Archive for the ‘Search Engine Marketing’ category

How To Setup The New Google AdWords Product Listing Ads

November 19th, 2010

Google has been testing Product Listing Ads for over a year with select *lucky* advertisers. This past week Google has rolled out this feature to all AdWords advertisers. In other words, we are all lucky now.

For some reason, the setup process does not seem very straight-forward. Here is a quick guide on how to set up Product Listing Ads.

Step 1 – Connect Google Merchant Center To Your Campaign

About a year ago, Google released AdWords Product Extensions, where related products are displayed under your ad in a PlusBox. Setting this up is the first step towards getting Product Listing Ads up and running.

You will need to goto the Ad Extesnsions tab in your campaign, and select Product Extensions from the drop down list. Then click on New Extension and check off your Merchant Center account which should show up.

Once this is done, your ads will start displaying with a PlusBox and related products under it on Google.com.

Step 2 – Create Product Targeting On The Ad Group Level

Now that your campaign is connected to your Merchant Center account, you need to select product targeting in the new Auto Targets tab. Click the Add Product Target button and select all products or a subset of your products using the filters. TIP: These product filters look for an exact match only and will give you the ability to validate the results.

Step 3 – Create A Product Listing Ad Type

The next and final step is to create a new Product Listing Ad in the Ads tab of your Ad Group. click the New Ad button and select Product Listing Ad.

You will then be given the option to fill in promo text and save the ad:

That’s all. You’re done… You should start seeing your products displayed on the top right of the Google SERPs for related terms.

For extra credit, you can watch this Google video explaining product ads.

How To Setup Conversion Tracking In Microsoft adCenter

November 4th, 2010

Microsoft adCenter Conversion Tracking

Now that Microsoft adCenter is powering ads for both Bing.com and Yahoo.com, it is extremely important to make sure you are tracking your campaigns properly. Here is a quick guide on how to set up revenue and conversion tracking for Microsoft adCenter.

Step 1 – Turn On Conversion Tracking

In adCenter, conversion tracking must be turned on for each individual campaign. You can do this by navigation to your campaign and clicking on the “Change Settings” link. In the top right corner of this page you will find a check box to Track Conversions. Check this box.

If you just want to track the number of conversions, you can click the link to “show code” and paste it into your order confirmation page. If you want to track revenue too, then you’ll want to follow the next steps.

Step 2 – Revenue Tracking

In order to track the revenue generated from orders originating from adCenter, we will need to set up custom code. Start by clicking on the “Open Campaign Analytics Tool”. This will bring you to the Campaign Analytics section of adCenter. The next step will be to set up a goal by clicking “Create Goal”.

It will bring you to a simple form that you will need to fill out. Most of the form is self-explanatory. Just make sure you select “Variable” under the “Revenue to track” option.

Once you fill out the form, click “Save and generate code”. Copy and past the code and…

Step 3 – Inserting Revenue Variable

At this point you should have code that looks kind of like this:

<script type="text/javascript">if (!window.mstag) mstag = {loadTag : function(){},time : (new Date()).getTime()};</script>
<script id="mstag_tops" type="text/javascript" src="//flex.atdmt.com/mstag/site/dexe4973-10a0-2abe-823e-5b2123f42eb0/mstag.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript"> mstag.loadTag("analytics", {dedup:"1",domainId:"XXXXXX",type:"1",revenue:"",actionid:"XXXXX"})</script> <noscript> <iframe src="//flex.atdmt.com/mstag/tag/dexe4973-10a0-2abe-823e-5b2123f42eb0/analytics.html?dedup=1&domainId=XXXXXX&type=1&revenue=&actionid=XXXXX" frameborder="0" scrolling="no" width="1" height="1" style="visibility:hidden; display:none"> </iframe> </noscript>

At this point you need to generate the order total from your eCommerce system and pass the variable in the two places it says revenue. Here is an example, look at the word revenue on lines 3 and 4.

<script type="text/javascript">if (!window.mstag) mstag = {loadTag : function(){},time : (new Date()).getTime()};</script>
<script id="mstag_tops" type="text/javascript" src="//flex.atdmt.com/mstag/site/dexe4973-10a0-2abe-823e-5b2123f42eb0/mstag.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript"> mstag.loadTag("analytics", {dedup:"1",domainId:"XXXXXX",type:"1",revenue:"1234.56",actionid:"XXXXX"})</script> <noscript> <iframe src="//flex.atdmt.com/mstag/tag/dexe4973-10a0-2abe-823e-5b2123f42eb0/analytics.html?dedup=1&domainId=XXXXXX&type=1&revenue=1234.56&actionid=XXXXX" frameborder="0" scrolling="no" width="1" height="1" style="visibility:hidden; display:none"> </iframe> </noscript>

Your final code should look something like the code directly above. You can paste this code into your order confirmation page.

NOTE: Don’t copy and paste this as it won’t work, because I removed all the IDs that adCenter uses to identify which account this is for.

How To Track Phone Sales In Google AdWords With Call Metrics

November 3rd, 2010

Every online merchant knows how complicated it is to track phone sales… Google has announced a new Ad Extension called Call Metrics. This works by getting a new phone number for each campaign through Google Voice. AdWords will then report how many calls that ad received.

How-To

Go to the Ad Extensions tab on any campaign and select View Phone Extensions. From there you can select New Extension. You will be prompted to fill out the following info:

  • Country
  • Phone number to call

Then check the box next to “Call metrics: Use Google Voice to track calls from my ads”.

Image Credit: Search Engine Land

Here is a video Google created to explain the benefits of call tracking.

NOTE: This has not rolled out to all accounts yet.

Image Source: -eko-

How To Save Money In AdWords With Broad Match Modifier

October 22nd, 2010

In the middle of July, Google announced the release of the new Google AdWords Keyword Match Type called Broad Match Modifier in the US. Here’s a quick “how-to” and why you’ll want to use it.

Until now Google offered three match types:

  1. Broad Match
  2. Phrase Match
  3. Exact Match

How & Why?

For some advertisers, Broad Match is too liberal and Phrase Match is too conservative. What Broad Match Modifier brings to the game is somewhere in between. For example, if you had previously wanted to advertise the term “nike shoes” and only have your ad displayed when the search term included the word “nike”, you would have had to use the phrase match terms. This becomes difficult because you need to add many different variations of the terms in order to reach a wide enough audience. With the new Broad Match Modifier, you can now use one keyword: “+nike shoes”. This will display your ad for many variations of the keywords and make sure that it always contains the word “nike”.

Overall, this new feature should save you time and money while helping you expand your reach.

Do you see this helping your business?

Use Google AdWords Offline With Google Gears & Work Faster

February 10th, 2010

I just found a new option in my Google account. The ability to activate Google Gears for AdWords. This stores all you account data on your local computer for faster load times. Look for an offline icon on the top right of your AdWords account.

When you click on it you are prompted with the option to continue and activate:

This was reported by Search Engine Land last week:

Instead of loading the data off Google’s servers each time you click on a section in the AdWords console, Google will load the data off your local computer. Google said, “each time you access AdWords, your data loads directly from your computer, making your experience much faster.”

Do you have the offline option in your account?

How To Use Day Parting To Trim Wasteful Spend In AdWords

December 30th, 2009

Simple logic would dictate that if someone searched for your keywords, show them an ad. Sometimes hard facts are completely different from what you would expect. In most AdWords accounts that I have dealt with, I have seen much lower conversion rates and revenue in between the hours of 2AM and 7AM. Here’s how to check if this is the case on your eCommerce site with Google Analytics.

How Do I Check?

In Google Analytics, go to Ecommerce –> Conversion Rate. Select a 3 month date range, last 90 days is the best. The click on the little clock icon where it says “Graph By”. This will segment your conversion rate for the last 90 days by hour of the day. You should see two charts like this sample below.

Conversion Rate By Hour, Click To Enlarge

Conversion Rate By Hour, Click To Enlarge

If your chart is anything like this one, you will see that specific hours of the day perform better than others. This means that your cost per acquisition will likely be higher during those times.

What Do I Do?

There are two possible solutions to help minimize wasteful spend during these hours.

Option A — Lower Bids

The first basic option, is to lower your bids in each campaign during these hours. You can do this by going to Campaign Settings –> Advanced Settings –>Schedule: Start date, end date, ad scheduling. It will pop up a window where you can set hours and percentages of your regular bids. (Click on Mode: Bid adjustment.)

Option B –Pause Ads

The second basic option, is to pause your campaigns automatically during these hours. You can do this by going to Campaign Settings –> Advanced Settings –>Schedule: Start date, end date, ad scheduling. It will pop up a window where you can set which hours you would like your ads to run. (Click on Mode: Basic.)

Bottom Line

Make sure that you are getting the most out of your advertising spend. Every little trick can help. Another thing you can do is to set your campaigns to use Accelerated Ad Delivery to display your ad every time someone searches for your keywords during the correct hours.

How To Display Google Base Products In AdWords Ads

November 30th, 2009

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Google has been testing product ads for some time now. As of last week they have turned on this featured called Ad Extenstions. By turning this feature on you will attract more eyeballs to your ads and in effect raise your click-through rate. Google stated on their blog post which announced this new feature that some advertisers have seen a 10% increase in their CTR.

Here is how to turn on AdWords Ad Extensions, it must be done for every campaign separately:

Go to Campaign –> Settings; under Networks, devices, and extensions; click on edit under Ad Extensions and check the box that says: Connect to my Google Merchant Center account. This should automatically bring up your Google Base (Product Search) account, once it finds it, just click Save.

AdWords-Ad-Extensions

UPDATE: The process has changed slightly, instead of finding this under the Campaign Settings tab, you will need to go to the “Ad Extensions” tab and select “Product Extensions.”

Cheatsheet: How To Create AdWords Campaigns Easily

November 4th, 2009

Here’s a quick tip that comes in handy when you are marketing a brand of products that has a similar name to other products or services on the web.

If you want to advertise Apple, Inc. products but are having a hard time coming up with a comprehensive list of keywords, this may work for you. Add the keyword Apple as a Broad Match term with an exact negative of [Apple]. At the same time add negative terms for anything that comes up on a Google search for the term Apple that you are not advertising. For example you may add these as Negative Keywords:

tablet
tv
new york city
bank
trailers
rumors
ipod
store locator
  • tablet
  • tv
  • new york city
  • bank
  • trailers
  • rumors
  • store

This accomplishes the same as building out a huge list of Phrase Match terms but with much less work. Google will look at the Broad Match terms you have listed and show ad for all of them after cross checking and excluding all your Negative keywords. Keep in mind that this may cost slightly more than running a long list of Phrase Match terms. Best thing to do is run your campaign this way for 2-4 weeks and then look at the keyword list that Google actually showed your ads for — now you can just check off the good ones and add to your campaign for a lower CPC.

Image Courtesy: zenera

How To Restrict Your Ad Position In AdWords

October 14th, 2009

There is a cool feature in AdWords that allows you to restrict your ad to specific positions. This comes in handy if you know that a certain position, say position #3, has had the best performance historically. Here is how to set up Ad Positioning:

Step 1

In the Campaign Settings, under Position Preference you can turn on the ability to mange your position preference and have AdWords automatically manage maximum CPC bids to target a preferred position range.
Google-AdWords-Position-Preference

Step 2

When you edit keywords in the Keywords tab, you will now have the option to select positions you’d like to restrict your ad to. It will let you select one position (i.e. #3) or a range of positions (i.e. #1 – #4).

Google AdWords Position Preference Selection

Bottom Line

Keep in mind that if according to Google’s algorithm your ad should show up in position #4 and you set your ads to display in position #3, your ad will not display at all. Use it when you have the data to back it up, when you know that any clicks from other positions will not bring enough conversions.

New Google AdWords My Client Center (MCC) Interface

October 14th, 2009

It seems that Google is trying to standardize the new interface across AdWords. Aside from cosmetic differences, it does not seem to have any new features except for a newBudget tab. See screen shots below:

I just noticed this link today in my MCC account:

Link-To-New-Google-MCC-Account-Interface

Link To New Google MCC Account Interface

New Google AdWords MMC Performance Tab

New Google AdWords MMC Performance Tab

New Google AdWords MMC Budget Tab

New Google AdWords MMC Budget Tab

Is the new AdWords My Client Center interface active in your account? Can you spot any other differences?