Staying on top of AdWords updates gives you an advantage in PPC management, a competitive arena for businesses. Even a slight edge can save you money and allow you to get the most out of your budget. This year Google announced a complete makeover to the AdWords platform. Many features are reskinned and repackaged to be more easily readable, and some features are new entirely.
Being deliberate about how you approach pay-per-click (PPC) marketing will help you reach more of the people you want to reach, while keeping a handle on your marketing budget. Businesses using the new Google AdWords interface have some exciting features at their fingertips now, with more enhancements expected in the coming months.
Explore the following new features to boost your business’s PPC management.
PPC Management Tips
1. Auction Insights
This isn’t a new feature, but it’s been revamped in a very helpful way.
Auction Insights help you compare the performance of your PPC campaign with the advertisers you’re bidding against.
Using this feature properly can help you make decisions about your budget and bids that allow you to succeed, even for very competitive keywords.
Auction Insights provides data on:
- impression share
- outranking share
- overlap rate
- top of page rate
- average position
- position above rate
You can compare any of those metrics against each other in a graph that shows you how you’re performing compared to your competitors.
For example, you could get information on how often your ads are showing at the top of the page versus others bidding on the same keywords. Or, you could get some insights on how many impressions you’re getting compared to your competitors. If they’re getting in front of customers’ eyes a lot more often than you are, you can build an action plan to improve your campaign in a meaningful way.
2. Centralized “Audiences” Page
Audience targeting is central to the setup of AdWords Display Network campaigns. The AdWords Display Network expands beyond “keyword targeting” (on the Search Network) to allow advertisers to reach their target audience through Google’s website partners, such as YouTube, Blogger, and Google Finance.
With its new “Audiences” page, the Google AdWords platform gives users a single spot for managing PPC audience targeting (formerly called “target and bid”) and observations (previously referred to as “bid only”).
Defining an audience with some specificity really allows you to target exactly who you want to with your Display Network campaigns. It’s a much more precise approach than simply choosing some interests or placement options and letting the campaign run wild (a potentially expensive prospect).
Audience targeting allows you to build up a select group of people to target, defined by parameters that you set. Maybe you want to target customers who added an item to their cart on your site but didn’t check out, or you want to target potential customers who visited your site but didn’t buy. If you have a product that people buy regularly, it’s possible to target an audience of people who bought your product approximately 30 days ago.
With the new “Audiences” page, managing all of your Display Network campaign has gotten much easier and more effective.
3. Call Bid Adjustments
Bid adjustments allow you to bid more or less money on search terms when certain conditions are met. This feature now also applies to call extensions: the AdWords click-to-call functionality that shows with text ads.
This new feature, announced in July 2017, allows you control how often the call option appears with your search ads, in order to help you generate more calls. Use call bid adjustments to increase bids on campaigns that drive valuable phone calls.
For example, if you’re a travel agency, you may see higher order values from calls because it can be easier to cross-sell rental cars, group tours, and other vacation add-ons during a live conversation. Raise your call bid adjustments to show call extensions more frequently and drive more of these high-value call conversions.
4. Household Income Targeting
Targeting by household income can help you reach a demographic that may be able to better afford your company’s products or services.
Users on the new interface can now use HHI targeting to see the effectiveness of ad campaigns by household income. This feature is currently available for U.S. locations only.
Currently, the HHI targeting is available by tier within a selected geo-location. See example below:
- Top 10% within Atlanta
- 11 – 20% within Atlanta
- 21 – 30% within Atlanta
- 31 – 40% within Atlanta
- 41 – 50% within Atlanta
- Lower 50% within Atlanta
HHI targeting not only gives unbelievable insight into who is interacting with your ads, but you can add bid modifiers to be more or less competitive for a select income tier. For example, if you are promoting a product or service with a high price tag, you may find it beneficial to add a positive bid modifier on the top 10% income tier within the market you are promoting it in. Alternatively, you may consider excluding the lower 50% using a – 100% bid modifier.
If you’re just getting started with HHI targeting, we recommend adding all tiers of HHI targeting in addition to your actual target. Once added, gather data for a 30-60 day period, prior to making any bid adjustment modifications. Often, assumptions in these settings, such as setting the top 10% for a luxury item, leads to missed opportunity to reach a prospective customer.
5. Promotion Extension
Sales and promotions are not a new concept; marketers have been using these to draw in customers for decades.
The Promotion Extension feature allows you to promote specific offers in your text ads, with a tag icon that makes your offer stand out more prominently. Promotion extensions can help your customers better spot your special offers and deals.
AdWords supports that promotion extensions drive very high click-through rates. The new promotion extension makes it easier than ever to do so in AdWords. The promotion extension is an add-on to your ad, so it saves valuable ad space. You don’t have to use up precious characters trying to highlight a sale anymore. You can swap out promotions to be up-to-date more efficiently than through direct edits to your ad copy.
Marketers can advertise one of several types of promotions, including:
- Monetary discounts: a static dollar amount to deduct from the price of the product, such as “Get $X off…”
- Percent discounts: offer a set percentage discount on your price.
- Up to monetary discounts: set a maximum dollar amount to be discounted, such as “Up to $X off…”
- Up to percent discounts: set the maximum percent discount customers can receive. “Up to X% off…”
6. Bonus: N-Gram Views
N-grams are natural language processing tasks. With the addition of some code to your landing page, in addition with the new AdWords interface, marketers can to see the specific words that triggered ads.
The deeper color the word or phrase, the more impressions it received. N-gram Views help you identify which queries work best for you, helping you further target your advertising efforts. You can easily see the number of impressions, clicks, and conversions for different N-grams in your ads.
Using this data can help you to refine your campaign. Being able to easily see which search terms trigger your ads can help you identify new search keywords, where to add negative keywords, and can also guide ad copy editing. These factors improve quality scores so you can maximize your bidding and budget.
More PPC Management Features Are Coming
In addition to the above features that are already live on new AdWords, businesses can look forward to some other exciting features to help with PPC management. Those include:
- In-Market Audience Targeting – Tailor your target audience even further based on your website, business goals, and more.
- Landing Page Performance – View the effectiveness of multiple landing pages in one dashboard, helping you optimize those pages for better results.
- Store Sales Measurement – If your business captures and uses customer loyalty email addresses, you will be able to import transactions into AdWords, giving you more actionable insights about your customers.
- Attribution Modeling – See how the “clicks” your customers make when interacting with your business after a search can help you better optimize your bidding.
Maximize Your PPC Management to Maximize Your Business
Leveraging these new features can help your business reach its goals. Working with a proven Atlanta PPC company can help you make the most of your advertising budget. To learn more, contact us online or call us at 404.751.1043 today.
