What do big brands use for SEM bid management?

I’ve lost touch a little with the paid search bid management market since leaving Adobe. I thought it was time to see what’s going on, and which platforms the big advertisers are using. A bit of digging into the HTML of the Google SERPs gives a good indication of what’s going on. Third party platforms […]

Coding to make your sales team better

We all know the power of code, and how software is eating the world. But coding itself seems like such a binary activity — forgive the pun — either you code or you don’t. I’m not a proper coder or a programmer and I don’t claim to be. But that doesn’t mean I don’t enjoy […]

Falling CPCs are inevitable if Google increases paid ad space

True to form, Google announced another bumper quarter last night. But one statistic causing some hand wringing is the continual fall of CPC prices. Google say this isn’t a problem and not a concern for their business. Not only do I agree with them, but I think Google are the cause of the decrease in […]

Google Trademark Policy Change

On Wednesday Google announced separate trademark policy changes in that affect the UK, Ireland and Canada and the rest of Europe differently. Reading about the changes on the web, I’m really surprised how many articles have got this one wrong. Mostly it seems to stem from an inability to distinguish that different policies have applied, […]

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 […]

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: […]

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 […]

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.

Maps embedded in AdWords

How long have Google been doing this?

Jonathan Beeston

Online advertising, digital marketing, social media and technology

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