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.

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.

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.

New AdWords Features for 2013

You’ll want to watch this 30 minute of so video from Google AdWords that reveals what is in store for AdWords advertisers for 2013. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dNyqfC0JXVE&feature=em-uploademail)

Here is a quick overview of what’s coming:

1. Product Listing Ads for mobile, Dynamic Contextual Ads for the Display Network, and even Dynamic Remarketing.

2. New Search Extensions are coming: customer support interfaces in the search engine results, email submission to add your name to a subscription list without leaving the Google.com search results page, enhanced call metrics, and social extensions.

3. This one is pretty big – remarketing is coming to the search results! Currently only available in the Display network, remarketing or “stalker ads” are coming to Google.com. This will be my most anticipated new addition for 2013.

Make sure to watch the full video so you can see where AdWords is headed for 2013 yourself.