Day Two, and I’m sort of hooked on learning this AdWords thing. Thanks to you all, I’ve changed my mix of keywords, separated my content bids from my search bids, been on the alert for Chinese based clickfraud (thanks, China Boi….no, really….) and a lot more. But here’s a puzzle I ran into (the answer is below). I am testing the keyword “blog advertising” (stay away, fraudsters, I’m not spending that much…). This is a very hotly contested keyphrase, and Google wins the auction, as its ads are at the top. Here’s a shot of the ads at the top:
There are also a ton of ads on the right, and you can see that by lifting my bid a bit, I’m at the top of the heap.
Cool! But that seems to tell me one thing – that not many folks are clicking on these ads – if they were, I couldn’t have jumped over all the other contenders simply by adding a few pennies to my bid (as Google calculates position based on bid price AND click through rate…). Or, maybe I could – hummm.
Anyway, here’s the real question. I noted that Google’s ads had the word “blog” bolded. AHA!, I thought. Here’s and example of the house dealing to itself! I couldn’t find any way to bold MY ads using Google’s platform. I’ve caught Google with its hand in the AdWords cookie jar!
Of course, a bit more research on the AdWords help page, and I found out this:
How do I make my ad text bold?
Your ad text will appear bold whenever it exactly matches a user’s search terms. This includes your ad title, body, or Display URL.
Ahhhh….indeed. Shoulda figured it was something like that. Time to go change my creative to match the keywords….
And keep those tips coming, folks. I’m learning a lot!