It is a great strategy for your competitors to buy your brand name on Google Adwords. You invested time and money into your brand name and they reap the benefits by showing their ad every time someone searches on your brand name.

Should you stop them? Not necessarily:

• If they are the bigger brand it may be smarter to advertise on their name and let them to continue to advertise on your name.
• Since they are better known you will get more exposure than they will.

If they are not advertising on your name should you advertise on their brand names?

That depends.
You have to consider the legal issues. Consider this recent case from Israel, where Dr. Dov Klein won a court case against Google because his competitors in the plastic surgery field had bought Google Adwords using his name.

The case was interesting because the case was outside of the USA. This means that you may be exposed under different laws which apply in different countries. In the USA the courts take a different view. Read this long article to see how a USA court views this issue.

Google Adword Trademark Lawsuit in the USA is different than the one in Israel

And the opposite is true. If you want to stop your competitor from using your brand name it may be worthwhile to start legal proceedings in a different country

Vote for the Best Ad

We were so impressed with the creative ad entries that we received for the Google Adwords Creative Writing Contest, that we decided to add a runner up, and we want you to choose!

We selected 10 of our favorite ads and would like you to vote for your favorite creative ad. All you have to do is:

• Visit: http://www.aims.co.il/blog/creative-google-adwords-ads/
• Click on the ad that you like
• Rate the picture by selecting the number of stars you want to give the ad
  
• Fill out your email (so we can enter you in the draw)
• Click the send button
• Confirm your vote via email.
  (You will receive an email requesting confirmation up to 5 minutes after voting)

Voters will be entered into a draw where 1 lucky winner will win a $100 gift certificate to Amazon.
The entrant whose ad gets the most votes will win a $100 gift certificate to Amazon.

Contest ends on August 1, 2010.

Tips for getting those creative juices moving

Due to stiff competition it is critical to write ads that perform. I hope these ideas will help you increase your Adwords campaigns performance.

• Try writing the opposite
  • For example:
    • Instead of: Get the Fastest Computer
    • Write: Don’t get a Slow Computer
• Put the words in the opposite order
  • For example:
    • Instead of: Free Shipping & Returns
    • Write: Shipping & Returns Free
• Tell the Truth – If your product is expensive, figure out a way to turn that into an advantage
  • For example:
    • Pay More & Worry Less
• Explain why you shouldn’t use the product
  • For example:
    • To Get Fat Don’t Buy

Have any ideas that will help others? Know where some Adwords copywriting resources are? Send them to me at ron@aims.co.il

Have a good idea for an ad?

You can win a great prize by joining our Adwords Copywriting Contest

Additional Resources:

Funny ads which can help get your creative juices flowing http://blog.xnepali.com/funny-text-ads-might-not-be-that-creative-but-funny-they-sure-are/

Adword tips with realworld examples http://www.googlelady.com/416/10-killer-headline-adwords-tips/

People are writing amazing ads for our Google Adwords contest. Here is the one I like the best so far:

Have you ever wanted to break Google’s rules for Adwords?
Use 2 exclamation points? Use a word you just made up? Add InterCaps?

Now you can.

Our Google Adwords Creative Writing Contest limits you to the number of characters that Google allows. However you are free to break all the other rules. Your imagination is the limit.

$500 Prize for the best ad. More info here.

Google has begun advertising its Chrome browser on street advertisements in Israel. The signs in the UK and other countries have a lot of text as you can see in the examples below.

Google Chrome street advertisements in the UK and other locations

The text on the Israeli Google Chrome ads reads:

If it is part of your life
It is part of your browser

I am not sure how this convinces you to switch to the Chrome browser. Something to ponder as you drive by in your car

Google Chrome Street Advertisement in Israel

It does however fit the rules for Google Adwords:

Google however is using a different ad. Their Adwords ad does include the benefits for the user: fast and easy browsing. That is more than I can say for the street ads.

Note that the name of the browser they don’t translate to Hebrew on Adwords or the street signs. It is nice to know that someone thinks that all of us Israelis know English.

We recently started working with a company that asked us to start by optimizing their Google Adwords campaign. This made sense since almost all of their sales were coming from Adwords. However we recommended that we work on SEO as well. We saw a great opportunity for them.

Bottom line is that their Google Adwords sales increased, but more surprisingly to them, their SEO sales increased even more. After working with them for just 3 months, SEO sales are 37% more than their Adwords sales.

Our experience shows that companies typically under spend on SEO. A recent Forrester Research study shows that in 2009, PPC spend was more than 5 times the SEO spend. This same study shows almost no change in the relationship for the next 5 years.

PPC spend is 5x more than SEO spend in 2009. Source: Forrester Research’s Interactive Marketing Forecast 2009-2014

Why do people spend more on PPC than SEO?

• PPC is more predictable than SEO
• SEO is riskier
• PPC is easier to do than SEO
• You get results faster with PPC

The truth is that both PPC and SEO have their place but make sure you are putting enough resources into your SEO campaign.

Rumors are that the Google Superbowl ad in the 3rd quarter will be this ad on YouTube.

Rumored Superbowl Google Ad on YouTube

Whether it is true or not I though it would be fun to see how the search engine result page (SERP) is different in Israel. What is interesting is that although the search result is the same, you can see in the screen shot below that in Israel there are ads.

Rumored Superbowl ad SERP in Israel

You might think that there are ads only in Israel. However, if you do the search in the USA you can see that there are even more ads (see screen shot below). Google did not want to show the sponsored search ads in their ad. Could this be because it hurts the search experience?The ad experience?

To be fair, if Google did include the ads and the clicks were on the ads, some may complain that Google was hinting that people should click on ads. And the ads might distract from their message.

Rumored Superbowl ad SERP in USA

Whether or not the ad will actually run it sure is creating a lot of buzz on the internet. The screen shot below shows just a few reactions to the Google Superbowl ad.

Google Superbowl ad reactions

Anyone who does web analytics knows how easy it is to make a mistake. So it is not surprising that the New York Times published an article which can be misleading.

The NYT headline is “The Payoff of Ads on Search Engines” and reports on a study by Engine Ready that “visitors who get to retail sites through sponsored links are more likely to buy than those who click on organic results.”

Unfortunately this really doesn’t mean anything. There are many reasons for this:

• We are not comparing the same keywords
• A search ad keyword can represent a whole family of keywords
• A search ad keyword can be manipulated so that the ad will not show if an undesirable keyword is used with it

In order to have meaningful conclusions we have to analyze the same exact match keyword with the same positions. That way we will know if PPC is beating out the organic results. Actually, this may be interesting information but it really won’t answer the question of where should we be investing our resources.

SEO vs. PPC: What Should Companies Invest in?

In order to answer that question we should compare the ROI of PPC vs. SEO. The revenues of PPC vs. the cost of ads and managing the campaign vs. the cost of running a SEO campaign. Even this is more complicated than it looks as not everyone buys something on the 1st visit.

• A buyer could 1st come to the site through PPC and then come through SEO on the buying visit. So you have to decide which channel gets what credit
• Or the same person can buy the first time when he comes to the site through Adwords and then buys again a month later when coming through the organic results

Organic results can be better than search engine

You should probably be using both SEO and sponsored search channels but you do need to decide how to divide your budget. Most companies under invest in SEO and SMO because it is more challenging and harder to predict results.

I was surprised that an Internet company would commission a survey without contrasting it to actual behavior. What consumers say and how they actually act are not always the same thing. That is why we have web analysis and other methods which measure actual consumer behavior.

While there is a place for surveying customers, I would have expected Linkedin which accepts online advertising to complement the survey with click through and conversion statistics. Hopefully they will include that in their next report.

Another problem with these kinds of surveys is that they generalize. What they report may not be relevant to:

• The segment you are targeting
• The product you are marketing
• Your target geographic location

These online surveys may be fun to read, but if you want to improve your bottom line, there is no substitute for PPC ad testing.