US law (specifically the Controlled Substances Act) forbids the importation of prescription drugs from pharmacies beyond the country’s borders, and the Department of Justice reports that the pharmaceutical AdWords campaigns led to illegal shipments of medication from Canada to US customers. Google’s payment of $500 million (the equivalent of £305 million) is a reflection of the revenue generated by the search giant and the pharmacies as a result of the AdWords advertisements. According to the Justice Department, Google was aware of the legal restrictions, and paying the penalty for “improper advertising practices” will allow the company to avoid criminal charges. This follows a 2-year investigation into the matter.

With a turnover of $29.3 billion during 2010 alone, it’s clear that even after paying the largest legal settlement in US history, Google is unlikely to experience any financial ill-effects – however, the impact of the widely publicised pharmacy advert settlement on the company’s reputation could be a bitter pill to swallow. This serves as a valuable reminder to those of us providing SEO services to clients around the globe; it is crucial that we follow a firm ethical code in all our work, bearing in mind the legal implications of each and every project, even if we can’t rely on the world’s major search engines to do the same. This is a sure-fire prescription for healthy business solutions and happy clients – the Google settlement is proof that anyone straying into illegal marketing territory will soon get a taste of their own medicine.

For further details on Google’s legal settlement, take a look at the news report below.

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Strong Medicine for Google: $500M Settlement

In turn, online business will no longer be able to base their overall growth on hyper-inflated keyword statistics. The keyword tool paints a more accurate picture in this case, with little room error if used correctly. Google is trying its best to advance their ranking data, but more information from Google needs to pass onto the keyword tool community before its power can truly be harnessed.

Yet what of long tail keywords – the previous version of the keyword tool was excellent for discovering extra long tail keywords that were associated with the primary keyword. The new keyword tool merely displays all associated keywords and suggested keywords in a mixed list. The older Google AdWords keyword tool was certainly easier on the eyes in this respect and much fiddling with tools such as Google Insights and Google Suggest will be needed in order to validate suggested long tails from this point on. The process is certainly made more frustrating for the inexperienced SEO user; hopefully Google will continue to develop the new keyword tool until it points us all in the right direction.

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New Google Keyword Tool: Our Views

The AdWords policy update rolled out in the US in June 2009 and will become effective in the UK, Ireland and Canada on September 14. Most European countries will also be able to use trademarked text as of September. This is huge news for the PPC advertising industry, as the new AdWords trademark policy will increase the relevance of UK advertisers’ campaigns and allow them to compete with the larger companies who own the trademark rights. While advertisers will be pleased by the news, trademark owners will most likely not share their excitement about the AdWords trademark policy updates, as the bidding for their trademark name pushes up the cost per click.

In addition to the AdWords trademark policy, another AdWords development is the addition of ACE – AdWords Campaign Experiments. ACE allows advertisers to run two simultaneous versions of one campaign, meaning they can experiment and find the most effective text in half the time it would have taken with the conventional before-and-after analysis. ACE will greatly increase the effectiveness of the campaigns, regardless of whether the advertiser takes advantage of the new AdWords trademark policy or not.

In the ever-changing search marketing industry, it’s good to know that Google is constantly working on innovations to make the process more efficient – of course the new Adwords trademark policy will mean a boost to Google’s profits as advertisers attempt to out-bid each other, but many will feel that the increased marketing opportunities offered by the use of trademarked keywords are worth the cost.

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New AdWords Trademark Policy to Hit the UK

It’s been ages since I’ve worked on AdWords myself (hands on, besides the training I do), and I’ve spent the last few weeks getting back onto the bicycle and stuck in again. In most cases it is easier to work on a project from the beginning VS coming in at the end and having to figure out what the goal/strategy was for an account setup.

There are a number of reasons for starting a new fresh PPC/AdWords account for clients, such as:

• The number of deleted campaigns/ad groups that still appear in the account become a visual account management nightmare (it would be great if there was some overriding feature that would allow you to remove those deleted campaigns from the account completely, like a recycle bin function… “are you sure you wish to permanently delete these items?”)

• You didn’t take note of your quality score for your keywords, which may have resulted in you being banned from using them within your PPC account and that may be a problem in some cases where the phrases are necessary to your campaigns.

So, now you want to create your new AdWords PPC account, however, you need to ensure that your analytics will be linked correctly (without having to create a new analytics account). Who? What? Where? How much? Pardon? Perhaps I was too specific with the searches I did to try find a starting point for me to work from, in which case it might be a good idea to dust the cobwebs off, and start again.

So, for any of you out there looking for a quick guide (without worrying about possibly breaking something that is currently working), here it is.

Create a new Google account and setup your new PPC AdWords campaigns/ad groups as needed within your account

NB - Ensure that you have admin access across both Google Accounts (the same Google account can access both PPC accounts)!

Now it’s time to get analytics linked. You need to have them linked to ensure that traffic is tagged correctly, otherwise you will not be able to track CPC traffic; it will be logged under direct traffic to the site or under organic traffic. We have seen CPC added to organic traffic referrals on some clients, while others have mentioned GA logs the traffic under direct referrals.

To start with, you need to log in to the existing AdWords account. Go to you analytics tab and Edit Account Settings (Unlink account).

Log in to the newly created PPC AdWords account, go to the analytics tab and select the option “I already have a GA account”, continue and then select the related analytics account from the dropdown menu supplied (data is supplied from G Admin account linked to the new Google Account).

And you’re done! Be sure to double check your analytics settings tab for the website profile associated with your Google AdWords account (this is done through Google Analytics settings for the associated website profile) to ensure that the cost data have been applied for accurate reporting.

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Starting a fresh Adwords PPC account – unlinking re-linking

It’s a handy tool in that its results eliminate the terms you are already optimising for. If you have an Adwords account, and are logged in, then it will only display those keywords that your account is not currently advertising. One of the most convenient things about the tool is that you insert your URL and it then searches your site for missing keywords, as opposed to sitting on the Google Adwords Keyword Tool and going through hundreds of possible keyword options, which will then need to be checked against your site to see if they are already optimised for.

Don’t get me wrong, I am not slating Google’s other keyword tool and personally find it very valuable. It definitely has its benefits, and is especially helpful if you are looking for the long-tail variations of a particular key phrase. It also limits the keyword derivatives and search volumes to your targeted country. I’m not entirely sure if the new Search-based Tool limits the search results to specific countries’ volumes/derivatives according to the URL entered (.com, .co.uk, .co.za), but it poses a number of problems for .gov and .org domains for instance. Another option is that the tool bases the search results on where the site is hosted, but this has its own set of problems as often sites are hosted outside of their target market’s geographical positioning.

After entering your URL and key phrases, the tool displays the results page which will look something like this:

Scanning through the terms that your site is not yet optimising for can deliver some interesting results, especially when some of the missing terms are close to terms already being optimised, but which are not quite covered. There may also be some simple terms missing from your existing account. At this point you should consider which terms will bring in the best ROI and add them to your Adwords account immediately, so as not to miss out on potential business.

This tool is, of course, beneficial for Google as well because they expect it to encourage online advertisers to increase their Google Adwords spend. This in turn helps Google fill their pockets while they ‘help’ various online companies benefit from the potentially business enhancing suggestions. Even though I haven’t used it extensively, I find it to be a valuable addition to Google’s various search engine optimisation tools. This being said, be aware that this may not be the final say on the matter from my side:)

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Google’s new search-based keyword tool is a welcome aid for advertisers