Knowledge is the Foundation To Success  

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.

If you have been to Google.com recently you have probably seen the latest innovation from the Google – Google Instant.  Joining the ranks of instant coffee, instant rice, instant cameras, instant mashed potatoes, instant Jell-O, instant oatmeal, instant messaging and more – on Wednesday, September 8, 2010 Google announced Google Instant.  Described as “an innovative new Google.com interface that creates an interactive search experience for users by predicting their query as they type and instantly showing updated results,” Google Instant boasts that it can shave 2-5 seconds off each Google search.  After some experimentation with the new Google Instant interface, I can’t deny – it is very slick.  How does it predict what I am going to type?  Apparently the Google Instant algorithms are just that smart.

After testing out Google Instant, the first question we had here at JumpFly was: “How will this affect the Pay Per Click(PPC) Marketing for our clients?”  With ads showing up before the entire search term was typed out, we were curious about the effect this would have on the number of impressions and click-through-rate (CTR) of our ads.  So we dug a little deeper and found out some details that may help explain Google Instant’s impact on PPC a little bit.

There are three different situations that Google Instant counts impressions:.

1.  Any click on the page – If the user begins to type a search query and then clicks anywhere on the page, an impression is counted.  This includes clicking on a search result, a sponsored link, spelling correction or a related search.

2.  Search selection – If the user clicks the Search button, presses Enter or clicks on one of the predicted queries, an impression is counted.

3.  ‘Three second rule’ – If the user stops typing and the search results are displayed for at least three seconds, an impression is counted.

That being said, we must anticipate that Google Instant will increase the amount of impressions received by the keywords in our accounts.  Hopefully this increase of potentially frivolous impressions will not have the negative impact on CTR that we would expect.  As we have talked about before, a poor CTR can be a detriment to Google AdWords Quality Score forcing advertisers to increase their maximum cost-per-click (CPC) in order to be seen in higher positions in the search results.

Only time will tell how Google Instant will impact the Google AdWords accounts of the hundreds of thousands of businesses who advertise their goods and services on Google.com.  Hopefully Google Instant will be a good thing, providing timelier search results to users and more qualified clicks to advertisers.  Fingers crossed – Google, please don’t disappoint!

Are you testing new ad copy on Google? Are you trying to see if a new ppc advertising ad will outperform an old ad? One thing you should be aware of is that by default Google will optimize the serving of ads, meaning that over time it will show the best performing ads more often (based on click-thru rate). A vast majority of the time this is a good thing. You want the best performing ads to show more often because this will help keep your click-thru rate up, help keep your quality score strong, etc.

However, sometimes a newer ad never really gets a true chance to prove itself because a strong older ad quickly overtakes it. This leads the new ad to languish and die a quick death because the percentage of time this new ad is shown quickly plummets if it doesn’t immediately outperform the older ad. Of course, sometimes that is okay if the new ad really is that much worse than the older ad.

But what if you really want to test an older ad with a newer ad on a level playing field? Then what do you do? Google does offer the opportunity to rotate ads on a more even basis. If you navigate to the Edit Campaign Settings screen in your Google AdWords account, you will see a Scheduling and Serving category where you can choose to either Optimize the ad serving (the default setting) or you can choose to Rotate and show ads on a more even percentage basis. By choosing to rotate ads more evenly you will allow a newer ad to run 50/50 with an older ad. After a set period of times has elapsed, you can then compare the click-thru/conversion rate of the ads and see how well they have performed against one another. This isn’t necessarily something you want to do all the time, but it is certainly worth taking a closer look at once in awhile if you really want to test ad copy in a true head-to-head battle.

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