AdWords Business Credit Cards launches

It looks like the AdWords Business Credit Cards are now available. This should be good news for SMBs, though the fine print states "Rates range from 8.99% to 18.99% and depend on your creditworthiness as determined by Comenity Capital Bank."

Get more flexibility in your budget. Start here »

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Smooth out your cash flow. The AdWords Business Credit card separates your AdWords spending from your other expenses, so you get more room on your existing cards. Start here We've selected a few businesses to try out the AdWords Business Credit card. It's a dedicated card just for your AdWords spending. So whether your business is like KURU Footwear and you need the cash flow to pay for thousands of shoes at a time, or you just want more flexibility in your budget, you'll be covered. Plus, it comes with interest rates as low as 8.99% APR* and minimum monthly payments. To get started, enter xxxxxxxxxxxx on your application. If you have any questions, please give us a call at 1-866-2GOOGLE. Start here »   Take a look at how the AdWords Business Credit card helped KURU with their cash flow. Watch the short video » Sincerely, The Google AdWords Team         *Rates range from 8.99% to 18.99% and depend on your creditworthiness as determined by Comenity Capital Bank. Comenity Capital Bank ("Bank") issues AdWords Business Credit Card Accounts. AdWords Business Credit Card Accounts are subject to Bank credit approval. Offer expires June 30, 2013. © 2013 Google Inc. 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway, Mountain View, CA 94043 This email was sent to xxxxxx because you indicated that you'd like to receive AdWords promotions and special offers. If you don't want to receive such emails in the future, please unsubscribe here: xxxxxx You can also change your preferences on your account's Notification Settings page by logging into xxxxxx

New AdWords Beta - bulk uploads in AdWords UI

Today I came across a new beta for AdWords - bulk uploads. This allows advertisers to "download editable keyword reports, make changes right in the document, and then upload the updated reports back into your account where your new changes will be automatically applied."

The key benefit is that this will allow advertisers to make bulk changes without some of the drawbacks of AdWords editor (slow syncing, incorrectly applied URL changes, version conflicts, etc.)

The help page for the beta can be found here: https://support.google.com/adwords/answer/2477116?hl=en

Google Enhanced Campaigns (aka Enhanced Revenue)

Is Wall Street driving the evolution of Google AdWords? Based on recent trends, that seems to be the case.

Last June, Google updated the AdWords ad rotation settings to force more advertisers to optimize to CTR. Ads that were more likely to get clicks would be shown more than others. More clicks = more cash for Google. However, clicks are not conversions. This change hurt advertiser's abilities to test and optimize their creative based on actual performance (like users buying stuff). The blowback was immediate, with Google reversing course and allowing advertisers to opt out of the new rotation settings.

Just in time for Christmas, Google converted Google Shopping to only include paid listings. Users lost the ability to view unbiased search results, advertisers lost a free traffic source that they had to spend to recoup, and Google gained $1.3 billion in new revenues.

Now, Google is launching enhanced campaigns. The "enhancement" is that advertisers are opted into mobile campaigns, have less control on what they pay per mobile and tablet click, and cannot segment between desktop and tablet campaigns. These are some major negatives. Mobile, tablet, and desktop users behave differently and mobile CPCs have been low because mobile users are much less likely to buy than desktop or tablet consumers (ever try to enter a 16 digit credit card number into your phone?).

This seems like a blatant money grab by Google. "Enhanced" campaigns will raise costs for advertisers, lower performance, and reduce control. As an added bonus, there will be substantial cost in restructuring search campaigns to conform to the new settings, technical hurdles to tracking performance, an inability to budget by device, less room to craft creative messaging by device, less effective bid management, and new requirements in website design to provide the right user experience.

This most reminds me of the monopoly days of Microsoft where they used their dominant market share to impose additional cost on users and partners. Google is now a defacto monopoly in search marketing and is behaving as such. It's sad that the FTC has bought into the argument that Google is only dominant because of their great innovation. Network effects can create monopolies, and Google is certainly behaving as a monopolist.

Advanced Marketing Tools: Google Consumer Surveys

Google's product updates come fast and furious, so it's easy to miss some interesting product developments. I've been guilty of this too. Today, I learned about Google Consumer Surveys. This product was first introduced in March of this year, but was under my radar until I received a promo code to run a survey.

How it works is simple: you design a survey and Google traffics the survey on its ad network. Users can complete your survey to unlock premium content on partner sites. The marketer gets fast survey results at a low price, the publisher gets a share of the revenue, and Google gets the rest. Win, win, win.

More info can be found here: http://www.google.com/insights/consumersurveys/home

Simple Step to improve SEM Performance

Here's an article I wrote outlining some easy wins to boost your SEM campaigns.

Enjoy!
Richard

http://blog.mixrank.com/cure-your-sem-blues-with-this-4-step-account-85202

Bing Sitelinks have arrived!

Is AdCenter finally rolling out Sitelink Extensions?

Below is a screenshot taken from the new Bing Ads Editor showing the export dialogue box. Apparently, they are laying the groundwork for Sitelink Extensions. This has been a long sought for additional to the AdCenter / Bing Ads platform and will likely have a positive impact on advertiser's campaign performance. Stay tuned....