Does Google Ever Give A Quality Score of 8 For UK Campaigns?

I’ve been using an internal EF tool that gives quick, top-level data on quality score for an account (e.g. 100 keywords with 10, 150 keywords with 9 etc). Something that struck me after looking at a few accounts: no keywords ever had a quality score of 8. Weird, I thought, must be something wrong with […]

Two Great Videos from Google and Microsoft

Here’s a couple of really good videos I’ve seen from Google and Microsoft in the last day or two. Ten Years of Google I saw this yesterday at a conference as part of Mark Howe‘s keynote presentation. Microsoft Advertising Intro Perhaps the best explanation (to an advertiser or agency) I’ve seen from Microsoft of what […]

Who Owns an Adwords Account: the Client or the Agency?

Quite a fuss has been generated by an article in the latest issue of Marketing Week. In it, VCCP Search claim to be the first SEM agency to allow its clients to retain intellectual property rights over their search accounts. This is a pretty outrageous statement. Many SEMs from other agencies (including myself) say that […]

Visualising Quality Score with Treemaps

Quality Score is an incredibly important factor in managing Adwords campaigns, but is sometimes difficult to handle. To understand how Quality Score is impacting an account it can be better to visualise it than stare at rows of keyword data. I’ve created a couple of treemaps to demonstrate how this can be done. Example 1: […]

Google Charts API

Figuring out new and interesting ways of representing paid search data is one my particular interests. I found a bit of time today to play with Google Charts API which has a great Venn diagram generator. Although you can easily create Venn diagrams ‘freehand’ in Excel, producing them accurately from data is much more difficult. […]

Running Adwords Editor on Linux with Wine

I’ve bought myself an Asus EEE 1000H netbook for Christmas, and very nice it is too. Although I don’t intend to use it much for work, every now and then I want to check a campaign, so Adwords Editor is a must. But how to run it under Linux? Although my machine shipped with Asus’ […]

Don’t Switch the Test Ads On!

Sometimes when working with Adwords Editor, you might just create a few dummy ads while you work on another aspect of the campaign. It’s important not to push those dummy ads live.

Don’t Not Bid on Keywords You Don’t Want

Yes, that double negative in the title of this post is confusing, so let me explain. One of the biggest challenges any Adwords advertiser faces is controlling how Google serves ads against queries. Google gives us four match types (broad, phrase, exact and negative) to control the ad serving. It’s broad match which is the […]

What’s Right with Microsoft Live Search

Last month I ranted about some serious problems with search results for popular navigational queries on Microsoft Live Search. Dan Sharp commented that he’d written about the same issues at the start of the year. Within two weeks, Microsoft’s SEM-evangelist-at-large, Mel Carson, asked me to check again. And lo, the problems were fixed. It’s a […]

Google Updates My Change History

Here’s another one of those, “When did they do that?” posts. Looks like Google have made a great improvement to the My Change History tool.

Jonathan Beeston

Online advertising, digital marketing, social media and technology

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