Category: Digital Marketing

You should already be running multiple ads for each of your ad groups, but are you running mobile versions of each ad too?

A mobile ad gets priority in the ad auction when someone is searching on their phone. If Google has 2 similar ads, but one is mobile, they are going to show the mobile ad.

The big benefit here is:

• a boost to your CTR (in most cases)
• a higher quality score
• which in turn brings you lower bids.

Here’s an example of the type of CTR difference you might expect from a mobile ad (CTR is the % on the right).

Although we have hidden the ad text (for the privacy of the customer), you can see what a difference a mobile ad makes. The mobile ad has a CTR of 2.61%, while the identical non-mobile ad has a CTR of 1.56%.

Now obviously you can’t just make mobile ads exclusively (they won’t show to desktops or laptops, which is still a very sizable portion of the market), but you should still run them whenever you can.

You don’t even have to change the ad text to reap the benefits! The ad above used the exact same ad text!

If you want though, you couuuuld change that ad text to be customized for a mobile offer. For example, maybe you give 10% off to mobile visitors only – you could do this with the mobile ad! I think this was probably the primary purpose that Google invented a mobile ad for. It’s only really necessary to change the text in special circumstances though.

So how do you insert mobile ads into your workflow?

Give your regular ads a few tests to find some winning ad variations. Once you have some decently optimized ads, then duplicate the winners into mobile ads.

You can keep testing all your ads together from here, but testing your regular ads first is more efficient because adding in mobile ad = more work, so it’s best to have a good variation running before increasing your workload.

You should have 4 ads per ad group running at a time. That way you’re able to:

1. test which ad gets the best response
2. delete the losers
3. and create some new ads to test again. Rinse and repeat.

This process of constantly testing lets you find the absolute best ad for your market, and is absolutely required to get the most bang for your buck.

There is a problem with the way the ads Google rotates your ads. By default, Google Adwords will display your top 1-2 ads more than the others, in an attempt to “automate” optimization.

For the smart marketer, this is a bad thing. Because your ads don’t get equal treatment, you can’t really see which ones are doing the best. You’ll want to make a custom change to enable your ads to rotate evenly, so that you can optimize them manually.

To start:

1. Go to the campaign you want to change.
2. Click on the “settings” tab.
3. Go down to “Ad delivery”.
4. Click “edit”.
5. Choose the “Rotate Indefinitely” option.

You will receive a warning from Google saying that Rotate Indefinitely is not recommended – ignore this warning.

By evenly rotating your ads, you can truly measure which ad provides the best results, and give every ad an even chance.

It’s true that your CTR may go down in the short run (as some of the lower performing ads are allowed to keep showing), but in the long run you’ll be able to increase your CTR far more than if you used the “Optimized” options.

The extra special benefit of doing this is that you can also optimize better for which ads actually convert, even if they don’t receive as high of a CTR.  This means your campaign will be optimized to make money, not just please robots.

It’s true that Google has an option to optimize for conversions, but that holds the exact same problem as the “optimize for clicks” option: you don’t get to see the true potential of every ad you write.

Next week we’ll be covering how mobile ads can increase your CTR.

Do you know exactly which search terms are bringing you conversions in your campaigns? If not, you could be leaving money on the table (you’re actually leaving it in your competitor’s pockets, but we’ll try to be gracious with you here).

The search terms are not just keywords you’re bidding on, but the specific terms that are being searched. For example, you could bid on the phrase-match keyword “buy shoes”, but the actual term being searched might be something like “buy shoes for people with high arches”.

Once you know exactly which terms are converting well, you can:

1. Add them into your campaign as an exact/phrase match keyword
2. And raise the bid on that keyword to make sure you’re in one of the top 3 positions

By adding the exact phrase into your campaign, you’re able to increase your relevance/quality score for that search term, which helps you pay less for your converting keywords. It also means that you’ll be shown much more often for that search term (due to relevance), and it means that you’ll now have more advanced data regarding that keyword.

Here’s how to find out the exact terms people are searching:

1. Navigate to the campaign/ad group you want to work on.
2. Click the “Dimensions” tab.
3. Click “View > Search Terms”.
4. Sort by conversions. Date range: it’s good to go back to a point where you have at least 20+ conversions recorded if not much more. If that requires you to go back a few months, so be it. If you need to go back a year, that’s fine too.

From here you can see quite a few columns. You’ll want to start by making sure you’re looking at keywords that have conversions, especially any keywords with more than 1 conversion. You can do this by sorting the “conversion” column to the top.

Once you’ve sorted your columns, the most important column to look at is the “added/excluded” column. This lets you know whether you’ve already added this keyword to your ad group/campaign.

Any promising keywords that are driving conversions should be added to your campaign as phrase/exact match keywords. If they aren’t currently added, then you’re missing out on an opportunity (previously described).

In the above campaign, what opportunities can you see?

There are quite a few keywords in this campaign that are receiving conversions, but aren’t added into the campaign as keywords. If you look at the 2nd keyword on the list, you’ll see that it actually has a very low CPC – this is called “low hanging fruit” because it’s not very competitive, but still drives conversions.

If for some reason you see keywords that don’t belong in your campaign, you can always add them in as negative keywords as well. We’re not sure why you would want to block keywords that are driving you conversions, but depending on the way you track conversions, it might not be equivalent to a true sale.

Putting this into place should help to increase your ROI. If you wanted to really limit costs, you could even bid on exclusively the keywords that are bringing you sales, and eliminate everything else. You probably wouldn’t receive as much traffic, but your costs would decrease significantly (while your profit stayed very similar). Not a bad trade if you ask us.

Next week we’ll be covering how to rotate your ads like an agency.

Have a higher click-through-rate (CTR) on your Google Ads means a few things:

• more traffic to your website, especially if there are limited people searching for your line of business, because more of your impressions are turning into visitors
• you can lower your overall cost per click (CPC), because a high CTR increases your quality score.

Increasing CTR is one effective way to pay less for your traffic. You can increase your CTR by choosing keywords that are relevant to your ads (this means having different ad groups for different areas of your business), and by writing ads that are wickedly good!

Here are some tips for writing ads that “get the click”.

Include A Call To Action

Calls to action such as “Hire Us Today!” or “Call Us Now!” tend to get more clicks. Include them in your ads for the best results.

Other examples of calls to action include:

• Sign up today
• Learn more
• Start a free trial
• Call us today
• Let’s get started
• Try us today
• Save now
• Subscribe
• Get our free app
• Try our demo

Capitalize The First Letter Of Each Word

Ad text that capitalizes the first letter of every word tends to get a higher CTR. It’s possible that this might change in the future as the practice starts to make people “ad blind”, but for the time being it’s an effective way to increase your CTR.

What Are Your Biggest Benefits?

If you’re Volvo, then people know you for one big thing – safety. If we were Volvo, our ads would read something like:

“5-Star Best-In-The-Country Safety Rating. Drive America’s Safest Car Today”

Safety is their big benefit, and it helps to drive it home.

So what are your biggest benefits? What do you offer your customers that is really valuable to them? You can even list off a feature or two if you’re feeling to lazy to derive emotional benefits from those features. Examples like “30 minute delivery” or “Free shipping” come to mind.

Use Dynamic Keyword Insertion

Dynamic keyword insertion, at its most basic, puts the keywords that the visitor was searching in the text of your ad.

It’s not nearly as complicated as it sounds. Here’s how it works, and how you can implement it.

Say you had a headline that read:

{KeyWord:Nike Shoes}

If a visitor was searching “Blue High Tops”, and your ad was triggered (because you were bidding on that keyword), then your headline would now read:

Blue High Tops

Now they see exactly what they searched, making your ad more relevant!

So, why did we put the term “Nike Shoes” in there at all? That’s the default text that’s used in case the visitor searches a term that’s too long to appear in the headline. If they search “Blue and green hightop shoes with black laces”, that would be clearly too long for the headline, so the headline would default to:

Nike Shoes

Make sense?

Dynamic ads don’t always outperform regular ads, so try using variations of each. Speaking of variations…

Test, Test, Test

Always create at least 3-4 ads for each ad group. After you’ve received at least 1,000 impressions on each ad, delete the losers and keep your winning 1-2 ads. Then write a few more ads, and repeat the cycle again!

You can even just test different headline variations with different ad text. Test dynamic keyword insertion VS no dynamic keyword insertion.

Any variation you can think of, you can test!

With all of these tips, you should be on the right path to writing halfway competent ads. As your CTR goes up, try lowering your bids. You’ll be surprised that you can get very similar results with bids that are much lower than your original if you have a high CTR.