Search Marketing Sage

With Google AdWords for Video, you have the ability to use the videos from your YouTube channel as advertisements. Now, I know what you’re thinking: “We should make a viral video!” If that’s what your goals are, then I can’t help you. The concept of viral videos could be a whole blog post in itself, so my short response is this: you can’t make something go viral. (Michelle Doty actually touched on this in her recent blog post about how to make an effective social media campaign). Instead, I’m going to give you some first steps you can take to leverage the power of YouTube for the long-term success of your business, making it an integral part of your marketing plan.

If you’re new to search engine marketing or don’t have a lot of pay-per-click (PPC) advertising experience under your belt, you may not know where to start once your PPC account is up and running. There are a few key tasks you can routinely add to your To Do List to optimize your account that won’t take up mountains of your time, and can help improve and optimize your PPC advertising. These types of optimization techniques can help improve your account’s overall performance, as well as specific metrics such as click-through-rate, impression share, and even number of conversions.

Search Query Reports (SQR’s)

Search query reports provide insight into what search queries triggered your ads. Analyzing your Search performance data via an SQR allows you to find new keywords with high conversion potential to add to your current campaign, and look for search terms to exclude that aren’t relevant to your business (more on this below). This can help you avoid spending money on irrelevant search queries, leaving more funds to focus on areas that are getting you targeted, relevant traffic.

To run an SQR at the campaign or ad group level within the Google AdWords interface, you simply go under the Keywords tab and click ‘All’ under the “Keyword details” drop-down menu. You can look at the data from within the user interface or you can export it to Excel and analyze it that way.

In line with the rise of mobile devices, mobile apps are becoming more and more prevalent and with every passing day the competition is getting steeper. If you have a mobile app, what measures are you taking to promote or increase downloads? PPC may not be a route that you originally worked into your strategy, but Google AdWords offers unexpected ways to help advertisers promote their mobile apps, and, in turn,  increase app downloads.

Mobile App Extensions

Ad Extensions are offered through Google AdWords as a way to allow advertisers to show more information in addition to their traditional text ads. This helps provide searchers with more information, but also helps the advertiser take up more real estate on the search engine results page (SERP), drawing more attention to their ads.

Mobile App Extensions in particular are a new feature from AdWords, available in a full, global release to advertisers that have upgraded to enhanced campaigns. This will enable a link to download your mobile/tablet app to accompany your ad, with both Android and iOS as available options depending on the type of app you offer. This additional link would point to a deep page on your site, where searchers can download the app.

App Promotion Ads

As you may have learned in my last blog post about Display Targeting Methods, there are multiple ways to target ads in Google’s Display Network. Each type of targeting needs to be done a different way. Today we’ll get more into placements. Placements are locations on the Google Display Network where ads can appear. It can be an entire website, a specific page on a website, an individual ad unit, a mobile phone app, and many more. Placement targeting can be beneficial to any account because, if done correctly, can show ads to searchers who are already interested in what you are selling.

Placement targeting is choosing specific or relevant sites where you would like to show your ad. In the example above, the Volkswagen Jetta Car and Driver page was specifically chosen to show the Volkswagen Jetta ad, because they are so closely related. The main goal of placement targeting is to show your ad where interested parties may be looking. Someone who is looking up the specifics of a Jetta is probably starting the buying process for a new car, so they could be interested in the Volkswagen promotion!

Google for Nonprofits offers a grant through Google AdWords to give nonprofits the ability to advertise on Google.com to promote awareness or increase donations, volunteers, etc. If you have been managing a Grant or Grantspro account, you may have noticed a major change earlier this year. Grant accounts used to be restricted to $1 max CPC keyword bids, which really held back a lot of companies because a lot of keywords they want to target are highly competitive and are not eligible to show ads for a lot of their more important terms. Google decided to make a change to help advertisers with this problem, but it still came with some brand new issues to work with. Learn about the update, how it changed your data, and also what you need to do to improve performance with the new updates.

Update: January 28, 2013

On January 28, 2013, Google AdWords made a widespread change, increasing keyword bid limits for Grant accounts from $1 to $2. The notification came via email to Grant account owners and Admins, with the portion regarding the change below: