Category: Google AdWords

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Getting Your Full Value Out of Mobile

McCord Web Services is a Bing Ads Accredited Professional Company and Google AdWords Certified Partner.
McCord Web Services is a Bing Ads Accredited Professional Company and Google AdWords Certified Partner.

As the leader of online marketing Google is paving a new path into the digital world and helping advertisers on the way to understand how to market in our “always on” world. Anyone who is involved in selling knows that the new frontier is mobile and that it is changing how we market forever.

Google has done quite a few really smart things to embrace this new frontier. First, they have introduced AdWords Enhanced Campaigns which is the first step in leveraging mobile activity and advertising on smartphones to reach people where and when they are making buying decisions.

Second, Google created a partnership with DudaMobile to help advertisers get a free mobile website that can be used in the AdWords interface as the destination URL even with the DudaMobile.com domain URL.

Third, Google has done a marvelous job of training and reaching out to account managers like me to assist them with how to help move clients into the mobile arena. The seminars are excellent and topical. Although they are really in a closed by invitation arena and not widely published, much of the information has also been disseminated via Hangouts at Google+.

I personally have attended one and sometimes two, one hour seminars for at least the last eight weeks and have had a Google account manager available to assist me with mobile implementation, followup, implementation of mobile conversion tracking and assists with DudaMobile for my own clients.

The power of mobile is to not just getting click activity on mobile phones, but to understand that the real value of mobile is much bigger than that. Mobile activity drives website traffic, e-commerce activity, and increasingly foot traffic into stores. My personal feeling is that the true power of mobile to drive sales should not be discounted and should be fully evaluated for each business.

Not all businesses will need the marketing strategies that some local selling businesses may need when it comes to mobile, but even national businesses may find that mobile activity is a growing percentage of their overall online activity.

Mobile brings a whole new perspective to the marketing table. Make sure that you are testing, trying out, and really thinking about your own mobile strategy in the weeks and months to come.

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What I Like About Google AdWords Enhanced Campaigns

McCord Web Services is an AdWords Certified Partner.
McCord Web Services is an AdWords Certified Partner.

I’ve been busy doing and early migration for our AdWords clients into Enhanced Campaigns. Through extensive testing on AdWords rollout last month, I found that there was no downside to migration and that there were actually some nice benefits.Here’s Why You Should Upgrade to Enhanced Campaigns Early

1. If you are getting phone calls and have a under one dollar cost per click, moving to Enhanced Campaigns will lower your expenses. Phone calls to desktops and tablets will be free and from mobile phones will only cost you a click instead of the previously default minimum $1 bid. For one of my clients whose typical cost per click was $.21 to go from $1 a call to $.21 per call based on their typical call volume was a huge dollar savings.

2. Records phone calls as conversions based on your needs. We know for a fact that AdWords drives phone call activity and this for many clients is growing in importance. With Enhanced Campaigns, the client and I can decide the number of seconds for a call to be recorded as a lead conversion. And on top of that I can now even specify when the phone number will show. I will typically set the time to be 60 seconds and set the phone number to show during their office hours only. I can schedule the time of day as well as the day of the week.

3. AdWords Enhanced Campaigns offer very granular location targeting and the ability to bid up or down by location. By drawing radius settings around the addresses (even multiple addresses) that are listed as location extensions, you can bid up for better ad placement. For example, I manage a number of AdWords programs for dentists. I will routinely map out a radius of 2 miles, 5 miles, and 10 miles and then bid up 10 to 20% up by location proximity working to get more location specific traffic for my dental office clients.

4. I can now see activity and clicks by actual site link. This information is very helpful in regards to understanding what is important for a client. I can also now add up to 20 site links instead of 10, and change them at will. Now longer are site links tied together as a group, they are individual for the account and you click to add them by either ad group or campaign. The ability to specify site links at the ad group level for some accounts is a welcome enhancement.

5. I can craft smartphone specific ads that fit correctly on a typical smartphone sized screen and choose to serve this ad specifically to smartphone users. This is a very nice feature. I typically will use click to call in the ad text.

These are just a few of the things I personally like about AdWords Enhanced Campaigns and are using for clients. If you are looking for a knowledgeable AdWords account manager for your own program and one that know Enhanced Campaigns, I invite you to visit our AdWords services page for more information and account set up and management pricing.

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DudaMobile Integration with Google AdWords

A smart secret about AdWords and DudaMobile.
A smart secret about AdWords and DudaMobile.

This is a little known fact, but did you know that DudaMobile and Google have agreed to allow mobile URLs in the destination URL in Google AdWords to be a DudaMobile top level domain and still work.Let me explain

The destination URL, where your visitor goes when they click your ad on Google.com, by AdWords rule has always had to go to a page in the site of your top level domain. If it did not, your ad was disapproved.

Now you can have a DudaMobile destination URL and your own domain Display URL and your mobile ads will be approved and show by Google AdWords. Wow! Who knew! As Google is pushing mobile, and encouraging AdWords users to set up a DudaMobile website, but some business owners are having trouble knowing how to implement mobile or create a mobile CNAME record for their domain, Google has decided to make it easy.

Here’s an example:

In my AdWords ad, my Display URL for an ad would be www.McCordWeb.com. Typically my destination URL would be http://www.mccordweb.com/ but now for my mobile ads my destination URL can be http://mobile.dudamobile.com/site/mccordweb_2 and my ads will be approved and run! Cool, thanks Google for helping all business owners get into the game with mobile without too many headaches.

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Google AdWords Remarketing Strategies

McCord Web Services is an AdWords Certified Partner.
McCord Web Services is an AdWords Certified Partner.

AdWords remarketing has been around for a while, but AdWords has made some nice changes recently and if you haven’t tried remarketing or tried it previously and did not have success, it is time to try it again.Remarketing audiences are easy to set up. You’ll access the audience creation feature from the slide out library menu on the left of your Google AdWords control panel. Go to the Shared Library and then Audiences. Build a new audience for your needs. I recommend one to target the whole website and then refine to specific audiences using tag rules.

Once your audience is set up, AdWords will generate code. Get your webmaster to install the code in all pages of your website. Make sure to update your privacy policy as you need to be transparent on what you are now doing and allow people to opt out of remarketing. There are some good privacy policy examples out there already for you to use as a starting point for your updates.

Then create a new Display campaign. At set up select remarketing as your option and the steps are very simple you will select your audience (pulled from your shared library) and then create text and display ads using the Display Ad Builder.

Once your audience lists hits 100 people, Google will start to serve ads. I have to say from experience that this process is now so simple and streamlined that it should be used by every account using AdWords. I like to set the daily budget at about $10 a day and pay about $.79 a click for most account initially. I have found that nearly all account are having conversion success with remarketing.

If you haven’t given AdWords remarketing a look, now’s the time to check it out to see if it would work for you.