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Although laterally related, I think it's also a good idea to understand the concepts behind how an Adwords auction works and how they evolved the product. I recently read In the Plex and it offered some insights I hadn't read anywhere else.

I think you need to ask yourself this: If you were doing this type of "shady" PPC marketing like your competitor is, and they found out about it, do you think they would be so kind as to not turn you in?

Excel has a feature called advanced filters that I use to filter these out.  See here for more info: http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/excel-help/filter-by-using-advanced-criteria-HP005200178.aspx.  It allows you to filter your data by multiple criteria.  You might have to break up your regex a bit into multiple different filters, but you should be able to get it done with this.  They support * and ?. If you use Google Analytics, you could view this by setting up an advanced filter with a regex to separate branded vs. non-branded paid search queries.

Mike & crew, I think I've got to the bottom of it. (Mike - adding the utm_campaign was useful - thank you, but wasn't the cause of the problem) Short answer: 301 redirects were breaking the tracking. On the site in question we have products, parent products & child products (basically distinct SKU products but held under the parent - different sizing, or colours for example). The site was still sending the original URL of the child product to google shopping (Rather than adopting the parent URL), the child URLs have a 301 redirect to the parent URLs. So here's what was happening: 1. Someone clicks on the google product listing ad which contains within it the URL of the product.  Google appends it's tracking info on that url (the &gclid=), including the tracking we've set so, utm_campaign, source etc. 2. That URL was being 301 redirected to the parent URL (so the customer eds up where they should!), but this in turn stripped the tracking from the URL. 3.  Since there was no tracking after the 301 redirect, google couldn't see where it originated from. Obviously it makes more sense to fix the root cause, rather than try to redirect the tracking info too (although I'm sure that could be done).  We're changing the setup so that child URLs adopt the parent URL. Hope this is clear.  Thanks for all the help everyone. Kind Regards Ewan

Does this hold true for Google Adwords? I am practically experiencing the same issues but with Adwords and Analytics.

Hi Lindsay, thank you for your answer. I signedup for merchant, i added an feed with a product, but the problem is: 1. I see competitors, on another Country, and they have this merchant activated and shop, i have down it too, and connected to my adwords account, but the main problem is, i don't sell the product, i sell service, " Insurance " i dont have price or product to sell with pieces, but my competitors in another country have down it, but how, and if it's relevant or not, i dont know! Can you tell me more for example for me, i offer services, peoples are very happy, how can i make any product like a publishment and not product to sell! can you help me on this? For you John, same quesiton, if you have skills on this, share your idea! thanks,

Yes, there has been an algorithmic change to Google's PPC for QS. Your Quality Score is now being weighted to make landing page relevancy more important. IMHO this is great news for savvy marketers and end users. Here's a post from Google on the Ad quality improvement. Marin Software's findings suggest that this change has had a limited impact on under 11.25% accounts and affected by no more than 0.25 QS. I also believe that the rollout of shifting the weight towards LPs has been small, but I predict that more weight will be placed on LPs as paid search matures. I'd also speculate and add that Google Website Optimizer tool is probably being scrutinized and that the functionality of that tool will be upgraded soon inline with this change.

If I go into the adgroup I can see the cost by day no problem (just toggle graph options), but I want to do it a level up rather than collate them all individually. Seems like something that should be possible

Yes, it's really awesome. You will love it, trust me. I'm glad I could help.

I see it across all keywords, some have a % of new visitors that's pretty low (20% to 30%) and some have a slightly better figure: 50%. Were talking about tens of visits per week for each of these keywords (there are about 20 of them in total). While this might not ruin my business, I do find it annoying :). 99% of my visitors come from France (It's a French website :)) and 100% of paid traffic comes from France too

Thanks

Something I experienced when running an in-house ppc campaign for a smaller brand was that big companies aren't afraid to send out C&D letters from their very expensive lawyers if you bid on their branded terms (not using their name in the text). While there is certainly no law saying you can't bid on a branded term, a smaller brand is going to cave because they won't be taking on a giant in court.

In SERPs where I hold #1 and #2 organic rankings and bid high enough on Adwords to be dominant - about 25% of my traffic for relevant keywords comes from Adwords.

Shopping comparison(SC) sites work of a product data feed which is specific to every site.  So you've got two options 1. Create a data feed for every SC site you want to use or 2. Use a third party such as www.godatafeed.com who will take one feed from you and create the multiple specific feeds Some SC sites have implemented a bidding system others use a fixed cost per click.  If you go for the first option you can use Analytics software to optimise your feed (optimise titles/descriptions to increase CTR, remove items which have high Cost/Conversion).  If you go for the second option, they will most likely optimise feeds for you.

Thanks Lucas, good info. Yes, that is my experience as well. Do you remember the firm?

I would say it does but in a indirect way - more traffic = more brand based queries etc and more talk about brand on web etc Also google sees bounce rates etc which do play a roll So the short answer in my a opinion is yes but not enough to use it as a seo tactic