In a desperate race to out do their competing news rivals, the Telegraph and Business Guardian both have added Anita Roddick’s name to their pay per click advertising.

Traffic to the newspaper’s sites is so important; the media giants, who once ignored the Internet and search engines, now pay Google to forward them traffic. With businesses paying a premium to advertise on their sites it is imperative the newspapers grow their online presence. Any type of customer is a potential good customer and so we see topical stories driving the pay per click campaigns.

Personally I don’t view it as a bad thing as I am great believer in freedom of speech and with that surely comes the freedom to publish and freedom to promote. I just find it fascinating that when Googling such an amazing business woman I find newspapers using Google to promote their brand.

Are these the same newspapers who claimed “the Internet is just a flash in the pan and will never affect good old fashioned print?”

You have to hand it to the 2 papers mentioned though as they are the only ones utilising this technique.

On the other hand, if you have stumbled upon this site whilst looking to find out more about the great entrepreneur Dame Anita Roddick, the site you will find the most helpful in my opinion is Wikipedia.org.

Firstly it’s important to weigh up where your advert appears in the rankings. Are you going up are you going down? It is imperative that you measure your results.

However, are you aware that Google calculates the number of times you view the adverts? If you do not click on them, after a relatively short time (undisclosed by Google) your advert disappears!

Don’t worry it is still there for the rest of the world to see, however the search engine recognises that you keep ignoring it, so it serves you something else instead.

Very clever, but how do you check your adverts with out affecting the potency of the campaign?

Simple, go to:
https://adwords.google.co.uk/select/AdTargetingPreviewTool

This allows you to see all the adverts without any interference. This way you get to see everyone, including competitors etc. At the same time, by not clicking on competitors adverts, they are removed from the list as well, so it is easy to get a false sense of who really is competing in your market place.

You might be asking why does it matter to use the tool, and so what if you can’t see them, as long as your customers do?

Rest assured, Google is calculating the potency of your click-throughs and the volume of adverts that are being shown. Literally every view counts and therefore to guarantee best results, use the tool. In my opinion you should use this for natural SEO too, not just “pay per click”.

Please note you can’t click through to the various sites from this page it is merely a read only application.