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This doesn't look like the newest version of Google's remarketing code. Check your Tracking info and update it site wide. It should look something like this:

That depends on

1. how much you are paying for CPM for Fetchback and
2. how much Fetchback increases your traffic or conversion goals
3. if you are measuring revenue, what the total revenue increase is, and if that offsets your cost
   1. Does the return from Fetchback warrant the cost, or would some other marketing/remarketing program give you a higher return?

I'd suggest testing it out to see if it increases your 45% Return traffic. What would you consider an acceptable or successful rate of increase? 50%? 60%? Figure that out and measure the performance of Fetchback against that metric.

In another vein, is it possible to create sophisticated rules for your Remarketing on Fetchback? Perhaps you can create a set of rules where Fetchback only displays ads to your 1 time visitors who have not been back in X amount of days, or something similar.

Depends on what tab you are looking at.

If you're looking at the Queries tab, which is actually the only that shows KW Rankings, that is pure organic. You can see combined paid/organic traffic from your KW under the Search > Overview tab.

Yes it is easier to observe 2 distinct accounts, and connect them individually to each analytic profile.

You can get your competitor's trademarked terms to appear in your ads. There's a simple loophole, 3 words: dynamic keyword insertion. Boom.

David, I've been noticing this "insta change" QS as well. This is a recent change. It occurs both when you pause a keyword, and also when you change a bid at the keyword level. It also occurs on any keyword with any QS, like even 7 or higher.

While it is disconcerting I don't think it is the actual QS. As Justin notes, wait a few minutes, go back and check and you will see that the QS changes back.

They've definitely made some weird change to their algo. I find it quite annoying. Hopefully someone will realize what poor user experience this is for us, and roll back this change.

To identify what the competition is doing, two useful tools are: SpyFu and Keyword Spy.

I agree with David, find a reputable and experienced PPC company that is experienced with your situation, and pay for their expertise. Even if you are spending $1,500 per month on their services. Chances are they will also do MUCH MUCH better than you would in terms of your bottom line.

Let's just ignore the time savings from hiring out a good PPC company and focus on your return. Then it just comes down to a number game, and that should help you decide on how much you can invest on hiring a PPC company. Here's an example:

Let's say your budget is $4K a month on non-brand campaigns, and you're averaging 40 conversions, so your CPA is $100. If the PPC company does 100% better, you're getting 80 conversions for $5.5K a month ($4K + 1.5K service), and now your CPA is about $67. So what's better? You managing $4K and getting 40 conversions, or spending $5.5K and getting 80? And we haven't even factored in the possibility of an increase in average revenue per conversion yet! If the company can increase that too, well then... you get the picture.

Now, let's just focus on just the TIME savings, and let's say you can't go above $4K in total. So the PPC company eats $1.5K, and the rest goes towards your spend. Then the PPC company would only need to do 38% better to achieve the same results and number of conversions.

Hope all that made sense.

Hi Fancois, this comment above from (Feb 13) is older. Did you see my above comment from March 16th, 2012?

Here's a few in no particular order:

http://certifiedknowledge.org/

http://searchengineland.com/

http://www.ppchero.com

http://www.bryaneisenberg.com/

A few things that might answer your question:

1. Regardless of the number of competitors there is still a minimum bid requirement. I have tried to find how Google determines the minimum bid to no avail, but there is some secret sauce for this too
2. If you are bidding on phrase, modified broad or broad match keywords, indeed your dropping the bid is probably accounting for your lack of impressions. You should look at increasing your bids for these.
3. Quality Score. You didn't mention if any of these keywords suffer from a low quality score. If they do then this will also attribute to your ads not being shown as frequently.
4. You mention in a comment you want to find an equilibrium to pay as little to show as much. The "Bid Simulator" often shows a nice curve where you can sometimes see a point of inflection. It somewhat follows the law of diminishing returns. I like to target an 80% acquisition with 20% lost to low CPC for impression share. I think that is the happy equilibrium you are looking for.

Why don't you just apply a new coupon code since it's a new account? There are so many of them floating around on the internet. And if you have an MCC, and are signed up for Google Engage, they constantly give you new ones.

That's no longer accurate as of recent changes to the QS algo. Goole announced that LP quality and UX will play a larger role in the calculation of your QS. (http://adwords.blogspot.com/2011/10/ads-quality-improvements-rolling-out.html)

I'd bet that the quality of your LPs will become even more significant as our web space and Adwords matures.

No one has mentioned this, but have you thought about making all your ad groups geo-modified?

My guess is this client is targeting a specific location or several specific locations. Like "air conditioning repair miami" and then also tailor your landing pages to target that location too.

There is no penalty. If someone manually types in your redirect URL, they've broken the connection from the Adwords ad completely. On the other hand, Google does track 404 errors on your site, and any 404 error will affect your SEO and overall site rankings.

While I agree it makes for nice UX, I think creating a 301 redirect from the fictitious display URL to the actual landing page is overkill. I have never seen any 404 errors in my logs of a person manually typing in a display URL. People are inherently lazy. They will mouse and click.

In being transparent and holding yourself accountable, don't forget to also be generous with yourself!

My teachers/coaches/ and friends have adeptly pointed out that being passionate and driven can make us our own worse critic, and then we are hardest on ourselves. In the very act of practicing generosity with yourself you become more generous and empathetic with others. It may be more difficult to practice that type of generosity than to hold yourself accountable.

With Google heavily pushing Google plus and authorship it seems this may eventually have a large influence on the ranking algo. If we assume this to be correct, how does a small business owner who does NOT engage much online create authority for themselves? I'm thinking of the dentist, the plumber, etc. Where does their authority come from?

That's clearly deceptive pricing. By Adwords partner standards they must share costs of Adwords campaigns.

Report them.

I've been trialing WordWatch for about a month. I'll admit I've been skeptical from the start. I don't quite understand the results they're delivering or how it works.

So I did a search for "Wordwatch review" hoping someone out there could shed some light or help me decide whether this software was worth keeping. But all I can find are two suspicious and badly written posts, immediately raising red flags. (Penuguin should have eliminated crap sites using the Flesch-Kincaid reading level, but I digress.)

**Wordwatch premise: **They take over keyword bidding to maximize budgets and clicks. They monitor the Adwords campaign to find an "optimal" bid price. Two questions about this premise:

1. How is it different than using the Google settings for optimize for clicks or conversions?
2. Since Google Adwords is based on a Vickery auction, wouldn't lowering my bid only lower my position?
   1. Bearing everyone has the same QS, then lowering my bids to the range between 2 positions does not increase my actual cost.

I have Wordwatch enabled for a few of my campaigns. Their interface leaves a lot to be desired. They don't report the activity or the changes they make to the campaigns from the dashboard. I had to go into my Adwords Change History to track what they were doing. And lo and behold they're also adding long tail keywords to my ad groups.

Bottom line I didn't notice any huge impact, and I don't see how it's better than Google's own version of campaign settings. I don't know that they're really legit. But their marketing was so convincing, and they raised $1.4M that I need other opinions.

Any one with some pro/cons, or yay/nays?

Old habits die hard for me. I still use delicious.com. They have extensions for different browsers that make it easy to quickly tag and add links. Whenever I need to recall a link, it's been pretty useful.

For notes, text, and snippets, Google docs.