Entries from Category Google AdWords

Last Tuesday, Three Deep had the honor of hosting a Google Engage Connect Event. Three Deep was one of just a small selection of agencies asked to host this event for small businesses to improve their online marketing initiatives. We were fortunate to have a few of our friends join us despite the snowy weather, both in the office, and online.

Couldn’t make the event? Check out our Storify story, or take a look at our summary below.

Lisa Gevelber – Keeping Up With the Evolving Digital Landscape

Up first was Lisa Gevelber, Director of Marketing for Google. Lisa referenced research that suggests that users of the web can often be using up to four devices at any moment (their computer, television, tablet, smartphone, etc.). As a business, how can you make sure that your message is the one that stands out? She then showed an initiative with Google AdMob that paired traditional ads from leading brands such as Coca-Cola and Volvo and asked the creatives behind them how they’d adapt the tactics to online. The Coca-Cola campaign was featured, based on the 70s ad “Give the World a Coke”.

Featuring both mobile and desktop advertising, users could send a Coca-Cola to an unsuspecting person across the globe and could send translated messages. The recipient’s reaction was captured via video cam and was sent to the sender, along with any messages they sent back.

Emotional Connections

Lisa stressed the importance of how a brand should strive to establish an emotional connection with their consumers. Google does this in the following three ways:

Focus on one user

With the example of Daniel Lee, a father who chronicled his daughter’s childhood through touching messages on Gmail, Google Chrome demonstrated how it can “be there” for all the major milestones. Whether it be integrating Google Maps into an email, or attaching the latest YouTube video, Google Chrome ensures that these all work flawlessly together.

Champion Customers

Google also demonstrated how it helps customers achieve their goals by giving businesses a free website via the GXBO initiative. They used Vermont staple, King Arthur Flour to show how a small business can make the most of online with the right website and advertising.

Take Risks, Say YES!

Finally up, was Frank’s Restaurant, a story of a married couple that struggled to get their business moving, and how pairing with Google Reviews helped catapult their business to profits, and popularity.

Lisa stressed that if you’ve ever wanted to get your marketing initiatives off the ground, to start today. You know your customers, try something new that you haven’t done before!

John Nicoletti – The Zero Moment of Truth

After Lisa’s presentation, John Nicoletti spoke about Google’s research on the Zero Moment of Truth, which addresses how the internet has changed traditional decision-making. Whether it’s checking a smartphone for the latest coupon to buy a mascara, or discovering a review about a new restaurant, being aware of the Zero Moment of Truth is helpful for businesses of all sizes.

John informed the viewers that 83% of people consult reviews, and 58% of these people say that reviews do affect their purchase decision significantly. Additionally, 84% of smartphone users perform in-store research while shopping. The need for businesses to be accessible via reviews and mobile experiences has never been greater.

How to win the ZMOT

John says the best way to win the Zero Moment of Truth is to do the following:

• Put Someone in Charge
• Find your Moments
• Answer the Questions People are Asking
• Optimize for Mobile
• Win with Video
• and be Fast!

John encouraged viewers to map their moments of truth for their business and then to download the ZMOT Handbook.

Bickey Russell – Working with a Winning Agency

After John’s presentation, Bickey Russell helped to close things by addressing the importance of working with an agency, and how Google is equipping agencies to help small businesses succeed.

At the end of the presentation, our Vice President, Jeff Sauer told attendees that no matter the business, the principles that Google shared can be applied to any industry, and Three Deep is excited to help businesses discover how to better reach their audience. If you are curious how we can assist your business in leveraging these tactics or want a copy of the full recording, we encourage you to contact us today!

Google AdWords Enhanced Campaigns

Last week Google Announced major changes to their AdWords platform by rolling out an “Upgrade” to AdWords called Enhanced Campaigns. This is one of the largest changes to the AdWords system in years and has been discussed quite frequently by search marketers across the globe.

While this may be an actual enhancement for some, we view it as mostly marketing speak by Google to put a positive spin on a fairly unpopular set of changes among search marketers.

The basic premise of Enhanced Campaigns is that Google wants search marketers to stop thinking about their campaigns as Mobile vs. Desktop searches and start looking at campaigns as one. This can cut down on management time needed to work on campaigns, but also upsets most smart search marketers who are used to creating and managing separate Desktop and Mobile campaigns in order to control for bid and user experience disparities.

Why the Backlash?

The main reason for a backlash and negativity toward these changes are that mobile traffic does not always convert as well as desktop traffic for certain industries and objectives. For example, an e-commerce website may have a much lower conversion rate from mobile visitors than desktop visitors. With an “enhanced” campaign, it will be more difficult to weed out poor performing traffic. While you can reduce your bids on mobile by a % of traffic, the concern is that reports will no longer be transparent about which clicks are desktop and which are mobile. This can very easily drive up costs for many programs without delivering incremental results.

Here is a summary of the changes that come along with enhanced campaigns:

1) Mobile and Desktop Campaigns Merging

Dislike. While some of the features of enhanced campaigns may be ultimately beneficial, we dislike the fact that this is a forced change. Google has not had a great history of forcing changes with search marketers and taking away their ability to optimize accounts. For example, last year when Google forced ad rotation changes, it was such an unpopular move that they were forced to repeal their change and allow indefinite, even ad rotation.

I have a feeling that the forced merging of Mobile and Desktop campaigns may also be repealed in the future.

2) Sitelinks Reporting for Individual Links

Like. This will be a very positive addition to optimization of AdWords. The ability to analyze effectiveness of individual sitelinks in PPC will result in more conversions and potential cost savings. A win-win for marketers and Google.

3) Phone Calls over 60 Seconds Counted as Conversions

Like. Three Deep has been using a 60 second methodology to help determine if a call is a legitimate sales opportunity for years. It is good to see Google also adopt this policy. Why 60 seconds? Because it is long enough to ensure that the call is not wrong number, misdial or other low quality calls. This is not saying that all calls over 60 seconds are legitimate sales leads, but it does indicate that the call was at least connected.

4) User Context Optimization

Mixed. User context optimization is the ability to adjust your bids by a number of factors. Do you want to reduce your mobile bids by 70% at night? This can easily be done with user context optimization. While this sounds good and is great marketing sizzle, I don’t see how it will really play out to make things more simple. It seems as if this type of targeting just makes everything a lot more complex for people managing campaigns and has a lot of opportunity to do more harm than good.

5) Bid Adjustments Based on Several New Metrics

Like. I love any change that gives marketers more power to increase response from customers and lower overall costs. While this may make things more complex to manage, savvy agencies will use this to the advantage of their clients.

Overall Thoughts on Recent Google Announcements

We like most changes outside of the Enhanced Campaigns, but enhanced campaigns is such a large change that it makes the positive developments bittersweet for many marketers. While we remain hopeful that the merging of mobile and desktop will have minimal impact on rising costs, that still remains to be seen. The other changes to the platform are mostly quite positive and will help marketers get more bang for their buck!

What do you think of the new Google AdWords Enhanced Campaigns? Feel free to leave a comment whether you agree or disagree!

Three Deep is proud to announce today that they have received a partner certification with Google Tag Manager. Google Tag Manager is a newly launched tool from Google that is free of charge, and consolidates your website tags with a single snippet of code. It also lets you manage everything from a web interface, so you can add and update your own tags, with just a few clicks, whenever you want, giving you greater flexibility, and let your webmasters focus on other important tasks.

When I first started working in the home improvement business as a sales representative, my sales manager began my training by saying:  “All the leads you will ever run while you work here suck.  Now that we’ve established that, we don’t have to talk about it ever again.”  The point he was trying to make was that, even though the leads “suck” —  if you handle them the right way, a sales representative can make a decent living selling to them.  The same thing can be said about internet leads and lead generation services.  Contractors that have used these services unsuccessfully, tend to paint “Internet leads” with a broad brush by saying they are poor quality — yet the most successful companies are able to generate a good ROI from them.  Why?

Continue Reading Why All Online Home Improvement Lead Generation Services Suck →

Last week Three Deep’s Paid Search Team attended the Advanced Adwords Seminar in Minneapolis. Brandon, Jarad and I joined search marketing professionals from around the Twin Cities as seminar leader, Brad Geddes, led discussions around a variety of advanced AdWords topics such as:

• Keyword research
• Creating compelling ad copy
• Best practices for landing pages
• Increasing PPC traffic through dynamic keyword insertion
• Increasing quality score
• Conversion optimization
• Google analytics reporting

Day 1: Advanced Account Optimization

The first day we focused on best practices, tips, and techniques for improving an account’s overall performance.

Brad Geddes welcoming us to the seminar and discussing the day’s topics

Key takeaways from the first day included:

• Don’t perform long-tail keyword research until you know the specific keywords that convert. First, find the keywords that convert, then increase your keyword list by building around those keyword converting themes.
• Depending on which phase of the buying cycle the searcher is in, ad copy should emphasize features and or benefits.
  • Awareness Stage – Talk about benefits
  • Interest Stage – Talk about benefits
  • Learning Stage – Talk about features & benefits
  • Shopping Stage – Talk about features
  • Buying Stage – Talk about benefits
• Studies have shown that people look at the different parts of an ad in this order:
  1. Headline
  2. Display URL
  3. Line 1
  4. Line 2
• CTR is the #1 criteria for increasing quality score.
• Only exact match keywords are used to determine quality score.
• Keyword stuffing a landing page will not necessarily help to increase your quality score.
• Ad Group quality score only exists for display network, not on the search network.

Day 2: Advanced Conversion Optimization

The second day we focused on increasing conversions and profits in an account through advanced conversion optimization. Key takeaways from this day include:

• To determine a visitor’s lifetime value, try running a campaign that has a short term negative ROI, but a positive lifetime ROI.
• Test. Test. Test. You can test everything from search conversion rates vs. content conversion rates to conversion rate vs. total sale amount to number of page views by ad copy.
• Examining the search query report is one of the best ways to discover keywords that you’re missing out on.
• It’s important to leverage the power of Google analytics to learn ways to improve your campaign. Google analytics can reveal information such as: ROI by keyword, visitor loyalty, conversions by source, buyer geo-location, and conversion path optimization.
• It is possible to receive traffic that you did not pay for. You don’t necessarily pay for every click to your website.
• When looking to optimize a campaign, keep your eyes open for amount spent on a keyword in a day, amount spent on an ad group in a day, conversion rates by keyword, conversion rates by ad group, time spent on website, and pageviews per visitor.

After two full days of Google Adwords interactive learning and training, Jarad, Brandon and I walked away both eager and excited to implement news ideas, and reinforce some old basics into the paid search accounts we manage at Three Deep. From performing keyword research to writing ad copy to advanced conversion techniques, Brad Geddes had very useful insight and tips on everything Adwords.

Learn more about the Adwords Advanced Seminars and Brad Geddes here:

- Adwords Advanced Seminars
- Brad Geddes’s Blog

As marketers, we all know that there is a fair amount of turnover throughout the dynamics of the client/agency relationship. This post series covers solutions to many common problems that may arise while inheriting a Google Analytics account.

One of the key objectives in value added Web Analytics is answering the question “what is the point of this website” and “what do we want visitors to do when they visit.”  The metric we use to determine success is a conversion occurring during a site visit.

This is a pretty elementary aspect of web analytics, and a fundamental foundation for a solid analytics install… or is it?   From my experience, this is often overlooked.  The fact is that most web analytics installations do not have even the most basic fundamental configuration elements in place.

Continue Reading Google Analytics: Inferring Conversions with No Goals →

In addition to reverse-engineering Google’s Local Search algorithm, we Three Deepers are always looking for more venues for expanding our reach for our local business clients, especially with Adwords.  I have been particularly intrigued of late by Google’s iPhone search application and how it pertains to local search.

If you haven’t read about it yet, the basic premise is that you open the iPhone app, hold it up to your mouth and say your search term.  Google recognizes what you say and automatically ties what you say to your geographic location (using either triangulation or GPS) and then returns search results based on where you are located.

While evaluating this application, I noticed that there were no advertisements on the search app results, or the Google search results on my phone.  Not having ads on the results pages was great for advertisers with strong organic search rankings (and especially those who had top 3 listing in the onebox), but it was a negative for PPC advertisers who wanted to push their way up to the top of the results.  I knew it was only a matter of time before Google would start allowing advertisers to place AdWords ads on these results pages (remember, it’s AdWords revenue that made the iPhone app FREE to users in the first place).

Continue Reading AdWords on Your Mobile Phone (Google’s G1/Android and the iPhone) →

Google has consolidated several awesome new tracking features into a single view in AdWords over the last week (some features have been there a while, but are now receiving more exposure due to a recent interface update) and we at Three Deep are in the process of putting several of these into action. The first thing that we will talk about today is the call tracking feature that they have recently added.

Ever since Google acquired Grand Central in 2007, I knew it was only a matter of time before they would start adding call tracking into AdWords.  For good reason, as phone calls to local or 1-800 numbers on a landing page can account for a large percentage of leads generated from a PPC landing page.¬† In fact, for some of our clients, phone calls have outnumbered free estimate request forms at a 2 to 1 clip.  Even for those clients where request forms still dominate leads, adding a unique tracking number to a landing page has allowed us to truly track the number of leads that we generate for clients.

Continue Reading Google AdWords New Features – Call Tracking →