Online Marketing News Archive

We like Google.
We spend quite a bit of time defending Google to our clients and explaining how embracing Google’s quest for relevant search results is the most effective form of search engine marketing in the long term.
Every now and then we do, however, come across examples of the greed that many people despise Google for … Read full article>

Hitwise has been looking at the possible consequences of the changes to Google’s trademark polices, due to come into effect on May 5th.
The web measurement firm calculated that the top 100 Google Internet properties sent 36.55% of all online traffic to UK websites in March, an increase on 30.19% in the same month in 2007.
The … Read full article>

Google announced on Friday that, from May 5th, it will allow open keyword bidding on all search terms in the UK and Ireland.
This means that registered trademarks can now be bid on by competitors, whereas previously they could only show ads for trademarked terms with other words in the search query.
This open bidding for keywords … Read full article>

Google has announced that it will start taking page load times into account when it assesses Quality Score.
Quality score is used by the search engine which influences a particular ad’s position on the Google network, as well as minimum bids for keywords.
Other factors already taken into account are keyword relevance, the historical clickthrough rates of … Read full article>

Google has announced that it is launching demographic bidding on Adwords.
In essence, the new functionality will allow advertisers to target specific demographic groups, based on the profiles supplied by the content network website owners.
This sounds very promising and will of course be of great interest to online marketers, but we would suggest that it is … Read full article>

After temporarily removing all its paid search advertising from the search engine, eBay has returned to advertising via Google, though it has reduced its spend from previous levels.
The two firms had fallen out after Google had scheduled a Google Checkout party on the fringes of eBay’s own event in Boston last week. This was seen … Read full article>

As reported on the BBC site, Google has announced that it is opening up its Google Checkout service to the UK.
Google Checkout is the search giant’s payment processing system that goes head to head with some of the larger, more established services such as PayPal, which remains the dominant payment processing service.
It has been available … Read full article>

Click fraud accounts for less than 0.02% of all clicks according to Google
The search engine giant has released a figure for the amount of fraudulent clicks it fails to detect. In addition, Google plans to provide PPC advertisers with more information on its methods of click fraud detection.
Shuman Ghosemajumder, Google’s business product manager for trust & safety … Read full article>

Google has announced that it will start to show quality scores against all keywords in Adwords campaigns.
The concept of ‘quality score’ is one that has, to date, set Google Adwords apart from other PPC advertising platforms. Whereas most PPC channels reward the highest bidders with the top slots, Google has for some years ranked PPC … Read full article>

Many advertisers are experiencing alarming increases in bid prices imposed by Google for adwords campaigns. Previously successful keywords have been made inactive by Google who are demanding some eye-watering increases in bid price to reactivate the keyword.
Is this a sign that Google is desperately trying to satisfy investors or is there some rational reason for … Read full article>