If you are not leveraging Google’s Ad Extensions in AdWord’s, you should take a look at why you should.

What are Ad Extensions?

“Ad extensions expand a standard text ad with one or more lines that provide additional information such as an address and phone number (location extensions and call extensions), more page links (ad sitelinks), and product images (product extensions). Sitelinks allow advertisers to include additional page links on qualifying text ads that appear on Google.com and Google Search Network partners. This extension is available globally on ads that meet our quality requirements. The most common campaigns to qualify for the Sitelinks feature are high-quality campaigns that contain keywords and ads specific to your brands.” – Google,  https://adwords.google.com/support/aw/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=141826

To access Ad Extension go to your drop-down arrow at the far end of your Adwords tabs  (which include Campaign, Adgroups, Keywords, Ads, Networks, etc..) and select Ad Extension from the 2nd check-box.

With this new tab you now have access to Phone Extensions & Site-link Extensions as well as being able to link your AdWord’s account to to your Google places (Location Extensions), Google Merchant Center/Products (Product Extensions)

For the sake of this post, we will only be focusing on Sitelinks.

Select a campaign and add a new sitelink.  You are allowed 1-10 additional links which may appear below your ad.

For Example:

(Names have been replaced with XYZ for privacy reasons)

Notice how this ad “pops” with the additional line of text and also encourages the searcher to refine their results through your ad & show direct-link related offerings.

Does it work?  You be the judge:

(May 2011)

Those are some fantastic CTR results with very little effort to create – You can even add them in the Google AdWords Editor.

Other sitelink ideas:

• Services > Specials > Contact Us
• Men’s > Women’s > Children’s
• Brands > Part# Search > RFQ
• Debt Calculator > Programs >Testimonials

ad extensions, Google AdWords, sitelinks

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

While navigating a client’s account today in Google I noticed a new feature listed in the top right hand side of the screen:

When you click this tiny icon a pop-up appears giving a brief explanation of what will happen if you install Google Gears.

So what exactly is Google Gears?  According to their website, you can expect the following from this new Google product:

• Let web applications interact naturally with your desktop
• Store data locally in a fully-searchable database
• Run JavaScript in the background to improve performance
• Let users access information offline or provide you with content based on your geographical location
• Designed to be used on both Google and non-Google sites:
  • (Google Sites) Google Reader, Google Docs, & windows mobile version of Picasa.
  • (Non-Google Sites) Zoho and Remember the Milk

Continue with the prompts within AdWords to bring you to the Google Gears installation screen:

Once you have installed the product and your web browsers has restarted, return to Google AdWords and click that link again in the upper right hand part of the screen.  Once that’s done, you should be prompted to activate Google Gears:

When finished, you should see the the original icon which you clicked to begin this journey go from a red-slashed circle to a green-full circle.

So far, I’ve been playing around, jumping from screen to screen, and I can honestly say that the interface of AdWords is, in fact, faster!

However, this account has only a few hundred keywords and a few dozen ads… what about our client who has over 300,000 keywords and several thousand ads?  If you noticed in the bullets above, AdWords was not listed.  After logging into all of our clients’ accounts, I found that only this single AdWords account had been selected–an obviously limited beta-test release.  It would be nice to test Gears on our more robust clients, as any work done on those accounts typically require longer load times for all that data to transfer to my screen.

Keep your eyes peeled on your accounts to see if you can take advantage of this new feature.

Has anyone else seen an a positive, negative, or flat effect from using Google Gears?

Google AdWords, Google Gears

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