Google Is Listening: Enhancing the Enhanced Campaign

By Kye Mou April 11th, 2013

On Tuesday Google announced that advertisers will soon be able to set mobile bid adjustments at the ad group level, in addition to the campaign level, for enhanced campaigns. This comes on the heels of Google’s release of two new ValueTrack parameters: {ifmobile:[value]} and {ifnotmobile:[value]}. Google also indicated July 22, 2013 as the start of the migration deadline, when AdWords will begin automatically upgrading legacy campaigns to enhanced campaigns.

These recent announcements shouldn’t come as a surprise to search marketers. Google has historically made adjustments to new AdWords features as market demands became more evident. (A recent example is last year’s update to the campaign ad rotation settings.) Sophisticated search marketers have been asking for additional enhanced campaign features to provide additional control and transparency for optimizing their paid search programs. Today, we’ll review the two recently announced enhancements to enhanced campaigns and discuss their importance to search marketers who operate in a multi-device world.

Ad Group Mobile Bid Adjustment

Before this Announcement: A mobile bid adjustment could only be set at the campaign level, which allows advertisers to boost desktop keyword bids for searches on mobile devices by -100% to 300% across the entire campaign.

The Ask from Marketers: Search marketers are used to granularity. From management to reporting to optimization, sophisticated marketers often desire to operate at the most granular levels possible, which often means making decisions down at the keyword level. The reason is that clicks, cost, conversions, and revenue data are all attributed at the keyword level; and in order to optimize bids and maximize performance, keyword-level bids needed to be calculated and applied individually.

The Updated Approach: Google will now allow advertisers to set a mobile bid adjustment at the ad group level. Once implemented, the same boost range, from -100% to 300%, can be applied to all desktop keyword bids within a given ad group for searches made on mobile devices. The campaign level mobile bid adjustment will be ignored if an ad group level bid adjustment has been set.

What It Means: The enhancement to allow group-level mobile bid adjustments provides search marketers with additional control over their enhanced campaigns and mobile performance. For advertisers that follow account best practices, where ad groups contain a small set of like or similar performing keywords, this enhancement should meet the requirements for most paid search programs. Although some search marketers may long for keyword-level mobile bid adjustments, keep in mind that the goal of enhanced campaigns is to simplify the way advertisers manage their paid search campaigns across device, location, and time of day. Group-level adjustments appear to be a reasonable and effective compromise.

{ifmobile} and {ifnotmobile} ValueTrack Parameter

Before this Announcement: Search marketers could only leverage one landing page across all devices rather than have the ability to direct users to optimized landing pages based on device. The other option was to remove keyword level destination URLs in favor of creative level URLs.

The Ask from Marketers: Screen sizes and user behavior varies significantly between desktop and mobile devices. Presenting users with a device-specific landing page is critical to improving the user experience and maximizing paid search performance. Consequently, advertisers wanted the ability to define two destination URLs at the keyword level in order to present the most relevant content and optimal experience based on the device the user is searching on.

The Updated Approach: The {ifmobile} and {ifnotmobile} ValueTrack parameters will enable search marketers to direct users to device-specific landing pages at the keyword level. Additionally, these new parameters enable the measurement of the effectiveness of campaigns by device for advertisers who are unable to leverage the {device} ValueTrack parameter.

What It Means: The ability to assign a device-specific landing page falls directly in line with Google’s approach to a multi-device world—helping advertisers reach consumers with the right ad experience based on device, location, and time of day. As users move across device, this enhancement will enable search marketers to remain relevant and engaging.

Google Is Listening

Clearly, Google is open to enhancing enhanced campaigns based on industry feedback. However, I wouldn’t expect any further changes to be announced ahead of the migration deadline as advertisers nail down their migration plans and establish revised best practices before heading into the holiday season. In order for enhanced campaigns to be a win-win-win solution (for Google, the consumer, and the advertiser), Google will need to continue collecting and applying market feedback, especially once all advertisers have migrated over to enhanced campaigns.

Google’s New “Enhanced Campaigns”: What It Means for Search Marketers

By Kye Mou February 7th, 2013

Yesterday Google announced the rollout of enhanced campaigns, a major AdWords product release that attempts to simplify the management of campaigns across devices. With enhanced campaigns, search marketers will be able to target consumers based on device, location, and time of day through a single campaign. However, for search marketers that currently leverage separate desktop, tablet, and mobile campaigns, Google’s enhanced campaigns will remove some of the control and transparency we’re used to having. Additional details on enhanced campaigns can be found here.

What Does This Mean? To understand the implications of Google’s enhanced campaigns, let’s review the benefits and concerns.

Benefits

• Mobile preferred creative: Search marketers will now be able to create mobile preferred ad creative that are delivered to users based on their device or when they’re searching.
• Consolidated and simplified bid management: Search marketers can now leverage bid adjustments to manage bids across devices, locations, time of day, and more from within a single campaign.

• Enhanced ad extensions management: Search marketers can now assign ad extensions at the ad group level and display ads across devices with the appropriate ad creative, sitelink, app, or extension, without having to manage multiple campaigns for every combination of device, location, and time of day. Furthermore, ad extensions can now be scheduled to turn on and off, such as during times when phone operators are unavailable.
• Advanced sitelinks management: Search marketers can now report on the performance metrics for individual ad sitelinks and monitor their approval status.
• New conversion types: Search marketers will now have the ability to track and report on calls and app downloads, enabling the optimization of campaigns based on these conversion types.

Concerns

• Device specific budgets: In combing all devices into a single campaign, budgets will also be combined, eliminating the ability for search marketers to set separate, device-optimized budgets across desktop-, tablet-, and mobile-only campaigns.
• Mobile-only campaigns: Without the ability to opt out of desktop/tablet device targeting, search marketers will no longer be able to leverage mobile-only campaigns. This may significantly impact advertisers, like mobile app and gaming companies, who only wish to advertise on mobile devices.
• Tablet specific optimization strategies: With tablet device targeting now combined with desktop, search marketers who have specific tablet strategies in place will lose that functionality.
• Bidding on mobile keywords: Since mobile bids are boosted by a percentage of desktop/tablet bids at the campaign level, search marketers can no longer calculate individual mobile keyword bids based on performance. Furthermore, bidding to a preferred position for specific mobile keywords to combat the limited SERP real estate on mobile devices is no longer possible.
• Bid multipliers: The requirement to layer bid multipliers based on device, location, and time of day introduces significant complexities for calculating optimal keyword bids. Furthermore, since bid adjustments are applied at the campaign level, separate time of day multipliers can’t be set for separate locations. For example: +20% for New York and +50% on Saturdays, and -20% for Chicago and -50% on Saturdays.
• Targeting mobile operating systems: Search marketers can no longer target campaigns to a specific mobile device or device operating system (i.e. iPhone, HTC, iOS, Android).

Google plans to roll out enhanced campaigns across advertisers over the next few weeks. As a result, advertisers may not have immediate access to this feature within their accounts. By mid-2013, all campaigns are expected to have been transitioned to enhanced campaigns.

Google Embraces the Marin “Cloner”

By Matt Lawson January 3rd, 2013

In 2008, Marin unveiled the industry’s first “Cloner.” Eliminating tedious manual efforts in spreadsheets, the Cloner allows advertisers to quickly copy campaigns in order to replicate campaign settings and keyword targeting across geographies and devices. With the touch of a button, campaigns, budgets, ad groups, keywords, and creative are instantly duplicated, saving search marketers countless hours each week.

Today, Google took a giant leap forward embracing tools vendors and the innovative idea behind the Marin Cloner. Until now, the AdWords API Terms and Conditions have restricted vendors from cloning campaigns from Google to competing engines such as Yahoo! or Bing. This morning, Google announced a change to their terms and conditions which allows for cloning across engines, providing advertisers with true portability for their campaign data and the ability to more easily manage ad campaigns across search engines.

Search marketers will no doubt be excited by this move, as they can now avoid the duplicate efforts required to manage identical campaigns across Google, Yahoo!, and Bing. But this change is good for more than marketers mental health! Ensuring data portability is good for the industry, because it puts marketers in control. Using tools like Marin, marketers can now more easily measure, manage, and optimize digital advertising campaigns across channels, publishers and devices from a single platform.

Look for this change to unlock a sea of innovative features which are yet to come, benefiting advertisers, publishers, tools providers, and yes, even Google as marketers see higher returns on their integrated marketing campaigns.

What Search Marketers Need to Know about Google’s Impression Share Makeover

By Kye Mou November 26th, 2012

This post is by Mason Garrity, Account Manager at PPC Associates. Mason got his start in PPC in 2006 at Kayak.com while still in college at Pomona. After graduation, Mason started an internet division for a New York City-based yellow pages company and went on to start his own agency to work with New York City-based startups.

Many of you may know that Google has been planning on making some big changes to their Impression Share (IS) algorithm and that the changes, to be implemented early this month, will impact historical IS data.

Here’s a breakdown of Google’s new IS developments:

1. “Distinct search and display columns.” My take on this: you should be segmenting your campaigns based on network already and therefore already have distinct search and display IS metrics! If you aren’t  you have much more fundamental things to tackle in your account than Search and GDN Impression Share.
2. “Hour of day segmentation.” This sounds a little more useful and pretty good on the surface – more data is always better, right? Of course, but only if it’s actionable. Just because you can slice the data in your accounts in more ways, doesn’t mean you always should – be careful working off of insufficient data! Where this should help is with time-of-day auction conditions in campaigns where you are trying to maximize IS. You’ll now know if there are certain hours of the day where you are losing IS, and you can make the proper bid adjustments in your Ad Scheduling settings.
3. “Filters, charts and rules.” To me, this sounds like the most valuable improvement. If you have tranches or even specific queries that you want to have 100% IS (or as close to as possible), being able to set up rules adjusting bids to ensure this happens would be very helpful. We’ll see how these features are actually rolled out by Google.
4. “Accuracy.” I’m always a fan of increased data accuracy.

The Google reps I’ve heard from haven’t provided many specifics on when exactly these improvements will be released – the one date floated was Nov. 3, but from the looks of my accounts, that wasn’t the case. The good news is that if you were planning on using some historical IS numbers for reporting or presentations and haven’t yet grabbed the pre-Oct. 1 info yet, you can still access it. So go ahead and download any data that you think you may need before it’s gone for good! The latest AdWords blog update suggests it was sometime earlier this month.

At PPC Associates, our process is centered on the Alpha-Beta Campaign structure, which allows us to do some pretty neat things with IS. Our Alpha campaigns are our high-value, high-volume queries in exact match single keyword ad groups. These keywords are also exact-match negged out across the rest of our Beta Campaigns, ensuring forced mappings. What’s awesome about that is when Google gave us Ad Group level IS data at the start of 2012, they were essentially giving anyone who runs their campaigns in this manner query-level IS data since 1 AG = 1 Query with guaranteed mappings. Being able to ensure that you have maximum coverage on your high value queries is great from a management perspective, and it lets you reassure your clients that you are not missing out on any clicks on their most valued queries.

Impression Share is a powerful metric that should be incorporated into your regular checks and reporting, and can be used to find holes and opportunities that you are not fully taking advantage of. Once your account is really running on all cylinders and you have your fundamentals locked down, you can start to do some advanced things with IS, like creating Opportunity Reports to show your clients.

Stay tuned for Google’s imminent changes and share any interesting ways you plan on using these new features.

- Mason Garrity

Bing Ads Introduces Sitelink Extensions. What’s Different?

By Kye Mou October 17th, 2012

Last week, Bing Ads announced the release of their extensively piloted Sitelink Extensions. Seemingly identical in functionality to Google’s Sitelink Extensions, this feature is available today via the Bing Ads user interface, Desktop Editor and API. For more information about enabling and managing Bing Ads Sitelink Extensions, click here.

During the pilot phase, advertisers leveraging Bing Ads Sitelink Extensions experienced an average increase in click-through rate (CTR) by 20%, compared to Google’s reported average increase of 30%. In comparing Bing and Google search results, the disparity between reported increases in CTR might be due to the frequency of Google displaying a more favorable sitelinks layout.

Bing

Google

The most notable difference in sitelinks layout on the above search for “kay” was Google’s use of a two-column format, as opposed to Bing’s single-line format. Though Bing does display sitelinks in a two-column format, it didn’t occur very often in the searches I performed. Also, because of the single-line format, the Bing ad was forced to truncate the sitelinks, leaving out the link for “The Leo Diamond” landing page, which the Google ad does display.

Bing

Google 

Conducting another search, this time for “macys”, shows an even greater disparity in layout. Again, the Bing ad is delivered with sitelinks in the single-line format, but this time with four links. However, this Google ad maintains the two-column format, but expands to show five sitelinks. It’s interesting to note that Google highlights the keyword “Macy’s” in their ad, but Bing does not. Also, Google opts to include an icon along with the “Sale & Clearance” sitelink, most likely drawing more attention and generating more engagement.

What stands out the most between the two sitelink layouts is the amount of real estate Google ads command in the search engine results page (SERP). In both of my examples, the Google ad takes up nearly twice as much space as the Bing ad. It’s my guess that the difference in reported CTR increases has something to do with this; with higher reported CTRs for ads that more frequently command more real estate. Though this is obviously a very small sample size based on my initial observations, I’m interested in seeing if Bing will continue to make tweaks to their sitelinks algorithm to encourage more paid clicks. If you’ve recently implemented Bing Ads Sitelink Extensions, please share your thoughts or findings in the comments section below.

Introducing Bing Ads and the Yahoo! Bing Network

By Kye Mou September 10th, 2012

While football fans were celebrating the first games of the 2012 NFL season, Microsoft was making headlines by announcing Bing Ads as the new name for Microsoft Advertising adCenter. The new name and some of their recently released improvements are all part of a concerted effort by Microsoft to improve the paid search experience of managing and optimizing Bing Ads campaigns.

In the spirit of name changing, Microsoft also introduced the Yahoo! Bing Network, which is defined by the combined search marketplaces of Yahoo! Search, Bing, and their partner sites. This announcement shouldn’t be too surprising as most search marketers already refer to the publisher and network as Yahoo! Bing. However, my guess is that consumers will continue to refer to each search engine separately as Bing and Yahoo!

Though Bing Ads simplifies a name that is consistently used inconsistently, I think the adverse effects of this change from a search engine optimization (SEO) perspective will likely be felt. In other words, we’ll have to see how this change affects the way we find adCenter…excuse me Bing Ads…related best practices and industry news. Leave a comment or follow us on Twitter (@MarinSoftware) and let us know what you think of these changes.

adCenter Introduces Creative Rotation Setting. Finally.

By Kye Mou August 23rd, 2012

Yesterday, at long last, adCenter announced the release of their ad rotation function. Users can now select between two familiar options: to optimize ad rotation for clicks or to rotate ads more evenly. Unfortunately, since these options are only available at the group level, users will have to edit their groups one by one in order to leverage this new functionality. And because this ad rotation setting is only available through adCenter online and the adCenter API (version 8), users won’t find it in the adCenter Desktop Tool just yet.

So what does this all mean? In the past, new adCenter creative would initially rotate evenly until a significant number of impression and clicks were received. After significance was reached, creative would be shown preferentially based on their achieved click-through-rate (CTR). With the release of this new functionality, search marketers can now test and optimize their creative based on performance based metrics such as conversion rate, conversions per impression, ROI, ROAS or Margin—rather than just CTR.

It’s interesting to note the differences in the rotation settings between adCenter and AdWords:

• adCenter allows their rotation setting to be adjusted at the group level, whereas AdWords only allows adjustment at the campaign level.
• adCenter does not place a time restriction on their rotation setting, whereas AdWords will automatically default to optimize for clicks after 90 days (unless opted out).
• adCenter does not allow users to optimize for conversions.

The second point was explained by adCenter on their blog post, and appeared to call out AdWords for placing a time restriction on advertisers:

“Your ads will continue to serve based upon the settings you choose without any time restrictions because we acknowledge that different keyword/ad copy combinations need different amounts of time to establish a performance history.”

I would be interested to see how evenly adCenter rotates ads, since AdWords is notorious for delivering more impressions on higher CTR creative, even when the “rotate ads more evenly” option is selected.

As a best practice, adCenter recommends that advertisers pay close attention to impressions and average position when introducing new creative. Use these metrics as indicators for new creative that may achieve lower CTRs, which can result in lower ad rank and a decrease in impressions. For additional best practices, download The Search Marketers Guide to Creative Testing and Optimization.

Taking Flight: An Online Marketer’s First Take on Twitter Ads

By Kamal Thakarsey July 16th, 2012

As an online marketer, one of my biggest challenges is expanding my reach into new channels without exceeding my ad budget. About a year ago, we were approached by the folks at Twitter to consider an ad buy. While I personally love Twitter as a way to promote brands, offers and news, it did not seem economical for me to invest a sizable monthly budget on an unproven lead generation channel. Fast forward to May 2012 when Twitter invited us to participate in Twitter Ads, a pay-as-you-go advertising model similar to AdWords. This new program offers a great low-risk channel to reach millions of new, potential customers. In this post, I’ll be sharing my first impressions of Twitter Ads and what other online marketers can expect to see.

Promoted Accounts is a great tool for finding new followers at a relatively low cost. Promoted accounts show up in the “Who to follow” box on the left-hand menu. Twitter will promote your account to users that are similar to your existing followers or that may be interested in certain keywords associated with your business or industry. To get started, I simply set a maximum bid and daily budget. Since I only pay per follower, I’ve found Promoted Accounts to be fairly cost effective. I definitely started on the conservative side when setting my bids, but have gotten more aggressive as I’ve become more comfortable with a weekly volume and cost-per-follower that makes sense for my business goals.

Promoted Tweets allows you to expand your tweet’s reach past just your followers. You can select up to 5 of your previous tweets and promote them in 2 different ways. The first option, which also drives more volume, is promoting tweets to users who share similar characteristics with your followers. The second option allows you to promote tweets by targeting specific keywords that users are searching on within Twitter. Like Promoted Accounts, you set a maximum bid, daily budget and only pay each time someone clicks or engages with your tweet.  Let’s say your original tweet went out to your 5,000 followers. With promoted tweets, you have the ability to deliver your message to 50,000+ users over the course of a few weeks. In addition to the added impressions, you can expect to see a bump in followers and re-tweets, further expanding your reach. I’ve been changing up my promoted tweets on a regular basis to keep the content fresh and playing around with my bids to find the right balance between volume and daily budget.

Setup and reporting is a cinch. It only took a credit card and approximately 10 minutes to select the appropriate tweets, keywords and budgets to get my account live. Over time, I’d like to see new targeting features and recommendation tools built in to help grow and scale my account for reaching new, potential customers. On the reporting side, Twitter provides some insightful metrics. I can report on the impressions, clicks and re-tweets my campaigns are receiving and dissect analytics data collected about my followers, including: common interests, location, gender and other companies they tend to follow. I’m sure Twitter will include additional metrics in the future, such as devices and points of engagement, to give marketers a greater understand of what’s working and what’s not.

While still in its infancy, Twitter Ads already provide a cost effective channel for expanding my reach towards new, potential customers. However, I expect costs to rise as more advertisers enter this emerging market.  Over time, I imagine Twitter will offer additional ad formats and tools for making smarter business decisions, faster. But for now, this easy-to-use, low maintenance marketing vehicle provides great value towards expanding my online marketing reach.

Google Allows Users to Mute Display Ads

By Kye Mou June 29th, 2012

This morning, Google announced a new feature that will be rolling out across display ads over the next few weeks. In the upper right corner of select ads, a small [X] will now appear allowing users to click and “mute” ads from that campaign from being shown to them again. Google believes that this will be a win-win-win within the display ecosystem: users control their ad experience, advertisers don’t pay to show irrelevant ads and publishers display better performing ads.

Based on what Google is telling us, one irrelevant ad could cost online marketers from showing ads in an entire campaign ever again to that particular user. It seems extreme to prevent all ads within the campaign from showing again, rather than just the group containing the muted ad. However, the same ad could be shown again by a different ad company, or the marketer could run a separate campaign targeting specific content. Though muting isn’t a 100% guarantee that users won’t see that ad again, one thing is for certain, online marketers will need to ensure, now more than ever, that their display campaigns are focused and highly relevant. Hopefully, user engagement with this new feature and changes in ad performance will dictate future updates, if any.

For best practices on managing and optimizing contextually keyword targeted display campaigns, read part 1 and part 2 of our You, Google and the Display Network series.

How to Maximize Your Keyword Opportunities Using 5 Free Google Tools, Part 2

By Kye Mou June 4th, 2012

As paid search programs mature, it becomes more and more difficult to achieve incremental increases in traffic and revenue. Consequently, search marketers lean heavily on keyword expansion to drive more traffic in hopes of acquiring more revenue. Last week, we reviewed the Google Search Term Report and Google Keyword Tool. Today we will walk through three additional keyword expansion tools and provide best practices for maximizing your keyword expansion efforts.

Organic Search Traffic Report

Keyword expansion opportunities aren’t limited to paid search traffic or existing keyword sets. Organic search traffic provides insight into clicks and conversions occurring outside the scope of your paid search program. Adding converting organic search terms into your account can garner additional clicks and provide incremental increases in conversions and revenue.

The notion that paid search ads cannibalize organic clicks is somewhat unfounded and outdated. Including paid search ads with organic search results can lead to a 50% increase in clicks, even when that ad is accompanied by a position #1 organic search result (Google study).

Conversion tracking solutions, such as Marin Tracker, have the functionality to generate organic search traffic (or search query) reports. Google Analytics is free and provides online marketers with access to such reports.

On-Site Search Term Report

The queries that visitors enter into your site’s search bar provide insight into the products and services that interest them. Mining on-site search term reports for new keywords is a quick and simple keyword expansion strategy.

Keep in mind that your customers don’t use the same words as you when searching for your products and services. Unless the appropriate broad match keywords have been added to your account, these types of words might not be captured by your paid search term report. As you make these reports a regular resource for keyword expansion, you might find that many of your onsite search terms fall outside the reach of your paid search keywords.

Your analytics package should have the functionality to generate on-site search term reports. Google Analytics is free and provides online marketers with access to such reports. For more information on how to set up Site Search for Google Analytics, click here.

Google Insights for Search

Similar to the Google Keyword Tool, Google Insights for Search should be used in tandem with performance oriented keyword expansion tools. Google Insights for Search allows marketers to trend up to five sets of search terms to compare search volume patterns across geographic regions, product and service categories, seasonal time periods and Google properties. Simply copy and paste your new keywords into Google Insights for Search.

Gauging interest using Google Insights for Search allows you to build keyword variations around popular terms and reallocate budget based on interest and demand. For example, search volume for the keyword “mountain climbing” peaks during the summer months. In addition, searches on this keyword are higher in western regions where there is more mountainous terrain. To stay ahead of competitors, you might consider increasing bids on this keyword during the summer and further increasing it across campaigns that target western states.

For more information regarding Google Insights for Search, click here.