10 Facts About Ads Quality Straight From Google

In the SEM world, there are constant discussions taking place on how to improve Quality Scores. Although we’ll never receive the Quality Score algorithm, we’ll take what we can get when Google gives us tidbits of information.

Here are 10 things you should know about Ads Quality – straight from Google’s mouth:

1. There might not be ads on all search results, even for queries that advertisers are bidding on.
2. Just because there is low competition for a keyword doesn’t mean that it will be inexpensive.
3. Your ad position is not a factor in your Quality Score.
4. Your bid primarily impacts your rank, not your Quality Score.
5. Quality is given extra consideration when determining which ads appear in the top slots.
6. Your ad conversion rate doesn’t affect your Quality Score.
7. A few bad days of performance will not ruin your Quality Scores.
8. Quality Score doesn’t suffer when your ads are showing infrequently or not showing due to pausing or budgeting.
9. Restructuring your account doesn’t cause you to lose your historical Quality Score information.
10. Google doesn’t keep track of your landing page experience history.

You can find Google’s details about the above list here. Additionally, I recommend you watch this introductory video explaining the ad auction by Chief Economist at Google, Hal Varian.

It’s important that you digest Quality Score information with caution. There are many more details that are factored into Quality Score that are not reflected here. Need a couple of tips to get you heading in the right direction? First, be sure to construct your account structure so that campaigns, ad groups, keywords and ads are tightly themed and created in an organized and logical manner. Also, it’s important that your ads, keywords and landing pages are of quality and highly relevant.

We are barely scratching the surface with this topic. What are some high-level tips you have for improving Quality Scores?

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Google Remarketing Optimization Tips (Part 3)

In this final post covering Google Remarketing optimization tips, let’s quickly recap the best practices we previously reviewed.

Part 1 Tips:

• Ad testing
• Landing page testing
• Offer testing

Part 2 Tips:

• Frequency testing
• Segmentation testing

We’ll conclude this series with the following best practices and last thoughts. Remember, to find out what is most effective for your campaigns, you’ll want to test these tips and continue testing some more.

1. Site Exclusion Testing: Remarketing is different from display advertising in that the people seeing your ads have been to your site before. Regardless, certain sites and/or ad placements may outperform others. Evaluate site exclusion testing for underperforming sites that are eating up the budget by reducing the bid or excluding them if necessary. You may want to consider raising your bids for websites that perform better to gain impression share. Utilize this tactic sparingly since this is a Remarketing campaign – you can’t control what websites they visit.

2. Bid Testing: Monitor your bids for impression share in addition to ROI. Test different bid amounts to see where they are most effective. Since you are following visitors and not websites, you will need to bid appropriately and not to the point of annoyance. Your bidding strategy should also reflect your list segmentation. For instance, you may find it makes more sense to bid higher on lists that include recent visitors since they are more likely to convert.

Lastly, please don’t limit your Remarketing strategy. Although it is a great start to remarket to anyone who visits your website with a single offer – this is so limiting. You have the power to feature targeted offers based on varied and relevant sections of your website. Get creative with your Remarketing and laser target your offers to afford the most value to your visitors.

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Google Remarketing Optimization Tips (Part 2)

As a continuation to Google Remarketing optimization tips (part 1), this week we will review two more best practices. Last week we discussed the importance of testing ads, landing pages and offers. This week we are covering frequency and segmentation testing.

1. Frequency Testing: It’s happened to all of us. As we visit different websites, the same ad continues to follow us. Not only could the excessiveness get annoying, but it could also have a negative effect on your brand’s image. I recommend testing different frequency caps to strike a balance between not being annoying but yet harnessing the power of interested visitors. Tread carefully with frequency cap testing. Continue to monitor your audience size in relation to impressions. To review frequency reporting within your AdWords campaign, go to the Dimensions Tab > View > Reach and Frequency > and select by Day, Week or Month.

2. Segmentation Testing: Speak to your audience based on where they are in the buying cycle. Utilize different custom combinations including the length of the cookie and layering interest or topic categories. Test this tactic to see what is most effective. Thinking about your audience, wouldn’t you speak to someone who visited your website in the last 7 days differently than a visitor from 90 days ago?


In my next post, I’ll cover tips such as bid testing and what you need to monitor as a best practice.

What optimization methods have you seen success with?

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Google Remarketing Optimization Tips (Part 1)

So you’re excited that you’ve launched your Google Remarketing campaign and it’s generating conversions out of the gate, but now what? How do you go about optimizing the campaign to maximize results? Remarketing is not a “set it and forget it” type of campaign. Similar to Search campaigns, you’ll want to continue to optimize and test.

Looking for some tips to get started? Here are three best practices in no particular order; they are all equally important.

1. Ad Testing: You need to approach Google Remarketing ad testing with a slightly different mindset than traditional display advertising. Remember, these visitors are presumably more familiar with your brand as they’ve had some sort of interaction. Speak to your audience with this understanding. Test different messaging to try to win them back. Utilize all banner ad sizes in addition to text ads. When crafting your messaging, think about what pages the audience has already viewed. What can you say to them that will entice them enough to give you a second chance?

2. Landing Page Testing: Similar to Search campaigns, the experience from the ad to the landing page should function in a complementary fashion. If the messaging is disjointed, you’ll lose the visitor again. For instance, if your ad promises 10% off, be sure that messaging carries through front and center on the landing page. Experiment with landing your audience on different relevant pages to understand what messaging resonates best.

3. Offer Testing: Remember that you need to speak to this audience differently, so you’ll want to test a variety of offers. The generic type of offer will probably not appeal to these folks. Approach Remarketing offers with the mindset of “upping the ante”. What do you need to offer this audience to lead them further down the funnel?

Have you noticed the common theme in these tips? Test, test and then test some more. These tips will get you heading in the right direction, but there are many other tips to cover. In my upcoming posts, we’ll review additional optimization best practices so you’ll want to stay tuned.

What questions do you have about optimizing Remarketing campaigns?

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Optimize Your Display Network Campaigns with New Tools & Reports

Google recently launched the Google Display Planner for Display Network campaigns. This tool provides suggestions based on the data you enter including impression and cookie estimates, age and gender reporting and historical cost-per-click (CPC) information.

Along with this rollout, two new reports will be available: Demographic Performance and Placement Performance. Now with more powerful insights, you have the ability to optimize your campaigns to be more relevant to your targeted audience. For example, the Demographic Performance report gives you performance data by gender and age including impression, click and conversion rates for each group.

Generally speaking, the Google Display Network doesn’t convert better than other campaigns such as Remarketing or Pay-Per-Click; however, it absolutely has the potential to be a worthwhile test to gauge its effectiveness for your business. Google continues to fine-tune the Display Network’s targeting features and inventory selection tools. By understanding the relationship this marketing channel has with various other marketing channels, you may discover it is a meaningful contributor to overall conversions by way of assist.

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Time To Get Creative with Google Analytics Remarketing

You may already be familiar with the fact that you can make your Remarketing more powerful via Google Analytics, but it’s time to take it a step further and get really creative with this advertising method.

Depending on your business, you can slice and dice your Analytics data in numerous ways to utilize these insights via different lists. Aside from “loyalty discount” lists, another viable targeting option is – social media users. Because Analytics allows you to segment by source, you can target a list of visitors from social media sites with ad messaging tailored specifically to them. These types of users most likely reached your website via a link from someone they trust and are connected to, so they may naturally have a bit more trust in your brand as a result.

Think about how you can craft ads that truly resonates with them. How would you speak to these users compared to users who found your site by clicking through on a pay per click ad? Remember, they already have shown interest in something that you had to say or offer. Take this opportunity to answer their interest by showing them meaningful ads.

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Make Your Remarketing More Powerful via Google Analytics

Google Remarketing has proven to be a lucrative tactic for many advertisers. The product is continuously improved upon such as being able to target Similar Audiences, adding to your ability to identify and gain new customers.

Are you looking for a way to hone in even further on your target audience? Let me introduce you to Google Remarketing via Analytics.

This Remarketing method allows you to tap into your website’s metrics to show targeted ads for what your visitors are looking for. For example, if you want to target people who have visited your website more than three times in the past 7 days and purchased $300 of product – you can. In this case, it may make sense to remarket to them with a “loyalty discount”.

You will need to do a quick integration between your Google Analytics and Google AdWords accounts to take advantage of this feature. There is also a necessary small update to the Analytics code snippet.

Remarketing via Analytics allows for sophisticated targeting using rich insights while broadening your reach.

What opportunities do you see for energizing your Remarketing campaigns with this product?

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One Highlight to Google Enhanced Campaigns

When Google Enhanced Campaigns launched a couple of months ago, it received mixed reviews. The constraints of targeting tablet/desktop versus mobile are hard to swallow despite coming with a few bells and whistles that advertisers do indeed look forward to.

One highlight to Enhanced Campaigns is the upgraded ad extensions. Advertisers now have enrichments such as upgraded offer extensions, free phone call tracking, and more detailed reporting. You also have the flexibility to specify dates, days of week, or times of day for your sitelinks to appear.

The reporting upgrade really appeals to me. For instance, you can review data showing how an extension performs against other elements on an ad (e.g., other extensions or the headline) allowing you to fine-tune your campaigns even further. As a marketer, the more detailed statistics you can gain from your campaigns, the more intelligence you can apply to your optimization.

Do the Enhanced Campaigns’ upgrades outweigh the cons for you? Have you upgraded your campaigns yet? Please leave your thoughts below in the comments.

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Want to Remarket To People Similar to Your Customers?

Google Remarketing, also known as Google Retargeting, is a powerful internet marketing tactic. It allows you to reach people who have previously visited your website. With Remarketing, you can show these visitors relevant ads as they travel across the vast Google Display Network. For instance, let’s say someone visits the “pianos” section of your website but did not make a purchase – you can remarket to them. This means you can bring them back to your website with an offer that is enticing enough to get them to take a desired action, like a purchase. You now have a second chance to give them an offer they simply can’t refuse.

Did you know you have the opportunity to reach even more people with Remarketing’s “Similar Audiences” feature? By using this feature, your ads will show to potential customers that have browsing patterns similar to your current site visitors but haven’t actually visited your website. The logic is that these people are more likely to be interested in the same products or services since they have similar browsing tendencies.

The people on the Similar Audience lists are automatically determined by Google. Since browsing habits change regularly, the Similar Audience lists change on a daily basis, too.

Think of this feature as having a new audience that is prequalified from the masses. However, you must remember they may have no idea who you are. Be sure to craft your messaging with this in mind.

Because of the uncertainty of how this type of audience will respond, test this feature with a limited budget to start and gauge its effectiveness. Let us know how this test works out for you in the comments below.

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The Importance of a Mobile Search Strategy

Increasingly, mobile’s importance in our lives is becoming more evident. Our mobile phones can essentially be considered a permanent fixture of our daily routines. Can you leave home without it?

In conjunction with Nielsen, Google’s new report, “Mobile Search Moments: Understanding How Mobile Drives Conversions”, attempts to decipher what triggers people to do mobile searches and when, what actions follow as a result and how marketers can utilize this intelligence. This report explains the measurable connections between mobile searches and their correlated online and offline conversions.

What are the main drivers for mobile searches? Speed and convenience, with 77% of mobile searches performed in a location (work or home) likely to have a PC available to them.

Here are a few additional highlights from the report:

• 45% of all mobile searches are goal-oriented and conducted to help make a decision

• 81% of conversions (store visit, call or purchase) triggered by mobile search occur within 5 hours

• 55% of conversions from mobile searches happen within one hour

As a key factor in the decision-making process, a mobile search strategy is an essential piece of your overall marketing strategy.

What mobile search opportunities do you see for your business? Tell us your thoughts in the comments below.

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Google Analytics Change History Feature

Similar to the Google AdWords Change History tool, Analytics is rolling out with its own version over the next few weeks. Exclusively for users who have administrative access, the tool lists:

• Date column: The date and time of the activity

• Email column: Which Analytics user performed the activity

• Activity column: The Analytics object (e.g., account, user, profile, goal, filter), and what activity was performed on the object (e.g., added to account, created, deleted)

The days of mystery in trying to figure out who changed what within your account are long gone. For companies who have more than one person accessing their account (e.g., other employees or outside agencies), you now have the necessary tool for complete accountability. This log will maintain a record of activities within the account for the last 180 days.

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Introducing Google AdWords Enhanced Campaigns

Google AdWords Enhanced Campaigns have been rolled out to advertisers this month with a plan to upgrade all campaigns in mid-2013. This feature combines separate desktop and mobile campaigns into one. Rather than editing individual campaigns for possible device combinations, location and time of day, you’ll display your ads across devices with the correct sitelinks, ad text, apps and extensions.

Google positions this product as a way for AdWords to capture the power of context. By utilizing information such as location, time of day and device, advertisers will now have the opportunity to reach their audience with more compelling messages. By way of multi-device marketing, potential customers can seamlessly look for businesses on smartphones, tablets and computers while seeing more relevant ads. For example, if a consumer is searching for a pizza place from their smartphone, they will see a prominent call to action on an ad to click to call.

Love it or hate it, there is no option to opt-out of this upcoming change. You should start reviewing how these changes will affect your campaigns. Although Enhanced Campaigns are aimed at being more unified, you may find many of the fine-tuning capabilities that you are currently taking advantage of will be removed with this update.

Here are a few resources to get you started:

Should You Upgrade To AdWords Enhanced Campaigns?

Upgrading to Enhanced Campaigns

Google Webinars on Enhanced Campaigns

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Quick Tip for Organizing Your Homepage Google+ Circles

If you are trying to play in the world of Google+, you are most likely still learning the ropes and trying to figure out the most effective way to manage your presence. Although a quick and simple tip, you will find this to be extremely useful.

Lately, I have been focusing on optimizing my stream experience to manage the noise. But, I have found it difficult to do so as my homepage favorites bar wasn’t in the exact order I needed it to be. Thankfully, there is a way to remedy this predicament.

While signed into your Google+ account (not from your mobile), go to your circles page and reorder your circles so that your favorites are first in the specific order you desire. As a result, the first four circles will appear in your favorites bar, respectively.

Do you have any tips to share with the community? Or, are you experiencing a situation with Google+ that you need an answer to? Go ahead and leave your comments and questions below.

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New Strategies for Your Mobile Playbook

As you may have already noticed, I place a lot of importance on having a mobile strategy for your business. Interacting with your customers via mobile in some form or fashion is inevitably going to be a part of your business’s future. Mobile is a critical component to the overall success of your marketing strategy.

Google has released an update to the prior Mobile Playbook that includes new strategies on mobile creativity and ROI. The two main areas of focus expanded upon examples of compelling mobile creative and measuring the real ROI of mobile and its associated impact on a business.

The Playbook also features case studies covering the 5 mobile conversion types. This consists of mobile web, from apps, phone calls, cross-device and in-store. Using the “mobile web” conversion type case study as an example, TicketNetwork’s mobile site was designed with two critical components at the forefront – speed and simplicity. Four months after launch, ticket sales from mobile grew by 184% due to their efforts to build a mobile site that made the purchasing process easy for the consumer.

You can find the updated Mobile Playbook here. What mobile conversion type have you experienced the most success with?

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Looking For A Time Saver When Implementing Tracking Tags?

Have you ever had to implement Google Analytics code or Google Remarketing code and found it to be a hassle to implement it on all of the appropriate pages of a website? Or, maybe the IT department finds it difficult to carve out time to add code to several web pages as quickly as needed?

Google may have a new free product that can answer your troubles. Google Tag Manager will let you or anyone you grant access to, add and update your website tags all from one centralized and simple to use interface. This product works with Google and non-Google website tags.

Watch this video to see how it works.



This may be a lifesaver for marketers and agencies. How will you or your clients benefit from this product?

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New Google AdWords Feature Allows Shared Budgets

If you ever hoped that AdWords would allow you to share your daily budgets across all of your campaigns within one account, that time is now. Google released a new feature that may make administering budgets across an account effortless.

You can find this feature in the “Shared Library” section under Budgets. Here you can also review reporting for aggregate performance metrics for multiple campaigns with a shared budget.

Although shared budgets is portrayed as a way to make your life easier when monitoring your campaigns, I am concerned about how the budget will be distributed across the campaigns. Since Google is automatically adjusting the budgets, how will you ensure one campaign doesn’t eat into the budget of another? Will it give the other campaigns a fair test?

Depending on your AdWords objectives, this feature may make sense. Please leave your thoughts in the comments below.

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How Consumers Use Multiple Screens to Get What They Need

In our “always on the go” lifestyles, consumers have evolved their digital consumption behaviors to reflect our current multi-screen worlds.

As a result, it’s imperative that you understand consumers’ behaviors across the multiple platforms. In Google’s new report, The New Multi-screen World: Understanding Cross-Platform Consumer Behavior, they provide the statistic that 90% of people move between devices to accomplish a goal, whether that’s on smartphones, PCs, tablets or TV.

What does the multi-screen approach mean exactly? Say for example that you need to book a dinner reservation for a big meeting. You start searching on your smartphone for the best hot spots in town to get a better idea of where to host the meeting. Later on in the morning, you continue the search on your laptop now that you are in the office. And finally, once you have the perfect restaurant in mind, you book the reservation on your PC later on that night. The multi-screen approach proved to be more convenient in your search for the ideal restaurant.

The importance of structuring your online presence for mobile, tablets and multiple screens becomes more of a necessity every day. It’s crucial that you understand how consumers want to interact with your brand and adapt to those needs.

Google’s full research report explains further useful statistics and findings on the topic.

How is your business accommodating this behavior?

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5 Tips for Reputation Management

Whether or not you’ll admit it, chances are you’ve Googled yourself in the past year or two. Maybe you did it out of vanity, or maybe you were just curious to see what’s being said on the web about you. No matter the reason, it’s a good idea to know how your personal brand shows up online to others – especially for active job seekers. By the same token, it’s just as important, if not more, to know where your corporate brand ranks online. This is called reputation management.

Sure, there was a similar service offered back in the golden olden days (actually not so long ago) where public relations firms would provide clippings from publications that ran stories, features and advertising about your brand. In the digital age, getting started with reputation management can be done simply by entering your company name or variations into your favorite search engine and seeing what comes up.  

Reputation Management can help you identify issues you may not have known about otherwise, such as complaints on customer review sites like Yelp.com and forum discussions on consumer watchdog sites. While you can’t necessarily remove these types of negative posts, you can address the issues that sparked them, and take proactive steps to push down the negative results and ensure that you control the first two pages of Google.

      Here are five tips for online reputation management:

1. Determine what keywords resonate with consumers and focus on those terms.
2. Decide if you are going to address the negative reviews and how to respond.
3. Create great web content, such as active social media networks, informative websites and popular blogs.
4. Take steps to improve the problems that sparked the negativity in the first place and ask customers to leave a review when they’ve had a positive experience.
5. Measure the results against a baseline and work toward a goal.   

Don’t let this short list fool you – reputation management can be challenging, especially when someone high up in your company also has a reputation management issue, which can happen all too often. The key is to be proactive and monitor the search engines regularly. If you do have a problem with reputation management, you may even want to consider hiring a professional or agency to help you with a strategy and execution. Consorte Marketing recently put together this infographic on reputation management that includes additional tips.  

Consorte Marketing Infographic on Reputation Management

Has your company experienced backlash from negative reviews online? How did you deal with it?

Free Google Resources to Grow Your Business Online

“Learn with Google Beta” is a free online resource that allows you to watch videos and download worksheets all about tips for promoting your business’s online presence. It is an informative tool for small business owners with online marketing knowledge from beginner to intermediate.

The site includes a variety of how-to guides covering topics such as:

• Why does being online matter?
• Online marketing vocabulary
• Google apps for business
• Local marketing: the what, the why, the how
• Building your online marketing plan

The website also includes a consolidated section for Google tools such as the “Google Keyword Tool”.

From Google’s free webinar series to “Learn with Google Beta”, it’s worth carving out some time to gain a better understanding of the steps you can take to promote your business on Google – direct from Google itself.

What tips did you find the most helpful for your business?

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Google Mobile Search via Handwriting Recognition

It is known that Google offers a few different ways to search including voice command to auto-complete.

The search giant is now introducing another search method – handwriting recognition. Still in the experimental stage, Google Handwrite will support 27 languages and will run on Android phones and tablets, and on iOS devices running iOS 5. Since it’s still in the testing phase, users will have to enable it within their settings to enjoy this new feature.

Searching via this method will allow you to scribble on nearly all of your phone’s screen space. The autocomplete suggestions will appear below the search box after a few letters, just as the typical search does.

Google Handwrite is intended to supplement the traditional keyboard. You can watch Mashable’s brief video about this feature to learn more.

It’s highly unlikely “handwriting” searches will consist of more than one or two words due to screen space. How do you see this form of query impacting a business’s website visibility in search?

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