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

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.

Google Updates Changes to Rotation Settings

By Kye Mou June 1st, 2012

Last month Google announced a significant tweak to their “rotate evenly” creative setting. Specifically, campaigns using this setting would only rotate creative evenly for 30 days after the last creative was enabled or edited. After the 30-day period, creative would automatically optimize for clicks. This change caused quite an uproar within the search marketing community. Amongst concerns over the lack of an opt-out for this change and the limitations of a 30-day window for longer creative tests, Google responded today with an update to the expected changes.

In addition to providing search marketers with an opt-out of this change, Google will expand the even rotation period from 30 days to 90 days. Both changes will go into effect on June 11, 2012.

As a note, if Google experiences a large demand to opt-out over the next few weeks, the option will become available directly in the AdWords interface.

For more information on this update, click here.

How to Maximize Your Keyword Opportunities Using 5 Free Google Tools, Part 1

By Kye Mou May 29th, 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. Subscription-based keyword expansion tools can provide a quick way of generating new keywords, but still require manual effort and often lack granularity. These shortcomings make free keyword expansion tools very attractive. This two part blog series will walk through five free Google tools and provide best practices for maximizing your keyword expansion efforts.

Google Search Term Report

The Google search term (or search query) report is one of the most dependable keyword expansion tools available. Benefits of this report are twofold: marketers can add new keywords based on search terms that are relevant to and perform well in a marketer’s paid search program. Conversely, they can add negative keywords based on search terms that are irrelevant and result in unwanted clicks.
Keep in mind that your current keyword set already captures queries appearing in the search term report. As a result, a new bidding strategy, creative or both, should accompany newly added keywords.

For example, the query “mountain rock climbing” appears in your report as a top search term. It’s currently being captured by the broad match keyword “mountain climbing”, which exists in your account. Simply adding [mountain rock climbing] into your account won’t likely shift performance in one direction or the other. To properly expand into the keyword [mountain rock climbing] and analyze its performance separate from “mountain climbing” you must:

1. Create a new group and add [mountain rock climbing]
2. Set an aggressive max cost-per-click (CPC) to garner initial impressions and clicks
3. Add the negative keyword [mountain rock climbing] into the old “mountain climbing” group
4. In your new group, add a creative that includes the token “rock”. This will make your new creative more relevant to the newly added [mountain rock climbing] keyword

For newly added keywords, strategies like the one above can help increase Quality Score and click-through-rate (CTR) while decreasing CPC. As a best practice, use conversion tracking, in addition to cost metrics, to prioritize your keyword expansion opportunities. Just because a search term receives clicks, it doesn’t mean that it results in revenue. Enterprise-class solutions, like Marin Software, seamlessly integrate conversion tracking data with publisher click data to help marketers scale, prioritize and automate their expansion opportunities.

AdWords Help provides a quick walkthrough of how to run a search term report.

Google Keyword Tool

The Google Keyword Tool is a great way of determining potential traffic and competition for new keyword ideas. However, keep in mind that it’s in Google’s best interest for you to add any and all suggested keywords, since this tool favors quantity of keywords over quality of keywords. As a best practice, the Google Keyword Tool should only be used in conjunction with more robust and performance-oriented keyword-expansion tactics such as leveraging organic and paid search query reports.

Before adding a new set of keywords with Google Keyword Tool, utilize some of the tool’s more advanced features:

1. Copy and paste your keyword ideas into the Google Keyword Tool and select the appropriate match types
2. Select the option “Only show ideas closely related to my search terms”
3. Expand the “Advanced Options and Filters” window and configure appropriately
4. Under the columns dropdown, select “Approximate CPC (Search)” to reveal Google’s suggested max cost-per-click for each keyword suggestion
5. Click “Search” and take note of your “Search terms” results

Consider the Competition, Monthly Search volumes and Approximate CPC when adding new keywords and see if they align with your expansion objectives. For example, did you expect a particular keyword to receive more monthly search volume or cost less than $2 per click? Low-volume, low-competition keywords will likely come with lower CPCs, but may not result in many clicks or conversions. High-volume, high-competition keywords will likely achieve the opposite. Use the Approximate CPC as a benchmark when setting your new keywords’ max CPCs. Enterprise-class tools, such as Marin’s keyword expansion tool, automatically combine Google’s keyword estimations with converting organic and paid search query data, providing marketers with smarter, revenue-driving expansion opportunities.

AdWords Help provides a quick walkthrough of how to use the Google Keyword Tool.

Read Part 2 of our series for three additional Google keyword expansion tools.