Author: Adaxa Team

Google Ads Review Getting Slower due to COVID-19

Published: 19 March 2020
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Due to the preventive measures we’re taking to protect the health of our support specialists in light of COVID-19, we are currently experiencing longer than usual times to process new ads in non-text formats (such as Video, RDA, App, etc.). Requests to appeal a decision to disapprove an ad will also be delayed, and requests to expedite unreviewed ads will not be supported at this time.

During this period, we encourage you to use existing approved ads (without editing) or text formats for new ads (e.g., Expanded Text Ads, Original Text Ads, Responsive Search Ads (VTA). We also encourage you to use Self-Service Appeals via Policy Manager, which allows you to appeal a policy decision directly from your Google Ads account using just a few clicks.

We sincerely apologize for any inconvenience this may cause you and appreciate your patience. We will update this page as the situation changes.

Google Ads App comes with Optimization Score

Published: 18 March 2020
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It does matter where you are, Google really want you to be able to pay more attention to your optimization score. They are continuing to increase coverage on optimization scores in Google Ads accounts. It became not the key part for agencies to get status of Google Partner.

How good your account is set to perform is pretty much what optimization score is meant to be a reflection of. The recommendations tied to optimization scores are also generated automatically. Some can be useful while some not at all and advertisers need to evaluate the recommendations with that in mind. You will now see the account-level optimization score on the main Overview screen when you open the Google Ads app, and you can swipe through to see campaign-level scores.

Campaigns that have recommendations with the highest potential impact are listed first, so you can prioritize actions that will drive performance.

  • Notifications –  Under the “More” menu at the bottom of the screen you can get notifications when your optimization score changes by opting-in on the Settings page.
  • Dark mode –  The app also now has a Dark mode option. It will be enabled automatically if you’ve got Dark mode set on your phone. You can turn it on in the app from the Settings page.

Google Import into Microsoft Ads

Published: 17 March 2020
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Google Import offers the many ways to import your Google Ads account directly into Microsoft Advertising with no spreadsheets needed. You can choose what you want to import and you can now import up to 5 million keywords and 4 million ads and can choose the frequency — import once, or set-up automatic imports on a daily basis.

 

Here’s how you do it:

1. Click “Import” from within the Google Ads dashboard.

2. Follow the simple steps to import your campaigns.

It is important to understand a some differences between the two platforms, these are things you want to keep an eye on during the import and adjust settings. Here are four key differences between the two ad platforms:

  • Campaign Tracking: It’s helpful to know how visitors are reaching your website. To get this information, you will need to set the parameter “utm_source” to Bing for the campaigns you have imported from Google.
  • Device targeting: You can now import expanded device targeting. Bing Ads supports the same values as Google Ads, which means you have more flexibility to adjust bids and improve your ROI on ad spend. Today, bid modifiers range from -100% to +900% for desktop, smartphones and tablets.
  • Target languages: When you import your Google Ads, Bing Ads chooses the highest-ranked language according to data from the Bing Ads marketplace. If your ads are written in target languages that Bing doesn’t support, your campaign won’t import and you will get an error.
  • Target locations: Google Ads location targets must match location targets in Bing Ads. If a location target doesn’t exist in Bing Ads, those campaigns will be mapped to a nearby “parent” location.

Redesigned Google Ads Attribution Report

Published: 16 March 2020
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What every person in search marketing does on the beginning of the month? They check the performance of their Google Ads for previous month since it normal to check our goals and numbers to see how are you hitting your goals. But there is a big problem with those stats. What if someone browsed the landing page, but converting happened two weeks later. So technically you spent your budget in one month but you are getting results in next month. Thanks to the new time lag report in the Google Ads Attribution tab, you can now get a better understanding of how long it takes your users to convert.

The time lag report is found under Tools & Settings > Measurement > Attribution > Path Metrics and is only one of the many useful reports available in the Attribution tab.

Path Length Report

Ever think about how many ads a user clicks on before converting? This report has a planty of information about how many ad clicks and also ad impressions normally occur before a conversion.

Assisted Conversions Report

The Assisted Conversions analysis gives you how many click-assisted conversions and last-click conversions your campaigns did. This is useful in determining which of your campaigns may have driven interactions that contributed to the final conversion but were not credited for the final conversion under a last-click model. If a campaign has a poor CPA but also has a very high click-assisted to last-click conversion ratio, that shows it is a strong influencer of conversions and good for continued investment.

Model Comparison Report

The model comparison report allows you to compare different attribution models to check the impact they would have on your data. You can choose between first-click, last-click, linear, time decay, position-based, and data-driven models. This is a great way to measure the impact of changing attribution models before you make that actual change.

Device Paths Report

To check this report, click on “Dimension” in the top paths report and select “Devices.” You can use this report to see how many users interact first on one device and then convert on a different device. For example, if you are get a poor CPA on mobile traffic but this report indicates that a large number of users start on mobile and then convert on desktop, your real mobile CPA is likely better than what you see.

Top Paths Report

After using the path length report to identify that your users are clicking on five ads before converting, you can use the Top Paths report to understand in what order campaigns, keywords, and ad groups are coming through. This can give you good insight into what your customer journey looks like and potentially where you can adjust your strategy to better suit where the users are in their path to conversion.

Why PPC & CRO Congruence Matters

Published: 15 March 2020
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Important step of optimization when you are doing PPC and CRO is to make sure that your strategies align with a congruence analysis. Congruence is a great way to achieve the converting efforts for user be natural way forward by reducing the amount of decision making on their part. For example, if a user clicks on your ad looking for some specific product and you take them to a homepage instead of specific page it is more likely you will see a bounce from homepage becouse they don’t want to search again for that specific page or product. The whole journey from click to conversion should be as smooth as possible. Here are a couple of different areas to review to make sure your user experience is as easy as possible.

Visual Congruence

If your landing page is very different from your ad, it will likely make users to distrust and question the brand, and potentially abandon their search also. So the first area to check for congruence is visual one. This is how congruent the imagery is from your ads with the landing page users are taken to. This is an easy thing to check, but also important step in your analysis. Check your social and display ads with their landing pages. You want to make sure imagery, colors and fonts match visually.

Lingual Congruence

To improve the trustworthiness of your brand you need to ensure your message matches across landing pages and ads. So the next thing to check is the language. You need to pay attention to your headlines, sub-headlines and especially call-to-action copy. Like before we don’t want users to think about what their next steps should be because they should not be surprised where they land when they click on the ad. The ad needs to take them where they need to be. This can also help with your brand recognition. If you repeat the message from your ad copy onto your landing page, it will help users remember the message and remember your brand if your message was clear and consistent.

User Intent

Ensure that the intent of the user matches the goal of the landing page will be important to keep them engaged with the content. So you need to look at your landing pages and think about the intent of the user based on the ad they clicked because the intent is a key element to making sure you are providing users with a congruent experience and can connect both visual and lingual based congruence. Check out if users are clicking on a very specific ad that promises a discount and then land to a general shopping page or does your ad copy ask users to “Learn More” and then take them to a page to fill out a form to request a demo – you need to fix that.

Congruence analysis can be easily overlooked and it is important to check out your ads and landing pages. Look at both the imagery and language, and especially remember user intent is key to congruence.

3 Strategies to lower your CPC – Part 2 & 3

Published: 14 March 2020
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STRATEGY TWO

Match Landing Pages to Your Ads and Target Keywords

It’s important to keep your landing page offer consistent with the keyword and the ad text to lower your CPC as much as possible. Because the major component of your Quality Score is the relevance of your landing page and the keyword that has been targeted. The landing page is of course where you are getting the conversions that makes your PPC campaign actually profitable and it is the best time to convince the user that you have solution for their problem.

Your niche, offer and audience determine your optimal PPC landing page design. For example, eComm store might land users onto a product or category page, but B2B software might land users to a free trial page. Also a insurance provider might give the user a form to calculate their rates and recruiter might use thieronline jobs to get users actively engaged. Or in case of emergency plumber who might feature their phone number first so user can get in contact if needed. Overall, every business is different.

But without exception, all effective landing pages are consistent with the source and they demonstrate a clear value proposition.

STRATEGY THREE

Continually Test Multiple Ad Variations to Improve CTR

To contribute to a better Quality Score you can improve your CTR. That way you will also impact your CPC and lower it due to higher Quality Score. So it’s very important to optimize your CTR in the search for a reduced CPC on your campaigns and you achive that by adopting a mindset of constant testing. This means to never being totally sure about the performance of your ad. You can test different offers, ad copy, and callout copy and try extensions to make you CTRs better.

PPC marketers should always try to beat their previous best CTR with continuous tests and ad variations. And there’s no better advantage when testing than to know what the competition is up to.

Check Part 1

3 Strategies to lower your CPC – Part 1

Published: 13 March 2020
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Making your CPC as low as possible if you are running PPC ads on Google Ads is probably the most important thing you are trying to achieve. It’s normal that more efficient campaigns generate a better ROI and with that maximize your profit so you are able to scale your advertising to new lengths, or better to say heights. So, better than set and forget campaigns, it’s important to tweak your setup to get better and lower Cost per Click. In the set of 3 articles we will try to give 3 tips on how to lower your CPC by applying insights from competitor analysis that will improve PPC campaign performance.

There are many theories how to get lower CPC and relevance is probably the best and most important part of it. You will be able to reduce your CPC if you can match the user search intent troughout the funnel. By making it as positive and seamless as possible, you will get rewarded since it’s in best interest of Google to optimize the user experience.

STRATEGY ONE

Use of hyper relevant SKAGs – Single Keyword Ad Groups.

By targeting only one keyword per ad group, makes your PPC campaign hyper focused and thus provides results in a high relevant set of ads and ad groups with specifics ad copy and headlines. This will also keep your campaigns aligned to the intent of the searcher and improving the Quality Score and reducing the CPC as final result.

Other benefits of using SKAGs:

  • You will probably improve CTRs also due to increased relevance. Better CTRs also improves Quality Score which in the end means higher average positions and increased impressions share.
  • You can still use different match types for each single keyword and set up another SKAG when you spot a long-tail phrase. But make sure to add the long tail terms to the negative keywords in your original SKAG.
  • You will also experience better control over your Google Ad campaigns and achieve more visibility and down the line improve your sales. This will help you invest in more profitable single keywords and cut on the waste also.
  • Your landing pages can be optimized to appeal to the searcher more directly since you have pre-qualified searcher exact intent with your SKAG. This will improve your conversion and reduce your CPC.

Accelerated budget delivery going into the sunset

Published: 11 March 2020
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ad copy in google ads

Last October, we announced the sunset of accelerated budget delivery for use with Search campaigns, Shopping campaigns, and shared budgets. These campaigns have since been made unavailable for use with accelerated budget delivery.

Later this year, accelerated budget delivery will also be sunset for all other remaining campaign types for both shared and non-shared budgets. This includes Display, App, video campaigns, and others, and this sunset will affect budgets in all versions of the AdWords API, Google Ads API, and Google Ads scripts.

Starting at the end of April, 2020, scripts and both APIs will prevent campaigns from using new and existing budgets with the ACCELERATED delivery method.

  • Creating a new budget with its delivery method field set to ACCELERATED will no longer be allowed.
  • Changing an existing budget from STANDARD to ACCELERATED delivery method will no longer be allowed.
  • Setting a campaign to use a pre-existing budget with an ACCELERATED delivery method will no longer be allowed.

Any of the above operations will result in errors from the APIs and scripts, according to the following:

AdWords API

Service Field Value Error
BudgetService deliveryMethod: ACCELERATED OperationAccessDenied.ACTION_NOT_PERMITTED
CampaignService budget*
[*]only if set to accelerated delivery		 OperationAccessDenied.ACTION_NOT_PERMITTED

 

Google Ads API

Service Field Value Error
CampaignBudgetService delivery_method: ACCELERATED OperationAccessDenied.ACTION_NOT_PERMITTED
CampaignService campaign_budget*
[*] only if set to accelerated delivery		 OperationAccessDenied.ACTION_NOT_PERMITTED

 

Google Ads scripts

Method Error
AdsApp.​Budget.setDeliveryMethod(“ACCELERATED”) “Action not permitted”

 

Making changes to existing ACCELERATED budgets (e.g., updating amount or status fields in the API, or using their corresponding AdsApp.​Budget methods in scripts) will still be allowed until May 2020, after which any modification to these budgets will also result in analogous errors.

Future versions of the Google Ads API and Google Ads scripts may remove support for the accelerated budget delivery option altogether.

Source – GoogleBlog

Instagram to remove fake stuff from their yard

Published: 25 November 2018
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Instagram is taking steps to limit unauthentic activity on its network.

The company has declared it’ll be removing fake followers, likes, and comments from accounts that use third-party apps to inflate their quality. Instagram can accomplish this through the utilization of machine learning tools designed to spot such accounts. Accounts known as having used third-party apps to get unauthentic activity can receive an in-app message notifying them that the activity has been removed.

Those accounts will be asked to change their password, that was probably shared with the third-party apps.

Users who unknowingly shared their login info with another app could also be asked to change their password also. Accounts that prefer to continue exploitation third-party apps to bolster their perceived quality might even see their Instagram experience impacted, the company says. Instagram didn’t specify what that means precisely, however my guess is that the reach of these accounts are going to be restricted. The accounts might even be suspended, as third-party apps that generate unauthentic activity are a violation of Instagram’s community guidelines.

Purging unauthentic activity are going to be an in-progress effort for Instagram, therefore this is often not simply a one-and-done occurrence. This is only one measure the corporate is taking to cut back unauthentic activity. Updates on extra measures are going to be declared within the coming weeks.

Bought a domain with a bad history?

Published: 25 November 2018
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Google’s John Mueller has provided some advice on what website owners ought to do if they’ve buy a website with unhealthy history connected to it.

This topic came up in a recent Google Webmaster Central conversation where a website owner was worried regarding the domain he bought having a history of piracy.

Here is the question:

“We took over a URL with our brand and after that, unfortunately, we found out that someone before us, maybe half a year or two years ago, used that URL for piracy content. And if we take a look at the Google transparency report we can see that there has been a lot of trouble with that URL.

Is there any way to get some kind of reset at Google? Because we do not have any connection to the former owner of that URL. And of course we do not have any piracy content in our editorial offerings. So what should we do?”

Mueller responded by saying that this can be an issue that ought to resolve itself over time. It mostly depends on the extent of the unhealthy history and how long it had been occurring for. If there was simply a short amount of unhealthy history then it’ll eventually disappear on its own, Mueller says. However, if the amount of unhealthy history goes back upwards of 10 years or longer, then it should be a cause for concern.

Mueller suggests checking out Archive.org to look at the history of the domain and see how long the unhealthy activity was occurring for. Site owners might need to “bite the bullet” and begin over with a brand new domain if it’s found that the address they’ve bought incorporates a significant stretch of negative activity.

If a address solely incorporates a brief amount of poor activity, then simply move forward and concentrate on business as usual.