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Custom Labels – the most underrated Google Ads tool?

by Paid Search

When it comes to ecommerce, Google Shopping is a great way to get your products in front of the right people at the right time. At some point however, this can become ineffective so how can you use Google and its tools to grow the volume of sales in a way which works for your business?

Google Shopping allows you to advertise hundreds of thousands of products matching users’ search queries to product attributes within the feed. When dealing with this amount of products, it’s easy to get lost in the structure of shopping campaigns and how to segment them out effectively, especially as Google’s standard subdivisions only really include “Brand” and “Product Category.” Whilst these are great from a top level, they don’t offer the amount of detail or internal insights required to create an effective shopping strategy.

Custom Labels

Custom Labels allow you to group together products in ways which aren’t covered by Google’s own attributes. It provides greater flexibility in subdividing products and setting up the campaigns to work in your favour, based on different scenarios within your business. To do this you have 5 different “custom label” attributes to use, which means that you can mix and match different ones together to be really granular in your targeting. This can be set up in your existing shopping feed by adding the additional fields with the relevant information. 

There are multiple ways that you can segment custom labels out, but here I will touch on five that have worked well in my experience.

1. Stock/Shipping

Many ecommerce businesses will have faced stock and shipping issues, especially during Covid, the aftermath of which could hurt both sales and cash flow. By applying custom labels you can easily split products up into different categories based on their availability and delivery times. You’re then able to increase bids and visibility for products that are in stock and ready to be delivered within that week, and decrease visibility for those that have shipping delays or issues. In addition you can alter ad copy to highlight product availability. This is a great way of maintaining cost effectiveness, whilst also ensuring that customers are happy and aware of stock status.

2. Best Sellers/Worst Sellers

With Performance Max, and previously Smart Shopping, a lot of Google’s algorithms favour the products that sell well and pull back on those that don’t. This is great in the sense that we are getting visibility for best sellers. However, it doesn’t help to grow sales for those that are getting less visibility. By using custom labels you can highlight which are the best selling products and isolate them into their own campaign. This allows the under-serving products to generate more visibility as they are not having to compete against products with higher search volumes. This can be really effective in helping to grow sales within an ecommerce account, as it isn’t always about just pushing the products that you already know sell. 

3. Margins

Margins are crucial to the profitability of a business and it isn’t always the highest priced products that have the best margins. Yet Google will be bidding based on product value which isn’t always the most effective thing to bid towards. Therefore, grouping your products by margins allows you to adjust the ROAS (return on ad spend) of each segment in different campaigns, ensuring your spending is as cost-effective as possible for the business. That means you can have a higher ROAS for lower margin products and lower ROAS for higher margin products, giving the best profitability potential. 

Source: Google Ads

4. Value

If your product range is pretty consistent margin wise, you can group products by value instead. This allows you to really push the higher value products in their own campaign, rather than competing against potentially better selling but lower value products. The result of this can be increased visibility, driving volume and growth of both higher and lower value products.

5. Product Types

If your store has a huge product catalogue, you may want to push one type of product due to weather, seasonality or trends, which can be difficult to do if all of your products are in an automated shopping campaign. Therefore, some businesses could find it beneficial to use custom labels to split products out by product type. This means that the algorithms can learn specific user behaviours and search queries for different products, rather than all products being grouped together which might have completely different user journeys.

Custom Labels Conclusion

All in all, custom labels are a great way to not only segment out products and enable them to serve more effectively, but also to be able to see much more detailed data within the interface. We can now understand and analyse product performance with an extra layer of internal data, using the background information to help guide optimisations and strategy, thereby improving efficiency for both us and our client accounts.

Ask how we can make your shopping ads work harder for you today.

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How Important Is Audience Targeting In Display Advertising?

by Paid Search

Display advertising is an amazing way of getting brand exposure on the internet for a very low price. Ads can be shown on over 2 million websites online, meaning that the reach is massive. Not only that, it’s global. This is an incredible opportunity to generate awareness and drive traffic to your website for a huge amount of users, but how much is too much?

Having this much reach is great in theory but, realistically, how many of these users are going to be engaged with your ads and how many have no relevance to your business whatsoever? This is where audience targeting can come in handy to help make things a lot more granular. 

Types of Audiences

There are many different types of audiences you can use in Google Ads, which can help to hone in on specific users that are most relevant to your business. These include:

Which you use depends on what you’re trying to advertise/achieve. It could be that there are themes the target audiences are interested in, or it could be an age-related product or service. This criteria would then make the decision a lot easier to make. 

Why is this beneficial?

Choosing your audience type allows you to take a chunk of users who are more relevant to your brand and advertise only to these. The result is that you gain a higher percentage of engaged users who are more likely to interact with your business and, therefore, produce a better ROI and a more efficient campaign. 

What are the drawbacks?

There are certain drawbacks to audience targeting. Sometimes human bias can influence the way in which we pick and choose the right audiences for a campaign. You may subconsciously select audiences that aren’t actually the most effective and end up missing out on another portion of potential customers. Additionally, what you think you may know about your audience may not actually be fully accurate, especially when it comes to demographics:

These people are completely different and will have completely different interests and purchasing behaviours, yet are still classed as the same with demographic targeting. So it’s important to take this into consideration.

The other factor to consider is that some segments may convert a lot higher than others but have absolutely no connection or relevance to your business. It’s potentially quite silly to just take this data and run with it, without a little bit of a reality check on whether this makes logical sense.

So what should I do?

The most effective approach would be to use in-market or custom intent, as these are more “intent” based ways of targeting your audiences. These audiences are actively searching for your product or service, giving a much higher level of engagement with the brand. This, again, does limit the potential exposure, so a mixture of display campaigns with different audiences can help to maximise success.

Audience targeting overall

Audience targeting can be great, if taken with a pinch of salt. Google’s algorithms can end up being a lot broader than anticipated and sometimes this data can be generalised. What may look like a solid trend could really just be a coincidence, with someone being categorised in a certain audience list entirely without merit.

My advice would be to not exclusively use specific audiences until actual data has been generated and analysed. The best way of doing this is to use observation targeting setting to gather relevant data on possible audiences, rather than taking the leap and bidding for only specific audiences. There is also a lot more that can go into a display campaign, including placements and topics to help to find the right audience looking at the same types of websites as your target audience. As with most paid ads strategies, do your due diligence and test test test!

We’re happy to talk through our paid advertising services, or any other digital marketing you’re after. Drop us an email today.
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Apps Or No Apps? Do They Work For Display Advertising?

by Lead GenerationPaid Search

Apps are a huge part of everyday life in the 21st century, whether it’s a game or your favourite retailer, everyone is getting on the app bandwagon. But, when it comes to PPC and display advertising, is having mobile application placements beneficial or not?

Display is a great way to generate visibility across millions of different websites and apps. It can boost brand awareness and help to drive leads and/or sales, but there is much debate as to where the best placements are, and what works & what doesn’t.

Websites

Websites are a great way to get visibility. You can get your ads on top quality publications for a very low cost, alongside advertisers who are paying high fees to earn an advertising spot in the same publication. This makes it a really good way of getting in front of your target audience, by choosing websites that they would likely visit whilst also keeping costs down. You can either target specific websites or let the algorithm place ads anywhere on the internet to see what performs best. Users will be passively seeing your ad as they are browsing the internet, which can be good for brand recall & for bringing users into the funnel when they are ready to convert or learn more about your business. The thing to be careful of here is making sure that the ad copy of your display ads is contextual. These ads can sometimes embed into articles and it’s important that the user doesn’t confuse the ad as being related to the article/website itself. There is also brand protection to think of too; if there are any inappropriate/controversial websites that you don’t want your brand to be associated with, make sure to exclude these from the start. 

Mobile Apps

Mobile app placements are slightly different in that they appear when a user is interacting with an app. As apps are typically used on smaller devices, it can mean that the ad takes over the whole of the user’s screen rather than just being passively visible. The result is ads that then interfere with the user’s experience, interrupt gameplay or distract them from what they are doing. This can be annoying for the user & cause negative connotations towards the brand. It can also mean they click the ad as a way to remove it from their screen, thereby costing you money for zero return. However, in some instances, this can actually be perceived in a good way. Advertising other apps on active apps may mean your user is more likely to engage. For example, if a user is playing a game and you are advertising another game, the user is a lot more likely to respond to that than they are to an unconnected website. That’s because you know that the user plays games on apps, and this is exactly your target market.

YouTube

Like with websites, YouTube allows for passive reach across a wide range of users as they are browsing YouTube. The difference with YouTube is that there are different types of placements that can all be interpreted differently by users; some appear at the top of search results, some overlay the video & some appear down the side of a video. The ones in search results & down the side of the video may work much like website placements, creating brand visibility without interrupting the user’s experience. The one to watch out for is the overlay format, this may come across as intrusive by some users and, as I’m sure many of us can agree, ads when watching videos can get extremely irritating. 

Final Thoughts

All in all, there are positives and negatives to the different placements on the display network. It really is down to what you are advertising, and to understanding the best possible placements that will get your business in front of the most engaged users. As with everything in paid search, experiment, analyse the data & use that to help drive your decisions.

Contact us for more information or help setting up your in-app display ads  

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Life After Expanded Text Ads

by Paid Search

The shift to RSAs from ETAs is an interesting one. I imagine some marketers will be sceptical as is the case with any sudden and uncontrollable change made by Google. However, the results we have seen for our clients have led to an increase in click through rates (CTR) and conversion rates (CVR), and a decrease in costs per acquisition (CPA) across the board, so there are clearly benefits to the change.

With Google utilising machine learning more and more, this was an inevitable change and a natural next step in today’s world of automation. But, as with anything, there are benefits and drawbacks to the change, which we’ll go through below.

The Positives

There are many benefits to RSAs; it allows for real-time testing instead of having to manually set up and analyse A/B testing of ad copy. This happens automatically through RSAs, with around 43,680 different combinations thanks to the increased number of headlines and descriptions. Marketers therefore save time and resources otherwise spent setting these up and having to analyse the data manually. It also means that Google can use auction time insights and signals to match relevant copy to the intent of the users’ query, a previously more static element in ETAs which now gives the user a much more relevant ad than we could manually create.

The Drawbacks

The downsides to RSAs are related to control and data visibility. With Google creating these combinations automatically, you don’t actually have the control to decide exactly what gets seen by the user for each search. This means that the choice in headlines and descriptions has to be carefully selected so that each works with the rest. Google also gives limited visibility around the combinations, only highlighting the impressions each has rather than actual performance metrics. It’s a definite downfall, as marketers can find insightful trends from this data that they may have utilised elsewhere.

Ad Asset Combinations

This has now been taken one step further with the announcement of “Ad Assets” taking over what was previously known as “Ad Extensions”. These are now an integral part of campaign set up, and is great if you are the type of person to forget to add these on in the separate part of the interface. This again takes Google’s machine learning approach to the next level, reporting on not only the different combinations of headlines and descriptions, but now including these combinations with different ad assets (extensions) to really understand which work the best together.

This is now a set-in-stone change & expanded text ads can no longer be edited or created. It’s therefore definitely worth getting on board and adopting the best practices to give the highest potential for success with RSAs. Our advice for a successful RSA set up?

  • – Fill in all headline asset spaces with key USPs and features
  • – Create different descriptions to utilise the machine A/B testing 
  • – Pin any assets that you definitely want visible in all ads.

These simple steps are key to getting the most from RSAs and increasing CTR and CVR for your own or your clients’ accounts.

Speak to us about text ads or any other paid advertising for your next campaign

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Performance Max – Everything You Need To Know

by Paid Search

So by now you’ve probably heard about the introduction of Performance Max & the sunsetting on Smart Shopping. Some may be worried about what this means for their campaigns, as we know Google’s changes aren’t always the best in the eyes of an advertiser. However, I’m here to run through what Performance Max is, how it works & how you can get the best out of it. 

What is Performance Max?

Don’t be put off by the name – this isn’t a completely new product. It still acts in the same way as Smart Shopping but takes machine learning and visibility to the next level, incorporating more channels than ever before. This means that advertisers can now reach more customers from just one campaign, letting Google’s machine learning & automation optimise bids & placements that are based around your budgets, goals & conversions. Performance Max is essentially Smart Shopping Plus.

How does it work?

Performance Max is a goal based campaign type that allows users to access a wider range of the Google Network including:

  • • YouTube
  • • Display
  • • Search
  • • Discover
  • • Gmail
  • • Maps
Across_Google_channels.max-1000x1000
Source: Google

Building on the “Standard Shopping” & “Display Remarketing” combination of Smart Shopping, Performance Max also brings new opportunities by adding “Dynamic Search Ads” to the mix. This complements existing Search Keywords within the account but acts as a catch-all to ensure that advertisers are not missing out on any sales.

As I said before, this is a goal based campaign & in honour of its name, the main focus of these campaigns is to drive performance based on the specific conversion goals that you set. 

How do I set a Performance Max campaign up?

Google automates the targeting of Performance Max campaigns based on the information that you provide. Primarily, this is the budget & the campaign goal which gives the constraints to which the campaign needs to adhere to. Performance Max uses asset groups which are a collection of creatives centred on a theme or related to a target audience. Advertisers also need to provide the following creative assets which consist of:

  • • Final URL
  • • Up to 15 Images
  • • Up to 5 Logos
  • • Up to 5 Videos (Google has autocreated videos if you don’t provide any but honestly, if you have the resource, it is definitely worth creating these yourself as the auto-created ones aren’t the best)
  • • Up to 5 Headlines
  • • Up to 5 Long Headlines
  • • Up to 5 Descriptions
  • • Call To Action
  • • Business Name

However, new updates from Google’s Ads Liaison, Ginny Marvin, confirmed that if you connect your Google Merchant Feed but don’t provide any other assets, the campaign will only serve Shopping Ads. So if this is your primary focus & you don’t want to go back to Standard Shopping this could be the answer.

You can also add audience signals to hit the ground running & feed data into the algorithm – this will also be used to continuously inform the algorithms throughout the lifecycle of the campaign. 

Another important upgrade to Performance Max builds on the “New Customer Acquisition” feature of Smart Shopping where you could value new customers higher than returning. In PMax, you can now bid more for new customers or bid only for new customers. This could be a really interesting growth tool for businesses to expand their current customer base more specifically than ever before.

Performance Max also builds on the “Insights” tab of Smart Shopping, taking this further to highlight search themes that are driving conversions – this will give better insights into the trends & patterns within the market. Alongside this, it will also showcase what types of audiences are engaging with the different assets that the ads are showing. This will help you to understand how users are interacting with the ads and you can then use this information to improve & tailor your ads more effectively.

Source: Google

Performance Max continues the drawbacks of Smart Shopping too, with a lack of visibility over channel-specific performance & lack of manual optimisation; especially around the addition of negative keywords & placements. However, Google representatives have explained that this lack of data is to ensure that advertisers are allowing the algorithms to do their job properly. Giving these insights may enable human bias to pull away from certain areas within the campaign, be that channels or placements, but users should be reassured that the campaign’s sole focus is on performance. Basically, the algorithms will be taking into account any areas that aren’t delivering the required results & optimising towards the ones that do. Makes sense when you think of it like that huh?

So what do I do now?

Smart Shopping is being sunsetted in September 2022, therefore you have a bit of time to experiment & see what works for you. My guess would be to wait until the one-click migration tool is live in May. This will allow you to automatically migrate your Smart Shopping campaigns into Performance Max, meaning that there is no potential downtime of the campaigns. Doing it this way also means that Performance Max will be able to use all the historical data from the Smart Shopping campaign resulting in a much shorter learning period. This seems the safest option in both the transition & the speed of performance off the back of the migration. You can of course start testing now, however, this means that you will need to set the campaigns up from scratch which could be a lot more time consuming & leaves more room for human error.

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How to use dynamic features in Google Ads

by Paid Search
Are your ads lacking creativity? Then it’s time to embrace dynamic features in your Google Ads campaigns. In this blog, we cover how you can implement two popular dynamic features into your campaigns – dynamic keyword insertion and countdown timers.

What is dynamic keyword insertion?

Dynamic keyword insertion allows you to automatically update ads with the keywords in your ad group that trigger ads to show. For example, If you are advertising men’s watches you can use the keyword insertion code Headline: Buy {KeyWord: Mens Watches} to automate this advert displaying. Google Ads will try to replace this bracketed section with one of the keywords in your ad group such as “gold men’s watches”, “men’s black watches” & “men’s silver watches”. If the keyword can’t be replaced then it will just use “men’s watches”.

How can you use dynamic keyword insertion for Google Ads campaigns?

If used correctly, dynamic keywords can lead to an improved Click-Through Rate because the ad has been dynamically updated to match a users search enquiry. A user is more likely to click on an ad that closely matches what they are searching for. This is also a useful tactic if you want to target long-tail keywords that have a good search volume. Compile a list of search terms and if there are any that have a good amount of impressions and clicks then you might want to target these using keyword insertion. It is important to ensure that the number of characters doesn’t exceed 30. If you have a campaign for your competitors, it is vital that you do not use dynamic keyword insertion in your ads. Whilst it is legal to bid on your competitors brand term, you cannot use the brand term in your ad copy.

What are countdown timers in Google Ads?

This feature can highlight the end date of a sale and can create a sense of urgency amongst customers. Timers countdown by day, then by the hour, then by the minute. Furthermore, countdown timers can be used to improve the click-through rate of an ad – for more information about how to improve your Ads CTR, read this blog here.

How can you use countdown timers for Google Ads campaigns?

Countdown timers are another great dynamic feature available on Google Ads. they can be used as part of the ad copy and are ideal for e-commerce businesses that want to create excitement around sales. Countdown timers can be created when you create an ad in Google Ads and they are fully customisable. They can be set to a specific time and date for either the time zone where the business is based or where the customer is based, therefore if the retailer sells products worldwide then the timer can be set to different time zones. Note: It is important to make sure that your ad copy allows for the additional 8 characters that the countdown customiser code generates.
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How to spend less time optimising and more time strategising with Scripts

by Paid Search

Paid Media Manager, Anna Simpson, explains how Scripts gave her back precious time and helped her optimise client campaigns

Why strategy is important

We all know that optimising PPC accounts can be extremely time consuming. Tasks like negative keywords, adjusting bids and essentially doing everything that we can to ensure our campaigns are as effective as possible can use up a lot of hours. These long but crucial tasks can sometimes take away from what really matters and what can really make a difference in client accounts – strategy planning. Having a few extra hours to sit down and really look at an account, analyse the role of PPC and align this with the ultimate business goals of your client can make all the difference. Taking a step back and thinking outside the box is an important tool in understanding how to really drive client performance. Sometimes this can be overlooked due to the day-to-day optimisations and not having any spare time to do this essential leg work. This is where I found myself; getting so bogged down in the nitty gritty, I was missing countless opportunities to grow. And then scripts became my saviour.

Shopping Campaigns

I knew years ago that Standard Shopping campaigns in particular, can burn through budgets if optimisations aren’t made regularly. This has long been  a pet hate of mine; there wasn’t an automated way to bulk negative keywords UNLESS the search term included specific keywords that I wanted to keep. Fast forward a few years and I finally found a script that does exactly that (HURRAY!!). The script works by utilising a Google Sheet; you input the campaign name and ad group, and specify which keywords you don’t want to exclude. For example, if I had a Shopping Campaign selling bikes but I was getting a lot of irrelevant search terms for other types of products, I could use this script to add “bike” as a positive keyword. This would then tell the script to exclude any search terms that don’t have the word “bike” in it. Honestly, this script is amazing for anyone with multiple different shopping campaigns; you can be incredibly granular about the keywords that you want to keep and let the script do the rest!

Exact Match Keywords

The second script I’m loving is the Exact Match Close Variant Exclusion. Over the years Google has tried to hide data and steer away from advertisers having as much control as they may have had in the past. A great example of this is the “close variant” search terms that can appear in Exact Match campaigns. These can vary quite dramatically from the original keyword, sometimes not even being relevant at all. In competitive industries where CPC’s can be extremely high, it’s crucial to remain in control over the search terms that ads are appearing for – that’s where this script comes in handy. It will automatically exclude close variant keywords for exact match keywords. There is also an element of control here for quality checks with two variables that can be changed in this script: “Words In Common” and “Edit Distance”. If you set “Words In Common” to true, this tells the script to keep a search term if the keywords and search queries contain any of the same words and make a negative if not. “Edit Distance” allows you to choose a number of characters that can be different from the keyword and tells the script to still keep these search terms and not exclude them. This can be particularly helpful for keeping search terms that just have spelling errors. I like to run this on an hourly basis just to make sure my campaigns are as optimised as possible and not let any sneaky search terms rack up an enormous spend!

Ah, the weather!

Last but not least, the Weather Script. This is beneficial for a lot of our clients, both ecommerce and lead generation, but can be useful in a number of different ways. The script works by analysing weather data from the Met Office and adjusting bids based on the temperature, precipitation and wind that day in certain areas. This can be incredibly helpful for clients that sell well when the weather is sunny, and also for lead generation clients who slow down on days when people are less likely to be sat at computers. This allows highly granular optimisations for external factors that can be ever-changing (especially here in the UK where it can be sunny in the morning and torrential rain by 1pm *eyeroll*). 

So there we have it. These are just 3 of the scripts that help to free up some of my time and allow me to focus on a more holistic view and approach to our PPC strategy. If you would like a copy of these scripts or have any questions on how to implement them, then please feel free to drop me an email.

5 simple lead generation ideas

5 simple lead generation ideas

by Digital PR & Outreach tips
At Cedarwood Digital, we tend to generate most leads for our clients through Google Ads and custom lead capture landing pages. However, there are many other simple ways that we have utilised to successfully generate leads: here are our top 5 recommendations.

Create engaging content

Relevant and engaging content in this digital age remains the best way to get someone’s attention and bring them to your website. What makes content engaging, you may ask? Check out tools like buzzsumo.com or ahrefs.com which show the most shared pieces of content in your field that have gone viral, and get some inspiration from there.  The golden rule for any piece of content, according to entrepreneur Gary Vaynerchuk, is to give value to the reader. Forget about trying to sell your stuff. Put out great content and expect nothing in return. By providing valuable content you establish readers trust in your expertise. This lays a foundation that can lead to a conversation about your product or services. Don’t hesitate to give a lot of value: research shows that posts with 2,400 words get shared the most.

Create “how to” videos

Youtube is the fastest growing online platform by engagement rate, and online video viewership surpassed TV viewership in 2017. More and more people are looking for the right videos to solve their problems. Search queries containing “how to” are growing 33% annually. This creates an ample opportunity to create video content, ranging from how to create pivot tables in Excel, to how to paint your ceiling. You should really think about what expertise you have that could solve a problem for your customers. Again, this is giving unconditional value to build your credibility. As a result of watching your video, a prospect could visit your site and get in touch with you.

Use customer reviews

If you are providing an online platform, no matter how big or small, make sure that you sign up to online review platforms like TrustRadius.com or G2Crowd.com. These reviews will massively boost the visibility and authority of your products and services. Review sites such as these usually have a high rank for many software comparison searches. Backlinks from these sites are also very valuable in terms of SEO. References and referrals are one of the key aspects that influence buying decisions between two similar products. If you ask your happiest clients to contribute to these platforms it will go a long way in terms of building credibility, and prominence of reviews on these platforms has the potential to bring you inbound leads.

Add a quiz or estimate calculator to your website

If you get users to your website, it would then be of value to have an interactive tool available. There you could ask them a few questions and dependent on the subject area, provide them with an answer which will be of interest or value to them. This is a great way to capture prospect emails and generate engagement, literally. Another example is the lead capture form on Airsorted, a service for Airbnb hosts. On their website, users need to enter their postcode and number of bedrooms to get an estimate of much money their property could earn on Airbnb, whilst providing useful information for the business.   

Host a webinar

Finally, online webinars are a quick and easy way to communicate with prospects, customers and employees.  Pick a topic that is relevant to your industry and find the best expert within your company or among your clients. Set a specific date and time, and create an event landing page with a simple lead capture form. Promote the webinar everywhere you can – Linkedin Ads are great for this because you can place them in front of the most relevant audiences. As you get signups, remember to send reminders both before and after the event. Furthermore, it gives your sales team a reason to get in touch with those prospects and engage in conversation. Find more lead generation advice over on our blog.
LinkedIn Icon Line Connection of Circuit Board

LinkedIn Ads – Are They For You?

by Paid SearchPaid Social
We all know about the effectiveness of Google, Bing and Facebook Ads, but what about LinkedIn Ads? Do they provide an effective ROI?

Who should use LinkedIn Ads?

A simple answer is B2B marketers whose potential clients are on LinkedIn. I have worked in B2B sales and I can attest that LinkedIn is a B2B sales gold mine. It is a world’s most up to date directory of 500 million professionals world-wide, including the key decision-makers who get on LinkedIn in their downtime to look for content and connections to better their careers and businesses. In short, if you are selling a B2B solution, then LinkedIn Ads could help you get in front of the right people in a micro-targeted way.

Audience targeting

In comparison to Google or Facebook Ads, LinkedIn Ads offer a very granular and accurate audience targeting. You can target specific companies, job titles, industries and regions. This enables you to target very specific audiences that fit your Ideal Customer Profile. You can narrow down your audience to as low as 500+ people based on multiple criteria listed in people’s LinkedIn profiles.

3 Popular LinkedIn Ad Types

If you are a frequent LinkedIn user you have probably seen them around the site, but here is an overview:

Display Text Ads

Text ads consist of Headline (25chr), Description (75chr) and an image (100×100 px). Text ads appear in a variety of sizes:
  • 300 x 250
  • 700 x 17
  • 160 x 600
  • 728 x 90
  • 496 x 80
All these ads, if they are showing a valuable proposition, can be effective in generating brand awareness and/or capturing leads.

Sponsored Content

The content posted on your company page is only visible to those that follow your company page. With Sponsored Content Ads you can push your post to be shown to specific audiences that do not follow you. This is a great way to boost the visibility of your brand posts and send relevant traffic to your site to capture leads. It looks like a regular post, the only difference is the little Promoted sign. Also, you can add Call-To-Action buttons like Learn More or Sign Up.

Sponsored InMail

A lot of Recruiters and Sales Development Reps use InMail to message individuals outside of their network. By using Sponsored InMail you can scale it up and send InMail blasts to very targeted audiences. Despite not being personalised messages, you can pivot your message to your specific audience by their company, industry or job title. According to SaaS company Replicon, Sponsored InMails provide 11 times better response rate than cold emails. Impressive, isn’t it? Nevertheless, InMails won’t replace Emails, but they provide an alternative way to get the attention of key decision-makers whose email inboxes are flooded.

Cost

The costs vary largely by industry, seniority of prospect and location. All LinkedIn Ads work on Pay-Per-Click, Pay-Per-1000-Impressions or Cost-Per-Send for InMails. So there is always an auction running before the ad is shown or InMail sent and it depends on competitive bidding for those actions. As a result, it is more expensive to reach the most important decision-makers in the key industries. CPC tends to be around $2-$5 and Cost-Per-Send for InMail between $0.20-$1. We are now in the early days of the rise of LinkedIn Ads. Ever since Microsoft acquired LinkedIn in 2017, their ad platform is evolving rapidly and more and more B2B marketers are turning to LinkedIn Ads to generate leads. Thus, bid competition is likely to become more intense and cause ad spend to go up. The time is now to try LinkedIn Ads.
The Future of Search

Voice search: the future of SERPs?

by SEO

If you think voice search is just a gimmick, think again. According to the Comscore, half of all online searches will be made through voice in 2020.

So, with the use of voice search on the rise, now is the time to lay foundations for a strong voice search strategy.

What is Voice Search?

Voice Search is a tool that allows users to search through speech rather than by typing a query on a desktop or mobile device. As the trend for voice search increases, queries must adapt to reflect the style of language used for voice search.

How to Optimise for Voice Search

Voice Search is more conversational and natural than searches made by typing in one or two keywords. So, whilst a user might search for ‘best restaurant in Manchester’ using google on their desktop, they’re more likely to a ask this as a question – ‘which are the best restaurants in Manchester?’ when conducting a voice search. This means that voice search queries are longer than typical keyword search queries.

Target conversational search terms

To optimise for this change in search queries, businesses should target more long-tail keywords on their websites. When carrying out keyword research, it is important to consider more conversational search terms and to think about how people talk and ask questions. Think about the questions that customers ask when they call your business and make a note of the queries that you receive. If there are common queries then it would be useful to start targeting them on the website for your business by creating articles in the blog section with the long-tail keyword being the main focus.

Featured Snippets

It is common for a business to focus on ranking first in the search results, however, this can be very difficult to achieve in a competitive market. Aiming to answer long-tail keywords within your content will also help to obtain a Featured Snippet. Additionally, making small changes such as stating and answering a question consicely, including bullet points and tables will help to gain a feature snippet for a given search query. This can be more valuable than ranking first as this content will be above every other search result. 

Create FAQ pages

Most businesses have FAQs pages on their website – which is great news. FAQs pages are a strong way to target conversational terms that are likely to be popular voice searches. And they’re really easy to set up. Try focusing on question words such as Where, How and What as to target relevant question-based searches. What do does the business do? What are the main opening hours? A sports clothing retailer might sell running trainers and these pages could have an FAQ section where common questions can be answered. But don’t just stick to questions directly related to your business – branch out to common queries. For example, Search terms such as ‘What are the best running trainers for wet weather’ can be targeted along with a list of recommendations.


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13 Tips To Optimise PPC Campaigns and Make The Most of Smaller Budgets

by Paid Search

When a crisis like Coronavirus hits, it can be difficult for small businesses to know where to keep your marketing budget and where to cut spending. The guide below is designed to help SME’s make the most of tight PPC budgets, we have outlined 13 simple tips that will allow you to optimise your PPC campaigns.


If you have any questions about Google Shopping, Remarketing or general PPC email us on [email protected] and we’ll be happy to help.


We’re also offering free PPC audits, so SMEs can get extra hands-on help for their digital marketing campaigns.


How To Target Customers With Adwords Audience Targeting

How to target customers with Google Ads audience targeting

by Paid Search

As the consumer market becomes more competitive, one of the key factors that can drive success is ensuring that your audience is being targeted in a granular way.  In this blog post, PPC Executive Anna Simpson explains how you can use Google Ads audience targeting to hone in on your potential customers.

What is audience targeting and how can my business use it?

Audience targeting is a feature that can be utilised in Google Ads which allows advertisers to be specific when choosing who sees their ads. This is done by taking into account factors such as:

  • What users are actively researching
  • When users are showing intent to purchase

This allows you to optimise your campaign spend to target the people most likely to purchase or enquire – every advertiser’s dream!

In-market audiences: reach your potential customers

In-market audiences have been available on Google’s Display Network since 2014 and were rolled out into the Search Network in July 2018. This audience targeting allows advertisers to reach potential customers who are currently browsing, researching and comparing similar items/services to your business. This means that they’re in the market for, and actively considering, buying a service or product like yours.

To define this audience, Google takes into account factors including clicks on related ads, the content of the sites and pages that the users are visiting, and the recency and frequency of visits. This is a great way of catching customers right before they are ready to covert making it a really effective way of targeting.

There are currently 508 different in-market audiences which you can choose from in your Google Ads account – so it’s more than likely that you’re able to find something relevant to your business from this huge range! After applying this audience strategy to your campaigns, you can add bid adjustments. This tells Google that if a user falls into the in-market category that you have applied, then you would like to bid more so that your ad appears for these particular users.

Note: bid adjustments will not be available with automated bidding strategies as this is taken into account within the strategy algorithms.

Businesses can improve the likelihood of a consumer converting with them instead of a competitor by using this method of targeting.

How do I set up in-market audiences?

If you think your business would benefit from using in-market audiences, then you can easily add them to your current campaigns. Select the campaign that you wish to apply the audience in, click on the audiences tab and then click on add new audience. Before you choose your audience type, ensure you have selected targeting or observation – whichever one suits the aim of your campaign the best. The option for in-market audiences is the second one down on the table so go ahead and select the most relevant category for your business. Each category has a drop-down menu which means that the audience can be narrowed down further to target even more specifically – so make sure you don’t miss any!

Custom intent audiences: be in control of who you target with display

Are your display campaigns under-performing? Then it’s worth exploring custom intent audiences. This is a really powerful new feature that Google introduced in November 2017. The feature allows you to define and reach your own ideal audience to target people who have shown intent to purchase your business’ products/services. Interested? I don’t blame you. There are two ways in which custom intent audiences can be implemented: auto-created or completely manual.

Let’s dig into the auto-created segments first – these are created specifically to your account, so segments you may see in one account could be completely different in another. This is because Google analyses the campaigns and data that are in the account already and uses its machine-learning technology to create audiences. Google takes into account keywords and URLs that appear in content that users are browsing whilst researching a specific product/service, and uses these insights to create an audience based off what Google sees from this, as intent to purchase.

Manual custom intent audiences have the same basis as this, except you can choose the URLs and keywords that you want to target rather than Google doing this for you. You want to ensure that the URLs and keywords all have a common theme so that Google can understand your ideal audience – best practice is to add around 15 as a total. It’s important that the keywords and URLs that you add relate to the product/services that the audience would be researching; think like a customer – which websites would you visit in order to make an informed decision before converting?

Custom intent audiences are a really great way of creating a granular audience, targeting users who are showing intent to convert. Allowing these audiences to be set up to be business specific shows that there is great potential for campaign success, as well as for the future of display advertising.

How do I set up custom intent audiences?

Select the display campaign that you would like to implement custom intent audiences in and then click on the Audiences tab down the side of the interface. Click on Add Audience and select either targeting or observation method – whichever is most suited to your campaign. The custom intent audience is located on the second line of the table and once clicked on you will be able to choose between auto-created segments (which you can browse through and select) or you can click Create New Custom Intent Audience. Make a start on adding the keywords and URLs that you would like to use if you’re creating your own. As you add more information, the estimated number of impressions for this audience will be visible, giving you a great indication as to how many people are likely to see your ad.

Following these steps will make sure that your ads get seen by the right people – now you can sit back, relax, and watch the conversions flood in!