PPC Ads

When you search for credit card or mortgages Google now takes the top ad called “Comparison Ads“.  It’s been running for some time now but it was never there for most of the time.  What is very interesting is that most of the top PPC ads dropped by one space and the organic results got pushed down (again).

My first impressions after clicking on the ads is that the results are very clear! Users now can filter the results quickly with out the need of filling a long form with 3 steps as they do in the other price comparison sites. The selection of providers is a lot more than it used to be when this was first introduced. I pressume this is because of the beatthatquote.com website a few months ago. Overall as a user I do preffer this price comparison site than any other out there. Another great thing is that there is no need to give them my contact details as they have all the phone number listed and I can apply online! This is definitely one of the greatest points as from my experience when ever I gave  my phone number to a price comparison site I got bombarded by calls and text message for loans/insurance/accident claims and many more.

My main concern with this though is that Google is getting greedy and was a piece of the pie. Keywords for the finance sector are very expensive and as a result a good lead could cost a lot to a company. What Google is testing/doing now is trying to be both things at the same time. A search engine and a price comparison site some people could argue (including my self) that Price comparison sites don’t offer much to the user and Google could do the same thing but without the spamming. On the other group a lot of people will argue that Google has a great advantage over everyone else!

Google introduced Social Search back in 2009 where you  find more relevant information from your friends through social networks such as Facebook and Twitter. This was available only on English speaking countries but as of last week it’s now available to all countries.  For example, if you’re looking for information about hotel and one of your friends  has written a blog post about it, that post may show up higher in your results with a clear annotation and picture of your friend.

In more detail:  Social search results are only visible to you and only appear when you choose to log in to your Google Account. If you’re signed in, Google makes a best guess about whose public content you may want to see in your results, including people from your Google chat buddy list, your Google Contacts, the people you’re following in Google Reader and Buzz, and the networks you’ve linked from your Google profile or Google Account. For public networks like Twitter, Google finds your friends and sees who they’re publicly connected to as well. You can see a complete list of the people included in your social search results in your personal Google Dashboard (this display is private). For an overview of Google Social Search, check out the explanatory video

You can watch the full video: Social Search

Google posted the following regarding impressions with Google Instant. I think its worth understanding the difference as this is going to affect your CTR/Quality Score of your account. We also added a screenshot which might make it easier.

When someone searches using Google Instant, ad impressions are counted in these situations:

• The user begins to type a query on Google and clicks anywhere on the page (a search result, an ad, a spell correction, a related search).
• The user chooses a particular query by clicking the Search button, pressing Enter, or selecting one of the predicted queries.
• The user stops typing, and the results are displayed for a minimum of three seconds.

Related articles

• Google Instant: A More Innovative Approach to Search (adwords.blogspot.com)
• Here’s What People Are Saying About Google Instant (GOOG) (businessinsider.com)
• Google Instant: The Complete User’s Guide (searchengineland.com)

As you might have noticed the last few weeks most of the campaign reports are not available under the Reporting tab but have moved directly into the Campaigns tab. This is mainly because now you can do it all on the same pages where you manage your campaigns, making finding key performance drivers (and acting on your discoveries) faster and easier. In a way this is much better and very helpful for a user to actually run the report and then act by making the relevant changes.

According to Google: In order to focus our efforts on building the most useful reporting tools possible, we are gradually moving the existing reports from the Report Center into the Campaigns tab, then retiring the Report Center entirely.

Although we are not very affected by this as we  run our reports using the Adwords API through our tools I still believe that the Reporting Centre is a great way to optimise the account and find areas to improve. Moreover most professionals and heavy users use the Google Adwords editor tool. Unfortunately though most of the featrures are not available yet.

It was reported a few days ago in the US that users are seeing the top PPC ads on Google Adwords with a pink background and it seems this is now launched in the UK too. Google move from the old blue background to the yellow one in 2007. In the meantime they have tested a lot of different versions. It will be interesting to see if this change increases the CTR!