You now know why you should test increasing bids during unseasonably good weather–read the previous post if you don’t know why. However there are local exceptions. Yesterday I caught the middle of an interview on the BBC. The interviewee explained that whenever there is good weather in Iceland, people take time off from work. If this is the case–increasing bids may not help since no one will be online.

Good weather can influence the success of your Google Adwords campaign. However you may have to turn your strategy upside down in Iceland. Photo credit: Martino!

Further proof that localization should be part of your Google Adwords, MSN and YSM ad campaign strategy.

Many companies are annoyed that competitors advertise with their brand names in their ads in the search engines. This is known as piggybacking. It is different than conquest buys where the advertiser uses trademarked names to trigger their ads but the brand name does not appear in the ad itself.

Most search engines like Google have policies against piggybacking but allow conquest buys in many cases.

Not all systems are perfect but from the example shown in the Wall Street Journal on this subject (June 4, 2008 European Edition) it looks as if the guilty piggybacking ad is using Google’s automatic keyword insertion feature. This is where the advertiser chooses keywords to trigger the ad and the exact keyword used by the searcher is inserted automatically in the ad by Google’s Adwords system.

Wall Street Journal illustration of Piggybacking. Does Adword’s automatic keyword insertion feature violate Google’s piggybacking policy?

So it seems that Google hasn’t been able to get its own automatic feature to abide by its guidelines. A case of the machine not listening to its human masters.

We recently checked to see if the companies (Marriot International Inc, InterContinental Hotels Group PLC, American Airliness and Northwest Airlines) in the piggybacking article still had the same problem. Turns out they do not. Could it be that the Wall Street Journal article somehow convinced the machine to stop the piggybacking?