We’re going to SMX West next week – and we’re speaking at a few awesome sessions!

Register to attend if you haven’t already, it’s going to be a blast!

The sessions we are speaking at:

Advanced Landing Page Strategies

Writing Killer PPC Ad Copy

Analyzing & Converting Paid Search Traffic

Let us know if you’ll be there! We’d love to meet one and all!

• Quick Update: Affiliate Summit West and Ads on this blog
  Affiliate Summit West 2010 I’m stoked to be going to Affiliate Summit West this year! I’ll be getting in late Sunday night but I’ll be...

Thank you loyal followers for sticking around – you will not be disappointed this year! Watch for some cool stuff coming up this month and throughout 2009.

Happy New Year to all of our readers and visitors!!

• The Code of the Underground Marketer
  Lately I have found myself getting less willing to share knowledge, insights and tricks in the ppc space or even some of the cool...

“With consumer confidence low and disposable income tight, the first weeks of November have been very disappointing,” said comScore chairman Gian Fulgoni.

However, comScore forecasts that there will still be growth this holiday season, and that the online marketplace will recover somewhat in the next few months.

“Assuming the stock market doesn’t deteriorate materially during the season and that there is no apocalyptic news of major financial institutions, manufacturers or retailers failing, we should see online spending growth inch back towards positive as we get deeper into the season,” Fulgoni said.

comScore, Inc. calls itself a global information provider. “comScore maintains massive proprietary databases that provide a continuous, real-time measurement of the myriad ways in which the Internet is used and the wide variety of activities that are occurring online.

Mission-critical information relating to both offline and online activities is collected through comScore’s innovative use of the Internet as a timely and powerful data collection medium.

comScore’s products and services are utilized by many of the world’s leading corporations to better understand, leverage and profit from the rapidly evolving worldwide Web.”

Source: comscore.com

What does this mean for PPC managers and online advertisers? Well, if you’re an agency you may have already seen your clients’ budgets decrease with the sliding economy. If you’re an advertiser or a storefront you may be seeing more “window shoppers” and less sales. Even if you haven’t experienced any of these things, now is a good time to make sure you’re running a tight ship PPC-wise. Try targeting transactional keywords, listing your prices in your ads, and tailoring your landing pages to holiday traffic. You may have fewer chances to grab your share of online purchases right now, which means you need to optimize for maximum effectiveness.

We’ll walk you through how to use this new tool right now:

1. Access the Search-based Keyword Tool by visiting this link: http://www.google.com/sktool/
2. Enter the URL of the page you want to base your query on in the first box – i.e. the page you want to generate more keywords for.
3. Enter keywords or phrases that you’d like to be part of the suggested terms in the second box. In the example below, we put “UFO” and “alien” in this box because we wanted to generate keywords that included those words:
   


(click to enlarge)

4. Now the cool part. Google now generates two lists for you. One is a list of keyword phrases related to the URL that was input. The other is a list of keyword phrases related to the search words you input. If this URL was linked to our AdWords account, the tool would have made sure to exclude any keywords we are already targeting!

   

   

5. Now you can analyze these results and decide what do with the information. In this case, it looks like the owners of the website should not only advertise on some new keywords, but also might look into expanding its product line beyond alien stickers and t-shirts, perhaps adding some PC games, toys, and skateboards. As an added help, Google tells you how many searches these terms get on a monthly basis, how much ad competition there is, and how much they suggest you bid on each keyword or phrase.

If you haven’t tried the new Search-based Keyword Tool yet, you ought to give it a shot. Tools like this can be invaluable to PPC managers and SEOs, not to mention webmasters and in-house marketing teams.

Selected AdWords advertisers are having a line show up below their ad in search results that says “+Show Products from [Advertiser] for [search query].” When clicked, this link expands to a box with three product images, complete with title, price, and description. The box takes up a very large portion of the screen, bumping the next results far below.

A Google AdWords rep confirmed in a message to us that the name of this feature is the “Product Search Plux Box,” and that the alpha test involves a very limited number of advertisers and is closed to additional participants at this time. The Google team may decide to re-open the test to additional advertisers in the future, but for now only those advertisers that were previously invited are able to participate in the test.

We were personally unable to replicate search results that featured the Product Search Plus box, but Search Engine Land posted a couple of screenshots a few weeks ago that we took the liberty to draw on:

It appears that the advertisers involved use GoogleCheckout, but it is unclear whether these products come from Google Base. Search Engine Land speculated that they do not.

Questions we have are: Can anyone out there find examples of the Product Search Plus Box out there? Can any of you replicate this? Also, are there similar results coming up with local adwords listings of some kind?

Antitrust investigations by the U.S. government are cited as responsible for giving Google “cold feet” even after the magnitude of the partnership agreement was scaled back significantly last week.

Chief legal officer at Google, David Drummond, wrote, “After four months of review, including discussions of various possible changes to the agreement, it’s clear that government regulators and some advertisers continue to have concerns about the agreement.”

Now that the agreement is off, it appears that the U.S. government will be discontinuing its antitrust investigation.

Assistant Attorney General, Thomas O. Barnett, said to the New York Times, “The companies’ decision to abandon their agreement eliminates the competitive concerns identified during our investigation and eliminates the need to file an enforcement action . . . The arrangement likely would have denied consumers the benefits of competition — lower prices, better service and greater innovation.”

Yahoo’s stock shares are trading at around $14 today, and there is speculation that in light of these events a similar offer from Microsoft’s previous one of a buyout for $33/share may again be brought to the table.

semvironment’s previous slogan was “Turning Clicks Into Customers,” and whereas this continues to be a primary focus of what we do, we have changed our corporate slogan to “Empowering Advertisers Worldwide.” This is demonstrative of our new focus on giving companies the tools, knowledge, and expert agency management they need to maximize their online marketing efforts and branch out in terms of profit growth.

A couple of our new services include:

• Website design testing and full-site redesigns.
  Our creative team is now offering more than landing page design for our clients. Now, you can put their creative talents to use in employing a site-wide redesign in order to enhance your users’ experience at your site. The key advantage to a site redesign from semvironment is that before building a whole new site, you can see the results of various design tests that we perform through paid search test campaigns. This way we can ensure that the new design we roll out maximizes your conversions, both organically and through PPC efforts.
• Increased Analytics Capabilities
  If you AND all of your competitors use Google Analytics, then you are all receiving the same data. Seize an advantage by utilizing our professional analytics and event tracking systems, which we deploy with dual intensity. Using both Google Analytics and another system, such as AWStats, we empower you with more information, so you can come out on top of your PPC competitors. Additionally, we enable you to track specific page and form events, goals, and variables, so you can discover how much of your form users complete before they abandon them, or what specific things cause visitors to leave before the conversion happens.
• Free PPC Education and Knowledge suite.
  We’re going to be releasing several series of educational manuals, tutorials, case studies, and white papers in the coming weeks in order to empower you with the facts and knowledge you need to create and manage your own campaigns. Of course, we are still offering full-service management for larger clients, but we’re shifting our focus to helping the start-outs and the smaller companies effectively manage themselves, while we invite advertisers with expansive campaigns and large ad budgets to take advantage of our management, design, and analytics services.
• Custom PPC Management Consulting For In-House Teams.
  Planning on having your own in-house marketing team manage your paid search efforts? Let semvironment train them in the best practices in account setup, management, reporting, and testing. We work with your team by showing them our step by step process as we create your accounts and get your PPC campaigns up and running. We build a customized blog with the step by step procedures that your team will follow for your specific campaigns in your specific industry, and we let them follow along as we manage your account for 2-3 months before handing everything over to them. In this manner, your team will have the best mentorship and training it can receive and gain a competitive edge on your competition – even those that are hiring full-service agencies.

We invite you to check out our new website and comment on the new services we are offering, as well as our sparkling new design. We hope to hear from you soon!

Wish us luck as we make the big switch!

So buckle up, and watch your accounts for the changes this week.

On the Inside Adwords blog, Google explained that quality scores will still be calculated using the same factors, only now several of those factors will be calculated instantaneously at the time of the search query. Google explains:

“We will still consider your account’s history, which consists of the clickthrough rate (CTR) of all the ads and keywords in your account. We will also consider your landing page quality. Although your overall Quality Score is evaluated at the time of each query, landing page quality is evaluated less frequently.”

The AdWords Team also explained that the new ‘first page bid’ metric that is replacing the old ‘minimum bid’ does not mean that it will now cost more than it used to to have your ad appear on the first page of search results. The only difference is now AdWords gives you a reference point regarding what it will cost you to get on that first page, whereas before it only told you how much you’d need to pay to have your ad show at all. Of course, now that everyone will know how much to pay to get on the first page, those costs may go up as the competition for the first page gets fiercer.

These quality score changes, increases in paid search advertising competition, and the constant innovations in the pay per click advertising industry make it necessary to lean how to maintain the top quality scores for your keywords. It may even be important for seasoned PPC managers to brush up on their skills.

The following are some screenshots of the new quality score changes, photo credits belong to The PPC Book:

Quality scores will now be calculated at the time of the search query, which means that different queries that would normally trigger the same keyword will now have distinctly calculated quality scores based on the location of the searcher and other variables. All this is done in an effort to increase relevancy for both searcher and advertiser.

This dynamic calculation of quality score allows Google to rescind the “inactive for search” keyword tag, so even keywords with very low bids (when compared to quality) can be shown, albeit in less competitive locations.

Additionally, in an effort to help advertisers know with more certainty where their ads will be showing, AdWords is removing the minimum bid metric and adding a first page bid metric. Now advertisers will be shown what bid is required to show up on the first page of search results, giving them a more accurate picture of their ad placement with their current budget/bid.

AdWords is rolling out these updates slowly, but all AdWords advertisers are expected to see them in place shortly.

James: I hypothesized about quality scores being dynamic back in January 2008…I haven’t noticed and I don’t expect to see any abnormal changes with our client accounts as they relate to their quality scores in the coming month or two because I am confident this has been going on for quite some time. I believe AdWords is simply becoming more transparent but I have no way of confirming that. I was simply noticing a ‘test’ or some sort of long tail abnormality given the unique query.