You can never stop learning when it comes to online marketing. Google’s Display Network is constantly being updated and you have to stay current in order to best utilize the tools at your disposal.
To help you do just that, check out Matt Van Wagner’s column at SearchEngineLand. He’s got the rundown of the latest updates and how they can help you.
On Twitter, the use of hashtags has seemingly evolved from a good way to group content of a similar category together, to a messy way to group content or a good way to make a joke. Either way, that’s probably not how hashtags were intended.
Katie Rose, of Business2Community, seems to take particular offense to this “hashtag abuse”. There can be some value in using hashtags more properly, however.
The best nugget I gleaned from the above article is that, if you want your audience to congregate together, show them the way. Whether from your site, a YouTube video or even from your physical business place, suggest a hashtag for users to use when talking about you and your business. Otherwise, you never know all the various combinations people will create for essentially the same thing.
This makes it much easier for users to use hashtags, rather than Twitter’s search function.
Bing Ads has been fervently working to become a realistic competitor and alternative to AdWords. Recently, they debuted their own location targeting tool, similar to one AdWords trotted out last month.
Just like AdWords, Bing users can now target only those in specific geographic locations or only those visiting specific websites.
So far, Bing has simply been trying to keep up with AdWords innovations, but they obviously are attempting to become a real competitor to Google.
Head over to CMS Wire for the details on the Bing Ads location targeting tool.
When it comes to improving organic search rankings, business owners will do anything to get ahead. That’s why so many wonder whether using AdWords and being paying Google customers will help their rankings or not. Matt Cutts, Google’s Web Spam boss, says it does not.
Cutts participated in a Google Webmaster Q&A in October and explained that Google attempts to be as fair and even as possible, regardless who they’re dealing with. This means that those that pay for AdWords and those that don’t get equal treatment.
Check out some of Cutts Q&A session at the iNeedHits blog.
Google reps have said that a good click-through-rate for AdWords is between two and five percent. There’s been no official suggestion for an acceptable conversion rate, however. Business2Community recently set out to remedy that oversight by conducting a thorough study of AdWords.
The first problem with such a study is how loosely defined ‘conversion’ is. Not all businesses require a sale to consider a successful conversion. In general, the average search network conversion rate for AdWords in this year’s third quarter was 5.63%. For the Google Display Network, that number dips slightly to 4.68%.
But to truly be able to gauge how well your business is performing with AdWords, you’ll need to look at the industry specific numbers. Follow the link to find the top 10 advertising industries broken down into their specific conversion rates and cost per conversion.
These are not official numbers from Google, but you can consider these a barometer for how well you’re utilizing AdWords.
Meet Paul Downes. He owns his own woodworking shop, which specialized in cabinets and conference tables. He contributes regularly to the New York Times small business blog and recently shared a crisis that surely will or has affected many small business owners.
Paul added a low-cost alternative to his line of conference tables after receiving a number of inquiries from school’s and non-profits. He then added ads in AdWords to get the word out about his new product and started selling quite a few of them.
However, he eventually saw an overall drop in his monthly sales even with this increase in new product sales. The problem was not with a failing economy, as he initially told himself.
Instead, Paul put some thought into his problem. He discovered that the calls for these low-cost, new tables mostly came early in the business day. Calls from big corporations, who are responsible for purchasing the higher-priced models that garner Paul bigger profits, usually came later in the day.
After poking around on AdWords, Paul found that his campaign wasn’t showing his ads for the higher priced tables to the audience that would buy them. Instead, AdWords was optimizing for conversions and the low-cost option was getting good conversions.
Paul made the simple fix of splitting the two products into their own campaign so he could get the most out of his budget. This is a real life example of the importance of paying close attention to your AdWords campaigns. Paul has since seen his sales steadily rise back to normal, but he will be playing catch-up for the rest of the year. Thankfully, he had the metrics available to fix a problem that was crippling his company.
Facebook recently made it possible for users to search specifically in its App Center. You can search by an app’s title or by generic keyword. Josh Constine of TechCrunch suggests that this could open the door for ads within the App Center.
Though there is currently no results page, just a drop down menu after a search, Facebook could easily add sponsored results similar to what Google has already been doing with AdWords. Ads for apps related to the user’s search could appear at the top of the current drop down format, or as full-on entries in a results page.
App Center is not only set-up for ads to easily be included, but it also already has the audience. After only 2 months of operation, it boasted more than 150-million monthly users and that number was up to 220-million at the beginning of October.
App Center has “qualified leads, ample traffic, a model proven by Google, and a huge base of developers/advertisers”. All that’s left is to actually make the ads a reality.
There are so many options to personalize and remarket ads to your potential customers online, you may actually be annoying those consumers and driving them away. No one wants to see ads tailored to them on every site they visit, all asking them to come back and buy a product they browsed for hours ago.
So, David Rodnitzky put together a list at Search Engine Land, which should help you be a fine-tuned marketer, not an annoying, stalker type. Here’s a look:
1. Attribution
Because you’re using so many vehicles to get your message across, you need to know which ones are working and how well they’re working. Attribution tracking allows you to discover how a consumer got to your site, but it’s a pricey service.
2. Frequency Caps
You can use the attribution data to find out what is superfluous in your advertising strategy. Limit the number of times users see your ads on a given channel based on how well those ads work and how they work in combination with your other campaigns.
3. Change your creative
With the data you’re collecting, you can discover what stage users typically are when they see specific ads. Use that knowledge to tailor your ads content and message. Ads for users who are early in the process can be about awareness, while ads for users later in their shopping process can be focused on conversions.
4. Risk v Reward
Consider how many consumers you will alienate with ads when looking at how many more conversions you could get. If you run some ads more to get a slight increase in conversions, you may also be increasing the number of consumers who swear off your site because of over-bearing ads.
Adwords is making some dramatic changes once again. In October, Google brought back the ‘Rotate Indefinitely’ option for campaigns even though they didn’t recommend the option themselves. Now, Google will be making campaigns not set to ‘rotate indefinitely’ default to ‘optimize for conversions’.
As posted to the iNeedHits blog, Google estimates the change will increase conversions by 5-percent across the board. With the ‘optimize for conversions’ option, Google will dynamically change bids from advertisers to run ads with the greatest chance of creating a conversion.
Users who prefer to ‘optimize’ manually can do so by using the ‘Conversion Optimizer’ and ‘Enhanced CPC’ tools, which can track advertising bids likely to lead to conversion and ensure ads with high chances of conversion are being shown the most without an increse in budget.
Google will make the change the week of November 12th. This means that you’ll need to do your homework before then to make sure your campaigns aren’t automatically switched to something you don’t want.
There are certainly times when you have too many options. Specifically, I’m talking about you AdWords campaigns. Making the right choices could potentially mean netting thousands of additional users. Thanks to split-testing, you can be more certain that you’re running the most effective campaign possible.
Split-testing is simple enough. Essentially, you run the campaign as is, and you also run it with one elemental change. Both ads are randomly displayed to users and eventually, over thousands of views, you discover which is more effective.
You change in your campaign can be a variety of things. Maybe the two ads being split-tested are drastically different in color, text or another way. Or, the ads could direct users to different landing pages.
To achieve your split-test, you’ll need to set AdWords to rotate your ads evenly. This may not be as effective as the ‘optimize for clicks’ option that AdWords suggests, but for the sake of testing it’s the only way to get real results.
Alistair Dent details the split-testing strategy at Search Engine Watch. Essentially, you should set aside one campaign strictly for split-testing, which allows your other campaigns to capitalize on what is already working. Copy the campaign you wish to improve into the split-test campaign, then turn it off in the main campaign.
Remember, it will take time and thousands of users to minimize potential variables, so don’t rush through the testing phase. If you are patient, you’ll get a clear answer on how to tweak your campaign.
