Online Marketing, SEO, & Web Design Blog

It happens more than you think – and no you are not alone – when creating a new campaign or adding new keywords, ads or even landing pages your ads may not appear right away. However, before you start lobbing emails and phone calls into Google support understand that there is a review process for new campaigns. The review process can take up to a few days, however while you are waiting make sure that it is not your fault your ads are not appearing.

Here are a few reasons that may effect your ads:

1) Campaign, Keyword, Ad – Paused

Yes it happens to everyone (including the pros) – make sure that everything is running correctly and not paused. It is easy to forget about this simple aspect espsically if you are in the interface making changes to your account.

2)Budget Issues

Yet another simple fix. Make sure that you have set your daily or monthly budget for your campaigns. This happens alot if you are using the Google Adwords Editor to create and manage your campaigns. Also make sure that your keyword bids are not higher than your daily budget.

3)Disapproved Ads / Keywords

To make the web a much more user friendly place for you and I, Google does not allow you to bid on certain keywords or place certain words in your ads. Most of these have to do with particular keywords that are prohibited, for a full list take a look here.

Ads can also be disapproved if you use similar prohibited terms or copyrighted phrases. Make sure to double check everything before you launch your campaign.

4)Low Search Volume

While it is always a good idea to bid on long tail keywords that you competitors are not biddng on, Google will not let you bid on terms that receive very  very low search traffic. If this is the case you will be notified in the Google Adwords interface in the status column that your ads are receiving ”Low Search Volume.” While this is sometimes disappointing – Google can not make people search for certain phrases.

5) Billing

This is yet another simple fix – make sure that you have added your credit card information and that Google has verified your card and billing address. And to answer your question – unlike everything else Google does, Adwords does cost money. (Now you know why your gmail account is free!)

Remember, most of the time your ads are not showing because of the review process. But it is always a good idea to double check that it is not your fault.

With more and more companies starting paid search campaigns everyday, as well as more emphasis placed on SEO, many question whether it is worth it or not to bid on branded keywords. From a per-cost standpoint, it seems very cut and dry – people searching for your branded term are going to click on your organic link, so why give them a choice to click on a paid link? However, this high level outlook is not as accurate as it may seem. (more…)

Lets face it, most small and even large businesses simply do not have the funds to use advanced Analytics software such as Omniture or WebTrends. However, with Google Analytics, these companies gain access to a very powerful tool for free. Although this is great, many users quickly find that because it’s so powerful, it’s not as easy to learn and use as one may think.

One of the problems that many e-business owners run into is tracking Microsoft Adcenter and Yahoo search marketing visits in Goggle Analytics.

The good news is that you can use Google Analytics to track paid search for Adwords campaigns because Adwords automatically tags keywords. Unfortunately, Yahoo and Mircosoft do not automatically tag paid keywords. While the process is not ‘automatic’ it is fairly simple… at least in theory. (more…)

Some good news over the past week! Google has finally rolled out image ads for paid search for all users. This is great news for all e-commerce companies, as they now can opt to show images and prices of their products right in the Google paid-listings. As I said in the previous post, these images will show when a user clicks on the “Show products from advertiser” link under the display URL.

To set up this feature in your Google Adwords account you first must have a Google Base account and have all of your products uploaded into it. If you already have everything in Google Base set up, then the rest is easy.

Simply go to the campaign your want to display images for and then click on the settings tab. From here scroll to “Networks, devices and extensions” and then go to “Ad extensions” -> Edit.

Click the Ad Extensions "Edit" link

Now, enter your Google Merchant Center account number and away you go!

I found it incredibly easy to link the accounts and start showing the image ads in the search results. It take about 30 minutes to be fully up and running, but it is worth the wait.