Product Extension Ads are a great way for your products to gain more exposure as well as gain a competitive advantage. See the examples below:

The two examples above show the product extension ads in the center but they can also have right side bar placement as well. These are not to be confused with Product Listings Ads. Like Product Listing Ads you must have a live and updated Google Merchant Shopping Feed with the two accounts linked.

How Do You Implement?
It’s easy to include product extension ad images to your search campaigns. At the campaign level, go to the Ad Extensions Tab and choose Product Extensions. Select the campaign you’d like to include Product Extensions and save. It can take a few hours for your Product Extensions to impression and you should use the Google Ad Preview Tool to view and test.

Below you can see the Product Listing Ad (red arrow) for our client Microfiber Wholesale. In addition to their Product Listing Ad there is also a text ad (blue arrow). With the two ads plus their great organic positioning (green arrows) they certainly have a nice competitive edge.

What are the requirements of Product Listing Ads?
•    Your site must currently sell products.
•    Updated and live Google Merchant Shopping feed.
•    Google Merchant Shopping feed that is linked to your AdWords account.
•    Google Merchant Shopping feed includes attributes for Product Ads.

Important Tips Regarding Product Listing Ads
•    Create specific campaigns only for Product Listing Ads.
•    Do not include keywords within these campaigns as they are driven by your shopping feed not keywords.
•    Do include a promotional message that will be placed below the image and pricing information. See how to implement below:

It’s that time of year again, spring has arrived and it’s time to air things out and clean up. Just as your house may need a good cleaning, your AdWords account could likely use some sprucing up as well. Here are some quick and easy tips that can make a big difference in your account performance.

It’s Time To Let Go

If you are packing up your winter clothes and are about to include that blue poncho sweater thing you haven’t worn since 2001, get rid of it. Now. Like the sweater, we need to let go of things that just don’t work for us anymore and likely never will. It’s easy to feel overwhelmed and not know where to start though.

It’s simple, really. Look at your AdWords data over the past year (this should be done more often but this is a spring cleaning article!) Sort by the highest costing campaign and start there. Look at each ad group within that campaign and the overall cost per acquisition (CPA). Which ad group has the highest CPA? Now do the same with the keywords within that ad group. You may want to pause some keywords or perhaps the whole ad group if you deem that it has been costly and not converting well.

Another easy way to further streamline your account is to delete keywords with 0 impressions and 0 clicks. It’s very important to pause keywords with low click through rates (CTR) as well.

Isolate To Optimize

Let’s be honest, many people experience the, “Uh-oh, summer clothes a little too tight” saga. Don’t beat yourself up about it too much. It happens to the best of us. Focus on the things that do fit and wear them well (and maybe, increase your daily workout a little and stop eating those late night snacks). And just like focusing on those summer clothes that look great, focus on those ad groups and keywords that perform great. Break down campaigns further by isolating your top performing ad groups into new campaigns.

Try New Things

It’s spring and I hate cleaning. Trying something new is always a positive thing. If you haven’t been keeping up with the latest new options available in your account you have some work to do. There is always something new to try! Check out the AdWords blog and the Ad Innovations Blog to see what you may have missed during that winter hibernation.

What’s new?

Broad Match Modifier Although it seems this has been around for ages; we are often finding when reviewing new accounts that this option has not been introduced. If you have struggled with broad match in the past, you should try this match type.

AdWords Automated Rules Going on spring break and want a new promo to go live while you’re away? No problem. With automated rules you can set ads to go live at a specific time. You can also set rules to automatically change bids according to CTR and conversion data or simply bid to position.

New Display Network Tab This was announced in late March 2012 and you can access and optimize display network campaigns from one place. The contextual targeting tool has also been revamped.

1. Location Specific Ad groups – In AdWords, we can’t set location targets at the ad group level, only at the campaign level.

Example: If you do business in Boston and Cambridge and set up two ad groups, each with city specific keywords and ads, Google will not always serve the most relevant ad. You could negate against each ad group – negate Cambridge from the Boston ad group and negate Boston from the Cambridge ad group, but what happens when the search query does not include the city? We still can’t depend on Google to serve the correct ad. If you want to target specific locations – set up separate campaigns for those locations.

2. Broad Keywords: Extremely generic, broad keywords that are not focused on exactly what the company is selling or providing can be dangerous. Mostly, it can quickly drive up impressions and generate too few clicks which will cause low click through rates (CTR) and that leads to low Quality Scores.

Example: If you sell bug spray, you don’t want to bid on “mosquitoes”. Although this strategy may not exactly fit for every business, think in terms of “buy terms”. Getting searchers to click on your ad during their initial research phase can be left to your organic efforts; keywords more specific or closer to the buy will convert better. Of course, there are some business reasons why every single keyword will not be a buy term but you’ll want to keep this in mind.

3. Duplicate Keywords: By having duplicate or keyword overlap you are essentially competing against yourself. This drags down the health of the account and goes against one of the main goals for every AdWords account – tightly themed ad groups. Think of it this way, just like your website: each page should do a specific job – each ad group should do a specific job. Using AdWords Editor, you can easily find duplicate keywords.

Note: If you are targeting different locations amongst various campaigns: these are not considered duplicates.

4. Account Structure: How you set up your account is very important. Often, when looking at an AdWords account, we see a classic mistake: few campaigns that each house too many ad groups.

Example: If you sell office supplies – having one campaign called Office Supplies with ad groups such as pens, notebooks, calendars, scissors, printers, ink, labels, tape, paper clips, rubber bands is the not the best strategy. A better approach would be to have a Pens Campaign with appropriate ad groups including the various types of pens you sell and a Notebooks Campaign, etc.

5. Too Many Keywords: We are no longer seeing a benefit to thinking of or researching every single keyword possibility. In fact, it just dilutes your ad groups and spreads out your data so much that it becomes hard to really get a handle on what converts. Over and over again, we have stream lined new client ad groups into just a handful of the top converting keywords per ad group and we have always seen an overall improvement in performance and ROI.

Are you a PPC professional looking for additional work? We are looking to fill a PPC contract position immediately. If you are dependable, passionate about PPC, and have solid knowledge of AdWords and adCenter, we want to hear from you.

Requirements:
• Currently work as a PPC freelancer / contractor.
• Able to commit to 20 hours per week.
• Weekly progress check-ins via email or phone.
• References

Required PPC Experience:
• At least 2-4 years experience working with AdWords and adCenter.
• Excellent ad writing skills.
• A solid understanding of Google Analytics and how to utilize data to further develop PPC efforts.
• The ability to pinpoint trends and the know-how to capitalize on findings.
• Up to date on latest PPC industry changes and trends.
• Creative thinker
• Enjoys testing and trying new things to improve account performance

This position is virtual.

Please email: careers@grouptwentyseven.com. Include your resume, references, hourly rate as well as a little about yourself and PPC experience.

Click To Enlarge

UPDATE: Sep 19th: I filled out the form and have been contacted by the company’s sales person. Even if this is an old extension, it’s giving this company an nice edge against their competitors.

New AdWords Ad Format?

Although I haven’t seen any announcements in the Ad Innovations or AdWords blog, I stumbled onto this new ad format. What is it? A new subscribe form ad?

Anybody else notice this?

You saw it here first!

A few weeks ago, she contacted us inquiring about another AdWords optimization program for the same account. She saw an increase in ad spend without an uptick in sales; her ROI had started to creep downward. She confessed that she hadn’t touched a thing in six months. She was again interested in just an optimization program and not on-going services.

Although, I was happy to hear from her, I was reluctant to go down the same road. I wasn’t really interested in putting a band-aid on things. I thought about what sort of shape the account would be in after six months without having any attention. Some of the things we like to do on a monthly basis are very basic but very necessary such as bid management, negative keyword management and in this case, we had set up several landing page tests in which the results were never checked on. In a way, it’s actually nice that we have six months worth of data for the landing page test, but we have not dug in yet to see if we would have applied obvious findings after a month or two hence possibly losing out on some good opportunities.

We created a list of things our client missed out on during the past six months to give us a sense of the scope of the project. After reviewing, she decided to work with us on an on-going basis because she realizes band-aids just don’t work sometimes.

Haven’t Touched Your AdWords account in six months? Here’s what you missed?

•    New Ad delivery option: We are still using the Rotate option for our clients because we like to test things out ourselves and not leave it in Google’s hands. Interestingly, after this option was available we noticed that some of our accounts had this option ticked off even though we didn’t do it. Mysterious. Sure enough, a few campaigns in our client’s account had this option selected.

•     AdWords Privacy Policy Update: This is one of those thing that you just have to do. Self-explanatory.

•    Call Metrics: Our good friend, Barb Young has a great blog post about the updates to call metrics. Nothing major, just that each call costs $1 while it was previously free. Sigh.

•    Remarketing: This option has been available since early 2010 and although, we have offered this option to many of our clients in the past it seems to be getting more main stream as I am getting more inquiries about remarketing since people are actually experiencing remarketing ads themselves and seeing their competitors advertise in this way.

•   iPad Targeting: With the addition of iPad targeting, mobile traffic is really taking off for some websites. We’ve been isolating and creating mobile specific campaigns for many of our clients as it’s only going to keep growing. With this strategy, we have better control on bidding, reporting and acting on our findings.

Bottom line: Don’t go the band-aid route. It’s inevitable you’ll miss out on opportunities and eventually waste money. Actively manage your PPC campaigns or hire someone that will.

The Results

Overall the account performance is excellent in comparison to the state it was in when we inherited it. Prior to the overhaul, impression share averaged 11.40%, now it averages at about 70%. We have seen the similar improvements with click through rate (CTR). Before it was under 0.27% and now it is over 3.7%. Cost per conversion is also much better.

Below is a snapshot of the overall account performance in November 2010, prior to our campaign optimization and a typical month after the clean up:

BEFORE:

AFTER:

All of our important metrics indicate that we have been successful in our attempt to overhaul this account but this is a series focused on quality scores, so let’s review:

What were the quality score results?

As we held our breath while going live with our new and improved campaigns, we were very relieved to see that our strategy had in fact improved quality scores. They were not stellar but there were no 1 or 2’s in sight. Generally, we started off with 3 and 4’s but since our CTR was quite good now, things improved quickly.

In Part 1, we showed a snapshot of the quality score from the Boston campaign. Here’s a more recent snapshot:

Some markets have even better results:

A few limitations have been discovered.

Although the account is much healthier than it was last year, we’d like to add some keyword phrases that do not include the city modifier. Even though broad match should activate our ads for phrases such as team building and team building programs, they don’t as much as we’d like. We suspect this could be due to the history of the account. We did add non city keyword phrases about a month after our launch and they were hit with our low Quality Scores of 2. We paused and tried again two months later and they started out with a Quality Score of 3, we are slowly adding more as time goes on as the account performance improves.

What type of low quality score issues have you encountered?

Landing page relevancy plays an important role in regards to quality score. Originally, the client had been landing visitors on relevant pages of their website. This can work well for accounts that have good quality score but we wanted to stay away from anything that was implemented prior to us reviving the account.

Hyper Focus on Relevancy

Our overall landing page strategy was to hyper focus on relevancy. Instead of landing the visitors on the original pages we continued with our city plus keyword strategy for our new landing pages. Each city campaign ad had its own city specific landing page. Title tags, headlines and content contained our city specific keywords along with a client testimonial and call to action.

The new PPC landing pages contained optimized title tags, headlines and content, just like basic on-page SEO.

Example Title Tag: [Company Name]: Scavenger Hunts in Boston, Massachusetts: Delivering Cutting Edge Team Building Programs And Activities

Example Headline: Boston Team Building & Scavenger Hunts.

In addition to the above examples and content optimization, we included a video of their top programs, a client testimonial and a short form.

Next, we’ll share the outcome of our efforts and some of our findings. Read how we our quality score improvement strategies worked!

After pausing all of the old campaigns, we got to work on our strategy, keywords first.

We worried that if we launched new campaigns with the same keywords, we’d still get pinged with the same low quality score issues so we knew we should stay away from all of the original keywords. This was easy for the most part since the client was originally bidding on extremely broad keywords such as Boston, Greater Boston and Team Games for a business and website solely focused on team building programs.

On the other hand, we were in a serious jam when it came to the highly relevant keywords that we most definitely would want to continue bidding on such as team building programs and corporate team building. Since the irrelevant keywords dragged the whole account into the mud, even the highly relevant keywords were penalized.

What was the keyword strategy?

We decided to focus on the city and location targeting aspect of this business. The client provides various team building and scavenger hunt programs in 21 cities around the US. We created city specific campaigns with two adgroups: Team Building and Scavenger Hunts. All of the new keywords include the city names such as Boston team building programs and corporate team building Boston.

Our hope was that broad match would still pull in team building and scavenger hunt queries that didn’t include the city names.

Next, we’ll discuss how we handled landing page strategy.