Roundup of the 3 big AdWords changes announced in the past week
In the midst of the fallout of last month's exposé in the Times that ads on Google Display Network (GDN) were appearing on terrorist or pornographic websites, Google has been busy making announcements about how they're helping brands and being transparent with their metrics.
In a brilliant move to increase the data at users fingertips, or a desperate ploy to detract from the fallout from the revelations about GDN (delete according to your take on the Google ads debacle), Google have just announced two new metrics they'll be providing to AdWords users. They've also introduced a close variants feature which changes how exact match keywords work.
Unique Reach Metric
To show users how many people are really seeing their ad content, they've created the new 'unique reach' metric. This allows you to see the number of unique users and average impressions-per-user across…
Chart of the day: Search continues to be the number on source of referrals for fashion retailers
Search engines drive the highest proportion of visitors to fashion brands. Connexity, the e-commerce & consumer analytics company looked at the channels which drive the most traffic to two high fashion brands Ted Baker and Karen Millen.
Though they found the actual numbers varied considerably, the order remained the same. Search is followed by Social, Rewards and directories then Email. What is interesting about this chart is that while Search features so high, the search strategies for both brands are mostly the same.
If you do a brand search then the ads are quite indistinguishable. While they make every effort to make their clothes distinctly there's, they could follow this through to their search marketing via the use of lesser used ad extensions e.g. review & price extensions.
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Those using automated bid strategies should expect an increase in campaign spend and bids
We've spoken time and time again about how the shift to mobile is impacting ecommerce purchase behavior. Google has been banging the 'Mobile First' drum for some time now, but we still see the vast majority of conversions taking place on desktop despite the fact mobile now makes up a majority of ecommerce traffic.
What is happening is that consumers are browsing on mobile devices, making crucial decisions about their purchase, and then switching to desktop to convert. This makes perfect sense. Mobile browsing is great for getting ideas, but when you find something you want, you need something with a proper keyboard to input fiddly payment details rather than attempting to do it on a small screen.
Now that discovering and researching products on mobile and converting on desktop has become an extremely common purchase journey, cross-device journey…
A detailed tutorial on how to research your AdWords target keyword list to improve your ROI from PPC
Keywords trigger your ads. Building and maintaining the right list of keywords is vital to getting the best return on your paid search spend.
Keywords are organised into ad groups. You assign ad creatives (ad text) to these ad groups, which appear when triggered by these keywords. Therefore, knowing which keywords will perform best is important.
Keyword research is the process of building keyword lists, based on the frequency at which consumers search for these words and phrases.
Why Is Keyword Research Important?
Keywords are the nuts and bolts of your AdWords campaigns. They let you control your visibility in search results, as well as affecting the amount you spend.
If you’re setting up an account for the first time, it’s essential to build a robust keyword list as soon as you can. The quality of this list will…
Google AdWords scripts are an incredibly powerful tool for managing Google AdWords campaigns and automating laborious tasks.
AdWords scripts were voted the 3rd most useful Adwords optimization tool by a panel of 41 seasoned AdWords experts.
One of those tasks is A/B testing, where it can be incredibly difficult to keep track of when all of your tests have finished in large-scale Adwords accounts. However, split testing is essential for increasing your CTR, Quality Score and conversion rates.
In this article, I’m going to be explaining how you can use AdWords scripts to monitor and report the progress of your A/B tests, so you won’t have to trawl through your data to see when your tests have finished.
I’m also going to be showing you how you can use scripts that aggregate data, so you can reach statistically significant decisions on ads faster, where individually there would not be enough data. Furthermore, I’ll…
Make sure you don't fall foul of these common but expensive AdWords mistakes
When it’s used correctly, Google AdWords can be a fantastic way to drive relevant visitors to your website and generate new enquiries or online sales for your business. AdWords works well for all sorts of products/services and you don’t need a huge budget to get started. Plus, it’s quick and simple to set up a basic AdWords campaign even if you’ve never done it before.
And that’s where the problems start. Yes, it is very easy for a beginner to set up and run their own AdWords account, but if you just accept all the default settings and don’t take the time to properly understand all the finer points of how AdWords works, you’ll end up spending a lot and getting very little return on your advertising budget.
Here we provide a list of the top 10 most costly Adwords…
Expanded Text Ads re-write the Ad Words rulebook. Don't miss out on their benefits.
Google’s new Expanded Text Ads (ETAs) have been a real game-changer for pay-per-click marketers, rewriting the rules for AdWords best practice and forcing users to adapt. Almost doubling the character count allows greater opportunity to create engaging, unique content, and with Google reporting increased click-through rates of 20-30% during beta testing, it’s a development that PPC managers cannot afford to ignore.
The search engine giant will be shifting to the expanded format permanently, phasing out ‘standard’ ads by the end of January 2017. Any experienced AdWords marketer worth their salt will appreciate the need to lead the pack and nail their ETA game before competitors know what’s hit them, so here’s a brief guide to doing just that.
What inspired the change?
It’s been 16 years since AdWords…
Introducing Expanded Text Ads.
Previously, the standard AdWords text ads that appear at the top and bottom of Google search results had a headline of up to 25 characters, and then two description lines of up to 35 characters each. They looked like this:
or, if you put a full stop at the end of your first description line, Google would move that description line up to be next to the headline, and your ad would look like this:
With the introduction of Expanded Text Ads, advertisers can now have two headlines of up to 30 characters each, plus a single description line of up to 80 characters. So the total space you’ve got available to put your message across has leapt from 95 characters to 140 characters. That’s nearly a 50% increase!
The display URL that appears in the ads has changed too – instead of being…
How to avoid letting these PPC Myths Corrupt Your Marketing
Have you heard about some of these PPC (Pay Per Click) myths before? As so many businesses use PPC, it’s not surprising there are lots of myths about them. Over the years, PPC has changed and been updated. Some of the old strategies that were successful ‘back in the day’ are now outdated.
Common misconceptions have allowed many myths to spread and have negatively influenced how people understand PPC advertising.
There are many PPC myths out there so we’ve picked some of the most dangerous. The myths we’ve chosen are so believable, they have the potential to corrupt marketing strategies or stump success.
1. PPC guarantees instant and fast results
Some marketers quickly jump on the PPC train because they believe it will win instant results. In truth, sometimes you can see a rapid rise in traffic but it definitely does not guarantee positive results.
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How the behavior of search users is evolving
Google handles 2 trillion searches per year, but the way people are using it is changing. Last year we saw the shift to mobile pass the tipping point, with over half of searches coming from mobile devices. It was this shift to mobile that prompted one of the biggest PPC changes of 2016; the removal of side ads. As you can see from the infographic below, this has mostly boosted clicks on ads that appear at the bottom of SERPS, although also has meant more clicks on the top ads as well.
Thanks to JBH for creating this infographic…
