I stumbled upon Google's wonder wheel, a great feature that lets you find related keywords.








So far so good. Now, this lets you drill down into each of those keywords and check out the keywords related to those.







So, if you're a search advertiser wanting to explore variants of keywords, this would appear to be a great tool. I use the term 'appear to be', because this didnt work too well for some of the industries Greenlemon's clients operate in (most of our clients are SMEs operating in regional/local markets), as you can see in the two examples below:








Next exhibit below:











Some of the elements here are explicable. For instance, three elements in the last pic are regional newspapers, which also happen to be major advertisers. You could, if you're so inclined, take a sympathetic view and say "oh well, cant really expect much more from a machine, can one?" :)

Some perspective also results from the fact that most other keyword tools arent very accurate in the niches relevant to us.

Having said that, I'd guess Wonderwheel is much more useful for high volume search terms. Like most Google products, it is simple, cool, easy-to-use. Plus you dont have to be a search advertiser to play around with it and have a bit of fun! :)

PS - Here's an easy tutorial on how to begin using Wonder Wheel.

Tags: Wonderwheel | google | SEM | Keywords | PPC

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During some casual searching, I typed in 'mumbai calicut'. A couple of ads offered me tickets between the two cities.







I clicked on the first 3 ads. Jetlite and Yatra took me through to their home pages. Where did MakeMyTrip take me?




Which of the sites would you book at?

Makemytrip saved me the trouble of scrolling through two long lists of cities. This, I'd guess, is the sort of thing that'd sway the 'marginal' traveler (say, someone who needs a ticket for the next day. Or someone who's booking at 9pm, really wanting to get back home.)

There is, of course, a cost involved in doing this. You'll have to configure perhaps a couple of hundred landing pages with pairs of cities that you want to target. You can do this only if the increase in conversions makes it worthwhile to take the effort of customizing landing pages. And if you've enough transaction volumes to recover your costs.

This is a great example of customizing user experiences to suit visitors' needs.

Tags: SEM | PPC | Landing pages | google | Adwords | MakeMyTrip | User Experience

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While setting up an SEM (Adwords) campaign for one of our clients, we found that the ads were 'pending review' for a long time. When the status did change, it was to 'disapproved'.

Why? Because the client's homepage triggered off a popup. Some poring over the Adwords Policies confirmed that popups can, indeed, lead to disapproval.

Incidentally, we didnt have that issue on Yahoo! Search Marketing, where approval was prompt.

This confirms, once again, that what we've merely considered bad-practices can have concrete consequences. With a medium like Google where everything is measurable, that's not too surprising, is it?

So, what do you do if you're in this situation? If the client isnt quite willing to take the popup off, you could set a different landing page on the site - one that doesnt trigger off a popup.

Does a popup on site (but not on landing page) lead to a lower quality score? We'll have to watch that campaign and find out.  If I were Google, and wanted to dissuade popups, that would be a good way of doing so.

Tags: SEM | search engine marketing | google | Adwords | Popups | Best practices | Yahoo | Quality Score

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