Ecommerce Marketing | Google Marketing

Reminder: Transition To Expanded Text Ads Before January 31, 2017

January 17, 2017 by

This is a friendly reminder that starting on January 31, you’ll only be able to create and edit text ads using the expanded text ads format. You’ll no longer be able to create standard text ads. While this will be the last date to create them, existing standard text ads will continue to serve. Expanded text ads can deliver great results, particularly with a commitment to testing new creatives.

As one of the top places people go online to search for apartments, Apartments.com knows the importance of having a strong digital presence. Wanting to provide renters with even more information about its listings, Apartments.com added expanded text ads to its Search campaigns. Apartments.com’s results were strong across its campaigns. It saw 15% and 10% increases in CTRs for expanded text ads on mobile and desktop, respectively.
While making similar improvements to your ads, keep these best practices in mind:

  • Implement multiple versions of your ads. Aim for at least 3-5 per ad group.
  • Leave your standard text ads running.  You can’t create new ones, but the old ones can still serve. Don’t delete them until they stop receiving impressions on their own or the message is no longer accurate.
  • Plan to optimize your ad rotation for clicks or conversions. These options give preference to ads that are likely to perform better.
  • Focus your testing on headlines. They’re the most important part of your ads.
  • Consider shorter headlines on things like brand terms where someone might not need more info.
  • Iterate new ads based on previously successful creative. Learn from what already works.
  • Add terms from user queries and your keywords in your longer headlines whenever appropriate.

Along with those best practices, remember that after January 31 you can pause and resume standard text ads, but it’s best to create new expanded text ads.
As you prepare for expanded text ads to become the only way to create new text ads, check out our best practices guide for creating effective ads or our previously-hosted Hangout-on-Air for more advice. Take advantage of AdWords Editor, the AdWords API, or the ETA Transition Helper to make these changes across your entire account.

Source: Official Google Webmasters Blog

Ecommerce Marketing | Google Marketing | Youtube Marketing

Video Campaign Management Gets Easier With AdWords Scripts

December 13, 2016 by

If you were wishing for an easier way to manage your video ad campaigns in AdWords this holiday season, the AdWords product team has the perfect gift picked out. Today we’re announcing AdWords scripts support for TrueView and six-second bumper ads.

This means for the first time ever, you’ll be able to programmatically create and manage video ad groups, targeting and other campaign features alongside your Search, Display and Shopping campaigns. The new script support is available for standard YouTube ad campaign types like TrueView in-stream, TrueView discovery and bumper ads – and we’re hoping to eventually expand functionality to additional campaign types like shopping.

Making this tool available for video means multi-step campaign management tasks will be much easier – like scheduling regular reporting, creating new campaigns en masse and even automating adjustments to campaigns based on real-time factors, like the weather.

Source: Official Google Webmasters Blog

Ecommerce Marketing | Google Marketing

Save Time By Applying Audience Lists At The Campaign Level

December 8, 2016 by

Reaching your most valuable and engaged customers at the moment they’re ready to act is critical in moving them along the path to purchase. Remarketing lists for search ads (RLSA) and Customer Match can help you do that by customizing your campaigns for people who’ve previously interacted with your business. However, getting started can be time-consuming, especially if you have a lot of ad groups. To make it easier for you to manage your audience lists at scale, you can now apply them at the campaign level. 

Campaign-level audience lists also make it easy to measure and change your bid adjustments. Instead of trying to change your bid adjustments for each individual ad group, you can confidently optimize at the campaign level where you’re more likely to have enough data to make an informed decision. Learn more audience bid adjustment best practices here.

Many advertisers are already using campaign-level search audiences to save time and make better optimizations:

“Campaign-level audiences have proven to be a great way to apply our remarketing lists at scale. Our campaigns often contain so many ad groups – using RLSA in the past required hours spent applying audiences to each one and analyzing the results by ad group. By applying them at the campaign level, we can be confident that no ad group is overlooked, while saving us time that can be better spent on helping our customers find their new home.” 

– Debra Carroll, Senior SEM Manager at Redfin 

“Being able to apply all of our audiences at the campaign level has drastically simplified the process of adding lists to multiple campaigns, as most of our campaigns have hundreds of ad groups. This allowed us to apply our bid adjustments in bulk, which has resulted in smarter spending and increased ROAS from our search campaigns.”
– Nathan Eagan, PPC Specialist at Webstaurant

With campaign-level search audiences, you now have more flexibility than ever in how to engage with your customers. Learn more about using campaign-level audiences in the Help Center, and read our best practices guide to learn how you can reach the right audience with a message that resonates. 

Source: Official Google Webmasters Blog

Ecommerce Marketing | Google Marketing

Fine-Tuning The Layout Of Search Ads On Google Play

September 7, 2016 by

Google Play reaches more than a billion people on Android devices in over 190 countries — providing a platform for consumers to find the coolest new apps and enjoy the latest music, movies, and books.

We introduced search ads on Google Play last year to improve app discovery and help developers reach users right when they’re looking for new apps to install. It’s one of several platforms, alongside YouTube, Google.com and the Google Display Network, where developers can introduce your apps to high quality users. Developers all around the world, like GrubHub, have seen tremendous success in terms of reach and install rates with Google’s app promo products. See full story. We’re building on this momentum by fine-tuning the ads experience on Google Play to deliver even more growth for the developer community.

First, for app-specific searches on Google Play, ads in their current form will not be shown at the top of the page. Instead, the organic result for the app will show at the top of the page, followed by additional organic results and possibly ads for other relevant apps. So when a user searches for “Google Express,” she will see the organic result for “Google Express” without an identical “Google Express” ad above it. This change is part of our ongoing commitment to improve user experience and advertiser performance. We encourage developers to monitor your campaigns as there may be some natural changes in performance metrics as we roll out these updates.

Second, a relevant, additional ad will start to show on Google Play for some queries like “music streaming app” and “exercise app.” This new ad spot gives developers an additional opportunity to promote the apps you’ve worked so hard to build.

Innovations like search ads on Google Play have proven to be a useful way to surface new apps for consumers and provide additional value for developers. We look forward to building on this momentum with new tools and best practices to bring even more success to the developer community.

Source: Official Google Webmasters Blog

Ecommerce Marketing | Google Marketing

AdWords Editor 11.5 Supports Expanded Text Ads, Mobile App Engagement Ads, And More

July 27, 2016 by

We’re introducing several updates to AdWords Editor, available today to all advertisers globally. This version includes support for expanded text ads and mobile app engagement ads, import/export and simultaneous posting for multiple accounts, and much more.

Expanded text ads

AdWords Editor 11.5 provides full support for expanded text ads. Expanded text ads offer nearly 50% more ad text for you to highlight your products and services before people even click into your ad. It’s important to take advantage of expanded text ads as soon as possible because, after October 26th, 2016, you’ll no longer be able to create or edit standard text ads. AdWords Editor lets you create and edit expanded text ads at scale so you can easily migrate all of your standard text ads before this date. To help you get started, check out our best practices guide.

Mobile app engagement ads

Mobile app engagement ads are a great choice if you want to help existing app users take action in your app. You can now create and edit mobile app engagement ads in AdWords Editor, making it easier to reach more of the right app users with the right message.

Import, export, and posting for multiple accounts

We’re always looking for new ways to make managing accounts easier and more efficient. With this latest version of AdWords Editor, you can post changes to multiple accounts at the same time, import a CSV file into multiple accounts, and export more than one account into a single CSV file.

Structured snippet extensions

Structured snippets let you highlight features of a specific product or describe the range of products or services your business offers. AdWords Editor now allows you to create and edit structured snippets at scale.

and much more…

AdWords Editor 11.5 also provides support for filtering by type when downloading campaigns, aggressive targeting optimization for mobile app installs campaigns, multi-column sorting, and enhancements to advanced search. You can learn more about these updates in the AdWords Editor Help Center or download AdWords Editor 11.5 here.

Source: Official Google Webmasters Blog

Ecommerce Marketing | Google Marketing

Test With Confidence Using Campaign Drafts And Experiments

February 18, 2016 by

Have you ever wanted to make changes to your AdWords campaigns, but wanted to understand whether those changes will help you reach your business goals? Over the next few weeks, we’re rolling out campaign drafts and experiments to help you test changes to your campaigns, easily measure results, and apply the changes that are working well for your business.

Use drafts to stage your changes

Drafts let you prepare and review multiple changes to an existing campaign before implementing them. For example, let’s say you want to increase mobile bids for ad groups with strong mobile conversion rates. You can create a draft of your campaign and set different mobile bid adjustments for those ad groups — without impacting your campaign. If you’re happy with the changes in your draft, you can apply them directly to your original campaign.

But how do you know if those mobile bid adjustments will help you reach your business goals?

Run an experiment

Experiments let you test changes to your campaigns in a controlled environment. Let’s say you want to see how your new mobile bid adjustments perform compared to your original settings. First, create a draft with your new mobile bid adjustments. Then, create an experiment from that draft to test those changes against your current bidding strategy. You decide how much traffic (and budget) to split between your experiment and the original campaign, and how long you’d like the experiment to run.

Measure your results

An essential part of running a successful experiment is understanding how your changes are impacting your business goals. For example, measuring the uplift in conversions can help you understand whether your new mobile bid adjustments are resulting in a better return on investment.

With campaign drafts and experiments, you can monitor results in two convenient ways to understand whether your experiment is driving the desired outcome:

  • Compare performance with the reporting scorecard. The performance scorecard has icons that highlight whether the experiment’s metrics are higher or lower than the original campaign, and whether or not the differences are statistically significant. 
  • Evaluate ad group level performance for deeper insights. Sometimes individual ad groups are responsible for significant shifts in overall campaign performance. Monitor ad group-level metrics to understand how each ad group is impacting your campaign. 

If you’re happy with the results of your experiment, you can quickly apply the changes from your experiment to your original campaign, or convert your experiment into a brand new campaign.

Testing with success

Customers like Red Ventures and The Honest Company are using campaign drafts and experiments to test and apply new campaign strategies at scale.

“Campaign drafts and experiments have revolutionized testing for our Fortune 500 clients. The tool streamlines the test creation, analysis, and implementation process. We can now launch more powerful tests in a fraction of the time that it took to manually duplicate campaigns and ad groups. The new scorecard allows you to confidently measure the impact of your tests and implement them in a single click if they’re successful.” – Jeremy Mayes, Vice President of Marketing, Red Ventures

“We have multiple conversion types with varying levels of customer lifetime value. Campaign drafts and experiments let us test new bidding strategies with a quarter of our campaign traffic, and the reporting scorecard let us easily measure the impact on the different types of conversion values. In the past, a test like this would require massive changes to the account. The new streamlined process lets us quickly test new bidding strategies until we find the one that best fits our complex business model.” – Josh Franklin, Search Account Manager, The Honest Company

Source: Official Google Webmasters Blog

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