Just before we all go away for Christmas just wanted to wish you all a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.
Circus PPC Blogs will be back in the new year with a lot more interesting insights into all areas of PPC.
Video, Attribution and Mobile are the 3 hottest topics at the moment which we will cover in depth early in the year, we will be providing dates for your diary’s to help you prepare your campaigns and covering new technology, advanced strategy and many more topics.
PPC is getting more and more interesting with more and more data at the moment. How you use this data will be key to your success in 2017.
If you would like to speak to us to help you create a PPC plan for 2017, feel free to get in touch
Written by Ahmed Chopdat PPC Director at Circus PPC Agency
Ifs – The New Ad Customizers
This summer, Google rolled out expanded text ads and the change to extra-long ads with double headlines generally resulted in an improved CTR and higher conversion rates across accounts. However, the move away from standard text ads also resulted in the loss of mobile-specific text ads, which were a useful tool in displaying custom messages to mobile customers. Now, thanks to the inclusion of a new Ad Customizer, AdWords users can once again include not only device-specific expanded ad copy – but also audience-specific ad copy.
How Does It Work?
Adding the “{=IF” syntax at the start of an ad copy description line will allow the choice of either a device-specific variable or an audience-specific variable. If device is chosen, text can be included to only show on either desktop, mobile or tablet devices. If audience is chosen, different ad copy can be displayed to custom user lists.
Looking at the below example, the device ad customizer is set up to display the text “Quick, Easy Mobile Booking” if viewed from a mobile device. However, when viewed from a desktop or tablet device, the default text will instead read “Best Price Guaranteed”. The Audience ad customizer is also set up to increase the discount percentage from 25% to 30% for returning visitors or cart abandoners. Customers visiting the site for the first time will instead see the default value of 25%.
The new ‘If’ ad customizers will be rolling out across AdWords throughout the month and may already be available in your accounts. As of yet, this customizer is not supported in AdWords Editor, so any changes will have to be made through the AdWords site.
- Keep aware of character limits in order to avoid disapproval: make sure that the values that replace the customizers keep your headline and description lines within the character limits.
- Ads with customizers, like all other ads, must meet Google’s professional and editorial standards.
- Remember to always keep an ad in each ad group that doesn’t use ad customizers to serve as a backup for the ads with customizers, should anything go wrong. AdWords will only run an ad with customizers if there are also ads that do not use ad customizers in the same ad group.
For further information, or for more help and tips please do get in touch.
Ads and Landing Page Split Testing
Sometimes called split testing, sometimes called A/B testing however they all mean exactly the same thing.
Testing is crucial to not only the success of an account, but also the constant improvement. I always say, “the day we reach a 100% conversion rate, we can stop testing on the landing page” but even this statement isn’t 100% true as we would then be testing to help improve the CPC and bring that down.
Questions we often hear are:
- Why do we need to split test?
- Should we be split testing?
- Are we split testing?
- When do we stop testing?
- What do we need to test?
In this article I will try to answer all of these questions and more.
Why should you be testing?
To explain why you should look at testing below are some numbers to help motivate you. To keep things simple I have kept the numbers quite low.
You can see just by improving the CPC by 5p you can have an extra 3 conversions and by improving the conversion rate by just 5% gives you an extra 5 conversions in the example above. In the real world this could mean an extra 100 conversions.
The 2 key areas of testing from a PPC point of view are:
- Ad copy testing
- Landing page testing
I will start off with ad copy testing.
The number of times I have come across accounts with only 1 ad (which also happens to be exactly the same) in every ad group is quite scary. The fact that this happens as often as it does goes to show how lazy people can be when building out an account. I will refer you to one of our previous articles about writing ad copy here.
On average we recommend testing 3-4 ads per ad group however this will vary by industry and by promotions you are running at the time.
What to test in the ad copy?
- Different Headlines
- Different headline 2’s
- Different messages in the description
- Try price vs no price – applicable to retail only.
- Offer vs no offer (if you are running an offer)
- Seasonality vs generic
- Display URL
- Try generic vs specific
- Different extensions
- Different sitelinks
- Different call out extensions
- Different structured snippets
- Different price extensions – applicable to retail only
Moving on to landing page testing:
Over the years I have learnt it isn’t what you think is better which will actually perform better. Even if you know your products and services inside out, you need to let your users decide what they want to see.
Some examples are:
A law firm which had very content heavy landing pages with no call to action near the top tried a landing page with no information or very minimal information with a lot of calls to action. The new landing page looked much slicker and looked like a definite winner. The stats proved otherwise and the old content heavy landing page performed better. In this industry we found people didn’t like to be pushed to convert into lead but like to feel like they are making their own decision. Later we tried some calls to action on all of the content pages which worked well.
In iGaming a few years ago everyone was using the 1, 2, 3 step process. One of our clients had a homepage which was slick enough to be a landing page but also listed the games they had. They tested the homepage vs a landing page using the same 1-2-3 step process. The homepage won. This again proved a good crossover between an easy funnel to conversion but with information worked well.
So what can be tested on a landing page?
The answer is anything and everything on the page.
To give you some ideas below is a list of things to get you started:
Remember: This list is only to get you started and by no means the full list of things to test.
How to measure the results?
One crucial point I would like to point out here is to ensure you have conversion tracking. I have come across a few accounts in my time which didn’t have conversion tracking. If you cannot measure what you are doing accurately then you cannot optimise accurately.
What will determine the success or failure of the test depends on your goal to start with. What did you want to improve?
- CTR
- Conversion rate
- CPC
- CPA
- Cost of sale
- ROI
The main thing you will want to improve is you’re CPA or if you are in retail, your cost of sale or ROI. Therefore if the CTR is down but you are getting more sales at a cheaper CPA that will trump a stronger CPC and even a stronger conversion rate sometimes (Although a stronger conversion rate will usually mean more sales and a stronger CPA).
It is important to decide on the main goal however before you start the test so you can monitor this closely.
How long shall run the test?
It depends on when you feel like you have enough data. Generally I like to run tests for 2 weeks, have 1 week to analyse the data and decide on the new test to start the following week.
This however doesn’t work if you do not have enough data. If you are testing on only 1 ad group, you may sometimes have to run a test for a month. On the flip side however if you are running a test across a few campaigns you may have enough data within a week.
I have finished my test, what now?
Are you at 100% conversion rate?
In that case why don’t you start a new test to help to continue improve the performance?
Some Tips:
- Try to test one portion of your account rather than your whole account.
- Try to run only 1 test at a time – too many tests will skew the data
- If you are running any special promotions this will also skew your figures.
- There are landing page testing platforms which exist which you can use to test the small changes on the landing pages.
- Always keep testing
For further information, or for more help and tips please do get in touch.
Written by Ahmed Chopdat PPC Director at Circus PPC Agency
Mobile Page Speed & Performance: Finding the Sweet Spot
Mobile users are increasing and desktop users are on the decline. With that in mind, the question of ‘what effect does site speed have on the conversion rates of users’ becomes an important one for PPC specialists to consider. When a potential customer clicks an ad on a desktop, it can be assumed that that they are on a secure, relatively fast Wi-Fi connection. When it comes to mobile, there is no way of knowing whether a potential customer will be browsing through Wi-Fi or using their (generally slower) mobile data. There is also no saying whether mobile visitors will be using 4G or a much slower 3G connection.
In an environment where over 50% of mobile site visits are abandoned if the page take longer than 3 seconds to load, an average load time for mobile sites of 19 seconds over 3G connections is not ideal for successful PPC campaigns. If Google detects that site visitors are bouncing off from your landing page, your quality score will be affected; which in turn will adversely affect your campaign performance.
To compare mobile sites that load in 5 seconds vs mobile sites that load in 19 seconds…
- Ad visibility is 25% higher
- Average sessions last 70% longer
- The bounce rate is 35% lower
Most crucially, mobile sites that load in 5 seconds earn up to twice the revenue than sites that load in 19 seconds.
In 2014, the performance sweet spot (the page load time that yields the best conversion rate) was around 6 seconds. In 2015, the sweet spot moved much earlier — to just over 2 seconds. This is evidence that year-on-year; customers are expecting better performing sites that load faster on their mobile.
How to test page speed
Luckily, it is easy to test the mobile speed of your site and take the necessary steps to improve it. You can enter your site URL into Google’s own PageSpeed Insights tool to receive a free analysis of mobile and desktop speed and usability. PageSpeed Insights measures the time it takes to load your landing page and then gives a helpful list of suggestions as to how to improve this speed. You will receive a score out of 100 for speed and user experience for desktop and mobile devices. Try to aim for a score of at least 85 across every category to ensure your site performs as well as it can on mobile devices.
As mobile devices get faster and mobile data services improve, mobile users expect pages to load much faster. If your site can’t keep up to speed, don’t be surprised to see bounce rates increase as potential customers take their service elsewhere!
Prioritising Your Ad Extensions
As any competent PPC Manager knows, Ad Extensions are vital to your campaigns and come in many formats:
• Sitelinks – areas of your site you can use AdWords to link to without compromising text space in your ad, such as seasonal promotions, contact page etc.
• Structured Snippets – these are as they say, little snippets of info that appear below your ad. They come in many forms, the most popular being “types” (as in product categories) and “brands”
• Callout extensions – popular use being to advertise USPs such as “free next day delivery”
• Call extensions – add a clickable phone number to drive phone enquiries – more on this later
Most of these (bar call extensions) can be specified at account, campaign and ad group level, Call extensions are limited to campaign and ad group level only (at the time of writing this article).
Ordinarily Google only shows two of these extensions at any one time (this is a very important factor), and often rotates them. Some users find this acceptable but before embarking on setting up as many ad extensions as you can/want you should consider what you need to be displaying for your client.
With one of my clients we set up the Big 4 ad extensions in order to improve the presence of the ads. It is widely accepted that ‘the more extensions you have, the bigger the ad’ but this wasn’t the case here.
The Problem (Requirement):
While the client sells online, a significant percentage of their sales are completed over the phone.
The Thinking (Resources):
Taking this on board we then considered relevance over quantity – while it may be useful to display the brands that are on offer using structured snippets they are not considered as important as driving phone calls. The same with callouts, they simply arent as important as driving the phone calls either.
The Solution (Prioritise):
As Google will only show two ad extensions at any one time, our strategy was clear; we must choose the two best ad extensions that will achieve the end goals:
• Call extensions – logical considering phone calls are their main sales channel
• Sitelinks – We decided to retain these as they are the only other interactive extension allowing users to click to specific pages of the site
As a result of this we saw a dramatic improvement in phone call volume, as we effectively ‘forced’ Google to display just these two extensions.
It is very tempting to try and inflate an ad with as many extensions as you can. What needs to be considered is what extensions do you really need? What do you need to achieve for your client? If the emphasis is driving phone calls, as is the case with etyres then the other extensions logically must be given less priority.
• Requirement – What do you need to achieve for your customer? Do they want online sales, phone calls, a balance? Ask the questions and your client will answer
• Resources – See what you can utilise to help you along with this
• Prioritise – Choose the extensions that need to be seen the most
Keep these three in mind all the time when setting up your extensions and you should see the results.
Circus @ Leeds Business Week
Being a specialist agency Circus PPC have been asked to present at Leeds Business Week to talk about one of our many specialist areas. With the worlds focus changing to mobile devices and the recent shifts in search behaviours we have chosen this to be our topic.
Spoiler Alert: The below chart from Consumer Barometer shows how the % of mobile users are increasing and desktop users are on the decline.
We have released articles on Mobile recently which you may have ready already:
http://circusppc.com/should-you-target-mobile-devices-with-ppc-ads/
http://circusppc.com/adwords-mobile-1st-approach/
And we will be running through this with examples that will help with your mobile strategies.
As mentioned in the article on the Leeds Business Week website, we will not only be talking from a PPC perspective but also on mobile in general and why this needs to be a big focus in your marketing plans. We will discuss the 25 principles of a mobile site design and we will finish with measurement.
To register please visit: http://leedsbizweek.com/events/view/98
Our talk will be on Tuesday the 18th of October at 3pm.
Below is a quote from the Yorkshire Mafia about the event:
“Leeds Business Week is not just a celebration of business; it is about bringing people together to make things happen. There is no point in standing in a room to collect business cards; we need to learn, to share and to create meaningful relationships that will benefit us all as a community.
There is a huge line up of events, and once again more than 100 businesses have shown their support. We know we have the talent, we have the credibility and we have the potential, it’s time to put all of those things into practice and give Leeds its rightful place on the map as a centre for doing business.”
Geoff Shepherd, Chairman, The Yorkshire Mafia
If you cannot make it to the talk but would like to discuss your Mobile strategy, feel free to get in touch with the Circus team.
Written by Ahmed Chopdat PPC Director at Circus PPC Agency
Google Update Their Seller Ratings Policy
Even though they have not made it official, Google have recently updated their seller ratings policy, so instead of 30 ratings in the past 12 months, businesses must now have at least 150 ratings in order for the star rating extension to appear in their paid ads. The average star rating of 3.5 or higher remains the same.
For those that are not familiar with it, seller ratings are an automated AdWords extension that lets consumers know what businesses have a good reputation and what to expect when it comes to the quality of their service.
These extensions will usually be displayed for businesses when their website, ad, or product listing appears across Google products. If you don’t want seller ratings to be displayed with your ads, then you can disable this automated extension.
According to Google, these seller ratings are based on a number of different sources, including:
- Google Certified Shops, a free certification programme that helps shoppers to discover online shops that consistently offer a great shopping experience.
- StellaService, an independent company that analyses the quality of your customer service through the measurement of your customer care, delivery and returns.
- Aggregated performance metrics from Google-led shopping research.
- Ratings from Google Consumer Surveys, a market research platform that we use to collect data for certain domains and businesses.
- Shopping reviews for your shop domain, which include reviews from the various independent sources such as :TrustPilot, Feefo, Bizrate or Bazaarvoice.
How to increase the quantity and quality of your reviews:
Since Google takes into account only the reviews submitted in the last 12 months, it is of uttermost importance to encourage your customers review your products and services regularly.
- Talk to existing customers
Reach out to your existing customers and ask for a review. TIP: a 5% discount on their next order might incentivise them to do so. - Think about the customer journey
Request a review at the right spot in your customer’s purchasing journey and you will be more likely to get one. - Read and respond to reviews
It’s really important to read and respond to your reviews regularly. This way your business provides more transparency and you have the ability to solve issues directly with the customers if they are not satisfied. - Go the extra mile
People are more likely to leave positive reviews if you provide excellent customer service. Keep your customers happy and their positive reviews will help bring in more business opportunities. - Be patient!
Even though this higher threshold will put more pressure on smaller businesses, it might also provide an opportunity to engage with their customers to collect more reviews and gain more credibility.
If you would like a helping hand with element of PPC advertising then please contact us for a free, no obligation PPC review and consultation with one of our PPC Experts.
Written by Daniel Lupu PPC Analyst at Circus PPC Agency
Device Specific Bid Adjustments – A Welcome Return
Google have recently confirmed that the long-awaited device-specific bid adjustments will be receiving a full global roll out over the next month. Although mobile-specific bids adjustments have been a staple in PPC strategy for some time now, we will now have full control over bid adjustments for tablet and desktop devices too. Speaking from a live Google Hangout on Tuesday, Product Expert Sally Chung and Product Manager Leo Sei explained the best practices for taking advantage of the upcoming changes, which we’ve summarised here:
1 – Manage All Devices within One Campaign
Google have suggested that keeping all of the targeted devices within one campaign is the best practice moving forward, as appose to breaking each device up into individual campaigns. Why? Simply because duplicating or triplicating each campaign for each device type is a lot of extra work for minimal benefits. Running all-device campaigns allows for consistency in the keyword coverage; plus only one set of ads, ad extension and negative keywords per campaign is much easier to keep under control. If your ads need to be tailored for each device, ad customizers have you covered.
2 – AdWords Smart Bidding
AdWords Smart Bidding (formerly known as AdWords Auto-Bidding) is a category of automated bidding options offered by Google. Google have been pushing hard to encourage PPC newcomers to make use of Smart Bidding in an effort to simplify the complicated process of managing an AdWords account. Although this option is a decent one for PPC novices – here at Circus PPC we are big believers in manual bidding strategies. Although it requires much more work, manual bidding also allows for much more control over PPC accounts; which in the hands of PPC experts, will result in better conversion rates.
3 – Device Specific Bids with Manual Bidding
To calculate device-specific bids manually, Leo Sei has recommended using what is known as “full-value conversions” in order to calculate the full value CPA and in turn determine the optimal device bid adjustment. Full-value conversions include conversion gained directly through AdWords, but additionally any sales made in the real world as a result of the ads (offline conversions, calls, etc.). The new AdWords “assisting devices” report will help in finding the full value conversions total.
When the full value conversion total has been determined and the total full value CPA calculated, the device bid adjustment change can be calculated using the following formula:
So in this example:
The device bid adjustment ratio for mobile devices is calculated by taking the total full value CPA (£9.41) and dividing it by the device full value CPA (£10.00). This leaves us with 0.941. Step 2 is taking the device bid adjustment ratio (0.941), subtracting 1 from the total and then multiplying it by 100. This leaves us with a device bid adjustment change of -5.90%.
The calculation can also be used for conversion rates if you prefer, and keep in mind that any existing bid adjustments will need to be factored into the device bid adjustment equation, using the following simple calculation:
For example:
We think it is fantastic that Google have implemented this long overdue change to the AdWords platform. By allowing marketers even more control over their bids, we expect plenty of our clients will strongly benefit from the new changes to device bid adjustments.
The Benefits of Shared Libraries
Shared libraries are a common set of assets that can be used between campaigns and accounts.
These mainly consist of:
- Callout extensions
- Sitelinks
- Structured snippet extensions
These libraries can easily be shared between different accounts with a common goal.
I am going to show you a step by step guide on how to implement common shared libraries across multiple accounts using both the online interface and AdWords editor
Part 1: Creation
Start with your first account
- Go to the Shared Library section in Adwords (very bottom left)
- Here you’ll have options for all your extension types
In this exercise we’ll work with a shared Callout extension, but this can be replicated for all the extensions mentioned above
- Next step – create your extension
- Don’t be afraid of stating the obvious; if your client sells clothes then it’s a great way to reaffirm the fact they sell clothes
Part 2: Associate The Extension
You’ve created your extension – it now need to be linked to a campaign in the account:
-
- In AdWords Editor (in the Shared library tab) you need to click + Associations
- Select ‘Add campaign associations’ and then select the campaigns that you would like the new call out extension to be applied to
At this point you’ve successfully created a shared Callout extension and applied it to campaigns in your account
Part 3: Copy & Paste
All that’s left now is to port them over to your other accounts.
- In the original (or source) account select all your Shared callout extensions and copy the extension (press CTRL+C)
- Navigate to the Shared library in the next account
- Select the Shared Callout extensions option and paste it into the account (press CTRL+V)
- Click the + Associations and select ‘Add campaign associations’
- Select all campaigns that you would like to apply the extension too
And that is it, you’ve managed to create a shared extension in one account, associate it with a campaign and then port this shared extension into another account.
Repeat this process for any other accounts that require the extension or for any other extension type.
Adwords: Mobile 1st Approach
Google have been talking about Mobile 1st for a long time now. Anyone who has been in the industry for a while will remember Google highlighting that Mobile searches were increasing and that they had potential to overtake desktop. In the past couple of years we have seen this shift come to fruition, and Mobile traffic is now as high as desktop and if not higher for most verticals.
So what have Google been doing to encourage the mobile 1st approach?
April 2015:
A Google algorithm change penalises websites that are not mobile friendly
March 2016:
Google stop showing ads on the right hand side of desktop searches
http://circusppc.com/google-to-stop-showing-ads-on-right-side-of-desktop-initial-update/
July 2016:
Google introduced expanded text ads
http://circusppc.com/expanded-text-ads-beta-testing-actual-results/
These changes are consolidating the formats, encouraging more mobile use and increasing the visibility of the PPC results.
As a Premier Google Partner Circus had many clients on the expanded text ads beta from the start and the results showed improved performance across nearly every metric. Due to the fact that the ads stood out more (as they are bigger) it improved the CTR which in turn increased the traffic & conversion volumes.
With expanded text ads now available across the board, we expect the early adopters to benefit and if you do not have all you ads updated soon you will get left behind.
So what’s new that’s helping advertisers with the mobile first approach:
Price Extensions
Google have now launched a new extension called price extensions:
The extensions, which will only show on a mobile device, allows an advertiser to display prices for their products directly under the text ad itself. We expect this to boost CTR, Traffic and more importantly Conversion volumes but for mobile users only.
https://adwords.googleblog.com/2016/07/showcase-products-and-services-with-price-extensions.html
Cross Device Conversions
Cross device conversions allow us to attribute mobile traffic/spend with last click sales more accurately:
The data has been available in AdWords for a while now but in a separate column, going forward cross device conversions will be included in the conversions data by default.
https://adwords.googleblog.com/2016/07/automatically-counting-cross-device-conversions.html
It’s worth noting that you will still be able to see cross device conversions in their own column and you can also segment data by device type to gain more granular reporting.
What makes a good mobile site?
Google have helped answer this question by providing 25 principles which can be applied to your mobile site here: https://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/articles/principles-mobile-site-design-delight-users-drive-conversions.html
And what is coming soon for AdWords Mobile?
- Separate device bids for mobile, desktop and tablets are coming back
- Responsive Google display ads to help fit image ads relative to the users device
- Ads on Google maps
For any help with the many topics discussed in this article or a discussion on your mobile strategy please get in touch. One of our experts will be on hand to help.
Written by Ahmed Chopdat PPC Director at Circus PPC Agency