Ads PPC Management is a blog to share tips and thoughts about Web marketing and Business management.
Many business owners manage their own web marketing and advertising due to various reasons.
I will try to help such business owners with tips and news to stay updated with what’s important for web marketing today.
Contact me to ask specific questions, read more about me , or just browse the content below. Thanks!
Affinity audiences list and the list of In-market audiences can be quickly browsed on this AdWords codes and formats page in the AdWords API documentation.
Although nothing extraordinary but this list could be very useful in some cases.
For example, you could be outside meeting a new prospect and suddenly if they want to consider the possibility of advertising on the display network, then, instead of loading the AdWords interface, the above page could be quickly loaded on your mobile, to easily see the list of available in-market audiences or the affinity audiences list.
The new AdWords expanded text ads allows 45 more characters. Its time to be more creative with the ad copy. Try these 20 trigger words to possibly improve your ad copy.
Detailed article :
I will come to the trigger words later but first I would suggest including more “BENEFITS” in your ads.
I think the best possible use of the additional allowed characters might be to add more product or service benefits to the ad copy.
There is a very popular saying in marketing – Benefits sell, features tell. When writing ads and landing page copy, this simple statement has always helped me get better CTR and conversions.
However many of my clients do not have any significant benefit over competitors. In fact I had to think of some differentiating factors when I started AdWords for some of them. This is very typical with small business and many business verticals where the product or service is almost commoditized. How does one differentiate ads is such a case? While there are many strategies available but the following trigger words could also help in attracting and motivating your target audience.
Remember, trigger words are not magic bullets. They are just words to which people might respond favorably. When combined with other advertising techniques, they can significantly boost your results but real business reasons, real business USP which actually make difference to your customers makes for a much more successful advertising than any language gimmick.
These words could be helpful to gain that tiny (or sometimes significant) advantage over your competitors so do try to use them in your ads and share your feedback.
( Additional resource : A much more detailed and very popular article about power words is here. )
If you want to make some minor edits to your current running FB ad but still want your ads to run continuously, then you could use the “Create similar advert” option.
Editing the current running ad will send the ad for review and ad delivery will stop. The delivery status will change to “Pending Review” till the ad is reviewed by Facebook team.
If it is an important day (like a sale) and you don’t want your FB ads to stop, then it is much better not to make the minor edit to the current running ad. Instead, create a copy of the current ad and once that is approved then you can pause the current ad.
Normally ad approvals happen fast but sometimes it can take time, so if you do not want to take chances, remember to create similar advert.
If you are managing your own accounts, you need to make sure you know about this change. This is a nice video about expanded ads.
I would suggest that you make new expanded ads in each adgroup and let them run along with your current text ads. Over time the better performing ad will automatically become evident.
Adwords Editor on Ubuntu works well once installed correctly.
Update: March 2017
I am just updating this old post to confirm that the latest AdWords Editor 11.8.0 also works on Lubuntu 14.04.5 LTS.
Installation method is same as outlined in the old post below.
The link to download the current latest Adwords msi file is https://dl.google.com/dl/adwords_editor/11.8.0.0/google_adwords_editor.msi
Installation instructions are as follows.
Old post follows :
I installed Adwords Editor 11.5.9 on Ubuntu 14.04.4 LTS using Wine 1.6.2
Step 1 : Download correct msi file using the following URL
http://dl.google.com/adwords_editor/__VERSION_HERE__/google_adwords_editor.msi
Example for AdWords Editor version 11.5.9 the URL will be
http://dl.google.com/adwords_editor/11.5.9.0/google_adwords_editor.msi
(Please note the zero at the end of 11.5.9.0 when the version number is being stuffed into the URL. Please use the correct version number in the above URL. The current version number can be found from here – https://www.google.com/intl/en/adwordseditor/ )
Step 2 : Set wine default to Windows 7 (This is true on Wine 1.6.2. Newer versions of Wine may not need this step.)
If you try to install AdWords Editor in Windows XP mode, the AdWords Editor installer would report that “AdWords Editor cannot work on this operating system” and the installation will fail. However if you use the Wine Configuration tool and change the default windows mode to Windows 7, the installer will work successfully.
Step 3: Run the installer using the command line.
After setting the default Windows mode to Windows 7, as mentioned in step 2, open a terminal window (xterm/ UXterm or your favorite).
Navigate to the folder where you downloaded the msi file. Then use the following command line to install from the downloaded msi file
wine msiexec /i ./google_adwords_editor.msi
Step 4: Set Wine default back to Windows XP.
Once AdWords editor is installed successfully, running as a Win7 app was not successful for me. (My wine version is an old 1.6.2 version. ) It generated error as follows :
This application failed to start because it could not find or load the Qt platform plugin “windows”
So after successful installation of Adwords Editor on Ubuntu, I set wine default back to WinXP and Adwords Editor ran just fine.
Big Thanks to AgenT – I got to know this method from
https://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=version&iId=32146&iTestingId=92838
AdWords keyword planner allows download to Google sheets. This can be very convenient for keyword research.
Once the data is in Google Sheets, you can sort and work on the data in many powerful ways.
A lesser known feature is the filter tool available in the “Data” menu of Google Sheets, which allows filtering data by condition based on many readily available conditions or even a custom formula.
Its a very interesting feature and can save time when analyzing voluminous data from the AdWords keyword planner.
As always, there are many ways to do the same work and some of the filter conditions can be achieved in the keyword planner itself but I find that moving the data to Google sheets gives me flexibility and more powerful tools for analysis. Its worth a try!
Leads ads on Facebook have been generating very good results for the client accounts I manage.
The cost per lead is coming lower than Google AdWords and its interesting to see which age & gender is responding best to our ads, this is something we cannot easily know in Google Adwords.
During last year I have noticed that Facebook has rapidly improved their ad platform in almost all aspects including the targeting options, available ad formats as well as the interface to create and manage ads.
An interesting feature, added quite recently is the ability to remarket to people who interacted with your lead form but did not submit the form.
This audience is potentially very valuable because they took interest in the ad offering and almost reached the point of conversion. I am testing this in some accounts and the results so far look interesting.
More information about Lead Ads : Lead Ads: Connecting People with Businesses in Just Two Taps | Facebook for Business
Converting visitors into customers is the key to successful PPC management for business growth.
The article Trustworthiness in Web Design: 4 Credibility Factors which reconfirms what the “web usability guru” Jakob Nielsen wrote back in 1999, is very relevant to the topic of website conversions.
The above article by Aurora Bedford is well worth reading. If you don’t have time to read the full article, the summary of the article (with my own notes) is as follows :
Visitors to your website will do business with you only if they trust you.
4 key methods to communicate trustworthiness, as detailed by above article are as follows :
If you have time, the original article Trustworthiness in Web Design: 4 Credibility Factors is well worth a read.
Important message of this article :
Remember to remove the converted audience from your remarketing list. This applies in most cases, except when your remarketing ad is specifically targeting audience that converted (for example remarketing ads trying to up-sell or those trying to encourage repeat purchase).
Summary :
I just purchased an item from ebay, yet I am seeing remarketing ads of the same item! It appears that ebay is not correctly creating its remarketing audience list. (I noticed this error despite being logged in while browsing products and using the same device, same browser session to buy the item.)
Detailed article :
In order to use the remarketing ad budget efficiently, it is important that your remarketing ad should reach the right audience. How can you ensure that?
Coming back to the eBay example I saw, I think the probable error might be that eBay is not clubbing similar items while creating its remarketing list. This could be due to error in remarketing implementation or simply because the vendors have not supplied correct unique product ids (which should actually be checked and strictly enforced by eBay).
This could happen on any eCommerce site, especially those eCommerce websites which act as market places, where multiple vendors are selling same product, under different listings, for different prices. The listing title and description can vary slightly from vendor to vendor but essentially the item is the same.
The error I noticed was as follows :
For simplicity reason, let us assume there are two vendors selling the same product, one for $2 and the other for $5. I saw both listings to decide which one I want to buy. Let us say I chose the $2 listing and placed an order. Now the marketplace should know that the other listing I saw was also of the same product. So essentially if I have bought the same product from the $2 vendor, then there is no point in showing me remarketing ads for the $5 listing.
The eCommerce market place must create ways to know that different listings are essentially the same product and take that into consideration while creating remarketing audience list.
This is also one of the reasons why all eCommerce platforms are encouraging and requiring vendors to use unique identifiers for their product listings.
(Here is eBay’s product identifier requirements and Google’s recent video on GTIN. Product identifiers like brand name, MPN, and different GTINs make it easier for shoppers to find your items by helping search engines and market-places to handle your data better. So, unique product identifiers are a win-win for all and in most cases they are easy to implement – for most standardized products all you need to do is look up the manufacturer website or the packaging.)
“Correct segmentation to deliver correct message” is one of the most important aspects of remarketing.
When implementing remarketing it is important that the structure and technical design of the website should help in clear segmentation of website visitors.
If you have a lead generation website, then you should make pages with clear focus, so that you know that the person visiting (or spending time on) a given page (or cluster of pages / section of a website) is clearly interested in that particular product or service. In most cases, it would make more sense to focus the remarketing ads to exactly this particular product or service.
Most eCommerce websites have one product per page, so its quite clear which all products a person may be interested in and dynamic remarketing allows creating ads for exactly those items of interest.
The next important aspect is removing the converted members from the remarketing audience list.
For eCommerce websites, this may be comparatively easier to implement because conversion would happen online only.
However for other types of business, there are practical difficulties in implementing this due to possibility of conversions happening via various channels – both offline and online. So, the implementation for this would vary from case to case but this is quite important and must be done as nicely as possible. This article explains tracking offline conversions . Your web developer could implement it for you OR you could use tools that offer this integration like for example Zoho CRM Adwords integration which essentially help in capturing the gclid and using that to track offline conversions.
More remarketing best practices can be read here :
