Knowledge is the Foundation To Success  

Did you know that over 20% of searches on Google are related to location, and that 88% of people who search for local information on their smartphones take action within the same day?  Local advertising on Google is HUGE, and if you are using Google AdWords to advertise your business locally, we have some very exciting news.  Google recently introduced three new features that will allow local advertisers to create ads more relevant to potential local customers.

The first local advertising enhancement is the ability to target customers by zip code.  Prior to this, advertisers were only able to target their accounts by cities and/or metro areas.  Google AdWords campaigns will now have the ability to target over 30,000 US zip codes with performance statistics available at the postal code level.  This means that you will be able to literally SEE exactly where your clicks are coming from and the quality of leads you receive from each specific postal code.  Advertisers will then be able to optimize their campaigns based on which area produces the highest ROI for their business.

The next update to Google AdWords local advertising is the ability to have “more clarity and control” through advanced location targeting.  Basically, Google is making the location targeting options easier to understand and implement by allowing them to easily ensure that people who should be seeing their ads do, and those who shouldn’t don’t.   This update should improve the click-through-rates (CTR) for locally targeted campaigns.

The final, and in my humble opinion, most exciting update to Google Adwords local advertising is the ability to create Location Insertion ads.  Similar to Keyword Insertion ads, location insertion allows ad text to by dynamically updated to include city, postal code or phone number that matches a searcher’s geographic location.  This update will allow advertisers to have extremely relevant and customized ad copy shown to potential local customers.  In order to start using location insertion, location extensions must be enabled in the campaign.  Next a parameter tag will need to be added to the ad text.  Google will then replace the parameter in the ad with information that most closely matches the location extension of the local searcher.  These location specific parameters can be inserted into the ad title, description lines and both the display and destination URL fields making for extremely relevant local ads.

Since the introduction of SiteLinks, Google has been collecting a lot of data, as well as experimenting with a plethora of expansion opportunities. The conclusion to their never-ending testing and tweaking has been called “one of the strongest performing experiments” at Google.  Enhanced, augmented, amplified, or upgraded – any way you put it, the Google SiteLinks Extensions have grown up and out, literally. SiteLinks blossomed from a few lines of directed links to full-fledged custom ads created by advertisers.

On February 14th, as Google took the cover off the Enhanced SiteLinks experiment, and worldwide advertisers should be excited to see the new amazing opportunities available to them.  Advertisers can now show their original ad, as well as four additional ads pulled from active ads closely related to the SiteLinks in their campaign.  This new feature effectively triples the real estate for the advertisement!

See an example of Google SiteLinks here.

Wouldn’t it be nice if these Enhanced SiteLinks were simple to implement? Unfortunately, they are not.

As with many of the new (and somewhat confusing) intensified features Google AdWords rolls out, Enhanced SiteLinks can be complicated to master.  The account managers at JumpFly have found that best practice is to create ad copy as closely related to your SiteLink’s titles as possible.  If your account then meets the proper criteria, your SiteLinks may show as Enhanced SiteLinks.  If your account is given the opportunity to to display these new, powerfully dynamic ads, the rewards could be truly amazing.

ComScore Inc. published a study called “Mobile Shopping Goes Mainstream” and the data is incredibly compelling. If you do not have a true, mobile-friendly website, you need to put that high on your to-do list for 2012. I wrote a separate blog about the importance of mobile websites for business-to-business companies, but this blog will concentrate on true ecommerce sites.

When I say “true, mobile-friendly website,” I don’t mean your regular website viewed on a smartphone, but actually optimized for the mobile user experience. Two-thirds of smartphone users performed shopping functions (including purchases, product comparisons, coupon searches, taking product pictures or retail location searches) in the month of September. (Another interesting statistic from this study is that 56% of people were in their home when purchasing, when they most likely had access to a desktop or laptop computer.)

Here’s why having a mobile optimized site so important (these statistics are from the 2011 Harris Interactive Mobile Transactions Survey, released in March of 2011): 63 percent of all online adults said that if they encountered a problem conducting a mobile transaction, they would be less likely to purchase from that company by any other purchase means. That means, if a potential customer’s mobile experience doesn’t work, you have lost them, not just for now but the future too. And four out of five of those that have had a problem will share it with others, either via in-person conversations or via a blog, Twitter, Facebook or other social media. Talk about viral marketing gone bad.

And from Compuware “What Users Want From Mobile”, 50% of users won’t return to a site where they’ve had difficulty and 40% have turned to a competitor’s site after a bad mobile experience. So not only is a bad mobile experience hurting a company now and in the future, but it’s actually beneficial to their competitors!

Mobile websites matter and that only will increase in the future. If you don’t have one, get one and sooner, rather than later. You can go to Google’s website www.howtogomo.com to see how your site stacks up, view best practices and some really compelling case studies.