Google Adwords is a cut throat business to be involved in. There are a ton of advertisers that use this tool to drive traffic to their websites. Adwords advertisers use all kinds of tools to optimize their ROI and get the most out of their ad money. But it’s always nice to know how one is performing against other advertisers in a category. That’s what Analyze Competition Tool is about. Google intends to roll this feature in the near future to help advertisers compare their performance against others in their niche.

This new tool will let you compare your performance against others based on impressions, clicks, CTR,  and average position. Of course, Google is only showing you averages and is not exactly disclosing sensitive information to other advertisers. Being able to compare your performance against other advertisers can be useful. But just like any other Google Adwords tool, you do not want to rely only on this data to make decisions for your business.

This new tool is not available to everyone just yet. So do not be surprised if you can’t find it in your account. Google does plan to roll it out to everyone in the near future.

Google is constantly innovating and adding new features to its services, though if you are not using Adwords or other Google services that regularly, you may miss easily. Google has opened a whole new can of worms by enabling Adwords users to install their data on local computers to speed things up. Google Adwords’ local storage feature takes advantage of Google Gears to store users’ data and makes it much faster to change views and do all kinds of things with data. Since you are using your local data here, speed won’t be an issue.

You can enable this feature by clicking on the appropriate mini-icon at the top right side of your Adwords account. If you don’t have Google gears, you’ll have to take a few extra steps. But installing this feature won’t be too much of an issue. The security of your data will be. Since this feature stores a copy of your data on your computer, you will have to make sure the computer you are using it on is secure (not a shared one). This is not a universal feature, meaning that you’ll have to do it for each computer. (more…)

As the economy gets worse (and you can expect it to hit rock bottom sometime in the near future), you are going to see folks who are going to sell you Adwords/Adsense things that can, get this, help you make millions out of these networks. That’s the oldest trick in the book. Let’s say, I have lost my job, I have a couple of kids to feed, and I have the year-end approaching fast. What do I do? Simple! I am going to get a book that will show me how to make millions in a year, and if I get 5% of that number, I will be happy.

I am all for learning. You should never stop learning, and one way to do that is by keeping up with blogs and reading books on a weekly basis. However, when it comes to Adsense, you can really learn a lot from watching the best do it. And who’s the best when it comes to using Adsense? I would like to think it’s Google!

There are no two ways about it. When Google bought YouTube, they did it to make money and get their initial funds back. There were other reasons, but bear with me here. So you have the largest online video library anywhere, and you are trying to monetize it for months. Does it make sense for you to put Adsense units that don’t make you money? You tell me!

I am no Adsense expert. I do make a few bucks a day from Adsense, but it’s not really my focus (that does not keep me from checking it every 10 seconds). Now here is the thing. YouTube is a goldmine when it comes to Adsense. You can figure out what formats would work for your niche site. And you are going to learn what Google is spending millions of dollars researching – where to put your ads.

I am not suggesting that Google CEO is actually checking YouTube’s Adsense account to see how much they are earning, but the ad format and positioning should be a good indication on where on your page you can expect to make more money. Each site is different, and your results will probably be different from mine or Google’s. But, you don’t have to read a book to figure out what works and what doesn’t with Adsense.

Google certainly knows how to squeeze more money out of folks. There is no question about that. But one needs to give credit where credit is do. I do get the fact that mobile ads are designed for folks who want to advertise on mobile phones. Personally, I don’t believe my market is ready for mobile ads. The conversion is atrocious, and you end up burning a lot of money on nothing. But you’ve got to give it up for Google for making desktop ads available on the iPhone.

It’s true that Google is going after its very own mobile users with the introduction of Android, but for them to come out and target one of the fastest growing mobile phones in the world shows that they get it. What I like about the desktop ads for mobile phones such as iPhone is the fact that you get to track them separately (like you would your content ads).

So we are no longer limited to mobile ads for mobile devices. There are more iPhone owners in the world than the total population of my mother country. Being able to target these guys more effectively is going to help a few of us grow faster than expected. But I still don’t believe mobile ads to be conversion friendly. Good for branding? Yes! Good for conversion? I have no evidence for this argument. So I would suggest you take a few anti-depressant before putting a lot of hope in your mobile ads.

If you have been following this blog, you probably know how strongly I feel about the merits of SpyFu. SpyFu is a great competitive intelligence tool that gives you a lot of ammunition to chip away at your competitors’ strengths in your niche.

If you have used SpyFu before, you are probably familiar with the above search box. It is your portal to finding what’s working and what’s not for your rivals. But until now, SpyFu allowed you to figure out what your competitors were doing and try to figure out what you were not doing. SpyFu Kombat takes it to the next level by allowing you to figure out what you have in common with your competitors, and what they are doing differently from you. Take a look at the below diagram:

It just goes on to prove my assumption that John McCain is doing a better job in the paid search channel. John Mccain ads show up for almost anything you can search for. But the Obama campaign has done a magnificent job with their organic campaign. They have obviously been helped with bloggers and publishers linking to Obama’s web properties.

But that’s not all. You can also compare these figures on a graph to figure out any historical trends.

You can get down and dirty with these diagrams and figure out what keywords your competitors are using. Now, I don’t compete with SpyFu with my coupon site, but it’s interesting to see what I could have in common with SpyFu.com.

It turns out that I have nothing in common with SpyFu (too bad!). But that doesn’t mean I am hopeless. If I wanted to change my coupon site to compete with SpyFu, I would obviously need a similar or better service. But also, I can use the keywords that SpyFu Kombat brings to light to create content pages to compete with SpyFu. This is just an example and not a very good one. But you get the point. If you know what keywords your competitors are showing up for, it’s easier to customize your pages and create new content to target keywords that your sites are not optimized for.

SpyFu is now charging $50 for this super bad @$$ service. But you get more than SpyFu Kombat. You also get the standard SpyFu service. I personally do recommend signing up for the annual subscription as it helps you save money and protect yourself against any increase in fees. But my experience with SpyFu folks has been great. These guys are in it not for the money but to provide value to us marketers. If you compare SpyFu with any of their competitors, there is no question that SpyFu provides the best bang for the buck by a big margin.

Who Shouldn’t get SpyFu Kombat:

SpyFu Kombat is not for everyone. If you are lazy to get down and dirty with your SEO and paid campaigns, SpyFu Kombat is not for you. If you have money to burn, you are more than welcome to spend it on SpyFu. SpyFu is for serious marketers (emphasis on serious). You don’t have to be a guru to take advantage of SpyFu & Kombat, but you need to have the spirit and the backbone to get down and do some great things. The sky is the limit with SpyFu, but like a powerful machine gun, if you don’t use it, it’s not worth the money. But if you are ready to challenge your competitors head on and make some cash in the process, SpyFu should definitely be a part of your arsenal.

Google Adwords is known for having a wealth of matching options for advertisers to use. With Broad, Phrase, and Exact matching you can pretty much define what phrase you want to show up for. But one matching option that goes unnoticed is embedded matching. Here is how normal matching workds:

Broad = Keyword1 Keyword 2

Exact = [Keyword1 Keyword 2]

Phrase =  ”Keyword1 Keyword 2″

So these are pretty straightforward. You show up for the exact matching if someone types your keyword order in the exact order and everything. With phrase matching you are a bit more lenient, but with Broad matching almost anything goes. Now here is how embedded matching workds:

- [Keyword1 Keyword2]

This is very powerful as it allows you to define the exact phrase that you don’t want your ads to show up. So golf for young kids would shoud up if you put “young kids” in the bracket. But the only way your ad won’t show up is when people search for “Young Kid” only. There are many ways to play around with this matching option, but at the end of the day, I have not seen my ads CTR improve dramatically by using this. It is only used to get rid of exact negative terms that you don’t want to show up for. Now I wonder why Google doesn’t talk about this feature very much…

Do you use embedded matching for your campaigns? have you seen decent results? Please share your thoughts.

Google has announced that they will be updating their quality score in the upcoming days for the Adwords service. Google’s quality score is their crown jewel, and now they are improving it to make provide more relevant results to search. So what does it mean for you as an advertiser?

• Uncertainty: The new Quality Score will be calculated at the time of query which means your quality score can go up and down at different times during the day. But what is certain is that landing page quality has become just a bit more important as its score is calculated less frequently.
• Inactive Keywords: Google used to make keywords that were found irrelevant to your site inactive unless you paid a large amount of money per click. Google has announced that they will activate those keywords and show them if there is a relevant search out there.
• Bye Bye Minimum Bids: not really, but Google will now show what it takes to show on the first page. First page bid estimates are really what matter to most marketers, so this is an interesting move by Google. You are going to probably pay more in competitive markets to end up on the first page, but at the same time, you don’t have to use the First page bid estimates as your minimum. You can bid below it and still be shown on the subsequent pages.

The effects will be known soon, and I am sure there will be a lot of complaints by affiliates and PPC marketers. But that’s usually given. Check inside Adwords for more details.

This is a question that has probably been asked since Google introduced the feature. When you set up a campaign in Google Adwords, Google by default puts your campaign’s ad-serving to be optimized:

As you see in the above picture, by choosing the “Optimize” option, you allow Google to show your better-performing ads more often. So that’s a good thing right? After all, your better ads keep showing up, and you get better results. Add to that the fact that Google is out to take care of you, and you are golden, right? Wrong! The last time I checked Google was still a public company, out to maximize its advertising revenue. By choosing the optimize option you simply kill any chance that you have for conducting a true A/B testing on your ads. Don’t forget that Google chooses this option by default, so you need to pay extra attention every time  you set up a campaign. You don’t want to spend thousands of dollars and find out that your A/B testing never happened.

Now here is a general rule of thumb: love Google but never trust it. This pretty much applies to all Google dilemmas.