Ecommerce Marketing | Google Marketing

Dynamic Search Ads Are Now More Effective Than Ever

March 28, 2017 by

Dynamic Search Ads (DSA) help you reach people who are searching for your products and services—without the need for you to actively manage keywords or ads. Today we’re introducing three improvements to DSA: page feeds, expanded ads, and quality enhancements. 

Control the products you advertise

Page feeds give you additional control over your DSA campaigns to ensure only relevant products and services are shown to your customers. Simply provide us with a feed of what you want to promote and select the landing pages that you want to include in your auto targets. We’ll use this information to determine when your ads will show, and where to direct your customers to on your website.

You can also apply custom labels in your page feeds to keep your ads organized. For example, create a label called “Holiday Promotion” and apply it to a group of products to easily activate and pause all ads within that promotion at the same time. Mark out-of-stock products with an “Unavailable” label to prevent driving traffic to them.

Hot Pepper Beauty, one of Japan’s top salon booking services, uses page feeds and has reduced its time spent managing DSA campaigns by 90%:DSA with page feeds helps us expand our audience reach and dramatically reduces operational overhead while maintaining targeting control at the URL level

Tomoyuki Ishii
Manager of Digital Marketing at Recruit Lifestyle

Booking.com, the world leader in booking accommodations online, has also experienced positive results with page feeds:
DSA Page Feeds has provided us with better ad performance through more relevant ads and allows us to reach more potential customersRichard Gradwell
Richard Gradwell, Director Marketing PPC Booking

Expand your Dynamic Search Ads

Earlier this year, Search and Display campaigns fully transitioned to expanded text ads. Over the next month, we’re rolling out support within DSA campaigns for this expanded format. Longer headlines and description lines allow you to show more information about your business before people click your ad. When you create a new ad, use the expanded description field to provide deeper messaging that focuses on what consumers care about. 

Show more relevant ads

It’s important that your ads only show when they’re most relevant to what people are searching for. For example, if you’re a baker in Palm Springs, your ads should only show to people who are looking for baked goods in Palm Springs. That’s why we’re always improving the effectiveness of our DSA campaigns. With our latest updates, advertisers are seeing on average an increase in conversion rate and a decrease in CPA. 

Source: Official Google Webmasters Blog

Ecommerce Marketing | Google Marketing

Google Optimize And Google Surveys 360 Join Forces With AdWords

March 24, 2017 by

AdWords users get two new ways to understand and better serve their customers

Here’s good news for AdWords advertisers: as you heard yesterday at Google Marketing Next powerful new integrations with Google Optimize and Google Surveys 360 are coming soon to your accounts. The Surveys 360 integration is now live in the U.S. and Canada; the integration with Optimize will be available in the coming weeks.

Optimize is a A/B testing and personalization tool that makes it easy to see which changes to your web pages work best for your users and your business. Surveys 360 is a market research tool that helps enterprises gather fast, reliable insights from real people online and on mobile.

Both new integrations with AdWords are designed with a simple goal: to make it easier than ever to understand and serve your potential customers. Here’s some detail on both.

Better landing pages, better results

Advertisers naturally spend a lot of time thinking about their ads. What gets people to click? Will the words “free shipping” sell more than “10% off”? AdWords has always made it easy to create many different ad campaigns to see which performs best. But the ad is only part of the experience.

The new integration between Optimize and AdWords makes it easier than ever to take the next step: to improve and personalize the landing pages those ads lead to. The integration gives marketers a fast way to create and test custom landing pages based on the keyword, ad group, or campaign associated with an ad – with no need to deal with destination URLs or messy query parameters.

It’s worth it. 90% of organizations that invest in personalized consumer experiences agree that they contribute significantly to more business profitability.1

Suppose a hotel wants to improve its landing page for the keyword family-friendly hotels. Using Optimize, the hotel can create and test a new variation of the landing page, one that features an image of a family enjoying themselves at the hotel pool, instead of a generic image of the hotel exterior. If the new page leads to more reservations, they’ve got a win. Then it’s easy to keep testing headlines and images that might also do well.

The AdWords integration will be available for both Optimize and Optimize 360 and will be available to start using in the coming weeks. If you haven’t tried Optimize, you can get started for free here. 

Why not ask your customers?

We all need faster insights these days. That’s one reason we added Surveys 360 to the Google Analytics 360 Suite last year. Surveys 360 lets you ask questions directly to a pool of 15 million real people as they browse the web or use their smartphone. The results arrive in days, or sometimes in just hours.

Now, what if you could combine that kind of speedy real-world feedback with the wealth of data that you already have in AdWords? Then you could understand both what users do and why they do it.

That’s what we’re announcing today: remarketing lists published in AdWords are now available in Surveys 360 for surveys targeting. That means you can survey the users on your remarketing lists to find out what worked best for them (or didn’t).

Want to know why shoppers abandoned their shopping carts? Ask them! Curious about how many customers converted due to your new free shipping offer? Ask them!

Then change your marketing message on the spot to match what you learn. If your survey shows that the words “family friendly” are what brought customers to your hotel, you can build new ad groups to take advantage of this information. (You might even use Optimize to test new landing pages with that phrase!)

Here’s an early report from the online shopping site Jet:

“Google Product Listing Ads (PLAs) have been an effective way for Jet.com to drive website traffic, but we needed to optimize for conversions. Surveys 360 connected us directly to our customers through remarketing audiences to determine which factors influence their purchase decisions most. The results were clear: customers care most about free, fast shipping and our free returns. We used this insight to revise our messaging in PLAs and across Jet.com which quickly improved performance.“
– Ben Babcock, Director of UX Research at Jet.com

Getting started is easy: Just log into your Surveys 360 account with the same credentials used for your AdWords account. When you select “remarketing audience” for survey targeting, your AdWords remarketing lists will be automatically pulled into Surveys 360 and ready for use. Learn more.

All together now

These new integrations are one more way for Optimize and Surveys 360 users to make the most of their AdWords investments. We hope you’ll find them a fast and simple way to understand what works for your customers and give them more of what they want.

Source: Official Google Webmasters Blog

Facebook Marketing | Social Media Marketing | Web Marketing

Is Facebook advertising the best way to boost your business?

March 9, 2017 by
Is Facebook advertising the best way to boost your business?

The world of advertising is transforming. In a society saturated by information, it’s harder than ever to grab the attention of potential customers. So, just how do you get people to take notice of your business? Try reaching them through social media. Facebook has nearly 1.8 billion monthly active users, so advertising on its platform could be the answer. Learn more about how Facebook advertising works and find out how Search Engine Pros can help you harness its power to boost your business.

Why use Facebook advertising?

Facebook advertising tips and ideas

Here are the key reasons why Facebook advertising wins over traditional ad formats like print, billboard, radio, TV and even Google Adsense:

  • Facebook ads are far cheaper in terms of cost to reach 1,000 people. For example, Buffer app found that spending just $5 per day on Facebook adverts bought them 9 likes, 1 click to their homepage and 787 new views. Moz claims that spending $1 per day on Facebook gets your brand in front of 4,000 people.
  • Facebook ads run on pay-per-click or pay-per-day impressions, similar to Adsense. That means that you’re in control of your budget and can set daily caps or limits on the total campaign.
  • Facebook ads are highly visible because they’re placed directly in users’ news streams.
  • You can target specific audiences with Facebook ads based on a number of factors including interests, age, behaviour, connections, languages, gender, location, religion, politics, marital status and occupation.
  • Facebook allows you to find existing customers using contact lists, web traffic from your site or activity in your app. This allows you to remarket to an audience who has already visited your site and has some interest in your business.
  • Once you have a converting audience you can use the Lookalike Audience feature to reach new people who have similar profiles.
  • You can test and track the success of your advertising campaigns in real time with Facebook Analytics and adjust them using the Adverts Manager tool.

Exactly how does Facebook advertising work?

Facebook advertising tips and ideas

Facebook has made over $6.4 billion in advertising revenue in the second quarter of 2016 alone. The social network has become a key leader in the ad field by creating the most sophisticated consumer profiling ever.  Here’s how it works:

  • When you’re logged into Facebook, it tracks everything you do on the internet. This allows it to build a profile of your lifestyle including what brands you like, your hobbies and interests, favorite foods, music, films and so much more.  
  • Facebook knows where you live and uses your electronic device and location settings to figure out key information about you.
  • The company also uses consumer data that has been sourced by credit companies and research firms like Experian to build a fuller idea of your lifestyle habits.

This might sound pretty scary for consumers, but it’s a dream for advertisers who can use this information to target very specific audiences. Plus, if they wish, Facebook users can adjust their privacy settings using the Ad Preference Tool to avoid being tracked.

What makes Facebook advertising even better is that it has 10 different ad methods which cater to different business aims:

  1. Boost your posts to a wider audience.
  2. Promote your page to get more likes.
  3. Send people to your website.
  4. Increase conversions on your website.
  5. Get people to install your app.
  6. Increase engagement in your app.
  7. Reach people who live near your business.
  8. Get people to attend an event.
  9. Get people to claim an offer, such as a discount on next purchase or enter a sweepstake.
  10. Generate video views.

How can we help you with Facebook advertising?

Facebook advertising tips and ideas

Whether you want to drive sales or increase brand awareness, with a little bit of time, money and testing, Facebook ads can provide a real boost for your business. If you need assistance setting things up, Search Engine Pros can help in the following ways:

  • We can work with you to assess your advertising needs.
  • Set up your Facebook advertising account
  • Test various adverts and analyze what works best.
  • Set up a regular advertising budget and schedule your Facebook ads.

Contact us to get started with your Facebook advertising campaign.

Ecommerce Marketing | Google Marketing

A Fast Start To 2017 For Click-To-Call Ads

March 8, 2017 by

Living in a mobile-first world has made it easier than ever to pick up the phone and talk to a business directly. That’s why we’ve continued investing in call innovations based on the great feedback we’ve heard from you. From call-only ads for marketers who prioritize calls to imported call conversions that allow you to upload your own call conversion data directly into AdWords, we’ve strived to drive more high-quality calls to your business in three main ways:

  1. Simplified workflows so you can set up click-to-call ads faster
  2. Better ad experiences that make it easier for people to call you
  3. Detailed call reporting that shows which parts of your campaigns drive the most valuable calls 

We have new updates coming soon across these areas to help you improve your calls performance.

Get your call extensions up and running more quickly

Account-level call extensions will begin rolling out this week to help you set up call extensions at scale. You can implement them once across your entire account rather than adding them multiple times to individual campaigns and ad groups.
In the coming months, we’re also rolling out automated call extensions to more advertisers globally to help you set up call extensions more quickly. AdWords will identify landing pages that already feature a prominent phone number, and automatically set up a call extension and call reporting for this phone number to help you drive more calls to your business

New year, new look for click-to-call ads

In addition to making call extensions quicker to set up, we’re improving the ad experience to help consumers call you more easily. For example, we started testing business names in the headlines of call-only ads last year to help advertisers maximize high-quality calls from people who intend to call them.

“Introducing business names to call-only ads has improved the quality of calls we drive from Google Search for clients across our agency. We’ve been able to showcase their brands more clearly and increase user trust, which has led to significantly higher clickthrough and call conversion rates.”
–Kevin Quinlan, President of wommster.com

We’re now rolling this change out globally and will continue experimenting with other new features in click-to-call ads, including testing caller satisfaction ratings to show consumers which businesses are delivering a great user experience over the phone.

New reporting for keyword and ad-level call details

Measuring performance from your click-to-call ads is essential for making informed decisions about your spend and optimizations. AdWords call reporting is easy to set up and available in 23 countries around the world at no additional cost to show you useful insights and conversions from the calls you’re receiving. We’ll soon be adding new call details to your keyword and ad copy reports. Additional columns for “Phone impressions” and “Phone calls” will give you a more complete view of call performance and help you see where there are opportunities to improve. For example, consider using call-only ads on keywords with the highest phone-through rates, or decreasing wait times when you have customers on the phone to improve call conversion rates.
We hope these new updates to click-to-call setup, ad experiences and reporting will help you ring in 2017 with great calls performance. To learn more, visit the Help Center and read our best practices for driving phone calls to your business and optimizing the caller experience.

Source: Official Google Webmasters Blog