Posts Tagged ‘ Channel: SEM ’

Google officially throttling Keyword Planner data for low spending AdWords accounts

Posted on: August 13, 2016 by in SEO
No Comments

Earlier this week some marketers noticed that Keyword Planner data was displaying ranged data instead of precise search volume. The ranges were wildly broad with results like “100K-1M” and “1M+”. Some wondered whether this was merely a glitch or if this was a calculated measure that favored higher spending AdWords advertisers. Today, Google confirmed the latter. At the end of June, Keyword Planner was acting up and many users got the message that they needed to have an active AdWords Continue Reading ...

FTC sues 1-800 Contacts over reciprocal, “anti-competitive” PPC bidding agreements

Posted on: August 9, 2016 by in SEO
No Comments

The US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has sued 1-800 Contacts for allegedly pursuing “anticompetitive agreements with rival online contact lens sellers that suppress competition in certain online search advertising auctions.” According to the FTC: 1-800 Contacts entered into bidding agreements with at least 14 competing online contact lens retailers that eliminate competition in auctions to place advertisements on the search results page generated by online search engines such as Google Continue Reading ...

How to get the old Google Keyword Planner volume data

Posted on: August 4, 2016 by in SEO
No Comments

Back in June, the AdWords Keyword Planner started displaying the same volume of searches for keywords that were similar. Search Engine Land reported on the anomalies and asked Google about it but didn’t receive a response at the time. Ginny Marvin speculated, and now an AdWords representative has confirmed, that this was caused by close variants. @tanestis Hi there, terms that are close variants of each other will show the same volumes within the Keyword Planner. -Mitch — Google AdWords Continue Reading ...

Expand all your AdWords ads in 30 seconds flat

Posted on: August 3, 2016 by in SEO
No Comments

Just about a week ago, all AdWords advertisers got access to expanded text ads. Have you converted your whole account over to take advantage of the new format yet? If you haven’t because you’ve been too busy with the day-to-day of managing accounts (or because you took that well-earned summer vacation), read on for an easy to use AdWords Script that can help. The concept The goal is to leverage all the work already done by your SEO team to give the PPC team a head start with creating longer Continue Reading ...

Merkle’s early data on expanded text ad CTRs: Results are mixed

Posted on: July 31, 2016 by in SEO
No Comments

Merkle has released early results on click-through rates of expanded text ads relative to standard text ads in its Q2 Digital Marketing Report. The agency began participating in the expanded text ads beta in April and analyzed the longer ad format’s impact on click-through rate (CTR) across thousands of ad groups. When Google first announced that expanded text ads (ETAs) were coming, the company touted as much as a 20-percent lift in click-through rates on expanded text ads. Merkle Continue Reading ...

Google reiterates suggested 33-character limit in ETA headlines to avoid truncation

Posted on: July 28, 2016 by in SEO
No Comments

As expanded text ads began rolling out, some advertisers noticed that the new, longer double headline is sometimes cut off. This can be frustrating and can have potential legal ramifications for businesses in highly regulated industries like pharmaceuticals. Here’s an example of a truncated ETA headline: Google AdWords’ social team responded to the tweet above with a recommendation to keep the combined character count of the two headlines limited to a total of 33 characters to avoid Continue Reading ...

Google’s ban on payday & high-interest loan ads going into effect now

Posted on: July 21, 2016 by in SEO
No Comments

In May, Google announced that ads promoting payday loans that require repayment within 60 days and loans with interest rates above 35 percent would no longer be accepted or displayed starting July 13. Yet many people have noticed that payday loans are still showing up in Google search results, a week after the ban was supposed to start. Google’s execution of the ban was delayed, but it is now rolling out. The company posted an update to the ad policies in the AdWords help Continue Reading ...

Machine learning for large-scale SEM accounts

Posted on: July 4, 2016 by in SEO
No Comments

A key challenge when working on what we could term “large-scale” PPC accounts is efficiency. There will always be more that you could do if given an unlimited amount of time to build out and optimize an AdWords campaign; therefore, the trick is managing priorities and being efficient with your time. In this post, I will talk about how concepts from machine learning could potentially be applied to help with the efficiency part. I’ll use keyword categorization as an example. To paraphrase Continue Reading ...

Influencing with ad copy: how to truly drive action

Posted on: June 23, 2016 by in SEO
No Comments

Persuasion. Influence. Psychology. The conversion rate optimization (CRO) crowd is adept at tapping into these to drive the actions of their audiences. When it comes to ad copy, there may not appear to be a lot we can do to actively influence our search audience. Short of a screaming headline (not allowed), all we have is a limited set of characters. We can make every one of those characters truly work by channeling our inner CRO expert. Before we jump into the words that work, let’s take a Continue Reading ...

It’s here: Bing Ads Editor for Mac launches in beta

Posted on: June 22, 2016 by in SEO
No Comments

Bing Ads Editor for Mac has long been the most highly requested feature on the Bing Ads user forum. Mac users got word in November that Bing Ads had started work on the Mac version — for release early summer 2016, and here we are. The team announced the beta version is available in the U.S. at SMX Advanced in Seattle on Wednesday. The Mac version has parity with the PC version of Bing Ads Editor, which underwent a redesign in May, gaining processing speed, multiple-account sign-in, Continue Reading ...