Well, more testing, here we come…
February 5, 2011
So, this announcement from Google AdWords seems like a pretty big deal. Not on the level of say, the introduction of broad match modified match type, but a big deal none the less.
Basically, it appears that Google is potentially using the first line of an ad’s description and appending it onto the headline. This is actually a very big deal. The headline of an ad has great impact on the ad’s CTR% – how much always varies by situation, but it is typically the most significant element of an ad in terms of affecting CTR%.
Read more
Why Product Listing Ads Are Worth Testing
January 31, 2011
Product listing ads from Google AdWords have been available to most advertisers since mid-November-ish. Depending on how you our your clients want to set up bidding controls, the actual setup of product listing ads can be somewhat of a pain and a bit confusing. However, the ability to test this new avenue for revenue is an important one.
Read more
The Improved Ad Preview Tool From Google
January 29, 2011
Here is a recently released tool from Google AdWords that I’ve benefited from in serving my ppc management clients already: the improved ad preview tool.
When signed into an AdWords account and using the ad preview tool, there are some great settings/controls that make testing your ads much easier. When dealing with things like geographic targeting, the new settings to preview ads for specific locations make debugging or discovering issues much easier.
Read more
Google AdWords Display URL Changes
January 27, 2011
Recently, Google announced that they were going to be updating the way the display url is shown to users of their site. Based on their own testing, Google has determined that by standardizing the capitalization of the display url’s subdomain and domain portions (sub-directory seems to retain its existing case) to lowercase, among other things, the ad click through rates increase.
This development has now been rolled out to most/all(?) users.
Read more
PPC Management and Remarketing – Why it Should Matter to You
May 29, 2010
A few months ago, Google Adwords announced the full on release of a new opportunity for advertisers called “Remarketing“. This functionality has been around on other advertising platforms, but finally makes its appearance on the big G.
Not sure what ‘remarketing’ is? In theory, remarketing allows display advertisers to show specific ads to users who have visited designated page/pages on their website. These ads can be as tailored and specific as desired and offer advertisers to target a group of people who are very highly desirable – visitors who have previously checked out particular pages of an advertisers site and done some tire-kicking.
Read more
Adwords Management – Why Pictures Speak Louder Than Words
January 15, 2009
For those of you who are considering hiring an Adwords management company to handle all of your ppc advertising needs, I’d like to suggest another reason why making the decision to hire an Adwords expert makes a lot of sense.
Let’s be honest, we all have less and less time to get the things done in a day that we need to get done. Focusing on the most important elements of your business and engaging others to handle other important aspects only makes good business sense.
Read more
Adwords Management – Hassle You Don’t Deal With
January 13, 2009
If you have been riding the fence about whether to hire a Adwords management company or not, you should consider the following situation I had come up recently with a client.
I was helping a client deal with an aggravating issue relating to tracking and conversions that was giving nothing but headaches. But, instead of those headaches belonging to my client and their having to deal with the time and aggravation of working with multiple platforms and support teams to resolve the issue, they got to continue working on their business while I spent hours sorting out the problem for them.
Read more
Adwords Management – A Real Time Saver
January 5, 2009
If your business has been actively utilizing pay per click marketing as part of your online promotion strategy, you have probably ended some days feeling like a champion and some days feeling like a ppc loser. Pay per click is not an easy, laid-back game any longer and requires a significant amount of time, effort, and understanding to really benefit from.
There is really no reason to feel ashamed or frustrated if you are finding that you have less and less time in a given day to try to keep up with the nuances and intricacies of pay per click advertising. In this increasingly specialized field, an emerging service has developed centering around adwords campaign management.
Read more
PPC Management – Google Reports
September 10, 2008
If you are an active, or potentially active, pay per click advertiser then you need to understand the importance of data. Within your ppc campaign management area, you will have access to an increasing amount of data relating specifically to your pay per click efforts. Now having all this data is all well and good, but what separates the men from the boys in the pay per click game is knowing what data is important and how to interpret it.
This is where a useful section of your Google Adwords account comes in very handy: Reports. Yep, sounds boring and is likely to be ignored by most Adwords’ users. However, learning how to produce usable and actionable data from the Reports section is a critical component to climbing to the top of the ppc mountain.
Read more
PPC Management – Keyword Targeting
August 26, 2008
When building out your pay per click campaigns, an important area to pay attention to is keyword matching options. While this functionality is called slightly different things depending on with pay per click service you are using, most major PPC engines offer a variety of keyword match types. Understanding these types and utilizing them for your benefit can mean the difference between a successful ppc effort and a failed one.
Why so dramatic? Well, I can’t help myself as getting the keyword matching options wrong can ‘clean out’ your advertising budget faster than you can say ‘why didn’t I pay attention to that?’
Read more
PPC Management — Adwords Quality Score Updates
August 22, 2008
If you have been advertising via pay per click using, you have likely come face to face with Google Adwords’ dreaded/beloved quality score.
By assigning a quality score to each keyword in your campaigns, Google is able to show ‘the most relevant’ ads to their users, in order to ensure the ‘best user experience’. Whether that is actually the result or not remains to be seen, but what is certainly true is that every advertiser using Google Adwords absolutely must cater to their quality scores. To ignore them only results in poor performance and decreased return on your advertising dollar.
Read more