Paid search has always been a popular method of advertising on desktop. However studies are finding that up to 30% of advertising methods are targeting mobile. There is no denying that mobile is growing, even to the extent that Google is focusing more on mobile and looking to benefit from mobile, as seen with new Enhanced campaigns.
A wealth of information was shared at the first day of the SMX London conference. From a paid search perspective the speakers shared knowledge and ideas on a wide range of areas pertaining to paid search. Below are some of the most valuable tips and information gathered on day 1.
Paid Search Updates and Tactics
Ann Stanley was the first speaker to talk about paid search, and dived into details pertaining to Enhanced campaigns.
Ann went into detail about the pros and cons of the launch of Enhanced campaigns highlighting specific areas that can be beneficial and other areas that can be a hindrance. While Google has mentioned that automatic changes to Enhanced campaigns will begin on the 22nd July 2013, Ann highlighted that the practices most agencies are seeming to use is to wait until the last possible moment before changing campaigns to Enhanced.
Advertisers are preferring to keep the campaign on the Legacy setting as long as possible in order to limit the risk of unwanted changes that could occur when activating Enhanced campaigns. (more…)
I can’t remember the last time I looked at a new PPC account that ticked all the boxes when it comes to the settings available within Google AdWords. Some of the settings are very easy to understand and set up, whilst others can be a little more confusing.
The aim of this post is to talk you through all of the settings available for a Google Search campaign and how to use and implement them. Some of these may seem very obvious to you, but you would be surprised to know how many campaigns are purely opted into the standard settings only. Advertisers can be wasting so much money on their campaigns if they are not targeted correctly and following the advice in this post should help you to get the most out of your PPC advertising.
I read with interest – and a degree of cynicism the recent research study by Google which highlighted a number of mindboggling statistics as to the impact of paid search in terms of driving incremental clicks to a site. The study for those that haven’t read it yet, suggested that an estimated 89% of ad clicks are incremental. At first glance that suggests a significant missed opportunity to potential advertisers that may be undecided about employing a doubleplay (or even triple play) search strategy which encompasses and tactically uses PPC alongside a mature and highly visible SEO campaign.
One may call me a sceptic – however I have been doing this job long enough to not take any research study at first glance However one has to take a closer look at the figures before jumping to any significant decisions as to how to move your integrated search spend forward in the long run. Firstly one has to accept – Google makes NO money from organic search and much of the revenue Google generates is from sources such as their traditional paid search inventory, the rapidly increasing mobile offering and the display network which Google increasingly takes more and more market share every month. As such any such studies are more than likely going to favour these channels rather than the organic model. One has to ask yourself in a similar situation with your business hat on – would you? (more…)
It is clear that mobile is not just a growing market, it is a market to really dive into. Mobile is interesting for both search engines and for advertisers. Research performed (in the US!) by Efficient Frontier shows us that the number of mobile searches and mobile paid ads is growing rapidly. But CTR and ROI still stays behind.
Efficient Frontier tells us that already 10-15% of traffic on average comes from mobile devices. And that’s an average, if you look at specific markets these numbers can sometimes even double. The research also shows that 5.4% of all paid search impressions currently come from mobile devices, which is a huge growth compared to last year. This means that by the end of 2011 Efficient Frontier believes that “somewhere between 7.0%-9.5% of search advertising dollars could be spent on mobile devices”. (more…)
The launch of Google Instant last week was received by the industry as being one of the biggest changes Google had made so far. Some proclaimed the death of SEO, others believed it was a change which would affect PPC the most. But now the first ‘storm’ has died down, there is more to worry about. Some ‘tests’ which were caught in the wild might suggest Google is getting ready for much more changes with a lot bigger impact.
Lets take a look at a few (possible) changes we might be seeing with Google and the impact that could have: a fourth ad on top of the search results and fewer organic search results in the pages all together. (more…)
Stay up to date with the latest articles
