But what exactly are RLSAs?

Remarketing Lists for Search Ads builds on what Google have already developed with traditional display ads, the idea of targeting ads to customers who have already visited your site. Google have expanded on this idea and made it available for the search network. This means that in theory all your previous work setting up display remarketing can now have a wider and larger impact, which means less work for you to now implement RLSAs. If you’ve already tagged your site with Google’s remarketing pixel then you have already gathered some invaluable customer data that you can use to your benefit! Odds are you also have in place some of the other essential conditions for getting started using RLSAs, which are primarily having Google Display Network remarketing already set up and already having all your campaigns set to include all features in settings (they should be!). RLSAs will use the same lists and management as your Google Display Network remarketing, which is why most of your work is already done. By using these pre-existing remarketing lists you will be able to target visitors on the search network who have already been on your site, on their behaviour whilst active on your site, as well as their search queries on Google. As an added bonus to use these RLSAs you don’t even need to set up new campaigns and ad groups you can attach a remarketing audience of your choosing to a search campaign of your choice. However, to fully take advantage of this great feature, you may decide it is best to experiment and set up some new campaigns and ad groups specifically to test RSLAs (we would suggest this for initial testing).

Remarketing Lists for Search Ads allow advertisers to create an entirely separate strategy for targeting previous visitors on the Google Search Network, allowing you to apply different keywords, bids and ad copy to different audiences and keywords. This makes RLSAs an incredibly powerful and flexible tool, certainly not something for you to ignore. In a world where everything is becoming more personal it has become even more important to modify and tailor your ads as much as possible to your users.  RLSAs provide a platform for greater personalisation, allowing you to create ad copy that is as relevant as it can be not only to the keyword but to where the user is in their interaction with your company.

Keyword research is immensely important to the relevancy of your RLSAs, the ability to apply different audience targeting allows you to refine who you reach out to and helps you refine your sets of keywords appropriately. Meaning you can now bid on more generic keywords or broader match types for visitors, that have visited your site before, that are most likely to convert, past convertors or something else entirely. These are keywords that you perhaps would never consider bidding on in your general search campaigns as they would be too broad for general search traffic. In terms of bidding you can truly tailor your bidding strategy any way you think best, for example bidding more to customers who viewed higher ticketed items, those who dropped out further along in the purchasing cycle or even those that have spent a certain amount of time on your site. Not only can you adjust your bids for different audiences but RLSA bid adjustments also combine with other bid adjustments for location, device and time.

DO NOT DISMISS RLSAs! The important thing to remember is that someone who is already familiar with your site is much more likely to convert and RLSAs can potentially deliver a higher click through rate, better conversion rates and a lower cost per conversion, so it will do you no favours to ignore this development. Why miss out on a second chance to target your previous visitors but through a different channel?

So  you might now be familiar with the basic theory behind Remarketing Lists for Search Ads, but just how exactly do we implement them and how on earth do we make sure we are getting the most from them? Let’s take a brief look.

Implementing Your RLSA

How easy it is to implement your Remarketing Lists for Search Ads depends entirely on whether you are already running Google Display Network remarketing. If you are not using this then firstly why not? (You are missing out on a whole world of untapped potential). But secondly there are a few things you will need to do to allow you to create RLSAs. To start with you will need to create a remarketing list and add a snippet of code that you get from Adwords, known as a remarketing tag, to every page of your site.

Very briefly to do this you need to go to the shared library of your account on the left hand side of the platform. Then navigate to the audiences tab (also on the left side of the platform) and select the option that states ‘Set-up remarketing’. You will then be guided into emailing the relevant person the set-up details. These details include a tag to be placed before the closing </body> tag on every page of your site. Additional technical instructions are included in the email itself. This ‘tag’ or code will tell Adwords to add every visitor to your site to your new list. This is how you will begin to build up a list of cookies. When someone visits a page on your site all the cookies associated with their browsers are added to your remarketing list. For your remarketing list to be useable on search ads you will need to build up a minimum of 1000 cookies. (This is so the privacy of your users is protected). When all this is completed you will have created your first ‘audience’ which will be entitled ‘All Visitors’.

You can then go on to create more remarketing lists based on certain rules or create lists that are a custom combination (these can be a combination of both rule-based lists and tag-based lists). You can create as many lists as you like based on the sections of your website that people visit. To make the most of Remarketing Lists for Search Ads it is a must that you create some more refined lists of visitors, that way you will be able to fully tailor your ads and optimise your bids correctly.

You will also, ideally, need to get the Google SmartPixel implemented on your site to take full advantage of all the RLSA features. It is worth noting that the conversion pixel does allow some functionality but by no means enough for you to fully utilise all aspects of the RLSA.

After this or if you already have all this set up then you have two choices. Your first option is something called ‘Bid-Only’. ‘Bid-Only’ allows you to make adjustments to pre-existing campaigns. With ‘Bid-Only’ you add audiences to campaigns; however your ads will continue to show to users who are not in any of your lists. ‘Bid-Only’, much like mobile and location bid adjustments, enables you to bid higher for those people in your RLSAs. This option holds a lot of value and management efficiencies, as well as being easier to implement, but you will not get as much optimisation as you will with the second option. To get started with this you will need to select any of your currently enabled search network campaigns and click into an ad group. Then click into the ‘Audiences’ tab and you will see the option to ‘+ REMAKRETING’. If you then select ‘Targeting’ and then ‘Remarketing’ your available lists will appear. After selecting your lists you will need to make sure you select ‘Bid-Only’.

TIP! If at first you do not see the ‘Audiences’ tab you will need click the downwards arrow next to the last tab, ‘Dimensions’. You should then be able to select ‘Audiences’ from the drop down list.

The second option, and the one we would highly recommend (a little more work but entirely worth it), is called ‘Target and Bid’. This involves creating multiple RLSA campaigns and/or ad groups for the same sets of keywords but allows you to really make the most of your ad copy, making your messaging as unique as possible. To do this we would advise you start from scratch and build a new ‘Search Network Only’ campaign. In here you can add keywords as normal, possibly even copying the same keywords as another campaign you already have running. Then once you have set this up you will be able to follow the same instructions as for option one except instead of selecting ‘Bid-Only’ you must select ‘Target and Bid’. This will mean that your whole campaign will only be shown to people in the remarketing list you chose to target.

The Importance of Remarketing Lists for Search Ads

Are You Getting The Most From Your RLSA?

It is one thing to have RLSA set up on your campaigns, but it is another thing entirely to be using them efficiently. Now you know how to implement and set RLSA up let’s have a look at what Google call the ‘3 levers’, these are the three best ways in which you can get the most from your Remarketing Lists for Search Ads.

• This Is Personal! – Ad copy is one of the most important things with Remarketing Lists for Search Ads. You can really go to town with how creative you are. Make sure you truly tailor your ads to your specific audiences, for example you could offer discount to those who have been away from your site longer and address the reasons why they haven’t made a purchase so far. For example you might want to mention that you are a respected, trusted company with many fantastic reviews. Look at what you tried in your original ads and make sure you try some different approaches. This is the perfect opportunity to make your ads more relevant and personal. Remember when creating your ad copy that you are targeting different people, you don’t want to use the same ad for those who dropped out at the basket stage as those who only got as far as your homepage, nor would you want to use the same ad for those who looked at say adult gifts as those who looked at gifts for children. Also, dependent on what your visitor was looking at or where they dropped out of the buying process, make sure to test different signal modifies such as ‘review’, ‘buy’ or ‘prices’. If you are creating audiences based on what products visitors were viewing you might also want to consider offering category specific discount promotions.

• Adjust Those Bids! – It is important to test and develop some bolder bidding strategies with your RLSA campaigns. Take advantage of what you already know and start bidding up for those audiences you know are more likely to convert, and down for those who are less likely to convert. For example if you sell subscriptions you may want to bid down for past converters, but if you sell a wide range of gifts then you may want to bid more aggressively for previous converters. You could always consider blocking certain audiences completely if you know they are very unlikely to ever lead to a conversion. Another possibility might be to bid differently depending on the time duration. Often it can be more productive to bid higher for those who have been to your site most recently, as opposed to targeting people just for the maximum of 180 days. Making the most of bid adjustments is vital for both ‘Bid-Only’ and ‘Target and Bid’ options, so there is really no reason not to put some thought into this. If you are a little more unsure or nervous about how effective your RLSAs will be then you should add your lists to a pre-existing campaign and set it to ‘Bid-Only’ without making any bid adjustments. Leave it like this for as long as you think reasonable so that you can start to pull in some stats and see how it performs naturally, then when you are more comfortable with these results you can start to adjust your bids accordingly.

• Broaden Your Horizons! – Remarketing Lists for Search Ads presents users with the perfect opportunity to bid on keywords they perhaps wouldn’t normally dare to. If you create entirely new search campaigns just for your RLSA you can bid on a whole new world of generic keywords and maybe even some more broad match keywords, as it does not pose the same risks as targeting them via standard search. You will always be restricted to the size of your remarketing list and you are only showing to people who have at some point expressed an interest in your site and product. You might even find it more profitable to now bid on some highly competitive terms as they will now be much more relevant to your chosen audience, and should ultimately lead to a higher conversion rate. Depending on what market your company is in you may want to also consider creating a list of your competitor terms to target only those that have been on your site and gone away. Remember a lot of industries revolve around comparison shopping. Don’t forget to alter your ads to suit your audience, just because your keywords are more generic doesn’t mean your ad copy has to be too!

In addition to this we would recommend that you also do some work on your target audiences. Don’t simply target everyone for 180 days or just those people who didn’t convert. There is a wealth of options available to you so get creative! Target different time duration audiences and create different custom combinations to target different people based on top viewed pages or whereabouts they dropped out of the purchasing cycle.

Tip! Don’t forget you can set up multiple Remarketing Lists for Search Ads campaigns in Adwords Editor. You can associate your remarketing lists with your ad group, once you’ve set up your campaign, by selecting the ‘Targeting’ tab and then selecting the ‘Audiences’ sub-tab. If you are adding remarketing lists to your main search campaign make sure to set targeting to ‘Bid-Only’. To change the settings you will need to go to the ‘Ad-Groups’ tab and go into the ‘Flexible Reach’ section.  WARNING! Adwords Editor’s default setting is ‘Target and Bid’.

Limitations

As awesome as we think these Remarketing Lists for Search Ads are, as with everything, they have their limitations. It is definitely worth noting that there a few things you can’t do with RLSA, these are:

• Beware Creepiness Factor – It is important that you do not create ad copy that directly implies you know your users have performed a particular action. By all means make your ad copy more compelling but do not let the user know what you know. On a minor level this may put people off altogether as they view your tactics as underhand and stalker-like, on a more serious note you will begin to infringe on some very real privacy and policy issues and chances are you will not make it past Google with this type of ad.

• 180 Days – Unfortunately, unlike remarketing on display, you can only keep people on your lists for 180 days when it comes to search. This can be a bit of a downside if you are in certain industries such as insurance where people renew policies once a year.

• Cannot Connect – So it would seem like a match made in heaven, especially for ecommerce sites, Remarketing Lists for Search Ads with Product Listing Ads. Sadly this is currently not possible. It is possible that this is in the pipeline for Google, however we advise you not to hold your breath as Google have clearly stated they are retiring good old Product Listing Ads in August this year. (You can read more about this change here).

• No Segmentation – Admittedly Google have become a lot better recently at letting you segment your data so you can see it from all aspects, however you are yet to be able to do this with RLSA. At present you cannot separate out search queries or other metrics by audience. This can be quite frustrating as a negative keyword might be appropriate for one audience but not for another. This is why we would highly recommend you have entirely separate campaigns for RLSA.

So now you know how to set up your Remarketing Lists for Search Ads and how to implement productive strategies you have no excuse not to be using them. This is yet another brilliant feature for Adwords that has unfortunately gone relatively unnoticed, so make sure you’re not one of those left behind still isolating yourself with purely keywords. There is a wider context now and gone are the days when advertisers could simply focus on a good selection of keywords to produce the best results. It is a new era where Google are leading the way in combining the targeting methods of the past with those of the future, so embrace this change or you will be out of the game!

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Now almost a year has passed since these changes and Google has announced more functions for the Keyword Planner. Unlike with some of their announcements, Google has hardly made a song and dance about these new additions; in fact they have been rather subtle about it. Maybe this was not the best way to roll them out in hindsight as keywords, after all, are at the heart of almost everything PPC professionals do, so anything that can aid us with finding new, potentially productive keywords is welcomed with open arms. Some researchers even estimate that advertisers dedicate almost 25% of their time to keyword research.

So what are these major new features and how can we strategically get the most from them?

New Additions To The Adwords Keyword Planner

First of all let’s take a look at some of the additional functions now available in the search volume section of the Keyword Planner; this is the section you will come across when you first access and begin using the planner.

• We’ve Got All The Time In The World – Users now have the ability to get search volume estimates and keyword suggestions for specific date ranges, as well as compare different time periods including the previous period, the same period during the previous year, or customised dates of your own. Many of the new features to the Keyword Planner come with an improvement in visualisation, this addition is no exception. You can view the search volume trends over time on a pretty new bar graph feature located nice and centrally at the top of the page, above your keyword suggestions. If you are doing a comparison Google will add an extra bar to each month for easy visualisation (see image below).

Tip! Hover your mouse over the individual bars and you will get to view details for each month separately.

• This new function can be particularly useful in looking at the seasonality of particular keywords. This is an important point to factor in when searching for new keyword opportunities, as performance and volume will change at certain times of the year and it isn’t always as obvious as you think, so make sure to do your research. You can make the most of this by using your newly discovered insight into what months of the year work better for those new keywords and what months have growth year on year, to then adjust your strategy and bids accordingly. This is the perfect opportunity to make sure you are using your budget wisely. If you need to make it stretch, know where to lower your bids, and raise your bids to make sure you aren’t limited by budget during your peak season!

• Location, Location, Location! – Another of the cool new visualisation features is the ability to see a breakdown of search volumes by your specified geographic targeting. To add or remove a location simply go to the ‘Targeting’ tab located at the top of left side of the screen. When selecting your locations you can get as granular as you like from comparing different countries, right down to comparing different cities, counties and regions. This new granularity in location continues through to the review stage of the keyword planner which we will discuss below.

• Let’s Go Mobile – So it’s the year of the mobile. Yes sceptics go ahead and roll your eyes. We’ve been hearing people talk about paid search for mobiles for some time now and yet the change towards mobile as a focus never seemed to be as dramatic as it was assumed it would. Maybe the cause was early performance as advertisers saw poorer results on basic mobile campaigns Vs desktop. However, as time has gone by the detractors have had to seriously consider how they integrate mobile searches into their strategy. People really do use mobile now for almost everything… and they use them a lot! One of the key new features of the planner is being able to visually see how your chosen keywords mobile search trends alter over time, on another beautifully colourful bar graph. You can clearly see how mobile search volume compares to all other devices, and just as it is with the search volume trends, you can hold your mouse over each bar on the graph to see the actual figures.  This is an excellent new feature to aid you in deciding how to set your mobile bid adjustments. It’s a great opportunity for those who got a little lost in the switch to enhanced campaigns last year to make up for some lost time and start being able to strategically set mobile bid adjustments based on actual data and trends. No more guesswork!

• Where Is It All Coming from? – Not only can you see how mobile volume compares with all other devices, but Google have now added another visual aid so you can see a breakdown by all devices too. This graph or donut chart, looks like the same graph you see for your targeted locations. You are able to see the actual search volumes, as well as a percentage, for your selected time period for computers, mobile devices and tablets.

• Absolute & Relative – When comparing two different time periods be it this season with the last season, this year with last year or even this month with last month, you can now see both the absolute (total) change and the relative (percentage) change. These are located as additional columns next to your suggested keywords and ad groups. As an added bonus you can now also sort by these columns so you can truly see what keywords are in-flux or on the decline. Plus do not forget that all the data on your dashboard can be downloaded should you need to do some further manipulation before deciding what keywords to use.

 Once you’ve chosen some ad groups and keywords to go into your plan you can then get estimates for various metrics including clicks, impressions, costs, and ad position and review your plan. As they have done with the search volume section of the planner, Google have now added lots more segmentation, granularity and other options to this section too.

• Back To The Future – Again Google have allowed advertisers more freedom to decide what time periods their estimates are based on. They now have the ability to not just see daily estimates but also monthly, quarterly and annual estimates. What’s more is that you can also specify your own custom period of time on which the estimates are based.

• Painting The Town Red – It would appear that Google have really gone to town on their location granularity, literally! As with the search volume trends you can now see estimates for your targeted countries, counties, cities and regions, however you can also see a breakdown by several other factors too including town, postal code, neighbourhood, and airport.

• By simply entering your bid and a daily budget into the two boxes at the top of the screen and setting your targeted countries (located in the same place as before) you can get estimates for clicks, impressions, cost and ad position. It is then all displayed on that stunningly colourful pie chart lookalike as we saw before, but within the box are four different tabs for your clicks, impressions, cost and ad position. The information is also available in a table below the graph section, but with additional metrics including click through rate, average cost per click and average position. As always this table is fully downloadable, should you need to play around with the data a little further.

• In addition to this you can also set bid adjustments for your targeted locations and see how these will pan out and impact on your vital metrics. Make sure you have a good play around with this to really get the most out of it, and don’t forget to adjust your time periods (as I mentioned above) so you can see more than just your daily estimates. Once you are comfortable finding your way around this tool make sure you put it to full use and implement some location bid adjustments, only if they are appropriate to your campaigns of course. Remember it makes no sense to bid on areas that convert very badly, you would be better off using that money more wisely on areas that do generate more quality traffic! 

•  The Divergent Device – The first thing to mention here is that much like the granularity with location, and the same as with the search volume trends, you now have the ability to see estimates broken down by device. Again once you have entered your bid and daily budget you can see estimates for clicks, impressions, cost, click through rate, average cost per click and average position split out by desktop, mobile and tablet. As above, the information is located in a downloadable table, but as with the location tab, you also have the ability to see it visually on a graph. For clicks, impressions and costs (each, again, located within their own sub-tab) you can see a line graph which tracks how changing your bid would potentially affect your volume. The image below demonstrates these features.
• The second feature to mention in the devices tab is the new ability to set a mobile bid adjustment (highlighted in red on the image below). This is in our opinion very cool as it allows you to see how different bid adjustments might affect the expected contribution of individual devices. DO NOT disregard this new tool within the keyword planner! It gives you the ability to make informed, logical bid adjustments based on the holistic view, something that was near on impossible before and can still be deemed as difficult task. Due to offline conversions, cross device conversions and limited or no call tracking, advertisers previously made arbitrary bid adjustments to measure the impact, but that no longer needs to be the case. With this new insight you should be able to make the most of your campaigns, not just in terms of bids, but also in knowing which campaigns need a mobile preferred ad and mobile preferred call extension.

With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility 

Although this is the first great update to the Keyword Planner as we said at the start of this article Google were very quiet about it and it’s hard to know exactly why. These improvements are arguably a lot more exciting than some of the other releases by Google that Google have, in the past, very publicly showcased. These new functions and features upgrade the Keyword Planner from being just a useful aid to being an essential and incredibly powerful tool. New mobile and location bid adjustment simulations force the Keyword Planner to make a necessary transformation to a new ‘connected world’, accepting that people use all devices, all the time, from all kinds of locations, allowing advertisers to send the right messages and make the right bid modifications, to get the right results. On top of that there is no longer a need to get sucked into a sea of distracting or confusing numbers. The new, brightly coloured visualisation features are immensely appealing, making various metrics and segmented data easier to understand for you or the client.

So whether you’re a PPC Professional, a newcomer or an online trader, we recommend you start using the keyword planner and see what insight you can find.  

The post No More Educated Guesses – How To Make The Most Of The New Additions To The Adwords Keyword Planner! appeared first on .

Earlier this month Google announced that by the end of August 2014 they will push Product Listing Ads into retirement and advertisers will be forced to upgrade to Adwords Shopping Campaigns, or have Google do it automatically for them. Shopping Campaigns were launched last year, but only became available to all advertisers internationally on the 18^th February this year, so relatively speaking it could still be seen as early days. Google claims that feedback has been extremely positive from the get go for Shopping Campaigns but there are still those that are more cynical about the results. Regardless of how you feel about Shopping Campaigns it will still, no doubt, be a sad loss to us all in the Paid Search industry to see Product Listing Ads vanish completely, especially considering that 89% of us use them. So here we will discuss all things connected to the switch from PLAs to shopping campaigns.

So will this be a change for the better or are things about to get ugly?

Before we take a look at the lows and highs of this switch over lets first take a brief look at the fundamental differences between Product Listing Ads and Shopping Campaigns. After all knowing what you’re dealing with is the first hurdle to overcome and will surely aid a swift transition to the new world!

• Keep Your Eye On The Target – Instead of manually creating and managing each of your product targets you can now browse and organise your entire product inventory within Adwords. Your campaigns are still powered by your Merchant Centre product data but you don’t need to reference it! There is no need to create ad groups to track impressions, cost and clicks, instead you can analyse, report and even segment your feed by any number of attributes including; category, Item ID, condition, product type, brand or custom label. Then you’ll be able to bid on product groups accordingly. This allows for much greater flexibility and a chance to be more strategic and analytical in your approach.

• So long ‘Adwords Labels’ – ‘Adwords Labels’ or ‘Adwords Grouping’, as it’s also known, is now being replaced with ‘Custom Labels’. ‘Custom Labels’ will provide you with the ability to further categorise your shopping campaigns when attributes are not enough, allowing you to subdivide your products.

Warning! Tread carefully when it comes to the new ‘Custom Labels’. Until the deadline is here for switching over do not replace your ‘Adwords Labels’ with custom ones in your product feed as it may negatively impact upon your performance. What you should do is create new ‘Custom Labels’ for your Shopping campaigns. It is also worth noting that you are restricted to five ‘Custom Labels’ per product and only one per column. When it does reach switch over time bear in mind that regular PLA campaigns that use Adwords labels or groupings will not be transferable on Google’s new Adwords upgrade option.

So now that we’ve seen the real differences between regular PLAs and Shopping campaigns what is the downside so far?

The Downside

There will always be those that embrace change and those that fear and resist it with all their might, but in this case there are many sceptics about the upgrade to Shopping Campaigns from Product Listing Ads, and for very good reason. As touched upon above, you will need to rebuild your feed if you are using Adwords labelling or grouping. Even if you are not using this Google still advise that you begin from scratch when it comes to shopping campaigns so that you can fully take advantage of the new features. This can be a big job particularly for advertisers with many PLAs.

The new structure of Shopping Campaigns means that it can be easy to delete an entire campaign all at once. As Shopping Campaigns are structured one on top of another it means that if you delete a top product group you will then delete all of the products within it. So choose wisely and carefully exactly what you delete!

Negative keywords still play an important role within Shopping Campaigns but finding them and adding them can be a little more tedious. To view the search term queries you need to go to the ‘Dimensions’ tab and select ‘search terms’. You must then copy any queries you wish to add as negatives and go to the ‘keywords’ tab to exclude them. Although this feels like a long way round it is still necessary.

At the end of the day it is not just the theoretical downfalls of this switch over, but also the real evidence we have already seen against it.

On several of our accounts, where we have implemented Shopping Campaigns to run alongside Product Listing Ads, we have seen that Shopping Campaigns are not performing as well as would be expected. As you can see from the examples below the numbers speak for themselves. Conversions, CPA & Conversion Rates are significantly lower. In fact the only performance metric that has improved (slightly) is CTR.

Looking at the actual data is the most important thing when deciding how effective Shopping Campaigns are. Although the data doesn’t look good it may be that when the PLAs are switched off Shopping Campaigns really come into their own and start producing the results. It might be this particular account could benefit from a revision of the strategy behind the shopping campaign as it was created as a like for like with the PLA’s to begin with. Remember that if you have both running you are, in theory, running two ad campaigns that are overlapping. There are two ways you could deal with this; the first is to build Shopping Campaigns whilst regular PLAs are still live and then pause these once you are ready to switch over. Alternatively you can run both simultaneously and experiment with the ‘Priority Levels’ for a short period until you have a significant amount of traffic coming through. It is a big leap to switch straight from one to the other so you may want to take the second option and experiment. Don’t forget to start adjusting bids within specific product groups as soon as you have enough data!

A Positive Effect

So Google’s official company view seems to be that Shopping Campaigns have as we said received great feedback. Whilst this might not be the case for all of the advertisiers forced to make this switch, they have at least given people some time and breathing space to prepare for this change. In fairness to Google, advertisers have been able to start working on Shopping Campaigns since February and still have until August to be fully migrated over. This means that the change should not be overwhelming for you IF you plan now. Our advice would be to take it slowly, but start early. If you step lightly and do it soon you can really begin to reap the rewards and benefits of using Shopping Campaigns. Also remember to use all the tools Google provides you with such as Adwords API which was rolled out for Shopping Campaigns back in March.

Summary Of Benefits

So just what exactly are the advantages to using Shopping Campaigns over PLAs?

• More Granularity – As mentioned earlier the key advantage of Shopping campaigns is the ability to browse your entire inventory on the Adwords platform itself, and more importantly create product groups using a variety of different attributes from your data feed. With this new system you can get as granular as you like right down to segmenting out by product ID!

• Advanced Performance Measurement – As a continuation of the above granularity in creating product groups, advertisers can now also view metrics associated with individual products or segment data by attribute. This allows for greater product reporting and even analysis of historical data. Furthermore you can also exclude products based on this data directly in the Shopping Campaign, as opposed to before where it had to be done within the feed

• Competitive Metrics – Isn’t making decisions so much easier when we know what other people are doing? Well Google, in their almighty wisdom and immense generosity have now decided to share a few more tasters about what the competition are up to. With benchmark metrics and impression share advertisers can now see how their vital statistics compare against the competition in the market.  You can now make bid adjustments and feed updates based on how your click-through-rate, cost per click and PLA impressions share stack up against others in your field. With this advertisers can now bid with a certain degree of confidence and make more efficient changes. In addition to this you can further optimise your campaigns using the new ‘Bid Simulator’. The ‘Bid Simulator’ will enable you to estimate how particular changes are going to affect the performance of your campaign, especially in regards to impressions, clicks and costs. This is a great tool to help advertisers identify new opportunities to grow their campaigns

• Get Your Priorities Sorted! – One big change from Product Listing Ads is the new ability to set priority levels for different Shopping Campaigns, particularly helpful if you have products appearing in more than one campaign. For example if you have a product appearing in 3 campaigns then Google will look at the criteria in the highest priority campaign when deciding whether or not to show the product. This is an important new improvement to give you even greater optimisation, so don’t overlook it. You will find the priority level settings located in the Shopping settings (Advanced) tab but it is not too advanced and can make a great difference to your performance

• Upgrading For The Lazy! – Although to really make the most of the new Shopping Campaigns you should always start a new campaign from scratch, Google have decided to create a ‘cheat’ or ‘shortcut’ for those who have less time to deal with the change or those who are just plain lazy! After first setting up your Shopping Campaign you will be directed to a new page to create ad groups. Here you will be faced with two choices; to start a fresh or to create an ad group based on a regular PLA campaign.

• Adwords API – Not to be underestimated is the new version of the Adwords API, which was announced back in March and introduced lots of support for Shopping Campaigns. The Adwords API enables advertisers to create, edit and bulk edit product groups at scale. Particularly useful for those with bigger accounts!

In an ideal world I’m sure we would have some definite answers to whether Shopping Campaigns will ultimately work better than regular Product Listing Ads, and there would be a nice long list of definitive dos and don’ts in terms of transitioning over to Shopping Campaigns. Unfortunately things are never that simple. In truth everyone’s experience of Shopping Campaigns will be slightly different.

Shopping Campaign Quick Tips

To avoid any unnecessary trauma just remember these simple tips:

• Accept That The End Is Nigh! – Whether you like it or not PLAs will be shut down in favour of Shopping campaigns, so deal with it and move on. The sooner you understand the change over the more relaxed you will feel and the more productive Shopping Campaigns will be for you.

• Take It Slow! – At this point you still have a while before the deadline for switching over is upon us. Learn as much as you can about Shopping Campaigns, experiment and test new Shopping Campaigns and steadily and delicately replace your PLAs with Shopping Campaigns.

• Embrace Change! – You should see this as an opportunity to improve your Adwords productivity overall and a chance to create even better, more powerful campaigns. Therefore AVOID THE UPGRADE OPTION if you can. It is a lazy way out and will not allow you to fully take advantage of all the wondrous potential Shopping Campaigns hold. It is also a fantastic opportunity to test some pre-existing optimisations for PLAs such as geo-targeting, mobile traffic segmentation, or ad scheduling by both day of the week and hour of the day. You should really already be using these optimisations but if not then start now!

Please remember that this is only the beginning of the transitioning period. Google have stated that they will, in the coming months, be releasing more new tools and aids to help with a smooth cross over to the dark, unknown territory of Shopping Campaigns. Despite how you may feel about Shopping Campaigns, once PLAs are killed off they will be needed more than ever. From a consumer perspective nothing is changing; ads will still appear in the same places online and on the same networks, and people will still find them as relevant and as informative as ever!

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Despite the exciting new features that came last year, it will still, no doubt, come as a relief to many that the most recent updates to the Adwords platform as announced on April 22^nd  2014,  are optional…..to a degree. That means you can pick and chose what to experiment with and what to ignore, or you can just carry on as you are. It would be a shame however to do this, as the new features that are to be rolled out over the coming months offer some great new opportunities for businesses of all sizes to regain some control over their accounts. The most notable announcement was that of the ‘New Enterprise-Class Tools’.

Although there are several new features coming soon it will delight many users to know that nothing is being retired specifically because of these. It is worth remembering, however, that Google is to retire the regular Product Listing Ads (PLA) by the end of August in favour of their shopping campaigns (which you can read more about here), and some of the ‘New Enterprise-Class Tools’ could well mark the beginning of the end for the Adwords Editor as more actions are added to the platform itself.

So what are these ‘New Enterprise-Class Tools’ and what other features have Google revealed?

‘Enterprise-Class Tools’

Whether intended as an attack on Adwords Management Platforms such as Marin or Kenshoo, or a truly genuine response to those asking for more help to manage increasingly large accounts and campaigns more effectively , the following new features will I’m sure manage to seduce many businesses away from using outside platforms. It might also come as a surprise to learn that these swarve new features are not limited to businesses of a particular size or annual ad spend, but will be available to all. Not that third-party platforms should have any cause for concern just yet, there will always be those who don’t wish to get their hands dirty and embrace the new enterprise-level Adwords management functionality.  For those that can’t wait for the new workflow, reporting and optimisation tools here is what we know so far:

1.       Increase In Bulk Actions – Previously many bulk actions were only available in the Adwords editor and other third party systems, now control is given to the Adwords platform itself.  You will be able to set up things such as location targeting and ad rotation across thousands of campaigns actually on the Adwords platform. Large numbers of ads can be updated quickly, across several campaigns with just a few clicks on the interface. A particularly useful element for things such as seasonal promotions or price changes.

 
2.       Automated Bidding – Expanding on what they’ve already started, Google are now adding the ability to maximise conversions or revenue by giving advertisers the power to set efficiency targets and business goals. Again this was an action previously limited to third-party platforms. 

3.       Enhanced Reporting – Appropriately nicknamed ‘Excel for Adwords’ this is perhaps the most exciting new feature. What was once a laborious task importing, exporting and formatting data downloaded from Adwords in spreadsheets can now be done directly on the platform using a multi-dimensional analysis tool. Drag and drop pivot tables could make downloading and formatting data in Excel a thing of the past. Using a variety of new visualisation tools it will be easy to analyse your data as well as turn it into tables, graphs and charts (including line, bar and pie charts!) which can then be downloaded and shared.

4.       ‘Your Own Lab’ – Life is not always straightforward and making decisions when there are number of variables at play can be extremely difficult. Hindsight is a wonderful thing, but not much use when the moment has gone and the mistakes have been made. Well worry no more! This new tool allows advertisers to create draft campaigns and experiment with a variety of features before fully committing to an idea. You can stage and test new ideas using a percentage of your live traffic, enabling you to make a more data driven decision. Plus there are hardly any limits to what you can play with – adjust everything from bid changes, new keywords, and campaign settings to setting special bids for times and locations, experimenting with ad formats and  so much more! So if you have ever wondered what affect an idea you have on an account will have, then you can measure it easily within this powerful new adwords feature.

It’s Not About Mobile It’s About Consumers!

Perhaps not the best opener to a marketing conference there has ever been, but the Enterprise-Class Tools would have been a tough act to follow, Google decided to lead their event with their new Mobile App Ads. This is not an entirely new area for Google as they have already begun to make inroads with things such as the AdMob Network and App Promotion Ad Format. The following new features aim to promote apps further making them easier to find and download as well as more engaging:

1.       Improved Targeting – Google want you to be able reach people who are most likely to engage with your business or service, and become a valued customer. With better targeting you should be able to reach people based on the apps they currently use, how often they use these apps, the sorts of in-app purchases they make, and their app download history. For example if you are a fitness enthusiast and use various apps to measure how many steps you take a day or how far you cycle then you could possibly see an ad for an app that would measure your calorie consumption.
 
2.       More Ad Impressions – App Promotion Ads should begin appearing as people watch YouTube videos on mobile devices. App installs will also become available as an enhancement to the current TrueView offering. Both these should increase ad inventory especially considering that 40% of YouTube views take place on mobile.
 
3.       Deeper Re-Engagement – It might come as a shock to know but 80% of apps that are downloaded are only ever used once and then trashed. Getting an app downloaded is only the beginning of the problem, gaining the person as a customer and keeping them engaged can be a lot harder work. Google have announced that they are now launching a new re-engagement campaign in Adwords for both search and display. Using this customers will be taken directly to already-installed apps and relevant pages encouraging further engagement.
 
4.       App Analytics Measurement – In the near future advertisers will be able to measure conversions across the entire life-cycle of an app; from installation, to re-engagement, to in-app purchases, pretty impressive ay!

Before we get too excited about these new developments in app marketing it is worth noting that so far Google have not developed any new identifiers, such as a new mobile cookie, nor have they confirmed that these new features will be implemented on apps outside of the Google Play Store. It shouldn’t come as a surprise that for now Android will most definitely take priority over iOS.

So will all this be enough to tempt advertisers to move away from third-party management software? In theory I’m sure that it will, providing you don’t mind doing some of the hard work yourself. However the proof will be in the pudding as they say! The one thing that remains is for us to see how well these wonderful new toys work when they’re here. In the meantime Google have also promised that they are still working on investing in Estimated Total Conversions which includes both off and online conversions, but as of yet they have nothing new to announce on the matter. Fingers crossed they eventually do find a solution to tracking off- line conversions!

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Google know that people using it’s search engine for research find Ad Extensions helpful in getting to what they are searching for more quickly, happy searchers (thus happy finders) mean a happy Google as better click through rates mean more revenue to for Google.

Previously Ad Rank was calculated by using your max CPC bid and your Quality Score but this new update will also take into account the expected impact form your Ad Extensions and formats, Google have also increased the importance of Ad Rank when deciding if your advert is eligible to be shown with extensions and formats.

So if you aren’t using Ad Extensions then you should definitely start testing them to see what difference they make from now on however you should create Ad Extensions that are relevant to  your business, for some businesses then a click to call Ad Extension will make more sense, for others a location extension or sitelinks might make more sense. You can read more here about the available Ad Extension types.

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Whether or not you have set up your PPC Google Adwords account or not is relevant, you still have time to do it, but you need to be quick, if you want to get on the Christmas bandwagon. According to a Google Insights survey http://www.google.com/think/articles/3-strategies-to-prepare-for-the-holidays.html  nearly half of the participants say they plan to buy Christmas gifts online this year. With up to 40% of this year’s online sales expected to happen during the Christmas shopping season, can you afford not to invest in Paid search?

Here are 8 things to keep in mind to make your Christmas PPC campaign a success:

 1. Learn From Experience.

If you are a seasoned online retailer with an active Google Adwords account that has been running for more than a year, learn from your experience. Review what worked and what didn’t work last year, look for buying patterns and plan accordingly. Which keywords worked and ad copy worked best? Make sure those campaigns are no longer paused.

2. Budget.

If you rank pretty high for your chosen keywords throughout most of the year, don’t take it for granted during Christmas. Companies invest heavily during the last quarter and competition is overwhelming in almost every sector. Many businesses don’t advertise during the year and only put their campaigns live during the Christmas period, with large budgets and heavy handed bids. Make sure you set aside a substantial amount if you want to stay in the game during this period and fully take advantage of all the potential of the final quarter. It’s expected to be the busiest online Christmas to date.

3. Bigger is not always better.

Unless of course we are talking about the budget for PPC campaigns. Don’t be put off by the big names. Granted, Amazon is pretty hard to beat when it comes to speed of delivery and customer service, but last year 25% of online shoppers purchased from a retailer http://www.google.com/think/articles/3-strategies-to-prepare-for-the-holidays.html  they had never used before. Before Christmas we tend to shop for things we don’t usually buy, so if you can offer what clients are after at a competitive price (which is a deal breaker for almost half of the buyers), their brand loyalty is out of the window. Only 22% of buyers look for the best selection. Don’t forget to upsell and offer as many options per page as possible without cramming it, because 33% of shoppers are researching further purchases at the same time.

4. Google Shopping

If you can handle the slightly more demanding Google Feed requirements https://support.google.com/merchants/answer/188494?hl=en for Google shopping http://www.google.com/shopping , now it’s the time to set some budget aside and get on it. We expect this to be one of the best performing features of search this Christmas. If you are already running a Google Shopping campaign, don’t forget to take advantage of dynamic remarketing this Christmas.

5. Adcopy

Create urgency by letting your potential buyers know how long they have left to order if they want to receive their items before Christmas.

Make sure you really pay attention to the wording and keywords you use in your adcopy.

- Make sure you have a list of all the gift-giving holidays people will be shopping from November till Februrary. Lets start you off! We have Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Hanukkah, Christmas, Kwanzaa, Boxing Day, New Year’s Day, January sales, Valentines day .. although some are busier shopping times than others depending on the target country.

- Make sure you include all common misspellings and consider all terms possible for each event.

- Make a list of all possible gift recipients. Consider the relevancy of your product of course: it will save you a fortune if you don’t invest all your budget bidding on “presents for mum” if you only sell cigars and men scarves. Don’t forget to include co-workers, hairdressers, babysitters etc.

- Use a list of all your products to create Christmas related phrases. Include words like gift, present, stocking filler, etc.

- Make a list of holiday promotions. Go beyond “free shipping” although this always helps. Offer guaranteed delivery before a certain date, whatever holidays you have in mind, also mention gift wrapping if you offer it, see if that makes a difference to click through rates and conversion rates (men are notoriously lazy when it come to wrapping!).

- Utilise the keyword planner tool once you have built a basic list of holiday search terms.

- Once you have built a list of holidays, recipients and offers, mash it all together! When that’s done, plug some of your best finds into Google Insights to get the idea of search volume you can expect. This will help you to budget accordingly.

- Negative keywords are almost as important here as all the good work you’ve done with the positive ones. In order to avoid wasting your holiday budget, you need to keep your traffic as focused as possible. Always be proactive in adding negative keywords. It’s better to be cautious than to find yourself bidding on GIFT on broad match and using up all your budget in hours. You will notice when using Google Keyword Planner (new, fancy name for Google Adword tool), you will see searches for example “homemade gifts”. Unless you offer homemade goods, add this as a negative keyword.

6. Mobile.

We won’t be wasting your time telling you again how important mobile advertising is. Just this one fact: Shopping-related search queries from mobile devices were up 59% year-on-year in July! http://www.google.com/think/research-studies/the-mobile-movement.html

You can no longer ignore mobile, and this year with over half of the purchases happening as a result of a mobile search it’s more important than ever to target mobile traffic.

If you are mostly a brick and mortar business, make sure you are registered with Google Places and your business is easy to find for any mobile savvy client. Offer discount for anyone who checks in at your place via Foursquare and other apps.

7. Seasonal Landing Pages.

During Christmas time, it’s hard enough to get your ad seen, so if you succeed to cut through the crowd and competition, and get potential clients on to your site: don’t disappoint. Make it look in line with the season. Targeted Media offers bespoke conversion optimised landing pages from £500.

8. Remarketing.

With all the expected traffic this Christmas, it’s likely there will be campaigns where you run out of budget each day, so make sure to take advantage of search remarketing to keep your ads live.

For more information and help with your Pay Per Click related queries, contact us on cathal@targetedmedia.co.uk or 0800 228 9122

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Ready Creatives is comprised of two tools: Ready Image Ads and Ready Ad Gallery.

Display advertising is an arena that most people don’t give enough thought to, yet it’s a great way to deliver highly relevant, dynamic, rich  content to alert and captivate consumers. Creating engaging banner ads is not easy, we have many years expertise at this and offer it as an in-house service for clients but whilst very cost effective it’s not as cheap as doing it yourself although our results show the ROI of our ads outweigh the cost involved many times over!.

Google’s new Ready Creatives now lowers the bar for smaller businesses to get involved in display advertising  and allows anyone to Instantly build IAB Standard, HTML5 compatible ads!

With just one click, AdWords customers can use Ready Image Ads flexibility just by adding their website URL and Google’s Ready Creatives will  automatically build display ads based on images taken from their website.

AdWords customers can further customise the ads by changing the text, colour, font, headlines, URL and images… and much more . The intuitive user-interface and streamlined process means that AdWords customers can build strong, compelling display ads in a matter of minutes, and best of all they are all automatically to IAB standard ads and they are in HTML5 format taking existing images from your website or your uploaded images. Even better news is that these HTML5 ads can be used on mobile devices as well as desktops!

Beautiful ads at your fingertips via Ready Ad Gallery

Ready Creatives doesn’t just quickly hash together the elements you want included in your display adverts – it’s more sophisticated and valuable than that as it helps you build campaigns that will really engage with potential customers and for those with zero design ideas, the Ready Ad Gallery has pre-built templates which you can easily customise to meet the goals of your campaign.

You can choose from the following formats :

• Dynamic Ads – Dynamic Ads deliver tailored creative across the web that combine the layouts, products, messages and offers that your customers are most likely interested in, based on what they viewed on your website.
• Engagement Ads – Engagement Ads captivate consumers with rich creative messages. They fit in standard display units, allowing to scale across the web, and then expand to a larger format after an innovative two-second hover delay.
• Video Ads – Videos are as effective as TV in building awareness of your business.  Create a quick video ad in seconds that showcases your brand.
• General Purpose Ads – if you need a simple display ad, browse through our hundreds of template options and customize in our easy-to-use editing tool.

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On a Boots search we are seeing the listing above, surprisingly, and probably quite annoyingly for Boots, other brands are there now to the right, Superdrug, Argos, Tesco, Asda and Debenhams all have their logos and a link featured under a new “People also search for” section.

Below is another version of the Boots page, you’ll notice some differences :

There’s a location listing, the Boots listing itself is now boxed in with local map, then a company summary to the right side.

Below is yet another version of the Boots listing :

In the listing above Geo-location is featuring with local listings and even photographs of the nearest store to where we are located, as well as a small map and a box about the company again.

I think most brands would be happy with screens 2 and 3 but not so thrilled at the first image featuring other retailers logos and links.

The listing for Argos is below, shows differences between Google.com and Google.co.uk :

Above you can see the logos in action again, some more boxed, but unrelated Argos content and a Search argos.co.uk box, which when searched leads to Google’s indexed list of Argos contents, not the Argos site, Google is trying to keep users on site again here, if they find what they are looking for then they’ll click through to Argos, if not then they will stay on Google and do another search.

Below is the Argos site as listed on Google.co.uk :

Note there are no competitor brand logos or links and the ‘see results about’ box is not here either.

On a financial brand like gocompare.com the listings and PPC are Company information box are fitting together quite well, although in that area above the fold there are now 7 other companies mentioned and 5 other logos visible now :

It would seem there is some testing going on here by Google, and the interesting (or distressing depending if you are the sector leading merchant) thing to note here is that if you click one of the logo links, in this case MoneySupermarket you get this screen :

Suddenly you are assaulted with 8 other brand logos in quite an imposing way. It would seem that Google is trying to push traffic around brands, maybe this is to engage them more, they pushed people onto main keywords with their predictive search in the search box and now it would seem that they are purposely creating brand awareness of other brands with this feature, this could be good for the merchants with less market share but could be annoying/costly for the market leading brand in each sector, only time will tell of the impact.

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They say that the reporting update will tie the 1-10 quality score more closely with it’s 3 main influencers : Expected Click Through Rate, Ad Relevance, and Landing Page Experience.

Google is rolling out this update globally within the next few days.

They are making the changes so that the reporting of the quality score more closely reflects the three key factors that affect the visibility and anticipated performance of you adverts. They say that they hope that by giving more transparency in the 1-10 quality score will aid you to improve the quality of your ads.

They go on to say that the changes are only to how the 1-10 quality score is actually reported and NOT how it’s is actually calculated and therefore it won’t have any effect on your ads actual performance, it’s just a reporting change. So unless you have automated rules tied directly to your reported 1-10 Quality Score, your ads should continue to behave as they have always done.

It would be wise to audit your automated rules to ensure that you don’t have any running that are directly affected by the reported quality score!

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They’re currently in Beta but you will be able  use the good things that other reputable 3rd party sources have said about you :

As you can see from the above examples, you can use a direct quote or you can summarise a key point like example two.

The main criteria for the review extensions content are :

• Content in AdWords Review Extensions must be from a reputable third party source and must comply with AdWords standard policies.
• It’s the advertisers responsibility to make sure that they are allowed to use each review in their ads.
• AdWords Review Extensions will be checked by both software and human editors to protect users from deceptive or misleading claims and validate the authenticity and compliance to Google’s terms and conditions.

At the moment they AdWords Review Extensions are only available in English language but as they expand usage we expect to see other languages incorporated. If you would like to start using the review extensions contact your AdWords rep or PPC agency contact who will sort this out for you.

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