Despite of the PR gaffe with invitations I decided to visit the event held on March, 12th in Hilton Hotel, Sofia. I arrived at about 11.30 when the substantial part of the lectures had begun. To my surprise 99% of the invited were people with a strong experience with Google AdWords. In other words (the words of internet marketing) the target wan not very suitable.

There were lots of technical questions like: “Why aren’t my sales tracked, though I placed conversion tracking code?”, “Where do I put the code? At the beginning or at the end of the page?”, etc. The most interesting were the answers you can’t hear or read anywhere.

Trademarks can be used in a campaign as long as they are not used in ad title or ad description i.e. they can be used only as keywords. If you have a registered trademark in the European Union, you can send an application to Google to include your trademark(s) in a list with keywords that cannot be used as keywords (this can never happen if the registered trademark is in USA). The process can take a month or so and you have to give a lots of documentation.

Beside the traditional ad formats - text and banner ads, the new form of advertising for Bulgarian market was video ads. The main problem is that most of the Bulgarian publishers do not have the possibility to enable video ads which reduces the scope of sites where video ads could be shown. Unfortunately this problems concerns AdSense team but the event was organized by AdWords team.

Although it was pointed that superlatives were forbidden yesterday I noticed this ad on my site:

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The title says - “The Biggest Fair in Asia”. Mistakes happen.

There is a way to overcome the superlatives rule. If your site is awarded by another company/site , for example “The Ugliest Looking Site for year 2007″, and there is a linkback to this site and there is an evidence of your award you can make an ad like that: “The Ugliest Looking Site - Hire me for designer and you will never get a client”.

One interesting fact is that if conversion tracking of your AdWords campaigns is not visible in your analytics report, that would probably mean that the chosen language of your AdWords control Panel is set to language that is not supported in analytics. If you change it to English or other supported Analytics language the conversion tracking will be visible.

When I asked about the percentage of fraud clicks, the initial reaction was as if I asked about Pentagons’ Top Secret docs. Then a teenage-looking guy from AdWords explained the efforts of the company to fight fraud clicking. The thing that astonished me was that he said that percentage of fraud clicks is 0.02%. Yes, right - zero point zero two percent?!?!

If you block the landing page from AdWords’ robots for some reason the page will not be able to get quality score and therefore you will hate give the highest bids.

Finally some advices for optimization of your campaign

- the best way to make a campaign is to combine all types of ads - text, banner and video ads;

- carefully choose the landing page  - it should be the page that shows/sells the product/service you advertise in your ads. That is because the user decides within 8 second whether to leave the page or continue browsing your site and statistics say  that only 50% of user visit a second page;

- when choosing campaign keywords, use synonyms, misspelled and transliterated ones (Cyrillic languages);

- use conversion tracking together with analytics. Thus you can check where your users came from, what words they use to make a purchase, where they come from.