The Big G rolls out Caffeine - So grab a cup and read!
This is Great News for the Evolution of the web search giant this is Google.
Just read this off their official blog and so I am re-posting it for you to read. Its going to change a lot of things this year.
“So why did we build a new search indexing system? Content on the web is blossoming. It’s growing not just in size and numbers but with the advent of video, images, news and real-time updates, the average webpage is richer and more complex. In addition, people’s expectations for search are higher than they used to be. Searchers want to find the latest relevant content and publishers expect to be found the instant they publish.
To keep up with the evolution of the web and to meet rising user expectations, we’ve built Caffeine. The image below illustrates how our old indexing system worked compared to Caffeine:
Our old index had several layers, some of which were refreshed at a faster rate than others; the main layer would update every couple of weeks. To refresh a layer of the old index, we would analyze the entire web, which meant there was a significant delay between when we found a page and made it available to you.
With Caffeine, we analyze the web in small portions and update our search index on a continuous basis, globally. As we find new pages, or new information on existing pages, we can add these straight to the index. That means you can find fresher information than ever before—no matter when or where it was published.
Caffeine lets us index web pages on an enormous scale. In fact, every second Caffeine processes hundreds of thousands of pages in parallel. If this were a pile of paper it would grow three miles taller every second. Caffeine takes up nearly 100 million gigabytes of storage in one database and adds new information at a rate of hundreds of thousands of gigabytes per day. You would need 625,000 of the largest iPods to store that much information; if these were stacked end-to-end they would go for more than 40 miles.
We’ve built Caffeine with the future in mind. Not only is it fresher, it’s a robust foundation that makes it possible for us to build an even faster and comprehensive search engine that scales with the growth of information online, and delivers even more relevant search results to you. So stay tuned, and look for more improvements in the months to come.”
Please comment on how you think this might change your business as we are all in some way partners in this!
Google Best Practise - Keep it simple!
So many people complain about Google’s tough rules, but I say…”keep it simple” & you will benefit from the rewards. I NEVER get below a QS of 7 on my camps and a CTR of 5% on my worst keys. (throw and Stick method) - Simple Guidelines from the Boss…
Organise your campaign by theme.
In each campaign, create separate ad groups for each of your products, brands or types of services you offer. Each ad group can then have a highly related set of keywords and ads that match the specific theme. By doing this, your ads can highlight exactly what a customer is searching for.
Choose your keywords carefully
Use specific keywords that directly relate to the theme of your ad group and landing page. Keywords that are too broad can lower your performance by generating many ad impressions but few clicks. One-word keywords are likely to be too generic, so try using two- or three-word phrases. Use the Keyword Tool to generate keyword ideas.
Include keywords in your ad text
Include your keywords in your ad text (especially the title) to show users that your ad relates to their search. If your ad shows when a user searches on a keyword in your ad group, the keyword will appear in bold in your ad text.
Use the right destination URL
Make sure that the Destination URL (landing page) you use for each ad is the most relevant page within your website - ideally, a page dedicated to the specific product or service that’s highlighted in your ad.
Track your success
To make informed decisions about how to optimise your campaigns, review your campaign statistics. To measure your success, use conversion tracking to see which ads and keywords bring the most to your business.
Give the searcher what they want, satisfy their need and the reaping of the sowing will surprise you.
Googles New tool for Exporting (With a twist)
“The world is open for your business!”
Just had a nice email from Google UK re: http://www.google.co.uk/intl/en/exportadviser/
-Check it out, its not working 100% yet but as you will see you can pop your into the box and choose from the G20, Europe, Asia, Africa etc, etc to see into the marketplaces for exporting opportunities. I prefer to default to Emerging markets…hit return & after the bot churns the data out spits your heat map. Change to table, and it gives a nice list (see below) for you to plan your export ideas.
TIP: The sneaky way I will be using this is to test out my various affiliate products, Put in the seed keyword first. Don’t go too specific, the app can’t handle long tails yet. Save the results in a specific folder. (save as). After finding the emerging market & rough cpc estimates go dig further using the Google calculator built into the main Google Keyword tool (more accurate & will give you many more related keys) set the country and language first. (You can also use https://adwords.google.com/select/TrafficEstimatorSandbox) If your paying in $ keep it at default or change to your local currencies. Gather your Keys & go test your new marketplace! Enjoy!
Adwords Insider 101 - hearing it from the horse’s mouth.
A fellow colleague on the most excellent Forum connected with the Pay Per Click Formula 2.0 just sent the following information to me. His name is Amir and he owns http://www.xconversions.com/. I have been using his tool for a while together with other keyword tracking software including Prosper202, Hlola 2.0 and Affiliate Prophet…I will be doing an unbiased review asap but for now I just read of this absolute goldmine of insider information…
“I had written this report a little while ago, yet it’s still as relevant today as it was back then. I recently got slapped for one of my campaigns and redid the same thing that I describe below. Below, you’ll find the result of a simple experiment that I did with two identical landing pages.
In reality the two landing pages were identical except…they were using different domain names.
Here are the two landing pages:
landing page 1:
(min bids .04c to .20 cents)
http://www.thewebsherlock.com/PLFBonuses.html
http://www.xconversions.com/slap1.JPG
landing page 2:
(min bids .20 cents to $10)
http://www.xconversions.com/plfbonuses
http://www.xconversions.com/slap2.JPG
One of the more clever customers plugged the two domains in the
google suggestion tool and found that google thought one of the
domains (the one that didn’t get slapped) was more relevant for my
keywords, while the other was for some reason classified in a
different context although as you can see both domains:
(www.xconversions.com and www.thewebsherlock.com) are pretty much
geared towards affiliate marketing.
I’ve spoken to an inside source at google and gotten a better
understanding for how this whole thing works and it’s really funny
how things come together at the right time…(I’ll explain I mean
in just a min).
I had a long technical discussion with the inside source, which
shall remain anonymous. I’ll won’t bore you with the technical
details. I’ll just present you with a few facts that will shed
some light on this whole quality score and min bid procedure. And
trust me, it doesn’t get any better than hearing it from the
horse’s mouth.
The are a few filters that the ads go through, but we’ll keep this
simple.
1- (This was a big surprise to me.) The google algorithm for
ranking organic results has NOTHING to do with adwords as a whole.
In fact the organic ranking algorithm is highly secretive inside
of google itself and only those that work on it know how it works.
Other developers/employees have NO access to it whatsoever..not
anymore than anyone outside of google.
I always thought that if a site comes up in the organic listings,
it means that google thinks it’s relevant for those keywords and it
will automatically get a good quality score/low min bids.
WRONG!!!! The organic relevance algorithm and the landing page
relevance algorithm have NO relationship to each other
whatsoever!!! Interesting huh?
2- All google employees and developers are genuinely trying to
create an optimal experience for the user and the advertiser. They
are told time and time again that optimizing revenue is NOT the
goal. They also read most relevant feedback they receive.
————————-
HERE IS WHERE IT GETS INTERESTING
————————-
3- There are various factors that affect the Quality Score (QS) and
min bids. Some of these factors are more prominent than others.
The most prominent of all is machine learning algorithm that
uses a LOT of historical data, your ad, your account history and
comes up with a score.
That system is the major deciding factor for which ‘bucket’ in the
min bid spectrum you’re placed in.
That system is also EXTREMELY complex with hundreds of thousands of
possible combinations and conditions. It’s also a
NON-DETERMINISTIC EVER EVOLVING SYSTEM that’s being worked on by a
team of developers.
Here’s what that means…
It means that the same set of data from your side as the advertiser
(ie the same ad, landing page url, account history etc..) can yield
different results in different iterations of the system. So let me
repeat that in different words.
If you start a campaign and write an ad and select keywords to bid
on and hit submit, you will get a set of min bids for your keywords.
If you start a new campaign with the same ad and bid keywords that
you just did in the previous step, you may get different results.
Arguably the variance won’t be that much, but nonetheless, it’s an
important point to keep in mind.
Another significant factor that can cause major shifting of your
min bid status and override the results of the first algorithm is
the landing page relevance algorithm. The first algorithm doesn’t
consider any of your landing page content whatsoever.
4- Two separate pages that have the same identical content are looked
at as two different pages by google eventhough they have identical
content.
This technical discussion although didn’t add much that I didn’t
know practically speaking, was very enlightening on how I look at
the adwords system now.
The question is:How can these new insights help us create better campaigns?
1- Make sure that the ads are highly relevant to the keywords that
your bidding on. The main algorithm that decides your min bids
doesn’t look at your landing page, it only looks at your ads, bid
keyword, and a bunch of historical data.
2- Your account history is VERY important. If google sees that
you’re a ‘bad’ advertiser, they just won’t show your ads.
3- Make sure your overall domain is relevant to the theme of your
bid keywords
4- Make sure your landing page has relevant content to the bid
keywords
Now probably the more important factor in this list, generally speaking is the first one. The difficulty though with making ads that are highly relevant to keywords your bidding on is that it’s very tedious and time
consuming.”
-Naturally a few solutions were developed to solve this problem the solution that I use and highly recommend is Speed PPC by Jay Stackwell. I believe Speed PPC is the best solution on the market right now to accomplish this exact task. A cheaper version is available called Efficient PPC along with Adgrenade (which works well with Clickbank tracking.)