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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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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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.

Like this post? Connect with Erika Barbosa on Google+.

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I Have a Dog Grooming Business; Can I Work with Ten Golden Rules?

Before today, most small business owners who wished to work with an agency would hear an answer they didn’t like – either it was cost-prohibitive or the agency lacked the scalability to work with smaller accounts. As a sign of the times, Ten Golden Rules is changing all that with new online marketing packages specifically created for small and medium-sized businesses that want to harness the power of the Internet to grow their businesses.

As a business owner, finding time to keep up with the ever-changing world of Internet marketing can be challenging. From Social Media to Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising to creating a competitive website, navigating the online world can be confusing if not a bit overwhelming. With these new services from Ten Golden Rules, you can now have access to the processes developed for larger companies, like hospitals and universities, without breaking your budget.

Simply visit the website and click on the service you’re most interested in. The entire process is automated for convenience and efficiency, and draws on almost a decade of knowledge from in-market testing and today’s best practices.

Do you do any of your own Internet marketing for your small or medium-sized business? Tell us about it in the comments below.

New Ratings for Google Quality Scores

You may have missed this update due its subtleness, but Google has increased its transparency in Google AdWords Quality Scores.

Now advertisers can get feedback directly from Google on an expected clickthrough rate, ad relevance, and landing page experience. This feedback is provided as “average”, “above average”, or “below average”, in comparison to other advertisers.

By way of a status hover (speech bubble icon) over a specific keyword, you will now find this additional feedback to the right of the numeric quality score.

As an advertiser, it is critical that you evaluate and improve your Quality Scores. Not only will you save money in the end, but the visitor has a more positive user experience. This way, everyone is happy! The higher your Quality Score means that your keywords, ads, and landing pages are more tightly woven.

Your Quality Score will affect the following things in your account:

• Ad auction eligibility
• Your keyword’s actual cost-per-click
• Your keyword’s first page bid estimate
• Your keyword’s top of page bid estimate
• Ad position

How are you using this feature to improve your campaigns?

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Google AdWords Announcement – New Matching Behavior

Similar to how Google’s organic search systems understand misspellings or variations in keywords, Google AdWords will soon offer the same.

Google explains, “Starting in mid-May, phrase and exact match keywords will match close variants, including misspellings, singular/plural forms, stemmings, accents and abbreviations. Based on our research and testing, we believe these changes will be broadly beneficial for users and advertisers.”

This means you will have a greater opportunity to generate more clicks as Google reports at least 7% of searches contain a misspelling, and the longer the search query, the higher this rate is. However, advertisers will still have the option to preserve their current matching behaviors in campaigns.

These new controls will begin deploying within the next few weeks, but, the new matching behavior won’t actually start until mid-May.

This will be a big time-saver for some advertisers. You will no longer have to worry about including misspellings, plural keywords, etc. to ensure you aren’t missing any opportunities. Now you will have more opportunities for impressions with less keywords. But, as a safeguard against erroneous clicks, be sure to use negative keywords.

Does this sound like a feature you will be testing in your campaigns?

Like this post? Connect with Erika Barbosa on Google+.

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Overview of A Few Google AdWords Basics

Last week I provided some details on a new Google webinar series that recently premiered. While watching a video from the Google AdWords Classroom, I jotted down a few highlights from one of the lectures that I would like to share with you. This information is ideal for someone who is just getting started or wanting to brush up on AdWords basics.

What is AdWords Optimization?

Optimization means taking steps to get the results you want by improving the quality and performance of your AdWords account.

The Benefits of a Good Structure

It provides a positive impact on:

• The overall performance of the account
• Makes account management easier and more effective
• Makes tracking and analysis easier and more effective

In the end, a good structure allows you to get more clicks for less money.

Campaigns vs. Ad Groups

Campaigns:

You should create separate campaigns when there is a need for different focuses such as:

• Daily budgets
• Adapted to country and language
• Start and end dates

Ad Groups:

You should create separate ad groups when there is a need for different focuses such as:

• To advertise different products or services
• To set different cost per conversion limits

A Few Key Factors to Keep In Mind:

• Organize campaigns by topic
• Create highly specific ad groups
• Avoid duplicate keywords across ad groups

To learn more about selecting optimal keywords, writing compelling ads, etc., check out the below video:



What did you learn from the video?

Personalized Google Pay Per Click Ads

While using Google search, have you noticed the link, “Why these ads?”


Upon clicking this link, Google advises that the ads are based on your current search terms. You also have the option to visit Google’s Ads Preferences Manager to learn more or opt-out.

The “learn more” section goes on to explain, “Google tries to show you the most relevant ads, whether or not you're opted in to seeing personalized ads. While we often match ads with specific pages (based on the page content or the search terms you enter), additional information helps us to personalize your ads.”

You also have the option to block specific advertisers’ ads if you don’t find them useful.

Personalized Ads Statistics

Fewer ads: Those who are opted-in see 19% fewer ads than opted-out users.
More relevant: Opted-in users are 59% more likely to click on ads than opted-out users.



Do you find yourself more inclined to utilize personalized ads due to the relevancy?