I’ve been following the commentary on Podcamp Perth, mostly because my friend Ross went and it always looked like it would be a good event. Next year maybe.

There was an article today in Canada’s national newspaper about the impact of the online search market on ad agencies.

I came across it on Andrew Goodman’s blog and I’m linking to it because I think it’s relevant to the Australian market. The paid search market in Canada is cheaper and less competitive than in the US. There are parallels with the Australian search industry in this respect. We are a couple of years behind the US and this creates opportunities for businesses and agencies.

Google’s president of marketing and commerce makes the point that advertising agencies shouldn’t see the dominance of Google as a threat but as an opportunity. He concludes with the message that (in Canada) “we’re underinvested compared to what the opportunity is.”

Andrew points to Gord Hotchkiss’s post on the same topic. Substitute “Australia” for “Canada”. The post is very relevant to our market as well.

The problems with broad and expanded match in Google adwords aren’t new but I’ve seen more discussion on it recently and I’ve also come across more examples in my own campaigns which I consider to be stretching the boundaries even more.

This article was sphunn (sphinned?, submitted to sphinn?) and generated some discussion on Rose’s blog and in sphinn itself.

It primarily talks about the problems with overlapping keywords in different ad groups. Sometimes broad match keywords can result in situations where you have carefully crafted a very targeted ad for a specific product and then Google displays an ad from another ad group unexpectedly (from your perspective). It typically occurs if you have an ad group with a general keyword like watches and another ad group with narrower keywords such as mens sports watches. If someone searches for mens sports watches then, in theory, either one of the keywords can trigger an ad as they both fit the criteria for broad matching with the search query. This is what I mean by overlapping keywords. From your perspective as an advertiser you want the ad targeted to mens sports watches but it’s not always the case. If the bid for the general keyword is higher this can be the one that is picked over the more relevant one.

It gets more complicated with expanded match. Ads can be triggered when someone searches for something related to your keywords. So, Google might consider timex watches to be relevant to mens sports watches and show your ad.

The result is more traffic, which can be good, and this is how it is justified by Google adwords. The big downside is ads showing for queries that really have no relevance to you. This lowers the click through rate and generates unwanted clicks.

The fixes are:

I’ve been in the UK for 3 weeks and fully intended blogging during that period but it didn’t happen. Anyway, I’m back on board now and will make up for it.

I’ll ease in gradually with a report on a great article by Gord Hortchkiss that was published in searchnewz.com. It’s a transcript of his interview with Nick Fox and Diane Chang from Google’s Ad Quality team. The subject is the adWords quality scoring and it’s a long read (well worth it though) so here are my highlights:

The bulk of the interview centres around the positioning of sponsored links at the top of the left hand side of the page above the organic listings. This is a very desirable position. Scanning studies have shown that the top of the left hand side is in the primary scanning path of the user. The links at the top of the left hand side are viewed more frequently than links on the right hand side.

Not all searches result in the display of ads in this top left hand corner. Often there are only sponsored links on the right hand side and there hasn’t been much information on the criteria for when ads are shown in the yellow box and when they are not.

The interview clarifies this to some degree in that the broad criteria is outlined

• Only high quality ads are placed at the top so the quality score has to be high
• The auction order is never broken (if someone bids a high enough price with a low quality score and their ad rank is number one, then the ad will be shown at the top but on the right hand side
• The maturity of the market plays a part and ads will be shown less frequently at the top in immature markets (China was used as an example of an immature market, US and UK as mature markets).

Here’s the interview transcript.