Knowledge is the Foundation To Success  

What are Google Local Business Ads?

Google Local Business Ads – or Maps Ads – are similar to search ads but they appear on the Google Maps platform.  This platform has been growing in traffic since its inception and is now available on many other devices beyond the desktop/laptop including the popular iPhone.

The significance of local business ads is that they satisfy the intent of the search when it comes to local business.  Most local businesses thrive on location – in other words – if someone is looking for a new dentist and you can show the visitor that you are minutes from their home or work, they are more likely to click through or give you a call than if they discover you are an hour or more away.  Therefore, showing your ad in the context of your location on a map gives the visitor that much more incentive to contact you.

Should I be running Local Business Ads?

Perform a search on one of your top keyword phrases from the regular Google Search screen – for example, “find a dentist”.  You will notice that one of the first natural listings, if not the first, is a large group of local business listings next to a map.  There is a large link at the top that says “Local Business Results for <search term> near <your location> and another smaller link at the bottom that says “More results near <your location>”.  When the visitor clicks on either of these links, Google Maps is displayed along with the first several local business ads. 

Because of the location within the natural search results, these links are much more likely to be clicked than any of the sponsored search results.  Creating local business ads to be shown on Google maps can greatly increase your exposure. Contact a professional PPC Management Agency with any additional questions.

More in my next post on How to run Local Business Ads.

Google AdWords recently ran a Beta of a monthly budget option. Instead of just the daily budget option, where Google would cap your spend each day regardless of demand, you could set a monthly budget (which was computed by multiplying your daily budget by 30.44, the average number of days in a month) where the daily spend could fluctuate. If you had a low traffic day and didn’t spend your daily ppc advertising budget, the excess could be applied to the following day or days, just as long as you stayed within your monthly budget total at the end of the month.

It’s a great concept, especially if you really want to hit your monthly spend and your traffic fluctuates a lot by day. Here at JumpFly, we’ve tested it for a few of our clients that were in the Beta and were pleased with the results, but as with all new things, there’s a learning curve. Here’s one of the biggest “catches” to the monthly budget, which could bite you if you didn’t know about it and react accordingly.

If you reduce your budget at some point during the month, the total budget for the month decreases which can actually back-fire in constraining how much you spend for the remainder of the month. For example, my client had a $7000 per month spend, which comes out to $229.96 per day. About 2/3 of the way through the month, we split out a portion of the existing campaign into new one, and allocated a portion of the $7,000 to the new budget. I reduced the daily budget on the existing campaign to $179.98.

Now here’s where it gets tricky. Google takes the $179.98 times 30.44 (average number of days in a month) to figure out the new monthly budget, which is $5478.59. I’d already spent $4829.16 for the month. Subtract what I spent from my new monthly budget and I have a total of $649.43 to spend for the remaining 10 days – or $64.94 per day, which is less than 1/3 of what I actually wanted to spend. I’ll be honest, it took me several days to figure out why this account had a decrease in impressions and spend. Everything LOOKED fine – the daily budget still said $179.98, the monthly still said $5478.59. I wasn’t getting any messages that my budget was being constrained. I was just about to call my dedicated Google rep for help, when I decided to investigate a little deeper into monthly vs. daily budgets, and there was my answer. Google’s help page says that if you do reduce your budget during the month, they’ll remind you of the number of days left in the month and how the budget change could affect your account, but I don’t remember seeing any type of message that warned me.

So, if Google releases Monthly Budgeting to all AdWords customers, it’s something that might be worth trying. Just remember, as with most Google tools, there’s nuances that can catch you if you are not careful.

More about Nikki

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.

More about Jack