A Former Googler’s Routine For AdWords Management

It’s been seven months since we launched Optmyzr’s first tool  at SMX Advanced in Seattle – the Quality Score Tracker – and we’ve been busy adding tools, reports and optimizations since then. Now, one of the most common questions we get is when to use various optimizations — and, of course, these apply no matter what tools you’re using.

There are plenty of daily tweaks to make in any AdWords account, but what are some of the optimizations we do on a regular schedule? While there’s no one right answer for every account, I’ll share some of my thoughts about what to do and when to do it to keep an account in great shape.

Do These At Least Quarterly

AdWords changes all the time — in the past year, we saw one of the bigger changes in recent memory with the forced migration to Enhanced Campaigns. AdWords also frequently launches new features that are less dramatic than Enhanced Campaigns but that can still have a huge impact on how your ads perform. Make sure you’re not missing out on any of these. Here are a few recent examples:

Mobile Bid Modifiers

Now that mobile and desktop ads are all served from a single campaign, are you using mobile bid modifiers for maximum performance?

Be sure you’re looking at how your ads are performing on different devices so you’re not losing money on mobile devices or tablets. With bid modifiers, you can bid lower for mobile clicks and make sure your ROI is similar to that on desktop. Try to avoid bidding your mobile clicks down 100% because that’s not a viable long-term strategy in most cases.

It reminds me of when we launched the Google Display Network and some advertisers were convinced this was a complete waste of money and turned it off entirely. Smart advertisers figured out how to set the right bids, set the right targeting and make this a very profitable part of their business.

I think there’s no such thing as a bad click, just a click that’s too expensive. So make sure your bids are set correctly to take advantage of the growing number of mobile searches. If you don’t do something with them, your competitors will.

AdWords Scripts
I talk about these ad nauseum, but I believe this is the biggest untapped opportunity for most advertisers. The ability to create custom reports, automate your secret sauce and become a more efficient marketer offers a huge advantage to advertisers that are not afraid of a little code (or copy-and-pasting code written by others).

Use AdWords Scripts to automate reports and optimizations you do frequently.

Conversion Tracking
It continues to amaze me how many accounts I come across that spend a lot of money but are not tracking conversions properly. If you’re not yet tracking conversions, figure out a way to start doing this immediately. Either that or go flush some money down the toilet… I’m serious, if you’re advertising online and not tracking conversions, you’ve got a big problem that you need to fix quickly.

If your conversions happen offline, you can now import this with Conversion Import, a tool Google launched in September.

And, thanks to Call Extensions being counted as conversions since November, it’s easier than ever to track calls as conversions without using any third-party tools.

Get A Better Ad Rank With Ad Extensions
The ad ranking formula changed in October: in addition to Quality Score and the bid, the performance of ad extensions is now also a factor. This makes a lot of sense since Quality Score is mostly a measure of CTR, and according to Google, ad extensions like sitelinks improve CTR of ads by 30% on average. So, by factoring the CTR of an extension into the ad ranking formula, advertisers that have added CTR boosting extensions get rewarded with a higher rank for their ads.

Use ad extensions to improve your CTR and get a better rank for your ad.

New ad extensions get launched periodically, so make sure you’ve taken a look at all the ones that are available to you. For example, are you using review extensions yet? They let you enhance your ad with a short snippet from a third-party review of your company. Have you updated your sitelinks with the two additional lines of text you’re now allowed to include? Have you considered setting different sitelinks for different ad groups now that sitelinks are no longer set at just the campaign level?

As you can see, there are always new features in AdWords — so be sure to do at least a quarterly review to ensure you’re not falling behind your competitors.

Do These At Least Monthly

Ad Text Cleanup
Ad text testing may be the most neglected account management task… not surprisingly so, since it’s the hardest to do correctly when using just the AdWords interface. While it’s easy to create new ads (have you tried Ready Ads yet for display ads?), it’s hard to keep track of what you’re testing and how the experiments are going. Even if you set ad rotation to let Google show the best performing ads more often, you end up with a slew of ads that don’t get served much but are still active in your account.

If you’re looking to clean up ads that are not performing well, doing the math to find those ads that are underperforming with at least a 95% confidence is not trivial. We have just launched a preview of a new report in Optmyzr that helps identify underperforming ads. Brad Geddes also has a new tool called adAlysis that helps with ad text optimization. And of course, there’s boostCTR, a company I advise, that’s been in the ad optimization space for several years.

The ad on the left has a 99% probability of beating the ad on the right. Go through your account periodically to look for the losers and delete them.

The next challenge with ad text optimization is finding winning ad text elements. You’re probably using similar lines across many ad groups; but, AdWords doesn’t provide any reporting that aggregates the performance of all headlines, description lines and display URLs.

For that, I wrote an AdWords Script that spits out a Google Sheet with aggregated performance data for every line I use in my ads. I can easily see if the line “Free Shipping” or “Next Day Delivery” has a better CTR. Armed with that data, I can quickly generate a bunch of new ad variations using the better performing text; then, next month, I can use one of the tools to clean up ads that are underperforming and do another round of tests.

Keyword Cleanup

While we are all buying keywords from Google, we should really be thinking about managing queries rather than managing keywords. The reason is that most keywords are not exact matches, so they are getting clicks and impressions from a variety of related queries.

I wrote in my last article that broad match keywords are liars. What you ideally want to do is take tight control over queries that you know convert or are critical to your business. By adding these as exact match keywords, you’ll have more certainty over their rank, cost and messaging.

One of the issues with broad match keywords is that they tend to rank worse for a query than another keyword that is an exact match to the query. That’s because in the case where the query and keyword exactly match, the advertiser has told Google they definitely want to have their ad show — when the keyword is a broad match, there is some uncertainty, and Google typically will rank that lower due to the uncertainty factor.

Add New Keywords From The Search Terms Report
At least once a month, check the search terms report and add converting queries as keywords to the account. You can add them to the ad group that generated the impression or you can add them to a new ad group, or even a special campaign for converting keywords.

When you put the new keyword by itself as an exact match into a new ad group, you’re tightly controlling the messaging in your ad for that one query. When you place the new ad group into a campaign with other converting keywords, you’re able to allocate a separate budget to converting keywords and ideally set that budget to be unconstrained.

Find Negative Keywords In The Long Tail Of Queries
At the same time, find negative themes from your search terms report. Do this by taking the keyword list and running it through a word cloud tool. That way, terms that appear more frequently will be more noticeable and you’ll have a better way to see what words from the long-tail represent a potentially significant volume of irrelevant clicks.

Deduplicate Keywords
When you’re actively adding new keywords to the account, you may find yourself accidentally creating duplicates. This is not a terrible thing, but it does complicate account management. So be sure to clean up duplicate keywords at least monthly. The AdWords Editor will help you find these, and we have a tool that takes it a step further and suggests the best one to keep based on QS, Conversions, CTR and other metrics.

Sculpt Your Account To Drive Queries To The Right Ad Group
One optimization we really like is to look through the search terms report for situations where Google shows a different ad than the one we had written for a particular query. This happens quite frequently in most accounts and reduces our control over the landing page, ad messaging and bids; so, we add negative exact match keywords to limit this behavior at least once a month.

Bid Cleanup
Make sure bids are sensible and your bid management strategy hasn’t just killed off your best keyword without telling you.

If you’re managing bids manually, look for converting keywords where you may be bidding slightly below the first page bid estimate or where your impression share is too low.
Clean up keywords that have spent too much and aren’t converting, especially if they aren’t exact matches.

Do These At Least Daily

There are plenty of tweaks to make in accounts every day. How do you know what tweaks to make? It’s best to have a clear set of reports and metrics by which you’re judging things and give yourself a big enough time window for the analysis. That way, you can steer your account in a consistent direction without making too many changes too fast. It’s like steering a car, you want to look far enough ahead and steer to the middle of the lane you want to be in rather than bouncing from one line to the other by looking just in front of the car’s hood.

For example, if you take too short a view on conversions, you may be missing the fact that some conversions take several days to happen (you can check this in Search Funnels in your AdWords account) and your bid adjustments could set bids lower than ideal.

Look For Anomalies
What I do look for are daily anomalies, or items in the account that are completely off track. For example, are there keywords that are suddenly spending way more than usual and converting poorly? Are there ad groups that show consistently declining CTR? The AdWords engineers wrote some AdWords Scripts that will notify you when some of these things happen.

Analyze Y-O-Y Data
I also like to compare last year’s top-performers to the top-performers now. If there are differences, try to understand why so that you can react appropriately.

Conclusion

So, those are some thoughts on how to manage an AdWords account for success. Stay on top of the performance every day and get into the routine of doing some of the standard optimizations on a weekly or monthly schedule, and do at least a quarterly audit to make sure you’re taking advantage of all the latest capabilities of the system.

AdWords Bid Management And Account Structure Mistakes To Avoid

On my one-year anniversary of working as an AdWords practitioner instead of a Googler, Brad Geddes interviewed me about Quality Score for his WebmasterRadio.fm show, Marketing Nirvana. He asked for my thoughts on AdWords now that I’m a user rather than someone building it, and I thought that was a great question and one worth covering in this month’s column.

I’ve always had plenty to say about the most common mistakes advertisers make, but now that I’m auditing accounts more in-depth and managing a few myself, there are some new mistakes I’ve seen that I think are worth sharing so that you can avoid them in your own accounts.

Bid Management Pitfalls

Handing the reins of bid management to Google or another third party has risks — but perhaps not for the reason I so often hear, which is that Google could use the information to their own advantage. I believe Google wants to use the information to give advertisers the results they want, and I am a big advocate of automated bid management because doing lots of repetitive math and keeping track of lots of variables is something computers are simply better at than your average account manager.

Automating bids is especially useful when you’re working with large accounts; any time you have more than a couple hundred keywords, managing all these manually is just too slow and tedious. But relinquishing all control to the algorithms can have unintended consequences, and it’s useful to understand the risks so you can decide what’s right for your account.

Monitor Your Top Keywords’ Bids Closely

An advertiser I was working with noticed that they lost pretty much all conversions on the one keyword that perfectly describes their business. This happened several months ago, and because they were spending so much time managing long-tail keywords, the drop-off on their money keyword initially went unnoticed.

Be careful about what automated bid management does to the bids of your top keywords. Here a keyword was bid down from the first page.

Only much later (during my audit) did they learn that this keyword had seen a week of poor conversion performance following a landing page redesign. The algorithm noticed it, too, and dropped the bid 60% — effectively taking them off the first page of results. They noticed the conversion rate decrease and quickly fixed the landing pages, but they never looked at resetting the bids for their keywords, so it continued to linger on page 2 of the results. Had the bid algorithm given the keyword another chance, it would have been restored to the first page of results and they wouldn’t have lost a ton of sales.

The takeaway here is that it makes sense to manage head keywords differently than long tail keywords. Even if you put them on automated bidding, you must monitor these keywords closely so that any change in performance will trigger a warning and you can investigate.

AdWords could make this much easier if they allowed advertisers to add charts of keyword-level detail to the interface. Until that time, we have an AdWords Script that builds a nifty little AdWords dashboard in Google Sheets.

Build a dashboard for any campaigns, ad groups or keywords in your AdWords account in minutes using an AdWords Script.

Changing Bids Can Change Which Keyword Is Served

The second issue with bid management is that your carefully calculated bids may not be the ones Google actually uses. Because of the vagaries of how Google selects the keyword from your account that matches the query, it’s possible that lowering the bid on a poorly performing keyword simply shifts its clicks to another keyword that still has a higher bid. This is exactly why we built the Traffic Sculptor – it helps find when Google gives an impression to a different keyword than what you intended. This way, you can be sure Google is serving the ad for your selected keyword, using its bid, ad text and carefully selected landing page.

Budget Constrained Campaigns May Not Work With Automated Bids

A third pitfall I’ve noticed with managed bids is that they may not always play well with budget constrained campaigns. On several occasions, I’ve seen that a campaign that uses bid automation depletes its budget too early in the day, even when ad serving is set to standard (meaning that ads are supposed to be shown throughout the day). Obviously, when the budget runs out by 10:00 a.m. and no conversions happen, it creates a potential vicious cycle — the bid management tool will eventually reduce bids too much and the campaign may entirely miss serving ads at the times of day when they would have performed best.

Account Structure Issues

Another common problem I’ve noticed is with account structure and keyword match types. I still come across accounts that combine display and search in a single campaign and accounts that have hundreds of keywords in an ad group — both not best practices in AdWords.

But one account structure issue that’s a bit more subtle (and that I hadn’t given much thought until this year) is that if you’re deploying a lot of broad match keywords in an account, it’s challenging to see trends or answer questions about why results change. That can make it hard to know if your strategy is panning out. As much as I like broad match keywords for their ability to help discover what users are really typing into the search box, they can make life for advertisers pretty hard….

Broad Match Keywords Are Liars

We’ve all heard that CPCs change based on seasonality or because Google introduces things like Enhanced Campaigns. But knowing how this impacts your account is trickier than just taking a look at the average CPC. The reason is that most advertisers use some degree of broad match keywords in their accounts, and stats for broad match keywords are averages that include data from each of the hundreds of queries that matched the broad keyword. We’ve all heard the adage that averages lie, and broad match stats are averages that obscure what’s really happening.

For example, when you change the bid for a broad match keyword, you’re changing the query mix because it becomes eligible for a different set of queries. The different queries have different CTRs, conversion rates, etc., so it quickly becomes a nightmare to figure out why a keyword’s performance has changed. Was it a competitor, a change Google made, an optimization you did, or simply the fact that your query mix changed? If your results are dropping and you can’t pinpoint the reason, it’s hard to correct the course. So unless you’re analyzing exact match keywords, you’ll have to dig very deep into the search terms report to try and come up with an answer.

To further complicate things, even exact match keywords may see sudden changes in performance because of the aforementioned issue where Google may shift the clicks to another, similar keyword with a better rank. In this case, the best way to understand what’s happening is to run a query report rather than a keyword report.

The Top 10 Reasons Why Your Website Is Losing Sales

The online retail game is not an easy one to win, but new research and analysis might help cast a light on the glaring problems causing your site to lose sales and customers.

Collecting user feedback and complaints from 400 websites over three years, Qubit has narrowed its findings to 10 main problem areas. The results paint a picture of a consumer with much higher expectations for retail websites and their user-friendliness.

Based on Qubit's research, here are the top 10 complaints that online shoppers have about their retail sites of choice.

1. Price

Price has been the top online shopper complaint between 2011 and 2013, and it's maintaining its spot. Qubit's research shows that consumers' biggest gripes about on-site pricing fall into either the "too high for a given product" or the "too high for me" category.

According to Nomis Solutions, consumers are 7.4 times more sensitive to price online than in-store, so it's imperative that your site's prices are competitive with the rest of your market and can offer something others cannot.

2. Product Range

Customers are taking their shopping online for many reasons — one of the biggest being the expansion product availability. Online shoppers want an easier experience discovering items than what they have in-store, and your site should reflect that desire.
Qubit suggests improving your site's product range by investing in site resources such as recommendation engines, dedicated lists for new and seasonal products, and "related item" groupings.

3. Size

Image: J. C. Penney

Many retail sites still don't have reliable or helpful sizing charts for their customers. Online returns are frustrating, and creating even a basic measurement guide can drastically reduce the amount of complaints you'll get from peeved shoppers.

4. Site Functionality

According to Qubit, if Amazon's checkout button was down for one hour, it could lose $2 million in potential sales. Basically, it boils down to this: If you have a feature on your site, make sure it works.
Best practices for maintaining customer relationships in the event of a site issue include being transparent when there are problems and providing an entertaining error message, such as Uniqlo's pictured below.

Image: Uniqlo

5. Latency

Considering how impatient and trigger-happy the average online shopper is, it's clear that site speed is a growing area for complaints. This quick-to-click mentality will only increase in the future, so it's imperative that your site fix any and all latency issues now.

6. Site Search

Image: JackThreads

Nothing pisses off a customer quite like a search bar that doesn't work at Google-like proficiency. To quell the rage, Qubit suggests improving and expanding your site's tagging system and adding advanced search features.

7. Stock Availability

Another recurring user complaint involves stock availability. Though this complaint has decreased since Qubit's last study, it could still pose a problem for your site, as customers expect a greater selection and variety when it comes to online retail stock.
According to Quibit, consumers frequently complain when items that are no longer in stock or discontinued are still displayed on the site.

8. Navigation

If your site isn't clearly labeled and easy to navigate, customers will leave. Make sure your popular items and sales are highlighted and your various pages are easy to find and navigate.

9. Discounts/Sales

One recurring complaint that Qubit has discovered is difficult-to-find discount code boxes. If you're going to offer sales and coupon codes, don't make them impossible to use, as it'll lead to shoppers leaving.
Many retail sites have begun implementing time limits on product purchases, which make the consumer less price-sensitive.

10. Imagery

Image: Macy's

If you're site isn't pretty, you're doing yourself a disservice. Eye-tracking studies show that web users scan first, then read. This means that product images are more important than ever.

According to Qubit, consumers prefer to see multiple images before making a purchase, and want to see clothing on models rather than simply laid out. Adding video content and multiple images can go a long way in getting a customer to make a purchase.

Use Google Analytics To Create Campaigns, Not Just Track Them

We all know that analytics are good for understanding how a visitor behaved on your website — what pages they looked at, what buttons they clicked or what keywords they used to find you. You can also use analytics to track campaigns like email blasts and paid advertising.  That’s pretty basic stuff.

What many beginning marketers and small business owners don’t know is that you can use analytics data to create an online marketing campaign.

Analytics can answer some of the key questions you might ask when you want to create a campaign: Who are you targeting? Where do they live? When should you start your campaign?

You can even pinpoint what content will resonate with your audience and combine that with the who, when and where. Using data to craft campaigns means you’re not just guessing — and guessing is gambling. I’m not saying there’s no place in marketing for the gamble; but sometimes, we need the safe campaign success to build us up to the point where we can take that gamble.

Collecting The Data

As we figure out what data to collect, I like to build a document that will start to take shape as an outline for an ad campaign. I set a time period that seems representative of the season I want to target. If I’m targeting Spring Break Travelers to Florida, I look at data from that same time period over the last two to three years.
My major sections are:

• Timing Target: What time of year are you looking to book, sell, etc.? (If there is no timing target, just leave this alone.)
• Top Converting Traffic Sources: Look at the All Traffic report under the Acquisition tab in Google Analytics.
• Best Converting Landing Page: Look at the Landing Pages report under Behavior –> Site Content and view it with Ecommerce info sorted by transactions descending.
• Highest Visit Count Landing Page: Look at same report as above, but sorted by Visits descending.
• Top 3 Keywords Driving Conversions: This is trickier because we live in “Not Provided” land. You will need to use PPC or Webmaster Tools Search Query data to help you get an idea of keyword phrases that convert.
• Top 3 Converting States/Cities/Metros: Under Audience –> Geo –> Locations, look at cities or states and Ecommerce, then sort by transactions descending.
• Male/Female Conversion Ratio: Under Audience, look at Demographics and then Gender. Apply the Ecommerce info and sort by transactions descending to see who converts more.
• Top Converting Age Group Demographic: Under Audience, look at Demographics and then Age. Again, apply the Ecommerce info and sort by transactions descending.
• Purchase/Booking Window: This is somewhat difficult to gauge in Google Analytics. I recommend looking at Time to Purchase under Conversions –> Ecommerce. The tricky piece is attribution — if you are looking at “Last Click Attribution,” which is the default and where many beginners or small business owners start — then a majority of your conversions will be on Day 0. The reality is that, for a novice or beginner with analytics, this number is likely something you know from dealing with customers and sales or from an internal reservation or sales software you use.

I then take this data and build a campaign. I start with source. A campaign that focuses on Search Engines as a source begins with a different strategy than a campaign that focuses on social media or email marketing.
Once I’ve determined source, I look for content. I look at landing pages, keywords, and demographics to flesh out the best targeted content for my campaign. My last step is to determine how far ahead of time I need to promote this campaign (if at all). If you’re targeting a holiday or a specific season and your purchase or booking window is long (say 30+ days), then you need to plan your campaign timing accordingly.

Let’s build a campaign with example data now:

Metric	Target
Timing Target	Spring Break – Feb 20 to March 31
Top Converting Traffic Source(s)	Email Marketing
Best Converting Landing Page	/rental/blue-swayed-shoes/
Highest Visit Volume Landing Page	/rental/
Top 3 Keywords Driving Conversions	key west vacation rentals, vacation rentals in key west, key west rentals
Top 2 Converting States/Cities/Metros	New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania
Male/Female Conversion Ratio	7:10
Top Converting Age Group	35-44
Purchase/Booking Window	35-45 Days

Now, I’m ready to build my campaign and most of my questions are answered — all using analytics. I can build an email blast with information that caters to women who like a 3-bedroom rental in Key West. Likely, they have a family and are looking to ship about 45 days or so from arrival. Knowing my purchase windows tells me when to start my campaign. This one in particular should be online by January 20 at the latest and run until early to mid-March.

If the best converting rental is already booked, my job is to find rentals nearby that have a similar size, look, feel, location and cost. This allows me to book similar units with a fairly targeted strategy. If you use a CMS software or collect customer demographics, you can segment your email list by age, gender and location. We use PARDOT, but there are others out there that will do a great job, as well.

Now, you have a model and a direction in which to go to start building your first online marketing campaign that originates outside of the “create an email blast for everyone” or “put up some PPC ads.” Your campaign could target Social Media, or even a specific platform such as Pinterest. Successful campaigns are built on what you know about your audience and how you can craft your “story” to hit home with them. Using Analytics to collect this data should get you started in the right direction.

LinkedIn Paid Ads: A Beginner’s Guide

Why LinkedIn Gets Overlooked

There are lots of ways to spend your digital advertising budget today; but, have you considered LinkedIn? Advertising on LinkedIn is a great choice for many businesses. Below, we’ll explore why you should consider it and provide a walk-through of how to create your first LinkedIn ad campaign.

Have you run a campaign on LinkedIn? If not, you are hardly alone. LinkedIn’s self-service ad platform often gets overlooked by today’s marketers and media planners. This could be due to a number of misconceptions or challenges such as:

• LinkedIn is not a typical social network; but, it isn’t a true content platform, either.
• LinkedIn is focused on business connections; so, marketers tend to think of it as B2B only.
• LinkedIn has a much, much smaller audience than Google or Facebook.
• LinkedIn lacks the integration of professional bid management platforms.

Understanding The Value For Marketers

Personally, I think of LinkedIn as a highly-targeted communications channel that offers marketers great opportunity. For starters, it has considerable reach — +259 million members worldwide, with an estimated 100 million in the US.

And, while some might dismiss its “smaller” audience, LinkedIn can actually help you achieve a very precise reach. This is largely due to two factors:

1. LinkedIn provides great targeting options, including the ability to target by job title, employer, role, skills, and interests;
2. LinkedIn profiles contain more detailed and up-to-date “professional” information compared to what people list on their personal profiles on Facebook, etc.

Beyond that, LinkedIn now provides additional value through content with its “Influencers” and “Pulse” efforts. Between both of these initiatives and the value of updates and shared stories, LinkedIn has evolved into more of a content platform that is providing a professional and exciting news feed.

In addition, LinkedIn’s self-service advertising platform has a similar feel to those offered by Google and Facebook. For example, it allows you to design different types of ads, create logical groupings, define bids for specific campaigns, and measure performance with metrics such as impressions, clicks and conversions (if tagged/collected).

Is LinkedIn Right For You?

Now that you know why you should consider LinkedIn for advertising, it’s time to figure out if the platform would be a good fit for your needs. Whenever I look at a campaign, I ask myself a few key questions (see below). If I can answer “yes” to any of them, I know that LinkedIn ads are the right choice for the job:

1. Do I know the job titles of my target audience?
Since LinkedIn offers targeting by job title, it can help you pinpoint your audience. For example, if you are running the marketing department for a law school that helps legal assistants become attorneys, this targeting option would enable you to focus your efforts on the individuals who have “legal assistant” as their job title. As you can see below, there are over 100,000 of them on LinkedIn.

2. Do I know where my target audience works?
This targeting method could be used for a number of different purposes. Organizations could tap into it for recruiting by using it to target competitors’ employees. It could also be used for a targeted sales approach as it can get your brand in front of the right people at a company you are trying to sell to. In addition, this targeting option could be a great job search tool — individuals could use it to get their name in front of decisions makers at a firm they want to work for.

3. Does my target audience have unique skills/interests?
The ability to target by skills and/or interest is great for all kinds of professional businesses. For example, a vendor of analytics software could use it to target individuals who have competitive software or specific analytics languages listed in the skills section of their LinkedIn profile.

4. Do I know the type of role my target audience holds at a company, or their level of seniority?
This might sound like a stereotype, but targeting by role can be very useful, as it allows you to gauge a person’s influence level and salary.

How To Create A LinkedIn Ad Campaign

Now that you have some ideas on how to target individuals on LinkedIn, let’s do a quick walk-through on how to create an ad campaign.

Getting Started:
To create a campaign, you’ll first need the following:

• A LinkedIn account
• Basic understanding of your audience
• Ad copy
• Video (optional)

Now go to the LinkedIn Ads login page and click on “Get started.”  This will present you with two types of campaign options: (1) Create an ad; (2) Sponsor an update.

While this article is about creating an ad in LinkedIn, let me take a moment to tell you about sponsored updates (after all, they are ads, too, just a different type).
Sponsored updates are a great way to get your message directly onto a user’s home feed. The offering is comparable to sponsored content on Facebook, and it is a good tool to use to amplify your content. For example, if you have a great story, interview or other piece of content, you can post it through your company’s LinkedIn account and then make it a sponsored update. (Learn more about sponsored updates here.)
Okay, let’s get back on track. Click on “Create an ad.”

Step 1: Create Your Ad

You should now be looking at the following screen:

This is where you create your ad. To do so, you’ll need to fill in a few fields:

• Campaign Name: Create a name for your campaign. I recommend following any naming conventions you use on other platforms.
• Ad Language: Select the language for your ad.
• Media Type:  Select either a basic advertisement that follows the traditional format, or a video ad that includes a play button on the image.

• Ad Destination:  This will allow you to link your ad to either a LinkedIn profile page or an external URL. If you are driving traffic to your website, I highly recommend that you tag your URLs so that you can measure the engagement and quality of traffic in your analytics platform. If you are not familiar with the tagging of URLs, there are numerous URL tagging tools (like this one).
• Ad Design:  Create your headline and description. Note that LinkedIn is a bit limited in this regard. The headline has a 25-character limit, and the description cannot exceed 75 characters (2 lines). You can also add your imagery here. Note that as you edit your ads, a thumbnail preview appears on the right side. The preview also allows you to toggle the ad size. Make sure you carefully inspect the ad preview to ensure that the image you used is visible and eye-catching.
• Ad Variations:  LinkedIn allows you to create multiple variations of ads. For each ad, you can choose either an external URL or a page on LinkedIn. Note that the choice of location does not affect the price — it costs just as much to send traffic to external pages as it does to send it to internal pages. Also, keep in mind that LinkedIn advertising is push advertising, not pull. That means that your audience is not actively looking for your product or service, so you have to work harder to make sure your ad stands out and captures the user’s attention. For example, I have seen question-style headlines get better engagement than statement headlines.

Sample Ad

Step 2: Targeting

Once you’ve completed your ad, it’s time to focus on targeting. This is where you can really start to leverage the power of LinkedIn.

While some of the targeting options on this platform are very similar to Facebook and Twitter (target by age, friends, company, etc.), LinkedIn allows you to go to the next level. As mentioned earlier, you can target people by job title, employer, industry, and even skills/ interests.
Below is the audience screen that allows you to precisely target and evaluate your target audience:

This screen has a lot of depth and advanced options that will allow you to target your audience precisely. Note that as you pick options, the preview screen on the right shows you your possible reach. Be sure you understand audience size, as it is different from possible impressions or metrics used by other networks.

On LinkedIn, audience size is the number of profiles matching the criteria you have. So, while you might have 2 million registered Math Professors, they might only log in once a month vs. a marketing or IT person who logs in daily.

For example, as I define the location for our sample campaign (United States) and the skills (Tableau, Spotfire, or Data Visualization), LinkedIn tells me that I have 28,793 possible users to show my ad to.

If you feel that your audience size is getting too small, pay attention to LinkedIn’s suggested options. This feature is very similar to Google’s keyword recommendations. For example, when I add Tableau and Spotfire as skills, LinkedIn suggests that I might want to include the following:

When I add Google Analytics to the list of skills in my ad and then choose a non-teenage segment, I get the following audience size, which seems like a great match for my awareness goal:

Keep in mind that the more granular you go with your audience design, the better your ROI will be. For instance, I could create one campaign for Tableau and one for Spotfire, with custom ad copy for each. This approach would deliver a much higher CTR and much more targeted information.

Also, adding the LinkedIn Audience network can expand your reach (it is similar to Google’s Display Network), though I’m not including it in our example.

I also wanted to mention another valuable aspect of a LinkedIn campaign — the ability to turn on “Lead Collection.” This feature allows users who engaged with your ad to send you their contact info and ask to be contacted. It is very similar to a contact form approach, but due to its tight integration with the platform, it’s effortless for the user and has a more secure feel to it.

Step 3: Budgeting

Last but not least, it’s time to turn our attention to costs. LinkedIn offers two basic pricing models: CPC (cost-per-click) and CPM (cost per 1,000 impressions). The cost-per-click model has a minimum CPC of $2 — which definitely makes it a higher cost network than Google or Facebook. LinkedIn also offers a suggested bid range to reach the top position.

Personally, I have found that LinkedIn ads are more successful when used for narrow reach efforts. For instance, I tend to use it to reach a very specific segment. Often, I have 20 campaigns running, each with an audience of 5,000. This way, I can have a highly-targeted audience see a highly-targeted ad, and then land on a highly-targeted landing page. Using this approach, I have seen CPC deliver a much better ROI, especially since I have found that click-through rates on LinkedIn tend to be much lower than on other sites.
Going by my sample campaign below, I think an average CPC of $2 would be too high, as it is purely an awareness goal. However, if I was operating Marketing Land, that price might make sense. I imagine the return visit rate and linked conference and advertising earnings would be fairly high. Therefore, acquiring a new user at a cost of $2 might be good ROI.

In terms of budget, LinkedIn has a minimum daily budget of $10. In order to successfully evaluate ad variations, I recommend having at least enough budget for 100 clicks a day. Again, LinkedIn should be about connecting with a very specific audience, so every click should be worth it.

Step 4: Submit Your Ad

The final step in the process is to submit your ad by simply clicking on “Launch Campaign.” Note that LinkedIn reviews almost all ads manually, so your campaign won’t be online until it goes through a quick review process.

Again, when it comes to spending your digital advertising dollars, you have lots of options. Hopefully, this brief article has given you some ideas on how you might leverage LinkedIn’s advertising platform for your next campaign.

How To Be The #1 Trending Hashtag On Twitter: Lessons From Nat Geo’s #KillingKennedy Campaign

The National Geographic Channel regularly uses both organic and paid campaigns to engage audiences on Twitter. For its film, Killing Kennedy, timed to premier the week before the 50th anniversary of the assassination of JFK, Nat Geo wanted to make a big impact on Twitter to build excitement and drive viewership.

Armed with Twitter-savvy celebrities and a wealth of visual assets, the team employed Twitter TV ad targeting for the first time to reach beyond its follower base of just over 520 thousand followers.
Nat Geo and its agency Mediahub/Mullen encouraged the cast — including stars Rob Lowe and Ginnifer Goodwin, both of whom were already active on Twitter — to tweet about the film during production. Nat Geo also used engaging graphics pulled from their website kennedyandoswald.com to tease the film.

The campaign was highly successful. During the November 10 premier, the hashtag #KillingKennedy was the number one trending topic on Twitter in the U.S. Nat Geo’s website experienced record traffic, and the film set a new ratings record for the network with 3.4 million viewers. These were no small feats for a small network up against big name shows during its timeslot, as noted in a tweet from Rob Lowe.

According to Twitter’s campaign wrap-up, Nat Geo saw average engagement rates of 10 percent on Promoted Tweets, which was 110 percent higher than the network’s historical average. TV ad targeting also proved to be highly efficient; costs fell 82 percent.

I spoke with Katy Anadale, Director, Digital Marketing for the National Geographic Channel by phone about the planning and execution of their first campaign using Twitter TV ad targeting.

Asked if the team set any specific goals for the campaign, Anandale says they didn’t peg goals for metrics such as number of tweets, retweets and comments, so much as they wanted to surpass what they’d done before. Historical performance was the benchmark.

Planning Ahead
Anadale says the team began planning early for #KillingKennedy. “This was a big priority for us so we started planning for this far in advanced. Putting things on paper was at least six months in advanced. For social we started talking earlier than we normally would in part because we had assets and information already available to us.”

With a typical series premier, Nat Geo starts promotion about three weeks out on air and turns to social within the two-week time frame before the first episode airs. Anandale says for Killing Kennedy, “We tried to be out in front, so we weren’t competing with all the other news about the 50^th anniversary.”  Nat Geo began to tease the premier on social media in June, shortly after Rob Lowe and Ginnifer Goodwin signed on to play JFK and Jaquelyn Kennedy, respectively.

The cast members also tweeted during filming to get fans excited. Nat Geo white listed Rob Lowe and Ginnifer Goodwin’s Twitter accounts to be able to promote their tweets about the film. Some of those celebrity tweets reached engagement rates of 20 percent.


The Power Of Visual Assets

Nat Geo and Mediahub/Mullen began to incorporate visual assets much more heavily with TV ad targeting  n the week leading up to the premier.  Anadale said, “Some of the assets were created specifically for us to use for social, but none were created specifically for the Twitter TV ads campaign.  The only thing we did differently was write specific tweets to try to resonate with viewers of certain shows. But what we learned, is that photos and infographics still did the best.”

For example, during a mob-related TV show, the Nat Geo team used Promoted Tweets about Kenendy’s rumored ties to mob. They found those types of tweets didn’t perform nearly as well as the photos and infographics.

Anadale says, “If you stay true to what works well in Twitter and social, it’s going to work. The Twitter TV ads reinforce what they see on television. If you have that visual reinforcement, the connection is just more immediate. We saw more tweets, retweets when we used visuals. TV viewers saw the emotion we have in our promos and were able to share that on Twitter.”

Media Buying And Social Teams Need To Work Together
Mediahub/Mullen handled the media buying and monitored performance at an aggregate level to provide insights, while the Nat Geo team monitored their feed throughout the day and executed the tweets.

The client and agency both echoed the need to have close collaboration between the social and buying teams to make the most of TV ad targeting on Twitter.

Sarah Stroller, Digital Media Advisor for Mediahub/Mullen, said via email, “From Mediahub’s point of view it was incredibly helpful to work so closely with the client to optimize our campaign and leverage the celebrity tweets. We were on call most of the weekend leading up to the premiere to promote celebrity tweets the minute they were posted to capture the full social potential of the cast. Our efforts paid off as these celebrity tweets resulted in extremely high engagement, adding to the success of the Twitter campaign as a whole.”
“We have a very good relationship with the buying team. You need to stay close and share your plans with them so they understand the whole process and larger picture. It does take some last minute planning,” said Anadale.

Nat Geo has more Twitter TV ad campaigns planned. Anadale says in the future they’ll try to tailor assets to specific shows or network audiences.

The Performance Marketer’s Field Guide to #AdWords #Ad #Extensions: Part II

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The Performance Marketer’s Field Guide to AdWords Ad Extensions: Part I

Ad extensions are a way to give potential customers useful and relevant info beyond a regular text ad.  You can win a customer’s consideration, convince her of your value, or drive her right to a conversion.  Ask yourself which extensions would fit with your keywords and fulfill a potential user’s needs.

People engage with ads that have extensions.  Seller ratings give users confidence in your website.  Call extensions connect customers right to your employees.  Advertisers spend lots of time optimizing their ad text (which is great), but you should know that implementing extensions is typically a more impactful way to improve CTR.   An ad extension adds value to potential customers just by being present.  Additionally, with the recent changes to ad rank, extensions have become an increasingly important part of getting your ads noticed.

Every type of extension that we offer is intended to benefit our users, which translates to a higher CTR for you.  Many, such as sitelinks, show improvements of 10-20%.

There are tangible and measurable gains to giving users more information, and extensions are auto-optimized to show the best possible combination on each and every auction.  Sometimes the “best possible combination” translates to areas aside from CTR - users may get value from seeing a phone number on a desktop ad (i.e. a direct connection to your business via a phone number) even if that doesn’t translate to a routine click.

We’ve also found that more information is a good thing, which means that ads with multiple extensions perform better than ads with only one extension.  Identify which extensions work for your business and implement them.  The best combination of these extensions is automatically determined on an auction-by-auction basis.

Enabling extensions is a good thing, but remember that your extensions are most likely not going to show 100% of the time.  Only certain positions are eligible to show certain extensions.

There are lots of extensions in existence (and even more in beta).  While this set of options will continue to evolve, here is what is presently available and where they can appear on the page:

Note: Search Partner site owners choose what, if any, formats they allow, so not everything will show by default.

As you can see, placement on the results page determines which of your extensions can be shown.  If you know you have great extensions in place for users, watch your average position and placement to ensure that your extensions are showing as often as possible.

Things to Remember

  Google try to show as many relevant formats as possible in the available space.  Since there are so many moving pieces, there’s no way to prioritize which extensions you want to show.  Enable whatever makes sense for your customers and let the AdWords system decide within those options.  The specific extensions that are displayed are a function of your previous performance, user context and available space on the page.

Clicks on extensions are typically charged the same price you would be charged for a click on your ad.  There are a few exceptions, though.  The below types of interactions are all free:

• Phone calls from your forwarding number on call extensions that show on desktops/tablets 
• Links to reviews from seller ratings extensions
• Clicks to the review site on your review extensions
• Clicks on +1 button or a link to your Google+ page

In many cases there isn’t a lot to optimize for extensions.  Implementation is the only step to take for a practitioner, but that doesn’t mean you can enable them and never think of them again.  Be aware of what’s going on in your account so that you know you’re saying the things your customers want to hear.

Reporting on Extensions

Report on how your extensions are doing by taking a quick snapshot of before and after implementation.  Take note of when you turned on certain extensions and compare dates in the interface to ensure you’re heading the right direction.  This isn’t going to be a perfect solution, as there are lots of other variables present over that same timeframe, but it should give you directional evidence regarding your account’s performance.

Segment your reports by click type to see detailed performance for many of your extensions.  Anything that’s active in that time period will appear as its own type of click.  There isn’t any reporting on the extensions that appear automatically (seller ratings, social annotations, previous visit annotations).

Extensions are a proven way to provide value to users and increase your ad’s CTR.  Implementing every type of extension that makes sense for you should benefit both your users and your account.

Improving users’ advertising experiences with in-ad surveys

Last year, Google placed a small [X] mute control button in the top right hand corner of most of our Display ads which gives users the ability to control ads they no longer wish to see. To date, users have muted millions of ads and we have used these signals to make ads more relevant and useful.

Over the next few weeks, Google be expanding the ways users can give us feedback about ads by introducing a series of short surveys in English-speaking countries which will appear after an ad is muted.

Here’s one example:

These surveys will help Google understand why users mute ads, serve better ads to users, spot publishers and advertisers in violation of Google’s policies, and help improve ad and placement quality for the broader advertising ecosystem.

Investing in ad controls with tools like Ads Settings and Mute This Ad enables Google to deliver better experiences for users and better results for advertisers and publishers.

Bing Ends 2013 With All-Time High In US Market Share, But Google Also Up

Bing ended 2013 with an all-time high market share of search activity inside the US; but, it was Google with the biggest monthly gain in December, according to the latest comScore qSearch data.

Google’s share of search queries was up 0.6 percent in December to 67.3 percent. Using comScore’s numbers, that’s Google’s second-highest share estimate ever. Last February, comScore estimated Google’s market share at 67.5 percent. Looking at year-over-year numbers, Google rose from 66.7 percent in December 2012 to last month’s 67.3 percent.

Bing only gained one-tenth of a percent between November and December 2013, but its estimated 18.2 percent of all searches is another all-time high. Bing’s gains are more substantial year-over-year. It went from 16.3 percent in December 2012 to 18.2 percent last month — an almost 12 percent gain for the 2013 calendar year.


Yahoo’s 10.8 percent in December is another all-time low. On the company’s most recent earnings call, CEO Marissa Mayer admitted the obvious — that Yahoo’s search share is falling and that the company is basically trading share with Microsoft.

Overall search query volume was up slightly in December after a bigger six percent drop in November.

AdWords Cross-Device Conversions: How 1-800-FLOWERS Is Using The Data To Be More Customer Centric

Yesterday,  we got an early preview of the first case study Google will publish on the use of estimated cross-device conversions in AdWords. It features 1-800-Flowers and also addresses the company’s use of click-to-call.


When Google first announced the release of estimated cross-device conversions in October, it seemed to be received with a collective shrug. Much like the view-through conversion metric, several marketers I spoke with at the time were skeptical of its worth. Yet, there are many, such as the 1-800-Flowers team, who have embraced the new insights as a positive move toward giving marketers a more holistic view of their AdWords contribution.

This morning, I spoke with Amit Shah, Vice President of Online, Mobile and Social for 1-800-Flowers about the case study findings and how he and his team have use the cross-device data to inform their marketing efforts. 1-800-Flowers was part of the beta test and began looking at cross-device conversion estimates in July 2013.

First the stats: When looking at estimated cross-device conversions, 1-800-Flowers saw the overall conversion contribution from AdWords rise 7 percent when counting orders that started on one device and ended on another. The contribution from mobile devices increased by 4 percent when looking at conversions that started with a mobile click.

It’s probably not too surprising that click-to-call has worked well for the company. After all, the very name 1-800-Flowers was explicitly designed to drive phone orders when the company was founded over 20 years ago. Shah says that 8 to 10 percent of AdWords revenue now comes through click-to-call on mobile devices.

I asked Shah the obvious question about whether he viewed this new data with skepticism. He said that while tends to take a skeptical view of attribution systems in general (and obviously understand that Google is the one running the auction), the amount of data Google gives it an unparalleled view of the world. ” Whenever Google introduces measurement tools, I tend to take it pretty seriously because of their volume. This is the start of what I think mobile has been lacking,” he says.

“The Users Are The Winners”

“Mobile is where the users are moving,” says Shah. “The users are the winners with this data availability because marketers will think more about the mobile experience than they do now. This is a fundamental change because it’s the user that is being taken into account now.”

To those who still have their doubts about using the cross-device data to inform their marketing decisions, Shah says, “We have moved on from the ROI discussion to ROMI, return on marginal investment. What we now use internally allows me to ask the question, where should I be investing my marginal dollars for the most efficacy. We always kind of knew that our customers were moving to mobile, and we have been moving that way for five years, but we weren’t able to [fully understand the behavior].

Shah says they are also seeing tablet behavior beginning to morph to a hybrid of that seen on phones and desktops, with customers using click-to-call on some of the newer Android tablets. iPad users, however, still demonstrate typical tablet content consumption behaviors.

Product listing ads have been competitive in the flower delivery market from day one it seems. Shah says PLAs continue to be a very important part of the mix. “We see them evolving both in how Google is testing the display of the ads as well as the algorithm.” They haven’t seen the same traction from mobile PLAs as non-mobile yet, but believe that will change and that the image-based ad units are being well received by users on mobile.

With the insights Shah and his team have gleaned by looking at cross-device conversions, he says they are asking themselves more questions about the mobile experiences they are giving prospective customers. “We are very deeply of the view that we want to run our marketing from a very user centric lens. We ask, do we have a real view of how customers are searching for when they are sending a gift to their loved ones? Are we part of that process? With cross-device conversions, we have better insight into whether we are really getting our message to our customers by each medium.

“Now with this data, what marketers should really ask themselves is, if customers are starting their journey on mobile and we’re not providing a good experience, were are under serving our audience.”

How To Use Excel To Easily Spot SERP CTR Trends

Data fiends and worshippers at the temple of clear data visualisation will have suppressed a dry chuckle when reading Google’s recent announcement on improved detail for Search Query reports in their webmaster tools interface.

The reason for our data geekery? Google’s ‘Impressions Vs. Clicks’ before and after comparison illustrating the impact of their change.

Spot the difference! Google’s charts showing before & after their data update.

You would be forgiven for taking a few seconds or more trying to discern the minor change in visual impact in the two charts above.

It is a shame, as the underlying data tweak is a welcome, and important, change in policy from Google: increased accuracy in their impressions and click data allows for much more accurate reports highlighting actionable outcomes that can have a significant impact on your SEO campaign’s bottom line.

The failure of these charts to visualise this important data to allow a useful insight (for example, try to pick out a firm outcome just looking at the charts above. Anyone, Bueller, anyone?) is a critical failure in Webmaster Tools.

Fortunately, however, Excel can help us easily create some actionable reports using this new data accuracy in super-sharp time.

Solving Poor Trend Charts: Double Vertical Axis FTW

The killer issue with Google’s existing charting is inherent to their data: impressions will always dwarf click data. The solution: chart clicks on a separate axis.

Exporting data is straightforward, although Google’s API for Webmaster Data does not allow for easy exporting of impressions and click data yet. (Google: this is my Christmas wish for 2014, please!) As a result of this limitation, we will only be able to work with the top 500 rows of data for any segment we apply. This should still be enough for some trend insights.

Set your report to 500 rows, apply desired filters (for example, remove brand terms, select US only, etc.), and then “Download Chart Data” in CSV.

Filter your data to exclude brand or target a specific location for more actionable insights.

At this stage, we can quickly graph out our data to better see any top-level trend by throwing clicks onto a secondary axis.

Open the CSV file in Excel and create a 2-D line chart with the data. In Excel’s ribbon bar, select “Layout” from “Chart Tools.” (In 2013, it will be “Format” rather than “Layout.”)  In the drop down on the far left, select Series “Clicks” and then click the Format Selection button underneath. For your series options, select “Plot Series” on “Secondary Axis.”

Charting Impressions Vs. Clicks in Excel

You may also wish to apply formatting to the date range information to make it more easily understandable for you and your team. Below, I’ve used some custom formatting to show dates in UK format with my preferred layout. (BTW, you’ll also need to cope with the export data using US date layouts if you’re changing them to UK. I’ve set up some data resorting to solve that on import.)

Formatting Date Ranges for Clarity

We’re then left with some clear trend data like the below, which allows me to see easily that between the 14^th and the 20^th of December, our SERP CTR was much greater than normal.

Clearly Visualised Impression Vs. Click Data

Digging into the individual term data will show me which terms overperformed for that period. I can also
easily see that there was better performance at the start of the data in this snapshot, so re-snapshotting the data for an earlier date range to compare against this trend is another quick outcome. Using Google’s WMT interface, I can filter by date and sort by CTR to find the key contributors to this performance.

Incidentally, I also add axis titles and a concise, clear title at this stage to ensure the data is clear and stands alone in the chart.

My outcomes: by knowing the terms contributing to increased SERP CTR, I can identify the organic snippet shown and pull out whatever call to action was used and was successful during that period. This can be used to improve the SERP CTR of my other listings for similar pages.
Bingo: I can now freshen up underperforming snippets with a proven conversion CTA for my business.

Micro Reports For Key Performers

Since we now have more accurate data from Google, we can also dig into the other data export available from Webmaster Tools and set up a few “Canary” micro reports to quickly spot SERP risers and fallers with good precision and high actionability.

To pull the data, set your rows to 500 again, apply filtering as before, then click “Download This Table” in CSV. To import the UTF-8 characters Google regularly encodes in this data to Excel, you will likely need to import as text, setting the encoding to UTF-8 and identifying the commas as data delimiters.

From there, you can apply a pivot table to the data, which will allow you to dynamically play with your charting data to either further segment the data by applying text filters, or simply to adjust pull-though term data for associated visualisations. Create your pivot table in a new tab, and for future reports you can simply replace the ‘Data’ tab and all your pivot segmentation will be applied with a quick refresh. (Hit CTRL + Alt + F5 to refresh all pivots in an Excel workbook.)

One of the most useful pivot architectures here is setting Avg. position as a report filter — then using the Query as a label, and then impressions and clicks as values. (usually I grab the “Average” value here, but Max or Min may also be appropriate, depending on the final report you’re building.) Then we can segment our report into top three ranking, top 10, or whatever ranking blend we choose.
This is particularly useful to find weaknesses within high value top ranking terms.

I like to also break out report sets where there has been at least one click for reports focused on already performing rankings. For example, here’s a segment incorporating: location, non-brand, within a defined date range, minimum of 100 impressions, for all ranking positions, sorted by average impression change MoM.

Canary Report

Though small, this range shows me terms that should be driving visits, but aren’t — which are improving and which are failing. Pulling out the worst performers will give me content refresh options that will improve my ranking position and deliver a better SERP CTR to boot.

As you can see, there’s a world of useful reports waiting at the touch of a button to speed your content strategy onto SEO success in 2014: get your copies of Excel at the ready and get mining.

Start The New Year With A PPC Health Check: Part 1

As Group Head at a fast growing search agency, I’ve carried out hundreds of campaign checks over the years. In my contributions here, I’ll be sharing my top tips on things to look out for when reviewing your own campaigns. Some of these things are obvious, while others might have slipped past you because you’re not up to date on recent changes or are just too close to the day-to-day running of the campaign.

It can be easy to just leave your campaign(s) running and not delve into the detail of things such as the settings of your campaign, especially if your campaign is performing well. But auditing your account on a regular basis and carrying out health checks are big keys to the success of any campaign. In the fast paced world of Google AdWords, even going on holiday for two weeks might mean you miss a big announcement of an upcoming change or new feature.

In part 1 of my PPC Health Check series, I’ll be covering structure, settings, conversion tracking, and budgets. This is laid out in a way that should be really clear and easy to follow, with step-by-step instructions on what to examine in each category.

These questions should give you the building blocks for performing a health check on your PPC campaigns. It’s really important to try and self-assess (or have a colleague assess) your PPC campaign every few months, as there can be so many changes within the interface and settings that suggestions for improvements can always be made.

One of the main areas worth examining during your audit is your campaign budget. Being limited by your budget isn’t really a good way to start the year. Assess the results of the campaign, and if performance is good, see if you can secure more budget for your PPC campaigns this year. In order to get growth from your PPC campaigns, you’ll often need to increase the budget to remain competitive and to take advantage of new campaign features and types.

Another key subject for analysis this year are your bid multipliers; these are still often underused in many accounts. Schedule yourself some time to carry out analysis and adjust things like time-of-day, location and device.

The mobile landscape has become more competitive than ever; as an agency, we’ve seen CPCs increase since the launch of Enhanced Campaigns. With this in mind, make sure you’re not falling behind the curve and missing out on this traffic. Remember: there are only positions 1 and 2 in the banner for mobile, and if you’re not showing there, you’re unlikely to be seen!

In my next post, I’ll be covering ad copy, keywords and performance so make sure to check back for updates from me!

Report: US Search Ad Spend Rises 12 Percent YoY In Q4 2013; Smartphone CPCs Drop

IgnitionOne released its fourth quarter Digital Marketing Report today, showing that the paid search market in the US continues to grow. Search ad spend rose 12 percent year-over-year in the fourth quarter of 2013. In part as a result of the later kick-off to the holiday shopping season this year, December ad spending was up a significant 27 percent over 2012.

Though overall ad impressions fell 16 percent year-over-year, clicks rose 5 percent and click-through rates jumped 25 percent in Q4.  IgnitionOne posits lower impressions are a result of “top of page innovations” including new ad extensions and image ads that “leave less room for ads”. Roger Barnette, IgnitionOne president, added by email, that extensions are “decreasing the overall number of ads that are showing up for any given search and thus lowering overall impression volume. It’s actually one of the advantages of utilizing these tools, not only do CTRs improve but it pushes the competition further down or off the first page.” Barnette also noted, “One thing I’ve noticed a lot is for exact brand searches there is often times only one ad that shows up on the page, which is a recent change.”

Advertisers Placed Lower Premium On Smartphone Ad Inventory: CPCs Fall YoY

Despite a 251 percent increase in impressions and 306 percent increase in clicks, smartphone CPCs actually fell by 13 percent in Q4 compared to 2012 among advertisers in this data set. Tablet CPCs rose 22 percent year-over-year on the more modest gains of 27 percent in impressions and a 49 percent increase in clicks year-over-year. Here again, the CPC increase for tablets is likely a result of the tethered tablet and desktop bidding instituted with Enhanced Campaigns. In contrast, while advertiser participation on mobile has increased with the roll out of Enhanced Campaigns, advertisers have actively discounted their mobile bids in relation to desktop/tablet.

Ad spending growth for tablets remained strong with a year-over-year increase of 82 percent. Smartphones spend saw exponential growth of 253 percent. The mobile share of spend in Q4 was 63 percent tablet, 37 percent smartphone.

Google Product Listing Ads Perform Strongly In The Holiday Shopping Season

As other reports have also shown, advertiser investment in Google Product Listing Ads (PLAs) increased substantially in Q4 compared to 2012, when Google converted to Google Shopping to a paid platform. Spending on PLAs increased 618 percent, impressions grew by 380 percent and clicks were up 312 percent year-over-year.

Still, PLA adoption has grown substantially, but traditional text ads still account for the bulk of advertiser account activity. For advertisers running PLAs, the ads accounted for 10 percent of impressions, 13 percent of the clicks and 16 percent of the total spend.

“It has been over a year since PLAs were introduced to digital marketers and this quarter has proved that the ad product has come into its own,” said Roger Barnette, President of IgnitionOne. “Both marketers and consumers have found value in these ads, shown by the increase in spend as well as the increase in click-throughs compared to standard search ads.”

PLAs by their nature, appeal to consumers deep in the purchasing funnel. The ad units were particularly effective during the holiday shopping season, according to the report, with click-through rates 74 percent higher than text ads during the week of Thanksgiving and 95 percent higher on Cyber Monday. On smartphones, however, IgnitionOne found that PLA click-through rates were 38 percent lower than smartphone text ads.

Yahoo Bing Network Held Steady

The Yahoo! Bing Network maintained share in Q4, up a tick from last quarter’s 22.6 percent to 22.7 percent of spend versus Google’s 77.3 percent share.