As it has always been in the past, competition in the market is like a tight race. You have to remain on your guard all the time and grab every chance you get to have an edge over your competitors. You must also explore any technology-based method or tool and gain the right technical know-how to launch useful research on other market players. In this way, you will be equipped to learn about your competition, giving you the opportunity to plan and strategize in order to stay in a good position. Keep in mind that doing market research is an essential part of any business and key market players will naturally spend for this to learn about other similar businesses.

Try your hand at creating an online business if you want to be part of the big market and eventually become stable. This is the closest way to getting started on a technology-based venture.

We have pooled together some practical ways to guide you on your first attempt at doing an online business venture. These simple reminders will direct you on doing a test.

1. Begin with the most uncomplicated way of doing the test. It is important to remember that simple keywords and a few text ad would be useful enough when testing your ad campaign. At least three elements will definitely do.
2. Give it more time to get high traffic in your website. It might take a while before you receive a lot hits.
3. Testing a landing page is okay but aim for more. Try to be a little bit creative in using different elements like graphics, hues, and subject lines.  Consider transforming your page bit by bit. A little modification can lead to a desirable outcome.

Since you don’t get the outcome right away, it would be practical to wait a while and don’t get frustrated instantly.  But sooner or later, you’ll see the result that you want.

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This advice today however, is well beyond the context of war. It is relevant to people climbing up the corporate ladder; it is wise advice to women in vicious social circles; and most significantly, it is especially relevant to AdWords marketers like you, who must, like a military general, continuously study your competition so that you could get a better leverage in marketing your landing page, and consequently, your products or services.

Analyze the Competition Indeed!

A few months back, Google launched the “Analyze Competition” feature. It is found on the “opportunities” tab of your AdWords account. Initially, this feature was open only to a select group of advertisers. Recently however, AdWords revealed that it is expanding this feature, offering accessibility for all English language accounts.

The “Analyze Competition” feature allows you to study your account’s activity over a two-week period. It shows you the categories of products/services that you’re actively advertising in, and determines how well you are doing compared to other advertisers in the very same category. Your performance result is based on three factors: search terms matched against keywords; ad text; and your landing page text. A bar graph that highlights your individual performance is then generated on-screen for you to digest, and for you to strategize in optimizing your ad campaigns.

Google further reveals that on top of this, the feature also determines “the Google search terms that triggered your ad for each of the most specific sub-categories in your account.” To be able to know what your target market or your clients typed onto the search bar is a precious privilege. You could then come up with better keyword ideas as you improve your existing ads or as you create new ones. It’s like getting inside your customer’s head, one factor that is essential in any business.

With the “Analyze Competition” feature, you get to optimize your campaigns even more!

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The test involved selecting a base keyword that was considered to have an extremely higher traffic. In the test, the base keyword “Las Vegas” was chosen. After which, three AdWords key categories, such as accommodation, Delta flights, and tour, were attached to the base keyword. Since the landing page webpage content was considered, a very limited and yet significant group of keywords was chosen.

For a period of time, the selected three trial AdWords campaigns were exclusively tested on the Google search network, concentrating on impressions instead of CTR or Conversion rates. The three AdWords campaigns were aimed at people who wants to visit Las Vegas.

The test also included the use of Performable as a landing page platform in running the trial and iFrame to display the website. With Performable, all the landing pages could be reproduced using iFrame and that can result in the test being subjected to outside factors with a limited effect on the landing page quality score.

In the process of the trial, a sample set was also employed while a keyword match domain, a brand new domain that does not have a campaign or content on it and an authority domain, with which the campaigns would be run.

Generally, the test revealed that the keyword domain garnered a significant number of impressions even on AdGroups or Keywords that did not have even a single click or varied by any factor that Google believes affect the quality score.  According to the conducted short test campaign, if one desires to have the Ads to show it is much better to run them on the Keyword friendly domain or at least a sub domain compared to a page or directory on an authority domain.

Among the significant results of the short trial showed that running Ads on a keyword domain would lead to a slightly higher quality score, making it more relevant to the person searching which boosts traffic. So if you’d like to encourage more people to view your site, establish a keyword-friendly domain. You can never go wrong.

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Enhanced CPC raises the Max. CPC bid once it predicts that a certain auction has a great chance to convert than the normal auction for that keyword. On the other hand, if enhanced CPC foresees that a specific auction is less likely to convert, it lessens the bid to cut the cost of a possible click from that auction.

If you notice enhanced CPC, especially its ability to automatically increase and decrease maximum bids is similar to what the Conversion Optimizer (CPA) feature can do.

The two bidding systems are the same in the following aspects;

• Both systems dynamically bid up keywords that have higher historical conversion rates.
• Both systems bid down keywords that have lower historical conversion rates.
• Both systems consider a large number of targeting factors pertaining to every particular search inquiry, such as user location, language setting, search query match type, significance of a certain broad-matched query, and many more.

However, the two bidding systems can be distinguished from each other. Here are the two main distinctions:

• The Conversion Optimizer will give you the chance to indicate a preferred CPA (cost per conversion). On one hand, enhanced CPC would not give you the opportunity to lay down that main target.
• With enhanced CPC, you can modify the keyword bids yourself. It immediately adjusts bids for you, but it never bids more than 30% higher than the maximum CPC that you initially established. With the Conversion Optimizer, bid adjustments are not restricted.

This new enhanced CPC is highly recommended for advertisers who wish to make the most use of the bidding system. It is aimed at conversion that is carried out by Conversion Optimizer while maintaining control over bidding.

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How to Set Up Your Popup Alternatives

1. Direct users to a name squeeze page, and reflect this on your ad. Instead of setting up your landing page to be a sales page outright, you could first get customer data by getting their name and email address. After they’re done filling up the form and providing the necessary information, you can then redirect them to your sales page. Most marketer pros do this by offering a freebie like an eBook, or a company item, or a newsletter in exchange of the customer’s email address. You might want to try this strategy.

1. Get a ‘hovering’ popup. There are some special kinds of popups that merely hover on the page, and since they work like dynamic menus on a website, they are allowed on your target page. There are several software programs that could help you create this type of popup.

1. Set up popups in other pages of your site. Google AdWords policy says you can’t have popups on your target page, which means that you can have them on any other page. Create interesting content for your customers to browse your site further, thus prompting them to provide information in your popup page.

Popup pages could significantly increase your sales statistics; some studies even reveal that it could increase sales by 50%! Now this is a hefty number, so it’s wise to use popups to the utmost advantage, without violating any AdWords policies, of course.

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Search across Your AdWords Universe
The ’search across accounts’ tool enables you to conduct a search across all of the accounts yoked to your MCC. Monitoring specific campaigns could be tedious, especially if you’re running a handful. With this new feature however, all you have to do is search for a term or a phrase linked with the particular campaign you’d want to check, and this AdWords feature will then generate search results. Just like your good old Google search page, the page will show all related keywords, ads, ad groups and ad campaigns. This beats spending several minutes on your dashboard looking for that one particular ad campaign you’d love to work on.

In using this feature, you must remember these pointers:

• You get only whole-word matches. This means wide search coverage, so that if you need to be exact, you have to encode the specific phrase with quotation marks, in the appropriate word order. This will then generate results that match the exact term typed on the search bar.
• Maximum search result is pegged at 100 per tab; if there are over a hundred results you’d see the indicator: “(100+)” on your screen. If there are zero results, you’d see the “(0)” indicator on screen.
• Sorting the data is not available yet.

Labeling matters!
Labeling is a good thing when AdWords is concerned, because you could organize your accounts into certain groups. By doing this, you could search for pertinent accounts more efficiently. Based on your daily MCC tasks, you could organize your accounts into whatever system you like. For example, you could label them by importance, or by seniority, or simply by favorites. One popular labeling manner among AdWords users is labeling accounts according to who’s managing them. Users directly connected to your MCC are the only ones allowed to view, apply and edit the labels.

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Google’s moves mean that they can improve their traffic share gains and increased CPCs because of higher conversion rates. Google’s conversion rates are currently pegged at a whopping 30%. It seems that Google’s now willing to take an affiliate fee for every person they send to an online vendor. Even if Google removes Like.com’s affiliate business, they will still earn more advertising dollars against the increased CPC rates that these shopping sites can generate.

Like.com’s platform which can recognize images and compare it to existing products can only boost the customer’s shopping experience. This image recognition/comparison capability will also enhance Google’s Image Search product. Goggles also stands to benefit from Like.com’s platform. Goggles lets you take a picture from your mobile phone and submit this as a search query to Google’s search engine

Google seems to be taking over a company per week and announcing them every Friday. Are we seeing a growing trend here? I wonder which company will be gobbled up by Google next Friday? Any predictions?

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The Power of Two
Just how strong is the new keyword tool? Well, to give advertisers like you the idea here’s a run-through of the Keyword Tool and the Search-based Keyword Tool. Combine the forces of these two and you have the prowess of the new keyword tool. Now you understand why AdWords advertisers are all giddy with excitement!

The Keyword Tool. This AdWords feature help you with get your new keyword ideas. All you have to do is enter a description below – either a word or a phrase – and the tool will generate some keywords suggestions to use. You could also simply type in your website address on the tool bar and it will automatically give you some suggestions.

The Search-based Keyword Tool. This feature on the other hand, is deemed to be more intelligent because it is more precise; it generates keywords suggestions based on actual queries on the Google search page. It also does some matching to specific pages on your website.

AdWords: Always Aiming for Improved Efficiency
Google emphasizes that the new keyword tool will improve AdWords efficiency, as it is expected to do the following tasks:
• Making search options flexible;
• Making keywords refinement easy;
• Filtering results more effectively by word or keyword match type;
• Allowing advanced options for mobile and local searches;
• Prompting easy removal of duplicate keywords ; and
• Allowing easy addition of negative keywords.

The Keyword tool is an essential part of Google AdWords, and with this big improvement set for implementation come September, advertisers like you will surely find the AdWords program more beneficial to your marketing campaign.

Market analysts say that consumer spending is getting more conservative as Americans aim for getting the best value for their dollar. Consequently, it will then take a lot more convincing skills from advertisers like you in pitching your product or service. Thankfully, with the new keyword tool, you’ll be well-prepared to target a more discriminating market.

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In the Google AdWords challenge, all the participants had to do was track conversions on their site with the use of Google’s free measurement products. There are several ones to choose from, so they won’t have a hard time picking one that’s suitable for their need. You too, could do the same thing in whipping up your conversion rate to perfect form. You may either use the AdWords Conversion Tracking product or the Google Analytics product.

Set up some measurement tools!
To set up your conversion tracking tools, you have to first refresh your knowledge on using HTML or web tools. Take a quick crash course online or if you’re too busy, ask a person who’s knowledgeable about HTML or web tools to help you out. This capability on using HTML and other web tools is necessary because you need to successfully place the conversion tracking code snippet on your site. You will also need to use have your website’s code, as well as your Google AdWords account password ready on hand. Once you’re all prepared, you and your HTML expert will have to go through two steps: getting the code snippet and inserting the code snippet on your website. The detailed, step-by-step guide is available in your AdWords account, and it would be good to have a printout of the instructions for better focus. Once you’re done with the two steps, you’re all good for tracking your ROI. If you want to take an extra measure, you could also go for Google Analytics, which determines site visits and tracks performance of your marketing campaigns.

Taking an individualized conversion champion challenge could only produce one result: the ultimate optimization of your sites and consequently, the positive stats that come with it.

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This Change is Certainly Good!
July was a great month for advertisers when Google finally launched new changes in the preferred AdWords API pricing. The change entails free API credits for developers who meet the API requirements set by the AdWords program. This allows advertisers to welcome tool vendors and optimize their site even more with new tools and new features. According to Google, “We calculate free AdWords API units for the developer token that’s approved for preferred AdWords API pricing using the amount of spend managed by AdWords accounts touched by your developer token. If you receive preferred pricing, we’ll provide you with 250 units for every $1 of AdWords spend managed.” Data access and site changes will no longer be a dread both for AdWords users and third-party vendors, because they will no longer be expensive.

All’s Fair in Google!
This big change makes the AdWords platform ever more competitive and fair, as it provides the same web environment for tools built internally with Google AdWords, and those built externally, by independent web developers. Most advertisers hesitate to build web tools outside of the AdWords environment so that they won’t pay for the charges. Thankfully, with this big change, everything is now fair at Google, and third-party vendors could now gain access to the AdWords developing arena without worrying about the costs. The best thing about this is that more and more sites will have their big upgrade with the Google’s gates more open now to third-party developers. Improved sites mean more consumer attraction and hopefully, more consumers spending for products and services offered by AdWords advertisers. This is a most significant development; especially in times that the finance world reports mixed signals in the consumer market.

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