It happens all the time. You upload a sweet new set of ads you’re sure is going to pump new life into your campaign. But then it either gets disapproved at the gate, or flagged a couple of days later.

A number of the ads rejected were for industries that they no longer allowed to advertise, such as bail bonds and ticket resellers.

Some of these companies were also among the over one million accounts that Google terminated over violations.

Yet, for all these accounts and ads that were major abuses of their policy, millions of the ads rejected were for legitimate businesses. And they were for violations that were often inadvertent.

So why is your Google Ad rejected:

Spelling or grammatical errors

As a Google ad is a reflection of Google’s own standards of professionalism, the advertising behemoth imposes strict policies around an ad’s quality and relevance—including requiring standard spelling and grammar.

Accordingly, ads containing typos or misspellings may get rejected until the issues are fixed.

There may be cases, however, when a word is intentionally spelled in a non-standard way. This is common with branded company or product names

Trademark infringement

In general, advertisers are advised to avoid potentially trademarked names of competitors or their products.

While Google’s algorithm is only able to recognize the bigger brands, ads can be reported by viewers (and potentially, your own competitors) for a human review, at which point they may be pulled for infringements that initially passed undetected.

Alternate calls-to-action

Under a Cost-Per-Click (CPC) model, Google makes money every time a user clicks on an ad. As a result, it prioritizes the click as the sole call-to-action (CTA) of an ad and rejects alternate CTAs that may bypass the click. These include:

• Leaving a phone number in the ad copy. (This can still be done through a clickable call extension.)
• Leaving an email or website address in the ad copy.

Exclamation points in the ad headline

It’s one thing to be excited about what you’re advertising, and another to come off as gimmicky.

It’s in the latter category that Google considers exclamations in either of the two headline fields—and another common cause of ad rejections.

Text speak and gimmicky spelling

It’s a common tendency to employ shortcuts when typing on a digital screen: Substituting “u” for “you” in a text or using a simple emoji to express emotion. If you want to see your ads approved, however, it’s best to leave these shortcuts to SMS.

(If you can’t bear to part with your emojis, it may provide some peace of mind knowing that Google is rumored to be beta testing our smiley friends in AdWords.

Short conclusion

Although Google disapproves so many ads, mistakes still happen. Often, they are flagged, but misspelled words do get into ads. I’ve also seen ads that were running despite the site being down.

If your ad is rejected review the reason for the rejection. If you have questions, then contact Google Ads or consider hiring a Google AdWords Consultant.

Google AdWords and Google Analytics can be two very powerful tools for your online marketing efforts.

Each has a robust amount of information available and allows you to really get your hands dirty in data.

On top of that, they’re also made by the same company, which means they can communicate with each other pretty darn well.

In fact, we’re able to tie these two accounts together to maximize a return on our data.

How to Link Google AdWords and Google Analytics

Linking your AdWords and Google Analytics accounts is a pretty painless process. You can initiate the linking process either from the Google Analytics or Ads side.

I personally find it easiest to do this from the Google Analytics side, but it’s important to remember that you’ll need to have Edit access for the Google Analytics account with the same email you use for Google AdWords login.

Benefits of Linking AdWords and Analytics

Improved AdWords Reporting in Google Analytics

With the two platforms tied together, they’re able to communicate much more efficiently and provide more granular data in our reporting.

Google Analytics has an entire section within the Acquisition reports dedicated solely to AdWords performance which you cannot get unless you’ve linked your AdWords and Analytics accounts and are utilizing auto-tagging in AdWords.

Include Some Analytics Data in the AdWords Interface

In the same vein as seeing AdWords data in Analytics, linking accounts also lets us see some Analytics data in AdWords.

Once you’ve linked accounts, there will be a new set of columns available in the AdWords interface. On the Campaigns, Ad Groups, Ads, or Keywords tab, you can modify your columns to include the following Analytics metrics:

• Bounce Rate
• Pages / Session
• Avg Session Duration (seconds)
• % New Sessions

Importing Goals from Analytics to AdWords

In addition to getting engagement data from Analytics to AdWords, you can now import Analytics goals into AdWords as your conversion tracking.

This can be used as a replacement for AdWords Conversion Tracking or as a compliment to it depending on the goals you’re trying to track.

With Google Analytics goals, you’ll be able to import your performance directly into the AdWords interface with an average of a 3-hour delay in stats.

So real-time, same day data might not be great to optimize on, but the performance from the day prior will be just fine.

Short conclusion

Today’s customer journey doesn’t follow a standard path—it’s diverse, non-linear, and always evolving.

Consumers conduct research about products across a variety of devices—and marketers are looking for ways to deliver experiences that meet consumers’ rising expectations.

For many marketers, the solution lies in gaining a deeper understanding of the customer journey. The integration between Google Analytics and Google Ads helps you accomplish this.

Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising has become synonymous with Paid Social Advertising as social media has developed, resulting in the term “Social PPC.”

However, it’s quite different from traditional PPC in a number of ways, including ad formats, targeting, and delivery.

With social media advertising beginning to change the way we do social media marketing, it is a good idea to understand the difference between Pay-Per-Click (PPC) and social media advertising.

PPC refers to paid advertising from “click ads” online. What this means is, you the business will pay for any click you get.

In comparison social media ads like in Facebook, have you pay for ad space; any impressions or clicks you get do not change how much you spend on the ad.

PPC – GOOGLE & BING ADS

Before you start any Google (or Bing) ads, it is important that you have a landing page optimized for conversions. You don’t want your ad to just point to your homepage, it should point to a page that has a buy now button or leads a prospect to contact you quickly.

If your website is optimized for conversions, you will get a better Return On Investment (ROI) on each click you pay for.

The great thing about Google (Bing) ads is they have an excellent keyword planner tool. This tool gives you guidance on keywords for your service or product.

Just type in your keywords, add your location and it will show you the search volume and the competitiveness for each keyword or long-tail keyword (which is more than one word strung together to equal a keyword).

You can use these tools to guide your SEO content as well. These tools will also tell you how much you will pay for a click.

SOCIAL MEDIA ADVERTISING

Social media is very visual and engages users on a more personal level. If prospects see your logo all the time and if you are saying something fun and worth sharing you could trend on these platforms and build followers faster.

The important thing in social media to remember is, try to not make your ads too promotional and pushing for sales. This is a platform where people are socializing and sharing information, they don’t want to see a commercial.

Instead, think of neat things that people might want to talk about, comment on, or share with their group of friends. This is where demographics play an important role in setting up ads.

What Are The Differences Between Paid and Social Search?

To many new marketers, paid social and paid search might sound very similar, but this couldn’t be further from the truth.

Both of these advertising models excel in different areas, so understanding which is better for a certain niche or industry is essential.

The most noticeable differences between the two models are that paid search is best for targeting users who already know what they want.

If a user is searching to buy a product in Google and your advert appears at the top, then they’re probably going to click it.

Most users who already know what they want will likely be searching for different businesses who sell the same item to compare prices.

Compare this to paid social, and users are much more likely to be impulse buyers who aren’t necessarily looking for anything in particular to buy.

But if they happen to see something they are interested in while browsing social media, then they might be inclined to buy it.

This subtle difference can often have a huge impact on the success of the advertising method in a particular niche or industry.

Short conclusion

It is always a good strategy to run both PPC and social media advertisements. However, if you can only afford one platform ongoing, then take the time to run a test on both ad platforms and see which one gives you the best ROI.

In recent years, Google has continued to improve the AdWords interface to make it more streamlined and user friendly for paid search advertisers.

Despite this, managing and optimising accounts still remains a time consuming task, especially if you’re managing large accounts with multiple campaigns and ad groups.

Time and money can be limited resources for some businesses, but the benefits of AdWords Editor can help drive the efficiency and performance of your campaigns.

What is Google’s Ads Editor

Google’s Ads Editor is a free desktop application that will make your AdWords management a breeze.

With Adwords Editor, you can make major and minor changes to your account quick and easy. In this post I will highlight just a few ways this helpful application can you save time and headaches!

Top five benefits of using Google Ads Editor:

Make Changes to Your AdWords Account Offline

AdWords Editor does not require an internet connection. You can therefore make changes to your AdWords campaigns even when you don’t have access to the internet – such as during long commutes.

When you’re back in the office, or when you’ve found a secure WiFi connection, you can then post all of your changes to the account.

Import&Export

This is great if you want to make large scale changes to your campaigns, such as keyword bids. This approach is much better suited to users who are proficient with Excel, but not so confident with advanced AdWords techniques such as writing scripts.

In AdWords Editor, there’s multiple options available on what data you can export from your account. For example, you can export keyword data from a selected campaign, ad group, or the even whole account. You can even choose to export the data from your current view.

This allows you to export everything from the current window in AdWords Editor.

Apply Bulk Changes

You can even make bulk changes to keyword bids. If your campaigns are limited by budget, you may want to consider reducing your keyword bids to help prolong your ads to show for longer periods of the day.

From the Advanced Change function as shown below, switch over to Change bids, and from there you can increase or decrease keyword bids by a chosen percent, or even raise bids to meet top of page one bid estimates

Sniff Out Duplicate Keywords

Duplicate keywords can significantly harm the performance of your campaigns, and as you account becomes bigger and more complex, there’s an ever greater chance of this occurring.

They can impact your keyword Quality Scores, and if you’re competing against yourself for particular keywords, you will drive up your own cost per clicks. This is, of course, counter productive towards your efforts to run cost effective campaigns.

All you need to do is select Find duplicate keywords under Tools, and it will return with all duplicate keywords. Just make sure to select the option to scan the whole account. It’s that easy!

Advanced search

Finally, it’s worth mentioning the Editor’s advanced search feature. By clicking on the magnifying glass icon in the search bar on the top, you can apply multiple search criteria, and view filters to pinpoint opportunities to improve the efficiency of your campaigns.

This is particularly useful if you want to perform a search on keywords with a Quality Score of 6 or below. From there, you can start reducing your average cost per clicks by addressing the quality of landing pages, ad text and so on:

Short conclusion

Using Adwords editor can help you make changes to your account much faster and easier. Again, it’s a FREE desktop application tool

One format, called Discovery ads, offers suggested content in the form of a clickable image and text ads for the feed under the search box in the Google mobile app, in Gmail under the social and promotions tabs, and in the YouTube home feed.

The term “discovery,” specifically refers to the fact that you don’t need to enter a query at that time, in order to see the segment-targeted ad.

Seventy percent of users have indicated to Google that they are very interested in coming across new content without active effort.

What you need to know about Discovery Ads:

They are immersive and interactive

In addition to Display, Shopping, and YouTube, Google advertisers will now have yet another way to show prospects tangible images, and tell visual stories about their products.

Advertisers who leverage Discovery ads will have the ability to showcase a single image of their product or service, or multiple images in a swipeable carousel format.

Machine learning plays a important role

When advertisers go to set up Discovery ads, they’ll enter one landing page URL, at least one image, a logo, and up to five headlines and five descriptions.

From there, Google will use machine learning to serve the best combinations of your headlines, descriptions, and image creative to your prospects—across the best-performing placements (which we’ll get into in a second).

Google Discover is now ready for ads

Speaking of placements—where will Discovery ads live?

The reason Discovery ads are going to be important for Google is that it gives them a wholly unique way to monetize Google Discover, which replaced Google Feed just last year.

Google introduced Discover to contend with three fundamental shifts in search behavior—the shift from answers to journeys, from queries to the queryless, and from the text-based to the visually-inspiring.

Reach goes beyond Discover

Speaking of reach: It’s not just Discover’s 800 million global users that advertisers will have access to when they leverage Discovery ads.

They’ll also be able to serve Discovery ads on YouTube’s mobile home feed, and in Gmail’s social and promotions tabs.

New campaign type, same targeting

Another indicator that Discovery ads are going to be important for Google? It has its own campaign type. So you’ll need to run a Discovery campaign if you want to use Discovery ads.

Again, this is a pretty plug and play process—after selecting your campaign type, you’re merely uploading and inputting your creative. Google handles optimization and delivery of your ads across multiple placements.

Short conclusion

Discovery campaigns highlight was in which Google is taking advantage of its multiple properties and host of audience data to automate ad targeting and serving across its ecosystem.

It’s also an indication of Google looking beyond search intent to cover the entire funnel.

As we all know, the mobile environment is becoming more important, and mobile PPC is a topic companies are starting to pay more attention to. At this point, there’s still a lot of low-hanging fruit out there.

Take the Time to Customize Your Mobile PPC Ads

Doing so is incredibly beneficial.

How do you do it?

First, define your mobile value proposition and how that messaging will vary from general desktop ads experience.

For example, a mobile ad might include mobile ordering, store locator, connect with customer service, apps/games, mobile appointments, etc.

Second, whenever there is a mobile device preference box to select for an ad or ad extension – take it! This means serving the ads on mobile will be given preference. If this isn’t immediately visible, look under “advanced options”.

AdWords Mobile PPC Best Practices

We’ve analyzed millions in AdWords spend and compiled this list of mobile AdWords best practices based on the top performers across industries:

• Optimize for a mobile experience from start to finish. Research shows that 57% of consumers will not recommend a brand with a bad mobile site and 40% will move on to a competitor after a bad mobile experience. Maximize your mobile PPC ROI by delivering the mobile experience they expect.
• Enable Ad Extensions across your campaigns. Ad extensions are simple to set up, free to display and can have a huge impact on your paid search performance.
• Use action-oriented keywords to help users make a decision quickly. Broad match keywords perform well in mobile.
• Incentivize mobile searchers with offers and calls to action that speak specifically to mobile users.

Mobile Searchers are Easily Distracted

Sure, they are distracted, as a mobile user may be walking down the street, riding in his or her car, or waiting in line at the bank.

This means you need to use a strong call to action to hold attention and provide value from the moment a user sets his or her eyes on your ad.

Strategy Tip: Use attribution and analytics to understand when a user leaves his or her device and revisits your site or converts on a different device.

Mobile Searchers are Out and About

The real beauty of PPC is how you can custom fit your ads to the location of the searcher, based on his or her IP address.

And now with the emergence of mobile devices, you can customize ads based on the user’s GPS and Wi-Fi, going far beyond relying on Internet service providers for targeting.

If you are a local business, this is the perfect opportunity to use location extensions and callout extensions

Short conclusion

Three important sentences to remember:

• You want to do better mobile
• Be better at driving people from mobile to store
• Be better at driving people from mobile to call

The simpliest definition of a conversion rate is: A conversion rate is the percentage of prospects or leads that take a desired specific action.

The higher the percentage of people that take that action, the higher the rate. Thus, a this metric is a helpful way to gauge how a campaign, website or business is performing. Easy, right?

Let’s say you have people visiting your online shop and you want them to buy your products. The percentage of those visitors who end up buying from you is your online sales conversion rate.

Measuring Conversion Rates

Ultimately, you want people to be converting in the areas that actually benefit you, but you won’t really know what those areas are until you start tracking your site as a whole.

So, the first thing you’ll want to do is look to see what actions (conversions) are currently taking place on your site, and then determine what actions you want to take place on your site and make changes to connect the two together.

You’ll want to look for total number of unique visitors (called “Users” in Google Analytics) as well as the number of actions taken in a specific area – like overall sales in the month of July, or the number of new subscribers to your newsletter.

Then, divide and multiply: Conversions / Users * 100 = Conversion Rate

For example, if you had 125 new orders in July, and 8,000 unique site visitors for that month, your total conversion rate for sales would be roughly 1.5%.

It Depends on … What Industry You’re in

Look at any compilation of conversion data across industries and you’ll notice that some kinds of businesses are just luckier than others.

If you’re selling products online, you’ll have better luck selling software than sporting goods.

There’s no one all-encompassing source of conversion rate data for every industry. It’s worth doing a quick search for averages in your niche if only to give you a sense of what’s realistic.

But if you can’t find that data, I’d recommend not sweating it. Industry averages hide a ton of variation from business to business.

A brand new T-shirt company is likely to have different conversion rate patterns than a major department store’s site, which will have different conversion rates than a small but established clothing shop with a cult following.

Short conclusion

If you do notice your business is actually experiencing low conversion rates, you know it’s time for action. Your goal is to have more visitors taking your desired action.

That way you can have more leads, more sales, more revenue – and, hopefully, increase your profit margin. Do not hesitate to reach out to us if your business needs help increasing its conversion rates.

Making headlines in all significant and popular tech-magazines and journals, Artificial Intelligence (AI) is already the buzzword in the world of evolving technologies.

Artificial intelligence isn’t just creating ads, though commercially available platforms exist that use AI to create ads without human involvement.

No, AI is transforming what is possible in the world of advertising at every level, from ad creation to audience targeting to ad buying.

Brands today are beginning to use commercially available artificial intelligence to intelligently identify and segment audiences, build ad creative, test variations, improve performance, and optimize spend—automatically, in real-time, and at scale.

What Is AI for Advertising?

The term “artificial intelligence” means different things to different people, and covers a lot of technologies.

AI is an umbrella term that generally describes technologies like: machine learning, computer vision, natural language generation, and dozens of others.

The biggest point to understand is that AI excels at analyzing enormous sets of data better than humans and at scale.

The most advanced AI learns from this data and improves its analysis, predictions, and recommendations over time.

Challenges With Digital Advertising

AI has all the potentials to impact the future of the multi-billion dollars Advertising Industry. To understand what AI can do, let’s quickly take a look at the pertinent challenges facing the Advertising Industry Today.

How Artificial Intelligence Can Help Overcome  Challenges in digital marketing

Artificial Intelligence will eliminate the loopholes in the existing digital advertising processes. AI relies on data-driven accumulated information; the AI based neural networks are capable of experience-based self-learning.

This means that with more interaction or repeated application they evolve to become better and better.

Short conclusion

It is time to move away from seeing AI as a substitute for humans and instead look further ahead to the value it can drive in enabling new goods, services and innovations.

Google AMP is a framework developed by the search engine giant to help designers create incredibly quick-loading mobile web pages that use around ten times less data than average. The framework consists of three basic parts:

AMP HTML

AMP HTML is a stripped-down, basic version of what we recognize as hypertext markup language — the system of tags, numbers, and letters used to build the foundation of most web pages.

AMP JavaScript

To ensure speedy load times for all, Google restricted the use of author-written, and third-party JavaScript within the AMP framework.

AMP CDN

The AMP CDN (content delivery network) is an optional component of the project that allows creators to store a cached version of their web page on Google’s servers.

That cached version is a digital snapshot of the page that contains all its data in one place.

Why Speed Matters

As traffic from mobile users has grown (and now surpasses traffic from desktops), Google has made several significant pivots.

The most significant change was when Google’s search algorithm shifted to what’s often referred to as the “Mobile First Index.”

This started back in early 2018. One primary effect of rolling out the mobile-first index was that “beginning in July 2018, content that is slow-loading may perform less well for both desktop and mobile searchers.”

Even before the mobile-first index began rolling out, Google was implementing other ways to deliver a better experience for mobile users. Namely, it was focusing on speed.

Mobile users demand speed above anything else. If a page doesn’t load within 3 seconds or less, most mobile users will bounce.

AMPHTML ads on AMP pages deliver even better ROI

An AMPHTML ad delivered to an AMP page has better performance compared to the same ad running on a regular web page.

This is due to the inherent design of AMPHTML ads outlined here, giving advertisers better click through rates and viewability.

AMP pages have seen steady growth over the past few years and advertisers now have access to well over 1 billion impressions/day worth of premium (from a user experience & ad experience standpoint) inventory.

In addition, more than 35 percent of ads served to AMP pages are already AMPHTML ads.

How ALP affects post-click landing pages and post-click landing page ads

AMP-constructed post-click landing pages are designed with the framework to continue the streamlined mobile experience that users initiate when clicking on a mobile AMP ad.

“Making experiences fast is the first step, but they also need to be really well integrated into their environments into the context that they sit in,” said Muret of the new ALP program.

“If ads are not integrated well it can lead to ad blindness, or worse, annoyance and ad blocking. As an industry we need to come together and think about creating better ads for all of our users.”

Short conclusion

Slow load times have long been connected with lost opportunities and revenue. If estimates from Google are correct, and a boost in load time from 19 seconds to 5 can double revenue, you’d be foolish not to at least try AMP.

Additionally, AMP pages show up at the top of search results by default. Although Google has explicitly stated that AMP isn’t a ranking factor in its algorithm, the positioning of AMP pages on SERPs provides a nice boost in discoverability.

Click fraud is one of the most talked about issues affecting advertisers on Google and other Pay Per Click (PPC) platforms.

What is Click Fraud?

Click fraud is a black-hat technique of falsely inflating the number of clicks on a pay-per-click ad. Click fraud is usually driven by one of two incentives:

• Advertisers are trying to sabotage their competitors by driving up their costs and meeting their budget caps early on in the day
• Ad publishers are clicking on the ads displayed on their own sites to generate more revenue for themselves.

About invalid clicks Google said:

„Clicks on ads that Google considers to be illegitimate, such as unintentional clicks or clicks resulting from malicious software.

• Here are just a few examples of what Google may consider to be invalid clicks:

• manual clicks intended to increase your advertising costs or to increase profits for website owners hosting your ads
• clicks by automated clicking tools, robots or other deceptive software
• extraneous clicks that provide no value to the advertiser, such as the second click of a double-click
• Each click on an ad is examined by our system, and Google has sophisticated systems to identify invalid clicks and impressions and remove them from your account data.
• When Google determines that clicks are invalid, we try to automatically filter them from your reports and payments so that you’re not charged for those clicks. If we find that invalid clicks have escaped automatic detection, you may be eligible to receive a credit for those clicks. These credits are called “invalid activity” adjustments.“

Three main types of click fraud:

1. Manual Clicks to Increase Your Ad Costs

These types of clicks are usually done by a competitor looking to drain your ad budget.

Let’s say you are ranking higher than your competitor in PPC search results. Your competitor doesn’t like it, clicks on your ads (a lot) to drive up your costs and, eventually, drive them so high that you can’t afford to advertise for those search terms anymore.

2. Manual Clicks to Increase Publisher Profits

If your PPC campaign is running on the Google Display Network, you could be open to this type of click fraud.

Each time an ad running on your campaign being hosted by a third party website is clicked, they earn a cut.

3. Automated Clicks Using Software

Hackers have built sophisticated click fraud systems that use fake IP addresses and web sessions, sometimes known as “bot farms.”

Automatic click fraud is often targeted through data stored in cookies. Bots will look at demographic information, browser histories, past purchases and many other data points before targeting a certain ad.

What Are Search Engines Doing About It?

For years, search engines have been getting a lot of flak for not going the extra mile to identify and quash click fraud. This suspicion is not unwarranted.

Remember, regardless of whether a click is malicious or not, it’s generating dough for the search engine displaying it.

So, to uphold their reputations (and put weary advertisers’ minds at rest), all of the major ad platforms have designated their very own task forces to take on click fraud.

Short conclusion

Google continues to improve its fraud detection capabilities and with help from advertisers this problem can be minimized.