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Posts Tagged ‘Conversion Rate’

Weekly PPC Update – Luck o’ the Irish Edition

Sunday, March 17th, 2013

 

Welcome everyone to this week’s edition of the Weekly PPC Update.  Before you head out to celebrate St. Paddy’s Day, take a few minutes to catch up on the most important news in Paid Search this week.  You might find some golden nuggets in this week’s batch to help your campaigns make more green (get it?)

 

First, from Google…….

 

Automotive makers have been one of the widest adopters of Google+, according to Google.  Research shows that brands can experience a 91% increase in conversion rate for non-brand terms when running social annotations on search ads.  There’s a nifty infographic breaking down how this happens.

 

Google is providing a new tool, Brand Surveys, to help advertisers measure impact more precisely.  Advertisers will be able to set up these surveys within their AdWords campaigns without any additional tagging, etc.  Here’s how it works:

  • In AdWords, an advertiser designs a basic survey from a list of templatized questions about purchase intent, brand awareness, and other common categories.
  • Then they launch their display or video campaign.
  • Automatically, one group of users will see display ads from the advertiser’s campaign, followed shortly afterwards by the survey.  A second, similar group will not be shown the ads, but will receive the same survey.

Check out more details here.

 

There are 3 Google Hangouts coming up about Enhanced Campaigns.  They include:  Campaign Management and Strategies for Upgrading, Location Targeting and Ad Extension Updates, and Smarter Ads.

 

Product Listing Ads are now eligible to appear on smartphones globally, extending the shopping experience already available on desktops and tablets. Learn more about this new feature here.

 

Google asked participants to log their mobile searches over two weeks in a diary smartphone app – logging more than 6,000 mobile searches in total to examine conversion actions taken after mobile searches.  It turns out that half of all mobile search conversions happen within one hour.

 

Now, from Bing Ads…………….

 

The Bing Ads February release is bringing better targeting for advertisers.  In particular:  Any targeting options not expressly selected at the ad group level will now be inherited from the campaign level.  In cases where the ad group and campaign level targeting are the same, ad group level settings will apply.  Also, the keyword research tool and Bing Ads Intelligence are now available in Latin America and Western Europe.

 

Bing has a new Editorial Insights page that brings together the best of Editorial, answering the most frequently-requested Editorial topics.

 

Have you ever wondered how adult-themed ads get approved?  Adult advertising is a restricted program in Bing Ads and an advertiser’s account must be properly enabled before they can market their adult site. When an advertiser that is not enabled for the Adult Marketplace submits their adult ad or URL for review, it will be blocked upfront and prevented from serving online until this enablement is in place.  Learn more here.

 

Finally, from elsewhere on the World Wide Webz……

 

If you use an Analytics program other than Google Analytics, you’ll need to consider how integrating Enhanced Campaigns will impact your Analytics.  Check out this article to see how and where it might impact you.

 

An interesting article about retargeting drives home the point that users with display ads enables marketers to benefit from the recency bump beyond the search engine results page.  Have you seen this in your campaigns?  Check out specifics here.

 

That’s it for this week, folks!  Happy St. Patrick’s Day and have a great week!

 

 

 

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Weekly PPC Roundup – The Stuffed Edition

Saturday, November 24th, 2012

 

After finishing Thanksgiving dinner part 3 just a little bit ago, we are *this close* to passing into a food coma for the third time in less than 24 hours. Before we do that, though, let’s take a look at the latest news in PPC from the past week!

 

First, from Google….

 

There was precious little out of Mountain View over the past week, except for an article on how to be more productive with the AdWords interface.  This is a good time of the year to review and reflect on the prior year’s successes and build on them, so this article is quite timely. Some of the highlights from AdWords:

     

  • adding a “Keyword” column so you can see the exact term that matched someone’s search to trigger your ad
  • rolling out campaign diagnostics which run in the background and look for potential errors or conflicts in your account
  • updating many other features, including faster editing, automating with scripts, and more.

 

Now, from Bing Ads….

 

This post is a good wrap up of recently added features to Bing Ads for the month of November.  There were actually a LOT of big good changes at Bing this past month, including:

     

  • ad rotation
  • impression share
  • Quality Impact score
  • landing page by match type and more.

 

Here’s a video that also talks about the most recent developments at Bing Ads.

 

PPC News from elsewhere around the web…

 

PPC makes the New York Times!  This story introduces the masses to programmatic advertising, including the DoubleClick platform.

 

Search Engine Journal has a good article about mobile paid search and how to adapt your campaigns (and establish new ones) to optimize for these kinds of searches.  Tips include: capitalizing on “call now” and other “call” calls to action, separating mobile campaigns out, creating mobile friendly landing pages, and more.

 

Speaking of landing pages, this article on diagnosing and repairing conversion rate problems has a thing or two to say about engaging visitors via landing pages and your website in general.

 

Have you ever violated AdWords policy?  Many of us have accidentally, and the canned responses can be downright confusing.  This article asks “Can Google AdWords Customer Service Be Saved?“  What do you think?

 

Finally, it’s a long weekend, you must have an extra hour.  Use that time to go get Global Search Greatness Through Keyword Analysis!  It might be worth your while.

 

That’s all for now friends, have a great weekend!

 

 

 

 

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Testing Rules and Opinion Drools

Monday, July 23rd, 2012

 

The title of this post comes from an oft-repeated truism among Conversion Rate Optimization professionals: “testing rules and opinion drools,” or in the words of Google’s Avinash Kaushic: don’t rely on the “HiPPO” (aka, Highest Paid Person’s Opinion) when you can quickly and easily run a split test to get results you can take to the bank.


It’s a lesson that’s I am frequently reminded of while reviewing BoostCTR test results.


Of course there are clear patterns and principles at work, clearly visible when looking at hundreds or even scores of tests — principles that any ad writer is well advised to make use of, and that we try to relate in the “Tips from the Boosters” column.


But when looking at the optimization of any one campaign that has multiple iterations of split tests for review, one also finds insights revealed in the test results that couldn’t have been arrived at through theory alone.


Given multiple possible appeals or persuasive strategies, many of them seemingly equally plausible or convincing, which one, or which combination, will work better? Only a fool would simply guess at this when he has the option to test. And given multiple ways to phrase an appeal, which words and imagery will prove most powerfully persuasive?


For example, in the online dating industry, do people respond more favorably to the idea of psychology and preference-survey-assisted matchmaking? Or to the idea of access to a community of demographically-similar matches? Or to some combination of the two? And which demographic signifiers matter most?


You could guess based on an intuitive hunch, or you could test. Here’s what the tests look like:






So what wins out?


Apparently, access to a community of demographically-similar prospective dates wins out over match-making. And age/maturity/values wins out over socio-economic status or “affluence.”


Now maybe you’re thinking that you could’ve guessed that. And maybe, in this case, you would have. But would you have nearly the confidence in it that you would after seeing these test results and knowing that the winning ads more than doubled CTR?


Also, do you think your intuition would hold up over multiple campaigns? If you do, you’re fooling yourself.


And that’s the point: testing rules — because it provides results you can build on — and opinion drools.


Now, that’s a “Tip from the Boosters” to beat all the others!


 

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Weekly PPC Roundup – Livin’s Easy Edition

Tuesday, July 10th, 2012

 

It’s Summertime, and the livin’ is easy (or so they say). How has yours been so far?

 

Things were pretty quiet in Mountain View over the last week. In fact, in a departure from the norm, there were no blog posts on the AdWords blog for a whole work week, but we have a couple from the end of the prior week and the beginning of this that are useful.

 

From the Google Adwords blog on June 29th, Google gives advertisers an update on enhanced audience targeting on the display network using “flexible reach,” which now allows users to choose settings at the ad group level. The article says “when you select Broad reach, your ads are shown on pages that match your primary targeting method” and “when you select Specific reach, your ads will show on pages that match all of your targeting methods.”

 

(more…)

 

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