Ecommerce Marketing | Google Marketing

Google Manufacturer Center Rolls Out International Expansion, API Updates, And New Content Discovery Opportunities To Help You Better Showcase Your Brand Online

29 November 2017 by

With the launch of self-sign up earlier this year, thousands of top brands and manufacturers have already begun using Google Manufacturer Center to enhance their product’s images, descriptions, and variants in Shopping ads. Today, we’re excited to announce new ways to help brands — both in the US and abroad — manage their data more easily and provide a more consistent brand experience on Google and across the web.

Manufacturer Center expands to more countries

To help brands abroad, we’ve expanded availability for Manufacturer Center to the United Kingdom, Australia, Germany, France, Brazil, and the Netherlands. Now, brands with products sold in these markets can use Manufacturer Center to best represent their products to shoppers, access unique analytics and insights, and improve the performance of Shopping ads featuring their products.

Increase opportunities to highlight your products’ best features and benefits

Shoppers are constantly looking for information, trying to ensure the product they ultimately choose is the perfect fit for their needs. Information from Manufacturer Center now appears in Google Knowledge Panels in the US, highlighting core product features to shoppers at key decision-making stages. With descriptions, images, features, and more directly supplied by you, the manufacturer, shoppers will be better informed and feel more confident choosing your branded products.

Manage product information programmatically with the Manufacturer Center API

We know that manually uploading, editing, deleting, and distributing product data can make it difficult to keep up with a brand’s ever-changing product assortment, and using feeds may not offer the desired level of control. With the launch of the Manufacturer Center API, brands (or their 3rd party data partners) can streamline product data updates in the following ways:

  • Add new products directly to Manufacturer Center.
  • Update existing products in Manufacturer Center with the most current product data.
  • Delete products from an existing Manufacturer Center account.
  • Monitor data quality and review product data errors to optimize a brand’s presence on Google.
  • Surface Google’s product data feedback in external data management tools.
  • Streamline product data updates and syndication to Google by creating custom workflows compliant with data management policies and procedures.

To get started with the Manufacturer Center API, check out the Developer’s Guide and Portal article here.

Source: Official Google Webmasters Blog

Ecommerce Marketing | Google Marketing

New AdWords Innovations To Drive Better Results For Your Business

16 November 2017 by

Consumers are more curious, more demanding, and more impatient than ever—and even more so during the busy holiday season. AdWords has been redesigned to help you reach these mobile-first consumers in faster and easier ways. Today, we’re introducing more innovations available only in the new experience. From promoting your latest offers to finding ways to grow your business, these products can help you save time and boost performance. Learn how some advertisers are seeing an increase in conversion rate and return on ad spend when applying these innovations to their campaigns.

Highlight your top deals with promotion extensions

People are always looking for deals, whether it’s for a discount on holiday gifts or a cheaper flight. In fact, 7 out of 10 internet users look for sales or discounts before visiting a store.1 To help attract these deal-seeking customers with your latest offers, we’re introducing promotion extensions.

Show your latest offers with promotion extensions

 
Promotion extensions make it easy for you to keep your promotions up to date without the need to create new ads. They also free up the rest of your ad for more unique content, like your brand terms or a clear call to action.

For example, if you’re a shoe store, you might use promotion extensions to show a “30% off” promo code on all Black Friday orders. You can also make these types of seasonal offers more prominent in your ad by selecting one of 12 occasions, like Black Friday or Back-to-school.

Brands like Torrid and Shoe Carnival have already seen great results after using promotion extensions:

“Promotion extensions effectively communicate our promotions without sacrificing our core message of quality and fit, giving us a conversion rate lift of 30%.” – David Chau, Senior Digital Marketing Analyst at Torrid Brands

“Promotion extensions give customers even more reason to come to our site and buy–all while raising our ROAS by 20%. This extension should be in every ecommerce advertiser’s toolbox.” – Michael Nuss, Director of Digital Marketing at Shoe Carnival

Test drive new ideas with ad variations

Sometimes small changes to your ad text—like adding a touch of holiday spirit or using a different call to action—can dramatically affect performance. That’s why today, we’re rolling out ad variations in the new AdWords experience: a fast and easy way to test changes across your text ads at scale.

For example, you may want to see how “Happy Holidays” performs when used in your text ads. With ad variations, you can test this change across thousands of ads in just a few clicks. In fact, some advertisers have set up variations for more than 1 million ads in less than a minute.2

You’ll then get the test results as soon as they’re statistically significant. If you see that an ad variation is doing well, you can quickly replace all of your original ads with the new variation.

Businesses like Merkle and Agoda are already using ad variations to test, measure, and apply variations that drive better results for their business in less time.

Performance marketing agency Merkle helped their client, a leading online educator, achieve a 13% increase in clicks and a 14% increase in conversions when their ad variations test revealed that expanding their text ads and implementing optimized ad rotations would improve their performance.

“With ad variations, we’re able to test ad copy changes across our entire account in just a few minutes, which previously took hours of manual work. This means we get to quickly test ad copy and make improvements that result in better ad performance.” – Robert Tayon, Head of PPC at Agoda

Reach the right shoppers with custom intent audiences

Right now, people may be actively shopping for gifts that only you can deliver. To help you reach these I-want-to-buy shoppers, we’re rolling out custom intent audiences for the Google Display Network. Custom intent audiences make it easy for you to reach people who want to buy the specific products you offer–based on data from your campaigns, website and YouTube channel.

For example, if you’re a travel agency offering holiday getaways, Google could automatically create an audience of people shopping for “all-inclusive ski resorts” or “flights to Palm Springs.” We’ll then show you reach and performance estimates for each audience, so you can plan your campaign with precision.

Find new opportunities to grow your business

Looking for more ways to improve campaign performance this holiday season? The Opportunities page now offers more actionable recommendations, relevant insights, and best practices to help you meet your business goals. With manager account support and the ability to filter by category (like “bids & budgets”), your opportunities are clearly organized so you can apply them across all your accounts and campaigns with just a few clicks.

Customers like Mindshare said the improvements on the Opportunities page were very helpful for their business:

“The Opportunities page in our manager account lets us quickly identify optimization and efficiency improvements, estimate cost, traffic, and performance impact across multiple markets, and implement them in one click.” – Amy Perkins, Paid Search Account Director, Mindshare

Get started

Log in to the new AdWords experience to start using these innovations and deliver better results for your business.

Source: Official Google Webmasters Blog

Ecommerce Marketing | Google Marketing | Youtube Marketing

Bring More Foot Traffic To Your Business With YouTube And Display Ads

10 October 2017 by

This year, around 90% of global sales will happen in a physical store.1 To bring more shoppers through the door, businesses need tools to efficiently reach nearby consumers and measure their campaign performance across channels. That’s why we introduced store visits measurement back in 2014. Since then, businesses around the world have measured over 7 billion store visits in AdWords.

Unlock offline results with YouTube

As we shared at Shoptalk Europe today, location extensions and store visits measurement are now available on YouTube. With YouTube’s first-ever ad extensions for TrueView in-stream and bumper ads, you can influence viewers to engage with your brand offline and drive more visits and in-store purchases. People watching your videos will see your address, directions, and business hours—right in the ad. You can then use store visits measurement to see how your video campaigns drive foot traffic and measure their performance against other online and traditional marketing channels, like television, print, and radio ads.

Says Darrin Kellaris, Executive Director, Marketing at IHOP, “Video has been an integral part of our digital strategy to optimize guest interactions online with relevant and distinctive content. We were happy to partner with Google to find new ways to measure the full value of our video campaigns. Through Google’s store visits solution, we gained useful consumer insights that helped us drive visits from YouTube for less than $1 per guest. Insights like this have given us an innovative way to measure business impact beyond standard brand metrics and to understand how video helps drive lower-funnel actions. This is something we’d like to see become more prevalent across all media partners.”

Jerome’s Furniture has included store visits in their Search measurement and optimization since 2015. It is now using location extensions and store visits for YouTube to drive more customers into stores and understand offline performance across channels. YouTube has proven to send qualified visits to our stores at a very efficient cost. The visibility into YouTube’s impact on store visits has opened our eyes and our investment in YouTube advertising has risen, dramaticallyScott Perry
Senior Vice President of Digital Marketing

Elgiganten, a Swedish electronics retailer, turned to video to help drive its omnichannel marketing strategy. After the first half of 2017, the company found that its video campaigns brought 6-10% of users who viewed its ad on YouTube to its stores. Overall, the brand has seen an 8.8% increase in its sales, and learned that its mobile search traffic delivers a 21% higher return on ad spend on mobile phones versus desktop. We can see which products are more likely to drive people to the store rather than buying online, and how people who are close to a retail location and using a mobile device are more likely to visit the storeNiko Niva
Digital Specialist at Elgiganten

Engage local consumers on sites and apps across the GDN

Earlier this year, we fully rolled out location extensions and store visits measurement to campaigns on the Google Display Network (GDN). Now, you can reach more nearby customers when they’re ready to buy and get a better understanding of your offline performance across channels. Advertisers large and small across industries have seen success using display ads to drive customers to their physical businesses—even those who usually depend on traditional offline campaigns, like catalog and circular ads.

Lawson, a convenience store chain with nearly 15,000 stores globally, was the first advertiser in Japan to use store visits to measure the full value of its display ads. Historically, the company focused most of its advertising on offline campaigns. After testing store visits for Display, the brand learned that mobile ads were more effective and cost-efficient at driving foot traffic to their stores, saving them 45% more in costs per visit compared to desktop and tablet ads. Understanding how effective our mobile display ads are and the profiles of the customers visiting our stores after seeing our online ads is a huge step forward for our business. This helps us better cater to customer needs and optimize our marketing

The Home Depot Canada, Canada’s leading home improvement retailer, used store visits insights to learn that 18% of people who clicked on its display ads visited a store within 30 days. It also discovered that 50% of these customers made an average in-store purchase of $65 Canadian dollars.This is valuable data, and we look forward to relying on store visits insights like this to help us keep driving our online to offline marketing strategy

In the coming weeks, we’ll also begin introducing more local ad formats powered by location extensions to help people find the products they’re interested in at nearby businesses. To start, we’ll be rolling out affiliate location extensions for display ads, which allow manufacturing brands to show which retail chains sell their products.

If you’re focused on engaging omnichannel customers, you can now use location extensions and store visits measurement across Video, Display, Search, and Shopping to drive more visitors to your business offline.

Source: Official Google Webmasters Blog

Ecommerce Marketing | Google Marketing | Youtube Marketing

Find More Of Your “Star” Customers With Universal App Campaigns

9 October 2017 by

We recently announced that we’ll be moving all AdWords app install campaigns to Universal App Campaigns (UAC). Starting on October 16th, all new app install campaigns created in AdWords will run on UAC. Existing Search, Display, and YouTube app promo campaigns will stop running on November 15th, so it’s important to start upgrading to UAC as soon as possible.

Check out our UAC best practices for more tips on creatives, bidding strategies and conversion tracking options.

How UAC helps you find the customers that matter most

UAC uses Google’s unique machine learning technology to help find your “star” customers based on business goals you define like signing up for a free trial or even making a purchase — across Google’s largest properties like Google Search, Google Play, YouTube and the millions of sites and apps in the Display Network.

Advertisers across the world and in different industries have found more of their best customers with UAC. Here are some of their stories.

STARZ is the second-largest premium content provider in the U.S. that features movies and original TV series. Alison Hoffman, Chief Marketing Officer, says “A new slate of STARZ customers now use our mobile app to watch their favorite shows and movies. STARZ partnered with Google to support the new seasons of our hit series Power and Outlander. (We) used Universal App Campaigns to drive potential fans to sign up for the STARZ mobile app … Universal App Campaigns helped STARZ nearly double the number of fans found through Google.”

Viber is a free messaging and calling app owned by Japanese online retailer Rakuten Inc. Viber’s growth team used UAC for Actions to acquire users with a 21% higher retention rate. “Using Universal App Campaigns with action optimization helped us acquire more high-quality users with better budget utilization. It allowed us to directly optimize our campaign for our business goal, which is to acquire loyal users,” says Moshi Blum, Head of User Acquisition.

Looking for more balance and mindfulness? Then the personalized meditation training and guidance in the Headspace app may be for you. Universal App Campaigns makes it easier for Headspace to improve the health and happiness of the world. According to Head of Growth, Robert Lamvik, “Headspace has a small, yet ambitious team, so we partnered with Google and use UAC to create more scalable campaign activity that brings us higher quality users. What’s great is that UAC finds people likely to take the actions we care about — like starting a meditation session or subscribing.”

Looking for more balance and mindfulness? Then the personalized meditation training and guidance in the Headspace app may be for you. Universal App Campaigns make it easier for Headspace to improve the health and happiness of the world. According to Head of Growth, Robert Lamvik, “Headspace has a small, yet ambitious team, so we partnered with Google and use UAC to create more scalable campaign activity that brings us higher quality users. What’s great is that UAC finds people likely to take the actions we care about — like starting a meditation session or subscribing.”

Source: Official Google Webmasters Blog

Google Marketing

Universal App Campaigns: Optimize For The Right In-App Action

26 September 2017 by

As you may have heard, we’ll be moving all AdWords app install campaigns to Universal App Campaigns (UAC) later this year.

With UAC, you can reach the right people across all of Google’s largest properties like Google Search, Google Play, YouTube and the Google Display Network — all from one campaign. Marketers who are already using UAC to optimize for in-app actions are seeing 140% more conversions per dollar than other Google app promotion products.1

Over the last few weeks, we’ve discussed how to steer performance for UAC using goals and your creative assets. In today’s post, we’ll talk about another very important topic when it comes to UAC — optimizing for the right in-app action.

This is important if you want to find app users who will do something specific after they’ve installed your app — whether that’s adding something to a wishlist for your shopping app, entering their frequent flier info to your traveler app or joining a group in your game.

First things first: take a look at what’s happening inside your app.

Track and send AdWords your in-app events

You wouldn’t stop measuring at the landing page of a website, so why would you stop at the install for a mobile app?

Each post-install event that you track and pass back to AdWords is a chance to learn more about how users engage with your app. The more we learn about your best app users, the easier it is to find more people like them. If you’re not sure what to track, look at this list of events by app category. Pick the one that’s most like your app and use it as a guide.


Let’s go back to our mobile game example: Before you start advertising your new mobile game, you pay a visit to the part of your office where the developer team sits. You kindly ask them to implement all the in-app events that apply to a gaming app — and you take some to discuss whether there are any other in-app events that are specific to your game.

Understand how users interact with your app

Once you’ve built up a user base, follow your users along their journey beyond the install. Create what’s called a “user funnel.” What are the key steps people take that lead to a purchase?


Example: You happen to sit next to your analytics team so you swivel your chair around to see if they have a moment to chat. You’d like to get their thoughts on a user to funnel you’ve created for your game: installs, opens, completes the tutorial, reaches level 5, joins group, reaches level 10, and then finally — makes a purchase. You and the team agree that this stuff is important to track so you schedule a regular meeting to analyze your game’s user funnel. Constant review of the metrics with your analytics team will help determine if your ads are bringing in the right users.

Pick the right in-app action for your campaign

Now comes an important question: what do you want new app users to do in your app? The answer will help determine the in-app action(s) you’ll pick as the optimization goal for UAC.


Example: During a one-on-one with your boss, you learn that driving in-app purchases is a priority for the business right now. You’re worried because you don’t see many in-app purchases happening per day (at least not yet), and you remember that UAC needs to optimize for an in-app action that happens at least 10 times a day.  You need to pick another in-app action that’s more common. You remember that your analytics team pointed out that users who join a group are very prone to making an in-app purchase 30 days later. And your data shows that this in-app action happens about 40 times a day so you set “Join a group” as the in-app action to optimize for.

Improve the user experience

What else can you do with the information you’ve collected? Review your user funnel. Identify where people are having trouble and see if you can help them out.


Example:During one of your meetings with the analytics team, you spot a big drop off at the tutorial section of the app. After your meeting, you rush downstairs to where your UX team sits. You work with the team to brainstorm a different way to teach beginners how to play your game. You want to see if this can improve how people get onboarded. If you’re successful, not only will you get better conversion rates for your ads — but you’ll create a better app experience for everyone! 


Review these principles for more ideas on how to improve user experiences and conversions for your mobile app.

And don’t forget to check out our best practices guide to learn more about how to get the most from your Universal App Campaigns.

Source: Official Google Webmasters Blog

Ecommerce Marketing | Google Marketing | Youtube Marketing

Know Their Intention, Get Their Attention: New Ways To Connect And Measure On YouTube

25 September 2017 by

We look at our phones while we watch TV. We watch TV on our phones while we walk to work. We work on our laptops while we cast a video to a set-top box. We spend the majority of our days connected, often via multiple devices—so much so that reach has become a commodity in advertising. And while reach is plentiful, attention is scarce.

Unless we’re talking about online video. Our latest research with Ipsos suggests people are 3x more likely to pay attention to online video ads vs. television ads.1 And within online video, people pay nearly 2x more attention to video ads on YouTube than they do on other social media.2 That’s because on YouTube, ads are more likely to be seen and people are more likely to arrive with intent to watch video—2X more likely than other online platforms.3 Today we’re sharing four new tools to help you capture the attention of your audience on YouTube:

1) Helping brands reach the right audiences

Intention is what has made search advertising so effective—the ability to quickly connect people looking for something they want or need, with a business that offers just that. Since January we’ve seen that what’s worked great for search works great for video as well. We found that campaigns that use intent-based audiences on mobile have 20 percent higher ad recall lift and 50 percent higher brand awareness lift relative to campaigns that only use demographic audiences.4

In order to help you deliver more relevant, useful ads on YouTube, we’re expanding the ways you can use Google’s broad ecosystem using Custom Affinity Audiences to reach people based on the kind of searches they do, or the kind of places and apps they like. That means an outdoor outfitter could use Custom Affinity audiences to potentially reach people who have searched for skis, spent time at ski resorts, or have downloaded a ski resort’s trail guide app.

2) Enabling custom creative at scale

Custom audiences are most valuable when paired with creative that is relevant to them. But personalization at scale can be difficult—new video creative is pricey and takes time to make.

We’re launching Director Mix to simplify the process of creating different versions of the same creative tailored for each audience—you give us the building blocks of your video ad, like different voiceovers, background and copy, and our system will create thousands of versions to match your various audience segments.

Campbell’s Soup used Director Mix to create videos with clever copy based on the content people were about to watch. For instance if you clicked to watch clips from Orange is the New Black, you’d see a bumper asking “does your cooking make prison food seem good? We’ve got a soup for that.” And it worked: Campbell’s earned a 55 percent lift in sales and a 24 percent lift in ad recall with this campaign.

3) Telling a story that breaks free of a single unit

Similarly, we’re introducing Video Ad Sequencing to help you architect an ad experience that unfolds over time. This new feature in AdWords Labs lets you string together ad creative. You can pivot, you can react—and you can take consumers down a different path depending on which ads are working for them.

For instance, you could start with a fifteen-second TrueView ad to build awareness, continue with another, longer spot that communicates product attributes, then follow with a six-second bumper ad to keep top-of-mind and drive to purchase.

To drum up excitement for their new Assassin’s Creed game, Ubisoft cut four sequential six-second bumper ads, each with a critical element of their longer trailer. The brand used Affinity Audiences and Video Ad Sequencing to serve the ads to core E3 audiences. The campaign reached almost 15 million unique viewers and resulted in best-in-class lifts in awareness (+25 percent), search lift for “Assassin’s Creed” (+224 percent) and search lift for the Assassin’s Creed trailer (+375 percent).

4) Measuring the impact—New ways to measure sales lift

And finally, you need a way to measure that you earned attention—and one way to do that is to look at its effect on offline sales.

We’re rolling out a new, global approach to measuring sales lift with Nielsen MPA (Matched Panel Analysis). This geo-based solution offers a fast, media-agnostic way to determine which online ads drive offline sales. With this implementation of Nielsen MPA, CPG clients can measure video alongside other Google media.

From looking at the Nielsen MPA studies we’ve run to-date, we found that YouTube drove sales lift for the advertised product in 14 of 19 studies globally.5

We’ve also expanded our Oracle Datalogix ROI offering in the U.S. to include six-second bumper ads so that brands can more comprehensively measure their YouTube campaigns. And we’ll continue working to deliver more solutions to complement our Nielsen MPA, Oracle DLX ROI, MMM and store visit offerings today, so you’ll have the measurement that works best for your business.

At YouTube, our aim is to show ads that are relevant and useful, so that instead of interrupting people’s viewing experiences, you’re enhancing them. This means matching what advertisers have to offer with what people are interested in—leading to a better YouTube experience backed up by comprehensive user controls. We hope you try out these new features as they become available, and hope to see you at Advertising Week.

Source: Official Google Webmasters Blog

Ecommerce Marketing | Google Marketing

New Reporting To Show How Often Your Shopping Ad Is In The Top Spot

31 August 2017 by

The holiday season is right around the corner – are your Shopping campaigns prepared to maximize increased shopping traffic? To help you get a head start identifying product data gaps and measuring your competitiveness in Shopping campaigns, we’re rolling out product status reporting and absolute top impression share.

Recover potentially lost Shopping traffic

If your Shopping campaign includes products not eligible to serve, that means disapprovals could be affecting the number of shopping results you show up on. See how many of your products are ready to serve by adding product status reporting to reporting charts in the ‘product’ and ‘product groups’ page. For example, a dip in ‘products ready to serve’ means your products are no longer eligible to participate in the auction.

A new diagnostics report in the products page helps identify your aggregate product status, like products ‘ready to serve’ or ‘disapproved.’ Add performance columns like Clicks and Conversions to the report to prioritize where product updates can make the biggest impact on lost traffic. Click on each product status to see more details on how to fix the issues immediately. Alternatively, you can also view a full list of affected products directly in AdWords from the report. Develop a routine cadence to go through your Shopping campaigns and identify the top-performing products not eligible for auction as product details frequently change, especially with the peak holiday season coming up.

New metric shows how often your Shopping ad is in the top spot

Now that your products are eligible to serve, it’s time get them in front of shoppers. The left-most ad on mobile Shopping results get up to 3X more engagement from shoppers1; impressions in this position are called “absolute top” impressions. To see the percentage of time you’re showing in this top position, use absolute top impression share (Search abs. top IS column in AdWords).

Absolute top impression share is the number of “absolute top” impressions you received in Shopping results over the total times you could’ve been in the top impression.

For instance, if you showed up as the “absolute top” in 8 search results but were eligible for 20 results, then your absolute top impression share would be 40%. If you have a high absolute top impression share, it means your products often appear at the top position in Google Shopping results. “Absolute top” impressions include ads from the Shopping carousel on Google search results are available for both Shopping ads and Local Inventory Ads.

You can use this metric to optimize seasonal campaigns and get in front of more shoppers. Let’s say you sell kitchenware and plan to have a holiday sale on pots and pans. Separate out the sale products into their own product group. Monitor it for two days and adjust bids upwards if you need to make your ads more prominent. Also review absolute top impression share by device at the ad group level. You can optimize an underperforming device audience by increasing the bid modifier. Ad quality is the other factor in growing your absolute top impression share; include high quality images, relevant product titles, and the correct GTINs across your inventory to improve the quality.
To monitor your impact in key categories, you also can combine absolute top impression share with other competitive metrics such as click share. By increasing both metrics, you’re claiming more of shoppers’ attention.

The diagnostics report and absolute top impression share are available starting today in the new Adwords experience2.

Source: Official Google Webmasters Blog

Ecommerce Marketing | Google Marketing

Introducing A Better, Simpler Ad Rotation

29 August 2017 by

The right ad rotation can help you show your best ads to people looking for what you have to offer. However, it’s not always clear which rotation makes the most sense for your business. That’s why, starting in late September, we’re simplifying ad rotation to two settings: “optimize” and “rotate indefinitely.”

Optimize for your best ads

Powered by Google’s machine learning technology, the new “optimize” setting prioritizes ads that are expected to perform better than other ads within an ad group. This setting will optimize your ads for clicks in each individual auction using signals like keyword, search term, device, location and more.

Keep in mind that using an optimized ad rotation with three or more ads per ad group can increase both clicks and impressions. The more of your ads our system can choose from, the better the expected ad performance.

If you’d like to prioritize conversions, the best way is to use Smart Bidding. Smart Bidding helps you tailor your bids based on the likelihood of a conversion, and will choose the ad most likely to drive that conversion. Note that if you’re using Smart Bidding, AdWords will automatically use the “optimize” ad rotation.

Simplifying even rotation

While an optimized ad rotation works best for most advertisers, we know that some of you prefer more control with an even rotation. Because the “rotate indefinitely” setting is already the easiest way to give your ads equal preference, it will be the sole option for an even rotation going forward.

And to give you even more control, ad rotation settings will be available at the ad group level–meaning that you can use multiple rotation settings across a single campaign. Learn more about ad rotation in the AdWords Help Center, and read our best practices guide to find out which rotation setting is right for you. 

Source: Official Google Webmasters Blog

Ecommerce Marketing | Google Marketing

Ramp Up Your Calls With Call Bid Adjustments

26 July 2017 by

Click-to-call ads were introduced seven years ago to help you connect with more customers over the phone. Since then, we’ve heard one thing loud and clear: you want to drive even more calls. And it’s no surprise—on average, calls convert three times better than web clicks.1

To help you generate more calls, we’re rolling out new call bid adjustments, which allow you to control how often the call option appears with your search ads. Use call bid adjustments to increase bids on campaigns that drive valuable phone calls. For example, if you’re a travel advertiser, you may see higher order values from calls because it can be easier to cross-sell rental cars, group tours, and other vacation add-ons during a live conversation. Raise your call bid adjustments to show call extensions more frequently and drive more of these high-value call conversions.

“Calls are an important source of new customer leads for us. Call bid adjustments help us improve our click-to-call visibility and ensure we’re appearing in the top 1-2 positions on mobile. Our on-the-go customers convert quickly within a short window of time, so it’s critical to be front and center, and show them that we offer storage units at the right price and location. Since implementing call bid adjustments and bidding higher for calls, we’ve seen a 37% increase in call volume with a 22% decrease in average cost-per-call.”
– Stephanie Christensen, Paid Acquisition Analyst

“Our customers want to speak to a real person to make sure they’re choosing the right medical alert system for themselves or a loved one. When we can walk them through our offerings live and give them that peace of mind, they have a 30% likelihood of converting, which is nearly 2x higher than with web leads. Someone connecting with us from a call extension is more valuable than a website click, so call bid adjustments to allow us to optimize for that greater value. We’ve worked with our agency, Metric Theory, to increase bids specifically for calls and improve how often the call extension shows. As a result, we’ve generated 20% higher call volume while decreasing the cost by 60%.” 
– Matt Guerrieri, Director of Marketing

“Call bid adjustments have helped us meet a key marketing objective by delivering a strong uplift in performance year over year, with a 79% increase in click to call rate. It has also enabled us to target our audience to generate higher value insurance policies. The flexibility of the service allows us to make the call option more prominent, thereby driving a greater number of relevant calls. Calls deliver a significant proportion of our monthly leads and we are currently working to push call bid adjustments even harder.”

– Anthony Gamble, Head of Digital Marketing (Acquisition)

Call bid adjustments are available exclusively in the new AdWords experience, which will roll out to all advertisers by the end of the year.2 To learn more about AdWords calls solutions, visit our Help Center. You can also check out best practices for maximizing call performance and improving the caller experience. 

Source: Official Google Webmasters Blog

Ecommerce Marketing | Google Marketing

AdWords Editor 12 Offers A Fresh Look And New Features To Help Simplify Your Workflow

29 June 2017 by

A new version of AdWords Editor, with a refreshed design, is now available for all advertisers globally. You’ll find it even easier to manage your campaigns at scale with custom rules, faster account downloads, and more.

Custom rules help you build high-performing campaigns

With AdWords Editor 12, you can now use custom rules to check for changes that don’t align with your best practices. For example, our best practices suggest showing search ads with four or more site links. When you use this rule, AdWords Editor will let you know which campaigns or ad groups don’t meet this best practice before you post changes. You can get started by using our recommended rules or create custom rules based on your own best practices.

Faster account downloads for new AdWords Editor versions

To reduce the time you spend waiting for your accounts to download after you update AdWords Editor, we’ll now transfer more of your data from previous versions.

A new look and feel

You’ll also see a new design that better aligns with Google’s commitment to material design. While the changes will be subtle and won’t affect how you manage your accounts, you’ll now have a more cohesive visual experience across AdWords Editor, the new AdWords experience, and other Google products.

and more …

The new version of AdWords Editor also supports bidding to maximize conversions, uploading up to 20 images and videos for Universal App Campaigns, and using the new customization fields for responsive ads. You can learn more about all Version 12 updates in the AdWords Editor Help Center, or download AdWords Editor 12 here. 

Source: Official Google Webmasters Blog

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