The use of other companies’ trademarks in your Adwords campaigns is something that crops up from time to time. After a recent judgement by Niilo Jääskinen, the Advocate General of the European Court of Justice,  it appears that the rules of the game are about to change (probably in the Summer of 2011).

What can we do in Adwords?

Currently you’re able to use someone else’s trademark as a keyword (or phrase) to trigger an ad. You are not allowed to use their trademark in the body of your ad. This seems to be sensible. You can advertise your alternative against a competitor or the market leader but you can’t mention them in the ad.

So, an ad triggered by the phrase “best hoover” can display an ad containing words to the effect “Our vacuum cleaners don’t clog up. Buy a Dyson”. In addition you can not show their URL at the bottom of the ad. I can’t think of a situation where the average user ,or indeed a “moron in a hurry“, can be confused by ads adhering to the current Adwords policy (please respond below if you disagree).

Are there implications for Google’s system?

By default the Adwords system is designed to match ads with keywords in a broad way. Ads will display against keywords and phrases that the system believes hold similar meaning. So, even when an advertiser adheres to a new law, they could potentially display an ad against a competitor’s trademark without specifically targeting that term. The following grab from the Google Keyword research tool seems to add weight to the idea that this is the case.

I wonder whether, since in its current form the use of the trademark is ‘behind the scenes’ and never seen by the user, Google’s use of trademarks in a database record somewhere to suggest that ‘ford’ is ‘similar to ‘vw’ against the likely trademark ruling? If so, this is surely absurd. Perhaps we’ll all have to add our competitors as negative keywords just to be on the safe side?

Is online so different from the real world?

The argument that I hear is that it’s not right for a business to profit from another’s trademark. Fair enough. How different is this from the scenario in the high street when Marks and Spencer opens a new shop? Other traders know that M&S will attract footfall in the same way that terms attract search traffic on Google. If the neighbouring traders can provide a compelling offer, they may be able to win some of that business that was M&S bound. No one’s been misled and I see nothing wrong. Surely, clearly written ‘competitive’ Adwords ads aren’t too different from that.

Photo credit: Tom Wardill

In the following post I’ll highlight a couple of actions that will give you the information you need to build a better online business.

Start with the basics

To get started ask your web developer or site administrator to give you access to your website analytics reports. The most popular service that I would recommend is Google Analytics. Analytics is free and used everywhere so as a ‘starter for 10′ I wouldn’t suggest you waste time looking anywhere else. If your webmaster hasn’t set this up yet, ask him to do it. If you’re running an online shop you should ask him to set it up to capture your eCommerce activity. This isn’t rocket science but is something that isn’t usually done simply because it’s not turned on by default.

Add a bit of salt and vinegar

With Analytics turned on and set up to report surprisingly useful information like “how many times people visit before they buy something”, you might want to get into more detailed analysis of user behaviour. A great way to do that is to look at where users click on your website. Although Analytics does have this capability, it’s a bit limited (read: rubbish!) so I suggest using an external ‘Heat map’ service. There are plenty of these about (CrazyEgg, ClickDensity etc.) but they’re all pretty expensive for ongoing use. A new service that is currently ‘in beta’ is Seevolution. It looks promising and offers free heat maps of both where people click and where they’ve scrolled. Other services like MET from Picnet are able to capture and replay customers’ mouse movements. I’m not sure how useful this really is but if it’s bells and whistles you’re after this could be the service for you.

So what?

Using Analytics and tracking user behaviour via heat maps is huge for website optimisation and design but also for informing the rest of the business what appeals to your customers. Think about it for a second. You can tell which images draw customers’ attention. Which brands should be promoted within your offline shop. With this kind of information you not only get the business intelligence to make your website better, you’re also able to make your real-world shops and print catalogues perform better. So go and speak to your web guy about setting this up for you (it shouldn’t take him long) and if you need any more website advice or insight give me a call, I’d be happy to help.

The only small comment I would make is that I believe the price paid is actually 1p (or $0.01 in the US) higher than the bid that’s been beaten rather than exactly the beaten bid price as Hal says. See more detailed info on the Google Help page about what you pay on Adwords.

There can be a couple of reasons for the Lost IS due to rank; one of which is that the ads are being displayed on a partner site that doesn’t display as many ads as Google’s homepage so effectively the ad drops off the bottom. This is logical.

However, in the above example the advertiser is only distributing their ads on the Google search results page, so it will never be displayed anywhere other than on the Google.com/.fr/co.uk/com.au etc.

A second (and more relevant) reason for the Lost IS (Rank) is that the advertiser is missing opportunities to display ads against long tail terms. Let’s assume that the advertiser above is targeting the term “curly wigs” (phrase match type). They’ve set their CPC bid and daily budget high enough to display an ad to 100% of the people searching for “curly wigs”. But only 93% of the people searching for “curly wigs” plus a modifier e.g. “brown curly wigs” see an ad. This probably means that their website isn’t optimised for all the possible long tail terms (“curly wigs that make me look like Michael Knight just when he gets out of Kitt” anyone?).

The more content they add to their site, the more keywords they target and the more they bid the lower their Lost IS (Rank) will be. But at over 90% I reckon they’ve got the curly wig market pretty well covered!

Image: Glenn Pebley

You probably already have an OpenID account but just didn’t know about it.

Examples of OpenID providers are Google and Yahoo! (if you have one of these accounts you already have an OpenID). This is great but if you want the flexibility to use your own, easy to remember domain you don’t have to set up your site to be an OpenID provider. You can simply choose a 3rd party you’re already using for other things.

This approach means you’re in complete control of your online identity and can easily see who has access to your credentials. If you’re no longer happy with them, you can simply revoke access…easy! Watch this all in action in the video below.

The code you’ll need to embed in your site’s homepage is:

So, if you’re a website owner and thinking about authentication, reducing the friction created by the sign up process is very important. Implement OpenID and as you can see in the video, your users will find it very easy to log in and start using your service.

Greg’s High performance SEO

Out of the box, WordPress doesn’t insert some common meta tags in your pages. Although the importance of these (specifically keywords & description) has been reduced since the early days of SEO, they still hold some value and it is just general good practice. This plugin has a wealth of features (and documentation) to help make your site a bit more Google friendly and to get it set up properly took me about 15mins. If you only have time to install one plug in, this is the one – it really is superb.

Google XML sitemap generator

To make sure that Google (and Bing and Yahoo!…) knows where all your pages are, you can submit an XML sitemap. However, editing the file manually every time you create a new post is a major pain. This plug in does the editing and submits the new sitemap to all the search engines automagically! Make sure that you take a couple of minutes to configure the plug in to get all the categories and tags that you want into your sitemap.

Wordtwit

There are a whole host of ways to integrate your WordPress blog with Twitter but this plugin gives you a couple of powerful features that are really slick. Once installed, you can create your own url shortening structure (now, that looks pro doesn’t it!) and you can track clicks from Twitter in your Google Analytics account. You can also restrict the posts that are tweeted by including or excluding a specific tag/category.

One of the ongoing annoyances for committed users of the web is the number of user profiles we need to create to engage with the all these websites. Fortunately, Google’s recently launched social networking platform, Friend Connect allows us to embed social networking tools into our websites without the need to ask users to create a new profile when they want to use the features.
Adding the various free widgets will allow you to create a plug & play community for your website without the barriers usually associated with setting up and using a social network. You won’t need any programing skills but you will need (ftp) access to your server to set it up.

Check out this intro video from Google:

I was cooking the other day (actually I was just preparing the ingredients for Liz to do the cooking!) and I had a recipe which was written in pounds & ounces. All my ingredients were in metric measurements so I did a quick search for a conversion tool…I didn’t need to look far!

Type this into Google: 1lb2oz to g

Amazingly, at the top of the screen you’ll get:
1 pound 2 oz = 510.291416 grams

Pretty amazing huh?!

You can also try it with all sorts of conversions (distances etc) but its also a really powerful calculator too. Just type this into Google:
100/8

Obviously firing up your PC to do some simple maths is pretty silly but if the PC’s on it could be pretty handy, esp if you need to concentrate on the cooking!