Google seems to be integrating Google Offers into AdWords ads. In my search for sleeping bags for an upcoming camping trip, the top sponsored link on Google from North face highlighted a special deal below the ad with a link to view the offer. Clicking on ‘View offer’ takes you to the Google Offers page with a deal from North Face.
Do you keep checking on your keywords and adjusting bids to make sure they’re showing in top position? Do you run time sensitive seasonal promotions that your ads need to reflect? Do you keep checking conversions and ROI and lowering budget on campaigns that are under-performing? Then you’ll love ‘Automated Rules’ in AdWords. With automated rules you can make changes to campaigns, ad groups, bids, statuses, ads, and keywords based on your custom requirements. You’ll save yourself time and optimize your account based on your unique goals.
Setting up automated rules is easy. In your AdWords campaign management tab, click to ‘Automate’ as shown in the screenshot below and select what aspects of your campaigns you would like to create a rule for.
Next, you’ll want to specify your criteria, such as what the rule will apply to, action, requirements for the rule to take effect, and frequency or when the rule should start running. In the example below, I chose to lower budget by 40% on all campaigns where cost/conversion went above $32. You can select how often you want this rule to run and receive an email with details. Happy automating!
Are you looking to increase AdWords conversions and lower your cost per conversion? You should be using CPA bidding. According to AdWords, advertisers who use Conversion Optimizer ssee a 21% increase in number of conversions while decreasing costs by 14%. Instead if painstakingly managing ad groups and keywords bids, or purchasing costly software that does that, AdWords will do the work for you. You’ll still pay per click, not per conversion. But the system will optimize your bids for you to help you reach your set goals.
The tool is free of charge and in order to use it, you’ll have to be tracking conversions, of course. Additionally, your campaign will have to have accumulated at least 15 conversions over the past 30 days.To see if you are elgible and start using it, go to your campaign settings and under Bidding and budget click on Edit your current Bidding option. You will see a Focus on conversions (Conversion Optimizer) option.
If you are eligible and would like to use it, you will want to decide if you want to do Max CPA or Target CPA bidding. If you’re new to the tool, I recommend choosing the system recommended bid in order to keep your traffic stable. If you go much below the system recommended bid, you might get less traffic and fewer conversions. Plus, you can always adjust the CPA bids, as you see how your campaign performs.
Conversion optimizer users your campaign’s historical conversion data and also takes into browser information, geographic location, and other information to help you achieve your conversion goals. CPA Bidding is one of the most robust tools AdWords provides to help advertisers optimize and manage ROI. If you aren’t eligible for CPA bidding and are tracking conversions, you might want to consider another conversion focused tool AdWords offers called Enhanced CPC I previously blogged about here.
Have you noticed the new advanced location options under your AdWords campaign settings? Previously, your ads were targeted by either a physical location you selected or by a user query. For example, if you chose to to target the the city of Springfield, Illinois, someone would see your ads if they were located in Springfield, or if they were outside of Springfield but typed in a location specific query, such as ‘Springfield it help.’
Now, you have the option to further refine location targeting. Advertisers can now target by either physical location and search intent, or both. This is especially useful for types of businesses who find that they get lower value clicks from outside their target physical location, or for city names that exist in multiple different states. Springfield, for example, is a city in several different states in the US.
To enable this feature, go to your AdWords campaign settings and under ‘Location Targeting‘ click on ‘Advanced location options.’
comScore just released their March search engine rankings, and Google remains strong on top with 65.7% market share. Make sure to budget your ad spend accordingly.
Have you noticed that AdWords changed they way they show ad display URLs? They are now all lowercase, regardless of how you set-it up in your account. Before the change, you were able to inter-capitalize an ad’s display URL ExampleURL.com. After the change, it will show as exampleurl.com in your ad. Apparently, the AdWords team did internal testing and found that lowercase Display URLs help increase CTR. The data was conclusive enough to overturn the previous best practice of inter-capitalization.
AdWords finally released a feature I’ve been waiting for for years, a setting which optimizes your ads for conversions. You can find it by clicking on your campaign’s settings, under the ad delivery section.
Previously the options were to have the system optimize ads for CTR or to rotate them evenly. Because ads with the highest CTR do not necessarily convert best, I used to recommend most advertisers to set their ads to rotate, then manually pause those ads that are generating a lot of clicks but aren’t converting. That process was manual and time-consuming and AdWords has come up with a smarter way to optimize your ads based on what’s truly working for you.
To take advantage of this setting, you’ll need to have conversion tracking enabled in your account and you will want to create multiple ads per ad group so the system can run them against one another. The ad that is more likely to convert will start to be preferred by the system and will show more often. Have fun experimenting!
Some of you may have noticed that AdWords recently released a new tab within the campaign management section of the account called Dimensions. In this post I’ll discuss how to enable that feature and what some possible uses are for the data it displays.
Viewing Dimensions
Dimensions will not be visible by default, you have to select to view the tab within your account. To do so, go to your campaign settings, and click on the drop down menu to the right of the Networks tab, as shown in the screenshot above. After clicking on Dimensions, you will see an additional array of options to choose from, as shown in the image on left.
What should I care about dimensions?
Dimensions provide you an easy view to segment and view your AdWords data by the dimension of your choice for an ad group, campaign, or your entire account. One of my favorite options is to analyze how your account performs on different days of the week. If you’re concerned about ROI and have a tight budget, and the dimensions tab shows you that on Sundays your cost/conversion is higher than on other days of the week, you can choose to lower your budget on Sundays or pause your campaigns entirely.
Another view I found useful is to look at account performance over a period of several months. You will be able to see all of your statistics month-by-month and this can allow you to evaluate how the account has changed since you started implementing specific optimization strategies or special offers, for example.
I also found Destination URL data very useful, since you can quickly view how your different landing pages convert and which ones are most profitable. Really, Dimensions are another quick way to integrate and present reports and data you care about!
Business owners that are looking to grow their online presence often ask why they should invest in pay-per-click (PPC) ads when they could be getting free organic traffic. When considering how to market your business online, it’s important to keep in mind that paid and organic ads both have their advantages and disadvantages.
One of the main advantage of organic is that clicks are free. Also, more people click on organic than paid ads, and those clicking on organic results tend to be more educated. However, paid ads do have some important benefits over organic, and these factors should be considered before you neglect your PPC efforts.
Top 10 benefits of PPC ads:
For all of these reasons, businesses should consider paid search, in addition to organic optimization efforts. White both strategies have pros and cons, you’ll likely find that each suits a different business need and deserves a place in your marketing plan.
adCenter recently increased their negative keyword limits to ‘thousands.’ This is great news for those who have been optimizing their campaigns in preparation for the Yahoo search marketing and adCenter merger. Previously, advertisers were able to only add less than a 150 negative keywords. To start taking advantage of the new system capability, go to your campaign or ad group settings and add new exclusions.
Unfortunately, unlike with AdWords, in adCenter negative keywords still cannot be assigned a match type. If you’re curious about when you might want to assign different match types to your negatives, and want to read more about negative keywords, see my post on negative keyword best practices.
