Your PPC account has been running for some time and you’re making a profit OK, but it’s always worth asking yourself if everything is really set up in such a way that there isn’t a significant efficiency leak.
We’ll lay out here how to check for some common, but easily missed causes for an account to secretly have much less efficiency that you have potential to actually achieve.

1 - Traffic control

If every time you push spend higher, the efficiency gets much worse (that would metrics like ROI and CPA), because sales don’t grow at anything like the pace of the spend, this is typically due to a problem with traffic control.

Traffic control is affected by 2 main elements:

• Match type share of traffic
• Intra-account cannibalization

To accurately get a feel for the true level of Exact, Phrase and Broad matching traffic, run a Search Query report and include the match type column. Count the share of traffic for each match type, if you have a minority of traffic coming through Exact match, you have a traffic control problem. You’ll need to grow exact match traffic by taking relevant and converting search queries and adding them to your account as Exact match keywords.

Cannibalization is simply where a search with which you want to trigger ad group A is inadvertently triggering ad group B. This calls for negative keywords and/or a clamp down on match types.

2 - Search Partners

What is the Search Partner Network? It’s all the non-Google sites that partner with Google to feature both on site search and web search. Often these are newspaper websites and other publisher but really it’s a range of different websites that is ever-changing.

Since ads are often displayed differently on these sites than on a Google property – different sets of ad extensions and differing numbers of ads – and because the context is not so clean as a Google SERP, the performance can and does differ on this delivery channel vs the Google Network.

Sometimes, the performance can be better but sometimes it can be substantially worse. And more than this, it can vary a surprising amount from campaign to campaign.

Whether you opt in or out of Google Search Partners is chosen at the campaign level and you should decide based on the long-term (3 months minimum) performance differential.

3 - Sitelinks

Sitelinks seem like an easy thing to get right and are often overlooked but if you do them wrong by taking traffic to bad pages that take users away from their buying route, you’re going to get some sort of hit on your efficiency.

Also, sitelinks are often not refreshed very much and you may find a dreadfully poor conversion rate on one that you should have replaced or paused a long time ago. Look at your sitelinks performance and see if there is a problem there.

4 - Falling Impression Share

It’s absolutely possible that you could see rising volumes yet falling Impression Share. Impression Share (IS) is your share of all the impressions your account was eligible for expressed as a percentage. So if you were eligible for 100,000 impressions but got 80,000, that’s an 80% IS.

On a top level, review the trend for IS and, in particular, Exact Match Impression Share. If it is falling, assess the campaign from top to bottom to understand why. Use the Auction Insights report to help too and use device segmenting to get a proper picture of the weaknesses.

Keywords that have always had rank of 4 and below will be easy to recover with higher bids, provided they have a decent Quality Score but you will need to keep a close eye them to see if they ultimately justify the higher bids.

As an aside, however, it’s always better to be losing IS due to Rank than IS due to budget. To fix the latter, either raise budgets or reduce bids.

5 - Device modifiers

You are probably aware that you can bid different amounts for Mobile Phones via upping or lowering your desktop/tablet bid by a custom percentage. However, you’ll soon be able to vary your bids by tablet, desktop and mobile.

This open an opportunity in particular to get a grip on Tablet performance, since it can often be worse than Desktop.

6 - Geography

In another example of where digging deeper can save you some unprofitable spend is running a geographical report. Analyse this data and you could find a part of the country that is draining money without returning profits. You can exclude such locations or you can simply vary your bids (by percentage) based on location so you can drive efficiency.

7 - Scheduling

Although we’re increasingly living in a 24/7 world, it’s still possible that your business doesn’t require 24/7 search ads. Ultimately, unless there’s an obvious reason that you shouldn’t run ads all the time, let the data tell you when to have live ads.

Look not only at days of the week – and, who knows, maybe there’s a totally dead day with no sign of life but, short of that, there could be clear days on which to bid less or more – but also hourly patterns within each day. This will guide to lower and raise bids and even stop ads for parts of the day that simply don’t work. It’s more likely, however, that you will nuance bids as opposed to pausing delivery.

Again, like all posts of this nature, this covers only some of the more common areas of budget or performance drain but it should help you checklist your account and help you build it up in a profitable way.

Need additional help identifying problems with your PPC? Tweet us or follow us on LinkedIn.

With Google’s Device Bid Modifier rolling out recently, you can now adjust bids for individual devices in AdWords. Previously, you could only have a set bid for Desktop and Tablets, then use a percentage of bid modifier for smartphones. Perhaps most importantly, tablet is no longer in the same category as desktop.

However, when using device bid modifiers, it can be easy to make mistakes if you don’t have data from a multichannel tracking solution.

Google already covers – to some degree – cross device tracking and some conversion attribution reporting options beyond the last click, but this still may not reveal the big picture. Why is this? Well, for one, AdWords can’t attribute across search engines, nor can it attribute beyond Google Search Ads. A customer’s journey to purchase does not just involve multiple devices these days but also multiple digital channels – SEO, Email, Remarketing etc. So you may not have the true reflection of performance without this information.

In addition, if you do not take into account the many ways a user can engage (and may be more likely to engage on a non-desktop device) with your site, you’re risking undervaluing the device spend. To actually take this into account, you need to track these engagements against your traffic.

With the introduction of a combined multichannel tracking solution you will be able to get the insight you need. You might be able to get these insights from sources like Google Analytics, but we can provide these services to you as well with our in-house multichannel attribution software.

As an example, there is received wisdom that tablet performs worse than mobile and desktop, and on the basis of last click tracking or limited cross-device tracking, this may appear to be true. But once you can see how tablet users may later visit and buy via desktop on a different search engine, you may reassess the real impact of tablet traffic on top level sales. Without this data, you can’t know for sure whether or not you are setting your bids appropriately.

Ultimately, you don’t want to dive in and slash bids without knowing the full picture. Otherwise, you may hurt yourself without realizing.

To hear more about how multichannel tracking and Bell Digital Marketing might help your digital marketing campaigns, tweet us or following us on LinkedIn.

Last month, Google announced that they will be making changes to travel and shopping for the upcoming seasons on mobile. The changes will include:

• Hotel Smart Filters: filtering by criteria like “pet-friendly” when searching for hotels.
• Hotel Deals: Hotels listing rooms at a cheaper price than usual will be labelled “Deal”
• Hotel Tips: Bits of information that may be helpful to shoppers, like the fact that moving their dates might reduce room prices.
• Flights Price Tracking: Google will let people looking to book tickets know when the price of a specific flight increases or drops.
• There will also be additional changes to shopping ads, making the overall experience more visually appealing. Merchants who pay for a premium option will be able to curate a shopping experience to their specific brand.
• The update will also allow for more global shopping as it will convert currencies for international ads on Google Shopping pages.

All of the above is powered by sponsored placements, no organic element here.
In the interests of completism, the update will also include the following changes to YouTube due to an increase in consumers researching products on the site before purchasing.

• Companion banner: An interactive banner listing similar products for sale on the side of videos.
• Product picker: Advertisers can choose which products are showcased in TrueView ads for specific campaigns

What’s the reasoning behind this?

Google continues to make ads richer and more “sticky” in order to make more money per search. Fundamentally, they are not actually incentivized to have people click on organic links. What they truly want is for (almost) every click on Google to be on an ad, to this end, they’re investing a lot in order to make the ads more useful and more appealing than an organic result. Hence, organic traffic is likely to be further eroded bit by bit.

The offshoot of this is that actually advertising, rather than being content with organic traffic, is ever more critical for a business to engage in, which serves to increase competition for those sponsored search ads and, so, raises CPCs and revenue for Google that way too.

What does this mean for the future?

As a result, SEO competitiveness is probably going to lose its centrality to digital success. Additionally, shopping feeds will need to be more fully populated with strong information to keep up with the competition, and descriptions and images need to be well made to boost CTR and so be more likely to show over your competition.

In practical terms, these new ad formats involve much more creativity and branding than such ads used to and you need to be on top of the implementation – working closely with Google – to get it right. In addition, it will take some effort to make sure all the information used for filters and descriptions are written well but also accurate. This could start to favour the major players who have the resources to put to these efforts over the smaller entities.

Should you need guidance on how to include these updates in your digital advertising plans, and want to hire us, tweet us or follow us on LinkedIn.

In an environment that is increasingly mobile-first, being present with your message to the right person at the right time as they use their mobile devices is extremely important. This includes ensuring that your GDN (Google Display Network) ads on mobile display where and when you would like for your marketing aims.

While GDN ads can be a great addition to your digital advertising campaign, they need to be carefully managed to avoid burning through budget and undermining your ROI.

The Good:

Google is introducing Responsive Display Ads, which will be able to change their dimensions and appearance in order to fit into any ad space available. It is, in part, Google’s first entry to the Native ads space but also means that your text ads may deliver in more websites on mobile devices.

Additionally, you now target mobile users demographically. This extra layer of targeting that Search Ads on AdWords are only now starting to introduce gives you a valuable extra lever to pull.

If you have an app, you can also advertise App Install ads on the GDN. This is a great way to get front and centre of retail shoppers on other apps or on a retail-related site (or a site that appeals to user in your market) and publicize your app beyond the marketplaces. You only pay for installs so fraud is relatively low compared your average display ad.

To get the maximum value of out the GDN, you will want to utilize all the ad types that make sense to you: keyword (contextual) targeting, placement targeting, remarketing, Customer Match and dynamic remarketing.

The latter 2 options represent the tightest targeting options and the rest can be very tight or be essentially as broad as you like.

Another interesting development rolling out over the next few months is that remarketing ads will have full access to the entire DoubleClick universe of ad exchanges and networks, which will give your GDN remarketing much greater reach to nearly all of the internet.

The Bad:

There are many options within the GDN that, by default are turned on and will almost certainly lose you money, so you need to be aware of them. By default your ads will delivery on:

• Adult/violent/crude sites.
• Parked domains (dormant and otherwise empty website domains that are normally only seen by the average user when they mistype a proper website URL).
• Error Pages (404 pages etc.).
• Forums – who know’s what is on them.
• Social Networks.
• In-Game ads.

It’s extremely likely you will not want to be here so do consider excluding them.

Also, your ads will deliver below the fold, and may never be seen, which you can opt out of. However, this may only be necessary if you are not paying per click or if you have a tight budget and don’t want the Impression Share of visible impressions to be affected by lots of below-the-fold impressions.

Ugly:

GDN ads can and will be able to do a lot of good for digital advertising on mobile, but it’s important to avoid the places where they won’t. For example, banner ads in apps are generally avoided by account managers because of fraud or low-quality placements. One source for the poor traffic on in-app ads is that many apps run on Android, but Android is an open source platform, meaning people can use bots to record fake clicks to raise money. Generally, it’s best to avoid standard GDN advertising in apps by following this step.

Conclusion

The GDN is getting larger in scale and increasing in complexity all the time. This represents both an opportunity but also a challenge – mistakes will cost more than they did but you have more ways to effectively drive sales and complement your other marketing through the GDN than ever before.

If you would like to hear more about the benefits and challenges associated with GDN ads, tweet us or following us on LinkedIn.

If you’re wondering what your ad may look like to search engine users, you might try searching to see it for yourself. While this feels like a fast and easy approach to knowing what your ad looks like, we’re here to tell you how this can actually be a total waste of your time.

If you want to start finding reliable information on where, how, and to whom your ads are showing, we’ve got you covered. Here are our tips for staying in the know about your ad campaigns:

Why is searching for your ad pointless?

Google and Bing personalise their ad deliveries with extreme detail, making a search result page for the same product search look drastically different from one individual to the next. If you’re running live searches, your experience may not be the same experience as someone in the same room as you.

Search engines use thousands of signals to determine what ads and organic search results to show you. These signals include search and click history, demographics such as age and gender, the type of device you are using, timing, location, the search itself (obviously!), and more.

These are just some of the many variables the search engines use that can affect the rank (prominence) of your ad, the amount of ad extensions shown with your ad and, indeed, whether your ad is chosen to be delivered at all. So running a live test search is not going to be useful to you.

Google AdWords and Bing Ads do have an ad preview feature, but because search results are so customized to the user, what you see there is not the same as what someone else will see as well.

Other elements of the Search Engine Results Page (SERP) can change for each person. Variations include:

• whether you see an embedded map.
• whether there are shopping ads (PLAs) shown.
• whether there’s a knowledge graph shown on the right side.
• whether you are shown a prominent Wikipedia result.

How can you be sure the ads are showing?

In a word: reports. Performance reports can be used to see if the ads are delivering and if they’re showing to the correct audience.

Include metrics like Impression Share, Exact match Impression Share, Impression Share Lost Due to Rank, and Impression Share Lost Due to Budget in your performance reports. These will show you everything you need to know about the ad’s impressions to see if it is showing when you expect it to.

Use “location of the user” and time segments in your performance reports to make sure you’re reaching the right people in the right places in the right moments.

To see where on the page your ad’s delivering as well as what extensions are showing, run ad extension reports and also include the “Top vs Other” segment alongside the usual Average Rank column. This will give you much more accurate picture at scale or down to the ad group level on how your ads are displaying and what is getting users to click (and convert).

Lastly, if you’re worried about how your ad is showing on mobile devices, add the Device segment in the reporting to view the delivery performance broken down by Tablet, Desktop and Mobile.

Ultimately, performance reports are the only cast-iron way to fully understand if your ad is delivering and who is seeing it.

To talk to us about consulting, account management or our tracking solutions, tweet at us or follow us on LinkedIn.

At the Google Performance Summit last month, Google Adwords announced the introduction of Expanded Text Ads (ETAs) which will allow for more characters and overall larger ads in search results. This exciting change has opened a world of opportunity for advertising, and we are eager to be a part of it.

Bell Digital is a powerful mix of PPC and digital expertise with cutting edge proprietary technology, and our multi-country presence allows us to work closely with both Google and Bing.

The new ETAs are in beta right now, and we have worked hard to allow our valued clients to be able to fully beta test this new ad version on our platform.

Today, we are pleased to announce that we are now live with ETAs and monitoring them closely. Early signs show that they may have a profound effect on performance. We’ll provide you with more information on this in a case study coming shortly.

Here at Bell Digital, we are an agency that loves innovation and learning from quality testing, so we’re very excited to be able to set up the delivery of some of the earliest ETAs in PPC. We’re looking forward to embarking on the new era of ETAs with confidence and insights before the full Google launch at the end of this summer.

If you would like to learn more about how we can help your business with ETAs, tweet at us @BellDigitalMkt or follow us on LinkedIn.

There are many companies out there who either have SEM managed by a dedicated SEM agency, or they have an agency that does all of their advertising including PPC in a separate team. If the company is managing their marketing in-house, often times PPC is still outsourced. This can lead to 2 issues in particular, because separating these areas of marketing can hinder the flow of information between them.

1 - What is PPC involved in? Search. There are only two reasons a person searches: because of their own self-generated need, or because they are being influenced to make that search (if it’s not through word of mouth, the most common other method is through marketing or advertising). If someone is managing PPC and another marketing effort (direct mail etc.) has triggered a lot of searches particularly on the brand, if they don’t know that has occurred they don’t know why people are searching. If something is happening that could affect search, the PPC manager can’t plan for it. By way of budgeting and, potentially, messaging. PPC Budgets are a hard spend ceiling so it is important to be able to have enough budget ready should a peak in spend happen. If you hit a budget ceiling, which causes ads to stop running, potential customers may end up clicking on competitor ads instead. Additionally, PPC can be used as a way of tracking the performance of offline advertising. If you guide people to perform a certain search, you can have an online ad ready that is related to the offline one – not just regarding ad copy but also the landing page(s).

2 - If your marketing channels are isolated, this can also lead to a broken conversion path. Sometimes, mainly for big ticket decisions, people can make over a dozen visits to a website before they convert. All it takes is one contradictory advertisement or weak customer experience between channels to break a conversion path, causing them to take their business elsewhere.

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Why is PPC so important?

PPC is the main beneficiary from other marketing sources offline and online because one way or another, in some stage of the research and buying process search is very often involved. From a logistical point of view, it’s important to know how to assign money to PPC and other channels in order to avoid the budget issues described above. From a sales perspective, it’s important to embed PPC into your whole strategy.

In addition to complimenting offline campaigns, PPC is a good way of selling apps. This is because you can have app extensions within ads that link to the app store. If you have an app and you want to sell it or if it is the centre of your business, use PPC to promote it even if your main source of income is from within the app. This will undoubtedly become a more usual part of the app maker’s landscape with Apple introducing a sponsored result spot on their App Store search results.

For offline sales, having buy-in from both the higher ups in the business and the offline areas is important for being able to cross-reference offline sales with online ads. Local inventory ads are the most direct way PPC can influence sales within physical stores, allowing viewers to find the product they are looking for before they make the trip there.

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How do you monitor all this properly?

The best way is to utilise multi-channel tracking – such as ESV Analytics – which can absorb marketing spend numbers, attribute sales beyond the last click and factor in offline sales and revenue.
If you’re set on having a marketing strategy as successful as Paul McCartney’s career, tweet us or follow us on LinkedIn for guidance.

When it comes to text ads, a small amount of extra screen space used can have a great impact on your paid search success. We’ve compiled a list of ways you can maximise the success of your text ads by using this space carefully and to your advantage.

Google and Bing make their money through ads, so they are incentivised to drive traffic to ads on the SERP (Search Engine Results Page). Google, in particular, has done this through making the ads larger. They have increased the width of their ads, and they announced longer versions of Google text ads last month that will become the norm by the fall. When you combine these changes with the huge array of ad extensions available to advertisers, it’s apparent that organic search results are getting more and more squeezed out of the space on the SERP. It’s incumbent on advertisers to maximise their own space usage by employing all applicable ad extensions on both Adwords and Bing.

Get to know the range of Ad Extensions available and how you can use them:

1 Sitelink Extensions: blue links or extra enhanced sitelinks beneath the title so potential buyers can visit your site.

2 Extended Sitelinks: Allow advertisers to add description text to sitelinks, which often increases your CTR (Click Through Rate).

3 Call Extensions: displays your phone number so people can call your business.

4 Seller Ratings: ratings for your business that appear automatically. Make sure your company name is the same on all Google review sites so that appears correctly.

5 Callout Extensions: Descriptive text that tells people what your business does. For example, ‘free shipping’, ‘international delivery’, ‘PC and Mac’, and so on.

6 App Extensions: link to your app in the app store so users can download it.

7 Location Extensions: includes a link to your location in Google Maps, allowing people to find your business with ease.

8 Previous Visits: shows the person searching if he or she has been to the site before. (Automatic)

9 Structured Snippets: List relevant options so users can see the range of your offering – different depending on your industry vertical (e.g. Hotel locations, product categories etc.).

10 Google introduces these ad extensions because it increases the CTR average, which is a key component in quality score. This should allow for more traffic at a lower cost per click, which should get more conversions because this means more traffic, due to the CTR, with a higher intent to buy because users are better qualified.

If you would like more information on how you can maximise your ad real estate, tweet us or follow us on LinkedIn.