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.

2 Ways to Decrease Your First Page Minimum Bid

By Kye Mou June 6th, 2012

If you’ve ever browsed through your AdWords account, you’ve most likely encountered Google’s pesky keyword status, “Below first page bid”. This estimate is based on your keyword’s Quality Score and competition, and is the bid you’ll likely need to set in order for your creative to show on the first page of search results. Though these keywords are active, they’re most likely missing out on a large chunk of impressions, and potential clicks and conversions. Since this first page bid is directly linked to Quality Score, marketers that regularly experience high first page bid estimates will likely benefit from improvements to their keyword’s Quality Score. Today we’ll review two strategies for decreasing your first page minimum bid.

     AdWords

     Marin Enterprise

When adding a new keyword, you’ll notice that Google automatically assigns an initial Quality Score. Whether that score is high or low, it’s determined by the keyword’s historical performance for other advertisers who have targeted that same keyword. As a result of this assigned Quality Score, your initial keyword bid might be below the first page bid estimate. As a best practice, be sure to check the status of all your newly added keywords and ensure that you’ve set appropriate bids that are above the first page minimum. It’s critical that marketers do this, since a keyword’s initial performance will dictate whether or not its Quality Scores move above or below the assigned score. Give your keyword bids an initial boost to help facilitate a higher ad position. A higher ad position promotes a higher click-through-rate (CTR), which remains one of the most significant factors in improving Quality Score. Once your keywords have established their own Quality Score, hopefully better than what was inherited, reassess your bids. With higher Quality Scores, your first page bid estimates will have dropped, allowing you to bid less for the same ad position.

For keywords that have an established Quality Score, decreasing the first page minimum bid can be a long and difficult task. In addition to setting an appropriate bid above the first page minimum, marketers must take the necessary steps to increase keyword relevance to promote higher CTRs. Create an organized campaign structure that promotes granular groups containing a highly focused set of keywords. In addition, generate relevant and engaging creative to support your keyword set. Finally, assign appropriate landing pages that focus on providing the best customer experience. These tried and true best practices not only ensure that relevancy is maintained from impression to conversion, but will result in Quality Score improvements and decreases to first page minimum bids.

For additional best practices on improving Quality Score, 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.

Google Tweaks Phrase and Exact Match Keyword Behavior

By Kye Mou April 18th, 2012

Yesterday, Google announced changes to the way phrase and exact match type keywords will behave in AdWords. Traditionally, advertisers have had to compile large keyword lists to account for misspellings, plurals and other keyword variations. Starting mid-May, AdWords’ phrase and exact match keywords will begin matching close variants, including:

• Misspellings (“waterproof sunblock” will match “waterpoof sunblock”)
• Singular/plural forms (“bollard cover” will match “bollard covers”)
• Acronyms (“MLB” will match “Major League Baseball”)
• Stemmings (“single serving coffee” will match “single serve coffee”)
• Abbreviations (“st.” will match “street”)
• Accents (“cliché” will match “cliche”)

This level of matching is already baked into Google’s organic algorithm, but the impact it will have on search advertisers has yet to be seen. Initial Google testing yielded a 3% increase in clicks, with comparable CPCs, however those who don’t want the potential for more clicks have the option to opt out.

Click here for more information on this upcoming change.

Compelling Trends from Marin’s 2012 Q1 Report

By Kye Mou April 13th, 2012

Marin is proud to announce the release of our 2012 Q1 online advertising report. This report, which identifies significant year-over-year paid search trends, was compiled using data from over 1,500 advertisers and agencies who invest over $3.5 billion annually in online advertising through Marin.

At a glance, our study revealed an increase in click-through-rate (CTR), with cost-per-click (CPC) remained relatively steady. More specifically, we found a significant increase in CTR and a drop in CPC on Google. Some of our key findings include:

• 46% increase in Google click volume
• 14% increase in CTR on Google
• 4% increase in the share of clicks coming from Exact match

So what does all this mean? The increase in CTR coupled with a 12% lower CPC points to Marin users increasing their efficiency on Google. This finding is further validated by the increased usage of exact and phrase match type keywords, as users continue to identify and fill gaps using Marin’s keyword expansion tools.

Device targeting, specifically smart phones and tablets, continues to soar in popularity. Increases in click volume give evidence of the growth in consumer adoption. With smart phones and tablets showing higher CTRs and lower CPCs compared to desktops, mobile search should continue to be top of mind for advertisers.

Want to see other Q1 industry trends from 2012 with our recommendations? Download the full report here.

Google AdWords Algorithm Update and Your Quality Score

By Matt Lawson November 7th, 2011

About a month ago, Google announced the global roll-out of an update to the AdWords algorithm that increases the value of landing page relevancy and quality when determining Quality Score. Google predicted with these changes, some campaigns would see variations in keyword Quality Scores and ad positions, but most would not see a significant change in overall performance. At Marin, we decided to investigate.

We sampled a population of 240 accounts across our Marin Enterprise client base that had limited average bid movements, consistent keyword counts, and consistently received greater than 1,000 impressions per day. For these 240 accounts, we examined the daily impression-weighted Quality Score at the publisher account level.

From the sample accounts, we observed 12 accounts with an increase in Quality Score greater than 0.25.

When taking a closer look at two of these accounts, we see the spike in Quality Score occurred on 10/2/2011 – 10/4/2011. Furthermore, there was little change to Click-Through Rates during this time, which suggests that the increase in Quality Score was related to the quality of their landing page.

We also identified 15 accounts that had a week-over-week drop in Quality Score of 0.25 or more.

After further investigation into four of these accounts, we see the drop in Quality Score took place between 10/2/2011 – 10/4/2011, with minimal change in Click-Through Rates, indicating these accounts had landing pages that Google deemed to be less relevant, adversely impacting quality.

What our investigation and findings suggest:

• The updated AdWords algorithm has had limited impact on Quality Scores.
• Only about 11.25% of Google Accounts saw their Quality Score change by more than 0.25 as a result of the algorithm change.
• If you did see a decrease in Quality Score during the 10/2/2011 – 10/4/2011 timeframe, with little or no change to Click-Through Rates, consider improving your landing pages to account for this change in Google’s algorithm.

A Search Marketer’s Guide to Facebook Optimization

By Abbas Jaffer June 27th, 2011

Search-marketers extending their marketing expertise to Facebook will first learn that Search and Social are entirely different marketing channels.  At first glance, the differences are blatantly obvious:  keyword targeting versus demographic/ interest targeting, text creatives versus image creatives, landing pages versus fan pages, to name a few.  Despite these differences, there are also similarities – the core values of online marketing carry over from Search to Social. In this post, I will focus on the optimization aspect of the two marketing channels.

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Traffic & Branding Through The App Market

By Casey Fuentes June 17th, 2011

With the recent news that Android’s share of market has passed Blackberry and taken a larger lead against Apple, it makes us all wonder how large mobile can grow and when we should all jump into the mobile game as well.  There are many ways to get into the mobile space as an advertiser whether it is running ads on the search engine mobile sites, banners in apps, optimizing your own website for mobile, or even creating your own brand app.

Most advertisers pay to drive users to their mobile website through banners and ads in search engine mobile sites, but place minimal attention to using the same medium to drive traffic to their own brand apps. Sure, the app market is still young and you might think that there is nothing for you to gain by sending traffic to your own application or even in justifying that you should build one to begin with. Recent studies suggest that my previous statement could soon be false.  IHS Screen Digest reported that the app market (run by Apple, Google, Nokia, and Palm) is going to be worth over $8 billion by 2014, with a predicted 78% growth in 2011. If you have your own app, Google Adwords allows you to drive traffic to the Apple App Store or Android Market and claim your piece of the pie. Currently Apple is expected to retain 60% of the paid apps market but with the increased use of Android smartphones, the Android market is only expected to increase its market share to close in on Apple.

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Differences between Google AdWords and Microsoft AdCenter

By Michael Poynter June 9th, 2011

In January 2011, Microsoft adCenter owned a 30.7% core search market share. (Comscore Jan ’11) With adCenter now being the gateway to such an extensive amount of search traffic, running on AdWords and adCenter is now a must for any serious search marketer. Running on both advertising platforms comes with a good amount of intricacies that marketers should be cognizant of. Below is a breakdown of a few of the differences to be aware of when running on both platforms.

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