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

A quick tidbit of information:

Engine Ready’s very own vice president, Brian Lewis, will be a guest speaker at Online Marketing Summit, an online marketing education conference being held this week in sunny San Diego.

Brian will be moderating the PPC vs. SEO: The Ultimate Search Marketing Battle panel, which seeks to finally answer one of the industry’s biggest (and toughest) questions: which is more effective, pay per click or search engine optimization? The panel will start at 10 a.m. on the 25th, the third and final day of the conference, and the debate is sure to be pretty lively, at the very least.

Online Marketing Summit runs from February 22nd to the 25th at the Paradise Point Resort & Spa in San Diego. More information can be found at onlinemarketingsummit.com.

Finally, we’d like to send out a personal invitation to visit us if you attend OMS in San Diego–our offices are only ten minutes away.

Conferences, Engine Ready, Industry Events, OMS, Online Marketing, PPC, SEO, SES

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