Although they’ve been criticised for it in the past, one of the most fascinating things about Google is that they can and do rely on the data and the facts and in this case it will be interesting to see the outcome of the experiment. There are a whole host of factors at play here and obviously their aim is to maximise the number of clicks on the ads, thereby maximising their revenue. Unfortunately us picky humans are in the way of that and suffer from all sorts of ailments like advert fatigue, varying sensitivity to colour, varying monitor settings and so on.

What do you think of the new colours? Have you noticed? Do you prefer any of them over the others? Let us know in the comments below!

The crux of the case was that anyone is allowed to bid on trademarked keywords via the AdWords system and have their ads appear alongside search results, however, only the trademark owner may use the trademarked term in their ads (this is something lots of people outside the PPC industry are unaware of). The brand owners were concerned that ads directing users to counterfeit products were being shown, thereby violating their rights.

Very few people in the business expected anything other than a ruling in Google’s favour and the court obliged by saying:

“Google has not infringed trademark law by allowing advertisers to purchase keywords corresponding to their competitors’ trademarks”

Google’s Litigation Counsel responded in an official blog post with:

Trade marks are part of our daily life and culture, helping us to identify the products and services that we may be looking for. They are key for companies to market and advertise their products and services. But trade mark rights are not absolute.

We believe that user interest is best served by maximizing the choice of keywords, ensuring relevant and informative advertising for a wide variety of different contexts. For instance, if a user is searching for information about a particular car, he or she will want more than just that car’s website. They might be looking for different dealers that sell that car, second hand cars, reviews about the car or looking for information about other cars in the same category.

Why Was Quality Score Ignored?

I haven’t seen anyone mention the AdWords Quality Score mechanism and I do wonder why as it provides a certain degree of economic control in favour of brand owners in situations like this.

Speaking simply, if I decided to start bidding against an LVMH Trademarked term, my Quality Score would probably be much lower than LVMH’s as 1) my adverts wouldn’t use the trademarked term (so the click through rate would probably be low) and 2) I wouldn’t be sending someone to a site that was heavily associated with the trademark. The resulting low QS would mean higher click costs for me compared to the price LVMH would pay, possibly making my bidding grossly uneconomical.

Thus, despite the threat of lawsuits and general opprobrium, there is also a serious and possibly terminal financial disincentive inherent in the AdWords system that actively discourages bidding against any brand term that isn’t your own. They didn’t talk about that, did they?

If you ask any PPC expert for the one thing that make their life easier they’d probably say “more accurate conversion tracking”. In an attempt to deliver this, Google have today released a new ‘View-Through Conversions’ metric for their AdWords platform, providing advertisers with an additional means to measure the success of their campaigns.

The new tool is used exclusively with display ads featuring on the Content Network and is designed to track how many conversions result after a user has seen an ad rather than clicked on an ad. If you think about it for a moment, this is a significant development and one that is actually far more important than on first impression (if you excuse the pun).

The benefit of the metric is that advertisers will begin to develop an understanding of the visibility that advertising on the content network can bring and the conversions that can be generated as a result. After all, users might not necessarily click on an ad but rather read the ad and remember your brand name for later. All well and good. but what this doesn’t account for is the users who saw your ad but know about your brand or company already. For example, I know about Apple and I know that their site is at www.apple.com. If I’m feeling flush I might go on there and order myself a brand new Macbook Pro. That purchase is entirely influenced by my past experience and knowledge of Apple and is nothing to do with advertising. But if I’ve been on a page somewhere (let’s say the Mac News Network) that features content network ads for Apple, there’s a good chance my purchase will be recorded as a View-Through Conversion, which is an entirely false assessment of the effectiveness of the ad.

Therein lies the problem – with View-Through there’s simply no way to assess whether someone converted because of the ad or despite it. If you optimise your AdWords campaigns based on these conversion statistics, you may well be lowering their effectiveness and putting your budget into campaigns, sites or activities that simply don’t work.

To effectively measure the effectiveness of these ads you would need to run a control on the campaign, looking at how many people who didn’t see the ad bought something anyway. Only then would you start to have an accurate understanding of whether the investment was worthwhile.

Despite that, there’s no doubt it’s a very useful addition to the online marketer’s armoury, albeit best taken with a dose of scepticism.