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We’ve had a great couple of days at SMX London – here’s what we learnt from the Paid Search track from day 1 and the SMX Advanced track from day 2!

Day 1 – Paid Search Track

Amazing Paid Search Tactics & Tools

Ann Stanley, Co-Founder and MD of Anicca Digital (@annstanley)

Ecommerce advertising has changed quite a bit recently: Google Shopping transitioned from free to paid last month in the UK, and Google have just announced that they’re getting rid of product extensions. That means having product listing ads is more important for ecommerce.

Having a PLA ad group set for ‘all products’ with a really low bid has got them good results – it can be a good way to turn up in searches no one else is appearing on.

There doesn’t seem to be a true quality score for PLAs, but CTR is a factor to whether they get seen or not. Improve CTR with negative keywords. Also check your feed – you may be using low quality information.

A few months ago Google announced Enhanced Campaigns. One of the major changes this brings is that segmenting Search Network campaigns by device is impossible. Tablet is now lumped together with desktop. Bids for mobile can be altered (as a campaign level bid adjustment), and you can turn off mobile advertising all together, but you can’t turn off desktop targeting to have a mobile-only campaign.

Your options are campaigns that target desktop and tablets, or campaigns that target desktop, tablet and mobile (with adjusted bids). This means that if you had different versions of campaigns for different devices, when you upgrade you can only keep one active. But if you’ve had separate campaigns they are likely to have grown apart, even if they started as simple duplicates.

So, let’s say you’ve decided to keep the desktop campaign but you have tablet and mobile campaigns you want to merge into it. You need to check for differences, then judge whether anything that was only in the mobile or tablet campaigns should be copied into the desktop campaign. But how?

From the title you may have guessed: I suggest using Excel.

 

AdWords has changed a bit over the years. The interface changes, functions come and go, new settings appear…

The problem is that not everything changes at the same time, meaning AdWords Help might not immediately reflect shiny new features. The AdWords exams – and the Exam Study Learning Center – are always behind on something.

It’s possible that some things are left out for simplicity. For example, it’s possible they left out some of the many and varied targeting methods for the Display network in the Fundamentals sections to avoid over-complicating things. But some things are just plain wrong.

If you use AdWords quite a lot but are just studying for the AdWords exams, it’s useful to know what the exam thinks is the case and what actually is the case. Or if you’re using the Learning Center to teach yourself about AdWords, you may be wondering why what you’re reading doesn’t match the real thing. Here’s a rough guide to where the Learning Center and exams are behind.

Following reports over Limited Run’s Facebook ad tests and their need to spend a minimum advertising budget of $2,000 a month in order to change their Facebook page name from Limited Pressing to Limited Run, we’ve been getting many inquiries from our clients.

We contacted Facebook and a spokesperson for the social network responded with the following:

Google’s made some exciting announcements about remarketing.

  1. You can use one AdWords remarketing tag on all pages of your site, and then create as many remarketing audiences as you like from it. The audiences are then defined according to the URL of visited pages.
  2. You can (after “a small edit”) use a Google Analytics tag to make remarketing audiences for a linked AdWords account. This is being rolled out “in waves by the end of the summer”, so keep an eye on your Analytics account for the remarketing option!

Why is this exciting?

Last February I gave you some handy Excel tips – here’s some more! Today I’m talking about array formulae.

{ heart }

Recently we were a little stumped with gclid and the Google Analytics cookie that’s placed on user’s computers. We were asked:

“I went to my website through an ad, and the Analytics cookie set on my computer says: utmgclid=StrangeGibberishHere456|utmccn=(not%20set)|utmcmd=(not%20set) )|utmctr=my%20search%20term – why are the medium and campaign not set?”

So we did a little digging around to figure out why ‘utmccn’ was ‘not set’ and thought it was appropriate that we share it with all of you too. So here’s the low down on what we’ve learnt:

Why link AdWords and Analytics?

Traffic from AdWords will be automatically tracked as such in Analytics. You can see information such as bounce rate and pages per visit for different campaigns, ad groups, keywords, search terms and so on. You’ll also be able to incorporate AdWords information, like clicks and impressions, into Analytics reports.

Also, goal completions in Analytics can be imported into AdWords to define conversions. This means you can:

  • Define conversions that aren’t page views, by using a goal that’s defined by an event (eg clicking a link to download a pdf).
  • Have conversion tracking without having to put extra code up on the site.
  • If you’ve got an ecommerce site with Analytics ecommerce tracking set up, then if you import transactions as conversions into AdWords it will automatically import the transactions’ values.

If you advertise on Search, you should already know how important it is to find negative keywords – they stop you wasting money by stopping your ads showing on irrelevant searches.

But if you’re on the Display Network, things are a bit trickier. You still want to avoid wasting money showing ads to people who aren’t interested (and you want to avoid unfortunate appearances), but negative keywords don’t work as well. For best results you’ll need to look at all of the negative targeting options.

  • Placements
  • These are websites you exclude. If a placement is a domain, that stops your ad from showing anywhere on that domain (or its subdomains). You can also specify subdomains or subfolders, or even individual pages.

    Unfortunately there isn’t an ‘exact match’ for placements, so you can’t block a site’s homepage while still showing ads on deeper pages.

  • Topics
  • Topics let you exclude swathes of websites according to theme. Google’s categorisation isn’t perfect, but excluding a topic is more powerful than just excluding a keyword or individual site.

    To get an idea of what websites are in a Topic, use the Placement Tool.

  • Categories
  • They aren’t available for positive targeting, but if you scroll down to the Exclusions section of the Display Network tab you’ll see ‘Categories’. If you want to stop your ads appearing on sexually suggestive content or pages about death and tragedy, go here. You can also see how you perform when your ads appear in videos, or on pages with videos, or in games. There are also particular types of website, like forums and parked domains.

So now you know the negative targeting options, how do you work out how to use them? What placements, topics and categories do you exclude?

Schema & Authorship: 1 Year Layer

  • Hresume in microformats http://t.co/SnqqVgph or schema job posting http://t.co/2yaFTRTf for positions, interesting!
  • Visit http://t.co/dxbvN0kT to find out when the next Google webmaster tools hangout is
  • Think of rich snippets as rich summaries, it must visible on the landing page.
  • Rich snippets are supposed to be short descriptions of the content on to the page, not a spam tactic
  • Google plus pages for publishers with rel=publishers to the publishers google plus page – ideal for Brands!
  • Authorship – use accurately for authors NOT publishers
  • Recommended tools: AWR and quixapp
  • Recommended tool: seo tools for excel – quickly pull data without being a developer
  • 21% CTR without rich snippet versus 26% CTR with rich snippet in one test
  • SERP Turkey is a b testing tool with SERPs
  • Copy the schema and chuck it into the rich snippet tool by google
  • Schema and micro formats enrich our SERPs (or pollute?)