I’m thinking more “audiences” and less “keywords” than ever before. – Melissa Mackey

According to many PPC experts, audience targeting was the most important trend in 2016. Which was nice after having 5 consecutive years of mobile.

And looking forward to 2017, audiences will continue to grow in importance and scale. As Melissa’s quote above indicates, thinking ‘keywords only’ really is a thing of the past. It’s the combination of intent (keyword or voice search), device, time, location and audience that we need to think about.

Most AdWords advertisers however, are familiar with remarketing audiences only. But actually this is just one of the 10 main ways you can target (or exclude) audiences in AdWords:

In the illustration above you can see which audiences can be targeted on which network(s).

And for those who like a historical perspective, see the timeline below for the years when different audiences were released in AdWords. Betas were often already available a year earlier.

Keep on reading!

Google’s new Expanded Text Ad format is a chance to re-imagine your ads.

It’s also a chance to become completely overwhelmed with the amount of work that needs to be done in a short amount of time.

Acquisio & AdAlysis will be hosting a webinar that will help you walk through:

• The transition
• Techniques for upgrading
• Common mistakes to avoid
• How to test your new ads
• And much more

Register now so you can upgrade your ads to ETAs like a pro.

Facebook ads, ETAs, paid search ads, display ads, and any other ad format relies on a process for great testing:

• Testing ideas
• Hypothesis
• Data metrics
• Statistical significance
• Taking action
• Insights

In this webinar, we’ll cover ad testing with Facebook, how to test in paid search, and testing metrics and processes that can be used across any platforms.

Enjoy this free webinar brought to your by Duane Brown from Unbounce and Brad Geddes.

Please register here to learn how to future proof your ad copy.

There are several ways to test ads:

• A/B Testing
• Pattern Testing
• Label testing
• And more

And then you need to:

• Determine winner and loser metrics
• Segment your ad tests
• Determine minimum data
• Determine maximum data
• Ensure you are confident in the results

All of these decisions are assuming that you’re testing and have ad ideas to test – the brainstorm of what to test is important. Finally, what do you do with the information?

• Change ads
• Launch landing page tests
• Use the information for social or email

There are many questions to ask about properly done ad testing -and we’re going to cover them in an upcoming webinar with Invesp.

Here’s the details you need to know:

Date: Thursday, June 16th, 2016
Time: 1 PM EST / 10 AM PST
Duration: 45 minutes

If you can’t make it but would like the recording – sign up and you’ll receive a recording in the future.

Please join us for this webinar and register here.

“If you look at a good PPC account and it’s not converting, in 99% of cases, the landing page is the problem.” – Brad Geddes

“Most websites don’t have a traffic problem… However, every website has a conversion problem.” – Bryan Eisenberg

In other words: if all you do is work on your PPC campaigns, but no one is obsessed with converting the traffic you’re paying for, then yes, you too have a problem. And it’s probably the single largest reason why your results aren’t what you want them to be.

So it’s about time we dive into landing pages and conversion rate optimization in this series. A topic one could easily write a book about, as in fact some of the brightest minds in digital marketing did.

That’s why I’d highly encourage you to read the books and blogs below, even if you’re ‘just’ a PPC marketer. Because as such, you already have great insights into your audience’s interests and what ad copy they respond best to.
So why stop there? You have to enter a URL in those ads anyway. Why not make sure it’s a URL that delivers a great experience?

Keep on reading!

Speculation about the impact of voice on digital marketing is running rampant these days, especially as it relates to search by voice input specifically.

Google and Bing have laid the groundwork for voice input: Google has the microphone button on desktop and on its mobile apps. Bing has the microphone input through Cortana on the Windows 10 desktop, and through Cortana on its mobile app.

With the foundation in place, will voice search take off? Will people give up their text input habit for the convenience (but not-quite-perfect) of voice input?

I recently spoke at SMX Munich about how voice search is going to change the world of advertisers. We started with a close look at the most recent research on voice. Who is using voice input? The most surprising thing is that apparently older people are adopting voice with enthusiasm – which makes sense in the context of the small smartphone screen and keyboard. Voice is easier, and you don’t have to put your reading glasses on to get it done.

Another fascinating stat is that most people (42%) only started using voice search in the last six months. If this trend holds steady, voice search will be roundly adopted within the next few years.

We also looked at the key differences between voice and text inputs, and why this matters to advertisers. It’s clear that the world of voice input is dramatically different, starting with the use of conversational language.

This one difference is responsible for a cascade of effects including more refined and clear intent (“Where can I buy pink rain boots?” versus “pink rain boots”), slightly longer keyword queries and a bias toward local search.

The session wrapped up with a forward look at what we can expect from voice search. Just as we’ve all readily adopted mobile phones, swiping and pinching, we will adopt voice input.
As the Internet of Things asks us to talk to our refrigerators and our cars, as wearables ask us to give vocal commands, we will move closer and closer to embracing voice search over text input.

This is a new and exciting shift for digital marketers, representing a way to once again adapt our message to our audience. This is a passion project for me and I’ll continue to update my research and analyze the voice search landscape. If you’re as fascinated as I am, start here with my presentation from SMX Munich.

You can view the presentation at slideshare.

How Will Voice Search Change the World of Advertisers – SMX Munich 2016 from Purna Virji

We’re joining the Acquisio team for an in-depth look at Quality Score that’s open to anyone on June 2nd.

There’s a few topics we’ll cover in the webinar.

Quality Score Importance

Quality Score is one of the most important and least important numbers in your AdWords account at the same time.

• When its bad, it is a very important number.
• When its good, you can ignore it for the most part and only focus on specific areas where it can be improved.

It can be difficult to find out if its good or bad or where the areas of opportunity lie. We’ll go over how to uncover areas of opportunity.

Quality Score Improvement

There are a lot of myths about quality score from how much you actually save in increasing your quality score to what the factors really are that matter.

In the webinar we’ll go through some of the ‘price discounting’ myths surrounding Quality Score and show you what actually happens as your quality score goes up and down.

Quality Score Factors

Quality score is made up of a few factors, and each one seems a bit convoluted (what is relevance?). We’ll go through the factors, their importance, and what they really mean.

New Data Insights

AdAlysis recently added many quality score graphs and data which has lead us to uncover some new data that we’ll reveal in the webinar.

Join Us

If you’d like to learn more about quality score, how its created, and how to improve it, please join us for the webinar.

PPC Rockstars is a great weekly podcast by David Szetela on anything and everything PPC related.

Tomorrow, Brad Geddes is going to be a guest on PPC Rockstars and chat about:

• Quality Score (reverse engineering the various factors)
• The right hand side rail changes
• The death of phrase match and the rise of broad match
• And a few other things in-between

The show airs at 1 pm ET on April 7, 2016; and will be available as a download (or on iTunes, Google Play, etc) in the next few day from PPC Rockstars.

One of the most common questions in paid search, is should you bid on keywords that you already rank well for organically, or is it just a waste of money?

In this article I’m going to be examining the two leading case studies by Kenshoo and Brad Geddes to provide a data backed answer to this question. I’m also going to be identifying other reasons why it may be worth bidding on organic terms such as the ability to choose your own landing pages, to increase your conversion rate and being able to use your PPC data to optimize your organic search ads.

1) Paid search allows you to increase your overall profit (in the vast majority of cases)

Case study 1 – Kenshoo and HP –

http://resolutionmedia.com/us/wp-content/uploads/sites/4/2013/09/TheSearchSandbox_Resolution.pdf

A recent joint Study by Kenshoo and Resolution media into Hewlet Packard, that looked at 1 year worth of data and $10 million in direct revenue found the following results. The test only featured data where there was a paid listing and organic listing for the same keyword.

When there was a number 1 organic ranking users still clicked on the paid listing 39.4% of the time and Paid search revenue accounted for 41.6% of revenue where there was a number 1 organic listing too.

The study also found that paid search drove 3.2% more revenue per visit than organic search traffic.

Case study 2 – Certified Knowledge

Brad Geddes ran a test with one of his clients, over various different timeframes and for a range of different keywords and got the following results.

Keep on reading!