Tag Archives: Google AdWords

Google Search Results Have Changed (again)!

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So here I was, showing some small business owners how to get more business online in a webinar, and I suddenly noticed that the Google Search results page (or SERP for short) is behaving differently. Here is a quick summary of what’s new.

Google Places

New Google Search Results page

New Google Search Results page

Results from Google Places (formerly Google Maps or Google Local Business) now appear a lot like organic web results, with the following differences:

  1. A red map marker
  2. Contact information
  3. A link to the Google Places record with the number of reviews that place has received, if there are any
  4. A map, showing red markers for all the Google Places in the search results, which (OMG) slides down over the advertising sidebar when you scroll down!

Page Preview

New Google Search Results preview

New Google Search Results preview

Keeping up with the Joneses Bing, every result (except subscribed links) features a magnifying glass icon to the right of the title. When clicked, the pages goes into Preview Mode and starts showing scaled-down images of the listed pages when you hover your mouse over them.

In Preview Mode, all the magnifier icons turn a darker shade of blue.

When another magnifier icon is clicked, the icons return to the lighter, duller shade of blue and hovering over search results shows nothing.

What does this change mean?

To me, this change shows that Google is investing a lot of thought into making their search engine user-friendly and providing relevant, useful results as quickly as possible. Since Instant Search, results appear in a heartbeat, but now we can also scan then much faster and avoid wasting time visiting the wrong pages.

Moreover, local businesses have gained an enormous boost to their search presence by getting full exposure within the results, as opposed to the crammed listings they had before.

The only ones who may not like this recent change are Google advertisers who now see the sliding map object hiding their ads from view when the page is scrolled down, but this may not be so bad, because the map starts above the ads at first, so if the person searching chooses to scroll down, the top ads are probably not interesting to them anymore and might as well be hidden.

Oddly enough, I believe that pushing down the sidebar ads may actually increase clickthrough rates for the top positions in the sidebar.

Have an eventful day searching,
Gal

AdWords Performance – I Win!

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imageThis is the story of how I beat a Certified Partner at their own game – getting clicks to a website quicker and for less money.

I’m great with , so most of my sites do well over time without advertising, but I use Google AdWords to launch sites, boost their performance and run time-sensitive promotions.

Recently, I was so busy I decided to engage another company to take care of my AdWords campaigns. I figured someone who solely does this for a living has to be better than me too. If they were good enough, they could justify paying for their services.

So I called a Google AdWords Certified company, which I’m not going to name, so let’s called them AW. They said they would audit my own campaign, make some generic suggestions and if I wanted, they were happy to take it over for me.

When I received their report, it was indeed generic. The recommendations came straight from Google’s standard documentation and seemed to ignore what was happening specifically in my campaign, but I thought that was all they had promised, so never mind.

I rang them and agreed they would run my campaign for 1 month, then stop and call me for a detailed phone review. They said I would have to double my budget for the campaign for best performance and pay them $150 for their services. Since this campaign had to do with a parenting workshop, for which each ticket was priced at $250, I figured I would do well anyway, so I agreed.

When I saw the AW-proposed keywords, I wondered why they were all singular. “Google doesn’t care about this”, they said, “It matches singular terms to plural queries. That’s not a problem”.

“OK”, I said, “You’re the experts”.

After a few days, I wondered if I could monitor their progress, so I asked to link the new campaign to my Google Analytics account.  What I saw in the following days was my ads appearing at the top of search pages for their chosen keywords, but very few clicks each day. My budget wasn’t being spent, but my business wasn’t getting any either. My confidence did not improve by seeing a single plural term outperforming every other (singular) keyword phrase by a mile.

A month passed and I heard nothing. I waited a few more days and then inquired about the campaign. It was still going, so I asked to stop and have that detailed review they promised.

… and all I got was this lousy Excel spreadsheet (not even a T-shirt). The sheet didn’t even have a column for the one thing I wanted: conversions – people who bought tickets for the parenting workshop. The number of clicks was oh, so small, no wonder there were no conversions.

“Bugger!” I thought, “I’m going back to doing my own thing”.

To show you what happened in detail, here is a comparison of my first campaign, the AW campaign and my new campaign and you can judge for yourself:

CampaignDaysImpressionsImp/dayClicksClk/day$$/click
Before AW5614,763263.62794.98299.281.07
AW372,15058.11571.5475.841.33
After AW103,005300.5545.455.561.03

Basically, if you gave AW $100 today and told them to run a parenting workshop campaign for you, they would take 49 days to deliver 75 visitors to your site. I would deliver 97 visitors to your site in just 18 days.

Like I said before, I win!

[Disclaimer: I am NOT a certified AdWords partner, but I'm happy to help with your AdWords campaign on a consulting basis or by managing it for you. Contact me for more]