Bigger text ads, separate device bids, responsive display ads and new ads on Google Maps
As expected, there were plenty of big announcements at the 2016 Google Performance Summit. AdWords was the star of this year’s show and Google revealed a string of big changes coming soon to the platform. There’s a clear push towards mobile with these upcoming features and plenty of reason to be excited. Here’s a quick run through of the biggest headlines to come out of the Google Summit.
1. Text ads are about to get a whole lot bigger
The most intriguing announcement from Google is that text ads are going to be bigger than ever. Expanded Text Ads (ETAs) will allow you to write two headlines of up to 30 characters, instead of the current single headline and 25-character limit. You’ll also have up to 80 characters for the newly extended description block, up from two 35-character…
European online advertising spend is growing 9.7% year on year. But who is spending the most?
IHS Inc. & IAB Europe have recently announced some interesting findings from its European Online Advertising Report, highlighting a sizeable increase in advertising spend, compared to this time last year.
One of the most notable statistics from the report is the difference in spend between the UK and the rest of Europe.
With the UK spending in excess of €11.8 billion on online advertising, almost double that of the nearest country in Germany and triple that of France.
Eleni Marouli, principal analyst at IHS Technology highlighted the disparity, stating how the UK is
"clearly the first stop for advertisers in the region and shows no signs of slowing down.”
He goes on to highlight how the top three markets account for the lion's share of the advertising spend…
Here is a breakdown of the most expensive keywords across some of the major industries.
Last year Google earned a staggering $67.39bn (97% of their revenue ) through their online pay-per-click advertising and with this set to increase this year, let's have a look at the keywords helping to reach this outrageous total.
Perhaps understandably, the most expensive keywords come from the legal sector. With some of the huge fees involved in certain cases, firms clearly see value in bidding serious money in the hope of landing their next prospective clients.
The highest cost per click on the list is "Best Mesothelioma Lawyer", which at $935.71 a click generates leads from Asbestos related incidents. This does seem an insane amount of money to fork out for a click, not even a guaranteed conversion, but considering the average mesothelioma settlement is usually in excess of…
Our summary of the wide number of changes to Google AdWords and Analytics announced at the Google Performance Summit.
Value: [rating=5] (Webmasters, Account Managers, SEM Professionals, PPC Professionals)
Recommended links: Google Analytics blog & Google AdWords Blog
Yesterday (24th May 2016) Google announced a whole host of changes to their AdWords and Analytics platforms, citing the shift in mobile as the reason.
"The shift to mobile is no longer a change on the horizon. It’s here."
During the Google Performance Summit, the likes of Jerry Dischler (VP for Search Ads) & Brad Bender (VP for Display & Video Ads) talk through the steps and the processes involved in the decisions behind the changes. Skip to around the 27 minutes to get into the nitty gritty.
For the sake of not making this article too confusing I'm going to split the changes up into two sections:
…
Learn which types of PPC are most effective at the various stages of the sales funnel
Why does anybody do marketing? The fundamental answer is to make more money. You might argue that some campaigns have other motives, but ultimately all marketing activity funnels back to one end objective – sales (or a charitable equivalent).
However, in order to complete sales we need to break our approach down into a number of smaller goals and objectives. These form our different marketing approaches.
The potential customer who already knows exactly what they want or need should form the core of advertising efforts, but what about those who haven’t yet reached that stage?
Perhaps you’re in a niche industry or a competitive market – your potential customers may not have even heard of you. Even if they have, do they understand your unique selling points and what makes you different?
The clever marketer knows that, while they…
What is the industry standard click-through rate (CTR) in AdWords for your company?
When you're running an Ad Campaign from scratch, or even if you've been running one for a couple of years, it can be tough to know how you're comparing to your competition. Wordstream recently used their huge dataset to show the average click through rate, across 16 industries (Advocacy, Auto, B2B, Consumer Services, Dating & Personals, E-Commerce, Education, Employment Services, Finance & Insurance, Health & Medical, Home Goods, Industrial Services, Legal, Real Estate, Technology, and Travel & Hospitality).
The search results confirm an age old saying - "Sex Sells", Dating and Personals leading the way with an average click-through rate of 3.4%; over 1.5% higher than the average CTR across all industries. Understandably, it's easier to write emotional copy, capturing the imagination of a lovesick audience.
Other noticeable CTR's include the Financial industry (2.65%) who…
Adwords/ PPC marketers need to make sure they're optimising for mobile- it makes up more than half of clicks!
We've seen the share of web traffic from mobile devices explode in recent years, with mobile overtaking desktop late last year. Now PPC has caught up, in America at least. In the 1st quarter of 2016 the combined tablet and phone PPC clicks outstripped desktop for the first time ever. Exciting times for mobile marketers, and an important moment for all PPC marketers, who need to make sure they are thinking about mobile as an integral part of their plans, rather than an ad on or appendage.
Source: Marketing Charts
Date released: May 2016
Data set: US Merkle clients
Related resource: Adwords guide
…
Back in February, Google decided to end their six-year run of experimenting with Sidebar ads, instead opting for a new format.
The rationale behind this was to move the search results to be more aligned with the Mobile experience, removing the sidebar ads and replacing them with three (sometimes four, depending on the how commercial the query is) above-the-fold ads and three at the bottom of the SERP.
There were certainly a few eyebrows raised within the PPC and SEO industries, who questioned how this would impact their CPC and the organic listings. It was speculated by the PPC industry, that the cost of an AdWords campaign would increase, due to the principles of supply and demand as there is now only 6 or 7 ads, compared to the 11 ads displayed previously.
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The last AdWords re-design was in 2008. Now Google is re-building it for our mobile-first world
Importance: [rating=5] (If you use or manage Google AdWords)
Recommended source: Google Blog
AdWords is now over 15 years old. Not a lot of platforms survive that well in the fast-moving digital landscape. 15 years ago computers were big boxes that stayed in one place and had less computing power than we all have in our pockets now. It's easy to see why some platforms have died away and others have taken their place. Yet stoically AdWords has remained, and in many ways thrived. It is Google's main source of revenue, and given that Alphabet (Google's parent company) is now the most valuable company in the world, it's probably the single most successful web application in the history of the internet.
The last time the AdWords interface was updated was back in 2008, when the smart-phone had only…
Key PPC budgeting lessons for modelling AdWords investment for B2B companies
At any one time, there are only a finite number of potential clients searching for your product or service that you could convert to an enquiry. Above this point, throwing more money at Pay Per Click or AdWords advertising will simply buy more traffic that will not convert to an enquiry. By analysing your data over a statistically significant amount of time it is possible to estimate the optimum PPC budget that will maximise customer enquiries and minimise money wasted chasing enquiries that aren't there. Here I outline an example of a UK manufacturer running a B2B campaign who reduced their PPC spend by 30% to deliver the same level of customer enquiries. The article then goes on to discuss applying the approach to your organisation.
PPC budget - the £700 rule of thumb
Deciding you optimum PPC budget is a difficult judgement call…
