As a media buyer, you’re gonna be able to use a lotta tools when creating a campaign. One of them is called frequency capping, and it can be applied to a campaign, ad or spot.

What is Frequency Capping?

Frequency capping is putting a limit on the number of times an ad is shown to an individual. In Google AdWords, you can enter a maximum ‘cap’ on how many times someone can potentially see a display campaign.

You can set these caps at the campaign, ad group, and ad level and further segment them by day, week, or month.

Why Use Frequency Capping?

Ads are like cilantro: some people love ‘em, some people hate ‘em, and others need some convincing. Everybody responds to ad creatives differently, so it’s another factor to test out.

You want your ads to hit the sweet spot between “dude, stop following me around!” and “I’ve never heard of you guys.”

How Should you Use the Frequency Capping Tool?

It’s a very useful tool when you’re buying on a CPM basis (cost per one thousand impressions) and you’re receiving by conversion, lead or sale.

As your main goal is leading the user to the conversion, you can restrict your costs by paying only for the impressions that are most likely to give you more revenues.

If a user sees a banner many times and doesn’t click on it, you can’t expect it’ll do it in the near future and so you don’t need to pay for that impression forever.

What’s the Optimal Ad Frequency Cap?

There’s no rule of thumb. The best indicator of future performance is looking at your historical ad frequency data. You can do exactly that by setting up and digging into you ad frequency reports.

How to Set Up Frequency Capping in Ads?

Here is how:

1. Open AdWords
2. Open up a Display campaign
3. Click the Settings tab
4. Click on All Settings
5. Scroll down and click + Ad Delivery: Ad rotation, frequency capping
6. Next to Frequency Capping, click edit
7. Input your viewable impressions per day, per month, per campaign or per ad

Short conclusion

The changes in the frequency capping are crucial when you’re trying to increase or limit your inventory.

For example, if you identify a period of the day/week in your campaign that performs better than others, you can increase the capping for that period to gain more impressions – basically, this means you work with the dayparting.

Be careful with changes in the frequency capping as they only work when you’re in a profitable position.

If you run an Adwords campaign with over hundred ads, I think you would agree that tracking each one of them is not easy.

What is ValueTrack?

ValueTrack is an upgraded version of UTM codes. It allows you to gather tracking data with tags that are populated automatically.

Tracking templates can be set at Account, Campaign or Ad Level.

Account level applies the tracking template to all campaigns and ads within the account.

Campaign level applies the tracking template to all ads under the campaign. Campaign level tracking takes precedent over account level templates.

Ad level applies the tracking template to individual ads. Ad level tracking takes precedent over account and campaign level templates

Using the Tracking Template

The tracking template starts with {lpurl} which is followed by the parameters that you wish to track down (as shown in the snapshot below). {lpurl} returns the final URL link that you have added in the ad messaging, so make sure to add it at the start of the template.

It is followed with a ‘?’ and the name of parameters. You can add multiple parameters but each need to be separated by an ‘&’.

About Custom Parameters

Custom Parameters offer advanced options wherein advertisers can add custom values unlike the predefined parameters under ValueTrack. You can set up the values that you wish your custom parameter to track

How Do Ads Custom Parameters Work

You can at max create three custom parameters at campaign, ad group, keyword or ad level and consists of two parts namely

Name: Up to 16 alphanumeric characters

Value: Up to 200 characters; can contain any characters (including | ; _ / ^ ( !), along with any specific ValueTrack parameters

Using Sitelink Tracking URL

Much like setting tracking template at desired destinations (campaign, ad group, ad, keyword level), sitelink level tracking can also be set up.

If you want to edit an existing sitelink URL, then follow the following steps:

Go to Ad Extensions > Filter sitelink extensions > Click on the edit icon of the sitelink you wish to edit > Expand Sitelink URL Options > Add the tracking template along with custom parameters (if any) or the ValueTrack parameters

If you are in digital marketing or advertising, chances are that you’ve heard the term “lightbox ads”. Interestingly enough, very few actually know what they look like, and even fewer know how to create them.

First thing’s first, a lightbox ad is an expandable creative asset that will take over a majority of your screen if you hover over its “thumbnail” for a couple seconds. It’s not a CPC model as most of us are accustomed to.

Once the user is shown the lightbox ad, it’s an extremely interactive ad type and allows for much more engagement than any pop up or banner ads.

As advertisers, we can leverage multiple images and video assets as creatives within the lightbox along with descriptions and different landing pages.

Difference between Display and Lightbox ads

Normal Display campaigns are used to generate the leads or traffic. But Lightbox ads are used for Engagement. Engagement means brand awareness.

Lightbox can be used for different industry, but it depends on the Campaigns objective. e.g. If you want brand promotion though video ads, you can use it.

It is also used for eCommerce client. You can run the Catalog Lightbox ads, where you can display Catalog of products.

How to create Lightbox Ad?

First, navigate to the Ads tab within a campaign. Click +Ad and select Ad Gallery. From there you’ll be given the option to choose “Lightbox ad”.

If you or your client has strong video assets, you may want to use those along with images. This creates a more engaging experience.

After you pick which Lightbox ad format you want to use, you are able to easily manipulate how the ad looks by adding rich media and imagery to catch users eyes.

Once you’ve reached the Setup screen, the process is very intuitive.

One of my favorite features is the ability to upload images in your ad straight from your website – meaning you don’t even need to download or generate creative content; you can literally swap it in from your site.

Why should you start using Lightbox ads and what should you use it for?

First of all, your target audience will be more interested and considered more qualitative as they have to hover over the Lightbox ad first in order to expand it.

Furthermore, the product feed asset allows people to browse information about and engage with your products in a very visual way.

Your audience will therefore be provided with a deeper experience to learn about and understand your products.

What is Shoppable Lightbox?

Shoppable Lightbox is the new brother in the Lightbox ad family. There is already Image and Video Lightbox that can be used to boost engagement with your audience in a very visual and fun way.

Shoppable Lightbox can be used in the exact same way with the exception that you don’t have to upload visuals or videos yourself, but link and filter products from the Merchant Center.

The main principle is that when the user hovers over the Lightbox ad for a couple of seconds, the ad expands and several interactions are being triggered.

Everybody loves remarketing on Google Ads.

There are few who would argue against the efficacy of remarketing to do anything from give you a second shot at a sale or blow past cart abandonment.

But most people using remarketing are using it in its most basic form: targeting all website visitors using the display network.

t’s easy to set up in just minutes and can net some decent results, so, why not?

But there is one type of remarketing list that most people aren’t using:

Remarketing lists for search ads, otherwise known as RLSAs.

What are remarketing lists for search ads?

Remarketing lists for search ads (RLSAs) lets you change your search ads for people who have visited your website before.

It’s a more advanced level of targeting which gives you a second chance to get those visitors to do what you want them to do.

This is not display remarketing.

You won’t be following people around with display ads on other websites they’re visiting.

RLSAs work when the person is searching for your keywords in Google. ?

The name really doesn’t help this confusion, but unfortunately there’s nothing we can do about that.

How it works

The foundation of RLSA begins when a user visits your site. Upon arrival, a cookie adds them to your remarketing list and, if you have at least 1,000 visitors in the past 30 days, you can use this information to activate an RLSA campaign. (You can also alter the time frame from which to draw users, or the pages they’ve visited and which to target.)

Aside from the remarketing list, the other factor in RLSA campaigns is the search keywords. Whatever keywords you decide to bid on, the end result is that whenever someone on your remarketing list searches one of these keywords, your RLSA ad will be triggered.

Three ways RLSA are used:

Increase your bids

You can choose to increase your bids for people who have visited your website recently. You might want to increase your bid by 25%, for example, to give you a better chance of beating your competitors.

Show different ads

You could tailor your ads to show specifically for people who have already been to your website and added products to their shopping basket.

You know they’ll likely already know about your product and brand – so try making this information more prominent.

Bid on different keywords

You know you’ll be bidding on a select group of people only.

They will have already been to your website, so you know they’re likely to be in the market for what you sell.

Short conclusion

Typical remarketing lists are good, but they are just that: typical.

They can get you results for a little while, but nowhere near what you could achieve using RLSAs.

With increased ad blocking technology, display ads are less engaging and users and far less receptive to them.

RLSAs have the benefit of targeting your remarketing list where they enjoy searching; directly on Google’s search network.

You setup a new AdWords display network. The campaign starts to generate traffic.

You pull up the placement report and notice dozens of junk placements.

Sounds familiar?

The good news is that there’s a fix for that. It’s actually the easiest and fastest yet overlooked setting to improve the performance of any AdWords display campaign.

Display Targeting Options – The Basics

Keyword Targeting

For example, if I target the keyword women’s fashion, Google may serve my ad on the same page as an article on women’s fashion trends in 2019.

Placement Targeting

For example, if I want my ad to serve when users are consuming sports content, I may choose specific sports websites or the sports section of online newspapers.

Interest Targeting

Google has several predefined interest groups that are available for targeting. Google will place individual users into interest groups based on their web behavior.

The interest targeting is further segmented into “In-Market” and “Affinity” interest groups

Audience Targeting

To use audience targeting, an advertiser must first build audiences in either AdWords or Google Analytics. The audiences will be made up of users (or a subset of users) that have visited the website.

Topic Targeting

With topic targeting, an advertiser will reach a group of websites that fall into the selected topic.

Whereas interest targeting will reach individual users based on their interests, topic targeting will serve ads on websites based on the overall theme of that site.

Demographic Targeting

Lastly, an advertiser can target age, gender and/or parental status.

What is Display Automated Targeting?

Display Automated Targeting is an automated targeting option within the Audience settings of the display campaigns that gives Google full right to show your ads to an  audience that is “similar” to the one you specified.

Conservative Automation

This option gives Google the ability to conservatively find potential customers based on historical data without going over your current cost per customer (or so they claim).

For some campaigns like remarketing, this could be helpful to expand the viewer base if you have less than 1K visitors per month, because Conservative Automation will expand the impressions while keeping targeting fairly tight.

Aggressive Automation

As you might imagine, Aggressive Automation will target a higher number of people with more liberal settings at a cost per customer that could greatly exceed your norm.

The goal for Aggressive Automation is to get as many conversions as possible, at virtually whatever cost.

Do note that in order for Aggressive Automation to be enabled, it requires the campaign to have achieved more than 15 conversions per month to be active.

How to make your Display Campaigns profitable

Track your entire funnel, not just your ads

This first one is absolutely foundational, so let’s start with the basics.

There is a fatal mistake that most marketers make when it comes to focus: they lose themselves in what’s known as the “wide end” of the funnel.

In other words, they only pay attention to how many people click their ads.

By creating a goal for each step in the process, you can see where visitors are dropping off and focus in on what needs fixing.

Optimize your on-site display ads, not just the ones “out there”

Most marketers focus on display ads “out there:” display ads that bring in visitors from other sites or search engines.

But what about prospects and customers who are already loyal to you? The reality is that acquiring a new customer can cost 6-7 times more than retaining and selling to an existing one.

You’ve likely already got a fan base of users or readers who know and like what you do. Why not try to reach them?

Even if your site’s visitors aren’t yet customers, they’re there for a reason. They’ve already committed.

Test the position of your display ads

Many display ad A/B tests only examine the ad’s image and copy. But have you considered testing ad position?

What do I mean?

I’m sure you’ve heard of “banner blindness” before – the well-documented phenomenon in which web users ignore content placed within traditional banner positions.

Build responsive display ads for mobile

The marketing world is abuzz with all things mobile.

Americans are now spending more time online via their smartphones than their computers by a ratio of 34 to 27 hours per month.

Responsive ad units allow you to dynamically control the presentation of your ads – i.e., their size and orientation – based on the size and orientation of the screen or device they’re being viewed on.

Short conclusion

The vital thing to notice about all of these steps is that they’re based on customizing the details, creating individualized visitor experiences and optimizing from there.

Don’t overwhelm yourself. Start with step one and work your way through the rest of the list a piece at a time.

HTML 5 is simply the newest version of the HTML standard, and as such, much of it is familiar to long-time web developers.

Plenty of elements and the creative ways you can use it are new, though, and it’s an evolving standard. It changes from time to time, as any good standard should, and it has been available in some form since 2008.

What Are HTML5 Ads?

HTML5 is the latest iteration of HTML—one of the markup languages browsers use to present content.

HTML5 is the first version of HTML that allows developers to write video, audio, and others animations directly into the source code of a page—thus eliminating the need for plugins like Flash.

HTML5 ads are at once more attractive to click on and less intrusive to look at—because they live within the page, they’re more subtle, more elegant, and not quite so interstitial-y.

How to Make HTML5 Ads

Luckily, you don’t need to be a full stack developer—or even be fluent in HTML5—to create an HTML5 ad. T

here are dozens of tools—Google Web Designer, Bannersnack, Flexitive, etc.—that allow marketers with limited knowledge of web-based code to create dazzling and click-worthy HTML5 ads.

HTML 5 Requirements for Google Ads

If you’re running Google Ads through the Google Ad Manager – and you probably are – your HTML 5 ads have to meet certain requirements.

HTML 5 ads must be SSL compatible

This actually isn’t a strict requirement for all ads, but if you want your ads to serve on HTTPS sites, your ads need to be compatible with SSL.

If you’re designing your ads through the Google Web Designer

You must choose the right environment when creating the ad creatives. Choose the “Display & Video 360” environment.

HTML 5 ads must follow dimension guidelines.

• Use the size meta tag to specify the size your ads are supposed to display.
• Use fixed sizes, as dynamic sizes (“fluid”) do not work.
• Your minimum dimensions cannot be zero.

Short conclusion

HTML 5 is the new future standard and will be the standard moving forward for quite some time. It’s an in-development standard as well, so rather than getting an HTML 6, we’ll simply get more evolved and expanded versions of HTML 5.

I highly recommend learning it, as it can do some very cool things, and it will make your ads truly pop.

The Google Display Network “GDN” is the largest contextual advertising network available on the Internet.

Consisting of millions of websites, advertisers can display their ads to a wide range of audiences using many targeting options.

Steps for better display campaigns

Apply the Pareto principle

Using the GDN, you may have seen your ads get placed on hundreds or thousands of websites — but only a handful are responsible for significant traffic.

Applied to digital marketing, we can expect 80% of our results to come from 20% of our placements, keywords, emails lists or other channels.

Identify opportunities in your account

The first step is finding the placements that produce the most volume. In your AdWords account, go to Display campaigns > Placements > WHERE ADS SHOWED.

In the placements dashboard, select a metric and reorder it from highest to lowest. The most important metrics to focus on are impressions, clicks and cost.

Create unique campaigns for top placements

Every placement has an audience with specific interests and behaviors.

Creating a separate campaign for these placements will give you the ability to manage budgets, deliver specific ad messaging and control landing pages that are most effective for that audience.

Block these placements from your general campaigns

The easiest way to do this is to create a shared exclusion list for the top placements and attach it to the old campaigns. This will ensure that only the new targeted campaigns will deliver ads for top placements.

Create ad groups with specific targeting

Ad groups are what will really separate the new campaign from the old one. This is where placements, demographics, topics and other targeting tools are controlled to segment the audience so specific people see specific ads and landing pages.

Design your ads

The image, headlines and descriptions are the main elements that influence users and determine performance. Make sure each is chosen carefully so it connects with the target audience.

Display targeting methods

Remarketing

When someone visits your site, a cookie is downloaded onto their browser which allows us to build an audience list based on their interaction with your site or YouTube channel. We can then show them remarketing ads across the web.

Target Similar Audiences

The Similar Audiences feature within Google AdWords attempts to find people with similar interests and browsing habits as your remarketing audiences.

To target similar audiences, set up a new display campaign and select the ‘Similar to remarketing lists‘ option within the Display Network targeting settings.

Placements targeting

By targeting placements, you’re able to select exactly which sites you want your ads to be displayed on, so it’s a safe option for advertisers just branching out into display advertising.

To set up placement targeting, navigate to the targeting settings of your display network campaign and choose ‘placements‘ from the Ad targeting drop down.

In-market audiences

Reach users who want your product or service in more places across the web.

Google can determine that someone is ‘in-market’ for your product or service by the related ads they have clicked, related clicks that led to conversions and related sites and pages recently viewed.

Affinity audiences

Reach users who have shown an interest in an area that relates to you product or service.

Based on previous internet activity, Google will build a profile of your users’ interests; Google Analytics then allows us to target your ads to these users across the Google Display Network.

Short conclusion

While the Display Network can feel like the wild wild west for some advertisers, there are tactics to create hyper relevant messaging directed to audiences that are more refined than traditional display targeting methods.

One of the important aspects of Google Ads is Geofencing, also known as Geotargeting. You want to make sure you are targeting the best locations for your business. If you only serve a small geographic area, your Google Ads shouldn’t be targeted to other locations.

When to Use Google Ads Location Targeting (and When Not to)

Location targeting is more complex than meets the eye.

It’s relatively quick to set up a Google ads campaign and target locations. But if you haven’t thought about the potential ramifications, you could be wasting your budget on ads that simply don’t generate results.

Here are a few scenarios where you should and shouldn’t be using location targeting to maximize your results and hedge your potential losses.

You sell in local retail outlets or have a storefront.

If you sell products in your own local storefront, it’s a no-brainer to run location targeting campaigns.

With rapid increases in “near me” searches, it’s clear that intent is there. Plus, these searches aren’t including brand names. Meaning your product could be sold anywhere.

Your product or service can capitalize on geo hotspots

Location targeting isn’t just for those who sell products in a storefront or through a retailer.

For example, if you sell outdoor gear or sporting equipment, you can target cities or states that are known for being “outdoorsy” like Utah, Colorado, Montana and more.

These markets are much more likely to be interested in buying outdoor and sporting gear than other markets are.

You aren’t mobile optimized

Mobile traffic has been more prevalent than desktop traffic for two years now, and mobile optimization is now an essential part of location targeting or any campaign.

Does your mobile site perform? Are conversions awful on mobile? How is the user experience?

These are some key questions of self-reflection to ask yourself. Be honest.

Your answers need to be: “Yes”, “No”, “Good”!

Display Advertising

There are a couple forms of geofencing but the one that we primarily talk about here is in terms of display advertising.

Let’s say you wanted to use Google to run display ads at a particular location and, on Google, the smallest geographical location you’re able to get down to is a zip code.

What we do is we will run these ads programmatically through a DSP (Demand-Side Platform) and we will run ads that are geofenced around a particular building.

It could be a building, it could be an area, it could be a park, it could be a one-mile radius around your location.

Branding Purposes

One of the best benefits of geofencing and really the primary reason to use it is for branding purposes. You’re not usually going to see a great ROI with geofencing right out the gate.

That’s one of those things where if you’re looking to get some kind of new initiative started, it’s perfect for branding, perfect for building awareness, so you start showing these ads to people who enter into that location at any given time.

What you’re able to do beyond that is extend the window that those people will see ads for 30 days, 60 days, 90 days, up to 120 days

Short conclusion

Location-based searches are seeing explosive growth — especially when it comes to mobile traffic.

Even if you don’t have a storefront with your business name on it, you can still capitalize on traffic from high-intent location searches.

Attribution modelling is the method used to measure the financial effectiveness of a communication channel and the impact this has on business goals.

What is attribution?

Attribution is essentially credit. Each PPC conversion on your website will follow directly from a specific set of targeting criteria.

Suppose your Adwords campaigns have been set up to drive sales of fancy candles for your business. Depending on your Adwords strategy, these could include:

• [candles for sale online] – Generic search
• Google Display Network ad – Remarketing
• [{your brand name} candles] – Brand search

If your customer clicks on one of your Google search or Display Network ads and goes on to convert, providing your tracking is set up and working correctly, Adwords will attribute (or credit) this sale to a specific ad and keyword.

What attribution models do you have to choose from?

In Google Ads there are six attribution models to choose from:

• Last click
• Time decay
• Linear
• Position based
• First click
• Dana driven

Last click

The default model used when setting up a conversion in AdWords is Last Click. This model favours efficiency as you will be able to see the last touch point where the user converted.

Is it the right model to use? Probably not. This model significantly overvalues your branded terms and favours customer recycling.

Time decay

This model is based on exponential decay, assigning the majority of the credit to the last touch point and a lessened value to the earlier touch points.

More complex in that it uses an algorithm to delegate the credit to the correct touch points, looking at the channel closest to the conversion and working backwards.

This model assumes that as the user gets closer and closer to converting, the importance of the channel will increase in line with the intent.

Linear

Linear modelling attributes credit to every touch point in the conversion path.

The benefit of this model is that every touch point is considered, so it creates a level playing field where you will be able to see where each and every keyword in your AdWords account attributed to a conversion.

Position based

This model combines the best of Linear and Time Decay, Position-Based Attribution attributes 40% to the first and last touch point and the addition 20% across every touch point in between.

Using this model will allow you to optimise your campaigns and keywords based on the most pivotal points in the conversion process.

First click

This model follows the same premise as Last Click; however, all of the credit is attributed to the First Click.

This model favours the first touch point and will assign 100% of the credit to the first click in the conversion, so if a new user searches for a term > clicks through on paid > returns directly > converts via a social ad – the credit will be attributed to the initial paid ad.

Data driven

This model is the holy grail of attribution models for AdWords, as it gives credit for conversions based on how people search for your business and decide to become your customers.

This model differs to all of the above as it uses your conversion data to calculate the actual contribution of each keyword across the conversion path, making the model completely different for each advertiser.

Short conclusion

While these models might seem a bit confusing, they’re well worth exploring. You may end up with a more accurate picture of which ads are driving your conversions.

With thousands of articles explain the details of running a Google “Call – Only”, I thought I’ll give it a fair shot.

There has been major increases in customers asking for these types of campaigns without truly understanding the full scope of what that entails.

Chances are, you’re part of the 51 percent of mobile searchers who admit to calling businesses often.

But just because mobile technology is increasing our inbound phone leads, it doesn’t mean we should go all in on this marketing channel.

What is Google Ads call tracking?

Google Ads call tracking is a type of conversion tracking that shows you how many prospective customers called your business after seeing or clicking one of your PPC placements.

Who uses Google Ads call tracking?

Any advertiser looking to drive phone calls to their business — and therefore gain a better understand how their marketing is helping drive those calls — should be using call tracking.

Google Ads, along with other call tracking services like CallRail, can show you which search keywords are driving the most calls as well as performance breakdowns by demographics and location, and your placement’s general positioning in SERP results.

How to set up Google Ads call tracking

Setting up Google Ads call tracking for forwarding numbers is simple: You only need to add call extensions to your ad(s), and then enable call reporting in Google Ads and Analytics.

During the setup, you’ll have to create a conversion action for a phone call under the ‘Tools > Conversions‘ menu in Ads, which you’ll then select when creating your call extension.

Keyword prices are higher in phone calls campaigns

Before you start with Call-Only campaigns, you need to make a decision on what a call cost for you and be able to justify that with actual data points because things can get really expensive quick.

Being able to establish an idea of what you are willing to pay for a call is important when setting up your campaigns as keywords (calls) are much higher in this market, then in a traditional search campaign.

Call fraud in PPC campaigns

Call fraud happens a couple of ways inside PPC campaigns.

Irrelevant and spammy calls are often generated in PPC campaigns with poor location and/or keyword targeting. Who wants to get calls for a region they don’t serve or a service they don’t provide?

Sometimes call campaigns are assigned what’s called “dirty numbers,” which means they’ve been used before by another business.

When advertisers get assigned “dirty numbers” they end up paying for leads that are irrelevant and were really intended for another business. This is more of a spammy type of call fraud.

Short conclusion

If you’re looking to achieve a more complete picture of which PPC ads are driving customers to pick up the phone, then call tracking software is a great solution.

By pairing call tracking software with Google Ads, you’ll be armed with robust data and analytics to support your decision-making the next time you optimize a campaign.