Ecommerce Management Advisors
Ecommerce Management Advisors
Google bans impersonation and false affiliation in ads, enforcing policy changes in March.
As a marketing agency, the bottom line for your clients comes down to how well you’re managing their budget.
No one likes the idea of wasted ad spend, but often, it can be hard to tell which funds are actually being put to good use.
Even when a campaign is successful, it’s important to understand which tactics are more effective than others.
How do you determine which platforms are generating the most quality leads for your clients? And how do you prove it?
With the right tools at your disposal, you can remove the guesswork from your marketing strategy and analyze performance more efficiently.
The key is to find out exactly what’s working and what’s not so you know where to focus your ad spend moving forward.
After all, a simple shift in budget allocation could ultimately save you thousands of dollars.
So, how can you optimize your marketing strategy and trim the unnecessary fat in your budget?
Let’s explore the top tools and tactics you can use to reduce your cost per lead and boost ROI this year.
One of the biggest problems agency marketers face is limited insights, which can greatly impact decision-making.
Without the full picture of your marketing performance, it can be difficult to identify your top-performing – as well as underperforming – channels.
This was the challenge for shared workspace management and consulting firm Workspace Strategies.
However, with the right tracking and recording tools, they were able to gain valuable performance insights and pivot their strategy to eliminate wasted ad spend – ultimately saving them $1,000 per month!
So how’d they pull this off? Let’s dig deeper into how the firm was able to prove the true ROI for its campaigns.
The bigger a brand’s digital footprint, the more successful it’ll be, right? – Well, not necessarily.
Although it’s important to expand your online presence, there is such a thing as overdoing it.
It’s one thing to market on multiple online platforms, but how can you tell whether they actually bring value to your business?
Workspace Strategies was utilizing Google Ads, as well as various social media platforms to maintain the occupancy rates at their managed workspaces.
Jason, the firm’s Director of Operations, suspected that some of these channels were generating more leads than others.
However, he struggled to prove which marketing channels truly drive results.
The solution for Workspace Strategies, in this case, was simple: They were able to track and optimize their campaigns more effectively with Call Tracking by CallRail.
With this advanced tool, the firm was able to attribute every one of their leads to a specific channel, which helped them remove marketing spend from ineffective social platforms.
“When you’re making decisions about how to allocate your marketing budget, proof of ROI is everything. We got proof with CallRail.”
– Jason Tiemeier, Director of Operations at Workspace Strategies
Read the full case study to learn more about Workspace Strategies’ success.
With 360° data, you can:
If you’re ready to prove – and improve – the value of your marketing tactics, it’s time to add CallRail’s Call Tracking to your marketing tech stack.
If you’re a business with multiple locations, tools like Google Analytics 4 may only provide you with a partial picture of your marketing ROI.
But what if you need to track the source of leads who contact your business by phone?
As businesses increasingly rely on phone calls as a valuable touchpoint for customer interactions, diversifying your datasets is even more important.
While Google Analytics 4 certainly has its benefits, it also has its share of limitations.
Some of the most notable challenges include:
For Workspace Strategies, the limited data Google Analytics provided made things particularly difficult, as it painted an incomplete picture of user interactions and behavior.
However, with Call Recording by CallRail they were able to collect valuable customer insights and close more sales.
Sometimes, the problem with businesses simply lies in how they’re interacting with their customers – anything from excessively long phone calls to weak sales pitches could end up costing them conversions.
For instance, when Jason of Workspace Strategies started monitoring recorded phone conversations with incoming leads in CallRail, he uncovered some missteps made by staff members while trying to close sales.
As a result, the firm was able to quickly incorporate these findings into staff coaching and training.
Find out more about how Workspace Strategies identified and corrected their client-customer communication gaps.
Often, businesses that receive a high volume of inbound phone calls through their marketing campaigns struggle to qualify those leads efficiently and accurately.
However, trying to outsource this task can be expensive and drive up the overall cost per lead.
For example, digital marketing agency Wit Digital dealt with inaccurate and expensive lead qualification, with their cost per lead sitting well above the industry average.
To resolve this, they powered up Call Tracking with CallRail’s Conversation Intelligence software.
As a result, Wit Digital is now saving up to $4,000 per month with a 64% lower cost per lead.
Learn more about how the agency benefited from CallRail in the full case study.
Conversation Intelligence uses AI technology to analyze your calls and turn your conversations into easy-to-act-on insights.
This advanced technology can:
“With Conversation Intelligence, I have new insights into what’s working in our campaigns and what’s not. Sometimes even a simple word change can make all the difference.”
– Ryan Cook, Director of Client Strategy at Wit Digital
With Conversation Intelligence, you get more accurate:
Plus, you can automatically filter and categorize your phone calls – for instance, if a call from a first-time caller lasts more than 60 seconds, you’ll know it’s very likely a qualified lead and can have it automatically categorized as such.
By removing the need to manually listen to calls and categorize them, Wit Digital was able to stop overpaying vendors to analyze their call data.
Wit Digital is now getting a better return on its own marketing efforts and retaining more customers as they too get better ROI on their pay-per-click campaigns.
And now, CallRail’s new multi-language transcriptions can even help agencies overcome language barriers between clients and their customers, regardless of their native tongue.
Ready to automate your data analysis and boost your campaign results? Try CallRail’s Conversation Intelligence free for 14 days.
Sometimes, the hassle of navigating between multiple platforms can be overwhelming.
Deep in the PPC ad platforms, there are plenty of hidden features that can improve performance and ease the management of ad campaigns.
Some features are “opt-outs” that are valuable for optimizations and campaign efficiency.
These ad platforms are complicated and always evolving so the average user may not be aware of some lesser-known opportunities.
Maybe there is a feature or two you didn’t know about that can elevate your campaign game.
Not to be confused with video ads or PMax assets, this is a little feature included in the responsive display ad format.
Along with the standard assets (components of an ad like headlines, descriptions, and images), you can add video content.
This may provide a more engaging experience for users than using Google’s auto-generated video.
Google should not show auto-generated video if you select your own video content, but you can also just opt out of that in the ad creation view by unchecking the box.
If you are using call extensions or call-only ads in Google Ads, perhaps you never realized there are report features that outline details about the calls received through Google Ads.
Let’s get to the report: Reports > Reports > Call details.
This report outlines call time, duration, and caller’s phone number (if available). There are also several metrics you can add to the report to help inform your optimizations and strategies for phone call engagement.
You can listen to the recording as well as download it if you choose. Recordings are saved for 30 days, after that the report will say “recording expired.”
This is one of the most unique features in Microsoft Ads, yet this little gem is difficult to find.
Besides LinkedIn, Microsoft Ads is the only platform you can use for LinkedIn profile targeting for PPC ads. Enjoy the capability to target any industry, company, and job function.
Boost bids for the selected values within those three dimensions. These audiences are “bid only,” so they won’t reduce the available traffic.
This feature is available for search, shopping, and display campaigns.
Screenshot from Microsoft Ads, January 2024Depending on how you look at it, automatically created assets can improve performance, save time, and reduce effort in managing your account.
On the other hand, some advertisers really dislike the quality and lack of control associated with Google and Microsoft’s AI-powered feature injecting itself into human-created messaging.
It is tricky to control these settings as they are sometimes hidden and a multi-step process.
In Google Ads, automatically created assets exist at the account level and campaign level.
Account level:
To turn these automated assets off in Google Ads, be prepared for an epic click journey.
There is a nine-step process, but if one of these assets is not appropriate for your business, it’s necessary.
Screenshot from Google Ads, January 2024Automatically created assets for ads allows Google or Microsoft to create and add headlines and descriptions in rotation with what you have already provided as a responsive search ad.
Find this in the campaign settings as an opt-in feature. You can access this at the campaign settings level in both platforms to turn on if you wish.
A feature that is easy to forget about is the serving of ads on Google’s and Microsoft search partners. These include other search sites that serve ads powered by Google or Microsoft.
For example, Microsoft exclusively serves ads to Yahoo search traffic as well as AOL, Duck Duck Go, and more.
There are two key areas you need to explore for digging into the search partners performance:
Consumer streaming video has become the default way to watch our favorite entertainment so it’s time one of the ad platforms creates an easily accessible way to market to our audiences on this channel.
Microsoft ads serves video ads on Netflix’s ad supported plan and over 860 other CTV publishers. Advertisers can target by demographics, location, audiences (including remarketing), and content genre.
Its simple to get started. In the New campaign creation experience in the web interface, create a campaign:
Screenshot from Microsoft Ads, January 2024Another hidden reporting gem comes in Google Ads by using keyword level auction insights and automated reports to help find information to improve bidding and optimizations in your account.
Go to the Reports item in the Reports menu and make a custom report.
You can choose the output as a Table and configure a report by keyword, domain, and quality score (ad relevance).
Then choose to see the search overlap rate (filter high to low), impression share, and outranking share.
Screenshot from Google Ads, January 2024The report can be scheduled to run weekly or even daily.
It will work as a reminder in your inbox to check the competitive landscape and adjust your bidding against competitors.
For display and video campaigns, advertisers often worry about the quality and type of content their ads will appear alongside.
Selecting an inventory type can help to ensure your brand messaging is limited to serving on brand-safe content types and themes.
Google has created bundles of content types labeled “Expanded inventory”, “Standard inventory” and “Limited inventory” that address concerns of profanity, sexual content, and violence.
Currently, in the campaign settings, advertisers can find Content exclusions where you can select the appropriate inventory types.
This is changing. Soon this setting will only be available at the account level in Google Ads renamed Content suitability.
Screenshot from Google Ads, January 2024 After exploring and then selecting an inventory type, Google provides an “Estimated impact” statistic that shows the potential impact (reduced) on reach.
This is a new tool feature and is good to know to help inform your decision.
After making this decision, please be sure to scroll down to Advanced settings because another world of exclusions awaits your attention.
Here you can get into excluding more specific types of sensitive content and placements such as political content, parked domains, or even specific YouTube channels.
Please note, if you are looking to exclude placements in games, that is not going to happen here. Read on.
Google display campaigns are a great way to generate awareness and get your message out to the right audience.
However, some advertisers find that gaming placements are not a good fit.
If you are selling an app or game, this would be an ideal fit!
But for practically everyone else it could be an inefficient use of budget, for two basic reasons:
Fine-tuning game placements can help to direct ad serving to more relevant placements. This is accomplished through editing topics targeting to exclude some or all game topics.
Here’s how:
Screenshot from Google Ads, January 2024By default, Google Ads turns on a feature known as “optimized targeting,” which allows Google to serve ads to a similar type of audience instead of strictly the audience or placements you manually selected for this campaign.
To save time and expand your reach, keep this setting so ads can serve to new segments likely to convert.
Not interested? Opt out of this to retain your selected audiences – find this at the Adgroup level:
This tool in Google Ads would be great for documenting changes, performance observations, budget changes, etc., in a small to medium account – if only you knew it was there.
The account notes panel allows you to simply add notes for the account. While any changes will be in the change history, the change history is more technical, while the notes are a free-form writing area.
The notes panel can also be opened and then minimized for easy access as one works in the platform. Notes can be made at the account or campaign level.
From the All campaigns view, a note entered refers to the entire account.
From an individual campaign view, the note will be applied to that specific campaign only.
Where do you find that elusive notes panel? It is under the More icon.
Screenshot from Google Ads, January 2024Have you ever used the Overview section of your PPC ads account? It’s at the very top of the nav. Sometimes, it’s the start page you ignore and briskly skip to other tasks, but stop and take a look.
Screenshot from Microsoft Ads, January 2024Google Ads and Microsoft Ads show performance snapshots in card form with data such as basic performance, networks, demographics, and more.
Each has a little bonus feature you may find useful, such as adding or removing cards, changing metrics, or, most importantly, Google Ads allows you to download an image of the card chart. Great little feature for a quick FYI email.
What did you discover that is new to you?
Which one of these hidden gems will you test out this week?
More resources:
Featured Image: Lina Chekhovich/Shutterstock
Google is looking into concerning reports that some businesses are sabotaging competitors’ Google Business Pages (GBPs) by creating fake Local Service Ads (LSAs) linked to their profiles.
Google Ads Liaison Ginny Marvin acknowledged the tactic on X (formerly Twitter) after Ben Fisher alerted her to a thread on Google’s support forum detailing the destructive scheme.
“This is a brutal new tactic that competitors are doing on LSA,” Fisher explained in his message to Marvin. “A competitor makes a new LSA for a competitor, and because the link to GBP is automatic, the system will essentially nuke the competitor out of existence.”
A Google support forum thread outlines how one business’s long-standing LSA account suddenly stopped generating leads and referrals after a decade of operation.
When the owner contacted Google’s support team, he was informed that a second unknown LSA account had been created and linked to the company’s Google Business Page, effectively hiding the legitimate ads from public view.
However, the owner maintained that he had only ever created one LSA account and had no knowledge of the mysterious second account.
Google advised completely deleting his original account and reviews and starting over with a brand new Business Page.
This suggestion was, understandably, met with dismay by the business owner, who questioned the fairness of the situation.
“Why would an unknown entity get to force us off of our own Google listing?” the frustrated owner wrote. “There must be a way where we can re-verify our account and eliminate any LSA’s we don’t approve of.”
Acknowledging the gravity of the situation, Marvin responded to Fisher’s alert, stating: “Thanks for flagging, I’m sharing with the team.”
This acknowledgment indicates that Google is now aware of the exploit and suggests that steps may be taken to address this loophole in the LSA system.
This tactic of faking competitor ads to sink Google Business Pages is an alarming new potential threat.
Google linking LSAs automatically provides an opening for abuse, and time will tell if the company can find a solution.
As the search marketing community waits for Google to address the issue, this incident is an eye-opening reminder of extremes some will take to hinder competition.
For now, businesses are advised to carefully monitor their Google Business Profiles and swiftly report any abnormalities.
Featured Image: Vladimka production/Shutterstock
Google to phase out cookie-based Hotel Ad strategies, introduces AI-driven tROAS and expands Performance Max for travel.
PPC management can suck up some major time if you’re focusing on elements that don’t matter, unnecessarily bloating your account, or skipping time-saving tools.
These seven Google Ads shortcuts and features can help you win back some of that precious time.
Not only will these help you save time, but they’ll also give you insights faster, so you’ll be on your way to better results even sooner.
As accounts mature or change management over time, it can be easy to lose track of what keywords are being bid on.
This is especially true when one account manager structures campaigns and ad groups a certain way, and then another manager takes over and starts implementing their own structure.
It would be time-consuming to comb through all the account keywords to find duplicates.
Luckily, the Google Ads Editor has a very handy feature that will do this for you!
You can access it from the top menu under Tools.
Screenshot from Google Ads, December 2023The duplicate keywords tool gives you many options so you can be intentional in how it defines duplicate keywords.
For example, you can choose a strict word order or any word order.
You may want to choose a strict word order if you’re mostly concerned with Exact Match keywords.
But any word order can be a great way to clear out broad match searches or phrases that are just the same words in a different order.
Screenshot from Google Ads, December 2023Another helpful option to be mindful of is the one for Location of duplicates.
An example of why you might want it only looking at certain groups would be if you have campaigns that are duplicates but set to show to different devices or different geographies.
They’re intentionally duplicated in those instances, so you’d only want to check for duplicates within each individual campaign.
Since we’re on the topic of keywords, let’s switch to a feature that will help you organize negative keywords in an account.
Negative keyword lists are a great way to exclude specific categories of keywords across multiple campaigns or the entire account.
As with trying to find duplicate keywords, it can be time-consuming to go through all the negative keywords that have been added to a campaign or ad group over time.
Negative keyword lists allow you to group certain keywords together into a list and can then be attached to different campaigns.
You can find this in the Google Ads online interface by going to Tools and settings >> Shared Library >> Negative keyword lists.
Screenshot from Google Ads, December 2023For example, you may already have a huge list of irrelevant keywords that you wouldn’t want to show up for any campaign.
Create an “Irrelevant Keywords” (or whatever you choose to name it) list, and apply that keyword list to all campaigns in the account.
Another example of how to use negative keyword lists is to separate Branded terms from Non-Branded terms.
Simply create a negative keyword list of all Brand terms, searches, or phrases and attach that list to all Non-Brand campaigns.
This ensures that there’s no crossover between Brand and Non-Brand performance.
The Label function in Google Ads is a powerhouse for account organization and time-saving.
In my opinion, it’s one of the most under-appreciated features in Google Ads.
While labels can be added to a campaign, ad group, and keyword level, using them for time-sensitive copy or routine testing to turn things off/on is where it shines!
It is also a huge help if you want to compare higher-level messaging or before/after efforts with copy tests.
You can add a label to any ad copy by checking the box next to the ad copy versions you want to label and then choosing Label in the blue toolbar that appears:
Screenshot from Google Ads, December 2023You can then check the labels you want to apply to those ads or create a new Label.
In this example, they want to easily test a new message related to a specific promotion happening on their website. There isn’t an easy way to see a comparison without filtering for each ad type.
Labeling each ad quickly makes it easier!
You can then just go into Reports > Pre-defined Reports and choose the option for Labels.
Then, you can just see the Label groups and apply the metrics you want to check out.
Another handy way to use Labels and ads is for scheduling.
After you label the ads as outlined above, select the ones that you want to turn on for a certain date and time. Check the box next to the ads, and then go to the blue toolbar and click on Edit.
From here, you can create rules for all the ads you selected with all kinds of timing and condition parameters.
You’d repeat this step each time you want something to turn off and then also to turn on.
Screenshot from Google Ads, December 2023Speaking of streamlining ad creation and testing, another handy way to do this is by using the Experiments feature.
This is located under the Experiments section, which is in the toolbar just to the left of your main pane.
Screenshot from Google Ads, December 2023Click on the “All experiments” section, and then click the blue “plus” (+) button to start creating your own custom experiment.
Screenshot from Google Ads, December 2023From there, you’ll be able to choose from multiple options:
Screenshot from Google Ads, December 2023One of the things I love about this option is you have the ability to set up the percentage split of your audience.
It can help you force a 50/50 split, whereas in regular ad testing, Google auto-optimizes.
Another thing I love about experiments is that it’s easy to indicate if there’s a clear winner.
Screenshot from Google Ads, December 2023In the example above, one of the experiments run showed a statistically significant change in clicks. This made it an easy decision to apply the experiment to the original campaign for better performance.
Keeping a log of an account history can be tough in Google Ads. There are so many moving parts, outside things that influence results, and then multiple people managing an account over its lifespan.
This can create issues when trying to analyze performance.
For example, you’re looking at year-over-year data and notice the numbers were so much better the previous year. Why?
It could be due to certain holidays that fall on different dates each year.
Or, maybe the brand got a huge PR bump that caused a lot of attention and searching.
Using Notes can help you log that external history and save tons of time trying to dig and piece together this kind of analysis.
How do you add Notes?
First, simply click on the performance graph in the Campaign or Ad Group view.
When you hover on the graph line, the date and performance metrics appear, along with a blue Add Note option. You can type your note in that.
Screenshot from Google Ads, December 2023Once you have notes in the account, they will appear as a little square along the dateline of the graph.
Screenshot from Google Ads, December 2023Clicking on it will show you the notes left and the date they were made.
A key feature that is often forgotten about is the ability to add audiences to campaigns.
Why is this important?
It’s no secret that Google is trying more and more to understand the intent and context of a user search. Not just the showing ads for the exact search term matched.
What used to be reserved for more upper funnel campaigns like Display and YouTube audiences can now be added to Search campaigns as well.
Before going too wild and narrowing down your campaigns to specific audiences, it’s wise to add different audience signals in “Observation Mode” to campaigns.
This allows Google to gather data on how those audience segments perform in a campaign against others who are not part of that audience segment.
If you’re in the information-gathering stage, this is a no-brainer to efficiently gain insights as to who is interacting with your ads.
Audiences can be added at the campaign or ad group level.
Once you’re in the specified campaign or ad group, choose “Audiences” on the left-hand menu.
Screenshot from Google Ads, December 2023From there, you’ll see a chart with a blue button: “Edit audience segments”:
You’ll be presented with a myriad of options to choose from, including:
Choose whatever audience segments that make sense for your campaigns, and then add as “Observation” to ensure that you’re not narrowing your targeting too quickly.
Screenshot from Google Ads, December 2023To see how those audiences perform, navigate back to the Audiences tab, and you’ll expand the table.
Google provides a breakdown of key metrics, including conversion metrics, for you to easily see how much more likely (or not likely) those audience segments are to purchase compared to users not identified as that audience.
If and when the time is right, you can switch audience targeting to “targeting only” if the data supports narrowing down to a specific niche.
Last but not least, the Insights and Recommendations tabs in Google Ads.
I’ve found these tabs to be a huge time-saver to help me identify key changes in performance week-over-week or month-over-month.
We’re all busy. It’s easy to miss high-level insights when we’re so “in the weeds” with our accounts every single day.
The Insights tab on the left-hand menu provides insights into an account as a whole or down to the campaign level.
Screenshot from Google Ads, December 2023It also drills down to other elements of a campaign, like search term insights or audience insights.
Knowing where to focus my time and effort from these insights saves a lot of time so I can focus on analyzing the problem and coming up with solutions.
The Recommendations tab is also found on the left-hand menu and provides a wide assortment of recommendations for your account.
This is also where an account’s “Optimization Score” lives, and applying or dismissing recommendations directly impacts that score.
I don’t recommend applying every recommendation that Google suggests just to increase the Optimization Score.
This tab is useful for account managers to look at the context of an account and easily apply recommendations that make sense.
Screenshot from Google Ads, December 2023These are usually broken down into categories:
For example, this recommendation suggests removing redundant keywords to more easily manage the account. Especially with match types loosening, applying this recommendation makes sense, and Google automatically does it for me.
Screenshot from Google Ads, December 2023That means I can spend more time strategizing and analyzing an account instead of doing the normal “busy work” of having to manually go in and review each keyword to decide what to pause.
There is a common theme among most of these suggestions you may have noticed:
Automation.
Google Ads is complex and can be time-consuming.
Administrative tasks can eat up a lot of time that would be better spent on things like strategy and higher-level decisions about PPC.
Take advantage of the tools Google gives you.
Test its automated bidding, review the insights and recommendations it gives you, and take the upfront time to create things that will make ongoing management a lot easier.
More resources:
Featured Image: eamesBot/Shutterstock
It feels like Google drops new AI-integrated features into its flagship ad platform, Google Ads, every month.
It doesn’t help that every other search engine also adopts AI features with their own spin.
Despite the rapid change, search marketers can use new platform updates to stay ahead of the competition and be at the forefront of search engine marketing.
Here are some unique benefits of PPC advertising:
While those are important for strategists and specialists, your CMO might not be convinced without some proof.
If you’re not advertising on search engines, you’re likely missing out by being too slow with just SEO or being too broad with just social media.
Here are just seven of the many powerful reasons to start planning for PPC in 2024:
This is often the most compelling reason to delve into PPC.
Google Ads and other search engine ad platforms come with multi-touch attribution modeling out-of-the-box, arming you with all the main marketing metrics but also enterprise-grade business intelligence metrics like Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) and Return on Ad Spend (ROAS) to impress your stakeholders with.
In the era of content marketing and thought leadership, marketers find all kinds of unique and creative calls to action (CTAs). With PPC, nearly any type of conversion can be tracked, such as:
And more if you’re up to speed with Google Tag Manager and a sprinkle of JavaScript.
Need help getting your data into Google Ads? Here’s our step-by-step guide.
Regardless of your conversion goals, Google Ads makes it easy to see the dollars going in – and, more importantly, the dollars coming out – making it easy to justify your budget to your higher-ups.
There’s no mystery behind the curtain in search engine ad platforms. With the combination of tools like Google Ads and Google Analytics, you can see your users’ journey throughout the entire funnel (while still adhering to new and upcoming privacy laws).
Thankfully, search engines collect massive amounts of data, allowing PPC specialists to match a user to a single impression, click, purchase, form fill, or phone call.
No billboard or magazine ad can attribute to sales like PPC can.
On top of this, marketers can use this data to customize their ads, landing pages, and campaigns for increased engagement and decreased wasted budget.
Here are some examples:
Even if you’re a decade behind your competitors in search, you can get a PPC campaign up and running with just a bit of research, copywriting, and button-clicking.
This is a big contrast with starting up SEO efforts, which often take a lot of time and attention to get the same positioning and traffic that PPC offers within minutes of launch.
On top of that, PPC lets you retarget very narrow audiences like your email list or very wide audiences like your website visitors.
When compared to other channels like email and organic social, you have the advantage of targeting people outside of those who are already aware of your brand.
Plus, most of the work is done within the PPC advertising platform – from the research to campaign build-out to writing ads.
You can get up and running quickly with minimal involvement of your development teams, aside from help setting up conversion tracking and any desired landing pages.
Despite the launch of a myriad of new AI and machine learning features that sacrifice granular bid adjustments in favor of growing PPC efforts at scale, platforms like Google Ads still offer account managers full control over where, when, and how they show up in Google.
With budgets tightening across the economy and search ads getting more expensive for many verticals, PPC specialists have an incentive to hone in on the keywords that produce measure return for their price point and pause or remove keywords that are unqualified, irrelevant, or simply don’t bring in an audience ready to convert quite yet.
If you see positive results, you can scale up immediately. And if you want to take a break, you can always pause and stop spending immediately.
This is hard to do with other ongoing marketing campaigns, and it gives you the advantage and budget flexibility to move quickly when necessary or desired.
Google Ads’ auction and the algorithm involved have the final say on where your ads will be positioned and what you’ll spend when compared to competitors.
The alignment of relevance between your landing pages and the keywords and ad copy can hurt or help you.
The good news is that you have the flexibility to make quick edits, optimize while your ads are running, and try new tests every day.
There’s not a long cycle from edit to deployment like you see in other mediums – and if an ad stinks, you can pull it without having to let it finish out a contracted media cycle.
Whether you have a quantity of leads goal, a ROAS goal, a spend goal, or other specific goals, you can manage toward them and track them with data that is fresh within a day.
Content marketing has taken over the digital marketing world, and content plans and calendars are the norm in most businesses now.
With the investment in producing original and unique content to support the customer buying cycle and establish thought leadership positioning, Google Ads is an engine that can drive visitors to content more quickly and improve the ROI of your content investment.
PPC and SEO work well together as the impressions and opportunities for traffic are often to the same audience – the people using Google to find information, services, or products.
The performance data of impressions, clicks, and conversions from Google Ads can provide great insight and direction on a keyword-by-keyword basis for prioritizing SEO efforts.
On the flip side, organic traffic performance data and SEO strategy can also advise PPC if the data is available.
All of this helps align with content marketing and ensures that efficiencies are gained and business end goals are not siloed.
Google Ads remarketing is a great avenue to keep site visitors engaged, regardless of how they found your site.
Remarketing ads are shown to people who visited and left your site and are based on specific rules or audiences you select.
If nothing else, remarketing can be a great place to start running PPC campaigns as well, as it is cheaper and lower in the funnel than prospecting and brand awareness steps tied to ads.
There are other cases where PPC can help provide data or an alternative to traditional direct marketing activities.
PPC can also be directly compared to traditional mail with costs per impression and conversion.
If you can shift away from more expensive traditional marketing to methods that provide real-time data and have better tracking, it can be a big win.
Many advertisers take a multi-layered approach in Google Ads to test and ensure full coverage across the networks and targeting types that can gain brand exposure.
This ranges from targeting keywords through responsive search ads to running display ads through remarketing based on their past behaviors or focusing on specific audience demographics on various display networks, such as:
By testing and trying out a mix, you can ensure the full scope of Google Ads is leveraged and that you’re getting as many impressions as possible while staying targeted to the personas in your prospective audience.
Going back to the business goals conversation, you can also see what performs best and set expectations on what the tolerance is for cost per click and cost per acquisition to compare the different targeting methods with each other.
Ultimately, the biggest benefit of the PPC targeting options available is that you are able to reach people who aren’t already in your audience, as well as those who have been exposed to your brand.
You have many options for how wide of a net you want to cast.
While there’s a lot of data and performance information directly available in Google Ads, the value of information gained goes beyond just PPC performance.
Impression, click, and conversion data for each keyword can be used to advise SEO strategy and content marketing efforts.
Beyond that, you can use the built-in keyword planner and display planner tools to find where your audience is.
You can also cross-reference where your competition is through third-party tools like SpyFu, KeywordSpy, and iSpionage to build a solid profile of what you’re up against and what market share you can gain.
Plus, you can still manually look at the search results and gain insight as to what the searcher will see.
Run your own projection to show the risk of Google Ads compared to other organic and paid traffic sources you’re currently utilizing.
By looking at what the cost will be for media, management of the campaign, and any content that must be created, you can put that cost up against what you’re currently spending for similar management and development activities in organic search, email, social, and offline marketing channels.
Additionally, you can take some simple inputs, including your current or projected conversion rate, and project with the keyword and display planner tools to see what traffic is out there.
From there, you can look at what the projection is if you were to increase by certain amounts of traffic, putting the cost of that traffic against the investment required to get it.
PPC advertising has proven to be a reliable and profitable channel for tons of B2B, B2C, nonprofits, and other companies seeking quick, quality traffic and conversions.
Considering all the benefits PPC offers, there’s little risk in testing it out to see where it can move the needle and gain a wealth of valuable data to inform your other marketing and optimization efforts.
With a little-to-no barrier to entry and incredibly measurable results in real-time, it’s always worth testing now and again to see if it can give your marketing program a much-needed boost.
As you plan for 2024 and start budget conversations with clients and higher-ups, put PPC on your channel list.
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An advertiser recently asked Ginny Marvin, the Google Ads Liaison, about an issue with seeing a high percentage of ad spend and conversions falling under “Other” search terms.
The advertiser explained that for a campaign using all exact match keywords, 80% of ad spend and 90% of conversions were attributed to “Other” search terms. Their client said these conversions seemed low quality and not ideal.
In response, Marvin explained that search queries not meeting privacy thresholds set by Google Ads are aggregated into the “Other” search terms category.
She recommended using Search Terms Insights on the Insights page, which analyzes query categories driving activity to understand performance better.
“Queries that do not meet our privacy thresholds are aggregated in within the “other” search terms line. Search Terms Insights (on the Insights page) can be helpful to better understand the query themes/categories driving activity though. The category groupings take all search terms into account, including those not included in the search terms report for privacy reasons.”
As Marvin noted, Search Terms Insights considers all search terms, including those left out of the standard search terms report, for privacy reasons. The tool groups terms based on intent and attributes to provide metrics for each category and subcategory.
As explained in a Google support page Marvin linked, Search Terms Insights helps advertisers understand how customers search for and engage with their business on Google.
The automated groupings provide key metrics without requiring advertisers to comb through individual terms, some of which are kept private.
Advertisers can view and download search terms insights anytime after March 2023 by switching to custom date ranges. The downloads contain aggregated metrics for categories and more granular data on subcategories.
Search Terms Insights are accessible in account and campaign views. This recently added capability in the Google Ads API works with Search, Performance Max, Shopping, and other campaign types.
The new insights provide advertisers with comprehensive data on all search terms, even private ones. It offers detailed breakdowns of search topics, subtopics, and key metrics.
With regularly updated data, advertisers can refine campaign targeting and creative to align with shifting interests.
Marvin’s guidance aims to help advertisers leverage Search Terms Insights to better understand the ambiguous “Other” search terms they may see in their campaign data.
Advertisers struggling with conversions attributed to “Other” terms can analyze the tool’s category groupings to understand campaign performance better.
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Google has integrated its most advanced AI model, called Gemini, into the Google Ads platform to enhance advertising performance.
According to Shashi Thakur, Vice President and General Manager of Google Ads, this integration is meant to make it easier to create ad campaigns and help ads connect better with what people are searching for online as search behavior evolves.
Gemini, which Google considers its leading AI technology, will now be used more widely across Google’s main products and services.
Applying Gemini to Google Ads is expected to be transformative, as it will enable more natural, conversational interactions that make it easier for users to create search advertising campaigns.
Thakur expressed enthusiasm about the progression, saying:
“We’ve been actively testing Gemini to further enhance our ads solutions. And, we’re pleased to share that Gemini is now powering the conversational experience. It’s the first of many Gemini integrations to come.”
The conversational tool combines advertisers’ expertise with Google’s AI capabilities. It starts with the advertiser’s website URL and uses AI to help create optimized search ad campaigns. The AI generates relevant ad content like creatives and keywords based on the site.
Google has launched the beta version of its conversational ad creation tool to English-speaking advertisers in the US and UK. The company plans to make it available globally to all English-language advertisers over the next few weeks. Support for additional languages is expected to follow.
Preliminary testing with a few advertisers has shown that conversational interactions considerably improve the quality of search advertising campaigns while decreasing the need for manual work. Ad Strength, a measurement that assesses ad copy relevance, quality, and diversity, has been a key sign of this enhancement.
Tom Foster, a Paid Search Manager at Page1, praised the new system:
“I found the conversational experience very easy to use. It helped me create even more high-quality ads with ‘Good’ or ‘Excellent’ Ad Strength, which has further improved the performance of my campaigns.”
Google is addressing the difficulty advertisers have in making engaging visual ads. Google plans to add a tool using AI to recommend images for campaigns. Advertisers will still choose final images to match their goals.
To be transparent about AI-generated content, Google will mark these images with invisible SynthID watermarks and metadata. This identifies images made by AI in Google Ads.
Stats show small businesses using conversational ad building are 42% more likely to get “Good” or “Excellent” Ad Strength scores. This matters because Ad Strength strongly predicts conversion rate. On average, conversions increase by 12% when Ad Strength goes from “Poor” to “Excellent.”
Google shares the industry’s optimism about the potential for AI to create new value for consumers and advertisers. However, Google aims to develop and deploy AI responsibly, in line with the principles for ethical AI development that the company outlined in 2018.
Advertisers and industry observers are advised to monitor Google Ads for future AI-enabled upgrades. Google also provides educational AI resources and tools for those interested in learning more about and working with AI technology today.
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Google has announced an update to its policy on inappropriate content for advertisements, aiming to better address ads running during or about sensitive world events.
The new policy will go into effect in February 2024 and more clearly define what constitutes a “sensitive event” for purposes of prohibiting certain exploitative or insensitive ads.
As per the updated policy, a sensitive event is defined as an unforeseen or unexpected situation that poses a significant risk to Google’s ability to provide high-quality, relevant information while reducing insensitive content in prominent and monetized features.
Sensitive events include those with major social, cultural, or political impact such as civil emergencies, natural disasters, public health crises, terrorism, conflict, or mass violence.
During such events, Google may take actions to address risks around misinformation, fraud, price gouging, and other predatory practices.
The updated policy provides the following examples of prohibited ads:
Google’s update to its inappropriate content policy for ads aims to strike a balance during major world events.
On one hand, the company seeks to provide access to timely information and maintain revenue streams that support online content and services. However, Google faces rising demands to limit misinformation and exploitation on its advertising platforms.
The expanded restrictions around sensitive events show Google’s continued efforts to address these issues.
For advertisers and publishers, the changing policies require close attention to stay compliant. And for users, it remains to be seen how effectively the rules curb harmful ads in the moments that matter most.
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