Google recently noted that they would be doing automatic conversion of AdWords accounts to their “enhanced” campaign accounts. The enhanced conversion will happen to all accounts in the middle of 2013, yet became available for advertisers who wish to upgrade early in the middle of February. As for the look, visually it has the same look/feel as the previous while providing some additional features.
Specifically they have focused their changes on mobile:
- Multi-device marketing – allows one to set a different bid amount for mobile devices such as tablets, phones, etc.
- Context matters – Context can be served up based upon one’s location, time of day, and device.
- Measurement needs – designed to assist you in tracking conversions across devices.
Okay, so back in October of 2012 I wrote a post about how to set up an AdWords campaign, and then followed this by an initial 2-week assessment post. Since then I have given AdWords some months to see how the campaign would fare over time, especially in consideration of the “automatic bidding” feature that I had set into place.
In case you hadn’t read the previous posts, or need a refresher, I started with $100 AdWords credit. Since then I have received approx. 5 clicks per month on my text Ad, with a cost variance of .99 to $3.47 (avg. was $2.51). If you are unclear on the auto-bid feature, in essence, you set a daily amount you are willing to spend, for me this was $3.00. An Ad is shown so long as its cost placement is within your daily budget and there are no other Ads with a higher bid amount per the number of Ad spots available in a given day. The fact that one of my bids exceeded my maximum daily bid amount is based upon the average daily amount in relation to the monthly amount.
As Google notes:
“While the cost of your campaign can be 20% above your daily budget on any given day, AdWords uses a monthly charging limit. As long as your budget is consistent for an entire month, you won’t be charged more than your daily budget multiplied by the average number of days in a month, which is 365 days in a year ÷ 12 months or 30.4 days/month.”
So to be clear, the higher your daily bid amount the greater likelihood your Ad will come up in a search based upon the parameters you’ve set in place in your campaign.
If you refer to my previous post on setting up an AdWords Campaign – https://www.ecurtisdesigns.com/2012/09/setting-up-a-google-adwords-campaign/ I’ve shown you how to create a “new campaign”, select campaign settings, select locations, set up the bidding and budget, add extensions, create ad group, select the keywords, and the final account set up options.
The challenging part for most people will be defining the locations to target and selecting the best keywords. For location, I would suggest targeting those cities which should be your customers, yet for whatever reason you aren’t getting business from. From a web design perspective most sites will be targeted for the primary city nearest the business location, and while designers would like to be able to target other cities as well, this is typically not easy to do effectively when there is a good deal of established competition. You can learn more about keyword targeting on my SEO related blog posts.
For example, my web design business targets Sacramento (as does most of my client websites since we sell locally) so we all do very well in Sacramento related listings. Yet what about Elk Grove, Citrus Heights, Folsom, etc? For my site, I do come up in these related cities since my website has been online for several years and my ranking is high enough; yet rarely do I rank at the very top for them. Of course I want to target for these as well, yet the reality is that one can only optimize for location in a limited number of ways, and by trying to optimize for several cities can lower your ranking in your primary city since you’ve decreased the keyword density ratio. Since most people will search for a local business using their specific city name small business owners need a viable way to target those nearby cities. With AdWords your site now has a potential of coming up in a search query as a city/region targeted Ad.
My advice is that if you are already coming up at the top in the organic searches for a city, then exclude this city from the location in your campaign. It makes no sense to display an Ad to a group that is already seeing your listing.
Keyword selection is the other area that most people find challenging. Google AdWords will provide you lots of suggestions, and some are good, yet most are too generalized.
My suggestion is to first do some research about the most common queried words in your general location for your specific business type. I note this since people in California will typically use different words to search for the same thing than people will in other states. In this regard you can use Google’s free Keyword Selection Tool, which is a part of AdWords (found under “Tools and Analysis”). This tool is a great option whether you’re using AdWords or not. In short it provides suggestions based upon your keywords or phrases, a website URL, or a category. The advanced filter options allows you to select by location, language, devices. The “new” feature from the enhanced option is to provide keyword ideas based upon the “Ad Group”.
Okay, so going back into campaigns, select your campaign name, then your Ad group name and you’ll see all of the keywords you’ve included. For myself I selected all the words that will likely be used to find my type of business, such as … web, website, design, designer, designers, services, portfolio, firm, company, custom, professional, etc. I then group these words together will all the variations I felt that one would likely search for. Note that I manually selected my keywords, but if I had chosen “automate” then Google would automatically include the keywords it felt were best based upon its database findings.
My concern with Google’s auto-feature (keywords tool, select “All”) is that the words are often too generalized. For example, just because “free” and “template” is popular, I don’t want someone who is looking for free web templates to click on my Ad. Why? Because this won’t create a conversion and will just cost me money with no potential benefit. One option to get around the automated process is to set exclusions in place. In this case you would choose the “exclude specific audiences from an Ad group” option in the audience, advanced settings section. You can learn more about how to set up exclusions at https://support.google.com/adwords/answer/2549058?hl=en&ref_topic=1713966
One of the great advantages of AdWords though is its tracking features. You can diagnose the keywords based upon the locales you have set in place, or test how they would do in other regions. I just tested mine, and well, most received a “low bid or quality score” notice. Not surprising since mine are targeted for local cities so more (city) specific than suggested. If you’ve used Adwords you will have noted that periodically Google AdWords will send you a message and suggest Keywords. A recent one suggested 100 keywords to add based upon estimated monthly searches. In this list there were UK and India listings, city names such as London, Sydney, and Calgary. To be fair, the list provided did have some good suggestions, and most importantly, it will show you all the variations that are needed for a given search. For example, likely visitors will search for the same phrase in different ways, such as “web design and development”, “website design and development”, “website design & development”, “web development and design”, etc. Each one of these is a separate search based upon word variations and word position so needs to be included. And finally, remember how I noted that it is important to consider which words to include. A couple of the highest ranked of the related words for my business is “web design” and “web designing”. I have not included these, why? Firstly, neither targets a city or locale (too general), and while I have had people find my site in other states and countries and use my services, most people will search locally for my type of business. Secondly, ‘design” and “designing” will typically be what one searches for to “learn” about web design, not to hire someone. I suppose it really comes down to what your budget is? If your budget is high enough then sure, include all of their suggestions, and while you won’t be getting many conversions at least you’ll be getting site traffic which is good. The only concern here is that you’ll likely have a high bounce rate so the SEO benefit of traffic will be offset some.
That being said, there are some new aspects of AdWords that you should consider.
If you’re business has a physical location then I would suggest selecting the “Ad extensions” link, and add your address with a map (imported from Google Places account) and your phone number (call extension). Other extension types include offer, site-links, products, social, dynamic, and app. You can learn more about Ad extensions here – https://support.google.com/adwords/answer/2375499?hl=en&from=188235&rd=1
Under Campaign Settings you now have the option of changing the bid amount by device (computers, tablets, phones). If you’re targeting mobile phone users then this is one option where you might want to increase your bid amount since Ads will come up first before any organic listings so visibility is high.
Under “Tools and Analysis” you now have the contextual targeting tool, and measurement tools for conversion tracking. The Contextual Targeting Tool automatically builds keyword lists that can be used to show your ads on relevant webpages across the Google Display Network. As for the new measurement tools, conversion tracking this is the page that you want someone to go to after they’ve clicked your Ad. For example, your Ad may link to a landing page, and on this page there is a form that encourages the visitor to submit their information for a free quote. In this regard you enter the URL of the conversion page and Google will provide you a code string to include on this page.
Best of luck with your AdWords campaigns, and as always, let me know if you need assistance.
https://www.ecurtisdesigns.com
