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As promised, we’re starting our series of articles about advertisers can adapt their accounts to the new PPC platform landscape. We’re looking at structure, campaign types, bidding types, ad types and ad extensions. Many of these are available on Google Ads and Bing, although Bing has currently far less to offer in the way of auto-bidding strategies.
In the last post, we discussed the background to why you should be reassessing how you’re managing your PPC accounts. Here we will discuss where to begin with this.
First Questions
The first matter to address is what new features and tools make sense to the business you are advertising. These are the sorts of questions to answer to help you decide:
- Does the account handle just a few conversions or hundreds and thousands per week?
- How complex is the website, just a few pages or is more e-commerce based with many product pages?
- Are your sales impulse-based and have short lead-in times or can it take a long time from first research to a customer choosing to buy?
- How comprehensive are your customer-facing support teams? Is there the infrastructure to handle text messages as well as calls?
- Are you able to remarket to users (i.e. you’re not advertising in a restricted industry)?
And now?
For all of the above, you must refer, and be subservient, to your advertising goal or goals. Otherwise, you’re basically improvising. The answers to these questions may not result in you deciding not to use any single tool or feature but they can help you prioritise your efforts in order of impact magnitude.
If you are dealing with a site that is low in volume, many of the bidding features, in particular are going to be unreliable at best. This is because algorithms thrive on data and so the less data, the less accuracy.
With the enhancement of Dynamic Search Ads (they have more text you can include and the targeting options are better), the dilution of reliance on keyword-based traffic is continuing but these types of ads are most suited to complex sites. If you have only a handful of pages, they probably won’t add much value to your account.
If your site is making its money mainly through quick hit visits then this will mean you don’t need to think about remarketing options but audience targeting can still be very valuable. In-Market audiences, Youtube category audiences and Gmail can all be useful.
In terms of customer-service related options, if you can handle round the clock messaging with customers, try the message extension on Google Ads. This works alongside Call Extensions to help users communicate with the business. Call Only Ads are also potentially a way for a business that is not focussed on its website (either for it’s offering, such as a taxi firm, or for its customer acquisition) to attract customers using Google. Location and device-based customisers can also be used to be attractive to audiences.
If you’re in an unrestricted industry - nothing that is legally sensitive or health-related - you can remarket people who have already been to your site. This can bring back users who are either very hot leads or have faded and forgotten your brand. In addition, you can remarket to those who purchased before with return offers on Display, Gmail, Shopping, and Search.
To do this in search or display, you can use ad customisers that show specific text or offers to a user depending on the audience to which they belong. There is also dynamic remarketing, which will show the products a user a last viewed to them in a display ad.
This, as ever, is a brief summary and cannot be exhaustive, but hopefully it will set off on the right foot. We will, over the course of this series, dig deeper in some of the tactics above - and elements of them not mentioned here - to give you a more thorough understanding of what opportunities are now open to you through the new PPC features.
For more information about Digital Advertising and ESV Digital’s Paid Search strategy, get in touch.
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