Google Testing AMP News Results In The Wild

As you know, Google will be releasing the AMP based search results in late February but it seems like Google is now testing the AMP pages in the wild right now, at least some searchers are seeing it now.

Alberto Estrada posted a screen shot of AMP related content showing up in the Google News carousel in the mobile search results. Here is that picture:

These pages are designed to be fast loading, especially on mobile devices. Google has backed AMP, Accelerated Mobile Pages early on and plans on launching this in the news carousel on mobile results later this month. The screen shot above is what Google is testing.

Google has implied they might do labels for AMP supported pages like they did/do with the mobile friendly labels.

For more on the AMP project click here.

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Attributing Retail Store Transactions To Online Clicks At Keyword Level

Updates to Google’s in-store conversion tracking now allow retailers to attribute user engagement at a keyword or ad group level, further expanding advertisers’ ability to see the offline impact of digital marketing.

In recent years, digital media has expanded data-capturing abilities and performance-driven ad features to outperform (and soon, outspend) traditional channels.

Digital advertising has opened new outlets for revenue growth and expanded audience insights beyond data available from traditional channels to assist advertisers in increasing brand awareness and ROI.

Digital Marketing Can Now Fully Support Brick-And-Mortar Sales

Through bridging online and offline data, digital marketing can now fully support brick-and-mortar sales, a segment that previously lacked in digital marketing measurement.

By leveraging the reach of mobile devices alongside the automation and unification of digital platforms, marketers can now see how user engagement continues beyond the click.

Google’s data ties specific content and keywords to offline user engagement to improve conversions and clearly identify the full impact of digital marketing. This transparency expands the connection between content clicks and in-store purchases through improved data accuracy and audience insights.

Google’s recent in-store beta program equipped advertisers with a deeper look into how online engagement stimulates in-store conversions. Advancements to Google’s platform connect store visits at a keyword or ad group level to identify optimal arrangements of content and targeting that drive users to convert.

Additionally, it offers nearly real-time transaction monitoring, allowing marketers to view store visits by day, week or month. This helps brands understand when conversion-focused content is most effective. Improved campaign insights allow for fine-tuning of targeting and delivery.

By integrating search ads with store visit data, retail marketers can see four times as many conversions overall, and 10 times as many on mobile devices.

Lessons From Google’s Beta Program

My company, ZOG Digital, was granted early access to test Google’s beta program and implement their new in-store attribution model for one of our largest retail clients, which has nearly 800 locations nationwide. The expanded insights from this platform allowed us to better tie online engagement to brick-and-mortar store traffic and attribute additional value to our campaigns.

Hyper-targeted ads were developed for each store location and displayed within a seven-mile radius. Data was monitored to track how users engaged with ads and identify when users visited a store location within 30 days of clicking an ad.

We were able to attribute store visits to ad clicks by tracking when users who were signed into Google accessed a store’s WiFi or approached a location. Conversion numbers were then generated from a sample of users who were shown the ad and calculated based on conservative conversion rate estimations.

How Did It Work For Our Client?

Google’s in-store beta program allowed our team to generate a 33-percent conversion lift and expand the conversion life cycle by 308 percent during the month of November. Additionally, cost per acquisition was reduced by 75 percent due to streamlined targeting and enhanced data gathered from paid search touch points.

Store visits are estimates generated from anonymized data collected from a large sample set of users who have activated Location History on their mobile devices.

To improve the accuracy of conversion projections, Google includes specific considerations to analyze the in-store behaviors of potential customers. In-store time is tracked to exclude short visits where sales were not made. It also leverages store mapping and WiFi signal strength to determine user locations within a store.

This extension of data monitoring expands the reach of engagement and further bridges the gap between retail stores and digital channels. With the continued development of paid search attribution, marketers will be able improve the value of their digital campaigns in 2016 with increased transparency that connects in-store purchases to digital clicks.

To begin connecting your brand’s in-store sales with clicks, ensure your digital presence is established with the proper local extensions within Google My Business listings and AdWords campaigns. Focus your keywords to attract local users with phrases like “near me,” and stimulate engagement with specific product-focused calls to action.

When used together, in-store conversion tracking can offer a more transparent view into the total impact of your digital marketing strategies and conversion-driving campaigns.

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Bring Your Work Home: How To Use Google AdWords To Improve Your Love Life

If you’re like most online marketers, you know that it can be hard to strike a good work-life balance. Sometimes, that can put a strain on your romantic situation (especially at the beginning of the year when expectations are particularly high).

With Valentine’s Day just around the corner, you’re probably stuck between making sure your campaigns are running effectively and putting a little pizazz back in your romantic life.

But what if there was a way you could do both? A way to put your hard-won PPC skills towards more amorous goals? What if you could get your love life back on track without leaving the comfort of the AdWords campaign manager?

Marketing Yourself

The secret to romance is great marketing.

As a marketer, you’re hoping that you can make your company’s offering attractive enough to win the attention and approval of your target audience. The same idea applies to romance.

You can’t stop after you get the clicks (er, attention of your significant other), though. If you stop wooing — generally referred to as “advertising” in business circles — the romance dies.

Sure, your significant other might hang around out of brand loyalty, but if you don’t put effort into the relationship, there won’t be a lot of passion for your personal brand…

Given the similarities between marketing and love, it’s only logical that Google AdWords — one of the most powerful advertising platforms on the planet — could also be used for romance.

Now, I don’t think Salar Kamangar ever intended for AdWords to be used as a courting platform, but with a little creativity, you can use your passion for PPC to fuel your sweetheart’s passion for you.

Wooing With AdWords

So, how do you get a $60 billion international marketing platform to discreetly advertise your affections? Let’s take a look at the campaign I put together for my wife, Teresa.

First off, you need to write some killer ad copy. Whether you are writing an ad for SaaS leads or simply a sassy ad, your copy needs to:

1. Make a connection.
2. Engage their mind.
3. Get them to act.

For example, here’s how I put together one of my ads:

This ad had a 100-percent click-through rate, so let’s examine what made it so successful.

1. Make A Connection

If you want your ad to get clicked, you have to make some sort of connection with your audience. What’s the best way to do this?

Well, as John Kurakoa puts it: “The second-best word is ‘you.’ The best word is the customer’s name.”

At the moment, it’s hard to do much better than “you” with your typical AdWords ad. For this sort of ad, however, you have a target audience of one (and if you can’t remember their name, there’s no hope for you).

So put their name in the ad!

Another great way to connect with your audience is to mention something specific to them — a pain point, interest or affiliation.

In this case, you know an awful lot about your target audience, so if there’s a particular shared memory, experience or inside joke that will catch their attention, include it.

2. Engage Their Mind

Your ad copy is your audience’s only clue to what they will get when they click on your ad. With that in mind, you need to speak to your audience’s end goal — what do they get for their click?

One easy way to do this is with a question. Asking a question forces your reader to mentally engage with your ad. For example, my ad would have been much less compelling if it had read “Rekindle the Flame” instead of “Ready To Rekindle the Flame?”

Great questions help your audience to self-identify with your ad. If you do it right, your paramour should read your ad and think, “Yes! I am ready to rekindle the flame. I’d better click on that ad!”

3. Get Them To Act

Now that you’ve got their attention, you need to give them a reason to click. That means you need to answer the question, “How does my offer solve their problem?”

Basically, reading your ad should evoke the following emotions:

In this situation, your goal is to inspire a desire for your company (double entendre intended). Speak to that with your ad copy, and they won’t be able to resist your call to action.

Landing It

After putting all that work into your ad copy, it would be stupid to send your lover to your business’s home page. The secret to successful online advertising is effective landing page design — your romantic efforts are no exception.

Designing Your Landing Page

Fortunately, putting together a landing page doesn’t have to be all that difficult.

Even if you’re clueless about web design, you can easily put a landing page together using Instapage. It’s not quite as robust of an interface as, say, Unbounce, but it will get the job done. Plus, you can try it out for free, which is perfect for our romancing needs.

As an example, here’s the landing page I put together for my campaign using Instapage:

As an additional note, if you happen to be artistically challenged, Instapage also has a ton of great-looking templates that you can customize to meet your wooing needs.

Now, to make sure you get the most bang for your buck, your landing page needs to include the following:

Call To Action

A great call to action (CTA) is obvious and self-explanatory, so your CTA should make it clear what the object of your affection gets from clicking the button.

For example, as much as you might want to say it, “I love you” doesn’t really work as a CTA. That sort of mush might make a good headline or body copy, but it doesn’t provide a whole lot of clarity about the purpose of your button.

Instead, tell them exactly what they can expect if they commit.

Okay, so you might leave a few tantalizing details out to maintain a bit of mystery, but make your offer clear. Mismanaged expectations are a great way to make people angry, whether they are a potential sale or your spouse.

Messaging

If you want your sweetheart to convert, your messaging needs to be consistent from ad to landing page.

For example, had this ad…

… led to this landing page…

… I doubt my conversion rate would have been good. To be honest, it probably would have created some backlash on social media.

However, my actual landing page was overtly romantic (complete with candles — a nice subtle visual reference to flame) and filled with information about Jake Baadsgaard, so my wife’s landing page experience was exactly what she was expecting when she clicked on the ad.

So if you talk about a special memory or moment in your ad copy, put pictures of it on your landing page. If you talked about visiting a romantic location, slip in a picture of the spot… you get the idea. Be consistent!

Confidence-Builders

Lastly, your landing page should fill your target audience with confidence. You might not need all of the following, but they can all help to make your offer more appealing.

• Make sure your unique selling proposition (USP) — or what your significant other gets for signing up — is clear. Your USP should be short enough that it can be absorbed in a glance. For example, on my page you can instantly tell what I have planned for my wife — Romance Awaits!
• Capitalize on the potential of your hero shots. Your hero shots should reinforce your USP and feature the product, so I included a romantic dinner photo and a picture of the great-looking guy who would be taking her (just to make the offer a bit more compelling).
• Legitimize your offer with social proof. For example, I included quotes to improve the perceived quality of the offer. I also threw in some trust-building elements (security seal, privacy policy and so on) in the footer to help allay any concerns about my trustworthiness.

Together, the combination of a great CTA, consistent messaging and confidence-inspiring page elements should create a page with a great conversion rate from the get-go.

All The Right Ads In All The Right Places

Okay, so you’ve written some great ads and put together a landing page that could set a Shaolin monk’s heart all a-flutter. It’s go time, right?

Not exactly.

If you’ve done your job right, your ad will drive clicks and conversions. But if you don’t set your targeting up right, you’re going to get clicks and conversions from a lot more people than just your significant other.

Unfortunately, Google isn’t exactly designed for targeting a single person, so we’ll have to get creative.

Under normal circumstances, we’d use highly-specific keywords to improve the relevance of our clicks, but in this situation, you don’t know what the love of your life is searching for, so your ad needs to show up for any search!

Google’s new customer match option would seem to be a perfect fit for this — all you have to do is upload their email address and target them on search — but unless your sweetheart happens to have more than 1,000 email addresses, you’re out of luck here, as well.

Obviously, Google hasn’t made this easy. But that just means we’ll have to be a little more inventive.

Setting The Stage

Obviously, the easiest way to get your loved one to see your ad would be to simply ask them to search for something specific that you’ve rigged your ad to show up on, but where’s the magic in that?

If you’re going to go to all this work, you want to create some mystery and mystique around your ad. Where did your ad come from? How long have you been trying to catch their eye?

Creating the illusion that you have gone to great time and expense to show your affection is a great way to win romantic brownie points, so you want your sweetheart to find your ad organically.

Fortunately, this part is fairly easy. After all, you should know your target audience well enough to know what they are likely to search for online.

Create a broad match keyword list around those potential searches, pop it into AdWords and set the bid for $50/click. Your ads will start showing up in no time.

Here are some of the keywords I picked for my wife:

Now, you’re probably thinking, “Jake, this approach will get my ads in front of my “target audience,” but broad match will also put my ads in front of everyone on the internet! I don’t want to pay $50 every time the internet trolls do a search on Google!”

Don’t worry, there’s a unique AdWords hack for this problem.

For Your Eyes Only

To keep your ad from showing up in front of the world, you need your loved one’s ZIP code and their IP address.

I assume you already know their ZIP code, but to find their IP address, visit this website while logged into their internet.

Once you’ve got their ZIP code and IP address, open your campaign and click on the Settings tab. In the Locations section, enter their ZIP code.

Scroll down to Location Options (advanced) and change the targeting to “People in my targeted location.” That way, your ads will only show up for people who search from within your loved one’s ZIP code.

Now things get a bit more difficult. To avoid advertising your advances to the whole neighborhood, we need to get a little crazy with IP address exclusions.

Building Your IP Address List

Narrowing down your targeting to just cover your sweetheart’s ZIP code gets our IP address count down to something manageable. Now we just need to exclude every IP address but your honey’s.

To do that, we need to identify all of the IP addresses in your loved one’s city. The easiest way to do this is to use this database. Generally speaking, IP addresses within a city tend to fall into specific ranges, so identifying those ranges will make your job a lot easier.

Once you’ve got all that information, you can use these instructions and this IP address-to-hex converter to build out your IP address list in Excel.

Exclude The Nosy Neighbors

With your IP address list in hand, go back to AdWords and scroll down to the Advanced Settings section of your campaign’s Settings tab. Expand the “IP address exclusion” section, click Edit and copy over your list of IP addresses.

One important note here: AdWords only allows you to exclude 500 IP addresses. However, they do allow you to use a wildcard character (*) to account for a block of IP addresses, so use that to block out those broad IP ranges I mentioned earlier.

That’s it — Your ads are safe from the world and will show up the next time your sweetheart types in anything even remotely related to your chosen keywords. (And look, we just found a use case for broad match!)

Putting It All Together

With one simple hack, your work life and your love life are now one and the same. Launch your campaign and get ready for some lovin’!

By combining eye-catching ad copy, heart-stopping landing page design and a bit of AdWords magic, you’ve created a campaign that’s certain to win your loved one’s heart (and their click).

And if at first you don’t succeed… there’s always retargeting!

The post Bring Your Work Home: How To Use Google AdWords To Improve Your Love Life appeared first on Search Engine Land.

Google Search Partner Network: Friend Or Foe?

The Google Search Network gives advertisers the ability to gain additional AdWords traffic and conversions from users across the web, as Google delivers ads on partner websites in much the same way it does on Google.com.

To target users searching on these partner sites, advertisers need only check a box in campaign settings to “include search partners.”

However, AdWords advertisers have long pined for a bid modifier to adjust bids for Google’s search partners, as the value of this traffic is often very different from that of clicks that come from users searching on Google.com. At the very least, it would be helpful if Google would allow advertisers to exclude specific search partners (as Bing Ads does).

While calls for additional functionality haven’t yielded results just yet, it hasn’t kept us from analyzing how these search partners are performing relative to Google.com. We’ve dissected the numbers to understand how performance looks for brand keywords, non-brand keywords and Shopping campaigns. And the results may surprise you.

Let’s start by talking about the current volume of search partner traffic to get a sense of how important the partner network is to paid search, then move into the value and cost of partner clicks.

Search Partner Share Flat To Down For Text Ads, Up For Product Listing Ads

Taking a look at how the share of traffic coming from search partners has shifted over the past year, we see very different trends when looking at text ads compared to Product Listing Ads (PLAs).

On the text ad side, partner share saw no meaningful gains over the past 13 months.

There was an almost one-percentage-point drop on desktop computers from December to January, which is likely the result of AOL leaving Google’s network for Bing Ads at the beginning of 2016.

PLA search partner share, on the other hand, increased significantly beginning in August.

Google announced in late 2014 that large retail partners would be showing PLAs more often, and in the latter half of 2015, we started to see more paid search traffic from major retailers such as Kohl’s and Target. This drove up partner traffic share, particularly on mobile devices, during the holiday season.

Additionally, Google began showing PLAs for image searches on phones in December, with this traffic attributed to search partners in Google’s performance reports in the AdWords UI. Image search PLAs were also recently expanded to begin showing on desktop, as well.

While PLA partner share saw a serious decline from December to January across all device types, it remains significantly above the levels observed as recently as July of last year.

All told, across all device types and formats, search partners are now accounting for seven percent of all paid search traffic.

Now let’s take a look at how partner traffic is performing for advertisers, but not before mentioning a couple of caveats.

Caveat Time

Before reading further, it’s important to note the following:

• We do advocate for creating campaigns targeting keywords to Google.com only with higher bids than duplicate campaigns targeting both Google.com and the search partner network (which is admittedly convoluted and not feasible in all circumstances). The hope from this strategy is that most of the traffic from the campaigns that target both Google.com and the partner network will come from search partners in order to allow us to bid this traffic as effectively as possible, with the Google.com campaigns getting most of the Google.com traffic. However, this strategy did not significantly impact the performance of search partners relative to Google.com for the sample of advertisers studied for this analysis.
• The query mix of traffic on Google.com and search partners impacts relative conversion rate and cost per click (CPC). This analysis does not go into that, but rather just divides campaigns up into brand text ads, non-brand text ads and shopping campaigns for each advertiser in the sample.

Those points made, the following figures are based on median search partner performance versus Google.com performance for a set of more than 20 advertisers which target the search partner network with their campaigns. These are their stories (Law & Order sound).

Search Partner Clicks Are MORE Likely To Convert Than Google.com Clicks For Brand Traffic

First, looking specifically at brand campaigns, search partner conversion rate is consistently higher than that of Google.com on desktop and tablet computers; in Q4 2015, conversion rates 13 percent and eight percent higher on desktop and tablet (respectively) for the median client.

While that’s probably a pleasant surprise for most advertisers, the downside is that cost per click (CPC) for search partner traffic is significantly higher than that of Google.com for brand terms. Thus, the cost per order is higher on search partners than on Google.com, despite partners returning higher conversion rates than Google.com on these devices.

On phones, conversion rate was 13 percent lower on search partners than on Google.com in Q4, while CPC was 185 percent higher. However, just 0.2 percent of brand phone traffic came from search partners.

As brand traffic usually converts at very high rates for most advertisers, search partners still maintain a great return on ad spend for these keywords, but it does speak to the need for more precise bidding controls that advertisers aren’t able to get the same return with the current system.

Non-Brand Text Ads: Return On Ad Spend For Search Partners Is Close On Desktop & Tablet, Not On Phones

When it comes to non-brand keywords, search partner conversion rate is significantly lower than Google.com conversion rate across all device types.

For desktop and tablet devices, CPC is 32 percent and 29 percent lower, respectively, on partners than Google.com compared to conversion rate being 40 percent lower on both devices. These figures are close enough that the overall return on ad spend isn’t far off for the median advertiser, and some advertisers do see search partner return on ad spend greater than that of Google.com.

Partners also make up a sizable share of non-brand text ad traffic on desktop and tablets, at 31 percent and 17 percent click share, respectively.

When it comes to phone traffic, conversion rate is 66 percent lower on partners than Google.com, but CPC is only 15 percent lower. That’s a pretty big difference, but fortunately, partners only accounted for four percent of all non-brand text ad traffic on phones.

PLA Partner CPC & Conversion Rate Relative To Google.com Line Up Very Well On Mobile

Finally, partner PLA conversion rate and CPC produce a return on ad spend that’s almost identical to that of Google.com on phones and tablets.

As mentioned earlier, PLA traffic on mobile devices in particular picked up significantly at the end of last year, and it’s awesome to see this traffic providing value in line with the cost.

On desktop computers, conversion rate is 41 percent lower, but CPC is only 27 percent lower — a reasonable disparity to swallow in getting additional traffic and orders from these well-performing ads, but yet another example of why advertisers should be given controls to adjust bids for partner traffic.

Conclusion

Some might look at these figures and ask, “Why do these differences in performance exist?” I don’t have those answers, as Google’s search partner network is a bit of a black box. Do partners have first-page minimum bids and top-of-page minimum bids? If so, do those minimums differ from Google.com minimums? Is Quality Score calculated differently?

I don’t know, but these data do give you an idea of how partners perform compared to Google.com for a standard advertiser.

In looking at relative performance by device, ad format and keyword brandedness, there are areas where return on ad spend lines up very well across Google proper and its search partners for the median advertiser. There are also areas where there appear to be some pretty clear inefficiencies.

Some advertisers do see better return on their partner spend than on Google.com spend, and there are also those that see significantly worse relative partner performance than the differences shown in the numbers in this post. Only by targeting the partner network and collecting data can you decide how that plays out in your own campaigns.

As always, advertisers want more control over the performance of their accounts. Whether Google will hand over that control remains to be seen, but I hope this analysis provides you with some framework on how to think about whether you should be targeting the partner network with your campaigns.

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Bing Updates Android & iOS Apps To Enable More Finding With Less Searching

In December Bing updated its iOS app to offer a barcode scanner, in-store price comparisons, third party app integration and other useful features. Today it refreshed its iOS app again and launched an entirely new version of Bing for Android.

The Android update is the bigger update, essentially bringing feature parity with Bing for iOS. The company has done a nice job with both apps, enabling users to get much more information with much less typing. The idea, according to Microsoft, is to help users “find” and “do” faster.

The company is trying to minimize keystrokes and typing with common queries (e.g., near me) turned converted buttons and tabs. Accordingly the home page offers: near me, restaurants, movies, news, image and video buttons that launch rich, image-centric search results.

As with the iOS app, Bing has also integrated third party links and apps into results and profile pages. Restaurant profile pages, for example, integrate deep links and content from Yelp, Foursquare, Facebook, OpenTable and others. There’s also Uber integration under a “get a ride” icon.

As with the iOS app, a “long press” on the search button on the home page brings up a camera icon, which then launches a UPC barcode scanner that will return product and price results if the content is in the Bing database.

The “movies” button on the home page brings up a grid of movie poster images. That then allows users to tap to search in nearby theaters as well as search by genre and “what’s hot” on Netflix and Amazon online.

The one difference I could find between the two apps was that on the iPhone app there’s a “deals” button on the homepage, not present on the Android version. It enables search barcodes or category buttons. The Bing blog post out this morning offers other examples and details.

Late last year I wrote about Relcy, a new mobile search app that seeks to be more actionable and get users to desired outcomes faster than conventional (Google) search. The Bing updates are quite similar and offer a somewhat broader range of capabilities.

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Google Revamps Travel Search Queries Almost Making Web Results Irrelevant

Google has quietly has revamped the mobile user interface for travel related searches. The result of the change makes it really hard to get to the organic web results. Let me walk you through the experience.

You start off by searching for something like [where to go in russia]:

Google then shows you a couple destinations with a big blue arrow to show more. So you click that and it expands into many more locations. Once you are there, there is no way to get back to the web search results without clicking back or redoing your search. You can also see the prices for flights and hotels in the area.

You are also given the option to filter by dates, interests or price; which has been in travel search already for some time now:

When you click into a destination, you are given the nice looking mobile knowledge graph card of the destination:

As you scroll through it, you are then given travel ads for flight options through Google Flight search, hotels through Google Hotel search and restaurants through Google Local results:

Then towards the bottom of the knowledge graph card, all the way at the end in a small grayish font, you have a link to “see web results.”

Don’t get me wrong, this is an incredibly nice user experience for those looking to travel. But those optimizing for travel search might not like the new mobile experience.

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Google Adds JSON-LD Support For Structured Data Markup

Google announced that they now support JSON-LD for structured data markup for reviews and products rich snippets.

JSON-LD, or JavaScript Object Notation for Linked Data, is a method of encoding Linked Data using JSON. Many developers and webmasters prefer using JSON-LD for the markup because of how clean and easy it is to use.

John Mueller, a Google Webmaster Trends analysts added that Google also “cleaned up some of our application logic.” So now when Google has specific requirements, they may now enforce it better. The example John gave was “for explicit reviewed item and correct property name values are now enforced.”

John Mueller recommends you test your markup in the Structured Data Testing Tool and/or the Search Console Structured Data Dashboard to ensure your site is not impacted by these changes.

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