Thursday, March 7, 2013

Adwords Enhanced Campaigns - Good/Bad - POV


The main focus of every business is to increase their profits and Google is not an exception to this and they have just proved this statement correct by introducing Enhanced campaigns.

The reason I say this is; if you look at the features offered in Enhanced Campaign, there is hardly anything for the advertiser/account manager that is beneficial. On the other hand there are a lot of things that are beneficial to Google.

First and foremost, with EC they would save a lot of bandwidth of managing millions of keywords in each account. Creating campaigns by devices and by location has been a general practice or a strategy of every search marketer/advertiser. With EC, there will no longer be such duplication. No need to create duplicate campaign by Geo location, this would mean less keyword to manage and Google can save lots of money on their server space.

What would this mean to advertiser? Managing one campaign in place of 3 campaigns would mean less work/less hassle? Let’s review some of the features one by one:

Removal of Device Targeting
Google - With the removal of device targeting, targeting Tablet devices is now default, which would mean additional revenue to Google, regardless of the fact that the traffic is beneficial to advertiser or not.

Advertiser – Not every advertiser would be willing to target tablet devices, as the same may not be beneficial to many advertisers:
·               If the advertiser website is not optimized for tablet device like a flash website, the priority would be to revamp their website for tablet device. An additional cost to advertisers.
·               Websites with long lead application form/checkout process, calls for rethinking their website design
·               Advertisers opted for tablet devices, had a control over the traffic with budget caps and bid adjustment, now desktop bids are applicable for tablet traffic and no budget caps.

Thank fully the option opting out of mobile devices is available in EC by bid modifier of -100%. If not it would have been mandatory for the advertisers to have a website compatible to mobile devices. However going forward Mobile only campaign cannot be created and it will be part of desktop campaign and will have to be managed by bid modifier feature. This may not give the advertiser with greatest of control over the budget split between desktop and mobile devices however can still set the tone in the right direction with correct bid optimization.

Device targeting is still available for Display campaigns, which means that, if you are already not running them in separate campaign (which definitely is the best practice) then they will have to be separated to take advantage of devices features in display campaign.

Changes to location targeting
Creating campaign specific to each geographic location has been the best practice so far, however going forward a single campaign can be created targeted to multiple locations with location specific bid adjustment. This doesn’t entitle any budget cap at location level, if you wish to have control over budget spent on each location it is still recommended to have separate campaign for each location.

Changes to ad extensions
EC offers a feature of adding extensions at ad group level, quite an interesting feature as this would help compare performance of extensions of different ad group with in a campaign. My take on this is, if all the ad groups are tightly themed to a campaign, then how different extensions could you test at each ad group level? Only benefit that I can see from this feature is that, we can compare clicks on sitelinks within different ad groups. If we are seeing more clicks on sitelinks from any ad group that would mean visitors are more attracted towards site link then ad, so would call for revamp of the ad copy.

Bid Optimization
With the introduction of bud multiplier option and by bringing mobile devices under a single campaign, it is a bigger challenge if you are currently managing bids using 3rd party bidding tools.  As we switch to EC we may have to start using AdWords bid multiplier option till we have a fix in place from the third party tools. Have you ever used conversion optimizer before? No? Isn’t this a nice way to say, you should only use AdWords?

To summarize it all, I believe it is more of a business oriented strategy from Google and less of an additional feature that is beneficial to end user. EC is new to everyone and as we would start working on this more and more, we will have clear picture of its pros and cons.

Friday, February 22, 2013

Google Analytics will soon include Change History

Google Analytics would soon include a the option of 'Change History'. User with administrative access can see a list of user activities of who did what and when in analytics. Change History maintains a record of activities for the last 180 days.

The new Change History tab will be available at the account level, alongside the Data Sources and Account Settings tabs.



The Change History lists:
  • Date column: The date and time of the activity
  • Email column: Which Analytics user performed the activity
  • Activity column: The Analytics object (e.g., account, user, profile, goal, filter), and what activity was performed on the object (e.g., added to account, created, deleted)

Monday, February 11, 2013

Update To Google Sitelink Policy

With the implementation of Enhanced Campaigns feature, Google has come up with an important update for their sitelinks policy.

The character limit that they have been supporting in Sitelinks creation was 35 and they have now changed it to 25 characters. Below is a quick synopsis of Why? and What? is the reason for such change:

Why?
  • They are now focusing more on Mobile traffic as it is very important and hence are looking to impliment mobile Sitelinks adoption. This ties in with recent launches like the 2-line Sitelinks format on mobile and the imminent launch of 3-line
  • Long Sitelinks don't render well on mobile because of wrapping; so we can't just directly port the desktop UI
  • Long Sitelinks don't work for Enhanced Sitelinks, which is where huge incremental CTR can be found
  • In general, longer Sitelinks don't work as well as shorter ones. Our Best Practice has *always* been to recommend creating Sitelinks that are roughly 15 characters max. each

What?
Sitelinks character limit is reduced. What does mean for the various ways you can now create/manage them:
  • New Sitelinks created through AWFE will support only the new 25 character limit max. as of today
  • New sitelinks created through the API will be able to bypass this for now. This is a purely technical limitation and won't be updated until migration is complete (projected to June end)
  • Legacy Sitelinks upgraded to Enhanced Campaigns will not be subject to change/disapproval on upgrade, if they exceed the 25 character limit

Friday, February 8, 2013

Yahoo Enters a Global Advertising Alliance with Google

Yahoo has announced this week that they have recently signed a global, non-exclusive agreement with Google to display ads on various Yahoo! properties and certain co-branded sites using Google’s AdSense for Content and Google’s AdMob services.

Yahoo has not disclosed the financial details of the partnership, but mentioned that Google will be just “one of its contextual ads partners”.

"By adding Google to our list of world-class contextual ads partners, we’ll be able to expand our network, which means we can serve users with ads that are even more meaningful. For our users, there won’t be a noticeable difference in how or where ads appear. More options simply mean greater flexibility. We look forward to working with all of our contextual ads partners to ensure we’re delivering the right ad to the right user at the right time," Yahoo added.

Google, which distributes similar ads to many websites, retains part of the revenue generated from the ads shown on its partners' sites. The revenue split over the Yahoo-Google advertising alliance was, however, not immediately known.

Not sure how to portray this unusual collaboration, I would look this as a beginning of a new relationship between Google and Yahoo in lieu of their fading relationship with Microsoft?

How is this beneficial to Google?
There display market share would now grow from 67% to close to 80% and to Yahoo, which is currently struggling to maintain its market share would start seeing additional revenue from revenue split over the Yahoo-Google advertising alliance

What this mean to the advertisers?
For an Advertiser it is definitely a win win situation, as he can reach to almost 80% of the Search market share with a single display platform and since Yahoo network are all authority sites can expect more genuine traffic. Google search base would definitely increase, so would the search volume.

What this means to Yahoo?
Expanding the Yahoo-Google advertising alliance, would actually mean additional revenue from google and also this alliance would lead to increase in competition for ad space, and this would mean bid for ad space would go up and so will be the revenue for Yahoo.

We will have to wait and watch the impacts this alliance.