Meet The New Twitter Ad Groups Tool

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Twitter-Ad-Groups-Tool

Twitter has released a new feature, the Twitter Ad Groups Tool which is designed for marketers who run more elaborate advertising campaigns that take advantage of segmentation and advanced customization.

 

Twitter hopes to follow in Facebook’s footsteps by offering a feature rich advertising platform that is relevant in today’s highly competitive digital world.

Twitter Stated:

“Ad groups introduce a new level in our campaign hierarchy: one campaign can have many ad groups, and an ad group can have many targeting criteria and creatives. This level of granular control helps advertisers improve how they measure results, set promotion schedules, test different audiences, and identify which Tweets work best.”

 

Twitter’s Advertising platform offers a variety of ways to target specific audiences which gives marketers a better understanding of how effective their ads are, while also allowing them to adjust and improve upon them.

Audience segmentation can be achieved in a number of ways, but here is a breakdown of the most popular targeting options:

 

Geo-location Targeting

This allows your ads to be customized based on your user’s location. Geo-location Targeting is useful for larger brands that have a global presence, you can target by a user’s location, country, province, or postal code.

twitter-map

 

Device Targeting

A great option for promoting Apps, allowing an advertiser to have a unique ad with a different download link depending on whether the user’s device is running Android or iOS. Device targeting can make a dramatic improvement in a campaign’s effectiveness.

 

Language Targeting

Displaying an ad in a language the viewer doesn’t understand is never a good idea, Language Targeting prevents this issue from occurring by allowing you to display different ads based on the user’s preferred language.

 

Follower Targeting

This allows a marketer to focus on a specific type of person and follow people who are similar to their target audience. Who a person follows tends to provide useful information about their likes and interests. This can be a quick way of finding people who are highly relevant for a particular ad campaign.

 

Interest Category Targeting

Segmenting based on a user’s interests is one of the most common ways to target, it allows you to target a user with the most relevant ad based on their likes and interests.

 

Gender Targeting

Some advertising campaigns are only relevant to a specific gender which is why the new Twitter Ad Groups Tool provides the option to target based on gender. This option allows an advertiser to only have their ads displayed to users of a specific gender, resulting in increased user engagement.

 

twitter-audience

 

Keyword Targeting

One of the most useful methods of targeting, Keyword Targeting allows you to take advantage of current trending topics by jumping in Twitter conversations based on relevant keywords. Properly implementing Keyword Targeting is a great way to increase reach and user engagement.

 

Summary

The new Twitter Ad Groups Tool is a big improvement and will give marketers the ability to target their desired audience much more accurately than before. Proper segmentation of ad campaigns will result in improved targeting and better measurement of results.

 

 

Getting The Most From Your Google Display Campaign

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display-ads

Most businesses have experimented with Display Advertising at some point or another, usually with either great success or total failure.

Today we’ll go through a few steps you can take to avoid some of the most common mistakes along with some solutions to set your Display Advertising Campaigns up for long term success.

 

Reviewing Ad Placement:

Is your CPA steadily increasing every month? This is a fairly common occurrence in Adwords and is typically caused by one of the following issues. Your competitors may have increased their display ad bidding strategy, your product may not be as competitive as it was previously, your product could even be out of season.

An increasingly common issue is having a large portion of your display advertising budget wasted on irrelevant mobile apps. Specifically mobile apps with a high percentage of children using them, games that involve rapidly clicking can result in accidental clicks on your ads. This can be easily remedied by clicking the Display Network tab, selecting placements and within this section you will have the ability to exclude specific apps from your campaign.

 

display-tab

 

Another issue with Display Campaigns is the time your ads are being display. Timing seems to have a much bigger impact on display Campaigns than regular Search Campaigns. It’s important to pay attention to the impressions and clicks your campaign is receiving during certain times of the day, this can be viewed from within the dimensions tab. A common issue is having the majority of your budget being spent during times your office is closed which can make it harder for a potential client to take action, potentially wasting a large portion of your budget.

Site categories are an important feature that shouldn’t be neglected. Google used to provide statistics that included details about how much of your traffic was coming from games, forums, adult content, 404 pages, etc allowing you to make much more accurate decisions on which sites to allow your Display Advertisements to run on. Now Google only gives the option to exclude or enable.

Consistently testing and adjusting which site categories you allow and exclude can play a big role in optimizing your Display Advertising campaigns. At the absolute minimum you can split test between having all categories excluded or enabled for a week and measure the impact on your key performance indicators.

 

Google Display Campaign Optimizer:

The Google Display Campaign Optimizer allows Google to automatically adjust and attempt to improve your Display Advertising Campaigns. You can enable it within your Display Campaign targeting options.

In order for the Display Campaign Optimizer to properly work, your campaign will require a minimum of 15 conversions in a 30 day period. Results can vary dramatically while using DCO from incredible to horrible but by using some of the following tips you should be able to keep your campaigns in the former rather than the latter.

  •  DCO typically performs at it’s best when paired with the Google conversion optimizer. You should be adjusting your CPA goal and staying on top of testing to determine the optimum positioning for your ads.
  • Audit your ads, some ads will perform better than others. Images might be performing better than text. With DCO selecting your best performing ads is critical to optimize your results. If you neglect this step, Google may test a poor ad in a good placement and if it doesn’t receive the expected results it could be a long time before it tries to test it again.
  • As advanced as Google is, it still needs a little help in certain areas. Make sure to regularly check and adjust placement exclusions, if a particular placement costs 10 times more than your CPA target with 0 conversions Google might need a hint that it should be paused.

 

By following some of these simple Google Display Campaign tips we have been able to generate long term sustainable results for our clients through the use of Display Advertisements.

 

 

 

5 Ways To Improve Your Remarketing Campaigns

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adwords-remarketing

A successful remarketing campaign can work wonders for most businesses but like any type of paid advertising to ensure the best results it needs to be properly setup and regularly tested. In this post we will cover 5 ways you can improve the performance of your remarketing campaigns.

 

1) Who Is Your Audience?

The target audience is typically the most important factor of a successful remarketing campaign. Selecting “All visitors” as your audience is not usually specific enough to optimize your campaign’s results.

Generally the more specific you are at defining your audience, the better your results will be. A good strategy is to segment your target audience based on your website’s pages, this allows you to create a customized ad copy that can directly targets those visitors.

By utilizing Google Analytics to help configure your target audiences you’ll be able to target individuals based on very specific behavior such as the time spent on a particular page, the amount of pageviews, etc.

 

remarketing-audience

 

2) How Are Your Campaigns Structured?

How have you segmented your remarketing campaigns. Have you properly separated your text ads from your image ads by assigning them different groups? Have you assigned a different ad group for each target audience? It’s important to ensure that your campaign structure is setup logically so that others will be able to look at your account and make sense of the structure.

 

3) Which Ads Are Being Displayed?

If you’re targeting users that have already landed on your site via a paid ad it’s important to show them a different ad copy in your remarketing campaign. Compare your remarketing ads with your normal display & search ads to ensure they feature different versions of your ad copy.

The ad copy that is being served should be based on the specific audience you’re targeting. IE: If someone visits a video card section of your electronics store, the ad they are served should be related to video cards as opposed to a more general ad showing computer parts.

 

4) Where Are Your Ads Being Displayed?

A good starting point for identifying problems with an under-performing remarketing campaign is examining the ad placements. Take a close look for any placements that are consuming a large amount of the campaign budget with low conversions or that aren’t particularly relevant to the ad copy. Removing these usually results in a simple but effective way to improve your remarketing campaign’s ROI.

 

5) How Often Are Your Ads Being Displayed?

For a positive user experience it’s important not to overwhelm your audience by constantly displaying the same remarketing ads to them, this can become annoying very quickly. Luckily, you can take advantage of the frequency cap settings to solve this. Under your campaign settings, if you scroll down there is an option to adjust your frequency capping setting. You can adjust the maximum amount of impressions for a given period of time at either the ad, group or campaign level. A good general number for a remarketing campaign is a max of 10 impressions a day.

 

frequency-capping

 

Summary

Following all of the above steps will help to optimize poorly performing remarketing campaigns and setup your digital marketing strategy for long term success.

 

 

 

AdWords Self-Optimizing Accounts Are Here

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google-self-optimizing

Adwords has taken another big step towards increasing it’s automation capabilities with Adwords self-optimizing accounts, it’s now possible to have Adwords automatically adapt based on the actions of your competitors in an an attempt to maintain campaign performance without the need for any manual intervention. Here’s how to set it up.

It seems like the Adwords development team feels structuring campaigns in this manner is not ideal based on some recent changes that lessen the effect of exact match and phrase searches but by forcing the system in this manner when user searches are focused on fewer terms using high budget amounts and competitors are also bidding on those same terms the result is a much higher CPC.

Because of this, it’s important to do some test campaigns that are based on long tail keywords (broad match or broad modified medium). This setup allows for much more flexibility even though it still requires some manual checking to locate lucrative user queries and to add negative keywords but all things considered it is still much more efficient than checking a hundred mini ad groups daily.

 


Search-Terms

Next let’s talk about bidding. A completely automated self optimizing campaign shouldn’t be relying on manual adjustments, only enhanced CPC & CPA bidding. Using CPA will require at least several conversions per day (any less and performance would potentially become worse) but CPC can be a little more flexible. In order to properly implement bidding automation all conversions must be accurately tracked.

If you’re not currently tracking the online goals for your business then you’re not taking advantage of some of the most powerful abilities of Adwords. The conversion being tracked should include everything from email subscriptions, downloads to leads and sales.

 

conversions-ga-adwords

 

A nice feature of auto-optimizing campaigns is harmony between your total daily cost and campaign budget. For example if you’re spending your entire budget daily you are allowing Adwords to choose which items your ads are displayed for, basically losing a portion of your potential impressions when you should be covering all traffic peaks using your top performing shopping items, placements & keys.

In addition to regularly adjusting search queries you will have to to stay on top of adding new variations and extensions to your ads, ideally as often as possible. The common practice of simply A B split testing two ads only really works if you’re consistently adding new ads otherwise the Adwords self-optimizing algorithm won’t be able to work it’s magic.

Groups that don’t have a large variety of variations will require more manual effort to determine the best variation for a specific location, time of day, mobile device, etc.

Even once your auto-optimizing campaign is setup properly you will still need to create some alerts if there is a problem that requires manual intervention. You should at the very least have an alert to monitor the impressions for active campaigns within your ad groups along with an alter that monitors any significant drop in conversion rates. Both of these alerts are easy to setup as rules at either the ad group or campaign level.

Even with the advancements in Adwords self-optimizing accounts, you should still be actively monitoring your campaigns to ensure everything is working as intended.

5 Google Adwords Mistakes You Should Avoid

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google-adword-s



Most people are already aware of how powerful Google Adwords can be for driving traffic to their website but the costs can add up very quickly if your campaigns are not setup correctly. Avoiding these common 5 Google Adwords mistakes will help to minimize costs while maximizing your return on investment.

A campaign that isn’t properly setup can end up costing more money than it’s actually bringing in, experience and proper management both play huge roles in determining how successful your Google Adwords campaign(s) will be.

In this post, we will go over 5 Google Adwords mistakes that are commonly made along with some advice on how to avoid making them yourself.

 

 

Mistake #1: Improperly Grouping Keywords

AdWords allows you to create campaign ad groups so you can manage different types of campaigns. Within each of your campaigns, you have the ability to break down each of your ads and keywords by ad groups (While within a campaign, click the green button “New ad group” to create a new group for ads or keywords”.

 

One of the most common mistakes is not properly setting up ad groups. People will place all of their keywords into a single ad group and show everyone the same ad instead of properly segmenting their ads based on similar keyword types.

This approach leads to numerous issues, the basics of PPC Advertising tell us that people are much more likely to click on a link depending on how close the ad copy matches the keyword. The ad being displayed should match the keyword being searched.

By lumping all of your keywords together is prevents you from being able to customize your ad so that it more closely matches the actual term being searched for. The more effort you spend on properly grouping your ads and keywords, the easier it will be for you to analyze and optimize your campaigns.

 

Mistake #2: Using The Wrong Keyword Matches

Another common mistake people tend to make is using the wrong phrase match, broad match, or exact match keywords.

Adwords will allow you to add keywords for a campaign as phrase match, broad match or exact match, here is a breakdown of each keyword match.

 

adwords-matching-types

 

A broad match keyword means that the order of the keywords searched doesn’t impact whether your ads will be displayed. If you had for example “Adidas running shoes”, your ad would be displayed for people who searched for “Adidas running shoes”, “Adidas soccer running shoes”, and “Buy Adidas running shoes online”.  Your ad will be displayed as long as the keywords entered show up regardless of the order.

A phrase match keyword means that the complete keyword phrase you have chosen needs to be included in the search in the order it was entered. Using the Adidas example, if you were to enter “Adidas running shoes” as your phrase match keyword then your ad would be displayed for terms such as “Adidas running shoes” and “where can I purchase Adidas running shoes” but would not be displayed for searches like “Adidas soccer running shoes” or “Where can I purchase Adidas shoes for running”.

An exact match keyword is exactly what you would think. The search terms needs to match exactly with the keyword you’ve entered in Adwords. For example, if you put “Adidas running shoes” for your exact match keyword, your ad will only be displayed for someone searching “Adidas running shoes” and wouldn’t be displayed for a very similar search of “Adidas running shoes online”.

How does all of this impact my Adwords campaigns? The type of match you choose will make a big difference on how your ads perform. A broad match will generate more impressions, but typically less conversions as it will be displayed for terms that aren’t necessarily the best fit for your product or service.On the other hand, exact match and phrases will usually lead to much higher conversion rates as your audience is much more specific, but as a result tend to generate significantly less impressions, meaning you may not be reaching as large of an audience.

 

Mistake #3: Not Implementing Negative Keywords

Another common mistake is not correctly implementing negative keywords. AdWords gives you the ability to use negative keywords to exclude keywords you don’t want your ads to be displayed for.

Here’s an example, if you were the owner of an e-commerce site that sells designer men’s shoes but not athletic shoes, then you wouldn’t want your ads to be displayed for searches like  “men’s running shoes” but would want them to show up on searches for “men’s shoes.” To accomplish this, you could add “running” as a negative keyword, and then your ads would not be displayed for a search that included the word “running.”

Negative keywords can be added at both the campaign and the ad group level. Thus, if a word should be excluded from only one particular ad group, then you can exclude it at the group level, but if you want it excluded from the entire campaign, then you can do that as well.

 

Mistake #4: Not Trusting The Data

People tend to make the mistake of getting personally attached to an ad copy they’ve created. This isn’t an issue if your ad is performing well but if the data is telling you your ad isn’t very good, you should listen.

It’s important to be constantly testing your ad copies using different bodies, headlines, call to action variations, etc. Testing with multiple variations is the only way to truly know which is performing better. An alternative headline might help with search results, mentioning a perk may increase conversions, the only way to know is to test.

Make sure once you start testing you take a neutral stance and don’t show any bias to a version of an ad copy you’ve created. Let the data show you which is better depending on your ad campaigns goals, whether it’s a lower cost per acquisition (CPA), higher conversion rate or more clicks. The results are more important than personal opinion.

 

Mistake #5: Not Showing Up For Your Own Brand

A common mistake a lot of businesses make is not bidding for their own brand. The assumption is probably that they already rank for an exact match of their brand so why invest any money into bidding on search terms for their brand.

The main reason you should be bidding on your own brand is that if you don’t your competitors will. Your competitors can actually use your brand name to directly target your site’s visitors. Even though your site is at the top of the organic search results for a search for your brand their paid ad will appear above you for searches for your brand.

 

Summary

Implementing all of the above recommendations will help you to avoid the 5 Google Adwords mistakes most commonly made and set your Adwords campaigns up for long term success.