Adwords Exact Match: [buy]

I’ve just been doing a bit of keyword research, went to google search and just searched on buy

Try it and you’ll see that several of the big online merchants are targeting buy as either a phrase or an exact match. Okay there is some strong intent indicated there by the searcher – they want to buy something. But buy what? DVD’s, a wii console (you’ll be lucky), an orthopedic mattress? It’s such an unqualified search that I’d imagine that the conversion rates are really low.

Or am I wrong on this one… anyone gone down this route and had success?

And as a slight aside as I’ve mentioned mattresses. My amazon tracking IDs (a must use BTW) show me that a user did indeed buy the book I was targeting and then they also spent nearly £300 on a new mattress. Talk about impulse shopping!

The T Factor: Trust Is Everything

Merchants email loses the trust factor.

I received an email earlier today from the sales director at a pre-paid card company offering me the opportunity to join their affiliate programme. I nearly didn’t open the email because it looked rather suspicious with a strange non-title. I checked their website and that looked okay so I crossed my fingers and opened the email.

I was being offered the opportunity to promote a pre-paid credit card and I presume (because they didn’t actually say) that they wanted to include it on our personal finances site. But the email immediately made me suspicious – the fact that it was poorly capitalised, didn’t address me directly and was in about 4 different fonts didn’t help. The terms of the affiliate programme were not detailed and there was not even a link to an affiliates page.

So, I have no plans to take them up on the offer. Affiliate marketing doesn’t work if there is no trust on either side of the merchant/affiliate relationship and in the case there wasn’t any to begin with.

Subscribing To Comments

I’ve finally got around to installing the subscribe to comments wordpress plug-in so I’m now able to let readers receive an email notification for additional comments on a post. I’m assuming the etiquette is to have the option off by default?

I’ve been meaning to install the plug-in for ages but just never got round to it, but having watched blogger now offer the same facility (but only for other google account users I might add) I decided to act.

I’m also currently playing with the all-in-one seo plug-in too on my running blog with the intention of using it here (and elsewhere) too. Need to upgrade to the latest wordpress first on this blog.

The more I use wordpress the more I like it!

Adwords Is Playing Up

A week or so I questioned if adwords was being problematic when it displayed the keyword status window. Now I did wonder if it was a me problem or not. Having put up with the problem for a time I really needed it to work yesterday so I emailed adwords support. They’ve come back to me this morning and confirmed it’s something their s/w engineers are aware of.

Well at least it isn’t me on this occasion.

Tesco & Spice Girls Ad

New Tesco ad features The Spice Girls. Or …

The Spice Girls ad features Tesco. You decide!

Dragons Den: Websites Update

As an update to a post in my old blog, here’s the list of Dragons Den panellist websites including a new link to James Caan.

• Deborah Meaden
• Peter Jones
• Duncan Bannatyne
• Theo Paphitis
• James Caan
• Rachel Elnaugh
• Richard Farleigh
• Simon Woodroffe
• Doug Richard
• Evan Davies

Entrepeneur Magazine

Managed to stumble upon En The Web this morning, a magazine for entrepeneurs everywhere but with a North West slant. There are some interesting articles about businesses from various sectors. Currently there’s news about Just Search.

A couple of quick bits I’d do if En The Web was my site:

• Offer an RSS feed (even though you offer paid-for hard copy mags)
• Resolve the duplicate content issue with http://www.entheweb.co.uk and http://www.entheweb.co.uk/news/
• Include email details on the contact page default view

Is adwords Playing Up?

Is it just me or is adwords being a bit temperamental today? Some campaigns that I can see as being active are being flagged as inactive when I hover over the magnifying glass icon. Some new ads setup this morning still aren’t showing. Anyone else seeing any funnies?

Here’s a thought… this little adwords magnifying glass which has recently acquired the green chevron, could be more useful. Rather than me having to hover over it to see if all is okay with my keyword phrase, why can’t it be a different colour when the ad isn’t being triggered for the keyword? Maybe there are already plans for the green chevron to turn red at some point?

Tell Google Your Geo-Target

It’s now possible to tell Google where your target audience is geo located (see here and here for info). For those of us who like to purchase inexpensive .coms and hosting from the States but whose target audience is the UK this is a useful facility.

For example, you’ll now be able to buy expatsinsunnyspain.com from someone like godaddy for about £5, host it on a server with a USA IP address but indicate to google that your target audience is Spain.

If your domain is already country specific (.co.uk .fr .ie etc) then whilst you can’t set the country for such a ccTLD you can further refine to a city/town/street address/post code. I suppose this could be useful if you had a local photography club, church, village take-away, whatever and wanted to define it’s physical location. If you are a local business you should be listed in the local business centre too.

I see that you can undo any geo-targetting preferences that you set, though presumably any intial and subsequent changes take time to filter through the system.

I’m going to use the facility for my running blog (which is a .com, hosted on USA servers) to start with as a test.

I’m not aware of any similar geo-targetting facilities from yahoo or msn, so consider that before you go on a .com spending spree!