Tips and Info To Improve Your Google Quality Score [INFOGRAPHIC]

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[INFOGRAPHIC] Quality Score

The quality score of your site is extremely important. If you’ve got a high score, Google makes it easy for your page to prosper. You’ll appear higher in search results, your ads can appear in the top, shaded region of results and it will cost you less per click of your ads.

As Neil Spencer reports for Business2Community, in order to ensure you get these advantages, you need to know how Google judges your site and how you can improve it.

Your ads should be specific and highly targeted. Google is looking for the relevance of the keywords you’ve chosen to your landing page and your ads. Also, make sure your landing page contains relevant, original content that’s updated often and is easy to navigate.

The included infographic is courtesy of DigitalNetAgency

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Google Attempts To Simplify Tag Management

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Implementing tags to measure traffic and visitor behavior on your site is a great way to learn about your audience and improve your site. But, managing those tags can be cumbersome and time-consuming. As Joab Jackson reports for ComputerWorld, that’s why Google recently launched ‘Tag Manager’ to streamline and simplify the process.

Much like AdWords and Analytics, Google Tag Manager is easy to use and it’s completely free. After embedding a small section of code to your site, Google will take care of providing appropriate tags for each page.

Tags that overlap can slow down your site’s load time and potentially lose you visitors. Google employs a way to eliminate that possibility and, of course, offers many ways for you to customize your experience.

Though Google is not the first to offer a tag management system, the number of websites that use one is expected to skyrocket in the coming months.

 

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‘Cachetown’ Makes Your World A Video Game

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Imagine being able to point your phone’s camera down a normal city street and see a video game type environment complete with puzzle boxes and coins up for grabs. That’s the reality that a San Diego based start-up, called Cachetown, hopes to bring to fruition.

The positive spin here is that once you’ve created interactive games for people to play, you can add in an advertising angle and use this “augmented reality” to offer deals and promotions for stores on the other side of a user’s lens. Maybe you point your phone at a restaraunt and see an opportunity to get half off your next meal.

Tom Cheredar has more at this story at VentureBeat, including a commercial produced by Cachetown. The most interesting thing about the video is that it even seems to realize the one, looming drawback to this technology. No one wants to walk around the streets looking at their phone. Whether it’s a reluctance to look like a tourist, holding up your phone in your own town or a fear of walking into a bevy of obstacles, most people would likely be reluctant to fully embrace Cachetown’s current model.

The idea is sound, however, and could have some interesting implementations coming very soon.

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Google AdWords and Analytics Form One Powerful Tool

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Google’s Dan Friedman recently took to the Google AdWords blog to discuss new integration between AdWords and Google Analytics. As David A. Utter reports for eCommerce Bytes, Friedman also shared a few tips for how users could benefit from the data gleaned from Analytics.

High Engagement Groups

Analytics allows you to discover ad groups that, on average, stay on your site longer and visit more pages per visit. Typically, those numbers would suggest a group with high levels of engagement and one that would give you great returns with an increase in your ad budget.

High Engagement, Low Conversions

You may notice a group or page that seems to have high engagement, but isn’t yielding enough conversions. Use this information to target those users with promotions or any other way to light the fire beneath them and get them to turn into a conversion.

Short Visits and High Bounce Rates

Monitoring for pages that aren’t doing so well is important too. But you can turn a negative into a positive. If you notice a certain page isn’t yielding the results you’d hoped for, use that page for A/B testing. You may discover a way to improve your site as a whole.

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Quick Fixes For Your New Google Shopping Issues

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Google Shopping officially switched to a paid service for businesses at the beginning of the month, which means a whole new set of issues for users trying to get their Product Listing Ads campaigns up and running.

Mary Weinstein reports for Search Engine Watch that AdWords support staff has been less than helpful when trying to resolve these new issues. So, here are the problems you’re likely to encounter and how to fix them.

You may have found that trying to get your Auto Targets to validate is extremely frustrating. Don’t throw your computer out the window just yet though.

  1. Check to make sure the wording on your Auto Target and the wording on your product type or AdWords label matches exactly. If it isn’t a carbon copy, with no special symbols, AdWords may have trouble matching them.
  2. Check your filters. Ideally, you have no filters running for your PLA campaigns. If you open the filters tab and see filters being applied, remove them from this campaign and you might just solve the problem.
  3. Check the PLA campaigns ad extension. Your AdWords account should be linked to your Google Merchant login. Also, if you have multiple logins, make sure this campaign is linked to the correct one.

Hopefully, these quick fixes will get you up and running with PLAs and allow you to avoid the time waste that is Google support.

 

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Google Introducing Credit Card For AdWords Buys

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Starting on Monday of this week, small business owners in the UK became eligible for Google’s newest service, AdWords Business Credit. Essentially, Google created a credit card that can only be used for paying for a businesses AdWords account.

As Ingrid Lunden reports for TechCrunch, the program launched in beta 1400 U.S. companies last year and nearly three-quarters of those companies now use AdWords Business Credit as their “primary form of payment.”

Now, Google shifts its focus to the UK, where revenue in the 2nd quarter made up about 11-percent of the companies total revenue.

The card will carry an 11.9-percent APR in the UK, which is up from 8.99-percent in the U.S. during the pilot program. No annual fees will be included. You may note that this is lower than major credit cards. This is likely because Google intends to make an increase in profits by driving more businesses to AdWords and increasing the investment their, not from interest rates.

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3 Reasons Google Remarketing is Great For Your Site

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Google Remarketing was recently updated to make it easier to set-up and easier to use. In case you aren’t familiar, Google Remarketing allows you to present users, who were previously on your site, with relevant ads as they continue browsing the web.

Marc Weisinger, of Search Engine Watch, has three key reasons you should be using one of the most powerful tools available to online marketers.

1. It’s Simple and Easy

Previously, implementing the remarketing code was a several step process. Now, you install one simple code in the footer of each page of your site and get on with your day. You can’t get much easier than one step.

2. The Possibilities are Endless

With the universal tag in place, you can use the Adwords interface to target specific groups. How specific? Well, that is up to you.

Want to target only those users who landed on a promotion page? Done.

Want to target only users who added a product to their cart, but didn’t end up buying? Done.

Plus, each new target group you set up gets the benefit of the cookies already stored by your universal tag.

3. Target Positive or Negative Audience

Before starting your next email marketing campaign, use the Adwords interface to target users who click through from your email to your site.

Alternatively, you can instead choose to exclude those users because, afterall, they sound pretty loyal and engaged already. That way, you don’t bombard them with your ads and are sure to instead target those users that may have seen your email but weren’t convinced right away.

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AdWords Unveils Shared Budgets

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If you’re using AdWords to advertise your business online, you’ll definitely want to look into their newest option, Shared Budgets, which was announced Monday on the Adwords blog.

Shared Budgets is exactly what it sounds like. Adwords let’s you set a daily allowance for how much you’d like to spend across any number of campaigns. Let’s say $100 total. You can then allocate a portion of that to each campaign. With Shared Budgets, any money that one campaign doesn’t use in a day gets automatically reallocated to another campaign that is seeing increased use. This way, you get the most out of the campaign that’s currently getting the most attention without having to constantly tinker with the budget allocation yourself.

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Welcome Bing Ads to the World

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The combined search marketplace between Yahoo! and Bing got a new name this week, the Yahoo! Bing Network. It may lack creativity, but at least it’s sensical. 

Along with this announcement, Microsoft included the news that their search ad network, formerly Microsoft adCenter, has been renamed as Bing Ads. The network and the functionality of it appears to be the same, however.  

Barry Schwartz broke this news on Search Engine Land and you can go directly to the source, the Bing Ads blog, for more information.  

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AdWords Scripts Adds Features, Becomes Globally Available

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Google announced last week that AdWords scripts, a project initally launched as a limited release in June, is now availble to all advertisers across the globe.  They’ve also taken feedback from early users and added frequently requested features.  

Adwords scripts allows users to make changes to their AdWords account using simple JavaScript programs.  Those who take advantage of this new tool are able to update keywords and ad copy or output account statistics.  

With the updates, Adwords scripts are capable of more complex script executions. Google also added support for Ad Parameters and the ability to schedule scripts to run only once, daily, weekly or monthly. 

On September 13, Google will host a webinar to help new users learn about and get the most out of AdWords scripts.  

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