Give your sitelinks additional detail in enhanced campaigns

Ads that provide detail and precision can help people make more informed decisions.  Sitelinks help people find information deeper in your site so they can get to where they want to go faster.   In February 2012, Google improved sitelinks by using text from other ads in your account or My Client Center to create sitelinks with additional detail.  Today, Adwords going one step further by enabling you to nominate specific text for your sitelink descriptions from within your AdWords account.  This will allow you to control the descriptions that display when this sitelink format shows.

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In testing, users have reported that sitelinks with additional detail were more useful and relevant, and clickthrough rates were significantly higher than the same ad with traditional 2- and 3-line sitelinks.

The new sitelink format with additional detail is available only in enhanced campaigns.  Enhanced campaigns enable you to reach people with the right ads in the right context - location, time of day and device type -  without setting up and managing numerous campaigns. All campaigns will be upgraded to enhanced campaigns on July 22nd.

After upgrading to enhanced campaigns, you will have the option of adding extra text to your sitelinks - simply fill out both lines of the "Description" field when creating a new sitelink or editing an existing sitelink.

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Note that your ads won't always show sitelinks, and when they do, the format that appears could vary.

The core guidelines for sitelinks remain the same with these improvements:

• Sitelinks cannot violate the duplicate sitelink URL policy
• Sitelink text cannot use keyword insertion
• Sitelink text cannot be the same as other sitelinks in the same ad group/campaign or the main ad that’s serving
• In addition to this 4 sitelink view, there is also a 2 sitelink variation

New Image Extensions Enable You to “Show” and “Tell” with Search Ads

Advertisers understand that sometimes it's easier to 'show' rather than 'tell' when promoting a business. As search ads continue to evolve, Google want to make it easier for you to do both. Today Google announcing the beta launch of image extensions, which will allow you to add new visual elements to your search ads.  Adwords added many extensions to search ads to help you be more relevant to users.  Image extensions enable you to more accurately convey the body style of a car, the cut of a pair of jeans, or a particular shade of eyeshadow, making your ads richer and more informative so they stand out in a crowded marketplace.

As the web evolves, Google users expect richer and more diverse content. More than one in six searches on Google today provide results with visual content. Image extensions will show in some cases when we determine that a search is likely for visual content. For example, it is more likely that your image extensions will show for a query like luxury car designs than locations of nearby car dealerships.

You can choose the images that you want displayed with your search ads and send them to Adwords Team for review.  You must have the necessary rights to the the images you wish to display with your ads.  Adwords encourage you to submit your images as they continue to experiment with and improve visual ad formats.

Image extensions are currently running in English globally.

How To Conduct Ad Tests In Enhanced Campaigns

Enhanced campaigns have brought about many changes to AdWords. One of the biggest changes yet to be discussed is the fact that your ad testing methods will have to change.
One of the “features” of enhanced campaigns is that your campaign can now run on desktops and mobile devices with different CPCs that are controlled by bid modifiers. However, since your ads can be run on multiple devices at the same time, you need to test your ad metrics by device.
This can easily be accomplished with device preference and Excel filters. First, let’s discuss why this change needs to occur, and then, how to control the ad serving to ensure you are testing your enhanced campaign ads properly.

Why The Testing Change?

Let’s say we’re testing two ads and that we’re running both ads on all devices (desktops/tablets and mobile devices). What happens is that after a while, we check our metrics and we see data that looks like this:

If you simply used this data as-is, you would assume that Ad 1 is the best ad overall and go with that ad.
However, averages hide all the useful data. You need to segment your data to truly understand what is happening. If you were to segment these two ads by device type, the data looks much different:

In reality, Ad 1 is not the best ad — it is the best ad on mobile devices. The best ad on desktop devices is Ad 2.
Therefore, you’d now want to control which ad shows on which device, and this can be accomplished with device preferences.

Device Preferences

When  you create a text ad, you can specify the device preference:

If a campaign is set to show on all devices, and you have not set a preference by ad, your ads will be shown on all devices.
If a campaign is set to show on all devices, and all your ad preferences are set to mobile, your ads will be shown on all devices.
To control the ad serving by device, you need both a mobile preferred ad and a non-mobile preferred ad in each ad group. To test ads by devices, then you need at least two mobile preferred ads and two non-mobile preferred ads in each ad group.

Image Ad Preferences

In “legacy” campaigns, most sophisticated accounts would segment their display advertising from their search ads, and their mobile display campaigns from their desktop display campaigns. Because these campaigns were already segmented by device, most marketers would just upload “mobile” ads to their mobile campaigns and desktop sizes to their desktop campaigns based upon Google’s sizes:

However, several of the sizes that are not traditionally considered mobile ad sizes can be shown on mobile devices:

Therefore, you will also want to specify the mobile preference of an image ad so that you can test your image ads by devices as well as your text ads.

An Easy Way to Determine Ad Types by Device

In the AdWords interface, it is not easy to see if you have a mobile and non-mobile preferred ad in each ad group. The easiest way to see this data is to use a pivot table and conditional formatting.
In this case, a simple pivot table was used to show the number of ads by device preference in each ad group; and then, conditional formatting was applied to highlight any cell that was less than 1.

If you wanted to make sure you were testing in each ad group, you could also highlight all cells with less than 2 ads using conditional formatting. This would allow you to see which ad groups need ads created so that you can test them.

Run Your Statistical Confidence Numbers As Normal

Once you have the ads set up and running by device, you can do your statistical confidence calculations and pick your winner — just make sure to segment the information by device.
Only use your mobile information to test your mobile ads and pick winners.
Only use your desktop information to test your desktop ads and pick winners.
Once the data is segmented by device, the way you run your numbers and pick winners will not change with enhanced campaigns.

A “Cheater’s” Way Of Testing

Creating thousands of new ads can be a daunting task — so, there is a shortcut you can use. However, please note that, as with any shortcut, there are some underlying weaknesses.
Instead of creating ads for every device type, if your landing pages have the same content (such as with responsive design) and if overall conversion actions by device are the same, then you can start with just ads on “all” devices. You can then segment the data by device type and run your statistical confidence by device.
Once you have a winning ad by device, then you can change the ad’s preference type of mobile if it’s a mobile winner and leave the desktop winners as all devices.
There are a few inherent weaknesses to this approach:

• You cannot customize the call to action by device
• When you “edit” your winning mobile ad, it must go back under review and the stats are “reset” for the ad

This isn’t an ideal long term solution; but, if you are trying to transition many campaigns and thousands of ads to mobile devices, it can be a way to start ad testing.
However, with a “good” transition, you will keep your mobile ads in your enhanced campaign by moving the mobile ads to your desktop campaigns (or vice versa) and using ad preference to keep them segmented.

Wrap-Up

Enhanced campaigns are a major change to managing AdWords. However, they do not change the underlying principles of ad testing. You must test ads — and a good ad test will not only examine the differences in multiple ads, it will also take into account segmented data such as the device where the ad was displayed.
By ensuring you are controlling your ads displayed by device type, you can be confident in your ad tests and ensure that you are keeping the best ad for your account.
Even with device segmentation, many of the previous columns on ad testing are still true – they just require a previous step – device ad control. You can still easily manage and test millions of ads and use cross ad group testing principles.

Before You Quit Pay-Per-Click, Follow These PPC Tips

The thought of advertising your small business is both exciting and unnerving.  Many business owners are proactive when it comes to marketing their own business, using pay-per-click (PPC) advertising for instant results. When business owners try to handle their own PPC ,  they can spend  hundreds or even thousands of dollars on pay-per-click advertising  only to see little return on their investment.
Before you give up on PPC, consider the common mistakes that business owners make when managing their own advertising campaigns:

1. Having Unrealistic Expectations
2. Not Checking the Terms They are Actually Paying For
3. Not Adding Negative Keywords
4. Creating Ads Without Keyword Relevant Landing Pages

Having Unrealistic Expectations

Small business owners need to be broken out of the traditional advertising mindset.  For years, small business owners advertised on printed media, radio, and television. They are used to seeing and hearing their own ad constantly.  With  PPC advertising,  your ad will not be up 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Often, business owners will set up a PPC campaign, search their keyword, and not find their ad. When this happens, their first thought is, “Where is my ad? This is not working!” PPC is a lot different than traditional advertising.  You pay for performance.  
There are a few reasons why you might not be seeing your ad:

1. Your ad  might have already been clicked on a few times today. Once you reach your daily budget, your ads will stop running for the rest of that day.
2. You may be targeting too many keywords or not the right keywords.  In general, the more specific the keyword, the better the results. See my post on longtail keywords.
3. Your daily budget may be too small. If your spending less than $10 a day, your budget might not be enough to provide meaningful results.

Not Checking the Keyword Details (Query String Report)

When I have talked to small business owners that manage their own PPC, I was surprised to learn how few people actually use this. The keyword details are the actual search terms that you paid for. You can also think of this as keywords driving traffic.  Lots of valuable information can be found in this report. You can quickly see if you are wasting money or may see opportunities for new keywords. Hands down, this is my #1 PPC tip.
Here is how you can see the query string report:

Click on the keywords tab.

Select all keywords to see every search term that you paid for.

Click on view keyword details.

See which search terms are actually driving traffic. Notice that this list doesn’t exactly match your keyword list. Look for keywords that will never result in new business and add them as a negative keyword.

When you look through this report, you should ask yourself one question- could this search term result in business?
For example,  I was recently looking at a PPC campaign for a maid service company. One of their targeted keywords was “housekeeping.” I looked at the query string report and I saw that she had a lot of traffic coming from people searching for “housekeeping jobs.” The business owner was paying for this traffic and didn’t even know it. I also found something rather amusing.  One of the search terms was “arnold schwarzenegger housekeeper”. I am not sure why a person searching for this ended up clicking on an add for maid service; perhaps it was an accident. Anyways, after I checked the query string report, I added 71 negative keywords to this campaign. One was “jobs” and the other was “arnold schwarzenegger”. with the addition of negative keywords, the business owner does not have to worry about paying for these terms that will won’t result in a sale.

Not Adding Negative Keywords Every Month

This is somewhat repetitive to the step above, but it is so important I wanted to break it out into its own section.  Negative keywords are terms that you don’t want to advertise for.  This is almost as important as choosing the words you do want to advertise for.
Let me illustrate with an example. If you own a carpet cleaning service, you might have “carpet cleaning” and “cleaning service” as keywords. Without negative keywords, someone searching for “window cleaning service” might see your ad and call you to find out that you don’t offer window cleaning.  Not only is this annoying for both the customer and the business owner, it also eats up your PPC budget.
Many small business owners running their own PPC campaigns don’t create a negative keyword list.  PPC platforms like Adwords and adCenter are designed for anyone looking to get started ASAP. There are few requirements in the actual interface. You need a budget, some keywords, and an ad with a landing page.  Because negative keywords are not required, most small business owners don’t set them up. Adding negative keywords will make your campaign much more effective by spending your budget only on keywords that will drive  new business.

Creating Ads Without Keyword Relevant Landing Pages

One of the biggest mistakes is not having the actual keyword you are targeting on your landing page. For example, say you are an HVAC company. You have a home page that talks about your company with some marketing language about “why choose us.”  You want to advertise your business when people search for “Water Heater Repair In Houston,” but no where on your home page do you have those keywords in that order. This is like shooting yourself in the foot. If you want to get results for this keyword, this is how you should up your campaign:

1. Sign into Adwords and create a campaign. Set your daily budget and target your ads to be shown in Houston.
2. Create an ad group called water heater repair.
3. Add keywords specifically about water heater repair (water heater service, water heater not working, broken water heater, etc.)
4. Add negative keywords related to this service (jobs, etc)
5. Create ads specifically about water heater repair.
6. Create a landing page specifically about water heater repair using the keywords from step 3.

Follow the above tips to get the most out of  your PPC, increase conversions, and drive potential customers to your website. You’ll enjoy the boost to your bottom line that a properly executed PPC campaign can create!

New Upgrade Center For Enhanced Campaigns Lets Advertisers Do Bulk Upgrades & More

Google AdWords is rolling-out a new upgrade center today for advertisers using Enhanced Campaigns. Accessible from the left-hand nav bar on the Campaigns tab, the upgrade center lets advertisers managing several campaigns perform bulk upgrades to multiple campaigns simultaneously and merge selected campaigns in a few simple steps.

The bulk upgrade feature allows advertisers to select multiple campaigns, choose a mobile bid adjustment, view traffic estimates and upgrade their Enhanced Campaigns with fewer clicks, making it easy to upgrade individual campaigns all at once.
The upgrade center also identifies search-only or search+display campaigns that have similar keywords and location targets, and offers a preview of possible campaigns that could be merged. Advertisers can then adjust the proposed settings, ad groups and extensions for merged campaigns.

Google notes that ad groups and budgets will be combined by default, and any campaign level settings and extensions in the Primary campaign will override Secondary campaign settings and extensions.
According the Inside Adwords blog, the upgrade center will roll-out to advertisers over the next few weeks.

Enhanced campaigns improvements for Google+ and mobile apps

People are constantly connected and are moving between devices throughout the day to shop, connect and stay entertained. This creates great opportunities for advertisers to use context – like location, time of day, and device – to show the right ad and bid more efficiently.  In February, we launched enhanced campaigns to help you reach people with ads based on their context as well as their intent. Since then, advertisers have already upgraded over 1.5 million campaigns and have shared many success stories.

We’ve also continued to build new features on the enhanced campaigns foundation.  Today, we are introducing two additions.

Enhanced campaigns and social annotations

People are looking for relevant information, and sometimes the most helpful signals are recommendations from people who know a brand or business well.  Social annotations in AdWords show endorsements from people following your Google+ page on your search ads.  Many businesses such as Red Bull, National Geographic and H&M are using social annotations as part of their broader Google+ strategy.  On average, search ads with social annotations have a 5-10% higher click-through rate.

Starting today, enhanced campaigns will include social annotations when they can improve ad performance, without additional edits to campaign settings.  All you need is a Google+ page with a significant number of followers and a linked website that matches the URL in your search ads. Social annotations on AdWords work hand-in-hand with your Google+ page to build community, conversation and engagement with your business on Google.
Enhanced campaigns for mobile app advertisers

Apps have become a significant part of people’s everyday mobile experiences. In fact, US consumers spend an average of 127 minutes per day using mobile apps¹.  Advertisers can now reach app users, with ads in apps, based on people’s context like location, time of day and device, with enhanced campaigns.  For example, if a certain mobile app has the most usage on Saturday evenings, you can increase your bid adjustments for mobile and this time of day to reach these users. You can also adjust bids across the key display signals like demographics, interests, topics and remarketing at the ad group level.  All of these powerful bidding tools will enable you to reach the right people with the right ads.

How To Determine Your Hourly Bid Multipliers In AdWords

While hourly bid multipliers aren’t new, they remain a crucial tactic for optimizing your AdWords campaigns. They work by reducing your ad spend at poor-performing times of the week and increasing your exposure at the best times of the week. Here, I’m going to share the steps you can take (along with a helpful spreadsheet) to determine your hourly bid multipliers for better campaign optimization.

Step 1: Pulling An Hourly Performance Report From AdWords

On the Campaigns tab in AdWords, go to Columns>Customize Columns and ensure that you’ve selected the appropriate metrics. Performance metrics required for the spreadsheet to function properly are as follows: Campaign, Clicks, Impressions, Cost, Avg Pos, and Conv (1-per-click) — all other metrics selected in the screenshot below are optional:

Once your performance metrics have been selected, hit the “Download Report” button. When prompted, add the “Day of the week” and “Hour of day” segments:

This should provide you with all the data you need to analyze hourly performance at the campaign level.

Step 2: Determining Hourly Bid Multipliers

Similar to the template used to determine mobile and geo bid multipliers, I’ve created a basic spreadsheet to help analyze hourly performance and easily determine your hourly bid multipliers. You can download it here.
Copy and paste your AdWords report into this spreadsheet as directed. From here, you can take a closer look at the following:
a. Performance By Day Of Week

b. Performance By Hour

c. Performance By Hour & Day Of Week

If you have collected enough hourly data for each day of the week, you should absolutely make bid adjustments on an hourly basis. This process can be time consuming, as it requires making adjustments on a very granular level, but the results are well worth it.
For those times with less traffic, you can still leverage daily and/or hourly trends. For instance, looking at campaign #43 in the attached spreadsheet, it appears that there was not enough data collected on Sundays from 4:00 am to 5:00 am to make a specific bid multiplier suggestion — but you might still want to increase the bids, since the data indicate that both Sundays and the 4:00 am to 5:00 am window perform well in general.
The attached spreadsheet will only address those times of the week with sufficient hourly data, while keeping in mind that “bid adjustments for locations, days, times, and any ad group-level targeting methods can be set from -90% to +900%.” Thus, it can help you to determine relevant hourly bid multipliers between -90% and +900% when there are a statistically significant number of clicks:

Step 3: Implement Hourly Bid Multipliers In AdWords

At the campaign level, navigate to the “Settings” tab; then, go to the “Ad schedule” section. The first step is to specify when you want to make bid changes. Select a day of the week from the drop-down menu:

From there, you can you can adjust the effective hourly bid multipliers, as calculated by the spreadsheet:

Conclusion

All of this is fairly straight-forward; however, your hourly bid multipliers need to be maintained over time, hence the importance of a (semi-)automated process. Also, keep in mind that once set in AdWords, those hourly bid changes do not take into account multiple time zones. For instance, if your AdWords account is set to “(GMT-08:00) Pacific Time,” and you want to increase the bids by 20% at 1 pm, then these bid changes will occur at 1 pm PST across all PST/MST/CST/EST locations. As a result, it makes sense to break down your top campaigns by time zone in order to set more accurate hourly bids.

How To Manage PPC Closely To A Budget

A few weeks ago, at SMX West in San Jose, George Michie of RKG, was talking about the challenges of managing enterprise-level PPC campaigns, and he made the interesting observation that you can either manage to ROI or to budgets, but not both at the same time.
The context of George’s remarks was setting expectations with client C-Level executives and educating them about what is and what is not possible with online marketing campaigns.

Maximizing PPC ad spend and managing to best ROI are usually conflicting goals.

ROI Targeting Differs From Budget Targeting

The reason these two goals are generally incompatible is that ROI targeting takes the dynamics of the auction into account and lets the ROI dictate the amount of ad spend. Spend rises and falls based on your ability to deliver profitable results. When you are told you must spend to a specific budget, your budget actually influences the dynamics of the auction and your ability to optimize CPAs.
For example, if you are given an extra $100K and told to spend it this month, you only have a few options available to you in the short term. You can increase bids to get more traffic from higher positioning; but, you’ll pay more for that traffic. You can also allow more budget to flow to your marginal campaigns, which also degrades your ROI.
If on the other hand, your budget is constrained, then you are forced to make decisions like advertising only on your brand terms, slowing down the pace of your ad serving by using standard ad delivery, or simply letting your campaigns run out of money before the end of the month, allowing your competitors to reap the benefits of your dropping out of the auction.
I think that most SEM pros and corporate CEOs would agree that managing PPC campaigns to ROI targets with unconstrained budgets is the ideal budgeting scenario. Common sense seems to suggest that if your paid search campaigns are improving both revenues and profits, you would want to spend as much as you can to keep the good times rolling.
Unfortunately, the reality (and unreality) of corporate accounting and planning structures often dictates that short-term budget targets are cast-in-concrete and to be met at all costs, regardless of business results. In this environment, missing your budget either by under-spending or over-spending is an undesirable outcome, and draws unwanted (and often unwarranted) attention to your campaign management prowess.
So, unless you are one of the lucky PPC managers with unlimited budget as long as you hit ROI targets, or you have the bravado to ignore budgets to prove your management machismo, your best bet is to come in right on the mark.

Staying Within Range Of Your Target Budget

I generally worry about three things when it comes to managing monthly budget targets: (1) going over budget, (2) getting too far under budget and (3) Blowing through our budget before the end of the month. Of these worries, preventing over-spend is probably the easiest problem to avoid.
Preventing Over-Spend
If we are severely budget-limited, taking the campaigns offline when the budget is exhausted is the certainly the easiest option. I don’t prefer doing this because it seems so contrary to common business sense.
However, I have also found that nothing is more motivating to clients than the thought of their competitors gaining advantage by having the search results pages all to themselves! So, sometimes this option works well to free up more funding for paid search.
Going Over Budget
To prevent campaigns from going over budget, the first line of defense is to use the budget settings within Google AdWords and Microsoft Bing Ads.

Bing Ads: Bing Ads allows you to set monthly or daily budgets for your campaigns. If you choose to set monthly budgets, Bing Ads will show your ads whenever they qualify for an auction and then pause them when your monthly budget is exhausted. Alternatively, you can also use Bing Ad’s daily budgeting feature to spread your ad spend across the entire month.

For example, if your monthly budget is $3,000 for a month with 30 days, setting your daily budget to $100 will ensure that your ads show every day. With daily budgeting, you can also set the ad delivery to either standard or accelerated pacing. Standard delivery means Bing will pace the delivery of your ads so that they show throughout the day based on your budget. Accelerated delivery means your ads will show in all eligible auctions until your daily budget runs out.

Google Ad Words: In AdWords, you can’t set a monthly budget directly. Instead, Google calculates an effective monthly budget based on your daily budget setting. AdWords multiplies your daily budget by 30.4 (the average number of days in a month) and uses that value as your monthly maximum spend.

During the month, your AdWords spend may vary, exceeding the daily limit by as much as 20%; but at the end of the month, your budget will not exceed your target ad spend. So, for example, if your daily budget is $100 per day, then your total monthly maximum spend will not exceed $3040. You can also share a budget across some or all of your campaigns to ensure your whole account stays within limits.

Under Spending
Under spending budget is also one of my budgeting worries, and it is a tough one to manage if you get behind. Under spending can happen for a number of reasons: inattention to campaigns, ads that have been suddenly disapproved, another big competitor has entered your space and is eating into your search click volume, or your client suddenly decides they need to dump a lot more funding into your campaigns in the middle of the month.
In big corporations, this tends to happen at the end of fiscal quarters or the end of fiscal years. While no one ever likes to turn down additional budget, dealing with a huge budget bump can be very tricky in the short term.

Tracking Daily Spend

When hitting budget numbers becomes an overriding requirement, it is important to keep a very close eye where we are relative to the target monthly spend and make bid and budget adjustments daily. The challenge is knowing how big or small the adjustments should be, because every day of the week has its own traffic and ad spending profile that needs to be taken into account.
For this reason, we like to take day-of-week spending patterns into account when making adjustments.

PPC Ad Spend Weighted by Day of Week helps inform bid and budget decisions.

The above chart shows two curves. The orange curve shows the average daily spend we need to achieve in order to reach our month end target, somewhere around $325 per day. The second curve, the blue one, shows a spending plan weighted by day of week based on our typical intra-weekly spend patterns.
We developed the curve below simply by taking the daily profile of the last five or six weeks of ad performance, and weighting the ad spend based on how individual days of the week perform as percentage of the entire week’s ad spend. As you see, there is a big difference between Sunday and Monday average ad spending:

Each day of the week has its own ad spend profile.

Using a weighted average can make a big difference in the adjustments you make to your bid and budget allocations day-by-day compared with using a straight line average. For example, when your month begins on a Thursday, and you come in on Monday morning, you’ll see that your daily ad spend might look like this:

Daily PPC Spend plans – weighted versus straight line average.

If you are comparing your actual ad spend against the orange straight-line average target spend curve, you may be  inclined to make a much bigger set of adjustments than if you were comparing things to the weighted average. The weighted average curve looks very similar to your actual ad spend, so you would probably make smaller adjustments.
When we work from a weighted average in managing closely to monthly budgets, we find we are less likely to make yo-yo adjustments – too aggressive one day, and too aggressive in the opposite direction the next.
In general, it is always preferable to work to ROI targets and allow ad spend to drift up and down as market efficiencies dictate. However, if you are required to also keep close to your budget targets, it’s a good idea to keep track of where you are relative to your strict monthly budget goals on a daily basis.

Geographic Targeting In An Enhanced Campaign World

AdWords enhanced campaigns will force many advertisers to change their campaign structures. One of the benefits that have been touted for enhanced campaigns is that you will need fewer campaigns, thus making AdWords easier to manage.
For mobile targeting, this is true, as the ability to target mobile devices is now gone. However, for the targeting features that are left, such as location targeting, you might not want to consolidate your campaigns just for easier management.
In today’s column, we will examine how locations affect your campaign structure and if you should change your structure to match the new enhanced campaign benefits.

Location Bid Modifiers

Most accounts do not have the same conversion rates by geography. In some cases, the changes are small; but in other cases, the changes can be quite dramatic.

In this instance, the CPA of San Antonio is double that of Philadelphia. Therefore, we would not want to bid the same for each of these locations. Before enhanced campaigns, in order to bid separately by location, we would need to create a campaign for each location and set bids based upon the keyword CPA by region.
With enhanced campaigns, this will not always be necessary. One of the great new features is bid modifiers based upon locations. With bid modifiers, you can automatically adjust your bid for each location being targeted.
For instance, we can set our keyword bids as normal based upon some global CPA numbers, and then tell AdWords we would like to bid 32% higher for the Philadelphia region and 39% lower for the San Antonio region.

Before you can set a bid modifier for each location, you must add them to your campaign targeting section. If you don’t add each location to your campaign targeting, then you will not be able to set a bid modifier by location.

The good news is that this is very simple. You set bids as normal and then automatically adjust your bid by region.
The main limitation is that this is a campaign-only setting. If you have some keywords that do better in San Antonio than Philadelphia, but overall San Antonio is worse so you’d want to use a negative bid modifier, you cannot exclude keywords from the bid modifiers nor have bid modifiers at the keyword level. Of course, having that level of control would be incredibly difficult to manage by hand, so using campaign bid modifiers is a nice middle step.
The bad news is that these changes just affect the keyword bids for the entire campaign. They do not allow you to adjust the budget or ads for each region. In some cases, you still want to make different campaigns for some locations.
If you are a national company that has never tried to manage bids or budgets by locations, this is a great feature to get you started examining how various locations affect your CPAs so you can start to bid them separately or even target the users differently by location.
Please note, the geographic bid modifier only works with CPC bidding, either manual or enhanced. As with all bid modifiers, it is not compatible with CPA bidding or budget optimizer. The only exception is that you can bid –100% (setting your bid to $0) to not show if the auction uses that bid modifier.

Controlling Budgets

Several years ago, one of the main issues with splitting out your campaigns by region for bidding purposes was that you might have a single budget target, and you didn’t care which region received the click and spent your money, as long as the correct bid was used and you didn’t go over your total budget.
The shared budgets feature fixed this issue for advertisers and created the opportunity to easily use multiple campaigns without fretting over how to split the budget between campaigns.
Some companies have budgets by region. This is common in areas where there are co-op marketing budgets involved, multiple franchise locations, or physical store locations. If you want to maintain budgets by region, then you still want to maintain separate campaigns by region as you cannot split a budget between regions with enhanced campaigns.
If your regions are large, such as the northeast, southwest, and so forth, then you can use bid modifiers within those regions to tweak your CPCs; however, your overall structure of keeping your regions separate for budget reasons is still sound with enhanced campaigns.

Geographic-Specific Ads

One of the main reasons to separate locations into various campaigns is to ensure that the ads speak to that particular geography. The most common instance of this is adding the region to the ad’s headline. However, it is also done to match offline promotions or test responses to offers by region.
If you have split out your campaigns for the purpose of using different ads by region, you will not want to reconsolidate your campaigns as you will lose your ability to specify specific ads by geography. So, if your main reason to use multiple campaigns is for ad serving, you will want to leave your campaigns separated.

Ad Extensions

The last major reason campaigns were split up by region was for extension usage. You might have different sitelinks, offers, or location extensions you wanted to use by campaign. As none of the extensions have a geographic ad serving component (except for the location extension), if you want different offers or sitelinks by region, you still need separate campaigns.
With location extensions, you can decide to bid differently for someone who is within the reach of your location extension. If you first add your location extension as a location target, you can then set a bid adjustment for someone in that radius.

If you have physical locations where you want the customers to come to your business, this is a welcome change as someone who is within a mile of your restaurant is usually worth more than someone who is 30 miles from your location.

Wrap-Up

Enhanced campaign bid modifiers make it easier to manage location-based bids if all your keywords have similar CPAs by region. The ability to set a bid adjustment based upon the user’s proximity to your location is also a welcome change. If you want a simplistic AdWords account, and yet have the ability to set different bids by region, the new enhanced campaign features are a very welcome change.
If you are an advanced advertiser who wants to change budgets, ads, extensions, or individual keyword bids by region, when you upgrade to enhanced campaigns, you will not want to consolidate campaigns just for location targeting purposes. You will still need to consolidate campaigns based upon device types, but you won’t do it for location purposes.
If you have segmented your campaigns by location, you can still take advantage of bid modifiers within the campaigns as locations often have sub-locations (states have metros, metros have cities, etc.) that will commonly have different CPAs by each region which you can micro-manage with bid adjustments. If you are using location extensions, then please take advantage of bid modifiers by location extension reach.
The launch of enhanced campaigns is one of the biggest changes Google has ever implemented, and it will change how AdWords accounts are created, structured and managed. While enhanced campaigns gave additional features to location based bidding, this new campaign type should not force you to reorganize most account structures based solely upon location targeting considerations.

How to use Google Trends as a Keyword Selection Tool

When you are looking for a way to find your keywords for your SEO or for your PPC – you have a lot of free tools you can use for your research.

If you are searching for “used cars” you can get information about how many people are conducting a search for that special word or words. Use free tools like Google Keyword Tool. Or you can use WordTracker.
You will get the information about how many times a phrase is searched for, and  information about words or phrases that are very close to your target keyword. So in our example you will maybe get information about “blue cars” or “new cars”
But with Google Trends you can go much further. First of all it will show you how popular the keyword is over time, showing if your keywords popularity is rising, falling or staying steady.
So let’s say you are not sure if you want to do SEO for the term “blue cars” or “black cars”. Go to the search” and you will see this picture. Don’t write the quote marks, you just write the phrases with a comma between the search phrases. You can compare up to 5 different words or phrases.






 So the “black cars” phrase is very steady and the “blue cars” phrase is rising and falling but is always higher than the phrase black cars.
Google Trends is also a very quick way to get information about singular or plural version of your searched keyword or phrase. Here I will compare “blue car” or “blue cars”.







 Here you can see that there will be much more traffic for the word car than for the word cars.





 To the right you will see the volume of news stories related to your keyword. Below you can see the result from selected cities, selected world regions and by selected world languages.

Google Trend can’t tell you everything
Use Google Tend as a keyword tool. But you will need more research. Google Trend can’t tell you how many times a keyword has been searched. You can compare two or more graphs but not the actual number of searches.
Even though you found the most popular keyword or phrase it doesn’t tell you how competitive the market for that keyword is.
Maybe you will have no change at all to get into top10 for the phrase “Blue Cars” but you will have a great change for the phrase “Black cars” even though the popularity is much lower. And therefor you can get more traffic from that phrase.

Use Google Trend as an inspiration
Start using Google Trend and get inspired. And when you have found a word or two you will need to go to tools like Google Keyword Tool. But Google Trend is a great tool.
And yes.. It’s FREE.

Surviving Google AdWords’ New Enhanced Campaigns

In "Cheaper Clicks from AdWords Coming?,"From a article from Feb. 2012, Someone questioned whether the then unprecedented decline in cost-per-click rates would be a blip or a trend. One year later, Google apparently thinks it's a trend, as Google is requiring all advertisers to adopt its new Enhanced Campaigns.
This will likely reverse the decline in CPC rates that resulted from increased adoption of smartphones and tablets, when advertisers expected lower conversion rates from mobile traffic, and bid down their mobile campaigns. With the new rollout you will still be able to bid down mobile phone clicks, but the way you do that will be much different. If you don’t properly migrate, you’ll be automatically opted into mobile campaigns — paying higher rates — and that could significantly impact the profitability of your campaigns.
To be clear, Google’s transition to Enhanced Campaigns is an important evolution in AdWords, and confers many benefits. It’s important that you prepare for this transition, however, or it could jeopardize the profitability of your campaigns.
Five important changes you should prepare for are as follows.

1. No Segmenting for Tablets

In the past, you’ve been able to segment different campaigns for tablet users and traditional computer users. But now you will no longer be able to. The reason this matters is that many merchants bid their tablet CPCs lower or higher depending on their rate of conversion from tablet users. Since you won’t be able to target unique bids to tablet users, you’ll need to factor this conversion rate impact into your overall bid strategy, which may require you to make significant changes to your bids.

2. No Mobile-only Campaigns

In the past, you’ve been able to create mobile-only campaigns — i.e. smartphones — that target specific keywords, and you’ve been able to adjust bids for individual keywords based on performance. After Enhanced Campaigns rolls out, however, you will have less control. You will have to adjust your smartphone CPC rates, on the campaign rather than the keyword level, by creating “mobile bid adjustments.”
This screenshot shows how the campaign level bid adjustments looks for mobile devices. In this case we’re setting the mobile bid adjustment to 20 percent. In other words, if you are bidding $1 per click on desktops/tablets, your bid for smartphones will be reduced 20 percent to $0.80.

Campaign level bids will need to be adjusted for mobile devices.

3. Campaigns Automatically Opted-in to Mobile

This is perhaps the biggest reason to take control of your migration to Enhanced Campaigns, by following prompts Google will display inside your account, like the one below.

Campaigns will automatically be upgraded to Enhanced.
If Google automatically upgrades you to Enhanced Campaigns, than your campaigns will automatically be opted into Google's mobile network, and you will be paying higher rates for mobile clicks than might be profitable for you. This has the potential to hurt a lot of small businesses who don’t know any better.
The right time to migrate may not be now, however. Once you migrate you cannot revert. If your campaigns are already designated by device, you may want to wait a few months and migrate immediately before the forced upgrade takes place. Companies operating smaller campaigns that just target searches from traditional computers, however, can migrate to Enhanced Campaigns as soon as they’d like.

4. Sitelinks Now Available at the Ad Group Level

In the past, Sitelinks — i.e., additional links below the main body of the pay-per-click ad — could only be setup at the Campaign level. But now they can be setup at the Ad Group level. To understand why this is important, consider the example of an online retailer bidding on the phrase “baseball cleats.” In the screen shot below, you’ll see the advertiser has Sitelinks set up — advertising “Name Brands Up To 80% Off,” “Gift Cards,” “New Arrivals,” and “Baseball Bats.”

Sitelinks can now be set up at the Ad Group level. In this example, Sitelinks are "Name Brands Up To 80% Off Every Day - Gift Cards - New Arrivals - Baseball Bats."
The reason these Sitelinks are so unspecific is that you can only set Sitelinks up at the Campaign level, which means the advertisers had to select generic Sitelinks that applied not only to, say, baseball cleats, but myriad related concepts. Now that Sitelinks can be set at the Ad Group level, the Sitelinks could be more targeted to concepts like “Popular Cleats,” “Clearance Cleats,” or “Nike Cleats.” This will result in a more effective and more profitable ads.
The screen shot below shows the interface for creating a Sitelink, and how they can be automatically adjusted based on the time of day, or day of week. You can also set a mobile preference to target specific Sitelinks to mobile users.

Google's interface for managing Sitelinks.

5. Offer Extensions Now Available at the Ad Group Level

This screenshot details the offer extension interface, which allows you to highlight time-sensitive offers directly within your ads. For example, if your conversion rates on “Baseball cleats,” plummet over the weekend, you can schedule special sales for Saturday and Sunday that will automatically stop on Monday.

The offer extension interface.

Conclusion

I talk with many online retailers who spend thousands of dollars per month on AdWords, and less than two hours per month on the management of those campaigns. Enhanced Campaigns is likely only one of many major changes Google will make to AdWords this year. Retailers who do not continually optimize their campaigns — in light of the changes — will incur higher costs. In the case of Enhanced Campaigns, in particular, there is a big cost to ignoring the upgrade.