Google recently announced an upgrade to the Google Adwords tool for advertisers; Enhanced CPC (http://adwords.blogspot.com/2010/08/increase-roi-conversions-with-enhanced.html)  Google is promoting this function as as a way to ‘turbocharge your ROI’.

How does it work?

In campaigns where you have Conversion Tracking enabled (or you’re importing Google Analytics Goals) you can enable Enhanced CPC. It works for both Search and Display and it can also be used if you are utilising third party bid management tools.

Once activated, the system will use historical account data and factors such as users’ time and location to analyse on-the-fly the likelihood of specific search terms converting, raising or lowering your bids accordingly. Initially 50% of traffic will have bids modified, with the other 50% held back as a control. Over time and with success, the control ratio will decrease.

You’ll find the option to switch it on in your Campaign settings. It works with both manual and automatic bidding.

The Caveats?

Firstly, Google Adwords reports do not currently show any reporting data to indicate how Enhanced CPC has directly affected performance, or indeed which bid-upon keywords have had Enhanced CPC applied and when. You can obviously look at top-level conversion volume and CPA but this doesn’t really give you the visibility needed.

Secondly, if you use Adwords Editor frequently for modifications, bear in mind that with Enhanced CPC enabled in any campaign, you will not be able to use Editor to modify anything in that campaign. This is a significant oversight at launch but we believe Google is working on this.

So does it work?

Well, it’s still early days, but having tested it since launch in a selection of campaigns with a long history and a good volume of conversions we have indeed seen more conversions at a lower CPA, after an initial drop in performance.

Overall, we’d say approach with caution and don’t simply assume that the tool will provide that turbocharge without any input from you. Some commentators have called it a charter for the lazy manager but we say why ignore something that can improve your ROI?

If you want to test it then give it time to settle in. Don’t see it as a reason to not to continue keeping a close eye on optimisation. And before you switch it on, if your CPA is at the top-end of your target range, you may want to adjust some bids downward, given that Google will bid up to 30% higher than your current bid.

Let’s face it, how many people do you know under the age of 40 who don’t use Facebook. Personally I know one and that’s because he’s concerned about online privacy. With the recent changes in privacy settings users are now able to lock their accounts down, so this issue is addressed. Will he be using Facebook now? Yes, because if he doesn’t he will have no idea what anybody is doing with their lives, when they are going out, what happened and the pictures to prove it!

Google has long highlighted search terms in the search results (SERPS) using bold text. As with all things Google, this practice is evolving not static and there are no hard and fast rules. Increasingly, Google is also highlighting abbreviations and acronyms not just the exact search terms. For example, a search on “ROI” returns results highlighting “Return on Investment” as well as “ROI” itself. Similarly, search on “PPC” and “Pay Per Click” will be highlighted.

Now there seems to be a shift towards highlighting words of semantic equivalence as well. Interestingly, a Google search on “Search Engine Marketing” performed on 5th July 2010 returned the following:

Notice that the direct acronym “SEM” isn’t highlighted by “SEO” is.

Bold text draws the searchers eye and grabs their attention. Highlighting doesn’t impact on search engine rankings but is likely to have some impact on click through from the SERPS to your website.

Climbing to the top of the search returns is a question of smart Search Engine Optimisation. But once you get there, your website needs to sell itself to encourage searchers to actually click through to your website. The challenge becomes one of Search Engine Marketing.

The preview text displayed with each web result is known as the snippet. Search engines often use the meta description as the snippet – hence the great importance of writing good meta descriptions. Clearly, a meta description must contain important keyphrases and accurately describe the content of the page, but a really good meta description must also capture the searcher’s interest like an advertisement so they click through to your website.

In retrospect, perhaps the title for this post should have been “To Click or Not to Click”. Online Marketers don’t have direct control over the snippets displayed for their webpages – neither over the text itself or which terms appear in bold. But, we can and we should monitor and experiment in the search for the best results.

UPDATE: Thanks Jaamit http://bit.ly/basSaJ The Times has now been re-indexed in Google, now who said Newspapers were old skool.

As the index loss is only half a day the revised figures suggest a reduced cost of £17, 500.

While Times Online begin their move to an online charge model following a very public spat with Google, it’s been revealed that Google has removed the paper from its all important news index.

Effectively this means Times Online will no longer receive any organic traffic from Google representing around 90% of their overall organic traffic, bearing in mind the respective market shares of Bing, Yahoo! Et al.

The monetary value of this loss of organic traffic could be significant if you consider the effect on Times Online’s online advertising revenue.

Times Online received 7.1 million browsers in March 2010*. If we assume that of this percentage only 20% comes from organic search traffic then this could amount to over 1.4 million browsers. Let’s assume that an average browser views 10 pages and visits the site 4 times a month this equates to nearly 57 million page impressions a month.

If the primary income from these page impressions is advertising and this is sold at £15 per 1000 page impressions then the revenue lost would be in the region of £850,000 per month.

These calculations obviously make several assumptions. Times Online tends to run two ads per page so this figure could easily be increased to £1.7 million a month.

Interestingly this equates to a just over a pound per browser, which just so happens to be the daily charge to online subscribers.

One thing is for sure, Rupert Murdoch has probably done his sums.

*Source ABCe