Website Marketing Strategies

I think Google’s got a glitch within their mobile app advertising program in the content network – here’s why:

1. 90% of our marketing clients are industrial based, they sell products like cleanroom environments, solenoids, machine safety products, gantry robots, etc.
2. Their customers are mainly engineers buying parts to fix things in other manufacturing facilities.
3. They have a very predictable monthly spend rate through Adwords ( both search and content networks) and a high percentage of their traffic will download a PDF, Cad Drawing, request a quote, read a whitepaper, etc.

When Google enabled their mobile app advertising within the content network, most of my clients spend rate and traffic went through the roof.  Great you think until you analyze exactly what happened.

Here’s an example of what happened to one client:

1. Client sells cleanroom equipment (wet process stations, clean benches, cleanrooms, fume hoods, etc.)
2. Average Adwords clicks for the last two years = 1,287 per month
3. Average Adwords spend rate for the last two years = $1,500.00 per month
4. The total clicks for a “two day” period after Mobile App advertising went live = 2,563 (double the monthly average)
5. The total dollars spent for that “two day” period = $1,132.00 (almost the total average monthly spend)
6. Average time visitor spent on site from Mobile App clicks = 14 seconds
7. Total number of action items (download pdf, request quote, etc.) taken = 0
8. Total number of keywords that caused these stats = 1 (wet process station – set to exact match)

If this were an isolated incident, I wouldn’t be that concerned but we have tracked similar statistics over 30 accounts we have in Adwords and all of them experienced similar results and all of them are industrial based.

One of my colleagues talked to a rep at ThomasNet.com and apparently they have had several calls from their advertisers stating the same issues.

Here’s My Theories:

1. Google has a glitch that causes impressions of ads appearing within the Mobile Ad network to be misidentified as clicks and therefore showing in Analytics as traffic that only stays for a few seconds and causing a charge to be accrued in Adwords.
2. Google has a serious loop hole that is allowing app developers to cause impressions to be perceived as clicks.
3. Or, there is some serious Click Fraud happening by some other means, whether programmed into apps or through foreign sources that are most often to blame for click fraud.

Anyone Have ANY Thoughts On This – Please Comment!!

On Monday, August 10th, Google officially announced a new search technology they will be releasing in the near future.  The new technology is called “Caffeine” – that gives me the jitters just thinking about how this could effect ranking results.

According to Google, “For the last several months, a large team of Googlers has been working on a secret project: a next-generation architecture for Google’s web search. It’s the first step in a process that will let us push the envelope on size, indexing speed, accuracy, comprehensiveness and other dimensions.”

So, once again we come to the question, “How Does This Affect Me?”.  Well, that’s a great question!  No one knows for sure what changes this will cause to current keyword positions or what optimization changes will need to be implemented, if any.

Google does give us access to test the new search and from what I can tell, 99.9% of the keywords I tested came up in the same positions as the standard Google search.  That’s a good thing because Google is not known for rolling out improvements to its search engine.

I want to caution everyone – just because the results seem to be similar, doesn’t mean they will stay similar.  There are people reporting huge differences between Caffeine and standard search but there could be any number of reasons for that, the least of which is the change in search technology.

We will be watching and testing the new search engine as long as we have access to it.  Once it is launched, which will be at Google.com and won’t appear any different in looks than the current search, we will be testing heavily to see if the launch itself caused any changes to keyword positions.

If there are any changes that need to be made to your search engine optimization campaigns, we will send out a newsletter explaining what those changes will be and the time frames for making them happen.

Trevor Walter is senior marketing director and vice president of Freelance Marketing Group www.trevorwalter.com :: www.fmgconsultants.com

Google Product Search, formally known as Google Base, is still run by the same product distribution technology known as Google Base but is know rebranded and incorporated into the Google Search Results as “Shopping Results”.

* see example: do a search for ipod covers in Google – you should see a “Shopping Results for ipod covers” section on the first page. These results come from Google Product Search.

So, What’s the big deal about Google Product Search?

During the month of November 2008, Google reported 11.8 million unique visitors had used Google Product Search. Those numbers are up 786% from the same period in 2007 – that is an amazing increase in web users.

Why the jump in visitors? Because Google finally started using their own technology. Google Product Search has been around for a long time but was always a flop for customers until Google included it in their standard keyword results at Google.com. This inclusion is all part of the new and revised Universal Search technology that drives Google.

So, What Does This Mean For Your Website?

Well, if you sell any type or amount of products, you can add them to Google Product Search for free. That’s right, this is a free tool and there are two easy ways to upload your products – the first being a single upload of one product at a time. Or, you can create and upload a data feed, which will let you put hundreds or thousands of products online quickly.

This is not the end-all, be-all solution to selling more products online but it certainly will give you a better chance attracting customers.

Check Out: Google Product Search

If you need some assistance with this program, give me a call or drop me an email and I can give you more details and help you get setup with this program.