Checkout this infographic of the Google AdWords landscape from the folks at SEOmoz.
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Posts Tagged ‘Google AdWords’
The Google AdWords Landscape [Infographic]
March 14th, 2013Shopping.com Will Now Syndicate Listings To Google Shopping
November 5th, 2012
It looks like Google Shopping is trying to beef up their product listings now that a lot of merchants are pulling their feeds because it is no longer free. Until Google transitioned to a commercial model, they had the most comprehensive shopping database because almost every merchant would list their products. Obviously not all merchants can afford to pay Google and have since de-listed their product datafeeds.
This would be a great way for Google to have a more comprehensive database while they try to get more merchants to sign up directly.
Shopping.com sent out a nootice of the partnership today:
Dear Merchant,We are pleased to announce that Google Shopping recently joined the Shopping.com portfolio of leading publishers. Google recently moved to a commercial-model based on Product Listing Ads and has become a critical channel for retailers. Via our new partnership, you automatically get exposure on this high-performing channel without any extra effort.
This partnership delivers several advantages for you:
Gain efficiency
It’s easy – submit one data feed to Shopping.com and get exposure across a powerful network of high-caliber publishers, including Google Shopping. This allows you to tap into Shopping.com’s rich catalog to deliver highly optimized feeds to Google. You will also have a centralized point of contact who will optimize your performance to achieve optimal ROI.Benefit from historical relevance
As an early participant in the Google Shopping pilot, merchant offers from Shopping.com gained valuable click history, a key element to boost quality score, which in addition to bid and relevancy, helps Google determine the right offer to serve. This improves the odds that your offer through Shopping.com will be displayed.Leverage Value Based Pricing
Shopping.com’s sophisticated algorithm automatically adjusts CPCs daily with our Value Based Pricing model to meet ROI goals.
No action is required on your part to gain access to Google Shopping’s customer base. Please contact us if you have any questions regarding this partnership or would like to opt-out.Shopping.com Merchant Services Team
New Google AdWords Feature: Compare Date Ranges
October 23rd, 2012
When I logged into AdWords yesterday, I noticed that Google released a new feature that always felt as if it was missing: a date selection tool. The new tool now let’s you compare date ranges à la Google Analytics. This can be very useful in measuring the performance of your campaigns over time. Just click the blue slider and select the previous period.
Google will then generate a chart with multiple graph lines comparing the dates selected.
Image Credit: TheBusyBrain
New Google AdWords Feature: Shared Budgets [How-To]
September 20th, 2012
Google AdWords just released a new feature which will help you control your budget. Until now, each campaign had it’s own budget. If you wanted to cap your spend across specific campaigns/promotions you had to merge everything into one campaign. The new Shared Budgets feature allows you to group campaigns and override their budgets.
Google AdWords Shared Budgets
Step #1 – Navigate to Campaigns –> Shared Library –> Budgets –> New Budget
Step #2 – Enter Budget Settings
- Budget Name (i.e. Fall Campaigns)
- Apply to Campaigns – select which campaigns should be under this budget umbrella
- Budget Amount – this new budget will replace the existing campaign budgets
- Delivery Method – same options as on the category level (Standard or Accelerated)
Try it out and let us know how it performs for you.
How To Set Up Google Adwords Remarketing Campaigns
February 2nd, 2012
What is Remarketing/Retargeting?
Retargeting works by tagging every visitor to your site and then displaying your ads to those customers on other sites in the Advertising network. These types of ads usually perform better than standard display ads. This is because the potential customer has already been to your site and will recognize your brand.
There are many retargeting companies out there such as Fetchback, AdRoll, Collective etc… This guide is specifically for Google AdWords because the setup is very simple and can be done without opening up new advertising accounts or committing to large ad budgets. This can be done in your existing AdWords account.
How do I set it up?
Step #1 — Set up Audience Profile
Go to the Shared Library section in the left hand menu of your AdWords account.
This will take you to a page where you will want to click “New Audience” and select “Remarketing list”. Fill out the form with a name and enter the number of days you’d like to track people for. If you enter 30, your ads will be displayed to anyone who visited the site in the last 30 days.
After you save the form above, you will need to click on the “Tag” link in the list of audiences. This will show you the code that needs to be installed on your site. There is an option for HTTPS, be sure to select that if your site serves pages through a secure connection (as most eCommerce sites do).
Step #2 — Install Tracking Pixel(s)
After you finished clicking around in Step #1 and you have the final code, you need to get it installed on your site. However, before you install the code you will need to figure out what pages should collect retargeting info. Keep in mind that you can set up multiple audiences in AdWords and show different ads based on the audience profile.
For example, let’s make believe we have an apparel site that we’d like to run a Remarketing campaign on. It would probably be best if we made separate audiences for Men, Women and Children’s apparel. This will allow us to tailor the ads based on the visitors buying preferences. Someone who was shopping for kids t-shirts will see a relevant ad and someone who was looking at a men’s sweatshirt will see what they were looking for. The more granular you get, the better performance your ad will have. Keep in mind that you don’t want to get very granular if you do not have a lot of traffic on your site.
Once you decide how to set up your audience profiles, circle back to step one create them all and copy the code into your website.
Step #3 — Set up Campaign
Set up a new campaign with separate Ad Groups for each audience. You will need to enter the same information as a regular campaign. Make sure that you have the Display Network turned on.
Go to the Audience tab in your Remarketing campaign. If you do not see it, you need to enable it by clicking on the “more” arrow.
Once you get to the Audience tab, click on the “add audiences” button and select your Campaign/Ad Group. A new screen should pop out with the audience profiles that you created in Step #1. Click “add” to add these to this Ad Group. If you have several Remarketing list, you will want to put them in separate ad groups so that you can target the ad creative accordingly.
Step #4 — Design/Upload Banner Ads
This is the part where you want to upload existing banner ads or use the Google AdWords Display Ad Builder.
Image Ads
To upload standard image ads, go to the “Ads” section of your campaign, click “New Ad” and select “Image Ad”. You will then need to upload image ads one at a time.
Display Ad Builder
If you do not have any display ads or if you would like to build ads featuring several different products, you can use the Display Ad Builder. In the “Ads” section click “New Ad” and select “Display Ad Builder”. This will take you to a page with many different options. I like to use the “Product Showcase” which Google describes as follows:
Templates that show a selection of product images with different destination URLs. Promoted products are shown like a catalog in these templates.
You will be given a form where you can enter information for multiple products and it will automatically build a dynamic ad in a variety of sizes.
Once you upload you ads, just make sure all the standard campaign settings are filled out properly (keywords, bids, budgets etc…) — At this point you should be done.
Keep in mind that a Remarketing campaign takes a while to pick up because it needs to collect visitor information so that your “Audience” can be targeted properly. Every time someone visits your site where the code is installed they will be tagged with the audience profile and they will start seeing your ads within the Google Advertising Network.
Good luck. Happy Retargeting!
How To Get The New Google AdWords Communication Ad Extension
January 17th, 2012
Google recently started testing a new ad extension called the Communication Ad Extension. This allows merchants to collect customer email signups directly in the ad. As of now, this seems to be a beta program with no information published by Google besides for in the AdWords support forums.
What is this?
The communication ad extension is a new extension that allows AdWords advertisers to collect leads directly from Google search.
There are two types of this ad format:
1. Communication Ads for Daily Deal sites: This type allows Daily Deal sites to collect email addresses and zip codes of new sign-ups to their
offer emails.
2. Communication Ads for Newsletters: This variant allows large businesses to collect email addresses and zip codes of people interested in joining a
newsletter or email list from a given merchant.
How do I get this?
I wanted to test this for a client, so I emailed Google AdWords support requesting additional signup information. I received a reply from Google within a day or so requesting specific information so they can review the account in question.
Once they review the account and see whether you are eligible, the ad extension goes live pretty quickly. When the ad is live, you’ll start receiving email notifications whenever someone fills out the form.
There are no guarantees about which sites Google will accept into the beta, however it seems pretty straightforward and can’t hurt to ask. I would suggest you email AdWords support and see if they will let you in the program.
How does it perform?
I have been testing this for a few weeks already. Currently there are no reports in AdWords for this ad extension. However, it seems to work reasonably well as we have been getting quite a few signups on a regular basis since this went live.
Image Credit: Search Engine Roundtable
How To Optimize Your Google AdWords Product Listing Ads
August 29th, 2011
The Google AdWords Product Listing Ads generally perform very well for most eCommerce retailers. You can read our guide on how to set up Product Listing Ads. Here are some extra tips to help you set up and optimize the campaign correctly.
Google Merchant Center
In your Google Merchant Center feed, you can add the following columns to help with Product Listing Ads.
| adwords_grouping | This field is used to group products. It can be used for Product Filters to limit your AdWords campaign to a specific group of products. This field can be useful if you want to bid differently on different subsets of products. It can only hold one value (i.e. “electronics” or “iphone”). |
| adwords_labels | This field is very similar to adwords_grouping, but it will only only work on the CPC bidding model. It can hold multiple values, allowing a product to be tagged with multiple labels (i.e. “shoes, sneakers”). |
| adwords_publish | This field is used to exclude select offers from Product Ads. If this field is not included or left blank, all product will be included in your product ads. If you want to exclude any items from being displayed you need to fill the column with a value of “true” or “false”. |
| adwords_redirect | You can use this field to set the click URL of the Product Listing Ad. This comes in handy when you standard Merchant shopping feed has all the URLs tagged (i.e. ?utm_source=Google&utm_medium=CSE). By filling out this field with a plain URL with no tracking (i.e. http://www.merchant.com/product.html), your traffic/revenue will only be attributed to one source. |
Google AdWords
Once you add these fields to your feed file, you can filter your campaigns by grouping and labels.
You can find more info in the Google Help Center.
New AdWords Account Snapshot Dashboard Available
March 15th, 2011It seems Google has launched a new version of the “Home” tab in AdWords. I don’t use the dashboard tab much myself, but it can be very useful to get a high level overview of your campaigns. Here is a quick tutorial on how to activate it and setup custom modules.
Here is what the old interface looked like:
Google AdWords Account Snapshot Old Interface
You will notice a new link on the top left that says “New version”, click on this to activate the new version. Note: When I clicked on this link the page just seemed to hang, I reloaded AdWords and was able to access the new interface.
Google AdWords Account Snapshot - New Version Link
Once you successfully activate the new interface, you should see a sleek modern dashboard that looks like this:
Google AdWords Account Snapshot - New Interface
You have the ability to add new custom modules by setting up saved filters in the standard campaigns tab. Any saved filter will be populated into this box:
Google AdWords - Custom Modules
Enjoy the new dashboard…
How To Import All Your Google AdWords Campaigns Into Microsoft adCenter In Less Than Two Minutes
December 15th, 2010
If you have many Google AdWords campaigns it can be a pain to copy them all into Microsoft adCenter. To Microsoft’s credit their are several tools to help with this process, some easier than others. I will concentrate on the simplest way possible: Using Google AdWords Editor to export a CSV which can then be imported in Microsoft adCenter Desktop. There is one caveat, this process is Windows only and will not work on a Mac or Linux.
Step 1 – Export your campaigns from Google AdWords Editor by clicking File –> Export Spreadsheet (CSV) –> Export Campaigns. This will prompt you to save a CSV file of your AdWords campaigns.
Step 2 – In the Microsoft adCenter Desktop tool you can click on the “Import” button pictured below. This will open a dialog asking you what kind of file you want to import, select “Import from Google.”
Step 3 – Browse and select the file you exported from Google AdWords Editor.
Step 4 – Review all fields to make sure that are mapped to the correct Microsoft adCenter fields.
Step 5 – Review and approve the results.
Once you have successfully imported the campaigns into adCenter desktop, all you need to do is upload the changes to Microsoft adCenter. You should be set!
As always, if you have any questions, please post them below.
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.
