Featured Article: Paid Search CPCs Overtake US CPCs After Kenshoo released research highlighting the inflation of paid search CPCs in the UK, The Drum have spoken to a number of search industry experts include Paul Kasamias from Starcom Mediavest Group to understand why: "Because mobile devices in particular do not provide the ROI of desktop, advertisers continue to try and reap the rewards from desktop which provides them with the overall highest ROI. However, with the decline in query volume and an increase in competitors entering more auctions, this is leading to the inflation in desktop CPC's which advertisers are seeing across the board,” - Paul Kasamias, Associate Paid Search Director
Read more about inflated CPCs and what other search experts have to say: http://www.thedrum.com/news/2013/04/08/uk-paid-search-cpcs-overtakeus-first-time
Enhanced Campaigns: Are Tablets and Desktops the same? -11th Apr As many advertisers make the transition over to Google Adwords enhanced campaigns, many are still debating whether or not Google are right to group tablet and desktop devices together. Do users search and interact with Google differently on tablets, than they do on desktops? Can customers searching on tablet devices be treated in the same way as those on desktops? - Kevin Ting
Read more about what similarities and differences make this an intriguing debate over at Econsultancy: http://econsultancy.com/uk/blog/62492-is-google-right-to-group-desktopand-tablet-together-in-enhanced-campaigns
EU Leans Towards “Labelling” To Resolve Antitrust Claims against Google – 11th April 2013 Google has been battling to avoid sanctions over the allegations that it abuses its dominant position within the EU search market. These accusations claim that Google promotes its own services in its search results to the disadvantage of its rivals. The Search Giant will be submitting its newly proposed business practices to the 'competition watchdog' wing of the European Commission imminently.
Joaquin Almunia (the EU's competition commissioner) has openly disclosed in an interview with the New York Times that he has regular text message conversations with Eric Schmidt (Google's Chairman). "I have an open phone line, or email line, or SMS line at any moment." In parallel to this, 15 large tech companies (including Nokia and Microsoft) filed another formal complaint to Brussels' regulators regarding antitrust against Google, but this time directed towards their 'Android' mobile operating system. Joaquin Almunia remains undecided as to whether or not he’ll take this new complaint on board. This overly drawn out 'Search and Advertising' court case - which started back in 2010 now appears to be in Google's favour whereby they will only need to pay a settlement fee to the EU Commission directly. This means Google is likely to avoid being charged with the said allegations and the need to pay a rather large, hefty fine. However, Almunia has made it clear that Google will be required to go ‘above and beyond’ just 'labelling' its services. He said that Google is expected to offer its consumers a "real" choice that distinguishes between its own products and that owned by its rivals in the search market. - Paul O'Gorman
For more information relating to article please see link below: http://searchengineland.com/eu-leans-toward-labeling-to-resolve-antitrustclaims-against-google-154948
Are you Google penalised? Do not panic! – 11th April 2013 In the world of permanent Panda and Penguin updates, the quality of backlinks plays a crucial role in your website’s search performance. Although, if you’ve got full control over who links to your pages and you follow the three major principles in this process, i.e. relevancy, quality and ‘decent neighbourhood’, you will not be as concerned with what is going on in Panda world. But in the case that you do not really know where your links are coming from and you might suspect that some of them are not completely safe, you need to do something with them in order to avoid a Google penalty. A recent article published on Bruce Clay SEO Blog deals with this issue in a very common sense manner. The main message is ‘stay cool’, even if you are already manually penalised by Google. The story starts from there and focuses on a step by step procedure which is summarised in this flowchart:
It covers all evaluation steps you need to take in order to decide which of your links are ‘bad’ and what to do with them. Just follow the arrows and don’t be afraid to apply ‘Ignore’. - Artur Kozdrowski
To read the full story go to: http://www.bruceclay.com/blog/2013/03/manual-link-penalties-revoked/
Google Announced Enhanced Campaign Mandatory Upgrade Dates – 9th Apr Google mentioned in its AdWords Blog recently that it will begin automatically upgrading all AdWords campaigns to enhanced campaigns starting on July 22, 2013. Google has also announced that Ad Group Level Mobile Bid Adjustments will be available to all advertisers in mid-May. One of the main drawbacks of enhanced campaigns when first announced, was its inability to control keyword bid across different devices. They could only support campaign level bid adjustments for mobile devices. The new feature should be able to help advertisers to gain more control over bids across different devices and do optimisations at ad group level to improve account efficiency. - Blair Liu
More Details: http://adwords.blogspot.co.uk/2013/04/ad-group-mobile-bidadjustments.html