Tag Archive for: PPC

Google Logo

Google has officially confirmed the end of ads in the right hand column of its search pages, except for two notable exceptions.

As of February 19th, Google is phasing out ads on the right side of its desktop search results. Instead, all ads will appear at the top or bottom of the results, though Google may include an additional ad above results for “high commercial queries.”

The change will effect users worldwide, in all languages. Google is also saying the change is motivated by a push to bring desktop results closer to the mobile experience, however rumors suggest the low click-through rate (CTR) of right side ads may also be a factor.

There are also two specific exceptions to the change. No ads will appear on the right side of desktop search results except in two cases:

  • Product Listing Ad (PLA) boxes will still show either above or to the right of search results
  • Ads can still appear in the Knowledge Panel

Overall, most users probably won’t notice the difference in search results. However, businesses competing for the already limited organic space on the front page of search results may find the change makes the competition even fiercer.

The decreasing front page real estate means an even higher focus on SEO for businesses seeking high ranking organic listings.

The rollout for the change should be complete today.

 Bullseye

Over the weekend, Google announced a powerful new feature in AdWords that will allow advertisers to target their audience unlike ever before. Through Customer Match, a new feature rolling out in the coming weeks, advertisers will be able to target ads by email address.

After you upload a list of email addresses, Customer Match will pair them with the corresponding Google users who you can target ads to. Advertisers can also target ads to similar audiences who share similarities with the individuals in the email list.

Customer Match is capable of targeting ads to anyone signed-in to Google on Gmail, Search, and YouTube.

With the audience sets generated by Customer Match, you can craft ads specifically build around reaching them, such as in the example provided by Google:

“Let’s say you’re a travel brand. You can now reach people who have joined your rewards program as they plan their next trip. For example, when these rewards members search for “non-stop flights to new york” on Google.com, you can show relevant ads at the top of their search results on any device right when they’re looking to fly to New York.”

There are still no details about any security measures in place to protect customer email addresses uploaded to Customer Match, other than stating the process is conducted in a “secure and privacy-safe way.”

Google has made a big deal about its ability to prevent advertisers from paying for ads that aren’t seen by real human eyes, including on YouTube’s ad network, but a new study by a team of European researchers suggests something is amiss. According to their findings, advertisers are still being forced to pay for ads despite YouTube’s systems flagging the view as “suspicious” or fraudulently coming from a bot rather than a human.

The experiment from researchers at NEC Labs Europe, UC3m, Imdea, and Polito, was conducted in three stages. First the researchers uploaded videos to YouTbe and set up an AdSense account to monetize them. Then, the team set up AdWords accounts to run ads against the video, before creating and deploying bots designed to specifically view the videos with the ads.

While the researchers concluded that “among the studied online video portals, YouTube is the only one implementing a sufficiently discriminative fake view detection mechanism,” they also found “that YouTube only applies this mechanism to discount fake views from the public view counter and not from the monetized view counter.”

That means that YouTube filters out views it deems as fraudulent for the public view counter, but they are still charging advertisers for those views.

Throughout their experiment, the group observed the number of monetized views was consistently larger than the number of counter views and came to the realization that “views considered suspicious are removed from the public view counter, but monetized.”

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This isn’t the first time Google has been accused of charging for fraudulent clicks. When similar situations were brought up with YouTube, the company said the discrepancies are likely due to users watching the video ad, but not the video itself. That would lead to the view to be monetized but not included in the public counter.

However, the researchers say that cannot be what happened here because the bot was designed to “view” both the ads and the accompanying video all the way through.

The team also took the fact that YouTube performs part of its view validation after the fact into consideration, however after six months the team saw no compensation adjustments. That happened even after YouTube suspended the AdSense account due to the bots’ suspicious activity.

The team also found YouTube is vulnerable to relatively simple attacks. They say they have given their findings to Google and will continue to refine the tools used for the study and potentially make them widely available.

A Google spokesperson said, “We’re contacting the researchers to discuss their findings further. We take invalid traffic very seriously and have invested significantly in the technology and team that keep this out of our systems. The vast majority of invalid traffic is filtered from our systems before advertisers are ever charged.”

Bing Ads is improving its age and gender targeting by collecting more robust demographic data from users to help advertisers better target consumers.

According to the company’s blog, Bing’s global coverage of demographic data has recently doubled, which the company says will ensure its new targeting capabilities will provide “an increase in click-through rate and conversion rate for targetable users, thus potentially increasing the overall return on investment for all your campaigns.”

Advertisers can now utilize Bing’s new increased targeting features by setting targeting rules in “Advanced Targeting” within their Bing Ads dashboard. From there, they can segment audiences by age range, gender, device, and time, which will cause an automatic lift in bids when targeted audiences are searching.

Along with the announcement, Bing Ads released comScore data on its current audience, showing Bing Ads audiences tend to be more female and are most likely within the age range of 35-44.

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Tell me if this has ever happened to you. As you’re browsing a website, your thumb accidentally hits an ad as you try to scroll past it, launching a new page. You close it out, and try to scroll down again only to accidentally tap the ad on the page yet again, leaving you in a loop of trying to close the page and move past it but repeatedly wind up tapping an ill-placed ad that you have no interest in.

Not only is this scenario a bad experience for the user, but it is also a nightmare for advertisers who are wasting money on valueless clicks.

This has been a growing issue for the online advertising industry as mobile browsing increases, but sites have struggled to optimize their sites (and their advertising) for mobile viewers and errant taps. Now, Google is finally making changes to hopefully solve the so-called “fat finger” ad clicks problem.

  1. First, taps close to the edge of an image ad won’t be considered clicks. Google says it has identified the border area particularly prone to accidental clicks during scrolling.
  2. Second, for in-app install ads interstitial ads like the one on the right above users won’t be able to click on the app icon because the close button is overlayed on that image. Users will need to click the call-to-action button.
  3. Finally, ads will only become clickable after they’ve been onscreen for “a short period of time”. How long that period actually is isn’t clear, but Google says the delay is to give users “enough time to examine the content of an ad”.

While most of these changes are relatively common sense (why on earth was the app icon ever considered a click?), but they are still welcomed by the advertising community who have been complaining about “fat fingers” since display ads came to mobile.

Bing is swinging back at critics with new data that shows Bing Ads is successfully serving Yahoo search ad click volume.

According to a new Bing Ads blog post, Bing Ads delivered ad clicks against more than 99 percent of Yahoo desktop traffic and approximately 90 percent of traffic from mobile devices over the last month. The click volume continues to average 99 percent of Yahoo’s April baseline click volume as well.

The post also says that a 1 percent deviation month-over-month is a normal reflection of seasonal queries.

 yahoo-click-volume

In April, Yahoo and Microsoft renegotiated their search partnership after six years, which led to rumors that Bing Ads would not be successfully serving Yahoo search ad click volume, but the data disputes those claims.

Under the old deal, Bing Ads delivered all the desktop search ads across Yahoo properties, but the new deal allows Yahoo to serve up to 49 percent of that traffic from its own Gemini ad system. Additionally, both companies can now sell their own ads, which previously only Yahoo could do.

googleadwordsGoogle AdWords is one of the most powerful tools available to companies trying to get their ads seen online. The only problem is the service can often feel overwhelming to those who are not experienced with the tool, especially with the near constant updates.

Thankfully Google is making it easier for business owners and advertisers to keep up to date and learn the ropes of AdWords with a super useful how-to-guide to paid search.

The guide is part of the Google Best Practice series, located in the Help section of AdWords. The series provides practical advice on using AdWords products to get the most out of paid search and covers everything from optimizing keywords to measuring analytics data.

To help keep up with the frequent updates, AdWords has also added a timeline tool which displays new features and changes to policy and guidelines in a convenient location. The timeline shows recent updates chronologically, so you can easily see what the latest news is.  The tool will show brief descriptions of all new products, features, and updates, with links to more information.

Considering AdWords updates hundreds of times a year, this timeline will be a godsend to many advertisers who are vigilantly watching for updates.

Online ads on Google’s AdWords network are a great way to reach a larger audience interested in your services, but breaking the rules can have harsh consequences. Google removed over 524 million “bad ads” from its ad network last year, and 214,000 of those advertisers are entirely banned from the service due to their bad behavior according to a recent announcement from Google.

“While this represents a tiny fraction of the total ads on our platform — the vast majority of advertisers follow our policies and act responsibly — we continue to remain vigilant to protect users against bad advertising practices,” Vikaram Gupta, director of ads engineering at Google, wrote Tuesday in the post.

The latest data shows several improvements from past years, such as a distinct drop in banned advertises for promoting counterfeit goods, but Google says it is a “constantly evolving fight” and the war against bad ads is far from over.

The announcement highlighted several of the “bad ads” trends that dominated 2014, including more than 43 million ads trying to trick users into clicking, over 4.3 million ads containing copyright infringement issues, and over 9.6 million ads containing healthcare-related violations.

The following infographic breaks down Google’s efforts to weed out bad advertising last year:

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ppc-icon-300Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising is still relatively new and many business owners are still hesitant about investing their limited resources into an advertising system they are unfamiliar with. But, there are countless reasons you should make the jump.

PPC advertising has proven itself time and time again as a means of driving real results for all types of brands across all industries, but it also offers several other benefits lacking in other ad formats.

Compared to other ad formats, PPC gives you a whole new level of control and visibility. That means you can finally feel like you hold the reins on your online advertising. Combine that with a professional to help guide you through the dangers of PPC and you have a surefire combination.

If you still aren’t sure, consider these five reasons PPC advertising is worth your time:

  1. You only pay when real people show interest. One of the best parts of PPC is being able to always know exactly where your dollars are going and you only pay when an interested party clicks on the ad. That’s starkly different from most traditional advertising strategies, where you spend money with the hope your demographic engages with the ad.
  2. You set the budget and control the costs. PPC is amazingly flexible and can be made to suit your needs, no matter what they are. You can set the budget to your needs, including putting a cap on daily spending. Of course, the more you invest the more you get back. But, you can at least get your foot in the door and see some engagement with limited investment.
  3. You reach your target at the best time with the right ad. PPC allows you to target a certain type of person in a specific place at a specific time with a specific ad in a simple and easy to manage manner. With full customization of who you are reaching out to, you get to decide who sees your message and when, allowing you to deliver specific messages to your consumers at just the right time.
  4. You can see results in just a short time. Traditional optimization and other organic online marketing can have a huge impact, but they take lengthy periods of time to gain momentum before their effect is obvious. In comparison, PPC is downright speedy. You can see results beginning to take shape the day after your ad runs and make changes to your strategy as soon as problems pop up.
  5. You can use PPC to improve your other marketing channels. The information you get from PPC can inform all other aspects of marketing, such as which keywords are improving, which products are getting the most response, or to promote niche events that often wouldn’t gain attention on other platforms. If you want to refine your marketing, chances are you will find useful data in your PPC reports.

As Google rolls out more mobile ad formats and targeting measures for marketers, the customers seeing the ads appear to be more readily engaging advertisements from their smartphones and tablets.

Marin-2014-Ad-Conversions

A new study from Marin Software shows that consumers are starting to use mobile ads to complete purchases, but desktop is still the dominant platform for conversions. Other interesting facts from Q3 of 2014 included in Marin’s report are:

  • Mobile devices comprised 31% of paid search impressions and 38% of search ad clicks on Google.
  • Mobile accounted for 30% of ad conversions with mobile conversions increasing 2.4% quarter-over-quarter and nearly 11% year-over-year.

Facebook:

  • 1 out of every 3 ad conversions on Facebook took place on a mobile device with mobile ad conversions increasing 16% quarter-over-quarter.
  • Mobile ads on Facebook accounted for 52% of ad impressions and 63% of clicks.

The findings also make it clear that Search ads are performing miles better than Display or Social ads. More-so, while smartphones may not be the most prominent medium for conversions, they consistently gain the highest rate of clicks.

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Marin says the large difference between Search CTE and Social or Display CTR can be attributed to intent. Searchers tend to be actively looking for something, meaning ads will be more tightly focused. On the other hand, those on social sites or Display ads which appear while users are already engaged with something else are less attention getting.