Dynamic Search Ads to Improve Targeted Traffic & Conversions

Dynamic Search Ads (DSA) generate incremental leads and sales by promoting your business on more commercial queries than you’re reaching today. After all, even well-managed AdWords campaigns containing thousands and thousands of keywords can miss relevant searches, experience delays getting ads written for new products, and get out of sync with what's actually available on your website.

If you’re not already familiar with how Dynamic Search Ads work, you may want to read about the targeting controls available,reporting and optimization features, and support for third-party PPC tracking.

Successful Beta Test
Many of our beta testers set up DSA to run alongside their existing large-scale search campaigns. And DSA delivered.

• Incremental and efficient results. On average, Dynamic Search Ads boosted beta testers’ traffic and conversion volume from AdWords by 10% and outperformed their non-exact keywords by 10% on clickthrough rate (CTR), cost per click (CPC) and cost per action (CPA).
• Success. A few examples of successful DSA beta testers include:
• Jonathan Meager, Marketing Manager at Gear4music (.pdf case study)
• Matt Wilkinson, Director of Search and Media at Rosetta and Steve Baruch, VP of eCommerce at MSC Industrial Supply (.pdf case study)
• Larry Cotter, GM at Apartment Home Living (video case study).

We also made numerous product improvements during the beta test including:

• Bid auto-optimization. Since one of our chief goals for DSA was more results with less work, we devised a system to automatically ratchet bids downward whenever specific queries for an advertiser produce lower conversion rates or user engagement levels. As a result, your ROI for Dynamic Search Ads can improve over time automatically. 
• Website crawl frequency. Any indexed page with a matched DSA impression will be crawled at least once daily. Pages with more impressions and clicks may be crawled more frequently. So DSA will now better reflect the latest products and inventory conditions on your web site. That means more clicks, higher conversion rates and better ROI.
• Mobile and tablet support. Given the growing importance of mobile campaigns, we developed full support for DSA on mobile and tablet platforms.
• Extension support. Dynamic Search Ads support the same ad extensions as other search ads.  
• Conversion Optimizer compatibility. Once enabled, many beta test participants reported success using the combination of DSA and Conversion Optimizer to simultaneously expand their campaign reach while automatically optimizing bids to meet their average CPA goal.

Get Started
Now any business interested in boosting their AdWords results can try DSA. You can find starting points on creating a DSA campaign and setting up dynamic targets in the AdWords help center.

If you’re interested in learning even more about Dynamic Search Ads, please stay tuned to our blog. More information and an invitation to join us for a Hangout on Air will be coming soon.

Source: http://adwords.blogspot.in/2012/10/boost-your-results-with-dynamic-search.html

Read More

Shared Budgets a New Feature in Google Adwords

Shared budgets is a new feature that lets you establish a single daily budget that’s shared by multiple campaigns in an AdWords account. Shared budgets can make it easier to match your AdWords spending with how your business allocates marketing budget. And they can save you time and improve your AdWords results. Let’s see how with an example.

How Shared Budgets Work
Say you’re an outdoor furniture seller with a single line of products. You’re currently running three campaigns: 

1. A desktop search campaign
2. A mobile search campaign
3. A remarketing campaign to reach people who have visited your site but didn’t convert

Your overall marketing plan allows you to spend $100 per day across your three campaigns. Without shared budgets, you’d next have to decide how to allocate the $100 daily AdWords budget across each of your three campaigns. Say you set a $60 daily budget for your desktop campaign, a $20 daily budget for your mobile campaign, and $20 to your remarketing campaign.

On most days, each campaign hits its daily budget and you’re satisfied with the ROI of each campaign. But on some days, your desktop search campaign sees fewer impressions and clicks than other days. So you only spend $90. On these days, your overall campaign results could be stronger if you were able to put an additional $10 into your mobile search campaign or remarketing campaign.

Using shared budgets allows automatic adjustments across campaigns, so you don’t have to constantly monitor and change individual campaign budgets throughout the day.

Creating a shared budget
It’s simple. Log into the AdWords interface, then click Shared library, and select Budgets. Then follow the steps to Create a new shared budget (see image below).

Reporting
The “Shared library” is also where you can review aggregate performance metrics for multiple campaigns with a shared budget.

Learn more
For more on shared budgets, please visit the AdWords Help Center or the AdWords Community to ask questions or share tips.

Posted by Vidya Iyer, Ads Engineering

Social that Adds Up: Performance and Measurement

| 7:59 AM

Labels: Social, Webinars

Join us for a webinar on Tuesday, September 18th at 11am PT, in partnership with Hootsuite, to learn how we can make better decisions based on performance metrics of social networks using Google Analytics social reports. Register today, it’s open to everyone!

Adam Singer, the Product Marketing Manager for Google Analytics, will go beyond the current social metrics of followers, +1’s, likes and others, to discuss the true impact your social media is making on your brand’s bottom line. Many of the current metrics available allow us to measure the reach of our message, but not necessarily the ROI. Learn how to connect visits to your social pages all the way through to a sale or conversion on your website.

You’ll also learn how social media can impact the rest of your digital presence. For example, when you verify your Google+ Page, recommendations from your customers and fans may be more likely to appear in search results on Google. This can raise the social awareness of your business and increase its relevance. For paid marketing campaigns, social can actually help you improve clickthrough rate performance. 77% of US consumers trust recommendations from their social media connections, more than any other media source, meaning that +1s may have a positive effect on purchase decisions. On average, search ads with annotations have a 5-10% uplift in clickthrough rate. Some of our advertisers have seen even higher uplifts, H&M achieved 22% uplift and Cadbury achieved 17% uplift in clickthrough rates on their search ads.

Start measuring the value you’re creating through your social media campaigns!

Source: http://adwords.blogspot.in/2012/09/new-adwords-budget-option-shared-budgets_17.html

Read More

Real Time Bidding - The Future of Search Engine Marketing

Real-time bidding (RTB) emerged at the intersection of data liquidity and inventory liquidity. Today, third-party data suppliers have put the power of audience information in the hands of media buyers. At the same time, the marketplace for online inventory has never been more liquid. There are vast pools of online inventory available to every kind of media buyer, from small businesses running their first display campaigns to large agency trading desks buying on behalf of Fortune 500 advertisers.

At this intersection of data and inventory, there’s been an explosion of choice of where display ads can run. With millions of sites accepting display ads, it’s too difficult for media buyers to buy the audience they want when buying directly from each individual site. To buy an audience across even a small selection of a few dozen sites, a buyer would have to define the audience for the campaign individually with each site on the media plan. It’s operationally impossible to get the exact same audience targeting criteria setup with all these sites.

Real-time bidding helps media buyers find audiences at scale. This, in turn, helps drive performance by ensuring an advertiser’s ad is seen by the audiences most likely to respond. All media buyers can appreciate an enhanced ability to find audiences at scale, but how did real-time bidding emerge in the first place?

The Rise of Exchanges
When ad exchanges opened, they brought more liquidity to the marketplace for online inventory. 2007 was
a pivotal year for ad exchanges. Three major exchanges were acquired that year: Yahoo! bought Right Media
in April, Google bought DoubleClick in May and Microsoft bought AdECN in August. Each company quickly made vast pools of inventory available, which greatly improved the experience for many parties to transact in online display.

The Rise of Consolidated Buying
To help advertisers take advantage of this new liquidity, a new type of media buying intermediary quickly sprangup. These companies could access inventory from multiple exchanges with no need to aggregate inventory through relationships with publishers. Among these companies include the demand-side platforms (DSPs) who built their businesses on technology and services catering solely to the “demand-side” of the industry, the agencies and advertisers. As Figure 1 shows, 2007 was a banner year for DSPs too. Five of today’s DSPs were founded that year, including Invite Media, a company Google acquired in 2010.

DSPs weren’t the only companies to take advantage of the inventory exchanges made readily available. Ad
networks began to look to exchanges as a way to supplement their existing inventory. Plus, other types of
buying intermediaries began to specialize in niche businesses within the intersection of data liquidity and
inventory liquidity, such as retargeting and audience targeting specialists.

Before RTB, buying from multiple exchanges was time-consuming and inefficient for these companies. They
had to use a different system to access each exchange. And since a typical campaign would pull inventory
from more than one exchange, there was no easy way to achieve de-duplicated reach or to cap the number of
impressions that audiences would see from any given campaign. They needed a faster, more automated way
to buy across exchanges.

RTB Delivers Heretofore Unreachable Efficiency for Cross-Exchange Buyers

Now with large pools of liquid inventory and a robust ecosystem of buyers capable of accessing it, the market
was ripe for innovation. RTB was the missing piece. RTB was conceived as a workflow solution tied to new
opportunities in data-driven display advertising. Seeing the opportunity to grow the overall pie for online
advertising, exchanges began to develop real-time bidding APIs.

As Figure 2 shows, a surge of activity took place in 2009 and 2010, when many ad exchanges and supply-side platforms (SSPs) announced support for RTB.

Since RTB offered a solution for efficiently acquiring online ad inventory, it began an unstoppable pattern
of rapid growth. Cross-exchange buyers—DSPs, ad networks, agency trading desks and other media buying
intermediaries—were quick to take advantage of RTB. This rapid uptake of RTB can be seen in the track record of DoubleClick Ad Exchange (ADX). As Figure 3 shows, ADX inventory sold through RTB jumped from 8% in January 2010 to 68% in May 2011—a tremendous upswing in just under a year and a half.

RTB has taken off for one simple reason: Buyers see real benefits from it. For example, in a comparison of
ADX campaigns running in April and May of 2011 executed via RTB versus those executed through non-RTB mechanisms, RTB provided for a 19% savings on CPM rates and raised CTR performance by .06 percentage points, from .09% to .15% CTR.

In a recent survey by Google and Digiday, 47% of advertisers and agencies who responded said they intend
to spend more on digital advertising in 2011 because of the benefits of RTB.2 A full 88% of advertiser and
agency respondents plan to buy online display via RTB in 2011, up from 75% in 2010.3 Plus, among media
intermediaries (such as DSPs and ad networks), 29% expect their RTB volume will increase by 100% or more over last year; 19% believe it will go up by at least 200%.

Read More

Exact and Phrase Matches Obliges to Google's Wish -)

Its time for change.. Mr.Exact Match & Mr.Phrase match. How on earth can you be unchanged for a long time? It is high time for you to relax and be flexible to users queries.

Google will wave the wand you to have to meekly surrender to it's wish. It is as simple as that!

Here you go directly to the post buddy.. http://adwords.blogspot.in/2012/04/new-matching-behavior-for-phrase-and.html

Read More

DigitalMarketing Contest 2012 - DMC

Head over to my new blogger.com blog... "digitalmarketing contest2012" at http://digitalmarketingcontest2012india.blogspot.com/ . Happy reading!

Read More