I went to the Online Marketing Show this morning at the Royal Horticultural Halls in Westminster. It was a good opportunity to see what the old competition is up to and also to attend a Google University for the first time.
 

Google split the “lectures” into beginner and advanced and I went to the latter. To be honest I didn’t really learn anything new but it was good nevertheless to have certain concepts reinforced or refreshed.
 

I thought for the benefit of mainly the Quirkstars back home I would provide a quick summary about what was talked about:
 

Bear in mind that throughout the whole presentation the underlying yet unspoken aim was that Google wants you to spend more money through Adwords. When they say “increase your click through rate” (CTR) they mean… spend more money. Very little time was spent talking about the conversion rate of those clicks which is without doubt the most important thing. Organic search wasn’t even mentioned apart from a few brief tidbits in the questions and answers section.
 

So first up were a few examples about how Google determines its Rank Index (RI) which is the number which determines the ranking of adwords ads on search queries.
 

It’s pretty simple: cost per click (CPC) x CTR = RI

So for example:

Ad A: £0.80 x 3% = 2.4

Ad B: £1 x 1.5% = 1.5

In this example ad A would rank higher than B because even though the cost per click is lower, its higher CTR means it has a better RI. Lots of anagrams but fairly intuitive stuff.
 

An interesting side note is that the CTR for content (Adsense displays) does NOT affect the RI. Good thing too because it’s a lot lower!
 

Some tips on how to increase your CTR:
 

• Use Dynamic Keyword Insertion but only for multiple word phrases and ensure that the default text is well written
• Group keywords by theme with common creative and then test different creative for each ad group.
• Campaign Throttling – When overall account performance is poor, delivery of all keywords gets slowed. As such start slowly with strong keywords and spread from there.
• Pan European Campaigning – Check translation and treat different counties and cultures differently
• Content – check your logs and remove sites that don’t convert.
• For local search don’t leave it broad. Localise your creative by putting regions and place names in the content. Also they stated that a Yell listing is important but not essential – I reckon it will become less essential over time.

 
Another crazy fact was that if you want people to stop bidding on your trademark you have to submit reasoning and it takes 2/3 months to be effected!!
 

I asked them for more info on Adsense for feeds but unfortunately the presenter didn’t know too much. Seems like its going to be treated in the same way as content ads. Not ideal IMHO but who are we to argue with the mighty Google.

 
Bottom line is… everything that the Google software does in its management of paid listings whether search or content is designed to maximize the revenue for Google – even if this means that in isolated cases this damaged yours. You have been warned… keep an eye on conversion as that’s the only metric that really matters.