Google Ad Innovations do a lot to keep us advertisers on our toes, it seems that every time I visit the search function there is a new toy to play with! I wanted to write this blog to give a bit of an understanding as to why this innovative ad is useful for advertisers looking for maximum exposure and how to use them, as we have had some great success with Google’s Product listing Ads.

What Are They?

As with all of Google’s products you have probably been using and looking at them for months, however been aware of them! They are the ads that appear in the top right hand side of the SERP, where you would normally see Adwords position 3, 4 & 5. They appear with a square product image a display Url, a price, hyperlink description and some basic sales messaging:

You will see a max of three, but sometimes less. The ad images, url and descriptive text all come from your Google Merchant Centre Product Feed, and the ads are actually managed from the Adwords interface.

Much like traditional PPC ads through search they work on a CPC, auction based model, that is somewhat simpler than that of the traditional auction, but ultimately works on the same basis.

Why Should I Use Them?

More exposure through an ever changing and more cluttered results page, and offer potential customers something different, something to help you stand about beyond the competition.

Also, we have seen very high CTR’s through these ad types, even when compared to terms that appear consistently in position 3 (Above the SEO results), indicating that users are engaging well and typically results in an above average conversion rate through our ecommerce clients.

How Can I Use Them?

Well the steps are actually pretty straight forward as long as you have your Google Merchant Centre linked to you adwords account. See below for a guide to the basic setup:

- Create a new Campaign
- Assign it a product extension
- Create a new Adgroup
- Add a new ad, ad type, Product Listing Ad
- This ad type will only be visible if you have ad extensions assigned
- Select The Auto Targets Tab
- Add a “product target”, choose either “all products” or “Add a group of products”

Much like with product extensions you can them define which product you would like to target based on the Google Merchant Centre parameters.

Save and then set live!

One thing to note is that there are no keywords required within these adgroups, Google bases which queries the ads are displayed for on information from your merchant centre, much like with Google Shopping and Product Extensions.

Providing more flexibility with targeting and more control.

Digital marketing is one of the industries that is constantly changing, and as marketeers its our job to keep up with those changes along with new ideas to get them out there! Heres a few tips to keep your ideas fresh and up to date.

1. Take a Break From the Web

WHAT! I hear your cry… According to experts studies, to get in touch with the muse, you have to first do the mental equivalent of cleansing your palate.
Some professionals use a “take a step back” approach. Often it’s as simple as spending a few minutes internalizing the challenge at hand, and then doing something else entirely.

Taking a walk is easy enough, but if there’s time then reading something on a different subject or going for a walk or just [doing] anything that actively stimulates your mind and senses really opens things up.

Also, sleep. Never underestimate the power of sleep!

2. Communicate New Ideas to New People

So what do you do after you’ve untethered yourself from your mac?
Its been said that its a good idea to strike up a conversation with someone — inside the office or out — who you don’t know very well. The theory behind this is the more random the person, the better because it will force you out of whatever mindset you’re in.

Advertising agency Crispin Porter + Bogusky, for instance, has a rule, articulated by co-founder Alex Bogusky: “Anyone who’s looking for inspiration from other ad agencies is in the wrong building.”

3. Avoid Brainstorming in Large Groups…

Brainstorming in large groups often ends in confusion as the sessions seem to go on for hours with ideas and comments often going around In circles. I quite often feel like I haven’t really come away with anything (except a headache)
We at SGM are a small team so that helps with our brainstorming. We talk, we organize and assign tasks to each of us and get the job done – most of the time anyways!

If you are hosting brainstorming meetings with more than 10 people, consider dividing the groups in halves and I am pretty confident they will be a lot more productive.

If that is impractical, brainstorming in a large group can work if it’s done digitally, rather than in the flesh. A chat room, for instance, might be a more welcoming place for new ideas than an actual room.

4. Look back at things that have inspired you before.

If you are having one of those days where you need to come up with something creative and innovative and you feel like you have hit a wall. Nothing good is going to come from your brain today.

Then I would suggest you look back at something you have done before, look back at old presentations, emails and notes, or this can even be things like movies, books, blogs, pictures and so on. You can literally pluck inspiration out of the air at times.

Music does it for me. If im sitting here desperately trying to think of a blog to write but all I see in my head is cupcakes and butterflies I tend to plug in my headphones and put my ipod on shuffle. This shuts me away from whats going on around me and before I know it ive written a fabulous blog called ‘Tips for Generating new Ideas to keep your digital marketing approach fresh’

I hope this is helpful and you are already feeling creative!

Apps are pretty much a part of our every day lives now. In-fact, when I think of the “pre app” times I cannot imagine not having an app for pretty much everything- from news articles to cinema listings, The same way that I still wonder how on earth I was allowed out in public before I owned a pair of GHD straighteners! (Hello, I’m Heather and I’m a girl)

We were discussing our top 10 apps in the office this morning and I thought it would be fun to share this with you all – feel free to send us your top apps so we can add these to our list to download.

In no particular order…

1. Sky & BBC news

- Very easy to use and provides the information clearly

2. Star Walk

- Star Walk is an award-winning Education app that allows users to easily locate and identify 20,000+ objects in the night sky. The 360-degree, touch control star map displays constellations, stars, planets, satellites, and galaxies currently overhead from anywhere on Earth. I love this app!

3. Flipboard

- Your pocket sized personal magazine. This app is fab you pick categories that you are interested in and this appears in a cool flipboard format! Give it a go.

4. G-Whizz!

- The best way to multitask your Google Mobile Apps. Its so easy to use, id highly recommend this one.

5. Instagram

- If you are a fan of photography this app is perfect. It’s a fast, beautiful and fun way to share your life with friends through a series of pictures! You can choose filters to transform the look and feel of the pictures and send to Facebook, Twitter or Flickr – it’s easy! Photo sharing, reinvented.

6. TV Catch up

- Watch live TV wherever you are, on WIFI or 3G. It features 28 top channels and there isn’t a monthly fee! We also love it as it also features a TV guide.

7. 360 Panorama

- The future called. It wants its panorama app back. This app is great for capturing panorama images. You can view the images as photos or experience them in immersive 360 View.

8. London Tube

- A really easy and quick app to use to get you around the London underground. (Especially if you are a little bit scared of it like I am)

9. Mi Coach

- Micoach is an app which combined with the Micoach speed cell can track workouts giving information about distance, top speed, and calories burned. Especially good if you are trying to stick to a workout plan!

10. Love Film

- If you have love film, this is an app that you need! its so easy to use and you can order DVDs in a matter of seconds.

And finally, our Monthly Poll

Change

Last year I wrote a 2011 wrap up article, looking back at the changes within Digital Marketing throughout the year, and as I was writing it I realised how much has changed in just a year. The speed of development is only going to quicken over the next 12 months, so the first thing we are likely to see this year is lot more change, and a lot faster! The implication: Don’t forget to keep up with it. Not all of it will benefit your customers, so the key is to know what they want, need, and use the latest technologies to deliver it to them.

Social

Social – Don’t underestimate its reach and impact! Not only from a customer point of view but also from a Search Engine ranking point of view. The search engine algorithms have been factoring social signals for a while now, and the prediction is that this is set to continue. The implication: Ensure that you have a plan for your social media strategy, and that it is done within the context of search engine marketing as this will be the only way you can leverage it to its full effect.

Mobile/Device

All joking aside is does appear that this will be the year of the mobile, or at least the year of the “device”. Apparently Apple are set to release 2 versions of the iPad every year, which releats to my earlier point about the speed of change in 2012. The implications for this are again, if your customers are adopting devices and using them to access your service or product online, then can you target them with mobile advertising, and can they view your site on a mobile device.

PPC – Paid search

Within the paid search arena I am sure we are going see more and more tests and trials with the search engine results page by Google. We have recently seen an example of one of these from last year, where by Google display the advert at the bottom of the page, under the SEO results. There is no doubt going to be more emphasis given to Google+ and an advantage given to the advertisers who integrate this into their online marketing efforts. We have not yet seen the peak of the online advertising market, so there is likely to be increasing competition within the space. The implications of all of this.. You will need to keep your eyes and ears open for new ways to differentiate your digital marketing efforts. Things will get more expensive if you don’t evolve with the changing platforms and markets. To keep these costs down you have to be more creative with your application of the technology.

Summary

2012 is set to be an exciting year for digital. The key take away to help you through 2012 is to embrace social, integrate it with your other digital channels, particularly SEO and PPC. Watch for new technologies that may benefit your customer, if they will, get on that band wagon as it is a fast moving one and if you miss it, you may not catch up!

Search Marketing has seen a huge amount of developments over the past 12 months, keeping every business and online marketing person on their toes. Well, this is just the start and changes in the industry are set to change at ever increasing speeds. We will be investigating and discussing the future of the industry in January, however in this post we look back to the most significant changes. Why? Because often the past is a good indication of future direction.

SEO

Key Google algorithmic changes:

Google are always changing the way the analyse and process peoples sites through algorithm changes. The main ones this year were the Panda and Freshness update.

The aim of Panda was to reduce the value of lower quality content and links within the algorithm. Previously people would write near non sensical articles, submit them to an article distribution site and gain valuable links back to the site, boosting their overall ranking. These sites have been picked up and identified in the Panda change, and subsequently devalued.

Freshness update (November)
Social signals have increased their priority in the natural algorithm. Twitter particularly is helping to inform the search results and increase the number of time Google visits your site. Again, this algo change has helped to ensure that the results users get are timely and up to date.

Site links have also seen a bit of a face lift. They now take up a lot more space on the page, helping the brand owner knock out those pesky competitors who are ranking for their brand term.

From an analytical point of view there have also been changes, and we have seen increased integration between Web master tools and analytics. These are powerful SEO analysis tools in their own right but combined they have increased potential.

And finally we say farewell to Yahoo site explorer. This was possibly the only reason I used Yahoo. Site explore was a great tool for finding out how many back links there were to a site or page. There are fortunately a number of other tools available, but this was my favourite!

PPC

Google analytics has changed to a new interface. The main addition to the tools is a multi channel funnel. This means that you are more easily able to monitor the impact each channels has on one another. i.e. How many people click on a PPC advert and then come back via a natural listing. Ultimately this is the start to an attribution model giving businesses a great chance of quantifying the effectiveness of each online channel.

There has been the release of new advert formats, which include product ads and call extensions. There have also been new match types which we have discussed in a previous article, helping to refine traffic further. Again more tools to master in order to gain online dominance.

Yahoo and MSN have begun their merger in the US. Yahoo is now running from MSN’s algorithm so you will see the same results in both Yahoo and Bing. This integration will go further in 2012 and will see the paid search platforms combining.

Social

All the social platforms have changed massively. We have also seen the introduction of Googles new social offering Google+. There have been social measurement tools that have surfaced, helping to try and quantify the social channel. Klout is a good example of this and there have been a number of others that are emerging as brands look to invest money in the channel.
There have also been a number of developments within the social management tools. Tools like Hootsuite have continued to developed their offering and management capabilities. Social bro is one of our favourites.

Facebook have made improvements to the advertising platform, but are still a way off the likes of Google from an advertisers perspective.

Stats:
750 million active users on Twitter
Facebook is close to 1bn global users.

Goals and Transactions are fantastic for tracking performance and ROI through Google Analytics, especially goals due to the flexibility of the setup… I’m sure we have all experienced the frustration of trying get a third party to add Google Adwords conversion tracking tags.

It should be a straight forward process, but we have certainly encountered problems with the installation which can be very frustrating, especially when you are as reliant on good data as we are when it comes to PPC optimisation.

Well the great thing is that we can now import Google Analytics goals into Adwords! And as you are probably aware, Goals are based on Url’s so no “dev” work required, that gives us the flexibility to create goals as we please, and then import them into Google Adwords which can cut out alot of waiting around for tags to be added!

Below I have included the steps you need to take to do this, I hope it helps!

Importing Analytics Goals into Adwords:

1. Make sure you have correctly linked your adwords and analytics accounts… if you haven’t see my guide on how to do so!
2. Make sure you are logged into your Google Analytics Account (You will need to be an admin user).
3. Click the “Edit Account and Data Sharing Settings” tab.
4. Select the “With other Google products only” option under “Share my Google Analytics data…”
5. Click “Save Changes”.
6. Navigate to Adwords, and go to the conversion tracking page. This page will show a message explaining that your goals and transactions from Google Analytics are ready to be linked.
7. Click “Import from Google Analytics”.
8. Now all you have to do is select the specific goals and/or transactions that you want imported, fill in the following criteria to ensure it all matches up with how the goal is setup in analytics (Name).
9. Select “Import” from the bottom of the table to finish.

At the beginning of this month we asked you to vote in our ‘Is blog marketing just a trend’ poll.

Results

65% of you voted `No- Its here to stay’
24% of you voted ‘Sort of- it’ll be around for a while but not forever
6% voted ‘Don’t know’
And 5% voted ‘yes, it wont be around for long’

We personally love blogging at Sleeping Giant Media and think that blogging is here to stay.

Luke is a blogging hero – have a read of his latest blog posts.

Making continuous, well tested improvements to each element of the account will over time time tune your account, improve performance and aid managed expansion.

PPC campaigns are not set and forget, they require regular monitoring and adjustments known as optimisation, so the campaigns are constantly evolving. If this is done based on tested logic this should drive the account in a positive direction.

In order to truly optimise a campaign there should be regular testing of the different variables, this may include adcopy testing, positions, new keywords, negative keywords, different ad formats, campaign daily budget distribution, the list of variables in adwords goes on for quite a while!

These tests and trials will enforce or call to question hypotheses and assumptions that stakeholders have and will help the drive more informed decisions as well as highlighting opportunities.

There are usually improvements that can be found and new areas to explore to gain account performance and business insight. With time there will be fewer and fewer improvements and they will be harder to find, but they are there if you look hard enough and use the data to inform the changes made.

Here are my top 4 Kaizen areas to focus on

Adcopy testing, by running multiple creatives on the same keywords the manager can determine which USPs drive the best performance, the advertiser can then incorporate this into future adcopy (and leave out what does not work).

landing page / deep link strategy – By testing more than one landing page the advertiser can see what is most likely to lead to a conversion ( or lead to a higher value conversion). An example of this might be when bidding on a term  for Train sets, would users be more likely to convert when they land on the Train Sets page or would they be more likely to convert if a specific PPC page is built using PPC landing page best practices?

Keyword selection – search queries are constantly evolving, Google suggests they find 20% of search queries in any given month are new. Therefore if the keyword list you use is not evolving with search behaviour you may miss opportunities – expand too rapidly and you may expose yourself to a lot of risk (in terms of cost) while taking smaller, gradual but constant expansion will allow for closer management of these keywords. The same applies for negative keywords.

Bids and positions – The keyword bid is a tricky one, this is because PPC is an auction, so it can vary depending largely on the competitors in that space, position and element called quality score.

And the conclusion

All accounts have to start form somewhere, an important part of the account set up is testing assumptions and building relevant data to drive insights. Based on these insights the accounts can be optimised on an ongoing basis, and with time will become highly optimised and bring the terms in the account closer to the Yield curve.

While there are times making large changes will be necessary, such as restructuring campaigns or making changes to make the account more manageable, these large changes should be kept to a minimum while making small, well tested changes should be a regular occurrence!

Happy optimising !

Ok so you have got this blog thing on your site and you know you should be doing it because companies like ours have told you it is a good thing. (It is by the way, check out my other post on why you should blog if you need some reasons!)

Here is the situation:

You are busy sifting through emails, answering phones and doing a million other jobs and you find half an hour every week to write a blog. It is really important that you make the most of that time! This post is aimed at breaking your spare 30 min’s into separate tasks, and give you the foundation on which to blog. Once you have followed these steps you will be ready to blog quickly when ever you get the chance.

Here’s how:

1. Branding and tone of voice (your first 30 min)

This is something I can’t stress enough. You need to find your own tone, your own voice, your own vocab. Everything you write has to fit with this in order to have the maximum impact. This should be something you develop as part of all your marketing activity. Once it is in place it is easy to write within that voice.

2. Blog topics (30 min)

Pick a whole series of topics that you can talk about. My advice is to take your core products and services and make a list of them. Then think about how your view on them can help other people. i.e. (Service + your expertise) so in my case, SEO and blogging effectively. I would suggest that you aim to create 10 blog titles which are pre prepared and ready to roll you get you next spare 30 mins.

3. News alerts (30 min)

If you are struggling to find things to blog about, one good way to find topics is to set up a number of news alerts via Google alerts. All you need to do is type in some keywords that are relevant to your business and Google will send you alerts when they are mentioned.

Now you have all the elements in place to start blogging, but remember..

4. Keep them manageable

Don’t bite off more than you can chew on your first attempt! It is often hard to keep things succinct when writing blogs. A good way frame things off and keep it manageable for you to write and your reader to read, is to base it around a number of key points. e.g. 3 things to help… or 5 reasons too… and so on.

1. Increased relevant traffic

Firstly if it is a good article and it is picked up by search engines or social channels there is a good chance you will get more people to your site. As long as the blog topic is relevant to your business it is fair to assume that the people who are reading it will be relevant to your business. As long as you make your site engaging, with a clear action on the page you can drive signups or enquires. (please see our sign up —–>>>)

2. Brand positioning

Often companies try to make themselves look more “corporate”, and their sites subsequently lack any form of personality and brand. This makes it a bit generic, and well, dull! A blog is a great place to add personality to your business. You can be more conversational, controversial and casual on the blog. You will have to determine what tone and language fits your business.

3. SEO benefits

Google loves fresh content on a website. The reason is that the web is plagued with companies that have still got a site but are no longer trading. Obviously Google don’t really want to send its users to these sites. One of the best ways for Google to differentiate between businesses still trading and those that are not is the recency and frequency of changes on the site. By blogging it tells Google you are trading and subsequently it favours you over sites with no changes.

4. Empowering/fun..

Well, I guess this is a point of view! But, personally I find it quite good fun to air my opinions and views online where it is viewed by people.

I hope that gives a few reasons why your company should be considering a blog.

Good luck with the blogging! Please write any questions you have in the comments below.