Google AdWords Feature & Policy Updates arriving…

The life of us folks who live. breathe and are looking most of our waking hours at the Google AdWords screens, are quite hectic. We live in a super dynamic industry with new media platforms and features pop up every day leaving us trying to keep up with the news while doing some work and aiming to achieve better results.

This is not an easy task, and if I look at how people used to do their jobs 10, 20 or 30 years ago – the amount of times they had to change their working methods during an entire career is similar to what we can experience here every quarter or so. Many many changes.

However, and this is the good news – for me, this is actually the fun part of my job. To know that nothing stays the same, a lot of what I’ve learned during the last year will be less relevant next year – not because it’s not true, but rather because there will be new exciting amazing stuff to learn. We live in a dynamic industry, one which makes you sharp, on the edge, interested, curios, learning and at the end of the day – getting better and better.

With that being said – Google has announced some new and important things in the last few days and I though this should be a nice place to summarize them:

1. Google Tag Manager

Tag Manager has been long anticipated, well at least by me. Ask a digital marketer about things slowing down the speed and efficiency of launching digital campaigns and most would indicate pixel and tag implementation process as nagging full of waste and with high probability to skew the data.

Tag Management will take online digital media analytics and tracking  towards a new era, quite similar to what open source “click to install” CMS platforms has done for HTML based websites – a true revolution.

I will not review this product in detail here today, especially because I have seen it work only a few weeks ago as a beta tester, however I do encourage people to learn and practice the use of this methodology.

Google Tag Manager – AdWords Blog

Google Tag Manager

Econsultancy on tag manager

 Video Introduction to Tag Manager

 Step by Step Guide – Online-Behavior.com

2. Impression Share Reports on Steroids

When Impression Share reports first showed up, It took me some time to really understand how to use them and get real insights. Today, Impression Share is one of the most important metrics we look at with our accounts.

The basic thing is, Search Engine Marketing is about finding very specific demand from consumers, and providing a meeting point for this demand with your products.

Impression share measures how much of the demand you are actually meeting, on timely basis and cut to your budget limitation as well as your rank (which can be simplified as the combination of your quality score and your bid).

These days, Google are relaunching this tool along with breakdown by the hour, improving the look and feel and most important providing tool at “actionize” this report. I think this is the most important part as we have so many reports and data points but not as much actionable data.

New Impression Share Reports

3. Google Adwords and Google Analytics are now closer and tighter than ever

The integration between Google AdWords and Analytics has not always been smooth, and we have learned to get over some illnesses and difficulties connecting the two and understanding the differences when they occur.

Now, the integration gets much better when you can actually see metrics from Google Analytics on AdWords and vice versa – such as time spent on site, average pages per visit etc. With these measurements alongside cost data advertisers can take decision not only on a Yes/No conversion decision but rather on quality and engagement, as well as to smoothen to decision from killing a keywords to simply lowering its bid.

For More Info:

AdWords Blog

5. Important AdWords Policy Updates

And hey, it’s been a while since Google killed some grey Adwords verticals – so if you’re into SEM for downloads, software installs, arbitrage, tricky ads with really high CTRs and other really really cool things which are a bit problematic from consumer trasnparancy point of view – beware from the date October 15th 2012, I suggest you take out the rain coat and boots and take cover as it’s is going to rain.

AdWords Post:

AdWords policy Update Notes

That’s it for today – Hope this added some value and was worth they read.

Ophir

View-through conversion reporting on the Google Content Network

Last year we’ve written in our company blog about view through metrics, and apparently Google has listened 🙂 Last few days I discovered a cool new column in my Google AdWords panel called “view through conversions“.

These conversions, are, as Google states on their blog conversions which occurred on the target web site within 30 days of a display ad impression, in the content network. Yes, you are reading correctly – Google is reporting on conversions which occurred due to an Impression, not a Click.

This is simply HUGE.

Running display campaigns usually brings lower conversion rate and higher acquisition costs than search campaigns (except from very specific verticals). This does not mean that display does not work, it simply means that search is more goal oriented and that the display activities are geared more towards awareness and reach, and usually contribue to increase the search volume.

For example- An airline would launch a special sale on their website, and promote that sale in many online channels. In our standard conversion attribution models, we will see that the display campaigns show impression, clicks and very little to no sales at all.

However, the search volume (impressions, clicks, conversions) would amazingly soar. The soar in searches and search based conversions is much related to the fact that users see the ads in the diaply formats, assimilate the message and then when the time is right, they would search for the product or the brand, and convert.

View through conversions will let us, as campaign managers optimize our media plan not only by those display outlets which convert directly, but those which influence the audience to convert.

As website in the google content network may send clicks and lack in conversion rate or acquisition cost – but influence with its impressions on latent sales which may arrive due to direct traffic, search, email campaigns etc.

I highly recommend adding this metric to your KPI list.

Ophir

Google AdWords Did it again! Bid like a pro with the bid simulator – Coooool

It’s been a while since I last wrote here, and I am thrilled to have the opportunity to share something I found to be very useful and could be somewhat revolutionary to Google AdWords bud management.

Google Released their new “bid simulator” a few days ago, a super-cute tool which helps us find that sweet-spot where the keyword bid would be high enough to get the traffic and low enough not to waste all the budget.

The actual news here, is that Google is now revealing the very common question my colleagues ask – How much to raise/decrease the bid? Is X% enough? Well up until now it was mainly experience and guesswork – but Google is now showing us how much X% raising the bid will affect our traffic and how much Z% decreasing the bid would hurt the traffic (Hint: Sometimes you can cut the bid by 50% and not lose a single click, other times you can increase the bid 400% and win just a few more clicks).

Google’s official email describes the new feature herein:

Have you ever wondered how many impressions or clicks you could have received if you had used a different maximum CPC bid? Until now, finding the right bid has typically involved a lot of trial and error.

The bid simulator, launched today, is a feature of the new AdWords interface that shows you the potential impact of your bid on your advertising results. While it can’t predict the future, the bid simulator allows you to explore what could have happened if you had set different keyword-level bids.

Using data from the past seven days, the bid simulator re-calculates the number of impressions for which your ad could have shown had you chosen a different maximum CPC, how many clicks your ad could have gotten for those impressions and how much those clicks could have cost. The feature provides increased transparency into the AdWords auction and gives you the insight to make more informed bidding decisions to meet your advertising objectives.

This simulation data can help you figure out the trade-off between click volume and cost, enabling you to answer more confidently questions such as:

 

  • How can I increase traffic to my site without raising my costs too much?
  • For which keywords should I alter my spend?

As you use bid simulator, it’s important to note that past performance does not guarantee future results. Additionally, simulations will only be provided if there is enough traffic on a given keyword to conduct a meaningful analysis. These simulations are currently available only for Google.com and the Googlesearch network.

For more information, view thebid simulator videoand visit ourhelp center.

To see data from the bid simulator, go to the ‘Keywords’ tab in your AdWords account.

Then, click on the bid simulator iconin the Max. CPC column next to the bid of any keyword you could like to see data for.

In this example, you are seeing simulations for the keyword “search email.”

Posted by Dan Friedman,Inside AdWordscrew

Speaking about Paid Search at SMX London 08

SMX London 2008
SMX London 2008

The famous Search Marketing Expo is coming to London this week. I’ll be speaking about Paid Search on the first day (Tuesday, Nov 4th 2008) and I’m very excited and thrilled.

For me, every time when I get a chance to visit on of these S** (SMX, SES…) events It’s sort of a fest. You see I’ve been involved in this industry since it’s very beginning back in 1998, and I’ve seen these events grow from a couple of hundred visitors small – friendly – cosy meeting to a full blown conference with thousands of enthusiastic professionals. Continue reading “Speaking about Paid Search at SMX London 08”