The debut of the iPhone 4 has created quite a stir for consumers worldwide trying to get the best and latest Apple product. The craze has even left some people waiting hours in line just to get the newest smart phone. But whether you are involved in the craze or not, the iPhone 4 and smart phones like it have the capability to influence you more than you may know.

For example, from an industry standpoint you may be wondering how does this affect me?  Other than the fact that you might personally want one of these smart phones, mobile phone advertising is quite different from your basic PPC ad. Most would assume that they show up the same regardless of the platform, they are actually very different.

Being the industry leader, Google is currently the only major search engine that offers full mobile advertising. For Google Mobile there are some minor requirement changes that your mobile PPC ads must adhere to differently than normal:okay

-Ad Format: Mobile Ads only allow three lines of text: the headline, one description line, and one url/number line that allows the advertiser to have a one url or phone number link for their customers to connect to.

-Character Limit: Due to the smaller size of your mobile phone, the size of you PPC advertisement will also appear smaller. The character limits of your headline and description line are 18 characters each, with a total of 36 characters for the entire advertisement.

While the differences remain structural, the advantages that mobile ads have will eventually become a big factor for advertisers and customers alike. Advertisers will be able to attract customers with a new form of advertisement. And customers will be able to easily connect to products that they find appealing from the convenience of their phone.

Adwords, Google, Google AdWords, Mobile, mobile phone, Online Marketing, PPC

Have you ever wanted to pull your hair out while writing text ads?  We keep this cheat sheet of  2-3 letter words handy to help stimulate the process and thought others might find it useful as well.  PPC management can be more efficient when you avoid writers block creating text ads.

ad creative, Adwords, PPC, search marketing

Last week, Google started rolling out a brand new AdWords feature called Search Funnels. It’s still in beta, of course, but we here at Engine Ready have been poking around with it anyway, like all shiny new toys deserve to be poked around with.

So, first things first, what the heck is a Search Funnel, and why the heck is it capitalized?

Well, you know how sometimes people don’t always buy things or sign up on the first click of your ad? Yes? Maybe?

Yes, sometimes they don’t. In fact, sometimes it takes quite a few search queries and clicks before a customer ever gets to the check out lane or sign-up form. That means, in a nutshell, that your PPC campaigns aren’t necessarily getting all the credit they deserve, especially when a customer does something like click on your ad, check things out, decide what they want, then wait until their paycheck comes in or their wife approves to get to your site organically and buy everything.

This is where the Search Funnel comes in. No longer will your campaigns be undercut by indecisive or vacillating searchers, because AdWords will be keeping tabs on every single click and query that leads to a conversion.

To put it simply: Search Funnel equals conversion path. All roads lead to the conversion, and the Search Funnel is the map.

So how do you check out this nifty new Search Funnel feature?

In your AdWords account, hover over the Reporting tab and click Conversions. Then, on the next screen, hit the Search Funnels option on the left hand side. This brings you to an overview of all your conversions, including stats on the average days, ad clicks, and ad impressions to conversion, among others.

So far, we’re still playing around with all the different data the Search Funnel feature provides, and we suggest that you do the same. While it might not change your entire outlook on conversion reporting in AdWords, it does provide some very valuable insight anyway. And yes, people can still switch computers and clear their cookies, so the system isn’t entirely perfect, but it’s still another step closer to the goal of happier optimizing.

Want more information on Search Funnels? Google’s got it covered.

Adwords, conversion improvement, conversion reporting

Occasionally, AdWords likes to add in nifty new features to its interface that even the most on-the-ball search marketers never really notice until a few months later, when they suddenly ask themselves (or the entire office at large), “Has this always been here?”

Such is the story of the new Segments feature, which AdWords first implemented in November of 2009 under the Filter tab.

Now, though, it gets a tab of its very own, sandwiched between All but Deleted Keywords and the aforementioned Filter tabs. Just click on that handy dandy little Segments tab, and you can sort all your performance data by network, day, week, month, quarter, year, day of the week, click type, device, and… oh, that’s it?

I think you get the picture.

Needless to say, this is a really cool and versatile new feature, made even cooler by the fact that it saves a lot of time as well. Instead of going through and selecting one day or week or month at a time in the date range in order to view your data, you can view it all at once and, blessedly, compare numbers without having to lay a finger on Excel.

Of course, since the initial discovery and subsequent whoas, we here at Engine Ready have been putting the new Segments tab to use. So far, we’ve mostly been segmenting by week, so that we can get a really good picture of why performance increases or decreases week to week. To do this, select a month (or two or three) as your date range, then segment by week. You end up getting something that looks like this:

Each of the four weeks of data is broken down, so that you can easily take a look at the changes in cost per click, conversion rate, position, and anything else that might be affecting your account’s performance. Which makes it much simpler to answer the question: why?

Which makes it much, much simpler to go for the impossible: true optimization.

Adwords, Analytics, Google AdWords, PPC