Google AdWords Enhanced Campaigns: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly

Posted on March 6, 2013 at 8:59 am by Rich Funk in Paid Search

Over the last week or so, you might have seen a cheery box staring back at you when you logged into your Google AdWords account asking you if you want to upgrade your account to take advantage of Google’s new “Enhanced Campaigns.”

Upgrade! Enhanced! These are two of the ultimate trigger words for any search marketer, so if any of you reading this have already clicked on the button to upgrade, even without knowing everything about Enhanced Campaigns, I cannot blame you. I just hope that Enhanced Campaigns are for you. Some accounts will see a lot of benefit from this change. Others may have to deal with being opted into targeting they might not want.

So are Enhanced Campaigns for you? Let’s look at some of the benefits and drawbacks to see whether this upgrade is actually an advantage for you.

The Good

If your PPC account has a different targeting or messaging strategy for multiple devices or geographic locations, you probably have a large number of campaigns in your account. After all, a good search marketer will manage separate campaigns for desktops, mobile phones and tablets if there is a different strategy for each.

Well get ready to clean up all of that. One benefit of Enhanced Campaigns is that you’ll now be able to manage bids across location, time of day, device type and more from a single campaign. For those of us who have accounts with 30-50 different campaigns, this is potentially a huge time saver.

You’ll also be able to show your ads across all devices while being able to designate specific ad text, sitelinks or extensions to show only on specific devices. On top of that, you’ll be able to specify location and time of day. You’ll no longer have to create a brand new campaign for every combination of geo-targeting, device and time of day. Here’s what this will look like (Click to enlarge):

The last major update of Enhanced Campaigns is having additional types of conversions. Now you’ll be able to track conversions such as app downloads and phone calls from smartphones directly within the AdWords interface. Google also mentioned that in the future, store visits could be tracked as well, which would close a giant blind spot in a lot of location-based PPC campaigns.

The Bad

Not everything is sunshine and roses for everyone. The reason you have to opt in to Enhanced Campaigns right now is because it introduces some major changes to your campaigns. These are changes that may not benefit many businesses without mobile-optimized sites.

One of the more significant changes is that tablets and desktops are now considered the same as far as AdWords targeting goes. On the surface this makes sense, with most popular tablets like the iPad and Nexus 7 having desktop browsers as opposed to mobile browsers. However, there are some companies that have found low-cost, high converting traffic on tablets specifically over the last few years, and those tablet-specific campaigns will now have to go out the window. For example, if you have an app that’s designed specifically for tablets, you’ll have to find a way to get that strategy to work with desktop searchers seeing the same ad copy or landing pages. On the flip side of that, you also cannot opt out of targeting tablets. Those of you who have conversions that involve software or whitepaper downloads, which don’t work on tablets, will just have to work around it. Same with those of you who have Flash-heavy sites that don’t display on tablets.

One potential solution would be not targeting iOS or Android operating systems, but Google is doing away with operating system targeting, too.

The Ugly

The worst part of Google’s Enhanced Campaigns is the fact that you cannot technically opt out of targeting mobile devices. Instead of being able to choose whether you want to target mobile phones and adjusting your mobile bids accordingly, all Enhanced Campaigns require targeting mobile devices. Instead of bidding with a dollar amount on mobile traffic, you’ll use a percentage of your desktop bid.

For example, if you bid $3 on a keyword on desktop, but you only want to bid $1.50 for the same keyword on mobile, you’ll have to set the mobile bid at -50%. Technically, you could set all of your mobile bids to “-100%” if you don’t want to target mobile devices, but that seems like a very complicated way to do something that currently exists within Google’s interface.

An unfortunate side effect of forcing all AdWords users to opt into mobile targeting is the fact that mobile click prices will probably rise over the next few months. One reason search marketers love mobile PPC is because for the most part, mobile traffic is less expensive since there isn’t as much competition. Now that more people are going to be present in the mobile auction, whether they like it or not, prices will shift because of the increased competition. This is good for Google. This is bad for you.

So How Does This Affect Me?

If you have three or more campaigns that are cloned versions of your desktop campaigns, one for each targeting segment you do, Enhanced Campaigns are a godsend. It’s going to streamline your setup process and cut down on the day-to-day upkeep that goes into supporting all of those campaigns.

If you’re not doing any mobile targeting, you will need to start soon. (See other reasons your business needs a mobile-optimized site.) Yes, there are ways to avoid having to pay for mobile traffic, as I explained above. But that might not last too much longer. The future of paid search is here, and we’re all along for the ride, even if we aren’t ready quite yet.

Rich Funk is 435 Digital's PPC specialist.

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Tags: Enhanced Campains, Google Adwords, paid search

435 Digital helps businesses build brands on the web. Visit here for inspiration on how to stand out and grow your business.

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Google Adwords New Feature: Call Extensions

Posted on April 10, 2013 at 9:10 am by Rich Funk in Paid Search

Putting your company’s phone number into the ad copy of a PPC ad has long been a best practice. If you have the space within the ad, why not? It kills two birds with one stone: Not only do you have the potential to get a phone call from a prospective client, it also doesn’t cost you anything since your ad was never clicked!

Sadly, those days are disappearing, but only partially. When logging into your AdWords account any time over the last few weeks, you probably saw this message:

Fear not, true believers! This is just Google’s way of nudging — forcing — you into taking your business’ phone number out of the ad itself and using Google Call Extensions. In their official announcement, they said, “We are making this change to foster a safer, more consistent user experience across desktop, tablet, and mobile devices.”

Along with the introduction of Enhanced Campaigns earlier this year, Google seems to be ushering their AdWords users, ready or not, into the world of customized ad delivery based on location and device.

Google does provide complete instructions on how to add call extensions to your account . Call extensions are going to show up on desktop and tablets differently than they will on smartphones and smaller mobile devices.

On desktops and tablets, they’ll look like this:

On smartphones and smaller mobile devices, users will see this:

Aside from having truncated ad copy, the real difference between the two ways your phone number will appear is the appearance of the actual phone number. In the desktop and tablet ad, the phone number is static since you cannot call directly from those devices, at least not without a third party program such as Skype. In the mobile ad, the phone number is taken completely out of the ad and is replaced with a button that will make the call for the customer. On one hand, this is a much easier way to connect to a business, but from Google’s standpoint, it also prevents customers from dialing the number themselves and denying Google the money from the “click” that should have happened.

The only other change to consider is with the phone number itself. You have two choices: Either you can have your actual number show up, or Google can auto-populate your ad with a random phone number and give you the ability to track things such as the length of call, and even time-specific conversions.

On one hand, using your own local number in the ad could build trust from potential customers, but you wouldn’t get Google’s call tracking statistics out of it. On the other hand, the Google generated numbers are not guaranteed to be local, but they come with free call tracking, which a lot of small businesses do not have. Whether you use Google’s numbers or your own depends entirely on whether you have call tracking in place and how important having a local phone number display is to you.

If you don’t use phone numbers in any of your PPC ads, this really doesn’t have any effect on you. If you do, it’s not much work to switch over to call extensions using the tutorial linked above. Either way, unlike a lot of the changes made when Enhanced Campaigns came around, Google is actually adding functionality without taking anything away. After how the launch of Enhanced Campaigns went, this is significant and welcome news.

Rich Funk is 435 Digital's PPC specialist.

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Tags: Call Extensions, Google Adwords

435 Digital helps businesses build brands on the web. Visit here for inspiration on how to stand out and grow your business.

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Google Places and Google Plus Pages Explained

Posted on April 3, 2013 at 9:07 am by Lauren Hartman in SEO

Google Places (also known as Google Plus Local) and Google Plus for Business are useful tools for your business that can help you show up higher in search results, especially local search results.

Google has been fairly confusing during the changes that it made to how local businesses are listed in its Maps and Search that rolled out last year, and it has not made things easy or clear for local businesses.

Originally, a local business could create a listing for themselves on Google Maps by using Google Places. After the creation of Google Plus, Google also made it possible for businesses to create social pages on Google Plus, called Google Plus for Business — similar to Facebook pages for businesses.

Google’s ultimate goal has been to combine the map listings of the Google Places pages with the social aspect of the Google Plus pages. The first step in this process was to upgrade the look and feel of a Google Places page so that it looks more like a Google Plus page. With the redesign also came a new name: Google Plus Local. Totally not confusing at all, right?

Some months later, Google rolled out a process by which you can combine your Google Places (Google Plus Local) page and your Google Plus for Business page into one complete page that is both listed on Google Maps and has social features. Take a note here: before you run to go do that, it might not always be a good idea, depending on what type of business you are. See the “Combining” section below.

Important things to note about setting up your pages:

Fill out as much information as possible. Business name, address, and phone number aren’t enough. Fill out hours, fill out your business category, add a description and pictures and videos. Note: if it’s a Google Places page, any videos you add won’t be displayed. Those must be added to a Google Plus page or a combined page.Your address should appear on your Google Pages exactly as it appears on your website. Google has its own standard way of displaying addresses, so if Google displays your address differently once you enter it into your Google page, you should change the address on your website. Google is more likely to rank you higher if all of your addresses everywhere on the web all match exactly.Don’t use a P.O. Box or a UPS Store as your address. Google will delete you. If you can’t receive mail at your address, Google does have some guidelines about what to do. If you are a Service Area Business, or a business that only serves customers at their location (such as a locksmith or a cleaning service), you must hide your address by checking a small box that says “Do not show customers my address.” The reasoning behind this is that the reason customers want an address would be so they can come to your place of business, and if you don’t serve any customers at your place of business, Google doesn’t want to confuse people by showing them an address. This little requirement also means that you should not have a “local business” Google + page since the address cannot be hidden, and you should not merge your Google Places page and your Google Plus page (see below).In general, the name that you put as your business name on either your Places or Plus page should match the signs that you have outside your business and the business name that you use when you answer the phone. Google moderators may check your street signs on Street View, or they may call your business to double check your information. Unless everything matches, they may delete your listing.If you have time, familiarize yourself with the Google Guidelines for these types of pages. If you violate Google’s guidelines, you may be subject to removal. Most of the guidelines are pretty straightforward, but there are some exceptions depending on what type of business you are, such as service area businesses.

Tired of managing and updating two separate pages? Google has made it possible to combine your Google Places page and your Google Plus page. However, you should only do this if you fit these specific criteria:

You don’t use the Bulk Uploads featureYou are not a Service Area Business that only serves people at their homesIf your Google+ page is not listed as a Local BusinessYou have a Google+ pageYou can receive verification postcardsYour business’s Google Places listing and Google+ page were claimed by the same email address

If you fit all the above criteria, merging your Places listing and Plus page should be possible. However, merging the pages will not necessarily help your SEO in any way. Benefits to doing this mostly include ease of managing pages.

The first place to get help is to look through Google’s Places Help pages and Google’s Plus Help pages. In addition to articles about common problems, there are also ways to troubleshoot and report issues and receive support from Google.

In addition, Google also provides the Google and Your Business Forum where business owners can ask questions and get answers from other knowledgeable people and Google employees.

For even more good information on this, see the dedicated, well-researched information on local search — primarily Google, but information about improving your business across all local search platforms in general.

Lauren Hartman graduated with a degree in economics, but has always loved writing, and now uses the combination of her data analysis and wordsmithing skills as an SEO Specialist at 435 Digital.

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435 Digital helps businesses build brands on the web. Visit here for inspiration on how to stand out and grow your business.

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What’s Your Response to the Retirement of Google Readers?

Yesterday Google introduced the retirement of the Google Readers RSS readers product.

I’ve tweeted just a little about this but thought it may be interesting to determine the response of visitors for this news. it appears a minimum of many people are worried (with 1000's signing this petition already).

For me personally it's annoying to get rid of the RSS readers which has explore my daily reading through of recent content on the internet – however what's of greater concern in my experience may be the impact it might have upon blog readerships.

Before I interviewed ProBlogger and dPS readers Google Readers was the #1 readers for signing up Nourishes among our visitors. While you will find a number of other options available and a lot of our visitors will without doubt change to another RSS readers I think that many will simply give on RSS.

Before I checked ProBlogger’s Google Statistics stats around 7.5% in our traffic was considered ‘Feedburner/Feed’ traffic. In no way nearly all our traffic – but significant (a lot more than originates from either Facebook).

While not every one of the 7.5% of traffic would be the consequence of Google Readers it’ll be interesting to determine the amount of it's once Google switch them back in This summer!

Would you use Google Readers? If that's the case are you going to stop reading through Nourishes or are you going to switch to a different readers (if that's the case, which)? Like a writer are you currently concerned that lots of your personal visitors is going to be lost because of the retirement of Google Readers?If you are concerned – what steps are you going to take to try and ensure visitors transition with other methods for following site?

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URL Be Sorry! Google Cuts Back on Top-ranking Exact-match Domains

This guest post is by Rob Henry of K2L Marketing.

Regular Google users will know that one of the easiest ways to get a good ranking in its search results is for your web address to exactly match the search query.

Get it spot-on and, until recently, you’ve been almost assured of a position close to the top, and often in the number-one slot on page one of the SERPs.

But Google’s continuing mission to put right what once went wrong in their algorithms is now targeting what Matt Cutts calls “low-quality ‘exact-match’ domains”.

This adds to the work done by the Panda update, which filtered out poor-quality web pages, and Penguin, which tackled spammy pages.

According to a Cutts’ tweet on September 28th, 0.6% of English-US queries will be noticeably affected.

This might not sound like many searches in the grand scheme of things. However, the latest comScore figures show that Google sites were responsible for 11.3 billion individual search queries in the US alone in August 2012, meaning that 0.6% of queries amounts to almost 68 million searches per month.

Cutts’ full announcement of this update on Twitter read as follows:

“Minor weather report: small upcoming Google algo change will reduce low-quality ‘exact-match’ domains in search results…

New exact-match domain (EMD) algo affects 0.6% of English-US queries to a noticeable degree. Unrelated to Panda/Penguin.”

The immediate response was positive, with one Twitter user simply replying with “Yippeeee!,” and another joking “I suspect that won’t be a ‘minor’ weather report to the vast majority of affiliate marketers.”

So just what does this mean for online marketing and SEO? Well, it goes considerably further than simply meaning that EMDs won’t be so prevalent in the search results, because it opens up that top spot to other websites that are able to compete using the remaining “acceptable” methods of SEO not yet targeted for penalisation by Google.

There are as many webmasters out there who are frustrated by always ranking second to an EMD as there are site owners who will be negatively affected by this change. So it’s the perfect opportunity for us to re-optimize any of our pages that could use a bit of attention.

Poor quality content is already a no-no, as are paid links or those created by spamming blog comments and discussion forums. Now EMDs are out too. So renew your focus on legitimate PPC platforms and the remaining on-page SEO opportunities.

Good-quality content will always be favoured by Google, and they’ve never stopped saying that well-placed on-page keywords are a good thing, as long as they don’t damage the overall quality and grammar of the page they’re placed on.

Look to your best-performing pages for inspiration, and you can’t go wrong: you’re likely to find a strong structure with keywords and phrases repeated a couple of times in appropriate places on the page, possibly helped further by your choice of anchor text for hyperlinks on the page, text used in image captions, and so on.

With these Google-approved locations for keywords, you can make sure your pages are viewed in the best possible light by the search robots, even if they’re hosted on an EMD. Hopefully, you’ll be able to snag yourself that top spot in the search results once the dust settles.

This blog was written by Rob Henry, marketing specialist at K2L. K2L Marketing is a full service marketing agency offering a unique approach to your marketing needs.

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WTF? Google Banning AdSense Publishers for “Potential” Fake Clicks!

Now, this is a reverse from the innocent until proven guilty route. Google is banning AdSense publishers not because they’ve generated fake clicks, but because they have a risk of doing so!

In the past week, I’ve heard quite a few stories of AdSense accounts getting banned not because of any TOS violation or fraudulent activities. They’re getting banned simply because Google thinks the publisher’s site has the potential to generate fraudulent clicks.

My friend Zac Johnson, who has been an AdSense publisher since Google started it was banned from Google AdSense today. Here’s the email Zac got.

This message was sent from a notification-only email address that does not accept incoming email. Please do not reply to this message.
——————————

Hello,

After reviewing our records, we’ve determined that your AdSense account poses a risk of generating invalid activity. Because we have a responsibility to protect our AdWords advertisers from inflated costs due to invalid activity, we’ve found it necessary to disable your AdSense account. Your outstanding balance and Google’s share of the revenue will both be fully refunded back to the affected advertisers.

Please understand that we need to take such steps to maintain the effectiveness of Google’s advertising system, particularly the advertiser-publisher relationship. We understand the inconvenience that this may cause you, and we thank you in advance for your understanding and cooperation.

If you have any questions or concerns about the actions we’ve taken, how you can appeal this decision, or invalid activity in general, you can find more information by visiting http://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/answer.py?answer=57153.

Sincerely,

The Google AdSense Team

To say Zac was surprised by the email was an understatement. He’s been a publisher since AdSense started back in 2003. He’s never had any fraudulent activities on his account, Google had sent him yearly Christmas gifts for being a great AdSense partner, and now Google has disabled his account not because he’s done anything wrong, but because there is a risk that he might do something wrong!

This isn’t even a case of guilty until proven innocent. Once Google decides you’re guilty, they don’t give you a chance to prove you’re innocent because contacting them is next to impossible, as Zac found out.

Trying to contact Google is definitely one of the areas they aren’t too interesting in improving. Instead of providing support, they will send you in an endless loop of forum posts which pretty much end up no where. If you are lucky enough to finally come across their Invalid Activity Appeal form, you can try your luck again, but they basically sent me the same denial email again. But then again, it’s all from “The Google Adsense Team” and just tells you to get lost in the forums again so I expected nothing less.

Live By The Google, Die By The Google

I have long said that if you live by the Google, you die by the Google. It’s a good thing Zac follows this same mantra. Both Zac and I have diversified our online income well beyond Google AdSense. While Zac will lose a few grand due to Google disabling his AdSense account, it won’t affect his lifestyle that much.

However, for most bloggers, the majority of their income will come from Google. This is a very dangerous position to be in. If Google can ban an account that has made hundreds of thousands of dollars for the possibility of fake clicks, they won’t even blink at banning a small account.

My advice

Build your blog traffic with quality contentCapture the emails of the blog readersSell your own products (or affiliate products) to the list

Build a business around the above model, and I guarantee you’ll make way more money than what Google AdSense can ever make. It takes a lot more work but the payoff will be a lot higher, and you won’t have to worry about Google killing off your AdSense account because you might “pose a risk of generating invalid activity.”

*Update My friend Gauher Chaudhry, an AdSense publisher for over eight years, just got his AdSense account banned for the same reason as Zac.

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How To Make Real Money with Google AdSense

written by John Chow on February 22, 2012

It would be hard to find a blogger or website owner who never tried Google AdSense, right? Yet if you ask around you might get the impression that most people only make pennies with it. Does it mean that AdSense doesn’t work and that making decent money with it is impossible? Not at all. In fact if you search around you’ll find people who make a lot of money with AdSense.

One of those people is my friend Daniel Scocco from Daily Blog Tips. Daniel makes over $10,000 monthly with AdSense alone (See the screenshot of his earnings below), and a while ago he was featured on Google’s AdSense blog as a success story. Today he’s launching a course for those who want to start making some real money with AdSense.

The course lasts 6 weeks, and the 6 modules covered are:

AdSense Basics: Understanding how the program works and what things are supposed to do and not to do.AdSense Optimization: How to choose the right units, how to position them efficiently, how to format the ads for maximum CTR and so on.Keyword Research: How to estimate traffic from Google, how to choose profitable keywords, how to develop a better content strategy for your websites and so on.Search Engine Optimization: Everything you need to know about search engines and optimizing your sites for better rankings.Website Promotion: How to promote your websites and increase your traffic consistently over time.Buying Websites for AdSense: Where to find the best deals, how to conduct the negotiation, how to tweak the sites once you bought them and so on.

Daniel told me he will be personally reviewing and making suggestions for the blogs/websites of the students, so this is also an opportunity to get advice straight from him. Make sure to check it out today as registrations will close by the end of this week. Here’s the link.

Daily Blog Tips AdSense Course

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