2012 saw Google make a number of important changes and updates to AdWords. I’ve touched on most of these here, but for a nice summarized rundown you can head the iNeedHits blog.
These changes are all ways to improve your online marketing strategy and increase your audience. Plus, the article keeps it short and sweet so you won’t have to invest too much of your time.
The reality of online marketing is that advertisers must find a way to reach users on a variety of different devices. AdWords recently made that difficult task a little easier with a new tool that allows you to convert ads using Flash to HTML5.
Since many tablets do not support Flash, this tool could help your business reach thousands of additional users. And converting takes just a couple of mouse clicks, no expert knowledge is needed.
To find out more, check out Chris Crum’s article at Web Pro News.
Google is offering up to two months of free advertising, or up to a $250 total value, for signing up for AdWords Express before December 16th. Most likely, you’ve received emails, possibly many, informing you of the promotion but it might be worth looking into for small business owners.
Find out more from Peter Kafka’s article at All Things D.
For anyone using online advertising, the Black Friday/Cyber Monday weekend is a great opportunity to see a spike in your ads’ views. Search Engine Roundtable reports, however, that a “technical issue” on some AdWords accounts caused ads not to show over perhaps the biggest online shopping weekend of the year.
No word yet on the official cause of the problem or how Google plans to deal with the backlash. I think I would want to be compensated in some way for the inconvenience and possible loss of business. Wouldn’t you?
To perform well in online marketing, you have to use Google. AdWords is far and away the best option available and you’re handicapping your efforts if you’re not using it. Unfortunately, Google understands this fact also. This means that as more and more advertisers rely on AdWords, Google can bleed more and more money from their budgets.
Joel Chudleigh has an in-depth look at the various ways Google encourages you to spend more for online advertising at Business2Community, but I’ll give you a quick synopsis.
Basically, Google has been able to develop innovative new ways for your ad to get noticed and ways for you to track how well your campaigns are performing, but has included in this innovations an urging to spend more to get more. This is not an indictment of Google, but rather a statement of fact.
Of course Google will readily show you click-through and conversion rates of ads that display at the top of search results as compared to your ads because they want you to bid up to capture those top spots. That’s just one example of AdWords’ service subtly prompting you to feed more into your ad budget.
Google has cleverly created a competitive landscape for advertisers where the highest bid receives the most views and clicks. For advertisers, there’s no choice but to play along.
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.
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.
