We’re listening……..

Posted on November 11, 2011 by Helen Brown

By Helen Brown

As I’m sure that all of our users are aware, there is a feedback function on our site so our customers can give responses to the questions as they are answering them. Good or bad, we take this feedback seriously and all of the information sent to us whether questioning the sentence construction to the accuracy of the information is thoroughly reviewed by our team. We always notify our users when we apply a change that they have suggested, and we also get in touch to give help and guidance if we feel that the feedback is not accurate or relevant to the question. We do our best to give an appropriate level of support within our feedback system, and we are grateful that our users take the time to message us with their thoughts.

Recently when reviewing feedback there have been a few queries addressing the validity of certain questions, specifically within our Fundamentals and Search resources. I would like to take this opportunity to explain a little further how we sort through the feedback, and why we apply certain changes quickly and ‘hold out’ on others.

First of all, it is important to know a few things about the exam that you will be taking. Whether Fundamentals, Search, Display or Reporting and Analysis, all of the learning material can be found in the Google learning centre. It’s a valuable resource which is very easily accessed and extensively detailed. Our practice resource and the real Google exams are based on the material that you will find in the learning centre.  BUT! some of the information in the learning centre details certain features of the AdWords interface that are now retired. Whilst we all know that these features have been retired, it still remains. Whilst this information is still held in the learning centre by Google, it can still appear within an exam and therefore we feel that it is still important to feature in our practice resource. When we receive a piece of feedback of this nature from a user within the AdWords community, we always check with the learning centre to see if the information can still be found on the specific subject matter, and remove/edit the question (or not) dependent on our findings.

We do take note of the changes and in the interest of keeping our resources as relevant to the exam as possible we do regularly check for the changes and edit/remove questions as necessary (we regularly write and add new questions to replace the questions that become irrelevant with AdWords progress too!) Also, our team do regularly sit (and pass!) the exams ensuring that we are up to date with any exam changes and also with our knowledge. I hope that this helps to address any concern over the learning material and exam.

I would also like to take this opportunity on behalf of team iPass to express our gratitude to our users for their kind messages of thanks and for the high standard of reviews that have been submitted in recognition of the quality of the resource and the support that they have received whilst using the website. We really like to receive this positive feedback, we all work hard to maintain the standard of the site from our tech/design team who keep the servers fit and well and continue to boost new functionality to the site, to our question authors/reviewers who are working hard to keep the resources up to date and our email support team who are always at hand to help too. :-)

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Contextual targeting by topic

Posted on October 14, 2011 by Helen Brown

By Helen Brown

When using the Display network to advertise it is very important to think about how to best reach your audience, and decide the most appropriate way you can get the attention of these valuable Internet users. The Display network features some comprehensive and in depth targeting options and earlier on in the year Google launched topic targeting on the display network. Using this targeting feature will further aid us in gaining the attention of users, by means of selecting topics and sub topics for targeting our ads. Using topic targeting will enable you to show your ads to a broader audience and get your advertising message across more quickly, compared to keyword contextual targeting alone, where the serving of your ads is based on your list of chosen keywords. It allows your ad to be matched to the subject matter of a page and not just specific wording . However, as this will most probably cause an increase in your ads delivery and traffic to your site, it is important to take this into consideration in terms of your campaigns budget. You can also choose to exclude certain topics if you want to ensure that your ads are not served on pages with certain topics, or if you find that some of your chosen topics are not performing well.
The topic of a web page is determined by a ‘crawler’ analysing the keywords and the frequency in which they are used, where on the page the words are placed and the font sizes, and also the language of the page plays a part too! As the crawler searches a page, targeting will be at the page level and not at the site level. An important thing to remember is that some topics can be quite diverse on a page, as pages can contain multiple topics. This is where you will need to think about topic exclusions, so that you can ensure that your ads are appearing for only the most relevant pages. To get an idea of where to start with topic exclusions, you can view your reporting section of your account.
There are a wide variety of topics to target (or exclude should you wish) with over 1750 topics and sub topics to choose from.
In terms of setting up contextual targeting by topic, its very simple. Within your campaigns tab, you will see a sub tab ‘Topics’. (If you don’t see this, click the menu drop down at the end of this row and select ‘Topics: Display network only’ and click apply.) After clicking the ‘Topics’ sub tab, you will need to click the box ‘add topics’. You will then be presented with a list of topics and sub topics to choose from by clicking ‘add’, or you can search in the search box located at the top of the list. Google advise to remember that if you click the top level topic, this will add all of the sub level topics too. If you wish to remove a topic, you can do so by clicking ‘remove’ or ‘remove all’ as appropriate. Some of the advised best practices when starting with topic targeting are to start a separate campaign for your topics in order to allow ease of control over your budget. If you wish to have in depth reporting it is a good idea to include sub topics within the topics, and also ensure that your topics and sub-topics are relevant to your ads. If you want precision with your targeting, use topics and keywords together. Always remember to save your chosen topics.
If you wish to exclude topics that are not performing well after analysing your reporting statistics, or if they are unsuitable for your advertising needs, this action can be taken at the campaign and the ad group level. There is a button beneath the ‘add topics’ section in your account labelled ‘exclusions’, click this and then ‘add exclusions’. You will be presented with two boxes, one for ad group level and one for campaign level, where you can exclude your chosen topics and sub topics as necessary.

During the webinar it was discussed that ad planner is considered a good way of getting inspiration for choosing topics, as it is great way of learning about your target audience. Go to http://google.com/adplanner and you can start to search a wealth of valuable information. There are two tabs available after opening the tool -
Search by site: There is so much to be learned from this page from traffic statistics to demographic information just from entering your sites URL, but of particular interest will be the ‘sites also visited’ and the ‘audiences interests’ sections of this page, as they can be used to detail your audiences online activity and this could be a great help in terms of thinking about choosing topics.
Search by audience: This is a good way of defining your audience by means of selecting the geographical area in which they are located, their language, different demographics from age, gender and household income etc. Also you can enter sites that your audience is likely to visit and keywords that you think they are likely to use search as this online behaviour is useful to better understand your audience. Its also possible to filter the site results you will get as ad planner does show statistics for any site on the Internet. Therefore you can choose to select ‘In Google Display Network’ under Add Items > Site Characteristics. You can also filter the results to show for sites that are related to a specific topic.
When the site results are returned to you, there will be a lot of information to consider and digest, from placements to page views and reach % etc. As the focus of the webinar was topics, Google advised to focus on the category column for the site theme as this is a good way of getting ideas for topics for your chosen audience.

However you choose to target your campaigns there are extensive options available, I hope this post is useful to anyone who wants to try topic targeting on the Google Display Network. Good luck!

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Understanding Quality Scores Webinar

Posted on September 23, 2011 by Helen Brown

By Helen Brown

We are all familiar with the quality score metric in our accounts, but how well do we all understand what this means for us? How does a well (or low) performing quality score affect an account? This week I have viewed the AdWords webinar “Understanding Quality Score” and I am going to dedicate this post to discussing the importance of paying attention to this metric, and also how to start addressing the issue of a low quality score.

The basic idea behind the quality score metric is for it to be a measurement of a keywords relevance in comparison to its ad text and also to the given search query. Keywords play an important part within your account as they can effect the ability of an ad to display and also the ads position.
There are two types of quality scores to think about within your account.
Although you will not actually be able to view the first type as an actual statistic, your auction quality score is calculated every time your keyword matches a search query. The score is a unique score and it is given for each query.
The second is your keyword quality score. This is based on a figure ranging between 1 – 10 and is designed to be a guide of how a keyword would be expected to perform in an ad auction. Google advise the following figures as a guideline when considering your keyword quality score-

A score of 1 – 4 is classed as poor performing
5 – 6 is classed as well performing
7 – 10 is classed as very well performing

The clear purpose to quality score is to keep the equilibrium with regard to relevance between the users, us (the advertisers) and also Google. They want their users to keep using their search engine, we the advertisers want the most relevant traffic to visit our websites and the people searching want the most appropriate results returned when they enter their search queries. Makes sense!
A user who searches for the product or service that they want will be happy and have a positive experience when they get what they required from their search quickly.
From our point of view, we need to think of maintaining a high quality score in a few different ways, as quality score is responsible for deciding whether or not the ad is in the running for the ad auction. It also decides where on the results page your the ad will appear in relation to other ads. When you think in terms of your costs, having a high quality score will enable you to maintain a good position and the amount you need to bid should be less. If you have a low quality score, you can expect to see a high first page bid.
There are many components that contribute to quality score, but there are a few in particular that we need to be mindful of. Click through rate is considered the most important factor contributing to your quality score. Relevance of keywords to ads in an ad group, and search queries are very important, and also the quality of your landing page needs to be high. Your site content must be relevant to your ads, it must be easy for users to navigate and considered ‘transparent’. Be clear about what you are doing and selling, and what you do with any personal information collected and how it will be used etc.

If you find that you have a low quality score, it is important to identify and understand why this has happened and also to work towards rectifying the issue. There can be a number of reasons as to why you can have a low score. During the webinar, a list of reasons were suggested and discussed as to why an account can have low quality scores, and that around 99% of the time that a low quality score could be attributed to one of the following reasons-

Poor landing page quality,
Low CTR,
Poor historical performance,
Recent changes that have been made to the campaign,
The ads not receiving enough impressions or clicks.

An efficient way of finding out about this is by hovering over the speech bubble next to your keyword(s) within the keywords tab of your account. This will give you a diagnosis with quality score and landing page information. From there, you can decide your best course of action and start to rectify the issue.
You may find that you need to review policies and guidelines to make sure you are compliant, or that you need to start assessing your keyword relevancy and use for example keyword insertion, or maybe even delete under performing keywords in order to increase your CTR. A search term report is a good place to start when refining your keywords (you can find this from within the keywords tab > see search terms).
Assess the changes you have made to your account, do not be afraid to revert your changes if you find that they are not working.

In summary, evaluation of your keywords and statistics is key to maintaining a good quality score. However, Google advised at the end of this webinar that sometimes, even when you have done everything correctly, you may still not see a perfect quality score. Don’t be disheartened with a quality score of 6 – 7 because this is perfectly acceptable. I hope this helps to give a better understanding of the subject and also helps anyone striving to improve their quality scores. Good luck!

Posted in AdWords, Display, Search, Webinar | Comments Off

Ad Extensions webinar

Posted on September 16, 2011 by Helen Brown

By Helen Brown

Whilst we all know that AdWords is an extremely effective way to get our advertising message across, wouldn’t we all like more visibility? Of course we would!

So, Google created ad extensions. A great way of increasing online visibility, giving the ability to display ads along with other formats such as maps, pictures, telephone numbers and also allowing us  to highlight their specific pages of relevance on our sites. This should generate and boost interest in the products and services we offer, by means of highlighting our most valued unique selling points.
Ad extensions literally work as an extension of our existing ads, enabling users to gather more information at first glance. This will in turn make our clicks more valuable and hopefully increase conversion rates too………….. and all of this at no extra cost!
BUT it is essential to have high quality scores if you want to use ad extensions, in order for this feature to work for you, you will need for the quality of your ads to be significantly higher than other ads in the ad auction.

Ad extensions come in a variety of different formats. In this post I am going to feature site links, location extensions, phone extensions and product extensions. All extremely useful, all performing a valuable action within our advertising campaigns.

Site links are additional links to your content. You will see site links displayed with search based ads, and using them will allow for an additional 4 links per ad, this will give your ad more visibility. It allows you to target multiple relevant landing pages, which will help your users in finding the relevant landing page quickly with less clicks. They can be seen with two formats; a one line site link with 1 – 4 additional links; a two line site link, although this is not as common as these are used for only the very best ads. You can also get 1 – 4 additional links with this too.
Site links give a user more landing page options and are more likely to direct a user to specific information such as a promotion that they are interested in. They also allow you to ‘segment’ your users before they enter your site, and will shorten the users route to making a purchase.
To enable site links, you will need to first enable the ad extensions tab. Within campaigns, go to the sub tabs and you will see a drop down. Click ad extensions. Select “View = site links” from the drop down menu and select new site link. Select “+ New extension”. Select the campaign that you would like to add the site links to. You can specify up yo 10 site links, you should add them in order of appearance. From the 10 site links that you provide, a maximum of 4 will be shown based on priority you enter them in and also the character length of the links, a maximum of 35 characters. Google advise to keep the text short as this will get better results with users. When thinking in terms of links, it is always best to use your most valuable pages.

Location extensions allow you to give additional business information with your text ads such as an address or telephone number. The ad will appear as normal, the extension appears on google.com, the search network and other properties such as google maps (a text ad will show, or an enhanced ad with a business icon and map marker that will expand to show a business image. If a user clicks on the map marker, a information window will expand to give additional information about the business). If used on display the ads will appear as sponsored links and can contain 2 – 4 lines of text. They can also show on mobile devices if they have full Internet browsers. They allow you to combine your business name, address information, and phone number with your text ad, and is a great way to promote your business brand, products and services that you provide. You can associate your business with a specific location or multiple locations should you wish.
You can use location extensions at the campaign level and the ad level-
Ad the campaign level: Under ad extensions, go to locations and check the box next to “extend my ads with location information”. Then, select one or both of these options-
1. Use addresses from an existing Google places account
(select this option to link your Google places account to your campaign. The addresses from your places account will be shown with your ad when relevant to do so)
2. Manually enter addresses.
(You can add up to 100,000 addresses and they too will be shown when relevant to do so)
At the ad level: this is for one address and one specific ad. You should first navigate to the ad group that you want to edit, click the ads tab and then the edit icon next to the ad that you want to edit. Next, click “always show with one address”, and select an address from the list. Click close. Google advise to remember that an ad level Location extension will over ride a campaign level location extension, and that it will only show for a relevant ad.

Phone extensions allow your potential customers to click your ad and call your business when your ad appears on a mobile device, it allows you to create an ad extension and add a telephone number to your ad text. This type of extension comes in two ways dependant on the circumstances of your business:
If you are a large business with a national telephone number or your calls go through a contact centre, you should use phone extensions, as this makes it easy for a user to call your number directly from the ad itself.
If you are a business with an actual location and address such as a retail shop, you should use location extensions, as this allows the user to click on the ad and go to your website OR they will also be able to click the call link and call your business directly. No more searching for a pen and paper or trying to remember a telephone number, just one click, its very convenient and it’s very easy!
If you wish to use phone extensions, first you will need to choose the appropriate campaign and check from the settings tab that you have selected “mobile devices with full Internet browsers” which you will find under the devices section of the settings tab. This will allow the number that you are going to add to be click-able. Next, navigate to the extensions tab. From there you will need to select “phone extensions” and click “new extension”. From there you can add your business telephone number and also the country where the telephone number is based. Google advise that you will need to make sure that you check the box that states “call only format” to make sure that only the telephone number is click-able.

To use Product extensions, you will need to have and be familiar with a merchant centre account. You will also need to link your merchant centre account with your AdWords account. To do this: from within your merchant account click settings > AdWords, and then enter your 10 digit customer I.D which you will find at the top of your AdWords account, and click “add”. Next, from within the AdWords interface select “product extensions” within the ad extensions tab. When you select new extension you will see that the merchant centre account will appear in the drop down menu. Product extensions will then allow you to display your products in Google Search. You can set up to 10 filters per campaign to make sure that specific products are showing with specific ads.
There are two formats for product extensions, the first is a + box format. This expands a + box which will enable a user to learn more about the products featured with pictures and prices. There is a 30 character limit on this format. This instantly gives the user more information about the products and will make clicks more valuable as the user is much better informed before they click through to your website. I feel that this is a really exciting ad format, I feel that images get a good response, people can see exactly what to expect for their money.
The second format is text only, this tends to show less often than the picture format discussed above, it only shows for the highest performing ads and has a 50 character limit.
All of this can be managed from your merchant centre after the link with your AdWords account takes place, and products will update automatically in your ads as this feature will choose the most relevant products to display. Also, product extensions will only show when the users query directly matches the products that you have to offer.

In terms of reporting, you will be able to see all of your statistics from the ad extensions tab. You can choose to segment the information displayed and find out what part of the ad received the click e.g was it the actual ad extension or was it the heading?

These are some really great ways to get your website and business some extra visibility and valuable traffic, I hope that we all have great success with implementing them! Good luck! :-)

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Conversion tracking and search funnels webinar.

Posted on August 26, 2011 by Helen Brown

by Helen Brown

 

This week, I’ve attended the Google Conversion tracking and search funnels webinar and I would like to share my findings with you.
Conversion tracking is an extremely valuable tool that we can all use to monitor the success of our advertising efforts. It’s important to learn how effective your advertising is, and how much return you are getting on your ad spend. Conversion tracking is a free tool that is available within your AdWords account from the reporting and tools tab.
Something to consider before setting up your conversion tracking………….What actions will you deem to be valuable on your website? Are these actions sign ups, downloads or purchases?
Also, when a customer completes this valuable action (conversion), what page will they see? A thank you page will show a customer that they have successfully signed up or that their purchase process is completed.
When you have correctly followed the process to set up conversion tracking on your AdWords account, conversion tracking will log these behaviors that you have deemed valuable as conversions within your AdWords account. It will let you see the campaign, the ad group, keyword and URL that lead to your site. You can check the cost associated with each conversion, this will give you a good idea of which campaigns and ad groups are giving good results and a good return for your advertising investment.
To set up a new conversion within conversion tracking, go to the reporting and tools section of your account. Select conversions from the drop down menu, click new conversion. You will need to give this conversion action a name and a purpose, and click save and continue. The next step in this process is to decide the security level of the conversion page, http or https.
There are a few other detail boxes which are optional to fill in, such as a revenue for your conversion figure and tracking indicator settings. After this, you need to click ‘save and get code’. At this point, HTML code will be generated and this code needs to be copied and pasted into the appropriate conversion page on your website (get your friendly webmaster to do this for you, if you are like me and cannot complete this part yourself!), it has to appear within the <body> </body> tags of your website.
Once installed, and after a user clicks on your ad and completes the action that you desire, the code will track this action and report the data within your account as a conversion.
You should check to ensure that the conversion tracking code is working properly in your web page. If the code is incorrectly installed it will not report any conversion data in your account. There are a few ways of checking this-
You can visit your thank you page, view the pages source code and check to see if the conversion tracking code is installed (you may require assistance from your webmaster for this, I did!)
You can choose to wait for a conversion to occur and check the tracking status column on the conversion tracking page. If it is working it will state reporting, if the code has not ‘fired’ yet due to no conversions taking place it will state unverified. (Please note, this can also be a sign that the code has not been incorrectly installed so do not assume that this is strictly the case!)
You could complete a test conversion yourself, run a search, click on your own ad and navigate to your thank you page.
Your conversions will show in two pages; within the conversions page in your reporting and tools tab and also within your campaigns tab.
In order to view conversion tracking data within your campaigns tab, you will first need to check to ensure that the conversions data boxes are checked within columns. Click this button and check the appropriate boxes and remember to click save. You will now be able to view conversion data within the reports section of your AdWords account. The data is down loadable, as are all of the other reports within your account. Just click the download arrow icon, add the appropriate report name, select the file format in which you wish the report to be created, decide who will be the recipient(s) of the report and click create.
Google advise maximising your opportunity for conversions by ensuring that your landing page is directly relevant to your ad, clearly and simply laid out, trustworthy to users and also easy to navigate.
If you are using Google analytics it is possible to import your analytics goals and transactions into the AdWords interface, but please note you can only do this if your goals within analytics have received conversions that are subsequent to an AdWords ad click. Go to reporting and tools, click conversions in the drop down menu and you will see the option to Import from Google analytics.
There are a few other steps that must be completed before you can import goals.
Your AdWords account and analytics account must be linked so that you can apply cost and click data back to your analytics account.
You will need to make sure that your cost data is applied by clicking the check box under the apply cost data heading within analytics settings > profile settings > profile information.
Within your Google analytics data sharing settings, you will also need to click to share your Google analytics data (with other Google products only).
You will need to enable auto tagging in your AdWords account, within account preferences you will need to check under the ‘tracking’ heading that this is enabled. This passes the ‘gclid’ (which is a unique reference number or ‘identifier’) with any AdWords clicks so that analytics knows that this click originated from an AdWords ad.
And last but not least! your ad must have at least one AdWords goal completed within the past 30 days.

Once using conversion tracking you can choose to use the conversion optimiser, but conversion optimiser can only be used with existing campaigns that have received at least 15 conversions in the last 30 days, as your past conversion data is required in order for the system to be able to place bids appropriately.
You can enable conversion optimiser on your selected campaigns from the settings tab of your campaign, go to bidding options and click edit and you can choose ‘focus on conversions’ (conversion optimiser). You will be asked to set your maximum cost per acquisition. After completing this action and when looking at your ad groups tab you can edit the max CPA from there should you wish to do so, as your max CPC column will now show as your max CPA column. It is good practice when using conversion optimiser to compare your  CPA and conversions before and after using the conversion optimiser to track your success.

One last thing to think about………………
Its not just the conversion that we need to gather information from. We can also find out lots of information about what lead the conversion occur. From the reporting and tools section, select conversions in the drop down menu. On the left side of the conversion tracking page you will see a link ‘search funnels’. After clicking this link, it is possible to find out information such as the path that a user has taken prior to a conversion (and so much more information I could go on forever!)This information can tell you about the search that proceeded the click etc. After all, your keywords, ads and campaigns all play a valuable part in your conversions. There is an unbelievable amount of information contained in this section of the account and all of this information will help you to further optimise your ads and keywords accordingly.

Posted in AdWords, Analytics, Webinar | Comments Off

Effective media planning

Posted on August 10, 2011 by Helen Brown

By Helen Brown

Whether placing your business in the marketing spot light for the first time or re marketing your business to previous online visitors of your site, having a media plan is very important. How will you decide which direction is best for your advertising aims and objectives without this valuable plan? Its important when marketing your business to do your homework, ‘know your customers’, also recognize your competition and where you rank within your category of business, and how you can make your products/services shine out from the rest.
It is important to define what are you hoping to achieve from your marketing campaign. Do you want to boost sales, or raise awareness? How will you allocate budget for advertising? This and many other questions are what we should all be asking ourselves when we decide to market our businesses.
I have recently watched a Google webinar on effective media planning for the Google display network, and I would like to share what I have learned.
When creating an effective media plan it is important to first assess your current situation as discussed above, and define clear business goals. It is also important to target your advertising campaign to the correct demographic, but who are they? A great way of learning about your target audience is by using ad planner from Google. Go to http://google.com/adplanner and you can start to search a wealth of valuable information.
From within the research tab, you can start to search information by site – add your site URL to the search box and set the geographic area you wish to receive information on. The results that are returned can give you valuable insight into the audiences that visit your site, but you can also use this search tool with a competitors website URL or the URL of another site within the same industry and return high level demographic results too. You can find out what other websites these audiences visit, this is particularly useful for insight into which managed placements to target for your advertising campaign.
You can search by audience – you can add a website URL that you think your target audience may visit, or add keywords that you think will be applicable, and ad planner will produce a list of sites that your target audience will be likely to visit. You can choose to select demographic settings such as household income, age, gender, education level and ad planner will return a set of results of websites that the chosen demographic will be most likely visiting.
You can search by interest – there is a large list of interest categories to choose from.
It is very important that you save your research, you will be putting it to good use shortly!
There will be different value propositions for your segments of your targeted audiences, that is, it is more than likely that you will find that you have more than one demographic that you can target. Also a demographic group will separate into segments of people. For example, a group of people who fall into a certain age bracket will not all be in the same line of work or earn the same level of income. You will need to think carefully about your message so that you can ensure delivery of the best and most appropriate message to your segmented audiences. Different audiences will require a different ‘pitch’. Make sure that you have thoroughly researched these demographics in order to successfully deliver a message that will be specific to the segment. When designing your ads, generate your creative with the demographic and segment in mind so that they are visually appealing to the correct audiences.
The next thing to think about is your media selection and Google are quite rightly keen to point out that they have a fantastic level of reach with the display network, within the UK market alone a whopping 84% of Internet user reach, with 36 million monthly unique users, 453 average impressions per user per month and hundreds of thousands of sites. When you start to think of this reach in terms of marketing your business, it is clear that there is a lot of marketing potential.
In terms of targeting options, there is contextual targeting – using keywords to place your ads next to the most appropriate and suitable content, topic targeting – choose from over 600 categories and your ads will be served on these categories of sites, you can refine this further by using keywords. Placement targeting is also a great method of targeting as you can choose your specific sites on the display network for your ads to show, you can use your earlier research at this point to add websites as placements that your specific audiences are likely to be searching on.
As mentioned earlier, it is important that you previously saved your research as you will be using it! Within ad planner, create a new media plan and enter the details of your plan, select the placements you wish to include from the research by clicking the check boxes and click to add to the media plan.
Re marketing (as discussed in an earlier blog post) is a great way of bringing back users who have previously viewed your website and left without converting. Ad planner can be effectively used to build a re marketing campaign also.
Of course, a major factor in running your campaigns will also be ad spend and deciding the duration of time for your campaigns to run, its important to ensure you have allowed enough budget for the duration of your campaign and have a clear idea of where you expect to be after running the campaign. Check your campaign/s regularly to ensure that they are meeting with your original objectives set out. It is important to have a bench mark set so that you can measure your campaigns performance against your marketing plans goals and expectations.
When evaluating your campaigns, you can choose to optimise your campaigns to further tweak performance if you find that they are not performing quite to expectations after viewing your reporting and analytics sections of your account.
Anyone seeking to understand the importance of a structured media plan will know I’m just scratching the surface here, but I’m sure we can all agree that effective planning is the best way to move forward with marketing a business.   Good luck!

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New Display Network Features

Posted on August 2, 2011 by Rachel Probert

By Helen Brown

Google have developed and released some new tools to further aid us in our account management……Hooray!

I’m sure that one thing we are all thinking about when it comes to managing our accounts is how well our Display ads are performing in relation to our competitors ads. I know I think about this regularly, regardless of how my campaigns are performing. Click- through rate is great for telling us how many people have clicked on our ads but this does not tell us how well our ads are performing on a page compared to other ads from our competitors.
Google have now introduced the Relative CTR column on the campaigns page of your AdWords account. This new column will allow us to see how our ads are performing in relation to other ads that are running on the same spots as our own on the Display network.
This is an example of how it works-

If your display ads have a CTR of 0.06% and other ads that are in the same place on the Google display network have a CTR of 0.03%, you would calculate your relative CTR by dividing 0.06 by 0.03 which will give you the result of X2. This will tell you that your CTR is twice the amount of your competing ads CTR and that your ads are indeed performing well in relation to others which is great, but it will also tell you if your relative CTR is low, for example X 0.5, so you can choose to tweak your advertising message and thus improve your relative CTR. Very helpful!

They have also created Impression share, this column will give you statistics on the percentage of times that your ads were shown out of the total available times that they could have appeared.
It helps you to understand how much of an online presence your ads are getting.
There is a Lost IS (budget) column that will let you know how many impressions you are missing due to your budget and a Lost IS (rank) column that tells you how many impressions you are missing due to your ad rank. After reviewing all of this information, you can make a better informed decision of how to progress and improve on your campaign.

To implement these great new features, simply navigate to your Campaigns page of your account, click columns and then customise columns. You can add the Relative CTR, Impression share, Lost IS (budget) and Lost IS (rank) columns from there.

Another great new feature that requires no set up at all, the Unseen Impression Filter.
Do you ever wonder how many of your ad impressions were actually seen? How many of your ad impressions are served below the fold? Do users scroll down and see them? All of these are valid questions when thinking about your display network ads. The Unseen Impression Filter
looks at the likely-hood of whether a user will scroll down to see your ad. If it is not likely that the user will scroll down, the Unseen Impression Filter will not charge for the ad impression, saving on your ad spend.

Coming soon! The Content Ads Diagnostic Tool. This is great! If your ad is showing it will tell you the specific placement that it is showing on, and if your ad is not showing it will tell you the reason why. It can then also give you a suggestion of what to do to remedy the problem.

All of these new ways of gathering extra information will surely help us all in having a better understanding of how our ads are performing in within the market place and aid us in running more successful Display advertising campaigns :-)

Posted in AdWords, Display | Comments Off

AdWords Express- Local advertising made easy.

Posted on August 2, 2011 by Rachel Probert

By Helen Brown

Google have launched AdWords express, a quick and easy new way to start marketing your business with no prior AdWords account management experience.

This great new product was created as an upgrade to Boost (Boost was launched with limited availability in America last year), with an aim to encourage local businesses to market themselves online quickly and effectively, no fuss, no hassle with a few clicks and a few minutes. It is aimed at businesses not already using AdWords advertising, and will help your potential customers find your website and products with the ads that you write, but management of your advertising campaigns is automatic so it is an extremely low maintenance method of advertising via a simplified search advertising system.
You provide some basic information about your business, write your ads and your campaigns are ready to run, it’s that simple. You don’t need an office or a shop front, and you don’t need a website to use this service.
Your ads will show up on appropriate searches on the top or the right hand side of the page just as with normal AdWords advertising, and the advertiser still only pays when the ad receives a click. The AdWords system will optimise the ads so that your campaign and budget are used economically. They will also show in Google maps with a blue pin marking the location of your business.  Maximum exposure, minimum effort and complete cost control.

So, I think that this new product sparks a couple of interesting questions…………..

Is this the new way forward for local businesses?

I think it’s a great way for local small businesses to start online marketing, it’s easily accessible and affordable, it could eliminate the concern of a common mis-conception that online advertising is far too expensive and only for large companies who can afford teams of web designers and marketing consultants and only ship expensive products. It will give small businesses a good chance to put “themselves out there” and broaden their opportunity for growth.

Do you think that this will cause PPC agencies a loss in business/clients?

I think that there a few different ways of thinking about this. First of all Google express is for the Google search network and maps only, it does not show ads on the display network. Any small companies/businesses who currently have an AdWords account, whether they self manage or employ someone to run it, will know and appreciate the importance that the display network plays in advertising a business. So instantly there will be a lot of small companies/businesses who will be very happy to stick to their tried and trusted method of marketing.
Another perspective to look at it could be: Will small companies/businesses hear of this new product and think that they can manage their own advertising campaigns, lose the expense of hiring an agency/ account manager and take control of their own account management by using Google express? I don’t really think that this is likely. I don’t believe (and I’m sure that many will agree) that an automated system in an AdWords express account is going to do the same job to the same level as a human being managing and optimising a regular AdWords account. I don’t think that this is in any way the same as or will behave like a substitute for a fully functioning AdWords account, with all of its optimisation features, reporting and analytics functions, and payments can only be made on a pre-pay basis with AdWords express, where as there is a post pay option for regular AdWords. When you consider all of the differences between AdWords express and regular AdWords, there really isn’t any competition.

It is literally just as the Google AdWords express log in page states, “AdWords Express is the easiest way to advertise on Google”.

Posted in Google, Google Express | Comments Off

Google+, the Grown-Up social network

Posted on July 19, 2011 by Rachel Probert

By Helen Brown

I will admit to spending a considerable amount of my time on social networking sites, it makes me feel connected to the people I know and care about. Since I live far away from my family, friends, and work colleagues, I crave to have regular contact with them although I really love the peace and quiet of my countryside home. I do not regret the decision I made to move, as it is easy for me to maintain contact via the Internet (although a quicker Internet connection would be nice!) I regularly use Skype, Facebook, Twitter………….there are so many methods of communication I can choose from!

There has been a lot of excitement recently, as Google have released Google+. I received an invite and have started using this new social networking tool for my personal and work connections. I feel that it incorporates so many features within the one system and I was immediately impressed by its functionality.
The idea of this new social network is based around ‘circles’. We all have different ‘circles’ of family, friends and work colleagues that we know, and we all share different levels of our lives with these people.

Within Google+ you can create ‘circles’, and you can select what level of information you share with these different circles. For example, when you create a message or a post within Google+ to share with a group of work colleagues, you can select this circle of people and share the information with them as it may be applicable to a current project you are working on, where as you would not want to post it as a topic for your friends and family to read. Or you may wish to arrange a family gathering or share some news that you would not want to make public to everyone within your friends or contact list, Google+ will allow you to perform this action and share the appropriate level of information with the appropriate ‘circle’ of people. This fantastic level of functionality takes away the need for multiple accounts, log on’s etc and the need to be running a variety of programmes on your computer. I already like it! You can also choose to follow people even if they are not following you and vice-versa.

The next thing that I tried was ‘hanging out’ with my work colleagues, this was great fun! We were able to (5 of us) speak to and see each other within a conference call, using our headsets and web cams. You can choose to hang out with anyone in any of your circles, and add various people to join the hangout. Before you ‘go live’ on the hangout, it prompts you to check the neatness of your hairdo and general appearance by showing you how you look through your web cam! brilliant!
I clicked to take a further look at sparks. This is interesting. We’ve all got interests and hobbies, and here is the place where you can look up any subject/information that you are interested in. There were videos, articles and many points of interest. You can click to bookmark these snippets under sparks for ease of recalling at a later date or you can choose to post and share your interests and information with others in your circles.

Of course, it contains features such as streaming for status updates and allows you to tag others in posts by the use of a + or @ sign in front of the name, also posting video clips and photos.  If on the other hand you are sick of repeatedly seeing the occurrence of a post that you may have previously commented on, you can choose to mute this post. When you do choose to post an update or a video clip, it is very easy to select the circle(s) that the post is to be made visible to, so it is easy to ensure that what you are displaying is being seen by the correct group of people.  It displays any +1’s that you have clicked thus detailing your interests and public endorsements etc on your profile for others to see. There is a chat box that you can use for instant chat (although I personally think that hanging out is the way to go!)There is a section that allows you to detail your ‘bragging rights’ or achievements, your line of work and a biography of various other details that you may want to share about yourself.

It really does seem to be the “grown up” social network, not an annoying gaming invite in sight! Don’t get me wrong, I’m not against gaming but I really don’t want to be bombarded with invites to grow crops, to lead an army of zombies, or commit to caring for a virtual pet……………..

I hope I can convince all of my friends and family that for ease and quality of maintaining communication, this is ‘the way forward’ in my eyes and I’m feeling quite sure that so many other people will feel the same way too when they start exploring this fantastic new social network.

Posted in Google, Google+ | Comments Off

+1 Button webinar from Google

Posted on July 12, 2011 by Rachel Probert

By Helen Brown

A public endorsement of your business is an extremely valuable thing to have, but how can you reach your potential customers searching in your business field without blasting pages of reviews at them?  How can you quickly reach them and demonstrate that your previous customers/users have been pleased with your products/services and would recommend you?

Google have released the +1 button, a great new way of showing potential customers endorsements given by previous users, and this new button shows when your search result is displayed. You still have your links and snippets in your search result, but now, to the right of the result is a +1 button and underneath your search result appears an annotation from a previous customer. It works whether it is an organic listing, or a paid listing. Another place where the +1 button can appear is on your website. This is a good place to implement the +1 button as, until people have used your site, how can they know if they want to endorse it?

The +1 button requires very little effort from users, it’s literally just a click. It is a great way to increase CTR on paid and organic listings, online research has shown that a high number of Internet users are much more likely to choose to use a business or make a purchase after receiving a recommendation or seeing endorsements. So with the +1 button, users searching online are always coming to your site via seeing a recommendation :-)

It is very easy to get started with implementing the +1 button, to get the necessary code, go to google.com/webmasters/+1button . The +1 code snippet basically contains 2 tags, a script tag and the +1 tag. When installing it in your web page it is very important to use the tag-
<link rel=”canonical” href “http: //www.example.com/” />  as there can be lots of pages that can contain content that is very similar e.g pages displaying products by alphabetical order and pages showing products in order of price. Using rel canonical you can specify the page that is the true page, this will tell Google the page that you want prioritised in search results. Google also recommend placing the script code right before the </body> tag as this will appear to make the page load faster.

The +1 button is for public, crawl-able URL’s.  The URL needs to appear in search or there is no point in including +1, no one will see the endorsement. It is not good to place the +1 button on email pages or thank you pages for example. The URL is determined by one of these three things:

The href attribute of the +1 tag – (Used if placing the +1 button on a blog page with various articles or a product page with various products)
The value of the link rel= “canonical” tag  (This is the preferred method for referencing but any one of these three can be used)
The page URL

It is best to place the +1 button near to sharable content on your website, e.g. near the beginning or the end of an article, near other sharing widgets or by a review section. You can put a small instruction next to the +1 button if you wish, to show users what it is about e.g +1 this page if you would like to recommend it in Google. However, you must not try to get users to click on your +1 button by offering them rewards or prizes for clicks.

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It is possible to use +1 in a testing environment, but as this generally would be a private environment it is highly likely that it will produce an error button as the URL must be public. To get around this you can canonicalize your private URL’s so that Google can reach them, as they will become a public URL on your private server, and you will no longer get the error button.
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The +1 is available in small, medium and large sizes, with or without a count box and also a tall button with count included. The focus of the +1 button is to improve traffic to your site, it will be possible to measure the effectiveness of it through 2 new tools (coming soon). These are Webmaster tools and a new reporting section in Analytics.

Webmaster tools will include a +1 activity page, a search impact page that will demonstrate the effectiveness of +1 against non +1, an audience page detailing age, gender and location of users, but for privacy reasons you would need to get a certain amount of +1’s before this information will start  to show.

The new reporting section in analytics will include a social engagement page showing how users who engage with social plug ins engaged with the rest of your site etc and you can compare this data with other social plug in data. When all of this is up, running and available, within 1 hour of implementing +1 on your sites, the new reporting section of analytics will show in your analytics account.

With a clear purpose and great functionality, ease of installation and detailed reporting, I think we will all see that this new feature will be a great advantage to us and our businesses on a massive scale.

Posted in +1, Google, Webinar | Comments Off