the keyword drags down the account. If you want to test a lot of keywords, you have to be willing to give the non performers the ax.
3. Go Local. If you think your product might appeal to a local audience (a new umbrella hat- why not target Seattle), you can use location targeting to help get your ad in front of the right people. If you can’t rely on the search as heavily, you need to think about all of the other tools that are available for targeting. Who would want this product? Where do they live? When are they online? If you think your target audience is suburban moms, you might want to stay out of the city and try scheduling your ads during the day when the are at home.

The discussion around these tips is just getting started.

Forum discussion at Google AdWords Help.

source: seroundtable

What? Really?

Yep, I read about this recently and immediately called our AdWords people, and they confirmed it. AdWords parses all searchers’ queries- if a searcher is outside your geotargeting, but their search query appears to be relevant, they may still serve your ad to them.

For example, say I want to serve ads about Myrtle Beach Hotels only to people in North Carolina – I’m creating a campaign specifically for North Carolinians with ads about a gas credit to save money on the drive down to Myrtle Beach. With AdWords’ current set-up and the query parsing exception, if someone in California searches for one of my keywords, like “myrtle beach hotels”, AdWords may still show them that ad. This happens despite the fact that the ad is for a gas credit that no one in California would ever use. Ridiculous.

Here’s some background info:

* “How to Prevent Adwords Ads from Appearing Outside your Geotarget” – Admittedly this is pretty inflammatory writing, but…
* What AdWords Help says. Check out the second bullet point in that answer.

One of our AdWords reps told me that the percentage of my clicks from outside by geotargeting should be small. So I checked, and the results are below. I’d be interested to see your results, if you review your geotargeted accounts.

Complicating this research is the fact that geotargeting is set at campaign level, but the geographic report in AdWords can only be run at the account level. So, I checked the three clients we have whose campaigns are all geotargeted. I may use Omniture and GA to check other clients later.

Results

In one client, fully 30% of the clicks came from outside the geotargeted area. And 30% is not just a few clicks. For another client, 20% of my impressions are going outside the geotarg area and the CTR for those impressions is zero. That will lower quality score because it lowers the account CTR. I’m taking that to my rep.

The first client reviewed was geotargeted only to NC and SC because it’s a medical service for which people are unlikely to travel much further. In a 2 month period, there were 669 clicks total. There was only 1 click but 10,738 impressions from other areas. The total of impressions from all areas was 51,526; so 20% of my ad impressions were shown to areas I didn’t request. Is AdWords’ insistence on showing outside relevant areas dragging down my quality score? Because 20% is substantial- but because the quality score algorithm is secret, I can’t project how much less CPC would have been with the better quality score I would have received from the more relevant impressions I requested.

Second client is a cable company that only services South Carolina. This does not and cannot serve clients outside of the state, so there are no relevant ad viewers outside SC. Out of 1.139m impressions, only 558k are in my geotargeted area. These (many in content network) get an overall 0.54% CTR. There were 581k from outside where I chose, and these only received a 0.06% CTR. Again, having 51% of my impressions come from outside my geotargeted area and getting 1/8th the CTR on those drags down my quality score and increases the CPC on the clicks from GOOD areas. There were 376 clicks from outside my geotargeted area for $1026.10 spend, which was 13% of the total spend in this time period. Google increased their earnings by 15% in this case on the anti-geotargeted impressions and by an unknown amount on my requested impressions.

The third client is a golf destination, and we targeted 31 states east of the Mississippi. This one turned out as my account rep predicted. For some reason, they showed 0.3% of my impressions in Quebec, which seems more reasonable. But my geotargeting here was much wider than in the other clients. Google may have shown impressions in these areas even if I had geotargeted only to NC. In this case, I have no big complaint, because the CTR for those Quebec clicks was good, and we know we get Canadian golfers wanting to come down to Myrtle Beach.

Discussion

Despite the third case, the larger problem remains: if I’m smart enough (or have good data from my analytics) to geotarget more specifically for better results or for specific campaign goals, I should be able to do so. Google either thinks their algorithm is smarter – and clearly it’s not – or they care more about making money than about helping me reach my advertising goals, or this is an antiquated approach they need to update.

In everyday life, I drive a stick shift because I like to control the machine. I don’t use automated bid rules or third party software to optimize AdWords. I do it by hand. I do it better and faster that way. I like the control because I know what I’m doing.

What Google is doing here, making query parsing an exception to geotargeting, is worse than turning a manual transmission into an automatic. An automatic would be fine for the convenience or if it got you better gas mileage, right? But in this case, their machine is set to maximize their KPI’s (more clicks and dollars), not mine (more relevant impressions, better CTR, better quality score, lower CPC, better CR, better cost per lead, better ROAS).

They use the rationale that query parsing delivers relevance, but the impressions and clicks are clearly not as relevant in two out of the three cases above. It’s a clever rationale, because we know relevance is the foundation of everything Google does… but it doesn’t make sense when the CTR is so dramatically lower and when they know that lower your CTR increases CPC and thus their earnings- they win either way- they get higher CPC on your relevant clicks, and they may get more clicks overall.

Generally I’m a Google supporter, but this policy goes over the line.

The advertiser loses here, and I think this is a bad approach for Google over the long term. They may be the best and in some ways the only pay per click solution right now, but if they abuse that position, advertisers will jump to the next competitor faster with less loyalty to Google.

Solution

In the meantime, the AdWords rep suggested I follow the solution in Dan’s blog. More specifically:

If you think that query parsing does not generate quality leads, then you can follow the steps outlined in the blog article and select the individual regions within the state or country that you are targeting. This would reduce the query parsing (but not eliminate it) because the more granular the targeting the less likely that someone is using that in their search term.

That is, you have to select all the metro areas, not just states. Extra work for us. And as he says, does not completely turn our AdWords system back into a stick shift. How about just a button that turns off geotargeting-oriented query parsing?

source: Brian Carter

Googler: “… if a site is made in a way that users run away right away, then chances are that we might not be recommending it as much as other sites that users like.” – We can conclude that the information Google receives through its toolbar is used in the ranking algorithm.

Googler: “I think it is fair for Google to use that [age of a site and the amount of time a domain is registered] as a signal in some circumstances.” – The age of domains and sites are ranking factors.

Googler: “Google uses a bunch of signals like location of the server or the TLD in order to determine which users might be interested in the sites content. “– This means the location of the server does influence the local page rankings.

Googler: “If you’re moving from one URL to another (even if it’s on a different domain), ranking signals can be passed via a 301 [redirect].” – Google will pass your old domain ranking information to the new domain if you make a proper redirect – 301. However, you should not use a 302 redirect.

Googler: “We work hard to make sure a site can’t have a negative effect on another site.” – So, a bunch of links from “bad neighborhoods cannot cause a drop in site rankings.”

Googler: “We generally treat all links the same – be it from .gov or .edu or .info sites.”

Googler: “PageRank is re-computed all the time (different PageRanks every day). But we update the toolbar PageRank 3-4 times/year.” – The toolbar PageRank is often misleading and does not show a true picture.

As search engine marketeer we should take note of these points. You could hang it as a poster in your office. Each time you look up,you will remember these points.

source: WebCEO

Onder luxeproducten verstaan we ondermeer horloges, parfums, cosmetica, designerkledij en handtassen. Wel is Internet een belangrijk informatiekanaal, net als in andere Europese landen.

Zo wisselt meer dan een derde via instant messaging en e-mail ideeën voor geschenken uit en zoekt op het internet productinformatie. De aankoop zelf gebeurt nog grotendeels in de klassieke ‘offline’ winkels.

Nog enkele resultaten over de Belgische deelnemers aan het onderzoek:
- Van alle aangekochte luxegoederen is bijna de helft bestemd om cadeau te doen.
- Uit het hele pakket van luxeaankopen gaat het grootste deel van het budget naar jassen en jurken.
- Van alle deelnemende landen spenderen de Belgen het minst aan luxegoederen en kopen ze ook het minst online.
- Meer dan een derde van de Belgische luxefans gebruikt het internet om informatie over luxeproducten op te zoeken. De meerderheid gaat hiervoor nog steeds het liefst naar `offline` winkels.
- Om inspiratie op te doen, vraagt 38% advies aan vrienden en familie, vaak via e-mail of instant messaging.
- Voor 54% van de deelnemers speelt het internet een belangrijke rol in de periode vóór de aankoop.
- Belgische consumenten hebben een minder positieve houding ten opzichte van onlinereclame voor luxeproducten dan consumenten uit andere Europese landen. Nochtans klikt 42% van de Belgische deelnemers wel eens op onlineadvertenties voor luxeproducten.

bron: digimedia

Per default is deze optie wel aangevinkt. Dus als je je advertentie niet richt tot surfers met mobiele apparaten(met html browser) dan ken je dat best niet activeren.

Voor meer informatie ivm mobile targeting optie, ga naar Google Adwords Helpcentrum

Hier zijn alvast de categorieën (in het document vindt je uitgebreide informatie terug):

1. Focus your ads on low prices and savings.
2. Use value-related keywords.
3. Make sure your ad groups are targeted and relevant.
4. Don’t waste money on irrelevant clicks.
5. Make it easy for customers to buy.
6. Focus your money on your high performers.

In Google Groups kan je de discussie(s) volgen.