Clearly someone at Fairfax doesn’t understand how to control where their ads do & don’t show on Google’s Display Network. And they’re not alone. So if the phrase “negative placements” means nothing to you, read on…

The sites on which your Display ads (typically text or image ads) show are called Placements in the AdWords system.

There are typically 2 types of campaign you might run: Automatic & Management Placements.

Managed Placements are exactly what they sound like – placements (websites) that you manage. You give Google a list of the sites on which you want your ads to show & Google puts them there.

This gives you more control (you know exactly where your ads will show), but also limits your reach (you have to think of every site yourself)

The alternative (& often a great way to run campaigns) is to make use of the power of Automatic Placements. Now Google will decide where to place your ads based on information you give it (more on this later).

The downside here is that Google is in control & your ads may show in places (or next to content) that you don’t want associated with your brand.

That’s where Negative Placements come in.

They give you a way to stop showing ads on certain sites. For instance,a negative placement we use a lot (on 99% of campaigns) is adsenseformobileapps.com which we’ve found to generally give poor results across the board in many different industries.

So, it would make sense for whoever’s running the Fairfax Digital campaign to exclude theage.com.au from the campaign showing ads for The Age.

Sure they’ll make a few cents if someone clicks their own ad – but why pay for the click/impression in the first place?

Far better to save that space for an ad that makes them money (assuming they have covered their online properties with ads to make money!).

Maybe it’s some warped idea of brand-building… but c’mon who really thinks they need to interrupt a user with an ad for their own service while using that service!

If you want to get a bit more advanced, you can use ‘Placement Exclusion Lists‘. A newish feature that Google quietly rolled out recently that allows you to create lists of sites & exclude them from campaigns more easily. This is great if you’re also running other types of Display Network campaigns such as topic targeting, interest targeting or remarketing campaigns.

Sadly there’s no way to easily share your lists between client accounts if you’re running an MCC account – maybe Google will add that one day. But given negative keyword lists aren’t even in ADWords Editor yet, we may be waiting a while!

Last tip…

If you are running ads on Aussie newspaper sites, you may want to exclude them from your main ‘automatic placements’ campaign & run them in their own managed placement campaign – so you can more easily see their performance & adjust bids as needed. Sometimes these sites work very very well for clients, other times they suck. It’s just one more thing that you must test if running ads on Google’s Display Network.

Our standard list of Aussie newspaper sites follows – feel free to add any others in the comments below. news.com.au in particular often gets very poor results & is usually worth excluding:

theage.com.au
smh.com.au
theaustralian.com.au
news.com.au
heraldsun.com.au
theherald.com.au
couriermail.com.au
adelaidenow.com.au
perthnow.com.au
dailytelegraph.com.au

You can get our funky new WordPress Plugin – WPremarketing – here.

You’ll need to know a little ‘widget logic’ but examples are provided on the plugin page once you upload the zip file to WordPress

******

Step by Step guide to setting up remarketing – ensure before you start that the strategy is known. It’s the strategy that will make or break a remarketing campaign.

Ensure the audiences tab is displayed (just makes life easier)

click audiences tab

then ‘add audiences’

ignore the campaign/adgroup section (for now) & click ‘create & manage lists

add a new remarketing list

give the new list a sensible name & set the membership duration. click save

the ‘tag’ is the code snippet you need to add to the web pages (you may need to refresh the screen to see this)

copy & paste the code snippet into a text file & send this to the web master. The strategy will determine which pages this needs to be added to.

next, you’ll create the campaign to target that remarketing list & actually show the ads

give the new campaign a sensible name (probably containing the word remarketing!)

Set the location to a wider area than normal. If you usually target a state, target the whole country. If you normally target a country, target ‘all countries’. This gives the campaign more room to work

set networks to Display Network & choose the ‘entire network’ option

If you like, turn off smartphones – typically iPad traffic will convert at a similar rate to desktops, so leave that enabled

start by bidding CPC & set your budget

save

next, add an AdGroup

don’t enter any keywords – this would limit the available impressions too much

set your adgroup bids – the display network bid will be the default for your remarketing ads (since they shown on the GDN)

you’ll need to add Ads – however it’s far easier to do this separately in AdWords Editor

Next, you’ll need to tell the remarketing campaign which audiences to show ads to. Click the Audiences tab

find the appropriate list & click add – more advanced strategies can make use of custom combinations of lists. Click Save – you’re done.

If you’re running GDN campaigns, this is a great way to get massive extra reach – however it is to be used with caution. It’ll work best with offers that have wide appeal & for advertisers more interested in brand awareness than in strict ROI targets… in other words, it’ll probably cost a bit more per lead than your other GDN campaigns.

Worth a try though! Have a look…

and if you haven’t already experienced the awesome contextual targeting tool – have a play inside your account today:

In your campaign settings, look for ‘advanced location options’

Targeting Method

This allows you to refine who will see your ads, let’s run through an example
If you’re a beauty salon in Melbourne & only want to advertise to people that are actually in the immediate area – with the previous options available, that was easy, but your ads would also show to people in other areas (say Perth) that included the word Melbourne in their search term (eg ‘beauty salon ideas from Melbourne show’)

With the new settings you can decide to ONLY show ads to people in that “physical location”

Exclusion Method

Now let’s assume you’re a real estate advertising properties in Sydney & you DON’T want to show ads to people based in Brisbane, or that are searching for properties in Brisbane (for whatever reason).
The new settings allow you to choose “exclude by physical location and search intent”

Clearly this is more restrictive than in the past – so use with caution!

You might also choose just to exclude by “physical location” only which would stop people in a geographical area seeing those ads, BUT (unlike previously) would still show ads to people that included those geo terms in their search.

This includes IS% for Display Network ads (text & image) as well as category targeting & – super awesome – our new Click to Call only campaigns!

This is a huge advance… being able to see your Impression Share across the GDN is a major break through in reporting

How will you use it?

(PS – don’t forget you can use the Dimensions tab to see how your Impression Share numbers change week on week, month on month – or even by hour of day!!)

** UPDATE: This data appears to have been short-lived & is no longer showing in any of our managed accounts, or those of people that we’ve been chatting to. Hopefully it was a test by Google & they choose to roll this out in future… maybe it was an error after all

They’re going to force all Display URLs (the 4th line of your AdWords Ad) to show in lowercase, regardless of how you have it set in your account.

I think this is a bad move. Google says it’s based on lots of testing (& of course, they have the data to back it up), but I wonder how much of that data represents the big companies… businesses with short, often one-word domains.
For those domains (amazon.com, ebay.com) the lowercase isn’t a problem
But for your average small business like SwimwearGalore.com.au or AustralianKettlebells.com.au it has been proven (at least in our tests) to reduce the click thru rate (CTR) on the ads.

Great example here from the always brilliant Brad Geddes of Certified Knowledge:

However, what do you see if this is the URL?

commentsexchange.com

Here’s the choices:

CommentsExchange.com (blog commenting)
CommentSexChange (sex change forum)

Which do you see?
[great example!]

Without us as advertisers being able to choose how we display these longer URLs, surely we must be at a disadvantage.

It’s another move by Google to remove the benefits of being a smart, pro-active user of AdWords who tests & measures.
The continued dumbing down of AdWords continues… Sad.

In its simplest form, it’s a way to show ads to people browsing the web – but only to those people who have already visited a particular page on your website. The benefits are improved ROI & more powerful search marketing strategies for your business.

How does remarketing work?

To use Remarketing in AdWords, you first need to ‘tag’ visitors to your site. Then you’re able to show ads (on Google’s Display Network) to those people & only those people. This gives you a number of strategies.

The type of visitor you tag is entirely up to you. For example you may choose to tag some or all of the following types:

• all visitors regardless of which pages on your site they visit
• visitors that view a ‘category’ of pages within your site (eg mens, womens & childrens; or, luxury, business & budget)
• only visitors that successfully performed an action on your site (eg opted-in, bought, downloaded a pdf etc)
• only visitors that placed an item in the shopping cart but then abandoned the cart & left the site without buying

Each type of visitor is then stored in it’s own remarketing list. You’re then able to market to individual lists, or even combine lists for more advanced strategies.

You can even combine your Remarketing lists with other AdWords features such as Geo-targeting, frequency capping, image ads and more.

A popular remarketing strategy

One of the more popular remarketing strategies is targeting users who left your site without purchasing anything. Since one of the most common reasons for not making a purchase is price, why not target these people with a special offer & either add value, offer a better bonus or discount the sale price?

To set this up create two remarketing lists. The first is for all your site’s visitors & the second is for your ‘buyers’. Google will give you two different code snippets – one for each list. Install the code on your site (eg snippet 1 on all pages, snippet 2 only on the thank you page). Now target the ‘audience’ that consists of all visitors but not buyers.

Customise your creative

As with anything in marketing, you’re only as good as your offer. So try different creatives for your remarketing campaigns. You already know which parts of your site they were interested, so try cross-selling or up-selling related products & services.

Once you find an offer that works, you can quickly roll out new text ads with variations on that theme & even add new image ads if your budget allows.

Another great feature is that you have control over the length of time that users see the ads. Google’s default time is 30 days, but you can always adjust this to the timeframe you think is reasonable.

For more information visit http://adwords.google.com/support/aw/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=173945

He’s also holding the event of the year: Fast Web Formula 2 in September (hurry there are still a few tickets left). This is NOT a pitch fest. Just hours & hours of useful, practical, detailed how-to information from the likes of Ed Dale, John Carlton, Brian Johnson & many more.

I’m delighted to have been asked to talk about the latest developments in Google AdWords, so come & join James, myself & a couple of hundred likeminded people in Sydney in September.

UPDATE: James just interviewed me on some of the recent updates to AdWords. If you want to get a sneak peak at my talk for FWF2, have a listen – particularly the parts about remarketing & our latest system for digging negative keywords out of your AdWords account

listen here

You can now choose a Target CPA instead of a Max CPA. So what does this mean and, more importantly, how does this affect you?

Max CPA

Is how Conversion Optimizer has traditionally worked. You set an amount that you’d like Google to not exceed for each conversion, for example you’d set a max CPA of $10 to get a new subscriber on your list.

In the past the result of this has been that your average CPA has generally been less than this Maximum (much like a Max CPC bid of $1 generally means you’ll pay an average of say 50-80c per click).

Your new option is Target CPA Bidding

Now you set a ‘target’ rather than a ‘maximum’ which means your average CPA should be a lot closer to the CPA bid that you choose ($10 in our example). The cynics will say this is another money grab by Google, but this should give more control to advertisers & help achieve CPA targets more accurately.

As with all bidding options, go to the Settings tab under the Campaigns tab & scroll down to the ‘bidding & budget’ section.