Using Phone Call Tracking

Whether your business is using conversion tracking as part of Google Ads (AdWords), or goal tracking in Google Analytics, this type of data is essential to understand where sales or enquiries are coming from, down to the keyword and advert level. However, for any business where most leads may come via a phone call, this is harder to track as the link between the source of the website visitor and the phone call being made is broken. This is where phone call tracking techniques can add more insight and value to an advertiser.

Phone call tracking has been around for many years in different forms, and as the need to track and optimise conversions grows, this technique is becoming another important tool for the advertiser. There are a number of good phone call tracking companies operating in the UK market and they can provide a reasonably low cost way of tracking the source of conversions, whether they come from Google Ads (AdWords) or any search engine visit, or from any other third party website. Google Ads (AdWords) also provides a call tracking system in the US and UK.

Call tracking usually works through the addition of some javascript on a website or web page, which identifies the source of a visitor and displays a unique phone number on the website. If the visitor calls the business, that number will track the lead by source, potentially down to individual search term level. Whether the website has their standard phone number displayed in the text or as an image, an alternate number can be displayed depending on where the site visitor come from, although images will need to be changed or adapted to cater for this.

The advertiser will buy a range of phone numbers – usually 1300 or 1800 – to be used for the various advertising sources and displayed on the website. The call tracking company will generate these numbers and track the calls made, including the option of recording the phone conversations, and provide analytics to show which sources have generated the calls. This data can sometimes be imported into a Google Analytics account as well, as a goal source.

One potential issue for advertisers is if they use a memorable number, such as 1300 FLOWER, as call tracking won’t be able to replicate this number and make it so memorable to the user – which can be an issue if the number might be used in a radio advert or on a billboard. The other main question is how many numbers might be needed, as these can be generated as ‘absolute’ (one number for each source) or session based (where a pool of numbers are used and displayed in time segments to identify source). The former method can be very expensive, particularly if there are lot of search terms being used in an AdWords campaign, but is more accurate. However, the latter method should be sufficient for most advertisers.

Although the cost of call tracking isn’t that high, it is an additional cost to include as part of the marketing activity. However, the insights that call tracking can provide is extremely valuable and enables advertisers to see the real cost per lead being generated by source, which will provide a more accurate figure for a Return on Investment calculation. Otherwise, call enquiries will remain a general ‘pool’ of new business leads which can’t be attributed to a source or the advertising spend.

If you’d like to know more about phone call tracking for your marketing campaigns, please get in touch for a discussion.

During May, Google announced the launch of a new tool called “Display Benchmarks” that provides useful comparisons or reference points aggregated from ad campaigns across the industry. If you are using display ads as part of a marketing campaign, this new tool facilitates an understanding of how your display campaigns compare to the rest of your industry, which helps to better plan and measure the success of those campaigns.

The comparisons can show average expansion rates for automotive creatives, expected Rich Media interaction rates for retail creatives from France, or just the average clickthrough rate for Entertainment ads from the US. So if you’re looking for comparisons by country, industry vertical, or how different ad formats and sizes perform compared to each other, the tool offers up-to-date benchmarks across 10 key display metrics, such as interaction rate and time, expansion rate and video completions.

For example, through its own use of the tool, Google has shown that people are increasingly choosing to interact with video ads. They state that video completion rates are the highest ever seen, increasing by approximately 24% since Summer 2012, to a 60% completion rate. This improved interaction rate correlates to larger ad sizes: the bigger the ad, the more frequently people will interact with it. It also found that rich-media-expanding formats are better for getting people to interact frequently, while in-page formats are better for encouraging longer interactions.

So, if this tool is used to its full potential, it can certainly shed some valuable light on the best way to improve display campaigns by reaping the benefits of the industry-wide information it provides. You can learn more about it here.

Contact us now if you’d like more information about how we can help you improve your display advertising with this tool.

Following Google’s recent introduction of the new Enhanced Campaign settings for AdWords search campaigns (which we featured last month), the company has just announced the availability of these settings for the Display Network as well. The Display Network covers those 3rd party websites that carry Google Ads (AdWords) ads, either in text, image or video format, and allows advertisers to extend the reach of their advertising beyond the main search area. So, what are the implications of this further development?

Some commentators were surprised that the initial launch of the Enhanced Campaign settings didn’t apply to the Display Network as well as Search, although there are significant differences between the two. The reason behind the enhanced campaigns for the Display network is to simplify the process of reaching the right person with the right advert, in the right location, at the right time, on the right device. This will now be possible from within a single campaign, whereas previously it was recommended to separate campaign by the type of device they were targeting (i.e. mobiles/tablets/desktops).

The fact that Google has different Enhanced Campaign settings for Display and Search means that this, at first glance, is good news for Display advertisers. Google kept some features for Display advertisers that they took away from Search advertisers: namely, device targeting. In fact, Enhanced Campaigns for display ads have even more device targeting options than ‘legacy’ campaigns and allow for display ads to target specific mobile devices.

This prospect may not be as rosy as it first seems however, as it’s harder to converge devices around Display, because of the differences in capabilities. Rich media and flash ads are pretty prevalent (and successful) on Display, but will struggle to get any traction on mobile platforms. So for the time-being at least, advertisers aren’t being forced to combine the devices on Display campaigns. It’s safe to bet though that this will happen once Google works out the technical implications around image ad formats.

So the long-term advantages are that when you upgrade a Display campaign you get bid adjustments, just like the multipliers on search. Instead of adjusting per device you get to adjust per target. At ad group (or campaign) level you can now specify the multiplier for a target. These multipliers will work together so that users who match multiple targets get even higher bids.

The disadvantage is that a user matching multiple targets isn’t necessarily more likely to convert than a user who matches one, if that one target is well defined. So if a person matches many targets your bid might reach unprofitable levels. This approach is also likely to encourage broader targeting at the basic level, so it’ll be important to use low bids on broad targets in conjunction with high multipliers to appropriately target the high value users.

So the initial benefits in the settings for the Enhanced Display Campaigns are not as straightforward as they may first appear, but on the whole, the industry opinion is that the extra control that they provide is going to be positive.

For more information about Google’s Enhanced AdWords campaigns for the Display Network, please contact us for details.

During February, Google announced major changes to AdWords which will have a significant impact on the way the search advertising campaigns can be managed. The new changes – called Enhanced Campaigns – allow marketers to manage their search advertising across different devices with some increased flexibility for bid levels and other features. There are some clear advantages and disadvantages with these changes and we review these in this issue, along with our recommended course of action for anyone managing AdWords campaigns.

The new Enhanced Campaigns are available now, but there will be a transition period up until June this year, when all existing ‘Legacy’ campaigns will be converted to ‘Enhanced’. It’s therefore important for any AdWords campaigns to be converted over the next few months in a managed way to ensure the best process with limited impact on current advertising performance.

The following is a brief summary of the changes being introduced with Enhanced Campaigns:

• the use of separate mobile targeted campaigns will end, with mobile-specific bid adjustments now available at campaign level
• the ability to target specific mobile devices and carriers will be removed
• the ability to specifically target tablets will be removed and these devices will now be bundled with desktop campaigns
• advertisers will now be able to control ad extensions at the adgroup level
• ad scheduling will now be possible for sitelinks and mobile bids
• there will also be more targeting and bid options by geographic area.

These are therefore quite substantial changes that provide some better management tools, but also go against the advice that Google has been providing for the past few years. The Enhanced Campaigns are designed to simplify the management of AdWords across different devices, but for many existing campaigns that have been structured for device targeting, this will require some significant transitions to the new format.

Advantages & Disadvantages of Enhanced Campaigns

Advantages

As we’re now living in an ‘always online’, multi-device world, Google has recognised that this warrants a different approach by marketers to reach potential customers. So these new campaign enhancements will provide the ability to deliver different creative depending on whether people are mobile with their smartphone or at home with their tablet, without the inefficiency of having to manage multiple parallel campaigns to deal with these different situations.

Many of the new Enhanced features are powerful additions to AdWords campaign functionality, such as bid level adjustments, sitelinks management and new reporting features that will help advertisers develop effective paid search campaigns in a changing online marketplace. One strong feature will be the “upgraded extensions” that will make it possible to create these either at the campaign or at the adgroup level, with more control over when they appear – by device and by time of day – and more reporting insights to help improve the performance of these advert extensions.

Another advantage of the new campaigns will be the ability to bid differently on a variety of geographies within the same campaign. For example, a coffee shop might want to bid higher for potential mobile customers within a mile of their location, a little lower for those within five miles, and even lower for those further away. In the longer term, there will also be the ability to provide offers based on user location and also call tracking functionality within AdWords.

Disadvantages

However, there are some disadvantages with these new changes. There is a widely held view that these upgrades will reduce the level of control that advertisers have over their campaigns. The changes will favour those advertisers running smaller and more basic marketing campaigns and reduce the level of control that many experienced AdWords managers are currently benefiting from.

Another complaint about the new changes is that it will no longer be possible to separate the bidding for tablets and desktop computers. This will stop some of the bargains that marketers were getting on tablet traffic. The types of click through rates can be similar on desktops and tablets but the conversion rates can vary significantly, so not being able to separate them could be detrimental, with a combined conversion rate.

The other main concern is the way that mobile bidding will change, and whether the bid adjustments will lead to higher mobile costs. At the moment, mobile clicks can run at 50% of desktop clicks for the same term, which has impacted Google’s profits as mobile search grows. Cynics will say that the new bid structure will help to push these levels up now and Google will see the benefits – this will be closely monitored over the coming months to see what impact there will be on mobile costs.

Recommended Implementation

There are arguments for and against upgrading campaigns to the enhanced format now. One of the reasons to postpone the changes for a time is if you have a large number of campaigns targeting different devices, then it would be necessary to prepare an upgrade plan and gradually merge these campaigns together. On the other hand, if the number of campaigns is fairly small and they are not too complex, then there is no reason to postpone the upgrade and to start taking advantage of the new changes.

The best solution would be to either create a new enhanced campaign and test the new features on a small scale, or to convert an existing campaign that currently targets all devices and to become familiar with the management and reporting tools before rolling out the changes to more of your managed campaigns. You can then start to develop new best practices for structuring accounts and campaigns, as well as testing different creatives.

This is the process we will be taking with our managed accounts, so that we test and learn the best practice with the new Enhanced Campaigns, before rolling out changes across all accounts prior to June. For large accounts, the AdWords Editor tool can now be used to manage the transition (make sure you have the latest version of this tool), and we will be keeping a close watch on the KPIs for campaigns before and after the transition to see where the main improvements or reductions in performance might occur. We will also be monitoring the extensive market commentary on these changes to see what experiences others are having with these changes as well.

If you currently manage your own AdWords campaigns and would like to receive Google’s detailed documentation for converting existing campaigns, please get in touch and we can email this to you. If we are managing your account, we will contact you once the transition process begins and keep you informed of the impact of these changes.

If you require any further information on the Enhanced Campaigns and how the Web Marketing Workshop can help your online marketing activity, please contact us now.

A common question that often arises amongst AdWords advertisers is “what is the difference between Display and Destination URLs in the adverts?” This is a valid question and it’s important to understand how these work and how they should be used to maximise the performance of a paid search campaign.

The difference between the two types of URL shown in the Google Ads (AdWords) ads are as follows:

• the Display URL is the URL (coloured green) that appears below your ad text when your ad is shown in the search results. This URL is purely a visual identifier on the advert and doesn’t function as the link for the website.
• the Destination URL on the other hand, is the specific location within your site where you’d like to take a user that has clicked on your ad (the landing page). This may be a long URL and the Destination URL isn’t visible in the ad, so you can use it to direct people to a specific page within your site without cluttering your ad.

Google has guidelines and restrictions on how the Display and Destination URLs are used. The most important consideration is that the Display URL must show the same domain name as the website that the advert links to. The www. part of the domain doesn’t need to be included here, although Google will show this in the advert if space allows.

It’s important to use the Display URL as part of the marketing content of the advert, to indicate to searchers what they will find on the website and, where possible, to re-emphasise key terms in the advert text, which will appear bold and can help to increase clickthroughs from an advert (such as yourdomain.com.au/Search_Term).

Remember, the text used in the Display URL is not the actual URL link to the website and has no influence on the Destination URL used in the advert. This destination is set up as a link from the ad but hidden from the searcher until they click on the ad and see the website and the landing page URL in their browser. Therefore, in the above example, the Destination URL would be something like: http://www.yourdomain.com.au/category/product/item15.html.

For more information about the use of Display and Destination URLs, including best practice and Google policies, read this. Alternatively, please contact us now for more information.

If you’re currently using Google Ads (AdWords) as part of your online marketing strategy, make sure your account is set up as effectively as possible for 2013 with our health check report. It’s becoming more important than ever to get the most from your search advertising spend, and so this report will highlight any key issues with your campaigns.

Our 10-point review will identify any potential areas for improving your AdWords campaigns, either through better targeting or reducing wasted spend. We’ll look at your account structure, the use of search terms (including negatives), how your adverts could be improved, and which ad extensions could help your clickthrough rates – all with the aim of improving your quality scores and get more visits and conversions for your spend.

SPECIAL OFFER: Our 2013 AdWords Health Check report is also available for half the usual price in January, reduced from £250 to £125 (exc VAT), so to request one for your account, please submit this form or contact us directly by email. (Existing clients receive this review as a regular part of their AdWords management service.)

The option to use different keyword match types within AdWords is something that all businesses, or managers that run a campaign, should be familiar with. This is because the correct use of these can result in the campaign being more targeted and the budget being spent more precisely. Understanding these differences and choosing the right keyword matching options can dramatically help to improve your return on investment (ROI).

There are settings available within the AdWords interface for each keyword that help to control how closely the keyword needs to match a person’s search term in order to trigger your ad. It’s possible to choose one or more matching options for a keyword, depending upon how precisely targeted a campaign needs to be. The broader the keyword matching option is, the more traffic potential that keyword has, whereas conversely, the more exact it is, the more specific that keyword will be to someone’s search.

So those with the smallest budgets need to be the most tightly controlled from the outset, with exact match keywords. Conversely, those with larger budgets can begin by casting a wider net through the use of more broad keywords and then further refine these in response to how much relevant traffic those generate. However, broad match does need to be used carefully to ensure accurate and relevant targeting of searchers.

There are four keyword matching options available:

• the negative match type ensures that your ad doesn’t show for any search that includes that term. This helps to prevent wasted expenditure on irrelevant keywords;
• the positives that do allow the ad to be shown, range from broad to exact in the following order of least closely matched to most closely: broad (and broad match modifier); phrase and exact.

If you don’t specify a particular matching option, keywords are automatically considered to be broad match. (You can find more details about these keyword matching options here, or here. You can see more information about the difference between regular broad and modified broad matches here).

In addition to these specific keyword match types, when using the phrase and exact versions, Google provides the option to choose if those should include plurals, misspellings and other close variants. This setting is selected by default, so if the campaign is to be focused upon showing the ad when only very closely matched keywords are used, it’s necessary to change this to exclude those variants.

Through on-going keyword match type refinement, a well-managed AdWords campaign should evolve into a precisely targeted one, leading to a more focused audience that in turn results in better quality leads and enquiries and an improved ROI.

If you’d like more information on how the Web Marketing Workshop can help to improve your ROI through keyword match types, contact us now for further information.

You will often see the Google Ads (AdWords) Certified Partners logo on agency websites – including on this site. GACP’s can be online marketing professionals, agencies and sometimes individuals who manage AdWords accounts. But how is the Partners logo achieved and what does it mean?

Certified Partners must meet certain requirements specified by Google – for individuals the entry acceptance is mainly based on passing 2 of Google’s AdWords related exams to demonstrate knowledge of the system. For companies, they must demonstrate management of AdWords campaigns and also the qualification of having passed the exams.

Only qualified companies can display a Partners logo on their website and this should be actively linked to their Partners page on Google directory of recognised Certified Partners. There are often cases of unscrupulous companies or individuals displaying the logo on their website, despite not being qualified and therefore there is no link to the page confirming their status. Therefore, if working with a GACP is important, you should ensure that they are verified members and that you can view their page, such as this one.

Google Certified Partners have invested time and training into using AdWords effectively. Using their expertise should benefit your campaigns and help generate new leads and business from Google’s paid advertising programs. Like many advertisers, you may not have a significant amount of time to invest in learning AdWords and managing your own advertising account, so hiring a professional can help save you time while maximising the return on your investment.

As noted above, Web Marketing Workshop are fully qualified Google Ads (AdWords) Certified Partners, and have been since 2006. We are also proud to have been selected by Google as one of only 5 agencies in Australia to participate in a Pilot Programme since October last year, which has given us additional support, insights and training to help develop our clients’ marketing activity.

For more information about our status as a GCAP and the benefits it brings to our clients, please contact us now.

Google has recently introduced a new analysis tool in Adwords that helps advertisers understand market activity and plan better bid strategies. Called the “Auction Insights Tool”, it can be accessed at keyword level and shows competitor information and potential missed opportunities for search rankings. By revealing more information from the underlying AdWords system, Google is now giving advertising a real insight into the complex ad auction system.

This new Auction Insights tool can be found under a new ‘Keyword Details’ button in the Adwords interface when looking at Keywords reports. However, not all keywords are eligible and require a minimum volume of impressions, so you can only access this report if search terms are attracting at least 200 impressions or more for the selected time period. In addition, the report can only be viewed at an individual keyword level, so each term may need to be analysed separately.

So what sort of data does the Insights tool provide? Previously, Google just provides impression share data at campaign and adgroup level, which tell the advertiser how many times the ads were displayed out of the total possible times that the ads could have been shown for relevant searches. Now, however, the new Insights report gives valuable information on competitor activity and missed opportunities at the keyword level so that deeper analysis can be made an advertiser’s performance, including:

• Impression share – percentage of impressions that each advertiser achieved for the search term, out of the total possible
• Average position – achieved by each advertiser for the term over the time period
• Overlap rate – how often another advertiser’s ads appeared when your own ad was shown
• Position above rate – how often another advertisers ads appeared above yours when both appeared for the search
• Top of page percent – how often each advertisers ad appeared in the top positions above the main search results.

Therefore you can now assess which keywords some of your major competitors are putting a heavy focus on. When you see that a competitor has a “high impression share” or “top of Page Rate”, it raises questions about their possible strategy for those terms and whether it should be countered. It might indicate a good converting term or perhaps a higher bid rate or better Quality Score than your campaign is achieving. The tool won’t tell you how much your competitors are spending but it does tell you how often they appear on Google for specific keywords.

If you find a particular competitor is gaining close to 100% impression share for a lot of keywords and also appearing at the top of the page most of the time, then this might suggest they have a large budget allocated to AdWords or a bigger budget than any of their other competitors. This could also present an opportunity to increase your own spend to compete for that space, although of course there will be other factors involved in determining the eventual ROI and you still need to manage your advertising to meet your own targets.

For more information about the new Auction Insights tool, please contact us now.

During May, Microsoft announced that their Microsoft Advertising brand is to renamed as Bing to bring it in line with the main search engine brand. However, there remains inconsistency and confusion as the search advertising service merges with Yahoo.

Small and Medium Businesses (SMBs) have become the core market for search engines and social media advertising. Small businesses are a particularly important audience for Microsoft, given the strength of Google Adwords among smaller advertisers, and so Microsoft has rebranded its Microsoft Advertising brand as ‘Bing’, although the PPC service remains known as Microsoft adCenter, at least for the time being.

Microsoft are hoping this rebranding will boost sales by giving advertisers a clue that they are buying traffic on Microsoft’s search engine, and Microsoft also believe that making things easier to understand will lower some of the existing barriers. When customers now access Microsoft adCenter they will see a page that looks like Microsoft’s Bing search engine, thus making the experience for customers more intuitive path through the Microsoft search experience.

Microsoft has also recently completed the transition of the Yahoo Search Marketing service into the Microsoft adCenter system in the UK, but Australia remains one of the last countries still using the Yahoo PPC tool to buy paid ads on Yahoo and Bing / NineMSN.

The latest figures from Hitwise show that around 6% of search activity goes through Bing or Yahoo sites in Australia, compared to over 85% of searches through Google. This is in contrast to the US market, where Bing / Yahoo have a bigger share of search, with 20% of all activity compared to Google’s 67% share.

For more information about search marketing on Bing, please contact us.