The Google AdWords blog recently announced the release of call extensions; a function has been in beta testing since last year. An overwhelming five million calls were made during this time, averaging a duration of six minutes, which convinced those at Google that it is a worthwhile extension. We expect to see many a PPC agency using this feature over the next couple of months.

The call extension function is available on AdWords ads featured on high-end mobile devices, provided that you have set your campaign to opt into Mobile devices with full internet browsers, located under the Devices tab. Should you also activate call metrics (currently only available in Canada and the US) then the call extensions will be visible on both desktop and high-end mobile devices.

For a while now Google’s various AdSense, Web Analytics and similar platforms have been providing site owners with data that enables them to optimise their site for maximum return on investment. Google recently released a new AdSense platform report that provides information about how users are accessing your site.

This report will tell you where your users are coming from, i.e. which platform they have used in order to get to your site. You can then optimise your site accordingly so that users can have the best possible experience. For example, if a large percentage of your traffic comes from mobile users then you may want to consider making a mobile version of your site that will be better suited to mobile users. You can also then optimise this with AdSense for mobile content.

Speakers

Kevin Ryan, Motive Marketing
Craig Danuloff, Click Equations Inc
Anders Hjorth, COO GroupM Search EMEA

This session went through the various aspects of PPC tools and when you should consider investing in tools.

Kevin Ryan, Motive Marketing

Tools like “Clickable” are mid market and pretty good.

From a survey I did –

• “What non-technical resources would your ideal search firm have?”
• “What are you missing now?”
• “What technical resources would you rate as most important?”
• “What is the primary driver in a search agency?”

The most common answer was – 3^rd party paid search tools. Agencies should build infographics to explain what they are doing.

Over the years bidding got really more complicated. The tools have become very good. Agencies have been squeezed to other services like landing page optimisation, Client intelligence, Primary research, technical oversight and informed decision making because the margins on a “percentage of spend” have become so low.

It looks like we are almost back to the days of the Iframe – with a difference. Google is showing your entire page without sending you the traffic, and as @graywolf correctly pointed out – they have the balls to host Adwords down the side with a big fat arrow pointing at them (flip to next page) and should you miss the arrow – well then you click the conveniently positioned ad!

http://fastflip.googlelabs.com/view?q=view:popular#V5LKvYsCtI-iIM

Already there has been a lot of talk about this arrangement contravening adsense guidelines. I couldn’t specifically find the paragraph that says you may not draw attention to the ads – perhaps someone who knows the guidelines inside out can enlighten us, but what worries me more is the fact that visitors are no longer coming to your web page to read your content. So your analytics will suffer in terms of home page pageviews. At present fastflip has pre-defined categories and sites for well known news sites such as “The Washington Post” and “BBC News”, so there is no danger of the average web site falling prey to this.

The PPC buying cycle, like any other buying cycle includes the following phases: Research, shop and purchase.

The issue we need to identify is where to spend our money. That seems to be a pretty obvious one to answer, but is entirely dependent on our goals. We also need to look at whether or not it’s worthwhile investing in the other 2 phases (namely research and shop).

Let’s start with the research phase: Customers may be searching for general terms such as ‘used cars’. There are many searches for these general terms, but their CPC’s will most probably be extremely expensive. Is it worthwhile to spend your money on these terms or would it be more beneficial to forfeit this stage completely? This is a bit of a tricky one and I think it’s dependent on a variety of factors including your specific goals, your budget, and the product, etc.

There are many shady SEOs out there; we call these guys Snake Oil salesmen because they’re scammers who would sell their own grandmothers given half a chance.

These are the guys who offer “Guaranteed” first page listings in a ridiculously short period of time. They target small businesses that don’t have a huge budget and are easily sucked into the vortex of deception. Of course, it’s not only small businesses that get approached, but these are the guys who will feel the impact most.

Whatever means these SEOs use to achieve rankings and deliver promised traffic, they cannot be ethical. At the end of the day, many small business owners don’t know any better, all they really know about SEO is what these conmen have sold him. Promises of great traffic and impressive listings, and they are sold. These are the bandits that give us ethical SEOs a really bad name and they must be stopped.

Is your PPC campaign suffering from low click-through rates and high minimum bids? It might be time to start looking at your account structure. This would, of course, be after scrupulously sifting through your keyword list. We are assuming here that your keywords have been meticulously and accurately selected.

Many experts advise advertisers to keep their PPC account structure in line with their sitemaps, or website structures. This is a great idea if it is possible. It maintains an order that is easily lost when creating targeted AdGroups, but in many cases, it`s just not viable.

Your next step would be to look at your AdGroups. Are they all tightly themed or do you have one Campaign and one AdGroup with a long list of largely unrelated keywords? In an ideal situation, each keyword would have an exceptionally strong correlation with the rest of the keywords in the AdGroup and with the Ad Copy associated with that particular AdGroup. Every keyword would appear somewhere within the Ad Copy. The most profitable keywords should, in addition, appear in the heading text.

An anti-corporate advertising evangelist paid Columbia Records to run a PPC campaign on their home page. The ad text he chose stated: “Major Labels Are Obsolete/ R.I.P or learn and thrive/ Music. Tech. The New Music Business”, and displayed a link to their home site, which promotes a vague new music industry – presumably a communist one. The point was to promote relevant ad placement, while supporting those smaller web masters who are often forced to pay their bills using advertising that is not congruent with their sites` messages.

The “new music business” is one I`ve discussed at length with Moth and some sound engineers of my acquaintance who have some very interesting things to say about syndicating the ‘quality of the bona fide recording` and sorting through blurred music nomenclature. But what interests me more is the idea of using pay per click advertising to prove a point – in this case, that incompatible advertising is unacceptable.