If you are familiar with Adwords and how to create and manage accounts, the addition of YouTube will be very simple. All you have to do outside of Adwords is create one or more videos promoting your business featuring its products and services. Like the search network, your ads will be triggered by keywords you set bids on, so you will be able to target relevant, qualified traffic. Or, you can choose to have your ads shown categorically to users who show an interest in similar topics – for example real estate, sports, or medicine.

The measurement features Google has set up for this new type of advertising is pretty slick too. You are able to see how many viewers have watched your video, visited your website, stayed on your channel, and even subscribed to your channel. And with TrueView video ads, you are only going to pay when a viewer watches your ad and does not skip over it. So off the bat, Google is helping its advertisers minimize wasted spend.

Excitingly, Google is giving away $50 million in FREE Google Awords advertising to encourage business owners to give the new Adwords for YouTube a try. Request your FREE $75 credit with Google Adwords here!

One of the first things we check in every account that comes to us is the geographic targeting.  Far too often this setting is overlooked, and it can easily result in thousands of wasted ad dollars.  In this post I am going to walk through where to find the geographic settings within an account, and what the different targeting options are.

The concept behind geographic targeting is simple.  AdWords allows you to select exactly where you would like your ads to appear (geographically), as well as other areas that AdWords suggests.  This is extremely important and beneficial, as it allows you to set a specific geo-targeting strategy that focuses your ads in areas where your most valuable customers are, increasing your ROI.

First, where to find the geo targeting settings within your account.

Login in to your AdWords account, and navigate to the "Campaigns" Tab.  Once there, select the campaign which you would like to set the targeting options for.  Once inside that Campaign, select the "Settings" Tab.

Inside the Setting tab, you will see the "Locations and Languages" section.  The geo targeting is done within "Locations."  Click Edit to change your targeting!

You have a few options when setting up geo targeting.  You can target by county, areas within a county, by a radius, and now by zip code.  You also need to decide whether or not you are interested in targeting by physical location, or search intent (I will expand on this in a separate post).

This is where you need to spend some serious time offline discussing where you want to display your ads and why.  The more broad your geo targeting is, the more potential impressions will incur and the higher the cost will be.  This is not a problem, as long as you are not spending money in places where you will not get conversions or sales.

AdWords has a few ways you can target areas:

Country Targeting:  This pretty self-explanatory.  You can target entire countries all around the world.  Before you jump into international targeting, make sure you have a firm grasp on the languages you are targeting, as this may necessitate a separate strategy.  To target a country, simply type the name of the country in the box within  the locations section within the settings tab that says "Enter a location to target or exclude."  As you are typing the country, you will see the estimated reach of you AdWords ads in that geographic territory, as well as the ability to add it to your list of targeted regions, exclude it from your targeting, or find nearby areas to target. 

Targeting areas within a country: If you don’t wish to target an entire country, but want to target specific cities or towns within a country, this targeting is perfect for you.  Simply type the name of a city or region in the geo targeting settings, and add the appropriate location.

Radius Targeting:  If you know that your target market lives within 50 miles of a particular location, you have the ability to set up what’s called radius target, to target users only within that radius, rather than selecting individual cities, regions, or countries.  Once you target a radius, AdWords will let you know which areas are contained within the radius, so you can make sure you are covering the areas you expect to target.  To set radius targeting, click "advanced search" in the location options.  At the top of the screen that appears you can click "radius targeting."  Here you will enter a city, region, or zip code that will act as the center of your radius.  Enter the size or your radius (in miles or kilometers) and click "map."  On the map your targeted region will appear.

Zip Code Targeting:  Goggle recently released the ability to target based on zip codes.  You can type these in manually, or bulk upload up to 1,000 zip codes at a time.  Set up zip code targeting the same way you would enter a country or city.

Exclusion Targeting:  If you are targeting a region or area, and you want to make sure your ads don't show in one particular location within that targeted region, you can "exclude" it from your targeting.  For example, if you are targeting the entire United States, but you do not want your ads to show in Illinois, type "Illinois" into the targeting box, and click "Exclude."  Now you ads will show in the entire country, excluding Illinois.

So far we have covered the primary geo targeting methods within AdWords.  Getting this right puts you much closer to properly setting up and optimizing your account.  Look out for our post that will dig into the advanced targeting features, and how to best utilize them.

You just checked your iPhone or Droid in your last meeting. Guess what? So did everyone else. Mobile search has grown at an exponential rate over the past two years, and studies indicate a continued increase in growth. By the year 2013 more people will be using their mobile devices for Internet related activities than their PC’s. Even more astonishing than that, by the year 2015, there will be one mobile device for every person on the planet (Source: howtogomo.com). That’s over 6.5 billion mobile devices! If that doesn’t convince you of the enormity of change taking place, nothing will. If you’ve thought about getting a mobile website or you’re teetering on the benefits of creating a mobile site, I’ll help you out -- stop thinking about it and do it. The world of mobile technology is growing faster and smarter at a phenomenal rate so now is the time to get on board.

How mobile is different

Mobile-friendly websites are different than websites created for computers in many ways. Most notably, a mobile site needs to be aesthetically different so your users can easily navigate the pages in a smaller space. If you have a very large website with hundreds or thousands of pages, a mobile site is often an abbreviated version of that site -- focusing on the highly visited pages of the site. The buttons need to be thumb-friendly and the text needs to be clear, concise, and big enough for your users to read. You should also make sure your mobile site has an easy, obvious way for your customers and clients to reach you. Lastly, don’t be intimidated by changing things up a bit. Going mobile is easier than ever. With the increased demand for mobile-friendly websites, there are an abundance of services and web professionals (including Silverback!) that can hook you up with a fully functioning mobile hub.

What mobile means for PPC

The prevalence of mobile searches definitely impacts the PPC game. It effects how the copy is written, the keywords we bid on, the bids of the keywords, the landing pages, ad rank, etc. It is very important that websites receiving a decent amount of mobile traffic and mobile conversions have at least one campaign targeted towards mobile users only.

One of the critical reasons a dedicated mobile campaign is important is ad position. A typical mobile search that yields paid search results will have one or two results at the top of the page. This is where you need to be on the mobile SERP’s. You can get lower listings, below the organic listings and on subsequent pages, but on a mobile device, that’s as good as not being there at all. Ad position is going to play a vital role in your mobile campaigns and you absolutely need to be in the top two positions.

Another important aspect to running a mobile campaign is having the appropriate ad extensions available for the users. The most important ad extension is the call extension. You always want to have a text ad accompanied by a clickable phone number that your users can click on to call your business. In the call extensions tab, make sure your campaign is set to “Allow click to call and click to your website.”

Lastly, before starting your mobile PPC campaign, test the speed of your site and make sure it is loading as quickly as possible. Mobile users have an even smaller attention span than PC users and they will quickly abandon a search if they cannot find what they’re looking for. Web Page Test is a great resource for testing the performance of your pages based on speed.

At the end of the day, becoming mobile friendly is all about the user and simplifying the process of navigating the web. People are looking for a way to get fast answers, make a purchase on the fly, or commit themselves to a service. Giving users a mobile friendly web platform to navigate will only increase your chances of converting more business.

In order to properly manage and optimize an AdWords account, you need key performance indicators (KPI) that you can work towards improving.  Every business and website will have different advertising goals; increase traffic, increase sales, etc., and conversion tracking is the most common and simplest way to track these.  While standard AdWords reporting will show you keyword level data such as clicks and cost, conversion tracking can help you understand if these clicks are turning into actual conversions, so you can make informed decisions on how to best optimize your account.

In this second part of our PPC audit series, I am going to walk you through one of the most valuable things you can do for your AdWords Account, setting up conversion tracking in Google Adwords.

Here I will explain the simplest method of setting up conversion tracking in AdWords.  Every site has different technical challenges that may or not may not make this method the best, but this will work for the vast majority of AdWords Accounts and websites.

Here are the things you will need in order to set this up:

• An AdWords account:  Hopefully by this point you already have one and are ready to go!
• A Website:  This is where we will place the code to track conversions.
• The ability to edit the website: As long as you have access to the backend of your site, and the ability to copy and paste, you should be good to go!

Step 1: Log into your adwords account, and click on the “Tools and Analysis” tab.

Step 2: Click on “Conversions” within the “Tools and Analysis” tab.

Step 3: This is where you manage all of your Google AdWords conversion tracking codes.  Let’s go ahead and click on the “+ new conversion” button to create your first conversion code.

Step 4: Go ahead and name your conversion code.  This could be anything that identifies the action we are tracking (sale, info request, etc.), and leave “Webpage” selected.  Click “save and continue.”

Step 5: This is where you can customize your code some.  Go ahead and select a the category your conversion falls under.  Set the security level to “HTTP” or “HTTPS” (you can go to your confirmation page and see which is used in your URL).  Select your markup language.  Enter a conversion value (only use this if you have a good understanding for the $ amount that is brought to you with each conversion.  If you have advanced revenue tracking needs skip this for now, there are other methods for tracking revenue).  Now you have the option of either selecting “Add a ‘Google Site Stats’ notification, or skipping the notification.  This notification is displayed as a little box on your confirmation page that lets users know that this tracking is occurring.  If you choose to skip the notification, you should at least mention this conversion tracking in your privacy policy.  Go ahead and click “save and continue.”

Select whether you want to send the conversion code to the individual who will be installing the code, or to get the code to install yourself.

Step 6: Whew!  You have created your first conversion code!  Now we need to install it on your website.  It is very important that the code be installed in the correct location to properly track conversions.  Your conversion code should go on the thank you or confirmation page that immediately proceeds the conversion point (checkout, form, etc.).  This should be the only place on your website the code is installed.  If you have multiple conversion points you are going to track with this one code, make sure the code goes on each confirmation page.  The code can be installed the same way a Google Analytics code would be installed, anywhere in the body of the page.

Congratulations!  You will now see the “conversion” column in your AdWords dashboard.  If you aren’t sure that your conversion code is tracking properly, you can always to a hard test (manually click on your ad and complete a conversion).

By simply having this new conversion metric in your AdWords account, you can at least begin to gain an understanding of your ROI.  While we leverage advanced tracking with our enterprise software, allowing us to get highly accurate revenue and path to conversion metrics not available in AdWords, you wouldn’t believe how many accounts don’t have the most basic tracking set up.

Keep your eyes open for the next parts of this series where I will talk about geographic targeting, and we can make sure you aren’t wasting more of your ad spend!

The Google Online Marketing Challenge is an exercise for students interested in marketing, advertising and new media to create an effective online marketing campaign using Google Adwords. Equipped with 250 advertising dollars, provided by Google, students develop an online advertising strategy for a business or non-profit of their choosing. A Campaign Statistics algorithm created by Google will determine global and regional winners. The algorithm considers over 30 factors within an account to decide its effectiveness, including ad group structure, quality scores, ad extensions, and ad copy best-practices. Last year, over 50,000 students in over 100 countries participated -- our industry is clearly growing.

Spearheaded by Dr. Theresa Clarke, Professor of Marketing, JMU has created 4 teams of 3-4 people each. All groups are representing local businesses that they will run an AdWords campaign for the 3 week competition.

Besides the academic credits the students receive for participating in the MKTG490 class, the Online Marketing Challenge does offer other intrinsic values that may prove to be more rewarding. The teams are given real money, working with real businesses, and executing real advertising campaigns. To a future employer, this experience is invaluable. It’s a unique opportunity where students can, before graduating, showcase their talents in a real-life setting. It’s also a great opportunity for us at Silverback to network with the industries rising stars, and maybe some potential future Silverback teammates!

In last year’s competition, JMU was the prize-winner for the Americas Needless to say, we were pretty impressed with the team's work. Given their track record, we are expecting JMU to bring home the trophy again this year -- and based on the campaigns we saw, I think they have a great shot!

Well, the fact is, in the hundreds of PPC audits we’ve conducted over the years, we see same mistakes being made time and time again. Here are the 16 most common mistakes we see – things you can easily spot in a quick audit and easily fix.

What I cover here is the low-hanging fruit, not a comprehensive list of every problem with your AdWords account, but after covering each item on this list you may have saved yourself a lot of money and hassle.

Ready? Here they are:

1. Conversion confusion

Running an AdWords account without a clearly defined and trackable goal is like driving a race car blindfolded. Every account has a different definition of a conversion, and it can be anything that brings value to your business - from a ‘contact us’ form being completed to a purchase of a product to a view of a key page on the site. Whatever your goal, be sure it is clearly defined and that you have conversion tracking setup in AdWords properly so that you can report on it and optimize towards it.

2. Poor geography

Did your account spend your entire monthly budget in one day? Do your campaigns have a hard time spending anything at all? Then you may be a victim of… improperly optimized geographic settings! It’s one of the easiest adjustments to make, yet it’s commonly overlooked. Make sure your campaigns are set to display to the proper geographic locations. Even better, run some analyses in the dimensions tab to see how different locations perform compared to one another, and consider shifting your targeting strategy!

When you are conducting your PPC Audit, make sure you aren't set to All Countries and Territories if you don't really want to advertise to all countries and territories.

3. 24x7 operation

A little bit of day parting can go a long way. Do your potential customers tend to convert on a particular day of the week or a particular hour of the day? By running some hour by hour and day by day analysis you can quickly spot trends and take action within your account by setting your campaigns to only run on certain hours or days. You can even set bid multipliers during times you know perform particularly well or just under average.

4. Extension repression

Google is constantly releasing new ways to make your ads stand out. From ad sitelink extensions to location, product and review extensions, ad extensions are a great way to get your ad noticed and boost some of your core performance metrics. Making sure each of these features is active and properly utilized is a quick way to squeeze more performance out of your ads.

5. Keep your networks straight

Running ads on the Google Search Network is a very different process from running ads on the Google Display Network, thus it require separate strategies. If you try and make one campaign run on both, the two ad networks will work against each other. If you want a campaign to run on both networks, make sure you split it into two campaigns and run one on search and one on display to evaluate the effectiveness of each.

6. Device blindness

People use search on different devices (computers, cell phones, tablets) differently. They expect a particular experience depending on the device they are using. This means you must set up and optimize a campaign according to the device it targets and  create a unique strategy for each campaign.  Like the ad networks, make sure you keep these separate!

7. Account Strucutre

Simple concept. Tricky execution. Every account is made up of several campaigns that contain one or more ad group, and each ad group contains a set of keywords and ads that point to a particular landing page. It’s crucial to carry a string of relevancy along this entire sequence to ensure you are maximizing your quality scores. It’s also crucial to pick the right keywords for each ad group and the right ad groups for each campaign.

8. Remarketing neglect

Recently, remarketing has become a staple of every well running AdWords account. It is simple to set up and more important, it is an extremely effective marketing tactic that can drive low cost, high quality leads. Do yourself a favor and make sure you have a remarketing campaign running. Like, now.

9. Mismatched types

Match types allow you to toggle the amount of control you give to Google when it determines whether or not a variation of your keyword is ‘close enough’ to the keyword you are bidding on. There is no one-size fits all approach to properly balancing your match types, but based on your business goals, it’s important to have the right proportion of broad, modified broad, phrase, and exact-match keywords in all your ad groups. Far too often I see an account where every keyword is a broad or exact match. This poor balance of match types will lead to extreme over- or under-spending.

Watch out for Scumbag PPC Managers

10. Focusing (only) on the positive

A robust negative keyword list will help you better manage your broad- and phrase-match keywords and ensure Google doesn’t take too much liberty in displaying your ads to irrelevant searches.

We commonly see campaigns and even entire accounts with no negative keywords, and we shudder. If you’re selling ham, don’t flush your budget on the phrase “free ham” because Google tags it as a broad match keyword. Get the picture?

11. Bid flatlining

Arguably the most crucial setting in your entire account is the keyword bid. This is where you have the most control over your ad position within each ad auction. The process of calculating optimal bids for every keyword based on potential performance factors (ad rank, time of day, geographic location, etc.) is huge, even for experienced search marketers (by the way, this is why we use Marin Enterprise software to do the heavy lifting). That being said, everyone should at least check on the bids every now and then and make sure that you are maintaining decent ad position (at least above the recommended first page bid). Bids should, at the very least increase for the best-performing keywords and shrink for the worst-performing. Until you can leverage killer software like we do, you must at least check the most basic bid optimizations.

Seeing Below First Page Bid on so many keywords is a clear sign that some bid optimization needs to take place.

12. Keyword stagnation

According to Google, 20% of all search queries have never been searched before. This means every day new opportunities are generated for your campaigns. Data sources such as Search Query Reports can help uncover new keywords (positive or negative, btw) and add them to your ad groups.

13. S’ad copy

Sometimes, the only thing standing between your keywords and your website is your ad copy. When done correctly, your ads will stand out from the competition and prep your users as to what they should expect and do when they get to your website. Done poorly, and you’re back to the flush factor.

14. Ad ‘groups’ that aren’t

There should always, I repeat, ALWAYS be at least two ad versions in each and every ad group. The nice thing about ad copy testing is that you can test anything. From a call to action to letter capitalization --any slight difference between ads will allow you to continually improve your ad performance. NO BRAINER.

Y U NO SPLIT TEST ADS?! Make sure every ad group has at least two ad variations, always!

15. Irrelevance, unbolded

One of the major influencers of quality score is what Google calls “relevancy,” and your ads are one of the best ways to create this relevancy. When a user types a search query into Google, you want to make sure your ad speaks directly to it. The best way to do this is by having the exact query right in the ads. One other benefit of having the users query right in your ad is that Google will actually bold the matching keyword, making your ad stand out and increasing your clickthrough rates.

Hot tip of the day: play around with dynamic keyword insertion. This will guarantee that the users query ends up in your ad.

16. Crash landings

Be sure the landing page a user ends up on reflects what you were selling in your ad. Like the ad copy, landing pages play a large role in meeting that “relevancy” factor for your quality scores. If they want red roses, and your ad says you are selling red roses and that you offer free shipping, make sure your landing page says as much.

A real-deal full PPC Audit will go way beyond what we’ve listed here, but chances are your account could benefit from at least one of these fixes, and your performance will likely immediately improve.

And don’t worry, we’ll be diving deeper into each of these factors in upcoming blogs, helping you understand where to go and what to look far in diagnosing your account. In the meantime, let us know what you think. Is there a setting you goofed that cost you money? A fix you made that amped up your performance? Now’s your chance to confess your own sins and help us flush out poor PPC practices for the good of mankind.

We get this question all the time from clients.  In PPC, it can be really difficult to separate personal search habits from how everyone else searches, which can often be wildly different.  Our performance data has always shown that more leads can be picked up by utilizing both paid advertisements as well as organic rankings on Google, but this was difficult to translate to clients, as our data set was never quite large enough to prove significant.  Lucky for us, Google is very good at crunching large datasets, and they did just that to answer this exact question.

Recently, Google conducted a study titled "Search Ads Pause Study," in which it looked at over 400 accounts across four countries in which it looked to use statistical models to answer the simple question: Are ads necessary when organic presence is high?   Because of our previous experience we already knew the answer yes, but we had no idea it was to the extent that Google found.

Here is a fun video Google put together explaining the study and its results.

On average, 89% of paid traffic to an advertiser’s site is lost and not recovered by organic clicks.

Wait a minute… 89%?  That’s HUGE!

The issue is we all suffer from a personal bias in which we believe everyone searches the way we do.  We may have never clicked a Google ad in our lives, but the $92+ Billion Google made last year would argue that plenty of people click on those ads.  This is just another reminder of the importance of data and the need to base decisions not on our own personal beliefs, but on the hard data.

What's the change? Google will begin reviewing paused ads in the same way they review active ones. The search giant said the change was made to "eliminate unnecessary delays in getting your ads approved and to ultimately enhance your experience with Google Adwords."

If you create a group of campaigns for an account and decide to turn on only half of the campaigns, the ads that are left paused will go through the same review process as the ads you turned on. When you're eventually ready to turn on those paused campaigns, sometime down the road, they'll have already been through the approval process - paused, approved, and ready for activation.

It's not Google's most revolutionary change, but it's a logical change that I certainly think it will make life for the common PPC'er a bit easier. When you have a client that wants to set up a special campaign for a product release or a current event, you can have that campaign built and ready to turn on, without the stress of the approval process.

First off, what is “+1”?

“+1” is Google’s first step in joining the world of social media.  As I mentioned above, Facebook has the “Like” button, well Google now has the “+1” button.  For example, you visit a hotel in Washington D.C. over the 4^th of July and have a great experience there -- comfortable beds, helpful concierge, and room service at any time of the night.  Months later you are returning to the Nation’s Capital and are reminded of this great place by one of their internet ads.  You were so impressed by their French dip at 3 in the morning you decide to hit the “+1” located right next to the ad.  That “+1” will be shared with your Google contacts if and when they come in contact with that same ad.  It will say something like “Joe +1’d this page”.   The idea is to spread the word with your friends about things that you like, to help make search easier. 

Why should you care?

This social-search innovation will be a good addition to your Adwords ads.  I certainly don’t think it will revolutionize the industry and it won’t turn a terrible campaign into gold.  But I do believe it will give an added boost to campaigns, improve click through and response rates, and take up a wee bit more page real estate – which are all good for you.  And for those concerned about negative implications need not fret.  Google has said that “+1” will not impact quality scores.  So if your ads aren’t getting “+1’d” all the time, your ad rank will not suffer.  ­­

What do you have to do?

Nothing. Google will automatically integrate the “+1” button to Adwords ads, unlike organic ads which require a snippet of code on your site. 

I see two possibilities here.  One is that this doesn’t have any effect on your ads or campaigns.  Google said it won’t negatively implicate your ads so that takes the stress out of it right there.  The other possibility is the “+1” button gives your campaign a little jolt with some increased click through rates and better page recognition. 

In the end, what at first seemed like nothing to get excited about, turns into a no-lose scenario with no effort on your part. Those are the types of innovations we can all get behind.

Sitelink Extensions

Sitelinks are quite possibly the greatest add-on since the inception of adwords. Sitelinks extend your ads value by adding additional links to other relevant landing pages on your site. A study performed by searchenginepeople.com shows that click through rates increased dramatically and conversion rates were also boosted (up to 60% in one case). Notice below how the sitelinks allow for additional links relevant to the users search query - a better, more efficient experience.

Phone Extensions

Phone extensions have been another great addition to ad extensions. Unfortunately, phone extensions haven’t been rolled out to all users, but adwords has granted allowance for random campaigns. Phone extensions allow a searcher to call you directly from your ad without the extra step of clicking. Google will generate a toll free number for you, redirecting to your local number when dialed. Adwords has also added phone call metrics to the interface allowing you to see start and end time, the duration of the call, and the area code that they called from. Check out the image below for an example of phone extensions.

Location Extensions

Location extensions are crucial for successful local adwords campaigns. When a user searches for something that triggers your ad, a local address will appear along with the text ad extending your ad. And the location extensions will only pop-up when the search and location of the searcher is relevant.

Product Extensions

Product extensions are an awesome way to enrich a search experience for a google searcher. Combining your google adwords search ads with your google merchant account, you are able to highlight products in the actual ads, as seen below. Not only does it allow you to capitalize on a large amount of page real estate, goblogin.com has reported higher click-through rates and higher conversion rates.

So the secret is out – using adwords ad extensions will dramatically improve your campaign’s performance. Without the asterisks or the controversy, ad extensions are like putting your adwords campaign on steroids. They'll keep you performing at the highest level while most adwords managers are still struggling to catch up.