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!
