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“Show products from this advertiser” – the new AdWords PlusBox

AVAILABLE NOW – APPLICATIONS ARE STRICTLY LIMITED

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Google is changing the game for Ecommerce Product sales online.

Right now, there’s an Internet Land Grab going on.

Selected advertisers and product suppliers are being invited to display product images as well as text descriptions and pricing information using the new AdWords plusbox feature on Google.

It’s new territory, available for the first time, exclusively to suppliers of physical products. Yahoo, and MSN/Bing, are being left even further behind…

And Ecommerce website owners are perfectly positioned to take advantage at an early stage – provided you get started as quickly as possible, before your competition does.

You will have already seen increasing numbers of Shopping Results images on the Search Results pages.

This trend is only going to increase, and online product images will soon become the difference between the winners and losers among Ecommerce website owners in Search.

Before long, having images as well as text on Google Search results will become the expectation, rather than the exception.

Our Display advertisers are already seeing huge increases in both ad clickthrough rates, and conversions to product sales, as a direct result of image ads with Google AdWords.

More Sales, at Lower Costs = Increased Profits.

What about you?

Are you frustrated that so few people are coming to your website from your precious online advertising spend?

Are you concerned you should be getting better results, and that you’re being overtaken by competitor retailers?

If you have hired an AdWords Agency, are they able to provide Display Advertising as part of your Standard Services?

This new feature is called the AdWords Product Extensions (using the Plus Box) – the integration of a FREE Google Merchant Centre account (formerly Google Base, or Froogle) and your existing AdWords account.

But the program is still in Beta test in the UK, and only available to a small number of specialist Agency Partners. Not many of these also have the technical knowledge to deploy this end to end for their customers.

Where we’ve deployed it, the results have been exceptional.

With one click of the mouse on the PlusBox in the lower left-hand corner of the AdWords ad, and without even incurring a click charge, the AdWords Plus Box transforms your normal AdWords text Ads on the Search Results pages into Display ads from your E-Commerce Site.

Changing this:

Into this (and remember, with no click charge):

Revealing many additional image ads, complete with product description text and pricing information, all drawn automatically as a data feed from your free Merchant Centre account.

Pricing, description text, and more, are all instantly visible to entice your browsing visitor into your online shop.

Your screen “real estate” visibly doubles, triples, even quadruples – forcing your competitors without the PlusBox lower down the page and out of the game.

And as you update your product feed information, your AdWords ads change within minutes, reflecting changes to pricing, discounts, exchange rates, VAT, stock levels, and availability, among others.

And it doesn’t stop there …

We also have access to additional, advanced AdWords Display Ad Extensions like

Ad Site Links

Selected advertisers showing their AdWords ads in premium placement at the top of the page qualify to display up to 4 out of an additional 10 related links to pages within the site – ideal for specific promotions, departments, seasonal offers and the like.

EXCLUSIVE – FeedManager

You may never have considered a Product Feed account, but not only does this make application for the AdWords PlusBox feature possible, it also allows you to advertise on a dozen or so of the Shopping Comparison Channels (like Kelkoo, Ciao, Shopping.com, etc and even Amazon), where we have found sometimes startling differences in click prices, conversion rates, and profitability.

There’s a lot more to setting up a Merchant Centre account so that it works, and works correctly, than simply adding product information.

It has to be correctly formatted, checked, and optimised before Google will even accept it and make it live.

FeedManager makes all this possible because we’ve already done all the work, so you don’t have to.

Even if you were to take just FeedManager alone, without the additional AdWords PlusBox functionality, you can scale your existing online advertising in a way you would never have dreamed possible.

No Risk to You for trying us out

Take our Forensic AdWords Campaign Audit for free!

In all the years we’ve been doing this, in every campaign we’ve seen we’ve been able to identify opportunities for improvement – sometimes quick and dramatic, no matter how experienced the AdWords account owner is.

And that goes for Agencies too. Sometimes we’ve found an agency-managed account that is making all the basic mistakes of an amateur.

We hope you’re not among them, but it’s much better to know and have peace of mind than continue in ignorance to pay the price to Google in wasted clicks.

If you can’t login to your own account – you’re immediately at risk to an unscrupulous agency. And if you check your Change History, this will reveal how often your account is being updated by them.

After the audit, we will discuss with you the best options to proceed. This consultation alone is valuable to help you understand what you could be doing to improve your online AdWords marketing, and how to incorporate the Plus Box feature.

So if you’d like to see your E-Commerce website displaying image ads like these on Google, contact us today.

Don’t forget that your competitors will be applying for this exciting new service, and that if we choose to partner with them, you will be excluded from applying.

Contact us Today for more information

Google AdWords Ad Site Links: Getting More Screen Real-Estate and Visitors by Having up to 10 Additional Links That May be Shown With Your Ad

Contents

A New AdWords Feature

Which Ads Qualify

How to Implement

Charges

A New AdWords Feature – increasing Choice and Relevancy in Search Ads

Introduced in November 2009, Ad Sitelinks is a new AdWords feature to extend the value of your existing AdWords ads by providing additional links to content deep within your site.

Rather than sending all users to the same landing page, Ad Sitelinks will display up to 4 additional Destination URLs on your search-based text ad.

With more options, you can create richer, more relevant ads that improve the value of your search terms and other targeted keywords.

With Ad Sitelinks, you can point to specific information on your site such as targeted offers, special deals, seasonal promotions, and store locations.

Currently, the option to set up Ad Sitelinks will only appear for selected advertisers, and whose ads meet a certain high quality threshold.

If your account qualifies to run this feature, you’ll find the option to set up Ad Sitelinks in your Campaign Settings tab — it will appear as "Show additional links to my site" under the "Ad extensions" section.

Which Ads Qualify to Run Ad Sitelinks?

Ad Sitelinks are designed to trigger in situations where an ad provides the "best answer" for a search query, and Ad Sitelinks are most likely to trigger on unique brand terms.

In addition, Ad Sitelinks are more likely to appear on top-ranked ads with high quality scores and CTR; however, they may not always be displayed for every top-ranked ad.

How to Implement Them

Ad Sitelinks extends the value of your AdWords ads by showcasing additional targeted and relevant links for users whose search queries have triggered your ad.

In addition, Ad Sitelinks makes it easy to update and refresh seasonal and limited promotions – you can change the additional links on your ads as often as you like to make each ad more timely for your current sales and marketing efforts.

There’s no need to change your current ads. Sitelinks adds additional links beneath your existing ads, making them even more relevant to a wider range of users.

How You are Charged for SiteLinks

All clicks are charged at the same rate, regardless of which links are clicked within an ad.

This means that you’ll be charged for one click each time a user clicks any link in your ad, whether it’s the main landing page displayed in your Destination URL or any of the additional links served as part of the Ad Sitelinks feature.

If more than one link is clicked while viewing an ad, this will be treated this as a duplicate (or invalid) click and you won’t be charged. 

If you’re too busy running your Business, I can help.

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Our Chief Economist, Hal Varian, explains the AdWords Ad Auction and how your max CPC bid and quality score determine how much you pay for a click on Google.com.

So you put your AdWords bids up to raise your Ad position, and your AdRank (position) actually falls – what’s going on?

Google’s Chief Economist, Dr. Hal Varian, demonstrates eloquently how AdRank and Click prices (CPC) are computed, and why Quality Score and Click Through Rate are so important whenever your keyword triggers your Ad to enter the Ad Auction.

The video is insightful and revealing, watch it in full at the bottom of this article.

And I now (as of today) also believe the point Dr. Varian makes about increasing bid prices and actually appearing in other auctions with lower positions as a result, although I didn’t when I first saw the video.

This afternoon I’ve just been doing some advertiser research, which involves typing a keyword, seeing what ads appear, and going through all the pages of search results carrying ads for this keyword (tents) – there were about 140 advertisers (UK).

I noticed several things, some of which I’d seen before, but which now “seem” to gel and make a bit more sense against this backdrop.

Firstly, to confirm I had actually reached the end of the advertiser results, I noticed the See your ad here » link which shows when all ads have finished, before starting over with the top AdRank ad again (rather than More Sponsored Links >> which indicates additional ads to come on subsequent pages).

When I was going through each page, sometimes I would see the same advertiser ad that I had seen on an earlier page, but now in a lower position – a different auction, presumably triggered both by me (since I refreshed the search by going to the next page), and by other users who are all searching just like me.

Some advertiser ads also had disappeared from the auction when I had visited their website, and then gone back a page to the results page carrying their ad which I had previously seen and clicked through on.

(Perry Marshall’s observation of the “search and search again” phenomenon where ads quickly disappear and change position if you repeatedly refresh your browser may also be implicated in this auction discussion).

What I think we need to consider are several points:

1. Quality Score which governs the AdRank position is computed REALTIME for every search (i.e every auction) and is therefore potentially variable, because of broad keyword expansion, CTR, different ad text being split tested, restricted campaign delivery, ad optimisation and rotation, exhausted budgets, time of day, scheduling, advertiser competition etc.

2. Since we’re talking realtime, you’ll only ever acquire data that pertains to a tiny snapshot of the whole auction activity over an instant of time – the next search that happens, or if you refresh your browser or go to the next page of results, and the auction has already changed.

3. So the best data you can ever acquire is going to be a series of averages over a specific time period, and the longer the better to avoid glitches. So it’s overall trends you need to follow, rather than snapshots which could go up and down quite a bit.

Maybe the only way to ensure maximum consistency and Impression Share (for an individual advertiser) would be to be in the happy position (with full comprehension of profitability of course) of being able to set a huge daily budget guaranteed to buy every click on the market (and then some), a high bid price to ensure consistently top position in the auction, accelerated delivery, for exact match only with a single ad.

I wonder if anyone’s ever been able to do that? (I bet they have). I’d love to see those reports!

Seems to me that sometimes we actually can expect “too much” transparency from Google, and that they have a highly automated machine which even *they* cannot fully explain all the results from, or offer reporting or tools which can help us dig deeper.

They are still developing and refining it after all. I cite the Ads Diagnostic tool which is a great (fairly) recent functionality, but why should it be a painful, time-consuming and bug-ridden process which you can’t run as a scheduled report? I expect (or hope) that will eventually appear, as many things eventually do (remember when we could not even schedule our campaigns? I go back more than 5 years with all this…)

So AdWords sometimes seems to me to be a bit more like Quantum Mechanics than we would actually prefer (by observing the experiment, you actually participate in it, and alter it without meaning to), and that sometimes we may need to go a little easier on our opinion of Google – after all, there’s no other system like it!

And this video by Dr. Varian *graphically* demonstrates how critically important Quality Score is in governing your Ad position (AdRank), and Cost Per Click.

So, not only is it important to optimise your AdWords performance through

• bid price management to individual keyword level (yes – all of them, and it’s easily done)
• “Peel and Stick” into ever smaller ad groups (I have Campaigns with thousands of Ad Groups, and they get up to 100% CTR)
• Ad Texts targeted to keywords in Ad Headlines, description lines and display urls

but now, Quality Score has to be targeted for optimisation also, and that involves your website and landing pages too.

Remember “Traffic is for Show, Conversions is for Dough”. If you’ve got a “concrete website” – you’re in serious trouble…

The top Quality Score of “10″ is now on your weekly optimisation “to-do list” …

Comments and feedback most welcome…

Start making AdWords – WORK

Contact me today.

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"David, Time for your much-needed wisdom. How to escalate a problem with Google?"

My friend Bryan Todd, at Perry Marshal and Associates, had a client problem recently:

"David,
 
Time for your much-needed wisdom.
 
How to escalate a problem with Google?
 
A trusted and valued affiliate of ours recently observed that his traffic had completely dried up on Google. He (with our permission) was bidding on related terms to our book and its various matching options, and sending traffic through an affiliate link to our site.
 
On May 21 his clicks stopped, and Google slapped him with a 1/10 QS.

He removed the affiliate link and aimed traffic directly at our homepage. Still the same 1/10 QS on those keywords.
 
Now, when we bid on the term and do the same, we have identical results.
 
His call to the call center yields a 23-year-old girl who reads off lines from the Help section about landing page relevance, and then says a  tech person will look at it.
 
Useless.

So what’s your experience in getting *real* help on issues like this? Or more appropriately perhaps, what’s your experience in getting  a dedicated account rep who will get actual answers?
  
Best,
Bryan Todd"

Since Google is now using human editors to help overcome occasional glitches in their almost totally automated machine, the only way to resolve an issue like this is to be able to speak directly with a specialist at Google, not just a call centre operator.

Since 2007, as an AdWords Agency Partner, I have had a dedicated Relationship Management Team at Google, with personal access to their product specialists whenever I needed to call.

Most AdWords Agencies do not have this privilege.

So, if you need an Agency that can get direct assistance from Google no matter the problem – like Bryan, you know who to turn to…

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Google is currently experimenting with headlines longer than the traditional 25 characters

Read the headlines above and carefully count the characters in each – there’s 28.

Reported to me by a client today (thanks Raj) Google is now allowing more than the usual 25 characters in the headline field.

Since AdWords has *always* restricted this field, I tried to quickly reproduce this myself, and having failed both in Editor and online, then immediately called my Account Manager for an explanation.

She was unsurprised – turns out they’ve been quietly experimenting with this for a week or so without telling anyone, and "there’s no guarantee it will remain".

However, I have yet to see any new AdWords feature rescinded (my Account Manager had the same, though personal, opinion) and I expect to see this roll out permanently.

She also informed me there’s no fixed character count as yet, so we’ll have to experiment further with it to see it’s limitations.

There’s a few other blog posts about this, reporting the same findings and a variety of headline character counts, up to 31.

So – how is it done?

And why?

Answers:

1. Dynamic Key Insertion
2. To increase CTR (my conjecture)

I’ll be publishing a fuller Briefing shortly – make sure you’re signed up to receive it.

Don’t see what you need? More questions? Contact Me

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"Europlex" – Google European HQ, Dublin Ireland

Last year (October 2008), I was one of only 100 AdWords Agencies across Europe to be invited to the "Above and Beyond" AdWords Agency Conference at Google Europe HQ.

Read the full story here