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Thanks for the reply. As managing web production is one of my responsibilities reducing the number of 404s for a 600K site has priority (for me - hence the question). Our company has 40 plus active campaigns and countless ad groups - and therefore thousands of display URLs. My motivation in asking this question is to reduce 404s -  if I can convince our paid search staff that there is value (other than less work for me) to following a best practice, then I might expect a degree of buy-in on their part. As Pashima alludes to below, from a conversion standpoint making your landing page relevant to your ad and search terms would seem the goal for a company like Google that professes to be all about the UX. not to mention your own internal ROI tracking.

How do you know Google is not considering these paid links? The site owner does believe Google is considering them paid links and that his traffic is reduced because of it. Please read his post at http://www.seroundtable.com/sponsored-links-12978.html for background on his view of the links on his site and Google.

Just got off the phone with Adwords Support and they confirmed it is definitely still in beta. If you have an account manager you can request it, but I don't spend enough money with them yet to have one

Yeah I've never heard of this. The other thing they might be doing is just optimizing the accounts they manage to spend less money after they take over the management of them. Optimizing bids, using negatives, and going after only highly profitable keywords could help them reduce costs and then they just keep the savings over the 5% they are guaranteeing you? If they are still leaving the account and billing in your control, you'd be able to verify this. Did they say how the billing is handled? Either way, this sounds highly suspicious.

Possibly, but if you were hit by Penguin, those links might be doing you more harm than good right now. If I had a chance in this situation to remove over-optimized, site-wide links, I would. And you nailed the conundrum of Penguin on the head

Hi Karen, SEOclient12 had some really good points, so let me just add my own 2 cents. To boil down the question to it's fundamentals, you're asking if a keyword rich domain is better for PPC campaigns is more effective than directing the ads towards a non-keyword rich domain. The easy solution is simply to amend the Display URL to include keywords. If you have the space, you can generally put whatever keywords here you want, including Dynamic Keyword Insertion. This has the usual effect of increasing your CTR, which in turn raises your quality score and lowers your cost per click. (if you aren't familiar with Keyword Insertion, it's a great technique worth checking out) This is the preferred solution and generally a lot easier than setting up unique domains for each ad. That's not to say that a unique, keyword rich domain won't help your conversion rate, but my suspicion is the benefit, if any, may not be worth the trouble. Also, if you do set up multiple domains, be careful about linking them together (or make sure to keep them out of Google's index) as too many linking domains may be interpreted as a network. Hope this helps. Best of luck with your SEO!

There are a couple possibilities. First, Google doesn't record and display data when there are very few (in their opinion) searches for a phrase.  Also, they only show data for phrases that their system deem valuable from an AdWords perspective.  Even if some people compete for them, if it's not a lot of competition, or if there's not a lot of actual AdWords clicks on a phrase, the Keyword tool won't display data for count. Then there's the reality that some businesses compete on phrases regardless of what the Google system shows as "valuable".  I've seen a lot of businesses compete for phrases that are bizarre and useless. The bottom line is this - the only real way you'll know if it was worth going after those phrases is if you do so and then look back over time.  If you get clicks, it was worth it.

I got hold of google to review the details. It started working however just before google had a look. I think there was an issue on the developers end, but happy it is all resolved now

Thanks for your help guys! We're going to implement it right away.

Adam-  Could be a couple of things... Option #1: there should be a drop down chat box or exclamation point that you can click on to get further information on why it is ineligible. You need to make sure that the ad is following all the requirements. Option #2: for google voice enabled campaigns there is a click threshold minimum for the adgroups-(I think it is 25 clicks for a month)-that will allow you to show a google voice number extension.... The last thing is make sure you have set up the phone extension correctly....might be an issue there.....(have you enabled the phone impression column in the setup?) here is a solid link that you cna use to make sure you have set it up correctly....its entitled what are phone extensions and how do i implement them? http://support.google.com/adwords/bin/answer.py?hl=en-GB&answer=173346 Good luck.Hope this helps... Mark

Awesome! Thank you

No it isn't, not really. It's still not an open source platform which means you can't make any customisations to the code and you're limited to what the pre-built ecommerce templates they provide have to offer - and looking at a demo of theirs, the way the platform is built, is still far from good. It's similar to 3dCart in this sense. It's self hosted meaning there are various fees for data transfer, limitations on quantity of products etc etc. Our recommendations for both an open source platform and self hosted solution are as follows:- Open Source: Magento - We're worked with pretty much every open source ecommerce platform there is, we've had issues and nightmares with most of them - very few are flexible and bug free however after 6 years of expertise in the ecommerce sector, I would recommend Magento every time (if it fits with your ecommerce requirements). It's free open source, very extendable, anything is possible and can be customised - all you need is a decent developer / agency that knows the software inside out. We generally charge anything from £1200 / $1900 ish for a Magento build depending on specifications (as an idea of costs). Self Hosted: Liquidshop - If you want a solution that is fully looked after for you, managed, hosted, with a support department you can just contact when you require to action anything on your ecommerce website, then by an absolute country mile, I would recommend Liquidshop by Sitemakers (based in the UK). Monthly fees are involved (as with any self hosted solution) and may prove to be a bit steeper than others on the market but you get what you pay for, they are at the forefront of consistent development, well coded, well optimised, clean and correctly coded platform stacked with tons of features. Ultimately, it comes down to budget and requirements, but these recommendations would be based on our experience within ecommerce - and we've worked with most providers.

I agree with Kane. While the other service provider isn't be forthright, they could still be delivering results to these dentists. Question is, are they showing it with phone calls and etc? Generally it'd be nice if ALL internet marketing providers were transparent, but it's wishful thinking. But I'll also add that any smart dentists takes advantage of both SEO and PPC to drive traffic and new leads. While I focus PPC services I encourage my clients (some dentists) to also engage in SEO services because they are complementary. A recent study from Google Research shows that even with high organic rankings, paid ads will add incremental traffic.

Todd, I have Private Messaged you the Url. I'd rather not put it out in the public thread. Thanks!

Hi, thanks a lot, i will read through it!

This may not help with PPC as much. I use concentrateme.com it allows you to import directly from Google analytics and gives you a visual layout of keyword analysis.The program also makes recommendations for long tail keywords. Ranks.nl has a very useful tool for suggested keywords (it uses Semrush date)

Most if not all the tools listed only support Google US, UK and a few others. Any tool that supports many more Google search sites such as The Philippines? What do you think of keywordcompetitor.com?

Hi Sean, We have a couple of ecomm sites on ZenCart - for some reason, our GA is not accurate at all (we are missing orders/conversions OR when we get them all - they all come in on the direct channel - so we can not differentiate the source of traffic). We started advertising on FB, and the quick solution would be a FB script - but it seems this does not exist I agree with you that GA should do the trick ... if it worked :). Hopefully - we'll get this fixed