Im new to google adwords (and internet marketing in general).

I have a google adwords account and my site appears on the right hand column of sponsored links when certain keywords are searched.

However, I notice some websites appear in a different sponsored links area, the one with the light-yellow colored background that appears at the very top of the first page of a web search result. I think theres a maximum of 3 links that can appear in this area.

What determines what adword websites appear in this area as opposed to the right hand column of adwords sponsors??

Is it solely based on those offering the highest pay per click in their adwords?

Is it based solely on pagerank or similar things that determine where your webpage appears in non-sponsored searches, and thus of all the adword sponsors for a single keyword, the ones with the highest page rank appear in the peach-area instead of the right hand column?

Or is it a combination of both having the highest pay per click bid-value and the highest pagerank of all the other adword sponsors??

Or is it based on something else?


Additionally, what steps must I take to get my adwords-participating website to appear in the light-yellow-area at the top of the web search instead of in the right hand column?


Thanks for your help guys. Ive been trying to understand why just a handful of the adwords sponsoring websites that use the same keywords as mine appear in the light-yellow-background box at the top of the search results page and why others appear in the right hand column of sponsored links... but I havent found any answer yet.

Raise your bids.. It's all about the money..

pretty much everything APART from PR which affects nothing at all

Max CPC, CTR and the Quality score.

Ahh thanks.

Follow up question;

In my adwords account campaign summary, for some of the keywords below the part that says "ACTIVE" theres a piece of text that says something like "Current bid is below first page bid estimate of $1.05"

Does this mean that in order for my ad to appear on the first page of adwords sponsor results for that keyword, my CPC must be $1.05 or higher?


Is there anywhere that says how much my CPC must be to get into the yellow-area spoken of in my last post?

Does this mean that in order for my ad to appear on the first page of adwords sponsor results for that keyword, my CPC must be $1.05 or higher?

That's about the size of it. or improve the "Quality Score" or CTR.
BTW Quality Score is one place where keyword "density" plays a small part

Is there anywhere that says how much my CPC must be to get into the yellow-area spoken of in my last post?

Good heavens, No!
You would know how to get away with spending less while you are testing

^ haha thats what I figured, bastards


What do you mean by keyword "density"? Not sure what thats supposed to mean.

Aside from changing the text in the adwords advertisement, is there anyway to improve CTR?

Heres an idea I just had, your feedback would be appreciated...
What if I was to set my CPC to like 1 cent per click, and then google my best performing keyword endlessly for hours in a row and click it each time it appears?? Would my CTR go up? Or does google recognize each clickers IP # and allow only 1 click from that IP # per 24 hours or something?

I hope its not the latter -- afterall, why would they want to deny themselves making more money by denying a person from clicking the same advertisement multiple times in the same day??? Haha you know they cant resist that... or... can they?


As well, so your saying the CTR is also important for determining the placement of my advertisement in the search results? (I guess google wants more money by more clicks so they give better position for sponsors ad's more likely to get a click).

What if I was to set my CPC to like 1 cent per click, and then google my best performing keyword endlessly for hours in a row and click it each time it appears?? Would my CTR go up? Or does google recognize each clickers IP # and allow only 1 click from that IP # per 24 hours or something?

Because the Adwords ads are what shows for Adsense publishers these kind of tricks don't work. Also, increasing the CTR on a particular word will start to increase the CPC

What do you mean by keyword "density"? Not sure what thats supposed to mean.

Aside from changing the text in the adwords advertisement, is there anyway to improve CTR?

keyword "density" is a extremely misunderstood term often bandied about by SEO "experts". For Adwords it is basically the count of the targeted word/phrase on the landing page (up to a point), this of course affects the quality score which then can affect your CTR. "Soot juggling" is the best way to describe it

It's the bits within your control is where your advert cost optimising effort should be focused.
Advert text and landing page relevance to the word / phrase / ad group will increase the "quality score" and should improve the ads CTR while keeping CPC reasonably static.
Merely increasing CTR without improving the quality score will drive CPC up, I guess the idea is to reduce the advertisers with big budgets and no sense, as bidding on words that aren't relevant to your landing page will drive the price up.

Read the Adwords help pages, especially
http://adwords.google.com/support/bi...page=tips.html & http://adwords.google.com/support/bi...y?answer=46675

(I guess google wants more money by more clicks so they give better position for sponsors ad's more likely to get a click)

Yep, but it seems they would prefer to get more clicks on lower priced ads rather than clicks on higher paying adverts.
Which of course makes perfect sense from the other side of the coin, Adsense. Better performing lower cost clicks makes Adsense click fraud less attractive.

Hey thanks for the clarification, very helpful! Ill be sure to check out those links.

Hooked ya up with some talkupation Not that you need it you rep whore!

My god. Ive spent at least 10 hours straight, my bum is numb, sitting here reading these adword help pages but theyre not helpful at all.

Every bloody sentence half the words are "google-terms" and I dont understand these terms and when they explain the terms they explain it by using more freakin terms I dont understand. I feel absolutely overwhelmed I dont know how anyone can learn this stuff without months and months of time and thousands of cups of coffee.


I have three major questions here;

1) If im not mistaken, by keyword density you mean the number of times the searched keyword appears on my landing page? and landing page is the page that my advertisement directly links to?

2) What are ALL the ways you know of to increase the quality score for a keyword?

3) What effect (if any) does using a searched keyword in my advert text have on my quality score for that keyword?

I dont know how anyone can learn this stuff without months and months of time and thousands of cups of coffee.

Sounds about right

1) Yep.

2) Just about everything on the page and the page name/URI
plus a few site quality things as well such as, having a privacy policy, contact details on the site, physical address clearly defined etc.
http://adwords.google.com/support/bi...y?answer=10215

3) Some is the best answer, it is part of the scoring but how much is an unknown outside of the Googleplex.

Google Rotate Ads all day. Is there really a great benefit for showing in the light yellow box? I don't think so. If you are using IE or Firefox, put in a keyword and keep clicking search. What you will notice is that light yellow box will disappear. You will also notice that the right side doesn't. Which side is more effective? I prove my point.

Google Adword Professional
< link drop removed create a signature>

My main concern is that for my search keywords, there is literally 5+ pages of adwords advertisements that come up. I want mine to appear on the first page, because I dont know many people who bother browsing through the pages and pages of sponsored links. They usually only click the ones that appear in the right hand column or more so, the top yellow box area. When your adveritsment appears on like page 3 of the google adwords ad's, its exposure is next to nothing, and my rediculously small amount of clicks is proof

There must be at least 50+ other adword participating websites using the same keywords as mine, and half of them are using higher CPC's than me so theyre getting on the first page of results (the ones that actually appear on the search results page).


Chris; Thanks for those tips. My website has most of those things. But for things like privacy policy and the company address, does it matter where it appears on the website? Or would it score better if it appears either;

A) on the mainpage?
OR
B) on the landing page?
OR
C) doesnt matter, as long as its somewhere on the website?


Also, how the hell can the google crawler/bots identify if someones included contact info for company address, or a privacy policy?

Do google-humans actually come and check these websites? I dont understand how a bot can accurately, and CONSISTENTLY 100% of the time identify such things without screwing up and missing things or misidentifying things a large precentage of the time???

Same with black hat tricks, how can a bot accurately identify black hat techniques 100% of the time? What if it mistakingly identifies a website as using black hat techniques when it actually isnt and its just a fawkup in the criteria the bot uses?



And another major question;

If I have my website listed through google Adwords, will it also appear in standard search engine results too??

For example; my website is #1 in google search results as well as in google adwords in the yellow box, if I search the keyword its ranked for, would my website appear both in the yellow box and then in the actual non-paid search results in top position right below the yellow box? (assuming my website was the #1 ranked site for the search word)???

Or will google omit any website using adwords, from also appearing in non-paid google search results?


As well; If you make the name of an image that appears on your website the name of a certain keyword, will google count the image name as keyword and if someone does a search can they see the image keyword come up in search result description?

Furthermore: there is an alternative-text thing for images where if the image doesnt load or someone has images turned off in their browser, an alternative piece of text appears instead of the image, if that text contains keyword, will it be counted???

For example lets say my website was about pure bred poodles and the main keyword searched for was "pure bred poodles" and I set the alternative text for an image on my website, an image that was a picture of some of our pure bred poodles and I set its image alternative text to "Pure Bred Poodles Header" would that be captured by google as a keyword?


AND; If I set a keyword "pure bred poodles" to broad match, and then somewhere on my website theres the words "PureBredPoodles" without spaces, will broad match correlate with that? Or does broad match not recognize space-less words?

And last but not least... if I set pure bred poodles as a broad match keyword, and then somewhere on my website was just the word "poodle" will the broad match catch that or does the broad match REQUIRE ALL the words in it to appear (but the order they appear, plural/not, etc dont matter but all the words must appear)???

Haha thats quiet a few questions but I really dont know how to find out the answers by searching cause I tried and couldnt get results even remotely close to explaining such things.

Any insight appreciated. I think im getting a hang of this **** slooooowwwlllyy. Still trying to probe what I CAN do

When your adveritsment appears on like page 3 of the google adwords ad's, its exposure is next to nothing, and my rediculously small amount of clicks is proof

The question being, do any of those few clicks actually convert? Which would at least tell you that buyers are clicking the ads rather than competitors "just looking".
And, if they do convert, is there enough margin to up your max CPC. Conversely if they don't convert, you would need to consider whether this is really a search phrase used by people or just something that has been "spoofed" there by automated checks etc.

it's always handy if your address appears on every page, mainly for other reasons than quality score, but as long as the privacy and contact details are not in some obscure page 3 clicks away from the landing page it should be fine.
It's real human beings that visit the site for details like that.

A bot can analyse page code for "footprints" easily enough, some things will get automatically identified and possibly penalised, some will be flagged as "grey areas" and sent to the spam team for further investigation.

For example; my website is #1 in google search results as well as in google adwords in the yellow box, if I search the keyword its ranked for, would my website appear both in the yellow box and then in the actual non-paid search results in top position right below the yellow box? (assuming my website was the #1 ranked site for the search word)???

Or will google omit any website using adwords, from also appearing in non-paid google search results?

Pages from the same site can appear in both the organic results and in the Adwords ads simultaneously.

For image search it seems to be that the filename, alt attribute text and text around the image code all play a part in determining it relevance to any particular phrase.

The alt attribute text is considered as body text for unlinked images, body text AND anchor text for linked images. That's for Google only BTW

If I set a keyword "pure bred poodles" to broad match, and then somewhere on my website theres the words "PureBredPoodles" without spaces, will broad match correlate with that? Or does broad match not recognize space-less words?

No.

And last but not least... if I set pure bred poodles as a broad match keyword, and then somewhere on my website was just the word "poodle" will the broad match catch that or does the broad match REQUIRE ALL the words in it to appear (but the order they appear, plural/not, etc dont matter but all the words must appear)???

I think you are getting a liitle mixed up here with adwords ads and natural results.
The adwords matching options only affect which of your adwords campaign groups would be triggered to show an ad (and landing page) it will have no effect on which page from your site would appear in the results (if any).

Thanks alot for taking the time to answer my barrage of questions, that really clarifies alot of my confusion. So there ARE humans who work at google, who wouldve thought... lol.

One thing I still dont get, is the difference between campaigns and ad groups (if theres even one?).

Heres what im interested to know;

A) If I have a campaign and have the monthly budget set to say $100. I then create multiple different ad groups, will all the ad groups in that campaign share the $100/month budget? Or does each ad group have its own budget?

B) If its the latter, is there anyway to have a cluster of different ads that all share from the same monthly budget?

C) If its the first one, then I assume if I wanted different ads to have their own unique budget, I would create a new campaign for each ad rather than a new ad group within a campaign, correct?

Or am I confused about what an ad group is.


Heres what I want to do, but im not sure exactly how;

If I wanted a cluster of different ads (using different ad title, and different ad description text, different keywords not repeated in anyother ads, and a different landing page targeting each ads specific keywords), that all shared from the same monthly budget for all the ads... what do I do?

1) Should I make each of these ads a new "ad group"?

2) If you can make multiple ad's in a single ad group, HOW? cause I havent been able to find any links that say "create a new ad within this ad group" or something along those lines, the only links I could find was I think "create new campaign" and "create new ad group".

3) Or if theres a different way, how? Where?

Campaigns contain groups and each campaign can have it's own budget figure which is shared for the groups in that campaign.
Creating a new campaign will potentially increase your costs, obviously.

IF you want the ads to be shown for different words\phrases or matching options, create a new group.
IF you just want to test different ads with the same keywords\phrases and matching options for the group, click on the "Ad Variations" tab in the Ad Group and create a new advert.
Any variations you create will be rotated when the adgroup is shown, and you can set different URIs\tracking parameter for each advert to monitor the best performing variation(s)

BTW I don't manage any Adwords campaigns for clients so don't be asking any budgeting questions
I teach them how to set campaigns up, how to research words and how to monitor it. How much they spend is their choice

So Chris, this is a breif summary of what im doing, is this a good approach? Nothing here is "black hat" is it? From my understanding of blackhat, it is not.

My goals for this are; increase the "quality score" for each ad I have, attract higher CTR, and hopefully, get more people to buy my product.


I take 2-3 keywords (generated using googles keyword search-stats tool) that are relatively similar in wording, and I create an ad group for the small number of keywords. I use/try to use, the keywords in both the title of the ad as well as in the ad description text as I noticed this makes those words appear BOLD when the ad popups in google which makes it more noticeable to the searchers. Each one of these ad groups of 2-3 keywords, links to its own unique landing page, the landing page is 'peppered' with the 2-3 keywords and functions as a "sales copy" (sales pitch basically). Each ad group has its own landing page, and I just switch the keywords with the keywords for the new ad group, and host it on my domain as a new landing page specific to that ad group, and repeat this process for 10 different ad groups/landing pages.

The landing pages also contain a link to the privacy policy, the company address, as well as links to the websites mainpage and the ordering page.

Since the landing pages have such a wealth of keywords, there are hidden links on the mainpage of the website that link to each of the landing pages, so that a google crawler that visits the mainpage can reach the landing pages to vaccum up the plethora of juicy keywords.


I guess next thing for me to do is do the "variation" for each ad group creating multiple different ad titles/descriptions to have rotated in to optimize each ad to attract the highest number of clicks.


One other thing; I want to be able to track the customers who click an ad. I want to know how I can monitor all the following things, preferably through one tool if this can even be done;

- See how many people who clicked each specific ad, then browsed from the landing page for that specific ad, to the ordering page (indicating they likely ordered the product or intend to)


Is there anyway for me to monitor this? It would help me know if my sales copy landing pages are effective at "selling" my product to those who click my ads, and I want to know what ad's I have for 2-3 specific keywords, lead to the highest number of clicks that lead to visits to the ordering section of my website by the visitors of those specific ads.

Can google analytics do this? Ive fiddled around with it but never saw anywhere that allowed it to tell me the "tracked path" of each visitor like
A) how they got my website (what google ad they clicked for what keyword(s)
B) once they reached the landing page, what page they then visited next on my website (i.e. ordering page)
C) once they reached the landing page, how many of them left without visiting any other pages of my website


Anyway for me to monitor this? Is it easy to monitor? Is there data given for EACH visitor or just given for a cluster of visistors on a specific day?

Would Google's webmaster tools allow this sort of monitoring needs?

The strategy sounds pretty good all the bases seem covered, However, I would have serious concerns about

Since the landing pages have such a wealth of keywords, there are hidden links on the mainpage of the website that link to each of the landing pages, so that a google crawler that visits the mainpage can reach the landing pages to vaccum up the plethora of juicy keywords.

Hidden links will eventually cause problems. If you are going to allow crawlers into the landing pages, do NOT hide the links. Display them but use a tracking ID for monitoring. BUT, your PPC landing pages SHOULD be excluded from crawlers because you really do not want the landing pages mixed up with the SERPs.
1: Because PPC landing pages usually look pretty crap in the SERPs. They are designed and structured to convert not gain click throughs.

2: Because it makes campaign tracking a little more difficult when you have natural results and PPC results hitting the same pages.

On the Google Analytics I couldn't honestly tell you, I just don't use it at all. I have my own tracking system (server side) and I also use the site logs.

Have a look through the HR Web Analytics forum. If you can't actually find it there, Randy will be the "man who knows"
And, while you are there give the PPC forum a look over as well. The members there are far more clued up on Adwords than I will ever be.

Nice Clarification here !!!!

my bum is numb, sitting here reading these adword help pages but theyre not helpful at all.

This is how google makes all its money - it gets YOU to do all the hard work and then charges you!

I have saved some sitepro news articles in my mailbox because they have information of use to webmasters here.

This is an excerpt from one of them:

(name of random brand) can't be matched in value or performance. Why pay for ads in Google, Yahoo! or other pay-per-click engines that experience a 15% - 25% click-fraud rate and cost you more in one day than a sponsored listing with us costs in months.

It came in on this subject-line
Forget Google AdWords: Cutting Costs in Hard Time

Which is a good indication of what is happening to google. In 12 months they have completely lost all their growth - down to zero. They are suffering very badly and will presumably try and overcharge all the little people in order to make up the difference for their shareholders.

I'd be wary of relying on google for your advertising. Sadly to advertise on impregnable affiliate networks costs 5 to 10k a month just in subscription payment to the network, and on top of that you have to pay advertisers for the sales they get for you. Probably need to be a big corporation to benefit from that.

It may be that labour intensive (free) marketing is the best way to go in the present day.

I still run adwords for a business to business service I sell, and I keep the bids as high as I can. The system is often stupid and unfair. Eg I sell a bunch of specific services and there are 1000s of good keywords I found, after literally spending months on hard hard work with the 'keyword tool' - digging out only truly sale-inducing keywords, and the sad thing is that if you don't want the minimum bid to rise, you really have to take those keywords, make countless groups and ads and pages, use meta tags to put all the keywords you have chosen onto the page itself, and more. It's a lot of work, in order to make your cost acceptable and indeed to keep your words activated.

Google's rules in adwords, like their rules in search, are NOT utilitarian and are NOT based on getting the best results for parties concerned. It is all designed purely to raise profits for google as high as possible whilst not allowing the world to see too clearly that when they tell you, for example, that there a 1.2 million results, they won't show you more than about 500 of them, ever! They just won't. So for all you know, the relevance of item seven hundred thousand two hundred and twenty four is way higher than item sixteen! It's not possible to make judgements on what you can't see - and with google you can't see much.