Search Marketing Sage

Start your mobile marketing program now. If you haven’t yet, you’re missing out. With mobile traffic making up nearly 22% of all paid search clicks on Google in the US in Q4 2012 and projections of mobile Internet usage overtaking PC usage in 2013, you should at least be considering a mobile marketing plan.

For those of you already utilizing mobile PPC or seeing increased traffic from mobile sources, don’t overlook the importance of a well designed, mobile-friendly landing page. This sounds obvious, but for many marketers, this is a lower priority item to testing other high friction elements on a landing page such as headline, CTA, hero shots, etc.

With last month’s arrival of enhanced campaigns for Adwords comes this month’s release of an update for Adwords Editor. The newest update for Adwords Editor is Version 10.0 that supports the newly-created enhanced campaigns. Whether you like enhanced campaigns or not, the newest version of Adwords Editor will make it easier for you to implement and make bulk changes.  This update in Adwords Editor is a clear sign that Google is continuing to push for the use of enhanced campaigns. Therefore, you better hop on the bandwagon now to ensure that when the mandatory switchover date does come, you are not left behind in the dust trying to figure out how to use enhanced campaigns.

If you’re like many other marketers, then you may not realize everything display advertising actually encompasses. To many marketers, display advertising means banner ads – and not only that, horribly untargeted, irrelevant banner ads. But in fact, display is so much more, spanning everything from text ads to rich media and video ads. Plus, with the vast improvements that have been made to display advertising over the last few years, it’s possible to target exactly the right audience at the right time., so no more buying impressions and hoping for the best. It’s definitely not your father’s display advertising.

Search Funnels for Adwords was released in 2010, but has since been hidden away under the conversion tab; much like how Kane “The Big Red Machine” until recent years, hid his gruesome face under his mask. However, two weeks ago, Google announced they would be unmasking Search Funnels and making the feature more visible in the Adwords interface by introducing a new Search Funnels column that can be applied across your account to your campaign tab, ad group tab, ads tab, and keyword tab. In addition, the new Search Funnels column is quite streamlined/convenient, and thankfully not as frightening as Kane’s face.

When I entered the world of online advertising, I quickly learned that Google leads and all other platforms follow. This was true with Bing’s Microsoft adCenter and has held true into the social space with Facebook and LinkedIn advertising. While Facebook and LinkedIn advertising offer unmatched demographic targeting options, the advertising platforms are a bit behind the times and the reporting leaves much to be desired.

Late last month, Facebook finally tried to make up some ground by releasing a new conversion tracking process. This is crucial for direct response advertisers who use Facebook ads to lead users to third-party sites. With conversion tracking, Facebook can now show that the ads led to a sale, purchase, or action you wanted the user to take on a specific website (or Facebook page). This measurement tool will provide further optimization potential for the advertising campaigns, as it will become easier to see what works. Since Facebook knows their users (and they are typically forever logged in), a user who views an ad on their mobile phone, but then converts on their desktop computer will be tracked!