I am often told by clients that they search for their Google Cost Per Click ads on a regular (almost daily) basis. In fact, a client recently told me she searches multiple times a day, just to make sure she is seeing her ads! I advised that although it is very enticing, as well as reasonable to want to see where her ads are appearing, it is definitely not recommended. Here is why…

Searching for your Google ads can lead to a low click through rate (CTR). Click Through Rate is defined in Wikipedia as “a way of measuring the success of an online advertising campaign. A CTR is obtained by dividing the number of users who clicked on an ad on a web page by the number of times the ad was delivered (impressions).” An impression is when your ad is displayed on a search results page. In laymen’s terms, if your number of impressions continues to increase, however, your clicks do not increase, your click through rate will be poor. This is exactly what occurs when you search for your ads on a regular basis. You are pretty much telling Google that your ad is not enticing enough to warrant a click, and your positions on the page will be lowered as a result. In actuality, not only does it lower your positions, it can also lead to higher click costs, because Google can actually state that a particular keyword is not performing well, forcing a higher mininum bid to even keep your ads running.

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It is pretty amazing how quickly technology transforms. Staying up-to-date with the latest technological advances is vital in the information technology industry. To the same extent, in the search engine marketing (SEM) industry, advertisers are constantly looking for methods to improve their marketing efforts. And now, they have a new way to go about implementing improvements to their campaigns.

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Web Search is constantly evolving. First generation search analyzed words on the page to rank content, second generation search tapped into link analysis and today search is becoming more personalized and specialized. By combining horizontal search, where the user searches a wide spectrum of material, and vertical search, where the user searches only through one topic area, the search engines are blending listings from their news, video, images, maps and other databases together onto one page. Google’s new Universal Search unifies all these different offerings by including links, where appropriate, to the standard Web results. All those listings, which were previously available only through the One Box displays and weren’t utilized by most users, limiting the scope of their results, are presented now on one page. The move ensures that the users receive all relevant content, by expanding the number of databases they are searching behind the scenes.

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