Infographic by the Pay Per Click Blog
Category: Search Engine Marketing
Get to Know Adwords: Trademarks
Good PPC managers know that bidding on the branded terms of their competitors can be highly effective. What keywords you can and can’t bid on or use in ad text has always been kind of murky to advertisers. Usually it’s left up to the automated Adwords system to disapprove a text ad if it has a trademarked term that gets flagged.
Google Adwords has changed their policy over the years, mostly due to legal complaints and in effort to improve relevancy in search results. Google loosened this system to allow advertisers to use brand names in their ads as long as they are “resellers, sellers of component, replacement or compatible parts corresponding to the trademark and informational sites”.
For example, under our old policy, a site that sells several brands of athletic shoes may not have been able to highlight the actual brands that they sell in their ad text. However, under our new policy, that advertiser can create specific ads for each of the brands that they sell. We believe that this change will help both our users and advertisers by reducing the number of overly generic ads that appear across our networks in the U.S.
If you feel that an advertiser has violated this policy and is using your trademarked terms against your will, you can notify Google via this Adwords trademark submission form.
Tips to Boost E-Commerce Checkout Rates
Increasing your website’s shopping cart conversion rate can have a big impact for your bottom line. For many e-retailers a few simple tweaks to the checkout process can dramatically reduce shopping cart abandonment. It’s challenging enough to get a qualified shopper to your website; the last thing you want to do is lose the customer at checkout because your process is either too long, distracting, inquisitive, or all of the above.
Items to consider when optimizing your checkout conversion rate:
No Passwords – Don’t force your customer to create a username and password. Wait to market to them after they are an actual customer. There’s nothing more annoying as shopper than having to create login credentials you won’t need again.
Provide Guidance – Let the visitor know how many more steps there are specifically what they need to do next to complete the transaction. Bread crumb navigation can help, but showing “step 1 of 3″ is most helpful.
Coupon Codes – The field to input the code should be easy to find. The discount to be displayed should be shown before any credit card information is required. Knowing 100% that your coupon is being applied to your purchase gives confidence.
Credibility & Security – A good checkout process identifies itself as safe and secure. Display credibility icons like the BBB and McAfee Secure Website so people trust that you are not a scam and their credit card or identity won’t get stolen.
Shipping Options – Make it easy to configure shipping costs. Include functionality to dynamically calculate weight and pricing for the customer’s destination. Free Shipping is a great incentive offer which will undoubtedly lift conversion. If you’ve determined your business can afford to offer it after a thorough analysis then do so.
WordStream Launches Two Free Niche Marketing Tools for SEO and PPC
WordStream adds to their suite of free search marketing tools, introducing two new products to help search marketers better identify profitable keyword opportunities
— Make Sure Your Read Our Past post 6 Really Awesome Keyword Tools
BOSTON, MA – December 16, 2009 – WordStream, Inc., a provider of keyword tools for pay-per-click (PPC) and search engine optimization (SEO) efforts involving large numbers of keywords, today launched a pair of tools designed to help businesses identify and optimize highly profitable keyword niches.
WordStream’s new tools, The Keyword Niche Finder and The Free Keyword Grouper, are designed to help businesses and marketers solve specific problems:
- The Keyword Niche Finder – Instantly identify and target the most profitable keyword niches
- The Keyword Grouper- Group and organize vast lists of keywords into actionable keyword groups to turn into ad groups or website content
Strong keyword organization is the foundation of successful search marketing, and WordStream’s Free Keyword Grouper lets marketers take massive lists of target keywords and instantly group these keywords into tightly-knit, relevant groups. This advanced level of keyword organization is critical for creating effective ad groups for PPC campaign advertising and for informing content creation and site navigation for SEO.
Beta user and independent search marketing consultant Ian Hughes said of the tools: “The great thing is that the two tools really complement each other: The Keyword Niche Finder lets me quickly identify not only single keyword ideas, but the most popular clusters of keywords, and The Keyword Grouper is great for making sense of a lot of data or a long list of keywords you’ve already created.”
With The Keyword Niche Finder, marketers can type in terms related to their business and receive a list of the most popular and relevant keywords for their websites, along with the most interesting keyword niches or clusters. Marketers and website owners can leverage the results from The Keyword Niche Finder to build and structure intelligent website information architectures or create new subsections of their existing sites to drive traffic and collect new business opportunities.
“One of the biggest challenges for business owners is determining where to begin their keyword research and how to continually expand and refine their campaigns to get maximum returns,” says WordStream Founder and Vice President of Product Development Larry Kim. “With our two new free tools, we’ve armed marketers and business owners with the power to instantly receive well-organized, prioritized lists of the most profitable keyword opportunities in their niche.”
WordStream’s subscription-based service also announced a major upgrade recently, including integration with Google Analytics and sophisticated multi-source keyword analytics. It provides users with a tool-set to take those insights to the next level by continually monitoring the performance of their keywords and offering actionable keyword suggestions that helps them grow their campaigns and revenues, all for a very affordable monthly fee.
About WordStream
WordStream is a provider of SEO and PPC solutions for continuously optimizing and expanding search marketing efforts, involving large numbers of search engine keywords. WordStream provides a scalable, private, online keyword workbench—which includes a free keyword tool and an AdWords tool—for conducting keyword discovery, keyword research, keyword grouping, search marketing workflow and for turning research into action.
WordStream believes that an organization’s keywords are a valuable, proprietary asset, and that organizing, prioritizing, coordinating and executing of PPC and SEO efforts around a comprehensive, researched and up-to-date keyword taxonomy is the key to search marketing success. Keyword management improves search marketing productivity and enables greater relevance, which enhances the value of search marketing efforts.
WordStream Press Contact:
Ken Lyons, Marketing Manager
617-963-0563, klyons@wordstream.com
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