Showing posts with label PPC. Show all posts
Showing posts with label PPC. Show all posts
PPC is a bit complicated to start, but when you add in having (tens of) thousands of products, each with a different price and margin, and multiple categories, life can get complicated indeed.
Here are three opportunities for e-tailers, that if you are quick, you can implement before the holidays.
1. Target CPAs – Individual Product Targets
Many people look at the CPA or ROAS of the account overall. However, you're really looking for that number on the campaign, ad group, ad and keyword level.
A simple way to do this is to put the target CPAs at the ad group level. While this takes a bit of time initially, your reporting and optimization is made quite a bit easier, as you can think just about bid optimization and ROI at the keyword ad level, without running too much math.
Expert Tip: Create reporting at the ad group level to get a fairly detailed understanding of what is and isn’t performing. By using a “right” calculation in Excel, you can grab the cost from the end of the ad group name and put it into a separate report.
2. Create Targeted Campaigns for Long-Tail Product Names (use Pricing in Headlines)
Many people will send all of the traffic to their category page, as they have a ton of keywords. Another approach is to send the very specific long-tail searchers directly to the product page that they are searching for. You can do this by building out campaigns from your product feed into individual ad groups in an account.
This looks a bit complicated, but as you start dynamically concatenating this information in Excel, it will become a bit easier. Also, remember that you may need to clean up the datafeed in order to make this a clean import.
This can often result in some great ad copy that includes prices for all of your products, delivered to searchers that are down to the last part of the sales funnel – where they are just researching price.
3. Match Keywords With Product Landing Pages vs. Category Landing Pages
In tandem with the above post, depending on your site, sending a visitor to a far too targeted landing page, where they are trying to research different products, will also lose you a potential customer. So, it’s important to look at the landing page conversion rates and identify if you're sending the customer to the best page for their query.
These three tips can help increase the performance of your campaigns, just in time to ride the holiday wave!
Every year, Google introduces new ad formats, changes AdWords settings and introduces a few high profile tests into the wild.
This year saw a lot more aggressive monetization by Google, with several high profile changes that increased the real estate for ads at the expense of unpaid listings.
This roundup covers eight key changes introduced to AdWords in 2012:
- Google Shopping and Product Listing Ads
- Overhauled Location Targeting
- Dynamic Search Ads
- Enhanced Sitelinks
- Offer Extensions
- Dynamic Display Ads
- Mobile App Extensions
- AdWords for Video
1. Google Shopping and Product Listing Ads
Google Product Search, formerly Froogle, was once a free tool to allow anyone with a Merchant Center account to include their products in the visual product listings that sometimes appeared in search results.
This year, Google shifted those results to be entirely commercial and rebranded it Google Shopping. These ads are now powered entirely by Product Listing Ads and take two forms.
First, they appear as a band of sponsored image ads, with product pictures, price and vendor, underneath the top search results listing:
Second, certain specific product searches will replace the right column of search results with a product description and links to retailers:
This is a dramatic change to the search results, how Google monetizes and paid search in general. It furthers the 2-year-old march towards paid search without keywords. Every retailer must incorporate these ads as a part of their AdWords strategy.
For more education, check out these resources.
How to create Product Listing Ads:
How to optimize your Product Listing Ads:
Watch Rimm-Kauffman Group’s webinar with Google about Product Listing Ads and read Google’s best practices for Google Shopping (pdf). Google blog post, Google Shopping: momentum and merchant success, details some of the other changes and highlights merchants who have had success.
2. Overhauled Location Targeting
Location Targeting in AdWords got an overhaul with a new location targeting tool and some more sophisticated options for local targeting. This change is particularly relevant for brick-and-mortar retailers with a limited service area and companies that need or want to target specific areas.
The most prominent change is the introduction of ZIP code targeting.
This targeting works well with location insertions for ads with location extensions, which automatically creates custom ads based on the users location.
Other features, like airport targeting, can be a huge boon for car rental companies or local hotels:
Politicians got a break with Congressional district targeting:
Watch this video to learn the basics:
3. Dynamic Search Ads
If you really want to catch a glimpse of the future of paid search, pay close attention to Dynamic Search Ads. This new technology will automatically crawl your site, according to logic you define, and created dynamic ads that combine information from their crawl with your ad template:
The ads only trigger for search queries that aren’t eligible to match existing keywords in your account. Theoretically, this allows you to address gaps in your account and more quickly adapt to changing inventory.
There are many technical nuances to setting up and tracking these new ads.
- RKG has a good overview of the basics of Dynamic Search Ads.
- Google: Using, creating, and optimizing Dynamic Search Ads.
- Google: Create targets for your Dynamic Search Ad campaigns.
- Google: Using dynamic tracking URLs.
4. Enhanced Sitelinks
In many ways, paid search has become a competitor to organic listings. This has become especially true in the top listing, which appears above organic results and pushes them lower on the page.
Most recently, Google expanded their sitelinks with enhanced sitelinks:
This creates a block of essentially five ads in the premier results location. Google automatically looks for text ads elsewhere in your account that match the sitelinks for your campaign and pulls in lines 1 and 2.
5. Offer Extensions
Google Offer Extensions add an offer below your text, similar to sitelinks. Offers can be redeemed online (trackable) or offline(not measurable in AdWords).
Offers only appear when you’re ad is in the top position. They’re primarily meant for brick-and-mortar retailers, but offers can be used online as well.
SEER Interactive has a nice write-up on the ins-and-outs of Offers extensions.
6. Dynamic Display Ads
Three years ago (!) Google acquired a company called Teracent whose technology:
…creates display ads entirely customized to the specific consumer and site. The startup’s proprietary algorithms automatically pick the creative parts of a display ad (images, colors, text) in real-time determined by like geographic location, language, the content of the website, the time of day or the past performance of different ads.
This year, that acquisition finally came to fruition with the introduction of Dynamic Display Ads. The ad is one template whose featured product varies based on where the ad is shown.
Like Dynamic Search Ads, this is a step towards full automating the advertising process. In this case, it makes scaling ecommerce display much more efficient.
Watch Google’s brief overview:
7. Mobile App Extensions
Apple's App Store isn’t very marketer friendly. Google answered the call of advertisers looking to promote their apps for download with new Mobile App Extensions.
This adds a sitelinks-like option underneath your main text ad:
These are an optional extension to your existing ads:
You can even track downloads in iOS if you integrate a snippet of code into your app.
Watch Google’s video for a high level overview:
8. AdWords for Video
YouTube is the second most popular search engine after Google and in the top 5 sites on the entire Internet. Google simplified the buying of video ads on YouTube and the Google Display Network with AdWords for video.
Targeting, measurement, and reporting for video ads on YouTube and the Google Display Network are integrated into AdWords.
To get a general overview read about Google video ads or watch Google’s overview video:
Remarketing works because you already know something about a user: at the very least, they’ve been to your site and therefore have some interest in whatever it is you’re offering. That’s really powerful knowledge.
Now that it’s December, you also know something else about people, which is that they will almost certainly make several purchases in the next few weeks. Here are some tips to make sure you maximize that knowledge and turn it into dollars.
1. Go Big or Go Home!
Even if you aren't ecommerce, this applies. We're in a time of year when the ad marketplace goes crazy. Dollars are flying everywhere.
Additionally, users are more amenable to seeing ads right now. In fact, they seek them out, doing things like buying newspapers just to see the local deals.
To ensure you maintain your impression share on your surely valuable remarketing campaigns, turn up the volume! Increase your bids (or CPA targets) and increase your budgets.
Additionally, ramp up your impression caps. You still don’t want to over-expose, but the threshold of tolerance is much higher to users right now.
2. Target Everything You Can
Again, people are in super-buying mode. Pixel your promotional emails to bring interested old customers back.
If you have a blog or other content that generally is made for SEO, pixel it and target those users too. Remarket to your YouTube video viewers. All the top-of-funnel purchase research that happens the rest of the year has a really high likelihood of coming to fruition in the next couple of weeks.
Also, if you typically stop remarketing when somebody converts, consider continuing to hit those users, as they may order again. I personally have made seven unique purchases on Amazon since Monday!
3. Target the “Wrong” Demographic
We're now in Bizarro-land. It’s the only time of year when women buy lots of hunting gear, 25-year-olds buy Hummel figurines, and anybody can be compelled to stop in the middle of their “Words With Friends” session to go buy that gift they’ve been meaning to get. If you have any exclusions (genders, categories, placements) on your remarketing campaigns, consider taking them off.
Even better, create campaigns that specifically target everything you normally exclude with customized messaging (e.g., “Want to Buy Him the Perfect Hunting Vest?”).
4. Get on the 'Remarketing Lists for Search Audiences' Train
If you aren’t already using this feature, this is the perfect time to start, because right now, for this target, you know three things about a user:
- They have been to your site.
- They will buy something(s) very soon.
- What keyword they just searched for.
This allows you to hit a way bigger keyword set than you use in your normal campaigns – you can bid to number one spots on head terms that generally don’t have ROAS for you, like “chair” or “toy” (along with super-cheap ones like “gift” and “free shipping”).
If figuring out those keywords is too much work, layer Google’s Dynamic Search Ads (the beta where you let Google “scrape” your content and serve search ads whenever they feel like it) with RLSA. Given all the things you know about these users, this level of targeting – broad match that’s so broad there aren’t even keywords – actually makes sense.
5. It’s Not Over When it’s Over!
If you're planning to dial your remarketing back on December 26, think again! Spending tends to remain inflated until around Jan 20, when the credit card bills come.
There are people to target who want to buy themselves what they are disappointed wasn’t gifted to them (could make for a great creative concept or promo!). Additionally, if you're an ecommerce business and you’re doing it right, on Dec 26 you’ve probably just collected the biggest remarketing bucket that you’ve ever had – and, hopefully, lots of satisfied customers.
Think of it like you think of your email list. There are huge opportunities at driving loyalty through remarketing that gets purchasers to write a review, engage with your social media, or purchase accessories. All the stuff you’d push in emails can also be pushed through remarketing.
Summary
By capitalizing on the universally higher intent to purchase this time of year with smart remarketing targets, you can drive serious profits – the best holiday gift of all!
In paid search marketing, the goal at all times is to drive better results. You spend your time pouring over data looking for that one data point that will help you achieve those better results.
In order to focus your time on finding that data point you need two things:
- Tools that drive efficiency so you can spend more time looking for that insight.
- Access to incremental insights that provide you the ability to see new data points providing better opportunities to optimize.
Google has recently spent some time upgrading AdWords to provide tools that help on both the efficiency and insights categories. Here are a few that you might want to take advantage of.
Insights
- Campaign Diagnostics: Now AdWords will alert you proactively if you're about to make a change to your account that might have a negative reaction. For example, adding a negative keyword that will inadvertently block another keyword. This catch can really provide an extra level of insights that often get missed far too easily when you are trying to do the right thing to an account, but it doesn’t turn out that way.
- Impression Share for Search & Display: Have you been wondering what percentage of display inventory you've been buying? Now AdWords will break out performance individually across both search and display. This is very helpful for the display side; however, you still shouldn't run display and search ads out of the same campaign.
- Email-only alerts with automated rules: Not fully comfortable with the system making some changes without your final, final approval? This tool will provide you with proactive insights about actions that can be taken given the rules you provide.
Efficiency
- Keyword columns in search terms report: For a while now, AdWords’ search query report has been providing information about which search query triggered your keyword ad. However, now you will be able to quickly add that keyword through the same screen.
- Faster editing across your account: AdWords is bringing a feature that has always been available in the Editor to the web – the ability to make bulk changes quickly. The ability to raise, lower, or make bulk changes becomes a great way to save time. Just be sure you're thinking about the implications of big generic bid changes.
- AdWords scripts: The ability to write some JavaScript code to help automate your ads with info from a pricing DB, update bids, etc. A helpful tool to create efficiency, and flexibility.
Overall, Google is doing a lot to help improve the system, and providing tools to help paid search marketers focus on driving improved results. Look for more to come based on feedback from the masses, and keep trying looking for those insights.
