Knowledge is the Foundation To Success  

I’m excited about the new Google AdWords option Shared Budgets that was rolled out starting September 17. I have to admit that when I first heard about it, I really wasn’t that impressed, as the way it was explained to me was that it was shared across the entire account.  The reality is that you get to pick and chose which campaigns you want to share the budget for. And that’s what makes me excited.

Let’s say I have a client with a PC campaign, a mobile campaign and a tablet campaign, and wants to spend $100 per day. Before Shared Budgets, I would have to decide the budget for each campaign. In theory, if I know the volume that the client gets for each device, I can allocate the budget to each campaign. But it’s not a fool-proof method. What happens on days when mobile sees a spike in traffic and could use extra budget? The Desktop or tablet campaign might not have hit that budget and it would have been great to add that extra spend to the mobile campaign. With shared budgets, I don’t have to worry about some campaigns under spending and some always hitting their budget.

Setup is very easy and can be found in the Shared Library > Budgets.

Make sure to check your Bidding and Budget Delivery Method. Per a Google post on the AdWords Community “Please make sure that your delivery method in the campaign settings of each of the linked campaigns all reflect the same delivery method setting. This is important as one linked campaign with an accelerated delivery method could easily burn through all shared budget, leaving any other linked campaigns setup on standard delivery with no budget to show their ads throughout the day.”

And make sure to watch actual performance. Similar to the delivery method issue, if one of your campaigns burns through budget faster than others, it may leave the others with nothing. As with all Google options, don’t set it and forget it – you need to make sure you evaluate performance and see if the option is working as you want it to.

It’s not an option that needs to be set for everyone, so I’m starting cautiously with just a few accounts where it really makes sense to see how it performs.

According to a recent Official Google Blog post, your Google Places account for your local business will soon be obsolete.  If your business has yet to embrace the awesomeness that is Google+, now would be a great time to start learning how Google+ can help you interact with both current and potential new customers.  All good things come to those who wait and this exciting Google improvement is no different.  Google+ Local will be rolling out and replacing Google Places accounts in the next few months.  What does this mean for your local business?

If you are a local business that has a Google Places for Business page – great news:  Your Places page will be automatically transitioning into a Google+ Local page with little to no effort on your part.  According to Google, you will still be able to log in to and manage your local business information through Google Places for Business.  From there you will be able to verify and update basic listing data and respond to reviews.

If you have already created a Google+ Page for your business – great job:  You are ahead of the curve and should be receiving information from Google on how to link your Google+ Page to your local listing.  Once the transition is complete, your Google+ Local page will be a fully functional social media machine capable of all sorts of complex customer interaction and fun stuff like status updates, hangouts, circles and more.

Either way, the announcement of Google+ Local is super exciting for local businesses.  Why not take advantage of all the cool social features being offered by Google+ Local?  Don’t forget to thank the Google for another free and extremely robust way to keep your business in front of customers.

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.