Knowledge is the Foundation To Success  

Last week was full of big news from the Google+ Project.  Not only did Google announce that they would finally be opening Google+ up to businesses via Google+ Pages, but they also unveiled the new Social Extensions feature in AdWords.  Social Extensions will be rolled out to advertisers this week and will allow advertisers with Google+ Pages to link their Google+ Page to their AdWords campaigns.  This means that all brand +1s that are received, whether via the website +1 button, ads or organic search results, will be complied and added together to be viewed as ONE single total visible to consumers.

How does this have the potential to affect the PPC advertising efforts you have in place for your business?  Google believes that adding Social Extensions can potentially improve the ad performance for PPC advertisers.  According to Google (via Harris Interactive, June 2010), recommendations from friends and family impact the purchasing decisions of 71% of shoppers.  The AdWords ads for current campaigns that do not have Social Extensions enabled only show the +1 recommendations for the specific landing page of the ad.  Once Social Extensions are enabled in your Google AdWords campaign, potential customers will be able to see all of the +1 recommendations that your brand has received and make their purchasing decisions accordingly.

Now that they are able to show more highly targeted and personalized ads, how will advertisers be able to study the performance data of this new feature and gauge whether or not it is working for them?  Of course Google has an answer for that!  Google has enabled a new +1 annotation AdWords reporting segment for any campaign, ad group, keyword or ad.  This new segment allows advertisers to view performance metrics by three categories.  The first performance segment category is impressions with personal annotations.  A personal annotation means that a personal contact of the searcher has +1’d your brand (your webpage, Google+ Page, organic search result or PPC ad).  The next performance segment is impressions with basic annotations.  Basic annotations are impressions that included an anonymous count of people who have +1’d your brand.  The third, and final, performance segment is for impressions without social annotations.  While both personal and basic annotations make your ad socially relevant, viewers that see people they actually know and trust +1ing something they are interested in purchasing will, in theory, be more likely to purchase said product.

If you are a PPC advertiser interested in making your brand more socially relevant, then you have some homework to do.  First, set up the Google+ Page for your business here.  Setting up your Google+ Page will not only allow you to get closer to your customers, but will allow you to create your business’s identity on Google+.  Next, you will need to use your Google+ Page URL to enable Social Extensions from the Ad Extensions tab in your AdWords campaigns.  Finally, after you have let the data accrue for a bit, use the +1 annotation reporting segment to see how the +1 features are affecting the performance of your advertising efforts.

Here at JumpFly we are very excited to see how these new Google+ enhancements will affect our clients ROI.  We expect nothing less than big things from the ever evolving Google!

Google is notorious for providing its users with free web-based products like Gmail, Google Music, Google Docs and the brand new Photovine.  While all these innovative Google products are robust, user friendly and easy to use, the Google tool that I use most frequently for pay-per-click (PPC) account creation and keyword research is the Google Keyword Tool.  This little gem of a tool allows me to plug in a specific list of words or phrases that I think people might be searching on.  Once the list is searched, I  can see keyword data on competition, global and local monthly searches, approximate CPC and lots more.  Google has recently made an update to the free Keyword Tool that was much needed and greatly appreciated.  Users are now allowed to search 2500 keywords and phrases at a time, a HUGE increase from the previous limit of only 100 keywords.

Why is this so great you ask?  Well, I begin my keyword research with root words and descriptive words.  For example, let’s say I am building a new campaign for a company that sells colored hanging file folders.  They have 20 different colors of folders and they can be called hanging file(s), hanging folder(s) or hanging file folder(s).  To begin the keyword research for this project, I would use an excel formula to create every possible variation of each color with each root word (yellow hanging file, yellow hanging files, yellow hanging folder, yellow hanging folders, hanging file yellow, hanging files yellow, hanging folder yellow, hanging folders yellow, etc.).  With 20 colors and 4 root words, this would give me a list of 160 possible search terms to research using Google’s Keyword Tool.  With the old tool I would need to paste the first 100 words in, star the ones with advertiser competition and/or search traffic, then paste the remaining 60 words and do the same thing.  With the new tool I can paste the entire list in one easy step – which is great!

Once I have several hundred keywords starred in the Keyword Tool, there is a “More like these” option which allows me to search for terms that are similar to the ones I have already chosen to star.  In the previous version of Google’s Keyword Tool I would only get search results for the first 100 keywords that I had starred, which was an inconvenience.  I would have to download the list, break it down into groups of 100 keywords and perform multiple searches again and again to get potentially great keyword suggestions for my new account.  With the new version, as long as my starred keywords do not exceed 2500, the Keyword Tool will provide me similar search terms for all of my starred keywords.  Hooray!

Another update to the tool that is worth noting is the “Group by” feature.  By default the Keyword Tool is set to “Group by None” but if you click on the dropdown, you can choose “Similarity to search terms” and the most pertinent words (keywords that include search terms) will show up grouped together below the search terms, but above the related keyword suggestions.  This is great for weeding through the hundreds of irrelevant keywords that the Keyword Tool often provides.

All in all, the Google Keyword Tool is getting better each and every time there is an update.  I am excited to see how it will progress through the rest of this year and beyond.  Keep up the good work Google!

Have you noticed that your top position AdWords ads are looking a bit different lately?  That’s because earlier this year Google made some changes to the way certain AdWords ads are displayed.  When ads appear in positions 1 – 3 (above the organic results on Google), ad copy with a first description line that ends with punctuation will see that first line automatically moved to the headline of the ad, separated by a dash.  This means that your headline, the portion of the text copy that gets the most attention from potential customers, is now able to provide even more information to Google users when your ad is being shown in the top three positions.  How great is that? 

Google made this update to description line 1 placement after performing tests and coming to the conclusion that it not only improves the user experience by providing searchers with more, relevant information easily and rapidly, but also improves the performance of the ad for the advertiser.  After doing some A/B ad testing with and without the punctuation at the end of description line 1, JumpFly’s account managers have seen the clickthrough rates (CTR) of the new ads with punctuation at the end of description line 1 skyrocket over the old ones without punctuation.  So much so that the JumpFly pay-per-click management teams now make sure that description line 1 ends in punctuation as often as possible.

Another change that Google recently announced is that top position ads will now be showing the display URL domain in the headline.  This update to how ads are displayed will allow Google searchers to be able to see and identify what site they will be taken to after they click on the ad and will help them decide whether or not they want to go to that site.  For AdWords advertisers, this is another huge change that is going to be great for them, especially for branding.  With the display URL being more prominent in the headline and still being shown in the display URL, your company name and web address exposure is doubled.  Sounds good to us!

Now, the question is:  How will Google AdWords decide whether to show the display URL or description line 1 after the headline?  Well, according to Google, BOTH can be displayed as long as the resulting headline is sixty-eight characters or less.  Imagine having a sixty-eight character, attention grabbing headline.  The amount of information you can get to potential customers in bold, blue text is unheard of and something all advertisers should try to capitalize on.

These changes to how Google AdWords ads are displayed are hugely important for advertisers.  In order to capitalize on them, you might want to call a professional PPC Management company like JumpFly.  We know the ins and outs of Google AdWords and we love implementing new, innovative ideas for our clients.