Tag: google adwords

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SEO

New Options for Fine-Tuning AdWords Bidding

Last month at Google Marketing Live, Google revealed updates for bidding controls in Google AdWords. Marketers should see those become available over the coming months as they roll out. Let’s take a closer look at what the new options are.

Set Conversions at Campaign Level

Until now, you’ve only been able to set conversion goals at the account level. Being able to set conversions at the campaign level allows you to fine-tune your approach. For instance, if you have campaigns where a download is the desired action, and other campaigns where requesting a demonstration is the conversion goal – it’s hard to track with the current setup. Once the new feature rolls out, you’ll be able to assign distinct goals to their corresponding campaigns, so you’ll be able to use conversion-based smart bidding strategies and have better conversion reporting.

You’ll also be able to group conversion actions into conversion action sets to apply at the campaign level.

Smart Bidding

Smart Bidding is a group of automated strategies that use machine learning to optimize for conversion or conversion value in all auctions. In order to use Smart Bidding, you must have conversion tracking enabled, unless you’re suing ECPC with Display campaigns. You have different ways to track conversions, so it’s important to be sure you’ve set up conversion tracking correctly for the type of conversion you want to track.

If you want to track things such as website purchases, button clicks, newsletter sign ups or any other website action, you must set up conversion tracking for your website.

If you want to track customer installs of your app, or in-app purchases, you must set up mobile app conversion tracking.

If you want to track phone calls, you’ll need to choose to track calls from ads, track calls to a phone number on your website, or track phone number clicks on a mobile website, depending on your needs. You can choose one or all of these options.

You can also set up conversion tracking for offline conversions such as phone calls after an ad you ran or visits to your store.

If you want to track multiple kinds of conversions, set up a different conversion action for each type of conversion you want to track. It’s also possible to set up multiple conversion actions for each source. For instance, you can set up an action to track purchases on your website, along with another one to track newsletter signups.

Google introduced the “maximize conversions” bidding strategy in 2017. Now, it’s expanding on that strategy to add “maximize conversion value.” The maximize conversions option aims to generate as many conversions as possible within your budget, the new strategy aims to optimize to get the greatest conversion value within the budget.

The available contextual signals to use with smart bidding are:

  • Device
  • Physical Location
  • Location Intent
  • Weekday and Time of Day
  • Remarketing List
  • Ad Characteristics
  • Interface Language
  • Browser
  • Operating System
  • Demographics (Search and Display)
  • Search Network Partner (Search Only)
  • Web Placement (Display Only)
  • Site Behavior (Display Only)
  • Product Attributes (Shopping Only)
  • Mobile App Ratings (New Feature Coming Soon)
  • Price Competitiveness (New Feature Coming Soon for Shopping)
  • Seasonality (New Feature Coming Soon for Shopping – More Below)

Conversion Rule Values

Values will appear within the coming months to allow flexibility in assigning values to each of your conversion actions. You’ll be able to set the conversion value rules based on factors such as audience, location, and device.

Seasonality Adjustments with Smart Bidding

Current smart bidding strategies already aim to account for seasonal spikes in ad campaigns. But, smart bidding for shopping campaigns will add seasonality signals, as well as price competitiveness. Google will offer an option to fine tune seasonality adjustments in line with your own promotion calendar. This means you’ll be able to schedule adjustments as aligned with your promotions to address higher conversion volume.

We’ll first see seasonality adjustments roll out for Search and Display, and later this summer, we’ll see them become available for Shopping ads. This data informs Google’s conversions predictions model, so you’ll only have this option when you’re using conversion-based bidding strategies.

Why This Matters

Google AdWords still allows for manual bidding, but Google has been downplaying this ability for a while now. According to Google, more than 70% of their advertisers are now using automated bidding. In this case, Google is giving their users more controls. The new features are meant to allow advertisers to fine-tune based on their own goals when it comes to using smart bidding strategies.

Of all these updates, the campaign-level conversion settings are likely the most significant, but all of them offer increased flexibility so you can tailor your conversion and bidding strategies to your specific business objectives surrounding each of your campaigns.

While it may take a few months for all of the new features to roll out to all AdWords accounts, these additional features and controls give us greater flexibility to adjust PPC strategies as needed for our business goals. Ultimately, this allows for better use of budget and should provide a higher ROI for those who use it correctly.

If you’re interested in learning more about how you can use Google AdWords to grow your business, but would rather not administer the account yourself, let’s talk. The team here at Sachs Marketing Group specializes in running PPC campaigns so all you have to do is discuss what your goals are, and we handle the rest.

Categories
SEO

Google Breaks Silence: Top 3 SEO Factors

Google Webmasters has started a new video series designed to dispel SEO myths – called SEO Mythbusting. The first episode debuted May 15th, and in it, Martin Splitt, one of Google’s Webmaster Trends Analyst speaks with his guest about how search engines work. As part of the discussion, he discusses how Google chooses relevant pages for its millions of searches every day, and the three most influential factors that webmasters need to consider when attempting to rank for any given keyword.

How Google Determines Relevance

Splitt says, “We have over 200 signals to do so. So we look at things like the title, the meta description, the actual content that you’ve got on your page, images, links… All sorts of things. It’s a very complicated question to answer what ranks you best, but yeah… we look at a bunch of signals.”

When asked about the top three things that someone should consider, Splitt responds with content, meta data, and performance.

Content is King – Number One Ranking Factor

“So… us being developers, originally, you probably want me to say, oh use this framework or use that framework… that’s not how it works.

You have to have really good content. And that means you have to have content… that serves a purpose for the user.

It’s something that users need and/or want. Optimally they need it and want it, like ice cream.

So, if your content says where you are, what you do, how you help me with what I’m trying to accomplish, that’s fantastic.”

Focus on the purpose of the page and build the content around that, rather than focusing specifically on the keyword.

If someone is looking for a Blue Soccer Ball, Google tends to rank product pages that are exact matches for Blue Soccer Balls. Google knows users are happier with pages that are direct matches to what they are looking for.

In the case of product page, the purpose is to provide accurate information about the specific item for sale. For a better user experience, add the ability to compare products.

When it comes to searches related to a topic rather than a product, Google ranks pages a bit differently, which is why many online businesses struggle with their SEO. It can be hard to take the focus away from the keyword and see the purpose of the page.

That’s where taking the time to match user intent to the keyword phrase matters. If you write content based on the phrase itself, rather than the stage of the buyer journey that someone would use for that phrase, you’ll miss the relevancy mark.

Meta Data

“So the second biggest things is [to] make sure that you have meta tags that describe your content, so have a meta description because that gives you the possibility to have a little snippet in the search results that let people find out which of the many results might be the ones that help them the best. And have page titles that are specific to the page that you are serving. So don’t have a title for everything. The same title is bad.

If you have titles that change with the content that you are showing, that is fantastic. And frameworks have ways of doing that. So consult the documentation but there’s definitely something that helps with the content.”

This means you need to pay special attention to the title and meta description. Using a template and automation can make it look and feel like cookie cutter content – which isn’t the best approach. But, tools like the Yoast SEO plugin use placeholders that make sure the title and meta descriptions are unique, and still follow automation.

For example, Yoast will take the WordPress post title and will automatically use it as the page title, with the site name appended to the end. Unless you create a custom meta description, it will automatically pull the first 160 characters of the blog post to use. You also have the option to create a unique page title for the meta data. This is particularly helpful if you want to create a blog post headline to encourage clicks, that doesn’t necessarily feature your keyword – because you can create the variant that features your keyword in the actual page title, instead of using your WordPress page or post title.

For years, the SEO community has understood that the meta description itself is not a ranking factor, but with the word from a Google employee that a meta description is part of the top three things to consider – even ahead of links. It’s a fairly good indication that Google has changed something.

Performance

Your website’s performance has been a top SEO factor for a long time. John Mueller, a senior Webmaster Trends Analyst at Google has said that as a ranking factor, performance (page speed) does not override other factors. In a Webmaster Hangout, Mueller says:

“…the good part is that we have lots of ranking factors. So you don’t have to do everything perfect.

But that also means that you run across situations like this where you say, Google says speed is important but the top sites here are not so fast therefore it must not be important.

So for us it is definitely important. But that doesn’t mean it kind of overrides everything else.

You could imagine the fastest page you can think of is probably an empty page, right? But an empty page would be a really terrible search result if someone is searching for something really specific.

It’s really fast but there is no content there. The user wouldn’t be happy.

So we have to balance all of these different factors. The content, the links, all of the signals that we have and kind of figure out how to do the ranking based on this mix of different factors that we have.”

Ultimately, because performance is a soft ranking factor, if you’ve nailed everything else, and the user experience will suffer because Google chooses not to show this site, you may still rank well even if your site speed is lacking a bit.

If the user expects to see a slow website, then that’s what Google will display.

A better way to look at it is performance is a top SEO factor, but it’s not often a top algorithmic ranking factor.

Splitt says, “Performance is fantastic, we’re talking about it constantly but we’re probably missing out on the fact that this is also good for being discovered online.” Google wants to be sure that people clicking on your website are getting the content quickly, so it’s not just about making your website faster, but making your website more visible to others, too.

While the full Google algorithm will never be released to the public, SEOs have been working for years to identify what influences rankings. Most of us had a pretty good idea about how content and site speed do influence rankings – and we use this knowledge to help our clients. I’ll be keeping a close eye on the Mythbusting show to share more insights with you as they come along.

Categories
Digital Marketing

PPC Beyond Google AdWords: Worth the Investment?

When it comes to pay per click (PPC) advertising, the first thing most marketers think of is Google AdWords. And that’s okay, because it works. And it works well, if you know how to optimize the campaign to get the best possible result. (See my post about keyword tiering if you’re looking for a new strategy.) It works because Google holds the largest portion of the search engine market, but it’s important to remember it’s not the only option.

 

Start Working with Bing

Using AdWords is a wonderful way to drive traffic (and hopefully sales) to your ecommerce business, but if you’re not dedicating a portion of your budget to Bing, you’re missing out. That’s where most of the search volume that doesn’t go to Google goes –so if you can’t catch your audience on Google, go to Bing to find them. This is especially helpful if you find your AdWords ROI diminishing.

If you’re already running campaigns on AdWords, Bing has an import option, so you don’t have to spend a lot of time recreating campaigns. And, as an added bonus, many keywords have lower bids on the Bing/Yahoo network than they do in AdWords.

 

Look Into Other Ad Networks

Yahoo Gemini: This lesser used option allows a range of ad types to target users across devices and platforms. It’s based on user intent, which makes it great to generate revenue, increase brand awareness, and promote your apps.

AdRoll: This is a popular retargeted programs. It supports Google’s display network, in adition to its own ad network. Though AdRoll’s prices are a bit high, the conversion rates typically are, too. Beyond retargeting, AdRoll now offers programmatic display, email retargeting, and “AdRoll Onsite” to provide personalized popups, which help push people through your funnel.

Advertising.com/AdSonar: If you want to run ads on premium websites like AOL.com’s network (think Huffington Post and the like), CNN Money, Slate, and CNN Money, this is where you need to be running campaigns.

AdBlade: This is another premium network to help you reach over 300 million users. One major draw back is that it uses a cost per thousand viewable impression (CPM) bidding model, rather than a cost per click (CPC) model. With this approach, you’re paying each time the ad is served, regardless of whether someone actually sees it or clicks it. That means you may or may not have a chance to earn your investment back – and it can yield a much lower ROI than CPC campaigns where you only pay for the ad when someone clicks it. Though it claims to be premium advertiser, the site doesn’t publicly list where your ads are served. You do not have the option to choose which sites your ads are displayed on – the system will do it for you based on where it believes your ads will perform the best.

Amazon: Ideal for ecommerce merchants who use Amazon, advertising here gives you the chance to feature your product in sponsored shopping ads, which send users directly to your products on Amazon. There’s also premium services to help you drive traffic off Amazon, but I always recommend people start with the Amazon Seller platform to create keyword campaigns to drive people to your products on Amazon.com. Once you have some traction there, you can upgrade to the premium services.

Infolinks: This is another user intent and real-time engagement ad platform. Since they are focused on that real-time engagement factor now, users are shown relevant ads based on what and where they are searching. Advertisers can choose from six types of ads:

  • inarticle – “User-initiated expanding ad”
  • infold – “Search and display, above the fold”
  • inscreen – User intent focused using interstitial ads
  • inframe – “Display ads with an edge”
  • intext – Native ads presented in a page’s text
  • intag – Display valuable keywords based on the page content

 

Go Social

Social advertising is done on a PPC basis, and expands your reach beyond showing up in search engines, while still ensuring your ads show on highly trafficked websites. In many cases, you can use actual content from your social channels, such as status updates, as part of your advertising, which allows you to blue the lights between advertising and social media content. Think about how many suggested posts you’ve seen on Facebook that look just like they are a status update from one of your friends. How many of those have you clicked?

Facebook: Advertising here isn’t just about getting more likes on your page. Yes, you can use it for that, but you can also use it to drive traffic to your website, or to remarket to people who’ve been to your website, but haven’t made a purchase. There are a variety of ad types, including video, mobile, and shopping ads.

Twitter: Like with Facebook, advertising on Twitter can be used for more than getting new followers. You can use it to drive traffic to your website, increase brand awareness, get people talking about your business, and amplify your reach with quick promote. You can target based on a number of demographics, including: location, language, gender, interest, device, behavior, keywords, and even followers of certain accounts.

LinkedIn: Advertising here is ideal for those in the B2B sector. There are plenty of targeting options, including job titles, and business type or job type. You can choose to display ads in the feed so you’re more focused on content, or you can choose to display text-based ads in the upper right hand side of the screen.

Pinterest Buyable Pins: This is another good option for ecommerce businesses. Pinterest says 87% of pinners have made a purchase because of something they’ve seen on the platform. It’s easy to think that people wouldn’t use the network to actually shop, but the opposite seems to be the case. Using the buyable pin format makes the pin blue, and includes the price tag. You’re still in control of the shipping and such, but shoppers can buy on the web and from their mobile devices with ease. And if you want to advertise those products, you then promote those pins. The ads are naturally included in the platform so they look and feel like the rest of the content experience. All you have to do to get started is pin the content to your own profile, and then you can promote it in a few clicks.

Instagram: Like you can run ads on YouTube with the Google AdWords platform, you can run ads on Instagram from within the Facebook power editor. You can run photo or video ads, or carousel ads where users can swipe to see additional photos or videos within a single ad. It’s also possible to run ads within Instagram Stories. You can use these ads to drive awareness of your products, services, apps, or business. You can also use them to drive traffic to your website where they can learn more about you, or use them increase sales, visits to your ecommerce store, or app downloads.

 

Worth it? Yes!

It is definitely worth experimenting with PPC campaigns outside of Google AdWords. If you don’t have much of a budget and can’t afford to run things on more than one network at a time, create a plan that allows you to adequately test each network. Run several variations of ads on each network so you can use the analytics data to determine if it was the ad content or the network itself that made a difference in your overall results.

It’s important to remember that while it’s worth it to deviate from Google AdWords, not all ad networks are created equally. If you find the ROI is consistently low, stop spending money with that network, and pour that portion of your ad budget into a network that is bringing you great results.

What networks besides Google AdWords do you use? Tell me in the comments below.

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