AdWords "Flexible Reach" Brings Multiple Targeting Methods To Ad Groups. AdWords advertisers on Google’s Display Network can now use multiple targeting methods at the ad group level, rather than the campaign level, via a new feature called “Flexible Reach.” The option was first reported by Philly Marketing Labs on its blog, but it is already appearing in accounts and in AdWords Help. With Flexible Reach, which can be enabled now within the campaign settings under Networks, advertisers can, for example, choose to target to a specific placement or placements — so the ads only show there. Alternatively, they can choose to bid differently for these placements, but continue to target a larger set of sites. Flexible Reach can be enabled now, and, once it’s enabled, the option can’t be changed back. All new ad groups under that campaign will have Flexible Reach enabled.
The move will give advertisers more ability to fine-tune campaigns at the ad group level. Related Topics: Channel: SEM | Google: AdWords. Get 280 Characters for your PPC Ads. 5 Ways To Fail Fast Using Paid Search. Let’s face it. Nobody ever learned a valuable lesson from success. Sure, succeeding feels great, and we can often look back at success and credit a number of meaningful contributing factors. I love it, we all do. In fact, our society and culture celebrate success to such a ridiculously high degree that we forget that the real knowledge and wisdom come from failing, not from succeeding. I was reading an article recently that talked about the HP TouchPad. But rather than struggle to gain market share with the device, HP promptly killed it. In fact, the failure led the company back to an increased focus on the imaging business rather than computing hardware.
Think about the recent digital transformations of music and photography and the companies that clung to old business models because that’s what they knew best. So, how do you fail fast? The first thing to do is to learn to embrace failure in its many forms. That means that in a well-performing campaign you’re failing 97-99% of the time. Better Understand Your Ad Traffic, by Google. 10 Foolproof Ways to Earn Your Landing Page Visitors' Trust. Landing pages are a critical tool for meeting your ever-increasing lead generation goals. Actually, only 8% of marketers reported that dedicated landing pages were ineffective, according to MarketingSherpa's 2011 Landing Page Optimization Benchmark Report. I'm not sure what those 8% are doing, but the effectiveness of landing pages for the other 92% of marketers hinges on one component that isn't often discussed -- visitors have to trust you enough to give away their personal information on your landing page forms to obtain your offers.
The thing is, we've all been burned too many times by companies that don't deliver on their offers' promises, sell our personal information, and SPAM us with irrelevant emails. As such, we've all accrued some keen Spidey senses that kick in when we visit landing pages that tell us whether a company is trustworthy, or whether we should cut and run. 1) Ensure your call-to-action (CTA) offer and landing page offer align. 9) Use proper spelling and grammar. AdCenter Revamps Location Targeting To Mimic AdWords. Microsoft adCenter is making changes to its location targeting functionality that will bring it into line with the industry standard Google AdWords. Now, the “market” (distribution channel) will no longer be available as a targeting option. It will be replaced by “language” and “target location” as individual targeting options.
Advertisers will be able to target to people physically located in the target location, or who express (via search query) interest in doing business in the target location area. Location options include all countries that speak the selected language, groups of certain countries, a single country, a single state or territory or a single city. Roll-out of the new location targeting is already in progress in the U.S., U.K. and France, and will be rolled out to all users in a “few months,” according to Microsoft. The new nomenclature and options are designed to make adCenter more user friendly to advertisers accustomed to using the industry standard AdWords interface.
The Paid Search Uncertainty Principle. Werner von Heisenberg courtesy of Wikipedia In 1927, Werner von Heisenberg documented what he referred to as an “Uncertainty Principle” governing quantum mechanics. The Uncertainty Principle holds that an observation cannot precisely reveal both the position of a particle at a point in time and its momentum. The more the observation reveals about one, the less the observer can know about the other. A similar principle governs paid search.
Physics sidebar: feel free to skip! For big things, this is irrelevant. If you want to know where a particle is at an instant in time, you have to “hit” it hard to get the answer quickly, but in doing so you impart a huge and unpredictable change in momentum to what you’re trying to observe. This reads: “The amount of variance tolerated in Advertising Efficiency (“E”) times the amount of variance tolerated in the volume of advertising spend (“V”) is greater than some constant, K.”
Fixing a budget for ad spend translates to the following: How to Use Broad Match Modifier. The broad match modifier is an AdWords targeting feature which provides you more control than broad match as the broad match modifier allows for additional word(s) to be before, between, or after the keyword that has been modified. Broad match modifiers are used by placing a plus (+) symbol directly in front of one or more words in a broad match keyword.
When a user does a search, the + symbol followed by the keyword(s), must appear exactly in the search. Words such as the, of, a, in, for, or, an, etc… does not need a modifier and people usually do not type these words when searching. If you were to add the plus symbol to these words it can limit your traffic. If a user was to type in keyword(s) searches such as misspellings, singular/plural forms, abbreviations and acronyms, and stemmings (like “floor” and “flooring”), the user’s search will be provided with results. As of now the broad match modifier is supported in most Adwords languages. Here is a case study example as follows. Google Clarifies: No, Ads Shouldn't Help Rankings & No, SEO Isn't Bad. “SEO isn’t good for users” and ”It’s a bug that you could rank highly in Google without buying ads, and Google is trying to fix the bug” are two quotes from a Google employee that go directly against things Google’s said before.
The real truth emerging? More like a new Google employee who doesn’t seem to know much about his company. The employee is Jonathan Rockway. Google confirms he’s a new Googler — or Noogler — as new employees are known. He started in early January. SEO Isn’t Good? That didn’t prevent Rockway from making comments about SEO and ads in a discussion on the Hacker News web site. If the social features are relevant, though, then users are getting a better experience. I’ve bolded the key part. Google Says: SEO Isn’t Spam Google’s official stance is that SEO isn’t bad.
Google confirmed to me today that the video above “accurately protrays Google’s position” on SEO, rather than what Rockway said. Ads For Ranking Well? Again, I’ve bolded the key part. Ads Don’t Matter. 8 Things You Should Know Before Building a Mobile App. Seth Porges is a magazine editor and the creator of Cloth, an iOS fashion app for iPhone and iPod Touch. His Twitter handle is @sethporges.
App appeal is obvious. The barrier to entry? So low! The upshot of producing the next Angry Birds or beer-chug simulator? So high! Heck, with just a small investment of time and cash, it’s not hard for would-be mobile moguls to turn a concept into a steady stream of cash. Here’s (almost) everything you need to know before you get started on your own app — and what I wish I knew before I got into the game. 1.
If you’re new to the app game, prepare for some sticker shock. You can try to offload some of your costs by offering your guys equity; on the other hand, everybody tries to get free (or close to free) apps by offering developers equity. This basic supply/demand dynamic also means that many developers ask for some pretty insane terms. And get it all in writing. 2. I would consider starting one's app at or near $1.99. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 8 Quick Ways to Increase Your AdWords CTR. There are times you just want to increase your click-through rates.
You might need to raise it to help Quality Scores, increase traffic, or gain visibility for a new product. Often by just raising click-through rates, you might not be raising your conversion rate. You can even decrease your conversion rates with ads. However, we’re going to focus on raising click-through rates regardless of how it affects other metrics. As always, you should be testing this for yourself to see what helps your overall account’s goals.
Adding An Extension One of the easiest ways to increase click-through rate that also helps conversion rate is to use ad extensions. If you have yet not added extensions, do so now. Add Sitelinks Sitelinks are a type of extension so this could be grouped with adding an extension except there is one big difference between all the other extensions and sitelinks. With the other extensions, only one extension will show with an ad. Extended Headlines Take a look at these three ads: Anonymous Shows How Easy it is to Intercept FBI Conference Calls. "I'm not sure if we're the only two on right now or not," says a voice with an American accent. The voice belongs to a man who identifies himself as Bruce, likely an FBI agent, who had just joined a conference call with other law enforcement officials based in the UK.
The irony of hearing Bruce utter those words at the beginning of the call is that, no, they were not the only people listening in. Somehow, members of Anonymous managed to tap into the call, record it and then post it online for all to hear. The subject of the conversation? Tracking and arresting online activists and hackers, such as those who secretly associate with Anonymous. After some casual small talk, the call's participants share details about progress they've made tracking various known hackers, some of whose real names are bleeped out of the audio.
It appears that whoever gained unauthorized access to the call was able to do so because they were privy to an email invitation containing the call-in details. How To Use The AdWords Search Term View To Optimize Keywords & Negatives. Optimizing Keywords and Negatives is a task I recommend to my clients that they do regularly. In this How To, I will include some real-world experience along with the basics of how to use the AdWords Search Term View to optimize keywords and negatives. What Is Search Terms View? The AdWords Search Terms View shows us the performance metrics on the Search Terms that matched against our Keywords (more detail on the difference between Search Terms and Keywords is coming up later in this post). Advertisers can use this data to optimize the Keywords and Negatives in their account. Optimization in this context usually includes adding Keywords (both new Keywords on an any Match Type and existing Keywords but on a new Match Type), and adding Negatives (again, both new Negatives and existing Negatives on a new Match Type).
The data can also be used to help remove Keywords and Negatives, optimize bids and ad copy, and to inform the organization of AdGroups and Campaigns. Why Optimize Keywords? Managing PPC Through The Fog Of Long Tail Keywords. PPC managers over the years have always struggled with the right number of keywords to have in their accounts. Should you build out a big inventory of long tail keywords, or keep your campaigns neat and tidy, with fewer terms that account for most of the volume? Honestly, I’d say that most accounts I’ve seen, and indeed, many I’ve built over the years are much more complex and unwieldly than they need to be. In general, I’d argue that for most companies, AdWords accounts with smaller keyword inventories can perform just as well as accounts using larger keyword inventories, because they are easier to understand and manage and more likely to become refined over time.
Using brute force to build out long tail lists of tens of thousands of keywords seems like a powerful technique, but the larger the account, the harder to refine, because all the mundane tasks associated with manipulating, and reporting on super large keyword lists is mind-numbing. Long Tail Overhead Identifying Useless Keywords. Microsoft adCenter Increases Ad Description, Adds Budget Widget & More Mobile Targeting Options. Microsoft announced their January 2012 adCenter release update. The update includes three major additions to adCenter: (1) adCenter increased the ad description length by one additional character from 70 to 71. They did this to help with import issues from other advertising products. (2) There is a new quick campaign budget overview widget to get your budget details immediately. (3) They added more mobile ad targeting to allow you to mobile OS such as Windows Phone, iPhone, Android, and Blackberry and Tablet OS options including iOS, Android, and RIM.
Here is where it is currently supported: Related Stories: Related Topics: Channel: SEM | Microsoft: Bing Ads. AdCenter Releases Features Aimed At Improving Advertiser Time-Efficiency. The adCenter team recently released some features aimed at improving Advertiser Time-Efficiency. These features are live right now, though they may not be officially announced at the time this post is published. During a recent trip to adCenter headquarters, Eric Enge was able to get some insight into these new features, and what we can expect from adCenter in the near future, which he shared in his recent post Can Bing & adCenter Bring More To The Table For Large Advertisers?. Here is a quick synopsis of the new features: Browser Compatibility with Safari and Chrome, and mobile devicesMobile Device TargetingAd Description Lengths Increased Browser Compatibility With Safari & Chrome Status: Live AdCenter silently released browser compatibility with Safari and Chrome this week, including mobile device support for iPad and other devices.
From our sources and anecdotal testing, the support appears complete and fully functional. My Take: Manage adCenter from your iPad! Device Targeting Resources: AdWords Small Business Guide.