Tag: AdWords

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Using AdWords for E-Commerce Third Party Shopping Carts

I’ve just recently run into this situation and wanted to share some tips with you on how an e-commerce store can best use Google AdWords.

First, it is important that if you are using a third party shopping cart that you understand that you really must create shopping category pages on your own front end website under your domain name if you will be promoting your product categories using Google AdWords.

Here’s an example, let’s say your domain was www.ILoveShopping.com. Your main domain only had a few pages residing there, your about us page, contact us page, and your site home page. When someone clicked your “buy dog toys” category link in your website navigation they were sent to bigstore.giantserver.com/ILoveShoppingcom/dog-toys-for-sale.aspx.

For AdWords you could not point to this category page in your ads as the destination URL if you wanted your display URL to be www.ILoveShopping.com. You would instead have to have your Display URL be bigstore.giantserver.com/ILoveShoppingcom and the destination URL be bigstore.giantserver.com/ILoveShoppingcom/dog-toys-for-sale.aspx –  right?

Well, at least this is supposed to be how it works, but just recently Google would not even allow an advertiser  use this format. It may be the max URL count for the destination URL is over the 1024 that are allowed or that the shopping server really does not exist and is a redirect page set at the store server level. And besides that who wants to be doing AdWords and have customers lose confidence when they see a weird display URL like: bigstore.giantserver.com/ILoveShoppingcom instead of ILoveShopping.com?

So, without being able to link to the category page suddenly your quality score on dog toys slips to 7 or even 5 and you start paying a chunk of cash to promote this popular category for your store.

If this is your situation, before you start promoting your store on AdWords you really need to address this by creating a category page that is keyword dense and lists your products by name or categories and then from there links to the store. Not only will this help with your AdWords quality score, it sidesteps the Display/Destination URL problem mentioned above, increases conversions, and will even help your main front-end site place organically as now your parent domain has new keyword dense relevant content to what you are selling.

If you have tons of products and say nah, I am not going to do this, you may want to consider creating a landing page for the category you are promoting on your main website that then showcases only your top sellers and has a prominent link to the complete category page in the third part store. Whatever your plan, to send the customer for a specific category to your home page where there is no specific content on this category or products to buy is wrong and a fails miserably when it comes to building a great quality score and increasing conversion.

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AdWords Beta Interface Broken But Has Possibilities

I am so sick of beta applications being released that really should still be in the developer’s sand box and the Google AdWords new beta interface is one of them.

I have to say that the new interface has tremendous new conveniences for power uses such as myself, but will terrorize do-it-yourself account managers as it is overwhelmingly complicated. For me, as a professional account manager, the ease of use and ability to customize the interface, as well as the ability to make changes all on one page is very welcome.

But the problem with the screen size and horizontal scroll bars is a real deal breaker for the new beta. Who wants to have to scroll to the right and then back and forth? Hey, you can get a repetitive stress injury doing this! Man, I just don’t want to be out for carpel tunnel syndrome surgery in the near future because of the AdWords beta.

AdWords says that the new interface has been designed for 1024 resolution screens, but it is not. I run a 1280 resolution (width) and I have about 4 inches of scroll bar on my screen. This is a HUGE problem. Please AdWords resolving this issue should be fast tracked so more people can use the interface.

So if you’re thinking of trying out the AdWords beta interface, if you don’t have a 1600 resolution screen size don’t get it. Thank goodness they have a revert back to the old interface button for now. So for real power users the beta is a “don’t go there” choice.

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Hot AdWords Tip on Title Character Count and Keyword Insertion

This just in from a chat conversation with a Googler at AdWords! (This note was also posted at the Webmaster World forum for professionals.)

I challenged AdWords customer support about a competitors ad that showed 26 characters in the title of the AdWords ad and was told by a specific Googler with the initials P. A. that “If you use keyword insertion in your ad text, the ad title may show more than 25 characters.” He verified this with a supervisor when I stated that I would post this on my blog and at Webmaster World.

This is news to me and I have been managing AdWords for over six years and this use of additional characters is not reflected in any of their training information.

To clarify even further the Googler stated that there is no guarantee that AdWords will show beyond the limit for the title but they may choose to show a keyword with 26 or 27 characters automatically. The he stated, “The keyword insertion issue is just a by product of our automated systems. In no way are we giving some advertisers more ad text characters.” Hmm, but they are!

In my case the title I wanted was Virtual Assistant Training which is 26 characters. Entering a title in the AdWords control panel allowed Virtual Assistant Trainin – which makes no sense. I am now setting up dynamic ad groups for keywords that fit these parameters for my clients.

Interesting that the Google rules state 25 characters max or less if you use double byte, but never state that they will show more. You can do a search on Google.com to see the 26 word title for two of my client’s competitors using the query Virtual Assistant Training. You will see two competitors showing the 26 character title.

I just wanted to pass this on to you so that you could leverage this new information for your benefit too.

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Coming Soon New Trademark Rules to Google AdWords

With Google fighting a lawsuit on the use of trademarked keywords, it is simply a matter of time before G0ogle AdWords will not allow trademarked keywords in your AdWords trigger list.

Read the full article at the Wall Street Journal here to come up to speed on the lawsuit.

For all AdWords accounts showing ads overseas in Europe it has long been the policy that not only can you not show trademarked terms in your ad text but you cannot even include them in your keyword list. Not so in Canada and the US. You may run into a problem using a trademarked term in ad text, but you can have the keywords in your trigger list.

With this lawsuit brought by Rescuecom Corp. I believe that Google keyword policy may be changing in the near future. Already over the years Google has really beefed up it use of trademarks in ad text. If you’ve ever run into the issue, you know what I mean. You can get your ad text approved, but only with the trademark owner verifying that you and your account number are authorized to use their trademark. This can all be done via fax, but must be on a corporate letterhead and signed by a titled executive.

With this lawsuit, I believe it will be just a matter of time before we see the European standards rolled out in the US and Canadian markets.