A new Refined Ads release has gone live yesterday with a refreshed look and lots of great features. Here is a quick summary of what has changed to keep you up-to-date. For further information and instructions have a look in our Guide.

Design

The first thing you might have seen after logging in to Refined Ads is the updated design. It’s not only a fresher look but it helps you to navigate through your account much faster and hence makes your life as campaign manager much easier.

Breadcrumb Navigation

This brilliant new feature will totally change the way you navigate through your account. By clicking on the breadcrumb navigation you will get a drop down which allows you to quickly scan your account for the desired element you’re looking for. Accounts, Campaigns and Adgroups – everything just a few clicks away without loading anymore.

And it gets even better. There’s also an integrated search within the breadcrumb navigation. Just type in the first letters or the whole name of the element you’re looking for and you will see the object instantly within the navigation bar. You can also add negative search strings to even more refine your search.

Guide: https://guide.refinedads.com/index.php/Navigation#Pfadnavigation

Sophisticated Campaign Settings

Refined Ads is now supporting a whole bunch of new campaign settings. For instance you can adjust your demographic campaign settings within Refined Ads and you have enhanced options to fine tune your campaigns to get the maximum out of your account.

Guide: https://guide.refinedads.com/index.php/Campaign

Faster Syncs

We’ve done a lot to improve the synchronization between AdWords and Refined Ads. Elements created in AdWords like campaigns, adgroups and keywords will show up in Refined Ads even faster than before.

Scheduled Transaction Reports

You’re now able to schedule a transaction report within the transaction management. This helps you to stay up to date on the latest leads or sales.

Guide: https://guide.refinedads.com/index.php/Transaction_Management

More adjustable Graphs

It’s now possible to highly customize the way you want to see the graph. You can choose if you want to see days, weeks or months in the graph an you can easily switch between the views to get a more detailed graph

Guide: https://guide.refinedads.com/index.php/Graph

Check out those new features right away in your Refined Ads Account! You will find additional information on the new features in the Refined Ads Guide. Of course our Support Team is also more than happy to show you the updated functionality.

A new Refined Ads release has been launched on Saturday with some great new features. Please read below for a quick summary on new features and changes in Refined Ads. For further information and instructions have a look in our Guide.

Image Ads

From now on we fully support Image Ads. Like Adtexts, Image Ads are delivered via the keyword selection within the corresponding Adgroup. They can have various formats, like Leaderboard (728×90), Banner (468×60), Small Square (200×200), Skyscraper (120×600), Wide Skyscraper (160×600), Medium Rectangle (300×250) and Large Rectangel (336×280). To manage your Image Ads within Refined Ads via different campaigns, you can use our internal clipboard. Furhermore a File Manager allows you to efficiently deal with these media files.

Guide: https://guide.refinedads.com/en/index.php/Image_ads

Traffic Control Change History

Often asked for, now it is included in Refined Ads: the Traffic Control Change History, showing you the changes Traffic Control did to your campaigns. You can filter the history in various dimensions.

…and a lot of additional features

And of course we did quite a lot minor improvements. For example you can now raise or lower the maxCPC for a bunch of keywords with an absolute value (e.g. every keyword maxCPC 0.05 € higher). This completes the already existing functionality, which did so far allow you to change the maxCPC in a relative way (new maxCPC is 110% of the old one) and to define an absolute new maxCPC (new maxCPC is 1.10 €).

Check out those new features right away in your Refined Ads Account! You will find additional information on the new features in the Refined Ads Guide.

The latest edition of Search Engine Strategies took place in Berlin and Refined Labs was also there. Lots of interesting search topics that were discussed by experts. It was a great event. But what else would you expect with Refined Labs founder Thomas Bindl as chairman? Here’s a short excerpt of what has happened.

Day 1

Covered Topics were the allocation of revenue in regards to long tail usage. This can be perfectly accomplished with a Bid-management tool. A well-chosen and optimized long tail can bring high revenue compared to spend. Take a look at our long tail case study with Google if you want to know more about the long tail and how you can optimize it.

Blue Summit discussed the relevance of brand keywords and how they affect the performance of your search campaign as well as the importance of the content network. The key findings in regards to booking the brand were, that the brand brings quality and history into your account and you get the possibility of an outcome oriented controlling of the customer via sitelinks.

Another session covered the value of the customer. You need to understand customer acquisition and where your customers come from. In addition we got an insight into how the search process is refined by the searcher and that 2 to 3 word queries are getting the highest CTRs in the German market.

In a very interesting session about cross media influence as well as the search process we learned that in the beginning the searcher is an informational searcher who becomes a transactional searcher and finally turns into a navigational searcher. Therefore the separation of brand and non-brand keywords is very important. A detailed analysis of the long tail and hence the funnel is essential. By the way, Refined Ads is a great tool to get the most out of the funnel and to accomplish these goals.

The last session of the day was a very entertaining session on link building strategies. Key findings were that the mixture of links is essential. There should be no pattern within the links – “bad links” are as essential as “good links”. Also the topic plays a key role within the link building process.

Day 2

Bill Hunt kicked off the second day with his keynote about “Getting ready for search 3.0”. What will search marketing offer in the future? Users will get a highly customized experience. The results will be based on interest or intent and there will be an increased opportunity to dominate the results listings. Search is becoming integrated with blogs, videos, PR and much more. This requires different thinking and companies need to evolve. More and more, the customer will become the center of all efforts. To say it with Bill Hunts’ words: “Stop talking start listening”.

The next session addressed the management of campaigns in multiple countries. If you manage campaigns in multiple countries it is very important to consider other search engines besides Google. In addition it is crucial to have an integrated way of controlling the campaign. Centralized or decentralized campaign management has its disadvantages. If you implement an integrated management you can minimize the disadvantages and get the best out of both worlds.

In a later session we heard that image SEO and video SEO is becoming more important since the advent of Google’s universal search, Bing and other search engine developments. But not only image SEO is changing. There will be a major shift in how you approach SEO and SEM. Universal search will change the search patterns. If companies do not adapt to those new developments quickly to gather data and to learn how those features work, they will most likely have major disadvantages within the market.

The following session showed the significance of social media. 700 million people are participating in social media worldwide. 43 million people are participating in Germany. A key message was, that if you want to use social media, it is crucial to know what you are doing. You need the ability to handle this massive power. You have to live social media.

Last but not least there was a very interesting session about the SEM and SEO tools and how you can facilitate the different tools that are out there on the market to get the best out of your SEM and SEO activities. Especially in SEO it is important to have an integrated tool that covers all areas. Some very interesting conclusions were that the value of classical organic search rankings is decreasing, SEO is getting more complex and more important at the same time and universal search again will play a very important role in the future. All told SEO Tools can help you to master these challenges.

So altogether we learned a lot and enjoyed our stay at SES Berlin. If you want to get a closer look and the presentations check out www.searchenginestrategies.de

Zusammen mit Google haben wir in den letzten Monaten untersucht, wie sich die Conversion-Rate in Abhängigkeit von der Einbuchung von Long Tail Keywords sowie dem Matchtype verhält. Die Studie bringt interessante Ergebnisse ans Licht.

Ausgangspunkt ist, dass viele Suchanfragen auf Google eine ähnliche Vorgehensweise der Internetnutzer wiederspiegeln. Zunächst werden generische Begriffe eingegeben, anschließend werden sie in weiteren Anfragen über die Marke bis hin zum Produkt verfeinert. Zum Schluss erfolgt der Klick, der letztendlich auch zur Conversion führt.

Das Ergebnis der Fallstudie ist eindeutig ausgefallen:

• 31 % aller Conversions benötigen mehr als einen Klick
• Die Conversion-Rate hängt eng mit den eingebuchten Matchtypes zusammen
• Je länger und spezifischer die Keywords, umso höher liegen Klick-Rate und Conversion-Rate

Direkt zur Studie (pdf): Fallstudie Google / Refined Labs: Mit dem Long Tail effizient zur Conversion

Was bedeutet das für Refined Ads und unsere Kunden?

• Die Optimierung des Long Tail ermöglichen wir über unsere Matched Keywords: buchen Sie Keywords als “broad” ein und analyieren Sie die Conversions der einzelnen Suchphrasen, die auf das Keyword gematched wurde. Zeigen sich hierbei einzelne Suchphrasen als Conversion-stark, so buchen Sie diese unmittelbar als “phrase” oder “exact” ein und senken damit deutlich ihre Kosten.
• Um nicht nur den letzten Klick zur Conversion zu erfassen, können Sie über Refined Ads die Gesamt-Conversion zusätzlich auch auf alle beteiligten Keywords verteilen, den sog. Search Funnel. Diesen können Sie sich ebenso graphisch anzeigen. So erkennen Sie, welche Keywords am Gesamterfolg beteiligt sind und vermeiden falsche Rückschlüsse über scheinbar unrentable Keywords. Denn: schalten Sie diese Keywords ab, bleibt die Gesamt-Conversion aus!

As already hinted we are very happy to announce a unique event in Europe: Refined Ads Adwords Seminar which will be held by PPC expert Brad Geddes from bgtheory. The event will take place on March 19/20th in Munich. The second day is more advanced and reserved for existing clients, but even the first day brings a huge amount of knowledge that it’s well worth attending.

In order to participate in this event which will also feature speakers from Google and Refined Ads it is necessary to apply for one of the few seats as we want to keep it below 50 people to ensure that everybody can ask questions and get the best results out of it.

Apply for free AdWords Seminar now

Lately we did a lot of product centered posts, sort of forgetting about the people behind and around Refined Ads. After being active in the search industry for about 8 years it feels like time just flies by, but one thing that amazes us every single time is how great the search community really is.

During last weekend a great friend of the company, Shakil Khan, made it down to Munich to talk with some of us about Online Marketing, running a business and being more successful. Together with him we managed to hang out with Lukasz and Kolja as well as some other bright people from the German Online space. A second good reason for this to happen was DLD, which took place earlier this week and once again proved to be a great conference. Meeting new people that were interested in sharing stories as well as meeting business partners and friends from all over the world made it really worthwhile. One of the better coincidences was walking by Marissa Mayer and her greeting, even though we met the last time in Zurich back in 2005.

After DLD the week went on with a big BVDW meeting where I had the chance to show more people how great Refined Ads is.

Unfortunately during the course of the evening it also became public that a friend, one of the first people parts of our team met, died in a tragic plane accident. Martin Schaedel was one of the brightest people that I ever met, his networking skills were unbelievable and the way he lived was as most people would love to if they had the chance. I guess it’s safe to say that Martin inspired thousands of people around the world and I have to admit that Martin always seemed like a hero with his talent and seeing that go is one of the saddest moments in my professional and personal life.

The following post is in German as it focuses the German market.

Herr Hövener (Bloofusion), Sie werden auf der SES Hamburg zum Thema „Das Einmaleins der Suchmaschinenwerbung“ reden. Suchmaschinenwerbung heißt ja in Deutschland primär Google AdWords. Was müssen Werbetreibende denn bei Google AdWords beachten?

Google AdWords ist schon ein hervorragendes System, um qualifiziert Besucher über Suchmaschinen anzuziehen. Leider nur sind viele Voreinstellungen bei Google AdWords nicht optimal, so dass insbesondere Neueinsteiger sehr viel Lehrgeld bezahlen müssen.

Ein Beispiel ist, dass standardmäßig das Content-Netzwerk freigeschaltet ist, d.h. dass die Werbungen nicht nur neben den Suchergebnissen, sondern auch auf anderen Websites erscheinen. Prinzipiell ist das auch eine gute Sache, aber für das Content-Netzwerk gelten ganz andere Spielregeln, so dass man hier schnell viel Geld verbrennen kann.

Wir sehen auch oft, dass gerade Einsteiger Kampagnen mit Broad Match fahren und auch dort zuviel Geld ausgeben.

Was ist Broad Match und warum ist das schlecht?

Man kann bei Google AdWords verschiedene Matchings angeben. Einer davon ist Broad Match („weitgehend passend“). Wenn Sie ein Keyword als Broad Match einbuchen, bucht AdWords automatisch viele andere Keywords hinzu, von denen angenommen wird, dass sie ähnlich sind.

Wenn Sie also z.B. „einfamilienhaus“ als Broad Match buchen, bucht AdWords Ihnen „zweifamilienhaus“ hinzu. Prinzipiell ist das natürlich eine gute Idee, aber in der Praxis werden oft Suchbegriffe hinzugebucht, die mit dem jeweiligen Angebot des Werbetreibenden nichts zu tun haben – von rechtlichen Problemen mal abgesehen, da AdWords auch durchaus fremde Markennamen hinzubucht.

Besser wäre es also, ein Keyword als Exact oder Phrase Match einzubuchen (eingefasst in Anführungsstriche oder eckige Klammern).

Was machen die meisten AdWords-Werbenden sonst noch falsch?

Häufig sehen wir auch, dass die Werbungen nicht auf Suchbegriffe abgestimmt sind. Da gibt es Gruppen mit zig Keywords, die nichts miteinander zu tun haben und bei allen diesen Keywords wird dieselbe Werbung geschaltet.

Besser ist es immer, für eine möglichst zusammenhängende Menge an Suchbegriffe eine möglichst passende Werbung zu definieren, die zudem auf eine Zielseite verlinkt, die zu der Suchanfrage passt. Also nicht immer alle Besucher auf die Startseite lenken, sondern stets auf eine passende Seite. Bei Online-Shops sind das z.B. oft die Rubriken des Shops.

Mit Google AdWords kann man also schon sehr viel falsch machen. Glauben Sie, dass man das eher an eine erfahrene Agentur abgeben sollte?

Nein, das glaube ich nicht – auch wenn mich als Agentur-Chef das natürlich freuen würde. AdWords ist ein tolles System, aber wie so vieles im Leben muss man sich eben damit auseinandersetzen, um optimale Ergebnisse zu erzielen. Einfach nur eine Kampagne erstellen, Keywords buchen und laufen lassen – so funktioniert es nicht. Zumindest nicht, wenn man Google nicht noch reicher machen möchte.

Bei vielen Unternehmen geht es ja auch gar nicht um Tausende von Keywords, die man manuell gar nicht mehr optimieren kann. Manche Hersteller, gerade im B2B-Bereich, haben vielleicht nur 20 oder 40 Keywords – eine Menge, die man also noch gut überblicken kann.

Dann muss man aber auf jeden Fall (1) gute, passende, attraktive Werbungen texten, (2) die Keywords nicht als Broad Match einbuchen, (3) Content-Netzwerk ausschalten oder dafür eine separate Kampagne erstellen, (4) ein paar auszuschließende Keywords definieren (z.B. billig, umsonst) und (5) sich regelmäßig mit den Reports auseinandersetzen.

Und auf diese Themen gehen Sie auf der SES ein?

Ja, zusammen mit Kim Engels von metapeople und Isabell Wagner von bigmouthmedia. Ich denke, dass das vor allem für Einsteiger eine sehr gute Übersicht über die wichtigsten Optionen und Optimierungsmaßnahmen geben wird. Ich freue mich auf jeden Fall auf viele gute Fragen…

Vielen Dank!

This is about my 10th WebmasterWorld PubCon I’m flying to and somehow I feel like there has been a shift in how this event is – at least to me.

Back in 2003 when I attended my first PubCon in London it was something completely different as I’ve never been to a bigger search event before, except a very small “Suchmaschinentricks Stammtisch” in Munich back in 2001 or so. The event itself was pretty unspectacular, drinking beer in a Pub, some guys standing on the bar and cheering to the folks. One of the most memorable moments was when Barry Lloyd from makemetop just said “Enjoy your drinks” and stepped down again. The rest of the event was dedicated to drinking and talking to people. Being 20 at that time and the first time on a commercial flight a few hours before, this was crazy. Basically it was all about networking for about 2-3 days.

Now I’m sitting on the plane again, roughly 4 years and 300 flights later and I feel like the world completely changed, at least the way search conferences behave. People fly to Vegas for a week to party, drink and go to sessions. Sessions haven’t been there in 2003 – weird. There are thousands of people coming (back then it was like 300-400 or so) and somehow everybody is excited and talking, sorry blogging about it. Rumor has it that secrets are still being shared and some people exchanged beer against Champagne, Jägermeister, Wodka or Goldschlager. Does this mean the industry has matured? I don’t think so, it just grew and the same problems are out there: Trying to be on top of the SERPs, but now there are way more people doing it, but we didn’t get so much more keyphrases. So we have to diversify.

Old school spammers became consultants or radio stars, former programmers became Spammers, former consultants became enterpreneurs and some just disappeared and rumor has it that they retired. But what does this have to do with PubCon? People are seeing PubCon differently. Whereas I used to go to PubCon to see friends, meet new people, drink, party and do some shopping it’s now a little more about business, getting things done and making sure you come back home with the highest ROI. This is probably also the reason why I’m doing one of my shortest trips to a conference in the US – 3 nights. Some might say this is crazy, some might say it’s effective. For me personally it’s both, but also a little sad and exciting.

I think the next years we will see even more professionalism going into the search industry. More structure in the way work is performed, more structure in the way it’s reported, measured and charged. But this is all because more and more corporations realize that search is todays direct marketing. I really wonder when the DMA or the DDV in Germany wake up and make their own search conferences. Considering how big these are (32 billion EUR spent per year in Germany on direct marketing) and what kind of power they have in terms of lobbying I think that they will make the big search conferences in 2012. They’ll have less drinking, more pitching involved, less partying, more booth work, less friends and more competition. Overall I’m not quite sure if I like this way from a personal point of view, but think that it will be a great step forward for a very young industry.

If you happen to see me in Vegas, please walk up to me and introduce yourself – right within the spirit of PubCon to meet new people!