With Google’s latest announcement about “AdWords Comparison Ads”, it’s beginning to look like Google is taking a step away from just providing listings, to instead qualifying potential customers and providing leads.

AdWords Comparison Ads, which is currently limited to just a couple financial services, will let searchers compare multiple offers for similar services, potentially based on specific qualifications or needs of the searchers.

In the ad creative, the services provider can ask qualifying questions in a radio button format, such as whether the searcher is looking to refinance an existing mortgage or take out a new mortgage.

When a user interacts with this, they might be taken to another page similar to the one below:

Google will also use a form of call tracking so that the advertiser will be charged if the user either clicks further to the site or calls from the Google page.

It will be interesting to see how the conversion rates play out under this format. In some ways, this could do away with landing pages in areas where conversions rate prove to be high.

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Don’t be alarmed if you are not seeing your own ads! Here is a great explanation straight from Bing…

 “Recently there was a system improvement implemented to enhance our current search algorithms. Part of this enhancement detects the likelihood of a particular user clicking on ads based on their preferences, history, and other quality factors.  The search engine learns about the users and how likely they are to click on an ad.  Users who are more likely to click, see more ads, while users who are less likely to click, see fewer ads.

Advertisers might not be able to verify that their own ads are showing on Bing as easily, due to their usage patterns or history.  Searching for ads without clicking on them may prevent advertisers from seeing their own advertisements when they look for them.  If you are unable to view your ad, please be aware that it does not mean your ad is not serving.  In fact, this helps to verify that the system improvement is in place to ensure your ads are shown to quality users who are most likely to click on your ad, providing you the best value for your advertising strategy.

I understand that advertisers would like to see their advertisements to validate that their ads are showing and to check their competition.  We are hoping to have a tool that allows advertisers to validate whether their ads are showing and where in the near future.“

-Bing Representative

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If you have recently gone to run a report in Google Adwords and attempted to customized the report by adding or removing columns you probably have noticed a change.  Under the “Conversion Columns” section you will now have the option of (1-per-click) or (many-per-click).

This is Google’s new update for conversion tracking, but what exactly do these new options mean?

(1-per-click)

Currently Google Adwords reports the 1-per-click conversion.  This means if someone clicks on your Ad and results in multiple conversions, it will only be counted as 1 conversion.

(many-per-click)

On the other hand many-per-click conversions will report each conversion after someone has come to your website through your Ad.  So if somebody clicks your Ad, buys something, bookmarks your page, and comes back a week later and purchases something else it will be reported as 2 conversions.

Your Thoughts?

For now, these additions are only being shown through the reports in the Adwords Interface.  Google is planning on eventually releasing this feature to Adwords Editor, Adwords API, and the new Adwords Interface.

These features will hopefully help managing campaigns with a variety of advertising goals and help you compare your PPC campaign with other online campaign as they usually use many-per-click as their conversion metric.

So how do you think of these new features will effect how you manage and report your campaigns?  We are not sure how useful it will be for us, but we will soon find out.

Adwords, adwords conversion metrics, Engine Ready, EngineReady, Google

If you’ve noticed that the Contextual Targeting status within the Ask.com user interface is turned on at the Ad Level, but turned off at the Keyword Level then you are not seeing things.  Double check that the settings box is checked for Contextual Targeting, meaning you do not want to advertise on the Contextual Network. If this is the case, we saw it as well, and contacted Ask.com through their online form to inquire about this discrepancy.

A side note: My experience with Ask.com’s online form, basically customer service through email only, has been superb. Although it doesn’t beat an immediate voice on the other end, they have responded to questions on the same business day (given the emails were sent no later than 9:30am). So for anyone looking to use it, the responses came back anywhere from 3-6pm.

Back to the Contextual Targeting discrepancy, Ask.com confirmed that is was a technical error and reassured that the Contextual Targeting was off, which was reflected at the Keyword Level. Please see response below:

“After reviewing your account, your contextuals are currently “off.” We are experiencing technical difficulties which result in our system incorrectly displaying your contextual setting as being “on.” To verify that your contextuals are indeed “off” please view your setting at the keyword level.”

Ask.com client representative contact form response

I just wanted to share this knowledge so that anyone advertising in Ask.com won’t be confused when coming across this occurrence too.

Ask.com