Search Engine Marketing

Google Expands AdWords Conversion Window Settings

In a small but significant change, Google is doing away with the 30-day conversion window in AdWords. Now advertisers can customize the conversion window from 7 to 90 days.

Extending the window up to 90 days is good news for marketers whose sales cycles typically take longer than 30 days after an ad click or for those advertisers focused on luring repeat buyers back to the site and want to track performance on that metric.

Advertisers with shorter sales cycles that don’t want lagging conversions to cloud their attribution data, can opt to shorten the window. Some may wish for an even shorter window (Facebook, for example, allows for as short as a one day window), but it’s a step in the right direction.

You can make edits by going to the Conversions tab under Tools and Analysis. As a guide to setting your conversion, AdWords provides a link to the Search Funnels conversion time lag report which shows the time it takes your customers to complete a conversion after clicking on your ads.

The EMD Update: Google Issues “Weather Report” Of Crack Down On Low Quality Exact Match Domains

The head of Google web spam fighting team Matt Cutts announced on Twitter that Google will be rolling out a “small” algorithm change that will “reduce low-quality ‘exact-match’ domains” from showing up so highly in the search results.

Cutts said this will impact 0.6% of English-US queries to a noticeable degree. He added it is “unrelated to Panda/Penguin. Panda is a Google algorithm filter aimed at fighting low quality content; Penguin is one aimed at fighting web spam.

This should come as no surprise, as Cutts said a couple years ago that Google will be looking at why exact domain matches rank well when they shouldn’t, in some cases.

Likely over the coming days, you will see shifts in the search results where many sites that may rank well based on being an exact match domain may no longer rank as high in Google’s search results.

Exact match domains mean domains that match exactly for the search query. For example, if I sold blue widgets and owned the domain name www.bluewidgets.com, that would be an exact match domain.

Keep in mind that this doesn’t mean sites with keywords they hope to rank for in their domain names are now doomed. Rather, the change aims to target low quality sites that might be riding on on the basis of exact matching.