If a search term is highly likely to lead to a conversion, Enhanced CPC will bid up to 30 per cent above the maximum CPC. On the other hand, if the adjusted bidding price is harming your campaign performance, Enhanced CPC will automatically trim down its impact.

Dan Friedman from the Inside AdWords Crew said you should receive more conversions while maintaining or reducing your overall CPA and hopefully spend less time managing your max CPC bids. Sure, sounds good to me!

Google has outlined three ways Enhanced CPC is able to help:

• Adjust your bid depending on how well a particular search or display network partner site in the Google network has converted for you in the past


• Recognize when specific words within a keyword (e.g. kits) convert well and adjust your bid when users search on variations of these terms (e.g. model airplane kits for children)


• Detect attributes such as the users location, language settings, browser, and operating system and analyze how these attributes may impact the likelihood of your ad converting

Of course there is a video to accompany this features launch. So, here it is:

The tool certainly looks very promising but I wonder how many advertisers will be willing to hand over control to Google?

Research from comScore and TMP Directional Marketing shows that more than 83% of customers search online and then contact a business offline, often in the form of a phone call. With click-to-call, Google can successfully eliminate the need for the customer to go offline.

Google recently outlined the success of click-to-call in a case study of San Francisco based auto insurance company, Esurance. The aim of using click-to-call was to enable all customers with a mobile phone to quickly reach an agent live. Esurance ran click-to-call ads and tracked the success of the campaign using unique 800 phone numbers in their ads and the results are quite impressive.

Esurance acquired customers at 30% less than through other marketing channels. Click-to-call mobile ads drove a 30%-35% higher response and a 5-10% lower cost per click on mobile than on online.

Tolithia Kornweibel, Esurance Director of Online Marketing backs up Googles claim:

With Google mobile ads and click-to-call, our cost per acquisition is 20-to- 30% less when compared with other channels.

The only down side of the click-to-call is that it is still quite new. Once people begin to realize its benefits it could raise the cost as demand increases. But currently this is a hidden treasure for those who got in early.

(For those who want the actual definition it is when Google aggregates the statistics for all outlying queries " i.e. queries that dont meet their privacy and volume requirements)

Now I know that there have been countless occasions when people have found examples of advertisers simply copying the data out of the reports and into their live campaigns without looking at what they are adding & I even used it as an example of not what to do when I was training a new employee about how to use the reports.

As I was running a SQR this morning I wondered if people had actually taken on board all the talk and mickey taking that had gone on before about simply taking the data without looking at it first. You can see from the screenshot below that the answer is obviously NO.

Now the fact that advertiser number 2 is using Unicode symbols in their Sitelink ad extensions makes me believe that they are not new to the industry and that they do read all the various PPC blogs out there as this is something that has been discussed at great length recently but this then begs the question- did they ignore all the previous stuff about taking all the data from their Search Query Reports?

The Google Search Query Performance report is a great tool to use when looking at what your keywords are doing and what they are matching against but unless you use it properly you can end up looking very silly and being laughed at by the rest of us You have been warned!

Until this point, agencies offering PPC management services have had little in the way of regulation on budget and management cost transparency.

Under the new guidelines outlined by Google, PPC management companies will now be required to be upfront about budget spending and the exact results from campaigns:

If you work with another company to manage your AdWords campaigns, you should be able to find out how much of your advertising budget (cost) was spent on AdWords, how many times your ads appeared (impressions) and how many times users clicked on your ads (clicks).

ineedhits are proud to one of the Google AdWords companies that already provide this level of transparency for their clients. It helps them understand budget allocation and more importantly gives them an honest representation of their campaign success.

However there are quite a few operators in the industry that will be forced to review their reporting and cost management practices.

Companies such as ReachLocal and Yodle have received criticism for their lack of transparency - with advertisers unsure exactly how much of their budget is going towards Google clicks vs management costs.

Managing small budget PPC campaigns is definitely challenging - ineedhits can vouge for that; but its critical that clients see where their money is being spent.

Googles new policy will ensure all small business advertisers have access to this level of campaign transparency. While I welcome the forced transparency, it doesnt provide answers to all the important questions and issues?

What do you think about the change:

• Is this transparency going to help reduce churn through partners?


• Will the transparency help advertisers achieve better campaign results?


• What else would you like to see enforced from PPC service providers.

Im not going to bother outlining how it works, Jacob does a great job so head on over to the article on the Mashable site at http://mashable.com/2010/07/29/google-font-api-guide/.

The search engine giant is in possession of a whole lot of information, that is a given. The number of apps and web add-ons that the search engine has is bewildering.

Many people and developers though have been wary that Google's ability to acquire information may be breaching the lines and is already invading our privacy. Several web plug-ins have surfaced to enable users to know whether they are giving out too much info not only to Google but to other search engines as well.

This week, another app called "Google Alarm" has hit the Web. This plug-in notifies the user every time information about him/her is sent to the servers of Google. Google Alarm works on both the Firefox and Chrome web browsers.

The Developer

Jamie Wilkinson, the developer of Know Your Meme"a site that documents various Web phenomena"and Mag.ma, developed this new add-on. Wilkinson says that Google Alarm is aimed at making users aware of the amount of information that they are sending to the search engine giant.

"Google makes great products and gives them all away for free, which has made them into -an- ubiquitous and omniscient force on the Internet" states Wilkinson. He adds that he was surprised when he found out that more than 80% of the websites he visited while developing Google Alarm have Google tracking bugs on them. The plug-in he developed, he says, is designed to notify users and make them more aware of personal information that is being sent out to the Internet giant.

Security for Users

There are plenty of web add-ons around the Internet that will enable users to block any malicious and unwanted content from the web browsers. The credibility of Google Alarm is yet to be seen but the potential it has is a positive development for the security of all Internet users.

From the article:

The company seems unsure about how to move beyond the core search business that has brought it such massive success. Google has placed expensive bets on acquisitions, chief among them its $1.6 billion purchase of YouTube, a $3.1 billion wager on ad network DoubleClick, and more recently its $750 million purchase of mobile advertising platform AdMob. But none of those deals have yet significantly diversified Google's $23-billion-a-year revenue stream: Google's main focus continues to be driving people back to the search box and the ad dollars that Google collects for helping marketers reach highly targeted consumers. Even Google's most successful new product, the Android operating system for smartphones, generates scant revenue for the company: Google gives the licenses free to mobile-phone operators to facilitate, you guessed it, searches and use of other Google services on mobile phones. And while it lets its whip-smart engineers dedicate a portion of their workdays to dreaming up the coolest products for the web, all that Googley experimentation hasn't had a huge impact on the bottom line.

Apparently Google's biggest downfall is the mobile and social web experience. They need to move beyond search if they want to keep up with the world's biggest technology company " Apple. "Google is not the hot company anymore," says Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce.com. "Their stock has been mostly flat for five or six years now. How can you claim to be a leader with equity performance like that? That's starting to look like Microsoft or Yahoo. They have to get into some other place, and quickly."

A thread at Webmaster World has been discussing the article and most forum members aren't happy. Many can't believe that anyone would write such an absurd article and I have to tend to agree with them.

While there are some points of merit in the article, Google is still one of the most profitable companies with some of the brightest minds in the business. I really can't see its employees and shareholders sitting back and waiting for the end to come. No doubt they have something special up there sleeve to advance into new areas of the web, they're just keeping it a secret from us!

What do you think about the article? Feel free to share your thoughts below.