Video Ads Through AdWords – 5 Quick Tips

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YouTube could be a useful tool for companies looking to boost their customer base through advertising. This tactic has worked for businesses, movies and many other entities in need of a boost. Five basic reasons why you should try YouTube Ads:

  1. Setup is easy – Inside of Google AdWords, create a new campaign, and choose “Online video”. Then, inside the “Shared library” section, choose “Link YouTube accounts” and connect a YouTube account that you own that contains a video you want to advertise. The rest is similar to standard AdWords ads.
  2. Not overly expensive – YouTube ads are still relatively new to many advertisers, so the competition hasn’t driven up costs yet. Your Cost Per View is small compared to relevant Cost Per Click costs.
  3. Free link back to site – It’s a “Call-to-action overlay”. Find this option inside your AdWords video campaign. It will allow you to place a link and call to action back to your site on top of your video.
  4. Options to show – You’ve got four different ways to display the video: in search results, as an option for viewers to choose your video before watching their video on YouTube, as a suggested video in the list of recommended videos next a video playback, and as a preview before a requested video on YouTube.
  5. It works – Video is still growing and a good advertisement created through video, when done right, will get results.

 

Read the full article here:
5 Reasons to Try YouTube Ads & Setup Tips – iMedia Connection (blog)

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Tips to Improve SEO For Mobile Phones

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Before you start worrying about SEO on a mobile device, you’ll want to check and see how many people are finding you through mobile searches. One of the easiest ways to do this is through Google Analytics. You can go in and adjust the Advanced Segments section of any page you’re interested in. On the Traffic pages you can set up Mobile as a segment and see exactly what keywords people are using to find you through mobile searches and details related to those searches.

Another tool that you can use to check mobile details is Google Webmaster Tools. You can set up a filter here to see only mobile searches for keywords and traffic (Traffic->Search Queries, then the Filters button and change the dropdown under “Search:”).

One that many people don’t realize is available is the popular Google AdWords Keyword Tool. You can change settings there to specify showing only search details for mobile searches (under “Advanced Options and Filters->Show Ideas and Statistics for”).

After doing your research, you’ll want to know what kind of results people are seeing when they get to your site. You can use Webmaster Tools again to check this out. In Health->Fetch as Google you can change “Web” to any type of mobile device and Fetch. It’ll take a little bit of time (could be a few minutes), but when completed you can see what the mobile bot is getting from your site, code-wise. You can also use a Firefox plugin (there are several) to change the agent the browser is imitating to display the look that device will get.

So now you’ve got an idea of your site’s appearance. At this point you’ll want to decide if you are going to go through making a separate site design for mobile visitors based on the traffic you’re expecting/wanting and the look mobile visitors are currently getting. Before you can make that decision, having the ability to do the proper research for your mobile market is very worthwhile.

See the video for this here:
4 Tips For Your Mobile SEO Strategy – Whiteboard Friday

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Facebook Messages Get An Update

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Facebook Messages is going through a change in design, to more closely mimic an email interface. They are testing it with limited users at the moment, but this change will roll out to all users over the next few weeks. In a recent post on their blog, Facebook stated, “The new side-by-side layout lets you click your most recent message on the left to see the whole conversation on the right. You can also bring conversations to life with multiple photos and emoticons.”

Read the full article here:
Facebook Messages Testing Recent Design Overhaul

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Google Is Now Showing “Hidden” Facebook Pages

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Originally Facebook was completely cut off from Google. All posts by personal profiles were hidden from the search engine, and you couldn’t do searches inside of Facebook that way. It appears that somehow Google has been able to get access, and some searches for Facebook content will display results with direct links to posts from personal profiles. This may have come from people sharing the links through other crawlable sites (such as Twitter). At any rate, some of these posts are now showing up in the Google SERPs.

Read the full article here:
Google Search Results Show Some Facebook User Posts Leaking Out Of Walled Garden

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Google Search Preferences Saved In Account Now

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Does it bother you when you have to reset your search preferences (such as turning off Google Instant) on Google when when you switch from using a laptop to an iPad or a computer? And if you change your browser, you have to reset those preferences again. Google has announced that search preferences can now be saved at the account level. As long as you are signed in to your Google account, saved search settings will be available from any computer.

Read the full article here:
New: Save Your Google Search Settings & Take Them With You

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Facebook Status Updates For Businesses: 7 Tips

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Facebook has implemented an algorithm called “EdgeRank” which adjusts the weight of importance of any post based on how popular it is. So how can you improve the EdgeRank of your posts on your business accounts on Facebook? Here’s a few ways:

  1. Scheduling – Pay attention to when your followers are most active on Facebook, when they’re most likely to see new posts. Try experimenting with different times of the day. Facebook allows you to schedule posts, so this is easier to do than you might have expected.
  2. Add tags – Pages that you’ve “liked” will be more readily available so that if you want to add a tag it will be easier to find these. To find any sort of connecting page to get a tag, just type in an “@” sign and start typing. You can discover many tags this way – it’ll help promotion.
  3. Add a location – When you do a status update, there’s a “placemark” icon that looks like an inverted teardrop you can click on. This can come in handy to tag events or to put your business location when people have a reason to come visit.
  4. Target specific locations – You can make your post in a specific place (instead of “Public”). Doing this is good if you are needing only to connect with people that are in that location, for example if you are promoting an event in that area.
  5. Target by language – Use the same customization you use for location (instead of “Public”) to target a language. This way you can do a very personal outreach to members of the public who are more comfortable with a different language.
  6. Add pictures/photos – If you put photos in your posts, it will grab attention much more readily and make it a lot more tempting to share or comment on.
  7. Emphasize a post – You can pick out special posts and draw attention by either “highlighting” it (click the start at the top of the post) to make it go across both columns in your timeline or you can pin your update. Pinning it will make it stay on top of all updates so that something of particular importance will stay at the top until you unpin it. To do this, click the pencil icon and choose “Pin to Top”.

Make your Facebook posts stand out by trying any one of these or a combination. See what works best for your page and keep those practices.

Read the original article here:
7 Tips For Crafting Local Business Updates In Facebook

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Google AdWords Ad Extensions Can Improve Performance

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Ad extensions allow you to show additional information on your Google AdWords ads such as displaying map with business locations, linking to additional pages within the site, showing a click-to-call phone number, connecting your Google Plus account +1s, and showing product images, titles and prices (from Google Merchant Center). Google has reported that using ad extensions can increase CTR by 30% on average. Setting up Ad Extensions is fairly easy to do, simply check the “Ad extensions” tab in AdWords and look through the options there to set up. After implementing these options, keep an eye on performance to see what differences the extensions provide, and be aware you can check some of these performances by using Segment->Click Type in each AdWords page.

Read the full article here:
6 Ways Google Ad Extensions Can Improve Your AdWords Campaign – SEOmoz (blog)

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Google’s First SERP Down To 7 Listings

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Google appears to be testing some changes to the first page of results. The first listing is getting additional “sitelinks” underneath in many cases, from two links to as many as six additional links. For search results that have the first listing containing these sitelinks, there is now only seven listings total on the front page. It doesn’t matter how many sitelinks, it’s still seven listings. For an example, Google “ebay” and check the results.

Another change is that Google is not limiting the number of results appearing for a single domain to two per page – it looks as though one domain can potentially dominate the entire front page now, without limitation.

Whether or not these are permanent changes or just tests we’ll see as time progresses.

Read the full article here:
7 Is The New 10? Google Showing Fewer Results & More From Same Domain

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How To Refine Google Display Network Ad Targeting

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People seem to think that the Google Display Network (GDN) is like drinking from a fire hose: turn it on and get a ton of traffic. But as a campaign manager you need to control the stream of visitors or else your GDN campaign will drown in unqualified clicks. Within Google AdWords there are number of tactics to exclude specific traffic from your GDN campaigns. These exclusion methods are of two types: behavioral and demographic. Behavior Exclusion includes Targeted Keywords, Ad Placements, Webpage Topics and Remarketing (more effective). Demographic Exclusion includes Age and Gender and Excluding Users by Interest.

Read the full article here:
Google Display Network Exclusion Tactics: Don’t Drink from the Fire Hose – Search Engine Watch

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Client Center Changes in Microsoft adCenter

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Advertisers can know change or add agencies without losing their entire account history, thanks to the updated version of adCenter by Microsoft. Microsoft are now calling that “Agency Enablement”, through that the agencies can link or unlink to client accounts, control billing preferences and manage client accounts at the account level, et al. This will provide immense flexibility for advertisers.

Read the full article here:
Microsoft Revamps AdCenter For Agency Relationships

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