Category: PPC

Google’s Performance Summit

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Hold onto your seats, because Google just made considerable changes to the way they create your ads. On Tuesday during the Google Ads & Analytics Innovations Keynote, Google speakers announced that they will be adopting a “mobile first” strategy, anchoring advertising strategies in mobile instead of on desktop computers and laptops. If you’re wondering how this may affect you and your digital marketing strategy, read on for the important changes announced and what you need to know about them:

The Google Rationale:

“Shift to mobile has happened” – more mobile searches made than on other devices last year.

They summarise the new environment of fast and easy searching and browsing with smartphones as “micro-moments” – essentially encapsulating intent with context (what do I want to do, where am I and what device am I using).

Google collects data from over 1bn users in each of their products (Youtube, Search, Gmail, Maps, Android etc.). That’s 1bn x 7! In Analytics alone, they collect over 500bn site interactions per day.

Google is, therefore, on the basis of the analysis of this huge data-set, going “Mobile first” – Mobile is the starting point from Google Analytics and AdWords perspective.

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Google is introducing expanded text ads:

Expanded text ads, one of the most prominent changes Google announced, are mobile-optimized ads that are designed to help you maximize the success of your advertisement in a mobile-first environment. Some of the new features and changes within this area are:

1. 50% more ad space and a more eye-catching headline size to feature your product.

2. The previous, single headline 25-35-35 character limit has been changed to a new, two headline 30-30-80 limit.

3. There will be changes to the Display URL to incorporate path fields, allowing 2 fields of 15 characters each (e.g. www.website.com/field1/field2).

4. The display URL field has been removed, and Google now extracts the domain automatically from the final URL.

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What’s in it for you?

1. Advertisers can control the new second headline.

2. The platform is more conducive to longer, creative messaging.

3. There is a clear landing page within every ad.

4. There is up to a 20% CTR uplift to existing text ads depending on each advertiser and how the individual account is set up.

5. The experience is optimized for mobile, an increasingly important platform today.

6. There is an additional line over existing text ads.

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Google AdWords:

1. Demographic targeting for search ads.

2. They are introducing similar audiences for search, which focuses on searchers who have not been to your site but with the same characteristics as visitors on your remarketing lists.

3. Device bid adjustments allow you to anchor your main keyword bids to a certain device of your choice and use percentage adjustments for the other 2 devices.

4. More ad format testing is coming for industry verticals.

5. In-store tracking via GPS – they claim over 99% accuracy.

6. Completely rebuilt UI for AdWords with easier navigation to key targeting options and insightful overview charts.

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Changes to the Google Display Network:

1. Google is now creating native ads for you within the GDN once you enter the headline, image, description, and URL.

2. The program does the heavy lifting for you, customizing the displayed layout for each device, website or app.

3. Google is extending the reach of GDN campaigns with access to cross-exchange ad inventory. Much broader reach on remarketing than just the Google Display Network.

4. Lastly, Google is introducing Individual bid adjustments for each device type.

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Changes to Google Maps:

1. More relevant ads within google maps.

2. There are now promoted Pins with promo text and customizable business pages in Google Maps.

3. As an expansion of Local Inventory Ads already available, customers can now view local inventory and search within it to find what they need before they visit the store.

Much of these changes are rolling out over the next 12 months, but you will want to be ready to go as soon as possible.

If you would like an expert’s opinion on how Google’s changes will affect your marketing strategy, tweet at us @ESV_Digital_UK or follow us on LinkedIn.

Text Display Ads

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Most users of AdWords – Account Managers or your in-house PPC person/team – will not only manage search and shopping ads but also Google Display Network (GDN) ads.

In a world of large and complex accounts, it’s a seductively easy approach to simply reuse search ads for the text versions of GDN ads (you can use banners as well but you always need text ads for sites that don’t use banners). But, much like it’s easy to save money by buying a $1 ticket for a Megabus rather than flying from Chicago to New Orleans, the compromise on performance maybe be more than you should go for.

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What’s the difference?

During the time that Internet users are browsing the web, they will come across display ads within the sites they use. While a customer may not be actively searching for your product, they may, if the ad is interesting enough, click to check out your company or, at the very least, may hopefully remember your brand after seeing your ad and act on this awareness when they are in the market later.

Display ads in text form are also shown within mobile apps – particularly on Android when it comes to GDN – you may have seen them and been suitably annoyed as they get in the way of your gaming enjoyment! This particular forum for ads, however, is better suited to awareness than driving sales.

Display ads can, unlike search ads, be targeted to certain sites, and certain demographics. Both types of ads, however, can target remarketing audiences specifically (prior visitors to your site).

A Search ad, on the other hand, is very much an answer to an inquiry. So the user is not only expecting to see a relevant ad but is wanting to act on a relevant and compelling result (ad) from the moment they type in their search. Also, search ads are incentivized by Google to include the keyword that has been bid on within the ad copy, and so this can affect how its creative is structured.

In addition, a search ad can have numerous “ad extensions”, which give you much more scope to further your messaging and provide a variety of ways for a user to engage with your ad (call, view a review, click on a deep sitelink etc.) than is possible with a display ad.

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Dos and Don’ts

Don’t…

#1 …just copy text wholesale from your search ads to GDN campaigns.

#2 …have only one text ad per ad group – you should A/B test.

#3 …use the same ad copy across the board.

#4 …be overly pushy on telling users to “buy now” unless there is a limited time sale.

#5 …worry about the quality score – there isn’t one!

#6 …target the whole web and hope for the best – for sales, often best to exclude mobile apps and use many of the possible exclusions available in AdWords – also consider using negative keywords so you won’t show on a page mentioning content you don’t want to show with.

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Do…

#1 …include special offers, sales, or discount prices.

#2 …write headlines designed to catch the eye – “quirky” text or something to initially grab attention before explaining your offering in the description part.

#3 …include a call-to-action – should be explicit and can be softer than “buy now” like “learn more”.

#4…review your ads’ Relative CTR (this is a useful competitive metric and the higher this is, the lower your CPC (Cost per Click) should be).

#5 …customise your message to the audience – geographically, demographically and their known behaviour on the site (customers or not yet customers, what product they last looked at and so on).

#6 …customise the message to the site you are targeting – if targeting a certain site in a campaign.

Hopefully, this will give you pointers to refresh and grow your GDN campaigns efficiently.
If you need experts to help guide your text display ad strategy, tweet at us @ESV_Digital_UK or follow us on LinkedIn.

What Type of Geo-Targeting To Use and When

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If you are either a small, local business or a multinational conglomerate, it will always be necessary to organise your marketing, including digital marketing, by geography. However, with digital marketing, you can nuance and refine this essential plank of marketing strategy to an enormous degree. In basic terms, location targeting helps advertisers focus efforts on the physical location where they can find the most profitable customers, and restrict their ads in areas where they don’t. This helps advertisers grow and reach where it matters to them and in turn helps them increase their ROI.

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You can use the varying geo-targeting features in the likes of Google AdWords and Bing Ads to do one of two main things:

Bid different percentages of your default bids for certain locations (lower or higher bids)
Target certain locations exclusively, which normally involves dedicated ad creativity.

In addition, when planning how you want to geo-target your campaigns, you will want to ask yourself what your intended audience is doing in a certain location (at home? Commuting to work?) and on what device. You’ll also want to relate this to your advertised offering – pizzas or insurance, for instance.
A user on a mobile device is less likely to be seeking delivery of shoes than a shoe store near them, for example, whilst a PC user searching for shoes is probably in the market for delivery.

Unmistakably, “local search” is becoming a hot trending marketing topic mainly because of the continuing rise of mobile device use and better mobile network reach.

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Also, local searchers are more likely to take action. Here’s proof (advertise.bing.com):

Four in five consumers conduct local searches on search engines across PC, tablet and mobile devices.
Three out of four mobile, and two out of three PC/tablet searches, result in a purchase by customers coming into brick-and-mortar stores.
Sixty-seven percent of smartphone users and 72% of PC/tablet users want ads customized to their location such as city or zip code.

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Search Engines offer the following ways to target users by location:

ZIP code targeting: Conveniently specify your target region by ZIP code (U.S. only) and see a clear map of the targeting area.

Radius targeting: Target by radius and set range in miles or kilometres. Recent upgrades allow radius targeting from 1 to 500 miles or 1 to 800 km in increments of 1 mile/km.

Intent or interest targeting: Target those searching for or viewing your ads in regions that you select. For example, an advertiser may want to serve ads only to San Francisco searchers who are looking for Seattle hotel information, rather than those who live in Seattle.

Location Extensions: Display your store address, phone number and directions directly in your ads. It’s proven to have increased user engagement and ad click-through rate by up to 33 percent.

Geographic location report: This newly redesigned report show you exactly which location type — like Physical Location or Location of Interest — was used to serve your ad, giving you a more detailed view of how your location targeting is performing.

Don’t forget, you can always capture location intent of a user with their search term (“tire shops in San Antonio”) in addition to the above.

So the takeaway is that you can target users wherever you want and give them an ad that messages to them based on their location. They will then know what to do next in order to become a customer of yours.

Need experts to guide you in your geo-targeting strategy, tweet at us @ESV_Digital_UK or follow us on LinkedIn.

Overseas PPC 101

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If your business has an international footprint, it makes sense to market internationally. Implementing online marketing is, due to its nature, logistically easy to do from a computer at a desk here in the UK, but this will only work if the strategy and tactics match each market. There are many elements to consider that you might think – it’s not just as easy as translating your UK ad campaigns and expecting great results.

The International Environment

The international landscape is extremely dynamic. Global consumers join the e-commerce world every day. According to Internet World Stats, Africa and Asia have the fastest growing online populations from 2000 to 2015 (7,000% and 1,000% respectively).

Before launching an international PPC campaign, advertisers should be aware that sometimes AdWords is not the predominant ad serving service in a specific country. Yandex is the “Google” of Russia, for example, whilst China is dominated by Baidu and South Korea is covered by Naver. In other markets, the search engine landscape is different in other ways, some countries prefer Yahoo over Google, some almost ignore Bing and Yahoo and favour of a massive domination of Google and so on.

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Tips

After doing the PPC research of the international landscape, you should be aware of the quirks that come with translating an ad from one language to another. For example, each Spanish-speaking South American country has their own colloquialisms for a variety of terms – using them in ads and customising keyword lists is important.

The messaging of the Ad Text is important to nail, but a lot of the attention should be paid towards the translation of Keywords. As we know, PPC campaigns revolve around the selection of the right keywords, making an international campaign research of the utmost importance. The value of using native speakers to translate from English, as we do at our agency, can reap huge rewards you would never know you’re missing if using automated or basic word-for-word translation.

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Be “Local”

Launching an international PPC campaign can be difficult and require a lot of research, but some will be happy to know that a typical PPC budget goes much farther in foreign markets than it does in the UK market. Emerging e-commerce markets like China, Russia, India and Brazil typically have lower keyword competition meaning your ad campaign will cost less too.

The extent to which even neighbouring countries can differ – and how knowing as much as you can about how each country ticks – is explored in my blog post from 2012 published here.

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International Pay Per Click at ESV Digital

Tracking internationally across multiple domains and channels can be overwhelming but our multi-channel platform was developed to collect extensive information on all marketing touch points between the users and your brand, regardless of how many sites or markets you target. You can monitor both visits, clicks & views (ad-centric data) and information on website user behaviour (site-centric data). This feature allows ESV Analytics to incorporate a measure of engagement into our unbiased algorithm for ‘best in class’ accuracy. Since our technology was developed in-house, we can tailor it to your needs. We are constantly investing in the research and development that provides us an edge over our competitors.

We are a flexible international organization that can mirror your own, whether you are looking for local contacts or a centralised organization. Our team of Google AdWords and Bing Ads certified experts have up-to-the-minute industry knowledge and are experts at optimising PPC campaigns. Our Account Management team can dive into the conversion funnel to get full insight into the true value of each of your marketing efforts. We know the international digital advertising landscape because we have international management experience for global campaigns in over 45 countries and 20 different languages.

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Conclusion

There are real opportunities for profitable growth internationally, if you do it right, but it isn’t logistically the easiest move for many companies. This is where the value of outsourcing to seasoned experts becomes starkly apparent and can rapidly have your campaign competing strongly with the local players quicker than trying to learn as you go.

Have an international digital advertising campaign that needs help addressing cultural variations? Contact us on contact_uk@esvdigital.com or follow us on LinkedIn or Tweet at us!

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Customer Lifetime Value

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Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) is one of the most important metrics for shaping your customer acquisition strategy. CLV gives advertisers the big picture beyond just a last-click and first sale model that many e-commerce operations work to analyse.

Specifically, CLV is a prediction calculation of the net profit attributed to the entire future relationship with a customer or the known revenue value of customers since their first purchase fitting different user profiles from which one can derive an average. CLV is also an important business concept because it encourages companies to shift their focus from profits and revenue on a single sale to developing long-term customer relationships.

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How do you calculate Customer Lifetime Value?

The most basic way to calculate CLV is to take the revenue you earn from a customer (or cohort of customers) and subtract the money spent on acquiring and serving them.

The total average is from dividing the total net revenue (after the costs of acquiring customers) by the number of customers.

Because you as a business are, via CLV, looking at the full value of acquiring each user, you can have more room to push bids and budgets for new users in the knowledge of how many times they are likely to buy and how much revenue you will probably get from them over time.

Using this metric and your collected user data from both internal and other analytics sources, you can slice and dice this collated information in many ways for extremely useful insights such as:

What product, when bought by a new user, tends to be linked to a high CLV?
What coupons bring you the highest CLV customers?
What times of day or days of week yields users with the highest CLV?
What geographies bring the highest CLV customers?
What channels are involved in the most repeat buyers?
How well do remarketing ads to existing customers work and through what channel (email, display, search etc.)?

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What does CLV mean to Multi-Channel Attribution?

A lot of money is spent on a range of advertising channels by medium-to-large businesses and much of it is being delivered to people who have already been customers. Determining what such customers have seen prior to repeat buying is as valuable as knowing what new customers have encountered before becoming a customer.

Through this tracking of both online and offline advertising and sales, multi-channel attribution can help you accurately determine the customer lifetime value. If you track offline sales too, this extra data could lead to higher budgets on certain marketing channels because users who shop both offline and online are likely to have a higher CLV.

ESV Analytics, our multi-channel attribution and analytics tool can help you track users across devices and channels through combining their interactions with your website and messaging data with both online and offline sales to give you as complete CLV picture.

If you want to know more about CLV and how we construct that picture for our customers, let us know! Follow us on LinkedIn or Tweet at us!

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How To: Remarketing Lists For Search Ads (RLSA)

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Users often (about 95% of the time) do not convert on initial contact with a website, instead, they do their proper research and return several times before they convert. As advertisers, we have the opportunity to continue to message such users to encourage more returns and, hopefully, faster purchasing decisions. We can do this via both Display retargeting but also in Search Ads.

Search retargeting can be done through implementing remarketing lists for search ads (RLSA). RLSA is a Google AdWords feature that lets an advertiser either customise search ads campaigns for users who have previously visited a site, and tailor ads to these visitors when they’re searching on Google or bid more or less for such users and even exclude such users entirely (and there are reasons why you would do that).

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Remarketing Lists for Search Ads are useful for:

Delivering special deal messages to previous (non-converting) visitors and catering these deals and messages even to the last product they looked at.
Excluding prior visitors (or prior converters) from seeing Brand ads, if your priority for paid search is to prospect for new visitors.
Delivering custom messaging to users depending on how recently they visited and if they never visited.
Provide loyalty-related deals in ads to users who have bought within a certain time frame.

RLSA is so exciting because an advertiser can set bids, create ads, or select keywords that align the previous user’s behaviour. Remarketing lists for search ads use remarketing lists to enable these behaviour-based customizations.

Check out this great Youtube Webinar from Google AdWords that covers, in detail, how to launch an RLSA campaign.

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RLSA leverages the fact that you, as an advertiser, know one crucial detail: this user has expressed interest in a product on our website. Below are several tips for improving an RLSA campaign:

Increase RLSA ROI by bidding higher for new keywords. Focusing on keywords that either new or not yet in the top position will provide an advertiser with greater campaign performance because conversions can be driven by ads targeted to past site visitors. RLSA allows advertisers to adjust bids for those customers that have been to your website before, and bid aggressively for these visitors. When ads are targeted to past site visitors, choosing a broader keyword match type can help an advertiser improve overall campaign performance since it drives volume with less risk (RLSA volume is heavily dependent on how many visitors your site gets in the first place, of course).
Remember audiences can be sliced and diced, included and excluded. You can combine your Google Analytics data on new vs returning visitors against your AdWords account data. This will help you decide if you want to include or exclude prior visitors or if it’s useful to bid up on an audience in a certain campaign that has seen a certain part of your site or left your site at a certain stage in the shopping cart procedure. You can subdivide audiences by location, how recently they visited, how recently they bought, how much they spent, the AOV of the product the last bought, and more.
Tailor your ad text to your past site visitors. Keeping content fresh and enticing will lead past site visitors to return and enter the conversion process. These ads should highlight new products, recent deals, and offers to people who visited your site before, or an advertiser can even tailor ads based on recent product lines visitors have viewed.
Combining RLSA with Countdowns Using the countdown feature in your ads along with exclusively targeting past visitors can boost CTR and conversion rates massively. Most offers are time-limited so you can highlight this with the Countdown feature described here.
Use data. As always, it is important to capture and analyse data gained from any ad campaign. This is especially important when it comes to RLSA campaigns as there are generally higher conversion rates. You need to be a position to raise or lower bids based on the audience performance so data is a vital component.

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Conclusion

RLSA is a powerful embellishment to the AdWords platform and gives you much more ability to focus on the needs and intent of the user much more – it opens the door to custom landing pages, customer offers, custom bids and, generally, more control.

If you want to know how we might implement an RLSA strategy for your business, let us know! Follow us on LinkedIn or Tweet at us!

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Catering to the 3 Main Types Of Devices in PPC: Tablet

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This is our third and final instalment of our three-part blog series on PPC device types: desktop, tablet, and mobile. We have looked at areas like bid management, ad types, messaging of ads, ad extensions, landing page design, and understanding Search Engine Results Page (SERP) layout differences. In this segment, we will cover the Tablet and how optimising ads to these devices is more complicated than the Desktop or Mobile.

Tablets may have a screen size comparable to a desktop but with the added convenience of mobility. Search Engines have moved to treat tablets as essentially the same as Desktop devices – like Desktops with touch screens – but often the performance does not reflect such parity. This lack of the ability to target tablets separately is a big challenge for advertisers. Nonetheless, below are some industry tips on how to take into account the Tablet user when setting PPC campaigns.

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Best Performance Tips: Tablet

Tablets are a perfect compromise between desktop speed and screen size, and the mobility/connectivity of mobile phones. Tablet users rarely use them outside – like desktops/laptops – but, due to how easy it is to pick them up and browse in a couple of seconds, they’re used for more casual research on products. Tablets are often used in times of relaxation for users like at a coffee shop, restaurant, in addition to lounging on their couch or in bed. This context helps to explain why tablet performance in terms of sales or conversions may seem weaker than desktop and even mobile. But the key is that these visits and engagements with your brand and messaging should lead to sales – even if not on this device.

Tablet bidding

Currently, only Bing offers bid variations for tablets – you can bid -20% to +300% of the standard bid, which at least gives you some room to manoeuvre when tablet performance differs from Desktop.

Ensure Tablets do not get the Desktop website layout

A touchscreen is so different as an interface from a mouse-led one on Desktop that presenting easily tappable links and options in the interface is crucial. Tablet users will dislike typing more than on other devices, so if you can, try to limit typing elements to the sales process.

On-the-go Users

Tablet users have the ability to use their devices away from the home or work environment much like laptop users, who are classified under the “desktop” device users. Unlike laptops, tablet devices are much easier to use on open WiFi spots such as public transport, coffee houses and restaurants. Some tablets can even connect to the mobile data network meaning that they can go online in any location if they have a good enough mobile phone signal. Such users can be targeted for Local Inventory Ads (discussed in Part 2: Mobile) and click-to-call extensions can also be acted on.

Since you cannot exclude tablets, nor bid directly on them in Google, nor write dedicated ads, the main area over which you have control is the user experience on your site (or your app) and in this area, you have total control. You should use analytics data to improve conversion rates on your site but you also need cross-device data to help you get a full picture. Our multi-channel platform can track cross-device traffic using a mixture of IP address matching and signed-in users (users who log into a client’s site on multiple devices). Such data with reference to tablets is not enormously actionable for advertising but can be very useful for testing improvements to your site user experience.

Need advice on how to start targeting tablet users? Send us an email at contact_uk@esvdigital.com.

Catering to the 3 Main Types Of Devices in PPC: Mobile

Mobile is huge. As we know from “Mobilegeddon”, there is no denying the power that mobile has over an advertiser’s target audience because these users are incorporating smartphone devices into their lives more with each passing day. Serving ads to these mobile users can make all the difference to persuading them to convert on your site, whether it’s on their desktop or not.

This is our second instalment of our three-part blog series on PPC device types: desktop, tablet, and mobile. We will look at areas like bid management, ad types, messaging of ads, ad extensions, landing page design, and understanding Search Engine Results Page (SERP) layout differences. In this segment, we will discuss mobile, how it has changed the PPC landscape, and how you can get the most out of the opportunity it presents.

Best Performance Tips: Mobile

Mobile Preferred Ads

Mobile Preferred Ads is a Google Adwords ad format that allows you to cater your messages to smartphones. Using a Mobile Preferred Ads improves your rank in AdWords auctions as long as you customize the Call-To-Action to the mobile user (e.g. “Call or go online”) and have a mobile-friendly landing page. In addition, advertisers can separately test mobile landing pages from desktop versions and utilise mobile-specific URLs (e.g. m.buywidgets.com) to trunk the traffic to the right experience for their device.

App Promotion Ads

If you have a mobile app to promote that you’re excited about, you can target the most appropriate keywords with App Promotion ads. These take users to their phone OS’s app store (Apple or Android) – and to the exact page of the store for your app so it can be immediately downloaded – instead of your website. You should use this carefully based on your company goals but it is a great way of promoting an app that could be a central revenue stream for your business whilst running different ads for desktop users.

Mobile-Centric User Experience

Just because someone doesn’t convert on their mobile device doesn’t mean they are not motivated, through research, to ultimately make a purchase. From our previous blog about Desktop users, we know that many mobile site visitors will initiate their researching process on their mobile device when they have some downtime, but they will continue and possibly follow through with a conversion on a desktop. However, the needs of a user that is willing to convert on their mobile device can also be quite different from a desk-bound, physically static user. For example, a user is searching for “Chinese food San Diego”, if they searched on a PC would probably be interested in ordering for delivery, whilst a mobile user is more likely to be out and about already and looking for a restaurant to go to or a carry out option and, in this case, proximity to them is very important. Also, the conversion experience on a mobile site must be conducive to the fact that to navigate, one must prod the screen with one’s finger rather than using a mouse or touchpad. So easily tappable buttons and options are a must. A click-to-call phone number makes a big difference too, both as an ad extension but also on your site.

Call Only Campaigns

This is an option that sometimes works and sometimes doesn’t but is, nevertheless, a custom mobile ad form that, crucially, does not require a website in order for you to use it. You write a normal text ad for search in these campaigns but the only action a user can perform is to call your business. Calls tend to convert at a much better rate than clicks, so this could be very useful for you, but much more so if you have no website – or not one from which you can generate conversions.

Local Inventory Ads

We cover this in more depth in this blog post but these are terrific if you have a network of stores and want to close sales to people searching on their phones for items that you sell. You can offer what is, in real-time, available in their local store, minutes away, and have them buy online but pick it up immediately.

Ad Extensions

Ad extensions are incredibly important for mobile PPC campaigns as they are to desktop PPC campaigns. Ad extensions allow you to either add a clickable phone number so users can call you directly, add a location link so users can immediately get directions to your business, and add sitelinks to link to specific pages on your site. Because the layout of SERPs on mobile phones is now biased towards the sponsored ads, if you use extensions, you get to dominate even more screen real estate and potentially boost your CTR. Indeed, not using such extensions can cause Google to charge you more for clicks.

How ads are shown on Google on the Mobile View:

Users typically have more than one device type and use them interchangeably every day: research from the Multi-Screen World Research report of 2012 found that 90% of online consumers who own multiple devices switch between them to accomplish different types of tasks. This illustrates the importance of creating an organized and targeted user experience across various devices – especially mobile.
In the screenshot below you can see how dominated by the ads the SERP can be on a phone. You’ll see only ads here, with 2 mobile-specific ads, one of which has a click-to-call link and a third ad that seems not especially mobile-focused.

Conclusion

There is significantly more to targeting mobile users, but this article serves to provide you with a grounding in the core differences, strengths and opportunities mobile marketing offers businesses. Mobile traffic (and the share of traffic that is on mobile devices) is continuing to grow exponentially so not being there is no longer an option. If you’re looking to take your mobile marketing strategy to the next level, send us an email at contact_uk@esvdigital.com.

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Catering to the 3 Main Types Of Devices in PPC: Desktop

Pay Per Click (PPC) has changed a lot over the recent years due to the growth of non-desktop devices like tablets and smartphones, and how users of these choose to interact with online ads.

This is our first instalment of our three-part blog series on PPC device types: desktop, tablet, and mobile. We will look at areas like bid management, ad types, messaging of ads, ad extensions, landing page design, and understanding Search Engine Results Page (SERP) layout differences.

Understanding how important it is to cater to users of all devices will help any advertiser to be successful in the PPC world; however, one should not forget about the traditional PPC device type: the desktop user. In the past month, Google has announced a major change to the ad layout on search engine result pages. More on this later in this post.

Best Performance Tips: Desktop

Notwithstanding, with this new update coming into effect, it is important to remember the ways you can ensure a PPC campaign can be successful in engaging desktop users by using the following tips.

Screen Size Advantage

Desktop computers and some laptops have larger screens, of course, than tablets and smartphones, which provides a larger display field for content. This means that more organic results will be visible on a 1080p screen, and the bigger the screen and higher the resolution, this only increases. So Desktop ads need to be more attractive due to this relatively lower prominence. In addition, Desktop ads tend to have more “bells and whistles” like social extensions, review extensions and more shopping ads simply because there is more space and you are not using your fingers to navigate – using a mouse means more links can be provided.

Online Consumers Use Their Desktop to Complete Purchases

Although mobile users are rising and every website now must be responsive to screen size, there is still a segment of online shoppers who prefer to complete their purchases on a desktop screen. According to an infographic published at Crazy Egg, 56% of customers researched a product on a smartphone, mobile or tablet and then made a purchase from their computer. So when writing ads for Desktop and when designing your landing page, you might try more “closing” messages to link into the greater likelihood that the user is ready to buy. In other words, less usage of “explore”, “learn” and “find” type calls to action and more “order”, “get” and “buy” terms.

Use Ad Extensions

Ad extensions show extra information (“extending” your text ads) about your business and offering (AdWords). Features such as Call Out Extensions and Sitelinks give you a tremendous opportunity to differentiate your offering from the competition and to qualify your traffic. It is widely known that Ad Extensions increase an ad’s CTR and, because of this, they also contribute to the Google Quality Score. If you’re not currently using Ad Extensions, you’re likely to be paying too much for clicks on both desktop and mobile.

Understand how your customers will use the device

When a user is searching on a desktop or laptop computer, they’re less physically mobile than a mobile user and, therefore, less likely to want instant, in-person commercial gratification. So, if you are a pizza store, a desktop user is most likely to want a pizza delivery rather than go to a store for pickup, whilst a mobile user is more likely to want to drop in and pick food up. And so, the calls to action in the ad and landing pages should reflect this.

Remarketing is possible on Desktop

The normal cookie method of remarketing to desktop devices doesn’t work so well on mobile devices so you can use remarketing audiences in your targeting in the knowledge that mobile device users are not likely to be included.

How ads are shown on Google on the Desktop View:

As mentioned before, the Desktop view often has more real estate than tablets and smartphones.

Google recently dropped the side text ads from Desktop – to match Tablet and Mobile – and now reserve the right side space, in terms of ads, for shopping ads only. So now we have a maximum of 4 ads above organic results, plus a number of shopping ads to the right (depending on the search) plus 3 ads at most at the bottom of the search page.

One upside of this update is that your text ads will be more prominent than before and they won’t be lost amongst a sea of other, often similar, ads dominating the page. But the top 4 places will be more competitive so Quality Score (which determines rank and CPC and is based on tightly matching the ad copy to the keyword and how competitive the CTR is on each search) is more important than ever to enable you to compete without breaking the bank.

Medium or large enterprise and need help defining your PPC Desktop campaign goals? Send us an email at contact_uk@esvdigital.com.