Google’s New Display In-Market Buyers

About Display In-Market Buyers

If you’re running display campaigns through your Google AdWords account, you may have noticed a new targeting option called Display- In-market Buyers (ROI) in your interest categories section.

In-market segmentation is a new audience targeting method that allows advertisers to target users who are actively looking to buy certain products or services in the near future or have high propensity to buy if they find the right product or offer.

Google classifies users being in-market by:

– Identifying content that indicates user-intent to purchase an item. For example, someone browsing consumer reviews and price comparison sites.
– Considering how often and how recently a user visited these pages.
– Identifying contexts where users have previously clicked on ads related to the product or service of interest and have converted.
– Considering common search keywords that led users to the page.
– Looking at display impression data or 3rd party data or both.

Display In-Market Buyers Best Practices

The set it up, I recommend creating a separate display only campaign dedicated to this targeting method, so you can use a different budget for this test. You’ll find Display In-Market Buyers in your Interests & remarketing section as you create an ad group and choose how to target ads.

The current available targets include categories such as “Autos & Vehicles” and “Education” and many others, as well as sub-categories if you’d like to make your audience more specific. If you do not see a category that’s relevant to you, make sure to check back as Google has been adding new categories since the launch of this feature.

I suggest keeping the bids more conservative than search, since you’ll be reaching a much more wide pool of users.

Make sure that you add image ads, and if you’re planning on using text ads, create separate ad groups for the text and banners, so you can use different bids.

As with any campaigns, check in on this campaign to make sure it’s bringing you the right types of visitors, and optimize by adjusting bids, excluding placements, and trying different ads.

So far, I am seeing a large amount of traffic from this strategy, but conversions have not been even close to search. It will likely convert worse than your remarketing campaigns, but could be a nice source of additional traffic for those who are looking to brand or reach new pools of users.

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Enhance Your AdWords Ads with Review Extensions

What Are Review Extensions

With Google’s recent announcement that ad rank is now factoring ad extensions, it is now more than ever vital to incorporate any relevant enhancements to your ads, such as sitelinks and call extensions. One of the more recent additions to the ad extensions menu are Review Extensions, which allow you to highlight reputable third party reviews and accolades. They can help you entice users to clicks on your ads by highlighting an endorsement and help expand your ad with additional real estate. If you’ve got some praise, why not flaunt it?

Reviews appear below your ad description in top ranked ads and link to the review source, such as a magazine article. If a user clicks on your review extension, you won’t be charged for a click that’s going to your review source, unless this user clicks on your ad as well.

How To Set-Up Review Extensions

Just like with sitelinks, you can set-up review extensions at the campaign or at the ad group level. When you’re choosing your review extension text, make sure that it is not too similar to your ad copy and potentially redundant. Use that space to communicate what someone else raved about and make sure you are accurately representing the original source.

To get started with review extensions, log-in to your AdWords account and go to tab Campaigns. Go into a specific campaign, click on tab Ad Extensions and choose Review Extensions from the drop down.

review_extensions

Click on +Extension to create a new review extension. You can either use an exact quote from your source or you can paraphrase text. Make sure to state your source in the Source field and link to the third-party URL — your review source cannot be your own website.

Here are some additional guidelines and restrictions:

-Your review should not be about a specific product or service, but about your business as whole. It should also not be just a description of your business.
-The review also needs to be less than a year old.
-Individual customer reviews and testimonials are not accepted.
-Aggregate reviews and rating from websites like Yelp.com are not allowed.
-Press releases cannot be used.
-Currently, review extensions are only available in English.
-Do not repeat your business name in the review – one review extension I created was disapproved for this reason.
-Use … ellipses to show missing words or phrases.

You can find the full list of requirements and restrictions here. There has been quite a bit of confusion with what counts are “reputable” with some seemingly prominent websites getting disapproved. Make sure to check on your review extensions to see if it’s been approved. If you notice that it’s been disapproved, get in touch with AdWords support to find out why, as no disapproval reason is currently listed in the AdWords interface.

Just like with other ad extensions, your review extensions won’t show every time a user is searching. You can review impressions and other performance metrics in the Ad Extensions tab by choosing the Review Extensions drop down.

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Happy Holidays!

Use Google’s Bid Simulator To Estimate The Impact of Bid Changes on AdWords Conversions

Are you considering changing your AdWords bids but are worried about making the wrong choice? Wondering what would happen if you increased your bid from, say $1 to $1.20, and what difference it would make?

Adjusting bids based on traffic and conversion patterns is essential to optimizing your PPC campaigns, and all successful advertisers modify their Max CPCs regularly to reach their goals. AdWords has for some time now provided data on the impact of bid changes on impressions and clicks, but what anyone tracking conversions really wants to know is what the impact will be on sales or leads. AdWords advertisers can now make some more educated guesses using Google’s updated bid simulator.

How The Bid Simulator Works

The bid simulator works with your Search campaigns only by analyzing data over the past 7 days, taking into account information like your competitors’ bids and traffic you received. It then estimates how results might have differed if you used a lower or a higher bid. For example, you can estimate how many more clicks and conversions you might have received if your bid was 10% higher. If you track conversion values, the tool will also include that metric.

If your campaigns are limited by budget, the tool will not be available and it will also not work with auto bidding or Conversion Optimizer (CPA Bidding).

How To Use The Bid Simulator

You can find the bid simulator at the ad group or at the keyword level. In your AdWords account, go to your Campaigns tab and navigate to an ad group. Hover over the Bid Simulator graph icon below your Max CPC bid and click on it to bring up the tool and explore the different bid options.

Google will provide some metrics based on a variety of Max CPCs you could choose, or you can enter a different Max CPC you are considering by clicking on Use a different bid.

Compare the current bid metrics to what your results would look like if you used a different bid and decide if the change in bid makes sense for you. For example, if after increasing the bd, the cost would go up significantly without a high enough change in conversions or conversion value, you might want to leave the current bid as is.

Keep in mind that the estimates you are seeing are just estimates and future results will vary, as search patterns are constantly changing and do vary week over week. Your competition is likely changing their bids as well on an ongoing basis.

Make sure to explore the available data when considering changes to your campaigns. If you do adjust bids, continue to monitor your conversion numbers, especially budget and ad spend if you increased your bids significantly.

Automate AdWords Campaign Management with Dynamic Search Ads

Do you sell a large number of products that are becoming difficult to manage in Google AdWords? If so, you might benefit from Google’s Dynamic Search Ads, a campaign type that helps automate the keyword and ad creation process. Dynamic Search Ads automatically matches up user queries to relevant pages on your website based on your website content. Each headline and Destination URL is customized to match the keyword a user is searching on.

To get started, click on + Campaign in your AdWords account and choose option Search Network only. On the next step, select campaign type Dynamic Search Ads and fill in your target settings, including desired locations, budget, and default bid.

Under Ad extensions, make sure setting Use my website content to target my ads is checked, enter your website domain, and choose your website language.

Next, you’ll create your first ad group and write a dynamic ad. You just need to write default description lines — AdWords will automatically fill in the Headline and Destination URL based on each query.

Under Auto targets, check All pages to include your entire website. It’s a good best practice to start with an “All pages’ ad group and create additional, more targeted category ad groups to refine your ads and bids within Dynamic Search Ads.

My recommendation is to run Dynamic Search ads in parallel with your standard search campaigns. While the campaign is largely automated, it does require some optimization. For example, review and adjust your bids based on performance, and make sure to exclude irrelevant queries by reviewing the search term reports. Continue to experiment with ad description lines and rotate multiple ads within each dynamic ad group to find text that works better.

Finally, Dynamic Search Ads may not work for all types of websites. It’s a campaign type well suited for larger websites with more than 20 pages.

Setting Up Google’s New Shopping Campaigns

Google’s new Shopping campaigns have launched to a limited number of AdWords advertisers. With the new Shopping campaigns, Google is looking to streamline product campaign and bid management as well as reporting, all a big need with the old Product Listing Ads (PLA) campaigns.

Everything looks pretty similar to what you may have seen when creating other campaign types, through there is a new Shopping channel option, where you can select to show products from your online site, local stores, or both.

Once you have chosen your basic campaign settings, you’ll have the option to create a promotion.

After creating a promotion, you’ll be taken to your Product groups, which will have your All products group and the option to add additional targets.

Clicking on the + sign will take you to a screen where you’ll be able to select product categories as well as more granular targets such as product type, brand, item ID , condition, and more to allow you to bid on each target based on how profitable it is, for example. You can also exclude a product type from triggering ads.

One interesting feature that you can locate in your Shopping campaign settings is Campaign priority. The default setting is Low, but if you set it higher, Google will prioritize this campaign if you happen to have the same product in another PLA campaign. Generally, your bid is what determines which ad will show, unless you set your Shopping campaign to a higher priority.

Additionally, Shopping campaigns will provide competitive benchmarks, such as impression share, and a bid simulator that will help you optimize bids and budget based on competition. Make sure to customize your columns to include Competitive metrics.

Shopping campaigns will eventually replace PLA campaigns so make sure you familiarize yourself with these new features that can help you run more profitable campaigns. If you have any questions, feel free to contact me.

YouTube Video Ads Best Practices

Google’s YouTube video ads are not just a branding tool for large advertisers anymore, they have become increasingly effective at driving direct sales and leads. If you have a YouTube channel, you should be testing video ads, which you can set-up through Google AdWords. In this post, I’ll share some strategies for getting started as well as best practices.

Connecting YouTube Channel To AdWords

Your YouTube channel with existing video content can be re-utilized to reach massive numbers of potential users. Do you have videos that explain your key product benefits or testimonials from happy customers? Use this videos to share your message with highly targeted audiences. When thinking about which videos to promote, Keep the videos short – no more than 60 seconds, otherwise users will skip or tune out.

Before you can run video ads through Google AdWords, you will need to connect your YouTube channel to your AdWords account. Follow these steps:

In your AdWords account’s campaigns tab, click to create a new campaign +Campaign and choose Online video.

Click on the Linked YouTube accounts section on the left, then on +Link YouTube account and enter your YouTube log-in information. You will now be able to pick and choose from your video library.

YouTube Video Ads Best Practices

Targets

– Start with broad targets, such as “All topics” and “All interests” and let ads accumulate impressions and clicks. Once you have data on individual topics and interests, create new targeting groups and set higher bids for top performers.
– Set low initial bids (such as $0.05) and adjust based on results.
– Set-up a keyword based targeting group to reach users using YouTube search keywords.
– Stay away from demographic targeting, at least not on its own as the only target.

Ads/Videos

– Target all 3 recommended formats:

1. In-Stream
2. In-Search
3. In-Display

– Create multiple videos ads to test the effectiveness of different assets.
– Pause videos that do not meet target metrics, once you have sufficient data.
– Include call-to-action overlays. If ads do not perform, try alternate call-to-action overlays.

Remarketing

– Set duration to 540 days for remarketing rather than 30 days.
– Create a remarketing target group to show videos to users who have previously visited your website.
– Create a display campaign in AdWords with text and image ads to target video remarketing lists that are automatically pre-populated for you. For example, you can target users who viewed specific videos or users who subscribed to your channel.

Keep in mind when evaluating video ads that the sales cycle could be a bit longer than what you’ve been seeing from your search campaigns. As with any campaign, monitor results, adjust and repeat!

Bing Ads Now Supports Call Extensions

If you use Bing Ads, you may have noticed a new feature – Call Extensions- which Google AdWords has supported for quite some time now. This is an important feature for any business that relies on phone calls for sales and leads.

Bing’s new call extensions are very similar to Google’s, allowing advertisers to associate a phone number with their ads. To set them up, go to your Campaigns tab in Bing Ads and click on ad extensions.

Click on the Call Extensions link and follow the prompts to add your phone number. You’ll be able to select a specific campaign to associate a phone number with, as well if you’d like to show your phone number on all devices or on smartphones only.

You can choose to show both your website and the phone number or only show the phone number on mobile devices. I prefer giving people the option to decide if they should call you versus click on your website.

If you choose to use Bing’s forwarding number, you’ll be charged $1 for calls to this forwarding number.

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