Category: Google

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Google Shopping Custom Labels Explained

If you are currently running Product Listing Ads (PLA) in AdWords, be aware that there is a new campaign type that is more powerful and allows you greater control available in your AdWords control panel called Google Shopping.

PLA programs won’t be rolled over automatically, so I recommend that you create a new Google Shopping campaign and then pause your old PLA program. However before you do that, you’ll want to update your Google Merchant data feed with a new column called custom labels.

At first I though that in the custom label field you could simply add your descriptor, but this is not how it works. So, here’s my recommendation.

1. You can have five custom labels. Decide how you want to sort your products as you will be able to bid on them separately with this approach. For example in your data feed you may call all bucket pallet fork products custom label 0, all manure fork products custom label 1, and all high profit items custom label 2 and so on.

2. Set up your Google Shopping campaign. In the new Product Groups tab, select the plus next to all “all products” to create sub categories and then select your custom label number. Then bid separately based on your needs for each of your custom labels.

3. This action gives you far greater control over what is shown in Google Shopping ads and greater control over your return on investment.

Here’s a great video from Google that helps clarify just what Google Shopping is and more screen shots on custom labels.

 

You can also watch the video here http://youtu.be/ivsyPeYeyqs

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The Clarity of What You Write Matters a Lot

Matt Cutts has some great words of wisdom for bloggers and website owners in this video on how technical you should get in content and blog posts. You can watch the video at YouTube.

In a nutshell, here are the takeaways on this important topic.

1. Clarity of what you write for your website or blog really matters to Google as it will determine relevancy and what queries your content will match in the Google index.

2. If you cannot make the content easy for people to understand then you do not really understand the content yourself. Matt says this not me! This does not mean that you need to “dumb down” what you write, but content should be informative and written in a manner that attracts those that may not have the depth of experience on a topic to your site to learn more.

3. There will always be a special place for higher level content on a topic but as far as Google is concerned the broader the appeal the better your placement will be.

4. When you make your content too technical or statistical heavy you lose the understandability of your content unless your audience is particularly coming to you for higher level information. Matt Cutts says err on the side of clarity and I say, write for the high school graduate in the bulk of your writing.

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AdWords Conversion Setting Guide

Google Partner Badge
McCord Web Services is a Google Partner.

In February AdWords will be making some sweeping changes in how it records conversions in your Google AdWords account. The changes will be an improvement and allow you or your account manager to have greater control over that data that Google records for your account.

Here are a few tips to help you get started with the new conversion program.

Conversion one per click. This conversion type is being renamed to Converted Clicks. This type of conversion is best used by those interested in tracking leads like professional consultants or business services firms. Here what is important to track is not the number of times a potential prospect fills out a lead or information request form but rather the number of prospects generated by AdWords.

Conversion many per click. This conversion type is being renamed to Conversions with additional descriptors of All or Unique. This type of conversion is best used by those selling products. Here it is best to record the number of actual sales generated by a click rather than the number of customers and then not recording the value of a click to the amount of sales generated by one customer.

With these new pending changes, Google will allow account managers more control over what is recorded statistically in regards to conversions further showing the real value of AdWords to clients. You can read Google’s full notice in their help section.

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Building Links Using Article Directories is a Dead Strategy

Creating articles that were informational in nature with links back to your website in a bio and placing these on news sites, article directories, and ezine sites for use by other webmasters on their blogs and in their websites in a way to build incoming links is just another previously good tactic that Google has disavowed.

Unfortunately, there are many business owners who are still using this tactic and are encouraged to embrace this tactic by SEO firms mainly based in India. It is very important to know that using this type of tactic today may actually work against you.

Make sure to watch this video on this topic from Matt Cutts the lead web spam engineer from Google and the voice to my industry. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bo75Og4M34Q

It is important to understand that this approach was highly useful and beneficial to websites one and definitely two years ago. But now using this tactic may actually drop your organic placement. Guest blogging is also another high profile tactic that has also fallen under Google’s eyes and has also been disavowed as a usable tactic to improve organic search placement.

With Google focusing on high quality unique content, that is not overly keyword dense, and has high user relevancy as tested through click through rate, time on page, and personal search history it is nearly impossible to scam your way to the top of the organic results.

A much better approach for placement today is to focus on improving the user experience on your website, refining the message, and promoting your site to generate traffic on social media and Google AdWords.

There will always be sites that are placed in the top ten slots on Google but getting there now is no longer an art form but rather creating the very best user experience that is the most relevant to a unique search query.