May 21

Everyone dealing with PPC campaigns or is interested in online marketing knows that Google Adwords updated their display URL policy, which states that the display URL is not to differ from the destination URL.

It’s very much to improve user experience and making it more difficult for affiliate sites to abuse trademarked brand names.

Our account manager however granted us an exemption for one of our clients who is using a different domain for the landing pages as a temporary solution. Google Adwords are finally catching up checking all their records to enforce the new rule from the 1st April. Google is using an automated system to search through all Adwords records and all of a sudden disapproved most of our ads.

My personal theory is that they started at A, as our client starts with S and we are half way through May :)

Main thing, which is annoying - we had an exemption approved, however our account manager is conveniently off on holiday for a few weeks, which makes it difficult to argue. Our CTR has dropped dramatically, as the landing page URL is not very well known, whereas our client’s brand is well known and trusted.

What to do??

I understand Google’s got another rule, and that it allows different display URLs if the shopping cart or similar is hosted on a different domain. Bingo!! Getting this fact confirmed by Google staff was tedious and took us 3 days!

Let’s face it - it’s really in Google’s interest that we can display the trademarked domain name, as it means a lot more cash for them….

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May 18

Finally I’ve got around to changing my blog to Wordpress. Wohoo! The blog part of my previous site was through Inserit, which is also very userfriendly (just like Wordpress) but unfortunately all the blog pages are hosted with them. Hence I’ve been fairly quiet in the past few months, as I didn’t really see the point in gaining search engine rankings if I couldn’t even preserve them.

One thing though - it took me ages to find a wordpress theme I liked. I just fancied something fairly simple, which my boyfriend, web designer Ruaridh Currie could amend and personalise for me.

Now I don’t have any excuses, let’s get blogging again!

Any comments are welcome!

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May 15

Hi everyone,

In the next little while I’ll be compiling an excellent Google Analytics user guide.

Google Analytics is a free web statistics package from Google. It has a lot of benefits from the usual AW or Matrix stats you get from your hosting providers.

To start with the package seems a bit daunting but I’ll provide you with great step-by-step guidance from setting up the tracking code to how to best utilise the Google Analytics data and make it really work for you.

In the meantime, if you need any help at all, don’t hesitate to contact me.

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