Here’s a look at what the new Optimization Score means for your Google Ads accounts and how much you should read into it.

Your Optimization Score is an estimate of your performance based on Google’s recommendations.

Scores range between 0% and 100% depending on your implementation of these suggestions.

Your score is calculated on several factors

Google’s optimization support page notes that the score is calculated in real-time and is based on a number of different factors.

Considerations in the optimization score include:

• Statistics, settings, and the status of your account and campaigns
• Relevant impact of available recommendations
• Recent recommendations history
• Trends in the ads ecosystem

Types of Google Ads Optimization

Bid optimization – Increase CTR or lower CPA

Bid optimization involves adjusting your bids to maximize your results. Often advertisers will raise their bids to improve their Ad Rank, which in turn will increase their click-through rate (CTR), and potentially increase conversions.

Ad copy optimization – Automatic rotation vs. even rotation

Ad groups exist to allow you to test and improve your ad copy. One of the simplest ways to optimize your ad copy is through ad rotation. By default, Google always wants to enter the ad that gets the most clicks in the ad auction.

Landing page optimization – Better landing page experience = more conversions

Landing page optimization is one of the most overlooked adjustments an advertiser can make. Creating unique landing pages for each ad group allows advertisers to match their landing page copy to their ads and keywords.

Keyword match type optimization – Match types for each stage of the keyword life cycle

Keywords are the fuel that powers Google Ads. But finding cost-effective keywords to advertise on can be hard. One of the best ways to optimize your keywords selection is to test match types.

Short conclusion

While Google continues to make its ad platform more user-friendly through visual representations of performance (i.e. optimization score), maximizing your ads performance requires a hands-on approach in key areas of a successful ad campaign.

Instagram is enhancing its shopping features and brands are ready to embrace the change.

There are more than 25 million businesses on Instagram and a growing, engaged audience that seems eager to test new features in the app. Instagram Shopping will no doubt be a powerful tool for brands.

Shopping gets more personalized

It’s easier now to discover new products by visiting the Explore section. Instagram will deliver a personalized selection of products for each user to tailor the shopping experience based on users’ interests.

The section was previously used to discover relevant posts and accounts to follow so it now adds the shopping element to its existing features.

Shopping tags arrive in Stories

An even more exciting announcement came from Instagram informing us that Shopping in Stories is now rolling out globally.

The testing started in June but now businesses in 46 countries will be able to add shopping features to their Stories.

What makes this news exciting? Instagram Stories are currently really engaging, with more than 400 million active users on a daily basis.

Where Can You Learn More About Instagram Shopping?

This is huge news for just about any online business. You’ve always been able to post your products in creative ways, but most of the time you would have to share a link in the comments or tell people to click the profile link.

Lots of news is coming out about the Instagram Shopping tool, but the best place to learn more is at the actual Instagram business page.

They have several videos and screenshots for you to see the tool in action, and you can follow along for additional updates if you want.

What do these changes mean for marketers?

Instagram is currently one of the most engaging social platforms for users. Brands cannot ignore its popularity and the launch of interesting shopping features can make it even more appealing.

There are currently more than 25 million businesses on Instagram while more people use social media as part of their decision-making process.

Short conclusion

Fortunately for Instagram, they hold a significant share of the younger market – particularly those 16 and over, the platform’s key target audience – and the brand name to boot.

It will be interesting to see how the app will be deployed separately or if it will be integrated into Instagram’s main app, like IGTV earlier this year.

Some bloggers consistently write awesome content. Everything they create is of the highest quality. Does that mean that these bloggers never have to clean up their website?

Well, we have some bad news… Even if your content is really great, you could still have too much of it.

Why too much content can be a problem?

If you are writing about a similar topic a lot, you’ll have a bigger chance to suffer from keyword cannibalization. If you focus your articles on the same topics and the same keywords, you’ll actually be competing with your own content.

Google will show one or two results from the same domain in the search results.

Combining content

In order to come up with your message, you could try to phrase a question which your new text should resolve. We refer to such a question as the central question of a text.

The new blog post will be the answer to your central question. It could be that your new article will have the same message as one of the articles you’re planning to combine.

It could also be a new (broader) message. Make sure to take some time to think about it.

Great content no longer relies on heavy word count

Today, consumers don’t look for intensive and long-form articles. They look for an experience. Whether that experience comes in 500 words or 1500 words, great content doesn’t depend on a word count.

Great content does depend on relevance to the reader. Certainly long-form content has its place in a content marketing plan, depending on your business goals and audience – but only when backed by a strategy and implemented workflow.

Attention spans are shrinking

Hello, Millennials! That’s right, we’re talking to you. The rising generation doesn’t have the want, nor the spare selfie time, to read long, irrelevant articles.

Keep in mind that majority of digital content engagement is through the smartphone. No one likes strolling for a decade on a small screen.

Now Gen Z – the generation that will challenge and ultimately change the content game – is another factor to consider when thinking of content curation.

If Millennials weren’t engaged before, the following generation is the true test on how long you can keep an audience on your page.

Short conclusion

is there actually a thing as too much content? The quick conclusion: No, if you wisely space it out. People want to see the inner workings of your business.

They want to see the faces behind it. They crave your stories, you need only come up with bright ideas to share and versatile ways to present them.

Your company already has singular tales and offerings, now you simply need to share them generously and diversely.

Beginning in a couple weeks, you’ll no longer be able to add Target Search Page Location or Target Outranking Share as automated bidding strategies.

In the coming months, if you still have campaigns using these strategies, Google Ads will automatically migrate them to Target Impression Share instead.

So, why is Google sunsetting two automated strategies in favor of Target Impression Share? Whereas Target Search Page Location and Target Outranking Share give you the option of manually setting bids—and letting Google Ads adjust them as need be—Target Impression Share is almost completely automated.

Once you select your desired part of the SERP and an impression share goal, you hand over the reins. There are no manual bids. This decision is likely due to Google’s increasing emphasis on machine learning and auction-time bidding.

New inventory for Showcase Shopping ads

Showcase Shopping ads were first introduced for search in 2016 and are intended to offer retailers the opportunity “showcase” a curated list products responsive to non-branded searches such as “summer dresses” or “outdoor furniture.”

Google previously said that up to 40% of queries are for these broad product-category searches.

The announcement extends Showcase Shopping ads to Google Images, the Discover feed, and YouTube feed. The latter will roll out in the near future.

A recent study shows that Google is the first place US shoppers go to discover or find a new brand or product,” Google said in its announcement.

But shoppers aren’t just doing their searches on Google.com. We’ve seen that 50 percent of online shoppers said images of the product inspired them to purchase, and increasingly, they’re turning to Google Images.

App deep linking and reporting for Google Ads

Google is also implementing app deep linking from Google Ads, together with improved reporting. If a user has the marketer’s app installed they’ll be taken into that app from Search, Shopping or Display campaigns.

That enables a personalized and expedited shopping and checkout process. That compares with the friction that could be involved with an anonymous mobile web experience requiring a customer log in or entering payment credentials again.

Short conclusion

This is yet another step in Google’s march to expand the range of tasks its users can complete directly on the SERP. Will it have an adverse effect on your site traffic? Maybe.

But if it boosts the conversion rate of your Google My Business listing—and saves potential customers the headache of figuring out your website—we’d call that a worthwhile trade-off.

Social media is a valuable tool for small and large businesses. It can be used to build your brand’s reputation, create loyal customers and even increase sales.

Check out these five tips for making the most of your social media presence and using it to drive sales.

Know your audience and potential customers.

The first step to creating successful social media campaigns is understanding your target audience and meeting them where they live.

Reach them with your brand message on the platforms that they are already on.

It’s important to know what platforms your audience is using and focus on those channels. Instead of using your resources and time building multiple accounts, focus on just a couple of platforms.

Target true engagement

Cheating the system to encourage engagement has been a popular social tactic for some time, with brands sharing posts that suggest users simply “tag a friend in the comments below” to rack up interaction figures without actually creating a conversation.

But algorithms are getting smarter, and engagement bait isn’t going to cut it this year as platforms crack down on spammy systems for garnering likes and shares.

With organic reach declining and more businesses upping their social ad spend, content needs to be truly interesting and engaging so that followers, and wider audiences, can’t help but get involved.

Work with micro-influencers

On the theme of true engagement, it’s no surprise that micro-influencers continue to win ground over their more celebrity-like counterparts.

Aside from budget benefits, in that micro-influencers often work on a gifting basis or simply have much lower fees than the big names, research continues to show that their audiences are more highly engaged and can be more niche-specific than all-singing, all-dancing social media stars.

Create Great Content But Don’t Make It Sound Salesy Or Pushy

While prioritizing on quality over quantity sounds obvious, most digital marketers still get it wrong. Social media users are very savvy. If you create mediocre content, you will not get the engagement you’re looking for.

As you create content, do not make it sound too pushy or salesy. You must consider that social channels are not solely meant for buying and selling. The majority of people are still there to socialize virtually.

Paid ads

Posting frequently to social media and replying to comments alone is not enough to drive sales. The most suitable strategy for making the most of your social accounts is via paid ads.

While organic reach on social channels goes on dropping, paid media helps you reach and boost your audiences quickly.

Every social media channel has advertising abilities. Facebook, for instance, features extensive targeting tools. This makes it really easy for businesses to develop successful campaigns.

Short conclusion

“Cutting through the noise” when every platform is now so noisy can feel like an impossible task, but with niche targeting and a trustworthy, relatable approach, it can be done.

Instead of throwing the net as wide as possible, marketers should take the time to look through detailed insights and get a feel for the small nuances of different sections of their audience.

Even if you’re just beginning to dip your toes into the waters, there are some fantastic free AdWords scripts out there that any account manager can copy/paste, tweak slightly, and start using in their accounts right away, without any coding experience!

How to setup AdWords Script

First, how do you set up a script in your AdWords account?

Navigate to the Bulk Operations section of your account, then to the Scripts section:

Select +Script:

Next, either copy/paste a pre-written script OR (advanced) try writing your own!

Give your script a name.

Authorize your script by selecting “Authorize Now.”

ALWAYS Preview the script before running.

Which scripts to create:

Script 1 – Quality Score tracker script

Quality Score is an incredibly valuable health metric that helps you understand how Google evaluates the relevancy of your keywords and ads within your account.

Making strategic changes to keyword organization, landing page experience, or ad copy messaging can lead to increases in Quality Score and correlating decreases in actual cost per click.

Script 2 – Pause keyword with 0 impressions script

In the chaos of launching new campaigns, expanding keyword sets, and adjusting bids frequently to hit performance goals, there’s inevitably keywords in your account that don’t generate a single impression.

Rather than keeping them around and taking up space, this script can be schedule on a monthly or quarterly basis to trim out the dead weight. There’s also an option to edit the script to either pause or delete these keywords.

Script 3 – Broken URL scripts

Nobody wants to spend all their time checking URLs to make sure they’re working properly. But in certain industries, especially e-Commerce, URLs can get updated frequently, therefore causing old URLs to 404 or break.

In order to catch these issues before you discover it by your conversion volume unexpectedly tanking, you can use an automated AdWords Script to check that URL links from your ads or keywords are loading properly.

The script will also apply a “linked_checked” label to confirm which URLs have been reviewed.

Short conclusion

Scripts can be run up to once an hour.

Always aim for the shortest path to your destination when writing scripts. Google has made this easier to do in many ways. Also, never run a script without Previewing it first.

It’s difficult to stress just how important the concept of search intent is to SEO. I’m not exaggerating when I say that if you want to rank in 2019, understanding and creating content with search intent in mind is critical.

Algorithm updates from Google, innovations in the way we search (mobile, voice search, etc.), and evolving user behavior all keep us on our toes as SEOs.

The dynamic nature of our industry requires adaptable strategies and ongoing learning to be successful.

However, we can’t become so wrapped up in chasing new strategies and advanced tactics that we overlook fundamental SEO principles.

What is Search Intent?

When it comes to your website, organic search visits are critical and should be one of your top sources of traffic.

Given that Google sees 15% of its daily searches for the first time, it uses RankBrain. This is a machine-learning algorithm Google uses to assess the relevance of sites and provide its searchers with only the most valuable, relevant results.

Why is it important?

Today, coupled with your keywords, Google also uses over 200 additional factors when ranking pages on your site, such as content length, freshness, relevance, security, domain authority, backlinks, and more.

In other words, Google observes how user-friendly your site is: how it engages your potential customers, and whether or not it satisfies their search query.

It refers to its combination of keywords and user experience signals as latent semantic indexing — analyzing the intent behind the search, rather than just the exact phrasing.

How to understand your customer’s search intent

Traditionally, to target relevant keywords, marketers used keyword research tools like Google Keyword Planner or Moz Keyword Explorer.

To understand why your customers entered the search terms they chose, you need to use some additional resources. Here are a few powerful options you may like to try out:

• Buzzsumo lets you identify trending topics.
• Answer the Public has a massive database of Google and Bing searches that lets it predict what searchers will ask next.
• Google Trends lets you identify the hottest topics in your niche and country. You can even compare two keywords to see which one is more popular among your audiences.
• Social networks serve as individual search engines. You can use them to find out what your customers are searching for. Most importantly, using social media listening tools, you can track discussions and learn more about the questions people ask and the topics they discuss.

Short conclusion

We assume that users know exactly what they want to do, but mobile and voice search have introduced a new dynamic to our daily lives and shape our day-to-day decisions in a way like no other.

Have you ever wanted to test a new bidding strategy, setting, or other element of your campaign with a fixed budget or duration?

Campaign drafts and experiments in Google Ads let advertisers do just that.

Why use experiments over traditional ad rotation or period comparisons?

If you’ve ever tested landing pages, setting changes, or advanced bid adjustments in a campaign, you may have done a period test or used Google’s ad rotation settings to give you a clean comparison.

While these strategies let you quickly test a change on the fly, they often lead to inaccurate data, poor performance, or lots of manual analysis.

Google said about campaign drafts and experiments:

“Drafts and experiments let you propose and test changes to your Search and Display Network campaigns. You can use drafts to prepare multiple changes to a campaign.

From there, you can either apply your draft’s changes back to the original campaign or use your draft to create an experiment.

Experiments help you measure your results to understand the impact of your changes before you apply them to a campaign.”

You can use Drafts and Experiments for any Search and Display Network campaign to test different settings like:

• Target CPA
• Bid strategies (automated bidding strategies)
• Device settings
• Location adjustments
• Ad extensions
• Negative keywords
• Structural campaign changes

Display & Remarketing targeting:

• Remarketing audiences
• Display interests
• Display placements
• Display topics

Tests that will impact your quality score and you will want to allow additional time to build up history and quality score:

• Ad copy
• Ad landing pages
• Ad copy display paths
• Keyword changes or additions

How to Use Drafts in AdWords Experiments

Drafts are often created to show clients or bosses how potential changes will impact a campaign.

For example, if you’re tasked with updating the strategy of an existing campaign, you can use drafts to show how changing different features will impact the overall result.

From there, drafts can then be applied to an experiment or the actual campaign.

How to Use AdWords Experiments

The experiment functions just like a campaign.

First, you set how long you would like the experiment to run and choose how much of the original campaign’s budget and traffic you’d like to use on it.

Then, when a prospect lands on a search page, Google will randomly whether your experiment or actual campaign appears, based on the split you selected.

Throughout the AdWords experiment advertisers can monitor results on their performance scorecard.

Short conclusion

Don’t end the experiment early because you think you already know the victor. Even if the experiment says it has a statistically significant result, you should always wait for the time on the experiment to finish before making a judgement.

The reason for this is long, complicated and very mathsy. But if you do so, you bias the results and increase the likelihood of a false positive in your experiment.

Google is not just the largest search engine, with billions of queries each month. It also powers a large portion of the internet’s display ads through the Google Display Network.

According to SEMrush, the Google Display Network:

• Serves ads across roughly 2 million websites and 650,000 apps.
• Includes 65 of Comscore’s top 100 sites.
• Reaches 210 million unique monthly U.S. users and 90 percent of global internet users.

Ad Personalization Profile

Google does most of its tracking through a user’s account. If you’re logged in on your phone or browser, Google is accumulating a lot of data. And it’s willing to show you.

To see what Google believes you’re interested in, navigate to Ad Settings. Once logged in, you’ll see a page like this.

Data questions

With so many avenues for data collection, Google rapidly acquired a good deal of information on each user. This begs the question: what is the company doing with all this data?

And the answer circles back to its core monetization stream, and the personalization of ads, also known as targeted advertising.

This is particularly valuable, as rather than just showing random adverts to random folks, as was traditionally done with television, radio and print advertising, Google can instead target ads at specific users.

It all starts with search

Google’s data collection begins with its search engine, as this keeps track of the topics you search for. The company then shows adverts relevant to those searches, and furthermore keeps track of which ads users click on to gauge interest, and therefore further target ads.

Google then collates a whole list of topics that are relevant to the particular individual.

Managing Your Data

While it collects a lot of data about you, Google is entirely transparent about it. You can view that data at “My Google Activity” The page provides detail about what Google has recorded.

For me, it includes searches I performed while using Gmail as well as websites I visited with GDN ads, which feed data back to Google.

It’s eye-opening to see how much is here, especially if you’re using an Android-based phone.

Short conclusion

In summary, Google collects a lot of data to improve targeting — and results — for its advertisers. At the end of the day, Google is a publicly-traded company that is trying to earn a profit for its shareholders.

Do you ever wonder if you have big gaps in your Google Ads campaigns that are costing you money?

That’s because Google Ads (previously called Adwords) is the most complicated (and sophisticated) advertising platform in the world.

There are lots of hidden settings and buried features that are wasting your money and keeping you from having the most profitable campaigns.

What are the most common mistakes?

Setting&Forgetting

It takes a lot of effort to get the campaigns set up – from keyword research to ad copy, to landing pages, tracking, and more.

It’s easy to think the job is done after your campaign is up and running, but that’s just the beginning!

Daily checkups are necessary to see if anything strange is going on – you ARE spending money daily after all.

Not using geographic targeting

Geographic targeting (also called “geo-targeting”) lets you refine your ads to a specific geographic area. This is especially helpful for small businesses that only want to attract customers within a certain radius of their brick-and-mortar location.

It’s also handy for worldwide corporations that want to funnel their budget into one particular country.

Forgetting negative keywords

Negative keywords are certain terms that you don’t want to trigger your ads. This helpful for broad and phrase match keywords where certain words could change the entire meaning of a keyword.

For example, if you’re selling men’s running shoes, you can add the negative keyword “women’s running shoes” to make sure those searches don’t trigger your ad.

That way, you don’t show up for an ad that you don’t want, and the user doesn’t get irrelevant results. It’s a win-win!

Using too many keywords per ad group

When you use too many keywords per ad group, your ads can’t be specific enough to get a good click-through rate.

Instead, you would want to break these up into different groups and create new ad copy for each keyword.

By doing this, you can match the searcher intent to the right ad, then get them to the right landing page.

Short conclusion

Even if you’re a PPC machine, PPC is constantly shifting ground, with new trends and tools crowding in and competing for your attention.

Stay focused and follow the guidelines above to avoid the most common PPC and performance marketing traps.

Optimize campaigns separately, but look at the bigger picture.