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Dynamic search ads, commonly referred to as DSAs, have been around for quite a while now, but they’re still not widely used by the majority of advertisers. Both Google and Bing offer DSAs as an option to automatically generate PPC ads for search campaigns, but contrary to popular belief, the feature offers many additional benefits beyond just automated ad creation. In this article, we provide a comprehensive guide to DSAs and insight into their value for performance marketers.
Dynamic search ads are ads automatically created by Google based on a user’s search query and the content on your website. Creating targeted ads is time-consuming, especially for businesses with a large inventory. DSAs can help you find customers on Google and present them with the most relevant offer for their needs.
When you opt-in for dynamic ad targeting, Google bots crawl your website, match search terms to your site content, and then create a dynamic ad. This ad type is ideal for advertisers with a well-developed website or a sizeable portfolio of goods or services. When someone searches on Google for terms related to your landing page titles and content, Google Ads selects the most relevant landing page and generates a related headline for your ad.
For example, say an advertiser owns a hotel chain and someone searches for “luxury hotel New York.” Google then creates a relevant ad with the headline “Luxury hotel - NYC” and links to the appropriate landing page. There’s no way to tell the difference between dynamic search ads and regular PPC ads in Google. They look exactly the same in search results:
DSAs, though, have the potential to deliver more relevant messaging based on search queries and your landing page content.
And Google isn’t the only search engine offering DSAs as a campaign option: Bing does the same with a few additional features to maximize ad targeting relevance.
All sorts of marketing initiatives are automated. This leaves some advertisers wondering if ad copy creation should be one of them. But using DSAs has many benefits beyond automating a time-consuming task:
Accurate keyword targeting is a powerful way to reach audiences through paid search, but even accounts with the most comprehensive keyword lists are bound to miss some relevant search queries. Since DSAs involve independently scanning your landing pages for suitable terms to target, they can fill in any gaps that come up in your keyword-based targeting campaigns.
With traditional ad targeting, there’s no way to create a headline that’s optimally relevant for every target keyword in an ad group. DSAs offer a unique opportunity to create the most relevant headlines every time, based on both your landing page copy and the exact search term people used to find your ad.
A major challenge for advertisers who sell many products is keeping their ads updated when inventory changes. DSAs address this issue by regularly crawling your website and adjusting your ads accordingly. As a result, Google will never show ads for products that are temporarily or permanently out-of-stock. Clicking through on ads for out-of-stock products is frustrating for users and results in wasted budget spend for advertisers. Using DSAs helps you automatically minimize campaign performance issues from inventory changes.
In the same vein, if you make changes to your landing page copy or product descriptions, DSAs will consider this in the new ad copy it creates. This ensures your headlines are always maximally relevant to your landing page content.
While DSAs are automatically generated, you still have complete control over who you target and with what content. Google’s DSAs offer several options for targeting:
Dynamic search ad targeting helps advertisers create more relevant ads that reach a larger audience of people beyond traditional keyword targeting. Automatically creating ad copy that optimally matches user search queries increases clickthrough rates on ads and ensures they’re directed to the most relevant landing pages, encouraging more people to convert on-site as well.
Keywords don’t always match search intent in the way advertisers expect, leading them to unintentionally target low-quality leads that aren’t interested in their products or services. By considering both your landing page content and search query relevance, Google Ads can help improve the quality and quantity of leads you attract from PPC ads.
Lastly, like with most marketing automation technologies, DSAs save significant time. Creating comprehensive keyword lists and matching them to relevant landing pages is a major undertaking for even the smallest Google Ads accounts. The same goes for creating relevant headlines that best match your keyword categories.
DSAs take on both of these tasks, freeing up account managers to focus on campaign optimization or pursuing growth initiatives. Automating tedious tasks empowers advertisers to spend more time improving budget spend, campaign targeting and performance, driving important business goals in the process.
Interested in trying out DSAs for yourself? Here’s how to create dynamic search ads in Google Ads. (For Bing dynamic search ad instructions, read this article.)
That’s all you have to do to create a DSA campaign and start seeing the benefits for yourself!
Dynamic Search Ads are automated, but there are still many campaign optimizations you can make to improve performance. Here’s how to create DSAs that maximize campaign performance from the beginning:
Google Ads offers expanded text ads as an option to add more descriptive text to ads on Search and Display. At first, this feature was only available to traditional ad types, but in 2017, they rolled it out for DSAs as well. Using the expanded description field gives you an opportunity to deliver a more relevant and meaningful message to your audience. It’s also the only part of your ad that isn’t dynamically created.
Expanded text ads is an important feature for advertisers who want more control over their ad messaging than what basic DSAs have to offer.
DSAs aren’t for every kind of business, but many can see positive results using this ad type to better target their audiences. To get an idea of how DSAs might perform, try targeting a specific audience to experiment. For example, you can use dynamic search ads to target Re-marketing Lists for Search Ads (RLSAs). If the campaign improves ad visibility and clicks, then you can expand to target more of your audience.
You can also experiment with different ad targeting strategies, such as landing pages, categories, or page feeds. Create exclusions for pages that might not perform well, and see how it impacts performance.
Lastly, you can also set bid adjustments to increase or decrease your ad target bids. This gives you more control over when you use dynamic ads to target your audiences.
One issue some advertisers have with DSAs is a lack of control over what search queries their ads are shown for. They have to depend on Google’s interpretation of their site content for keyword matches. There’s always the possibility Google will misinterpret meaning, showing ads for irrelevant search queries in the process.
One way to prevent this problem and improve DSA performance is by creating negative keyword lists. If you’ve run traditional ad campaigns in the past, you’ve probably already built a list of negative keywords that are equally relevant for DSA campaigns. Otherwise, you should take the time to consider how Google might misinterpret your landing page content to create negative keyword lists. If that’s too challenging, then the best option is to launch your DSA campaigns then closely monitor your Search Terms Report to see what kind of queries your ads are showing for. Then you can add negative keywords to your list when necessary.
You can use manual bidding with DSA campaigns, however, automated bidding and automated ad creation work quite well together. When both processes are automated, Google Ads can use auction-time signals to set bids and improve performance. For instance, it’s possible to set bids based on the exact wording of a user’s query to better match your bid strategy to what people are actually searching for. Target CPA, Target ROAS, or Enhanced CPC are good automated bidding strategies to use with DSA campaigns.
Apprehensive advertisers might think this is too much automation to really drive meaningful results from your ad campaigns, but automated bidding combined with DSAs allows Google to make more optimizations than even the largest PPC management team could manage.
Google conducted a case study illustrating the impact of combining DSAs with automated bidding. Trivago, one of the world’s largest hotel search engines, adopted this strategy with conversion-based automated bidding. The results were:
Of course, if you’re still not sure if combining DSA with automated bidding is the right choice for your business, you can always test it out with a new campaign experiment. Use automated bidding and DSAs to target a small portion of your audience, monitor performance, then see the results for yourself.
You can automate all sorts of marketing processes nowadays. But many advertisers agree that creating relevant ad copy is one thing that will always require human insight to optimize. It’s true that advertisers have a keen understanding of what kind of marketing message drives clicks and conversions. DSAs, though, offer a powerful option to combine great ad copy with ultra-relevant headlines tailored to the search queries of individual users.
Create a compelling message for your expanded search ad description and allow Google bots to create the right headlines for your landing pages. Make efforts to maximize the benefits of DSAs for your business to realize the value of automated ad creation for yourself.
PPC competition is a huge factor when it comes to advertising performance. Most advertisers perform paid search competitor analysis when first setting up their campaigns, but few revisit it as a long-term consideration in campaign performance. When you only focus on your account strategy, you overlook opportunities to adjust to competitor changes. If your campaigns aren’t performing the way you expected, changes in your PPC competition could be the cause. Here’s how to consider this in your Google Adwords audit, and make the right changes to optimize.
Google Ads provides free internal tools you can use to see how your ads are performing compared to the competition. To access these reports:
The Auction Insights report includes valuable data such as:
If changes in PPC competition are responsible for your performance issues, these metrics will likely show it. Impression share data shows how much visibility your ads are getting compared to your competitors, including Search Impr. share, Search Lost IS (rank), Search Lost IS (budget) and Search. If your budget, Quality Score, or bids are preventing your ads from getting impressions, they’ll perform poorly on these metrics.
For example, if your Search Impr. Share is 80%, that means you’re capturing the majority of impressions. If your Search Impr. Share is 40%, then there could be a lot of competitors bidding on the same terms, or your budget is too low. Search Lost IS (rank) and Search Lost IS (budget) will help you understand which of these issues are responsible for low impression share.
Overlap rate will show you how often you and your competitors are appearing in the same auction for search results, while Outranking share shows you how often you outrank competitors when you appear in the same auction.
Auction Insights allows you to segment these statistics by Device or Time as well. So if competitors are performing better in auctions on mobile devices, that gives you a clue as to their device targeting strategy. Same applies to performance differences at different times of day.
Bid strategy and keyword targeting could be responsible for performance issues with your PPC competition, but it could also easily be your ad copy message. If their ad copy is more relevant and better at driving clicks, this can affect your relative ad rank and performance immensely.
One way you can evaluate competitor ad copy is using Google’s Ad Preview and Diagnosis tool. It shows you what ads are appearing for a keyword you’re targeting. There are also many third party tools that can show you competitor ad copy and give insights into their strategy. Spyfu and SEMrush can show you competitor ads from as recent as a month ago.
Here are some important points to pay attention to with your competitor ad copy:
While landing page content isn’t an element of their ad copy, it does have a huge impact on bounce rate. This is an important metric Google Ads uses to calculate Quality Score, which in turn affects ad rank.
Most marketing managers ignore PPC competitor keyword targeting when building their own keyword lists. They focus on including all the most relevant terms that align with their ideal customer’s needs. But often the best keywords have a lot of PPC competition, and targeting too many highly competitive keywords will use up your budget quickly, leading to a high cost per acquisition (CPA) and poor performance overall. Auditing PPC competitor keywords is important when building keyword lists and when evaluating campaign performance down the road. As competitor targeting strategies change, keywords can become more or less difficult to effectively rank for.
The metrics mentioned in the Auction Insights report can help you determine if a lot of other PPC marketers are competing with you for the same keywords. Third party tools can also provide more insights into the competitive landscape of keyword targeting.
In addition to ad copy insights, Spyfu shows you which keywords your competition is bidding on and how they perform. All you have to do is type in a competitor URL and it will bring back their Google Ads budget, paid keywords, ad position, and clicks per day. If you use the paid version, you can also see keyword overlap and other advanced statistics. KeywordSpy is another helpful tool that shows you competitor keywords, domains, and ad copy. It also suggests new keyword and ad combinations based on competitor analysis.
Having some idea of your competition’s strategy and targeting can provide valuable insights to improve your own campaigns. It’s a bad idea to simply copy competitor strategies - instead use paid search competitor analysis to inspire new ways to optimize.
For example:
There are lots of ways to use your knowledge of PPC competition to improve paid search performance. Here are a few examples:
If competitor ads are consistently outperforming yours, it could be because they have a better, more targeted campaign structure. In general, the more specific your campaigns are to promoting different products or services, the more relevant your targeting.
It makes sense for even the smallest businesses to have more than one campaign to target audiences. Having too many ad groups and targeting too many keywords within one campaign makes it difficult to prioritize promoting your most valuable products or services.
Creating separate campaigns also makes it easier to optimize for different audiences you want to target. For example, having different campaigns for different countries you target allows you better control over country-specific bids. You can also include relevant location-based keywords for each campaign.
If your account currently only has one or a few campaigns, consider how you could create more. Is there anything you would change about your bidding or targeting strategy if some of your current ad groups were in different campaigns? This could be the key to outperforming the competition with more relevant, targeted ads.
If you find PPC competitor keyword targeting is a problem in your Google Adwords audit, then you need to make changes to your keyword lists and targeting strategy. Start by identifying your highest cost keywords. Are they driving a good number of acquisitions? Is their CPA acceptable for your marketing goals? Outliers could be pushing your overall CPA up, and should be removed from your keyword lists.
You can also beat out the competition with keyword targeting by creating better ad groups. If all the keywords in an ad group are closely related, they’ll also be more relevant to the ad copy your PPC ads deliver to audiences. Creating intelligent ad groups can improve click-through rates, ad rank, and overall performance.
One aspect of competitor strategies that changes most is bids. Thanks to automated bidding technologies, advertisers can make many micro-changes in their bidding strategy to take advantage of the market.
As mentioned earlier, the Auction Insights report can give you some idea if competitor ads are outranking yours because of their bidding strategy. If they’re using time of day, device, or audience bid adjustments to outperform your ads, you can adopt a similar strategy to beat out the competition. Say competitors are outperforming you on mobile, for example. Create a campaign experiment, then create a +15% bid adjustment for mobile.
Use this bid adjustment with a portion of your audience to see if it improves your search impression share or conversions. If it doesn’t, then likely ad quality and relevance are a problem.
If you can’t identify any clear patterns in how the PPC competition is outbidding you, it could be because more of them are adopting automated bidding. Bid automation tools can process large amounts of relevant business and bid landscape data to make informed changes to your bidding strategy. To see if this is the case, you can create a duplicate campaign in Google Ads and choose an automated bidding strategy to see if that improves your ad rank compared to the PPC competition.
If competitor ad copy outperforms yours, then making changes to improve ad copy targeting could fix your PPC performance issues. Here are some important areas to focus on when assessing your own ads:
The goal here is not to emulate your competitors, but to take advantage of opportunities to stand out from them. Is there anything you can incorporate into your landing pages to improve conversions that your competitors haven’t thought about?
You should also make sure you’re using ad copy elements to their fullest extent to drive conversions. Clickthrough rate is another important factor impacting Quality Score and ad rank.
Consider what ad elements your competitors are using, and which ones would be relevant to your business:
Ad extensions is one area where you really should emulate the competition if they’re outperforming you. For example, if your competitors have a higher impression share on mobile devices, it could be because they’re using call extensions or other copy elements to optimize their ad for mobile. You should test out using the same extensions with a unique call-to-action to stand out from the competition.
It’s easy for account managers to forget about paid search competitor analysis after launching a new campaign. But if you want to stay ahead of the PPC competition, it’s important to conduct regular audits of their changing strategies. Understanding how competitor strategies affect your own campaign performance offers invaluable insights to improve targeting and budget spend efficiency. So incorporate competitor analysis into your campaign audit routine overall. You can also take advantage of bidding technologies to automatically make adjustments based on constant changes in the competitive landscape.
Google’s mobile search has a new look. They have rolled out a mobile search redesign with a black ad label replacing the previous green ad label. You can see the official announcement here.
Search results for “Visit San Francisco” taken on 6/6/19 on both mobile and desktop. Mobile shows the new black mobile label in contrast with the current green ad label on the desktop. The green ad label you see on the desktop was previously used on mobile up until this change. If you take out your phone and do a search on Google you can see it for yourself.
Mobile Search Results
Desktop Search Results
For paid search, the word “Ad” appears bolded and in black. Before the word “Ad” appeared in a green box. The box has been removed and black is the new green. This change provides a more modern look in line with recent web design trends. It is also intended to make it even easier to read and ingest the search results.
This new look brings some branding to the organic search results such as the website icon and the publisher gets top billing. To get your organic search icon or favicon updated, follow Google’s instruction here. Be sure to follow their guidelines so your favicon has a better chance of being displayed.
According to TechCrunch, the branding may even help users better understand where the results are coming from such as identifying if it’s from a well-knowing site or news site. Overall, providing a better search experience.
Advertisers should be watching carefully over the next few months, monitoring mobile click-through rates (CTRs) for any changes, positive or negative. When looking at performance on mobile, keep in mind this recent change.
While there has been no mention of desktop yet, if the mobile rollout goes well, you should keep an eye out for similar tests and changes on desktop.
While it’s still early, Google has reported that a majority of users found it easier to identify websites, and more than two-thirds said it was easier to scan results more quickly.
It’s been reported that some advertisers are already seeing an increase in CTRs. However, it's still too early to know if these early results are sustainable or seen across the board for all types of accounts.
According to the FTC’s business blog, in 2013 they sent a letter to search engines reiterating the original guidance they set in 2002 and updating the guidelines.
In the 2013 letter, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) mandated search engines to clearly and prominently differentiate between natural results and advertisements. This resulted in removing the shaded boxes around ad and making moves towards the green ad labels that were introduced in 2017 and were in use until this new change in spring 2019.
The guidance provided by the FTC in 2013 states, “visual cues, labels, or other techniques to effectively distinguish advertisements, in order to avoid misleading consumers, and it makes recommendations for ensuring that disclosures commonly used to identify advertising are noticeable and understandable to consumers.”
The FTC’s goal is to make it clear when content is an advertisement and when it’s an organic result. When search engines make changes to results they have to ensure they are compliant with the FTC guidelines. This change does fit within the guidelines and goes above and beyond, particularly since it is easier to identify websites than it was before. Companies using competitors' names in their ad headlines, which you're not supposed to do, will have a more difficult time fooling users into thinking their ad is from someone else. This will make the user's experience better, which is the whole point.
For a more detailed history with images check out Search Engine Land’s Updated: A visual history of Google ad labeling in search results. They have images of Google Search ads from 2007 to the present.
As mentioned above, this change could expand to include desktops. Google is an industry leader and other publishers may follow.
Since this is a change to both paid and organic listings, it's assumed Bing will copy but maybe not right away. As technology continues to develop, the search advertising landscape will develop along with it. The history of search and its relationship to advertising confirms this. For more on SEM history check out our blog on A Brief History of SEM.
Looking to the future, Google has mentioned including Augmented Reality 3D models in search results as well as indexing podcasts so they can be included in search results based on content, not just title. One thing is for sure, search and the associated advertising will continue to evolve with technology to create an even better experience for the user.
Expectations that are not said are expectations that are not set. As managers, we often find ourselves holding people accountable for things that they may not even know they are accountable for! It’s important to ask ourselves, “am I withholding feedback? Is there something I'm leaving unsaid?” and course correct accordingly.
Going into the second half of the year, we've compiled a few best practices on how to conduct effective check-ins. Read on for the when’s, where’s, and how’s of employee feedback!
When?
Annual performance reviews are a thing of the past. At Centro, we encourage managers to continuously provide feedback to their teams, and to schedule a formal check-in at least twice a year (we call them "development check-ins.") Whether or not your company has a system like this for you to use, it’s important to check in with your employees as you turn the corner into H2.
Where?
When you do check in with your employees, make sure you meet in person whenever possible! This conversation is too important for it to live in emails or performance management tools alone.
How?
Have the employee start by asking them to tell you how they think they’re doing. Use questions like these:
Make sure you take the time to be thoughtful and respond to their answers. Then, provide your honest feedback—both constructive and, even more importantly, positive! It’s important to reinforce the behaviors you want to see.
For instance, if your employee thinks they’re exceeding expectations, but you think they’re simply meeting expectations, give them specifics as to why you think that. You could say:
“You’re doing a fantastic job, and I marked you as meeting expectations. I did that because based on the expectations I have of this role, including X, Y, and Z, I feel you are doing really well.
If I were to mark you as exceeding expectations, I would look for you to be doing things that are not included in your role—really going above and beyond and stretching into that next level on this team.
I imagine in the next 12 months I’ll start to see you doing more of those things and I will help you to identify what those opportunities are. But right now, I am extremely happy with the work you’re providing for the team.
Do you understand how I view those differently? What questions do you have?”
Our CEO, Shawn Riegsecker, has always said “if you think something three times, then say something.” It's important to remember that if your employees are not aware of your feedback, they cannot improve—and it’s your job to help them be successful!
If you have thought about something three times, no matter if it’s big or small, find an opportunity to communicate it. We can all agree that this isn't an easy task—it's often incredibly difficult—but with practice, it will become more comfortable for you and your team.
Cheers to a successful second half of the year full of candor and feedback!
Paid search automation has become increasingly popular in the past few years, striking a huge debate over the merits of manual versus automated bidding in Google ads. Advertisers have managed PPC optimization manually since the beginning of Google Adwords. As a result, many push back against automation technology as a tool for people who don’t know how to optimize campaigns themselves.
On the surface, manual bidding would seem to give advertisers the most control over their accounts and campaigns, allowing them to make any necessary changes to improve performance. But paid search automation technology has a lot more to it than providing shortcuts for campaign optimization. You can automate ad creation, market research, bidding, and more. The truth of the matter is that automated bidding is likely the most valuable and necessary feature for search advertisers in 2019 and beyond. Here are some of the benefits it brings.
There’s a wealth of data out there that advertisers can leverage to improve campaign performance. First, second, and third-party data can tell you more about your target audience, their needs, points in the sales funnel, and more. Data can also help you discover new audiences and understand how campaign elements are performing.
Market data provides valuable insights that advertisers use to adjust bids for different audiences and ensure their max CPC is optimized for every keyword. But there’s simply too much relevant data for PPC managers to work through manually.
Automation solves this problem completely. Paid search automation technology can process large amounts of data and make necessary changes to bids in real-time. Google’s Smart Bidding technology considers your historical performance data and competitor bid strategies to make the optimum bids to maximize campaign performance. Third-party PPC automation tools like QuanticMind by Centro can take this benefit even further by utilizing all relevant market data you provide, such as first and third-party data.
Even if you had a team of data scientists working around the clock to make manual changes, they wouldn’t be able to keep up with automation capabilities. This leads to inherent inefficiencies in campaign optimization that weren’t a reality before bid automation was invented.
Even modest advertising campaigns include a long list of keywords to target. Calculating the optimum cost-per-click (CPC) for each keyword is time-consuming, to say the least. If you work in e-commerce or have a lot of product groups, the task becomes even larger.
Advertisers that rely on manual bidding can simplify things using keyword filters or automated rules to make changes when necessary. But these are limited in scope and are still dependent on manual changes from a PPC manager.
On the other hand, paid search automation technology can calculate the best CPC for every keyword in real-time. The ability to make changes quickly and at scale ensures you don’t spend any time under or overbidding. Instead, you receive the best margins for each conversion, improving your cost per acquisition (CPA) immensely.
Paid search automation not only saves you time but also saves your budget. By calculating the best CPC for each keyword based on the latest market data, PPC automation tools can reduce unnecessary ad spend.
When you use Google Ads Smart Campaigns for PPC management, you select a bidding strategy based on your specific advertising goals. Some strategies include:
Google’s Smart Campaigns use artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning technology to bid towards the goal you select. Their algorithms can also make strategy changes based on past performance data to better allocate your budget spend.
Say, for example, your goal is to improve return on ad spend. Through manual bidding, you set a higher max CPC for high converting keywords and a lower CPC for low converting keywords. By analyzing historical performance data and the competitive bid landscape, automation technology could discover that actually increasing bids for more low converting keywords brings better ROAS than your original strategy.
Rather than optimizing spend on individual keywords, automated bidding algorithms consider keyword performance overall to improve budget spend. Advertisers who traditionally rely on manual bidding for Google Ads can see the improvements themselves when they try out paid search automation. Improving spend efficiency, in turn, frees up more budget that you can reallocate to new advertising initiatives.
Paid search automation isn’t just about optimizing budget spend to meet advertising goals. You can also improve audience targeting with automated bid adjustments. As you may know, bid adjustments allow you to optimize performance by showing ads more or less frequently based on where, when, and how people search. Most advertisers set bid adjustments manually, increasing or decreasing bids based on relevant circumstances.
Google currently offers the following bid adjustments:
For example, you could infer from your performance data that click-through rates from mobile devices are higher. So you create a +20% bid adjustment for mobile in order for your ads to show more often.
Optimizing bid adjustments manually is often about trial and error. Advertisers create an experiment, increasing bids for a certain audience to see if it improves conversions or other campaign goals. But this can all be automated using technology for PPC management.
Google Ads allows you to apply bid modifiers to Smart Campaigns with automated bidding. It will automatically make the necessary bid adjustments to prioritize an audience and target your set campaign goals.
Third-party PPC automation tools can also handle automated bid adjustments. QuanticMind by Centro allows advertisers to create bid adjustments for all audience types, including Remarketing, Custom Affinity, Affinity, and In-Market. It also uses all your relevant business data to create granular bid adjustments to improve performance and maximize the value of audience targeting to drive advertising goals.
Manual bidding for Google Ads gives advertisers complete control over their accounts, but also the responsibility of fully managing them. Analyzing performance and making necessary campaign improvements is a never-ending task for PPC managers.
On the other hand, paid search automation can handle the majority of bid optimization tasks for you. Rather than eliminating the important role of account manager, it provides them with an opportunity to focus more on strategy development. When advertisers aren’t spending all their time executing campaigns, they’re able to search for and pursue new growth opportunities. They can discover new keywords or audiences to target, create better ads or ad groups, or make other account adjustments to improve campaign performance.
PPC managers need to forecast future performance in order to secure and optimize their budget spend. Creating accurate forecasts can seem like a challenge when you use paid search automation. You can’t predict what changes your automation software will make and can’t factor them into your forecasts.
But you can actually avoid this problem altogether using PPC optimization technology with forecasting capabilities. You can create automated reports that are more accurate and actionable than those you’d create manually.
QuanticMind by Centro is one example of bid automation software with internal forecasting features. It considers historical performance, seasonality, bid landscape data, and other important data to create an accurate forecast of predicted performance up to 100 days into the future. The tool’s algorithms also rely on these forecasting insights to make informed bidding decisions automatically.
Paid search automation can outperform manual bidding in a lot of ways. But if you want to get the most out of the technology to meet your business goals, here are a few tips for starting out:
Try Experimenting with Automated Bidding
If you’re still not sure if automated bidding is the right choice for your advertising efforts, there’s no need to take everyone’s word for it. Test out the technology yourself and see if it brings better results.
Instead of switching an entire campaign over to automated bidding, you can create an experiment to compare the performance of automated vs manual bidding for Google Ads.
For example, you can spend a month comparing how your manual bidding strategy performs versus an automated strategy targeting ROAS.
Here are the steps to create an experimental campaign:
1. Go to Drafts & experiments from the side menu bar
2. Select + NEW DRAFT
3. Select the campaign you want to duplicate
4. Name your campaign draft
5. Hit SAVE
Then go back to Drafts & experiments and click +NEW EXPERIMENT.
On the next page that comes up, you can name your experiment, select what date range you want it to run, and how much traffic you want to direct to it (e.g. 50%).
Once you set this up, you can make any changes you want to your experimental campaign without affecting your original one. So you can test out an automated bidding strategy for a short time to see if it drives the results you’re looking for, and with more spend efficiency than manual bidding.
Choose the Right Bidding Strategy
Another very important thing to consider in the beginning is which automated bidding strategy you should choose. All seem to shoot for valuable campaign performance goals, but they approach bidding very differently.
Different bidding strategies will be more valuable for you depending on your current campaign performance and composition. For example:
If you’re not sure which bid strategy is most valuable to reach your business goals, you can also experiment in creating different automated campaigns to test and compare performance.
Use Scripts to Expand Your Automation Capabilities
Google Ads offers a lot of internal automation capabilities for PPC management. But there’s a lot you can do beyond these features to automate and improve campaign performance. Google ads scripts are a way to make custom automated changes to your accounts using JavaScript code.
There’s a wealth of premade scripts available that advertisers can use to automate actions in their Google Ads account, such as adjusting bids, adding keywords, or pausing ad groups. Scripts can also address some of the challenges of automated bidding, giving account managers the control they need. For example, Google’s automated algorithms are able to overspend by up to 200% in order to reach campaign goals. Advertisers who want to cap or control overspending can do so using scripts.
Scripts can also prevent poor campaign performance due to data quality issues. If there’s a problem with your campaign data and automated algorithms refer to it to make bidding decisions, it can hurt performance without your knowledge. But a script can automatically pause problem ad groups or campaigns when performance deviates too far from forecasts. This gives account managers the chance to address the issue.
Consider Third-Party Tools to Improve Precision
Advertisers who use manual bidding in Google Ads find it easy to switch over to automated bidding options on the same platform. Google has a strong solution that continues to introduce new features, but it’s not the most powerful solution for automated bidding. Third-party tools are uniquely capable of considering all relevant business data in calculating bids, giving advertisers an important advantage over everyone using Smart Campaigns today.
Third-party tools like QuanticMind by Centro can also integrate an array of automation features to work in unison to improve campaign efficiency and efficacy. Automatic built-in forecasting, performance reports, and anomaly detection technology eliminates much of the manual optimization necessary with Google Ads automation.
There’s no denying that automating paid search offers many more opportunities to improve campaign efficiency than manual bidding. It allows you to utilize all relevant market data to make quick, accurate changes to improve CPA, reduce wasted ad spend, and more.
Still, some advertisers cling to the idea of manual bidding because it offers one thing: complete control over campaign decisions.
But once you learn about how automation works and the flexibility of options available for utilizing it, the choice becomes more clear. Automation offers all the control you need to utilize the power of artificial intelligence and machine learning to meet your business goals. Meanwhile, the number of advertisers adopting paid search automation continues to grow, making it more of a necessity than an option to keep up with the competition in 2019.
In 2019, businesses are investing more in PPC performance marketing than ever before. Advertisers must constantly be on the lookout for ways to improve Adwords performance if they want to stay ahead of the growing competition. There are a lot of changes advertisers can make to improve performance and an equal number of ways to hurt it. PPC managers can no longer afford to experiment with changes and learn from trial and error. They need to invest in strategies that optimize while avoiding performance issues altogether. Automated PPC bidding technology is the key. Here's why.
Quality data is essential if you want to develop an effective optimization strategy, create accurate forecasts, and make the most of key insights to improve visibility and campaign performance. The better the quality of data you’re able to access and analyze, the more opportunities you’ll have to boost conversions, beat out the competition, and drive revenue from your ads.
One of the biggest reasons for missed goals in PPC performance marketing is low-quality data. Even if you’re using the most advanced optimization techniques, low-quality data can drive misguided decisions, causing PPC performance to fall short of expectations.
Advanced bid optimization technology is uniquely positioned to address this issue by analyzing a unified data set to make profitable bidding decisions. On the basic level, Google’s bid automation technology utilizes bid landscapes, historical performance, and other quality data to drive performance-enhancing insights. Advanced PPC automated bidding tools like QuanticMind by Centro can also consider additional categories of business data, such as offline data from call centers or CRM platforms, data from the web and mobile tracking solutions, inventory systems that track supply constraints, and other contextual data.
By taking advantage of all relevant categories of data, bid optimization technology is able to make informed changes to achieve peak performance. If you rely on a manual strategy or bidding solution that doesn’t capture and leverage all critical data, then you may have some inherent performance issues as well as missed opportunities.
Fully utilizing a unified data set that includes deep funnel metrics will unlock insights into where your prospects are in the sales funnel when you reach them. It can also help you understand which steps in the customer journey are most valuable for your advertising goals. Certain milestones of the customer journey can serve to predict whether a click will lead to a sale, and how much revenue that sale will return. Bid optimization technology is uniquely positioned to make bidding decisions with driving revenue in mind.
Manual bidding is no longer a default strategy in PPC performance marketing. Even for smaller accounts with just a few campaigns and ad groups, there are simply too many important factors that impact bidding decisions to be handled manually, including:
These factors are, of course, always changing. In order for PPC managers to avoid performance issues from under or overbidding, they need to constantly recalculate and update their strategy as the bid landscape and other factors change.
Bid optimization technology has advanced algorithms and data processing capabilities that can accurately calculate the best CPC to maximize campaign performance. Through automation, it’s also able to make constant changes to your bids based on the latest data insights. When you make full use of bid automation technology, it’s possible to avoid performance issues that come from outdated or sub-optimum bidding decisions.
Google’s automated bidding features respond to real-time data signals to make changes to your bids on variables such as device, language, operating system, and performance. QuanticMind by Centro can also optimize bids when data is scarce, for example in the case of long-tail keywords with few conversions. The software uses Natural Language Processing (NLP) to estimate the value of long-tail keywords/product groups.
Here’s a breakdown of the data and process used to calculate CPC and minimize wasted ad spend for PPC:
If you’re having performance issues, it could be because you’re optimizing towards the wrong metric. Every business has unique goals they want to prioritize when optimizing their PPC campaigns. In order to measure performance towards a goal, they need to choose the right key performance indicators (KPIs) to track. Most PPC marketers rely on so-called “vanity metrics” such as impressions, clicks, clickthrough rates, and conversions to measure success. But they often fall short of painting a full picture of how your ads are helping your business achieve your goals.
For example, say your main goal is to achieve a monthly return on ad spend (ROAS) of 150%. In this case, you’d want to include revenue as an important KPI to monitor. It would also inform your bidding strategy, as you’d want to bid more on keywords that generate more revenue and less on keywords that generate less revenue. Bid optimization technology can prevent PPC performance issues that arise from targeting the wrong KPIs. With Google Ads, you can select the right bidding strategy based on specific business goals, such as:
Automated bidding automatically considers all-important KPIs for your business goals when making bidding decisions. Third-party bid automation tools can also help you target a wider range of goals based on a hybrid mix of KPIs, such as maximizing profit margin. This ensures you avoid performance issues from optimizing towards metrics that don’t fully reflect your goals.
Bid adjustments are opportunities to optimize targeting by increasing or decreasing bids in certain situations. You can create bid adjustments based on factors like:
You can also make bid adjustments for certain audiences, such as remarketing lists for search ads (RLSA) or in-market audiences. It’s common for account managers to make bid adjustments manually in PPC performance marketing. This, though, can inadvertently lead to some efficiency and performance issues. A marketer could, for instance, increase bids for mobile devices by 15% because they know conversions are higher on mobile devices. But what if a 10% bid adjustment could achieve the same results? Or what if targeting in-market audiences (who are often searching from mobile anyway) yields better results than a mobile bid adjustment?
The only way to ensure your bids are optimum is through experimentation. But if you automate bid adjustments, machine learning technology can discover the ideal bid changes for you. It can also make constant adjustments to bids to keep up with market fluctuations. The ability to make thousands of granular bid adjustments at scale can significantly reduce wasted ad spend and improve campaign performance overall.
Contrary to popular belief, bid automation technology can be used for a lot more than optimizing keyword bids. Top-of-the-line tools have many features to help you improve Adwords performance, such as advanced reporting and forecasting capabilities.
Google Ads offers internal forecasting features from Keyword Planner so you can see how different keyword targeting and max CPC affect long-term performance. Bid optimization technology can also forecast future performance based on important factors like bidding strategy, historical performance, seasonality, bid landscape, and more.
Accurate, data-fueled forecasting is important if you want to improve Adwords performance and avoid efficiency issues. Most marketers create an initial forecast to secure a budget and plan how to spend it. But as they make changes to their bid policies and targeting strategy down the road, the forecast becomes inaccurate. And even if they don’t make changes, the competitive landscape will shift. So, having an automated, up-to-date forecast at all times is incredibly valuable to avoid performance issues. Any changes you make to your account that inadvertently hurts performance will be instantly visible with forecasting. The forecasting feature available within QuanticMind by Centro allows users to view the predicted performance of bid policies up to 100 days into the future.
It’s primarily the job of a PPC account manager to ensure that campaign performance keeps up with forecasted projections. If your CPA or other performance metrics vary widely from expectations, then an error in your account or data could be the problem.
Whenever an anomaly occurs, PPC account managers need to act quickly to pause problem campaigns and address the issue before it causes too much damage. This task becomes a problem with PPC automated bidding because bidding algorithms are constantly making changes. They also calculate bids using much larger datasets than what account managers using manual bidding would normally handle.
But there are certain features you can use to automatically detect anomalies and minimize their impact on PPC performance. Google scripts are one option you can use to automate this process. For example, there are scripts that can regularly scan your account performance and automatically email the account manager if statistics vary too far from projections. There are also scripts you can use to automatically pause problem campaigns or ad groups, giving PPC managers time to address the issue.
Effective anomaly detection also involves assessing the quality of low fidelity data and making necessary changes to avoid performance issues based on it. For the most part, more data input is always good, unless it’s low-quality data that keeps performance below peak potential and wastes significant ad spend. Often these data quality issues are hidden in the sub-segments of relevant data, making it difficult for marketers to discover by hand. Advanced bid optimization technology is uniquely positioned to address this issue.
QuanticMind by Centro includes an array of anomaly detection techniques to identify potential data issues. In a complex automated bidding process, anomaly detection is the last check before new bid calculations are pushed to publishers:
It monitors all key metrics, including cost, revenue, clicks, CPC, and more, then compares their daily performance to forecasted expectations. If results vary significantly, the tool automatically prevents bidding from being updated from deviant data and sends out an alert for account managers. Once the potential data issue is solved, bidding is resumed.
Bid optimization technology is a powerful tool for improving Adwords performance. But it also has important features that help advertisers avoid problems with their accounts and campaigns. Manually diagnosing PPC performance issues is time-consuming, and account managers may never fully identify the extent of the issues. That’s just one of many reasons why bid automation tools are essential for succeeding with SEM.
Dynamic Search Ads in Google Ads have long been a powerful digital tool to expand the reach of an advertising program and discover new, relevant search keywords. Still, they often remain underutilized and misunderstood. Every advertiser should consider Dynamic Search Ads as a part of their advertising arsenal. Here’s a guide on the what, why, and how to maximize the potential of these keyword-less campaigns.
First, what are Dynamic Search Ads, abbreviated as DSAs? Since October 2011, DSAs have allowed paid search advertisers to target customers without having keywords. Google’s web crawling technology indexes your website, much like it does to produce search results, and Google automatically creates an ad when a search is relevant to the content of your website. If that sounds like magic, that’s because it is. Magic in the form of dynamic ad creation. DSAs utilize the very same technology that makes Google a valuable search engine in the first place; it’s ability to index websites and direct search results to relevant content.
DSAs fit the following framework:
[dynamically generated headline]
Yourwebsite.com
Ad description
The ad headline that is shown when a DSA appears on the search results page is dynamically created from Google. The information that populates a DSA headline is pulled directly from the site. You still need to write a description line for the ad, but that is the only thing that can be adjusted. As you can imagine, having a specific and tailored headline that is about the actual product searched is a best practice, and is something that DSAs can help you achieve.
Since DSAs do not have keywords, bids are applied at the ad target level, called dynamic ad targets. DSAs use content from your website to target your ads to searches. There are a variety of targeting options:
Category - Sets of landing pages organized by theme. You decide which sets of pages to target.
Page Content - Descriptive content on the page contains a certain word or phrase.
Page Title - The title of the page contains a certain word or phrase.
URL - The page URL contains this word or phrase.
Each DSA campaign has one or more ad targets, and ad targets can be defined as any combination of the targeting options. Ad targets are typically broadly defined to help increase incremental search traffic.
Ad target bids otherwise function the same as a keyword bid, and DSA campaigns and ad groups have the same bid adjustments available (device, location, etc) as any keyword-based object.
A critical component to achieving success with DSAs is signaling when not to show ads. This can be managed via exclusions and negative keywords.
Exclusions - Exclusions come in two forms, the exclusion of a category, and the exclusion of specific webpages. When your website contains pages that you do not want to direct traffic to, those pages should be excluded. A common example of this is to exclude pages that contain the words ‘sold out’ to prevent customers from seeing ads for products with no inventory.
Negatives - Negative keywords can be added to DSAs just like with any other campaign. Despite DSAs having no keywords, negatives will prevent ads from showing in the case that a search query contains the negative keyword. For example, add ‘used’ as a negative keyword for a campaign dedicated to new car sales.
Create a new DSA campaign with a single ad group. Set a single ad target that targets webpages containing your homepage URL. This ensures content across your entire website is contributing to ad creation and potentially showing for relevant search results. Next, include exclusions and negatives that overlap with content for which you already have keyword campaigns. From there, get more granular, try creating more precise advertising targets, and review the search queries generating traffic and conversions for new opportunities to expand your keywords.
DSA setup is easy, but to have continued success advertisers should routinely reassess their exclusions and negatives to ensure not only that traffic is flowing to the appropriate pages on their site, but also that the traffic is relevant. The other major benefit of DSA campaigns is the opportunity to generate site traffic that would not have been generated via your existing list of keywords.
Most advertisers know what keywords contribute to the majority of site traffic, but reviewing search queries that lead customers to your site via a DSA campaign could help you discover valuable alternative search terms you can then add as keywords. This process should be performed periodically over time to generate additional program growth.
Bing Ads offers DSAs as well and they function the same as with Google Ads. Bing explicitly recommends duplicating your Google Ads DSA campaigns in Bing, which tells you just how functionally identical they are to Google. The same successful practices you administer on Google are equally applicable to Bing.
What industries or verticals stand to benefit the most from DSAs? Short answer, eCommerce, and online retailers. Reason being that DSAs will segment your website content into specific categories, such as product categories, to trigger highly relevant ads and landing pages. Advertisers who have a large catalog of webpages and products are ideal users of DSAs and will save time from needing to specify ad text and landing pages for every product.
Pros
Cons
The good far outweighs the bad, and bad is an overstatement, there really is no bad. The diminished control found using DSAs can be mitigated with a comprehensive set of traditional keyword campaigns. The best search programs are using DSAs in addition to keyword-driven text ads.
DSAs are a valuable ad type that every advertiser should consider. When managed properly, including thorough reviews of exclusions and negatives, DSAs offer a low-risk way to boost search traffic that may otherwise have gone untouched.
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To learn more about how you can create better, higher-performing ads that drive peak performance, connect with our digital media experts today.
There are about 3.2 billion social media users worldwide, and that number continues to rise daily. That statistic alone showcases the reach that social media has when it comes to digital marketing. Social media marketing allows companies to connect more closely with their clients and customers, whether it’s through wide-reaching Facebook or influencer-dominated Instagram. Now is the time to utilize the platforms that matter!
When it comes to B2B marketing, however, LinkedIn reigns supreme. The professional networking site remains the most used social media platform by Fortune 500 companies. But it’s not limited to high-profile company executives—millennials are flocking to the site as well. Out of over 590 million current LinkedIn users, 87 million are millennials.
How can you use LinkedIn to your advantage? Read on to find out.
LinkedIn users are looking for valuable content filled with insider knowledge, so it’s important to inform and educate rather than promote. Target your content to what your audience and connections want to see, because even sponsored content will appear organically in their newsfeeds. Tell an engaging story and make sure to include videos and photos in posts—62% of LinkedIn members interacted with platform content because they found it educational or informative.
Don’t be a faceless brand! Show your followers that your company has a team of real people behind it. Despite the professional landscape, LinkedIn is still a great place to tell stories and show your followers that you’re more than just a product or service provider. Not every post has to be business oriented—it’s also worthwhile to highlight company values, share thought leadership content, and celebrate employees.
Centro’s Basis now has an API integration with LinkedIn, making it even easier to advertise on the platform. Basis pulls daily delivery, performance, and spend data from LinkedIn directly into its dashboard. This eliminates the need for additional CSVs and spreadsheets to be manually downloaded from LinkedIn and uploaded into Basis.
Basis rationalizes delivery data from major ad servers, various social and search vendors, and its integrated demand-side platform (DSP). The LinkedIn integration drives productivity for media professionals by:
Basis improves revenue margins, controls costs associated with technology platforms, and lifts team productivity by automating the most manual and redundant tasks in digital media buying and operations. Don’t wait—visit our site to learn more.
There are lots of ways to improve PPC campaign performance by changing your keyword targeting strategy. You could get results by optimizing bids and audience targeting for broad match search terms with a high search volume. But it’s also possible to attract more traffic and optimize your ad spend by targeting long-tail keywords in Adwords.
Here’s everything you need to know about using long-tail keywords effectively to improve PPC performance.
Long-tail keywords are keyword phrases used to search for something very specific on the web. They usually contain at least three keyword terms derived from a head term. For example, a broad search term could be “marketing automation.” A long-tail keyword could be “marketing automation for Adwords PPC.”
Most paid search advertisers focus only on targeting broad search terms. But a huge portion of Google searches are long-tail queries. In fact, 70% of search traffic comes from highly specific four to six-word phrases:
Targeting long-tail keywords is a very popular strategy for organic search engine optimization (SEO). Marketers tailor their content creation efforts to optimize for long keyword phrases.
Marketers who invest in both SEO and PPC often balance their long-tail targeting efforts by targeting competitive head terms with paid ads. This is a worthwhile strategy, but completely overlooks the opportunity long-tail keywords offer for PPC targeting and optimization.
Long-tail keywords are valuable in PPC for several reasons:
Long-tail keywords are more specific phrases, and end up having lower search volume as a result. Lots of people shopping online will search for the head term “wireless router.” Very few will search for “wireless router with USB 3.0.” Because long-tail phrases have a lower search volume, most PPC advertisers won’t bother to target them. So, if you do take the time to identify and target relevant long-tail keywords, you’ll have much less competition to rank in search results.
Google Ads calculates cost-per-click (CPC) for a keyword-based on demand. Highly competitive keywords with a high search volume will have a high CPC, while less competitive keywords will have a lower CPC. Targeting keywords with lower CPC and competition means you won’t have to pay a premium price to get your ads to rank highly. This also frees up more of your budget to pursue other advertising initiatives.
Long-tail keywords are highly targeted and specific, suggesting a searcher is close to the point of purchase. Look at the “wireless router” vs “wireless router with USB 3.0” example again. People who search for “wireless router” are likely hoping to learn more about the technology, or are at the beginning stages of understanding what kind of wireless router they want to buy. Someone who searches for “wireless router with USB 3.0” has already done their research. They know specifically what kind of router they want and are likely ready to make a purchase.
Targeting long-tail keywords is also an opportunity to optimize for voice search. Voice search has changed the kind of search queries people use to find the products and information they need. Several research studies have shown that voice search queries are significantly longer than text search:
Considering that 20% of all Google mobile queries are voice search, it’s already a valuable strategy to optimize for.
The key to success is finding keywords that imply high purchase intent. Sticking with the wireless routers example: with your marketing content, you can target top-of-the-funnel keywords like: “will a new wireless router improve internet speed?”
These long-tail keywords suggest searchers are just starting to learn about marketing automation and aren’t ready to buy yet. If you want to drive high ROI from your PPC ads, then you’ll target bottom-of-the-funnel keywords like: “wireless router with parental controls and time restriction”.
Always consider searcher intent when researching long-tail keywords. Some keywords are great to target for SEO, while others are relevant for PPC. The types of long-tail keywords you want to target will also depend on your industry. If you sell e-commerce products, you’ll have many long-tail keyword opportunities with your product variants and specifications. You can include keyword terms such as:
For example, a retailer who sells children’s clothes could use a head term like “Polo shirt” and create a long-tail keyword like “Boys blue striped polo shirt.” Service or location-based businesses will target different kinds of keywords entirely. If location is important to your business, then you can use it to create long-tail keywords. A photography business located in Tacoma, WA could target “Tacoma, WA photography services.”
You can also create long-tail keywords using descriptors related to your industry or service. A marketing agency that specializes in promoting dentists, for instance, could target “dental practice marketing services”. Using these suggestions, you can brainstorm long-tail keywords then see if they have good search volume using Keyword Planner. There are indeed lots of ways to find new long-tail keywords to target using various tools.
Here are some options:
Google search is a great tool to help you find relevant long-tail keywords to target. Start out with Google’s autofill feature. Go to Google.com and type in a base keyword. Google will then suggest longer phrases based on your head term:
Google search also provides long-tail keyword ideas from related searches. Search for a root keyword related to your niche, then scroll down to the bottom of the search results to find it:
You can also dig deeper by taking Google’s suggested keywords and re-enter them into the search engine to find new ideas.
If you’re already running PPC campaigns, your current ads can be a goldmine of long-tail keyword ideas to target. The Search Terms Report will show you the actual search terms your current ads are showing for. Most of the search queries you’ll find here are simple variants of your main keyword. The report includes columns showing your target keyword, the customer’s actual search term, and the search term match type:
You can go through the Search Terms Report and look for any long-tail queries that are bringing up your current ads. As long as they’re relevant, these queries could be good to target directly.
Here’s how you find the Search Terms Report:
Keyword multiplier tools are a great option for e-commerce retailers who offer products in a variety of sizes, colors, models, etc. It’s an easy way to build a comprehensive list of long-tail keywords related to your product. There are a plethora of free keyword multiplier tools you can use out there. Just type your head term into one box, then any product variants you want to target in the other boxes (e.g. size, color).
The tool should generate a complete list of all the keyword variants you can target. You won’t want to target every keyword on your new list, but if you take the list to Keyword Planner and run a forecast, you can identify keywords that get enough searches per month to target.
KeywordTool.io is specifically designed to help you find all potential long-tail keyword variations for a base keyword. It utilizes Google’s autocomplete data to generate results, and you can also get suggestions from YouTube, Bing, Amazon, eBay, and more. All you do is type in a root keyword and select your language/location targeting, and it returns keyword suggestions:
The paid version of KeywordTool.io also provides search volume, trends, CPC, and competition information.
Answer the Public is another free long-tail keyword research tool you can use. It focuses on illustrating what kind of questions people commonly ask online related to a root keyword. Most of the results you get from Answer the Public will be super long tail. These are top-of-the-funnel questions from people who are just starting to research.
Say, for example, you type in “wireless router” as your root keyword. You’ll see a lot of results like:
These keywords are great to target for SEO, but far too long-tail and top of the funnel to target with PPC. Answer the Public also returns prepositions and comparisons in addition to questions. Dig deeper into these and you’ll find relevant long-tail keywords for PPC targeting.
Answer the Public creates a cool keyword visualization:
Or you can look at lists and export them:
There are so many relevant long-tail keywords to target, it’s easy to clutter your Adwords account with them. Once you build a list of potential long-tail keywords to utilize, make sure you run them through Keyword Planner to ensure they have enough search volume to be worth your direct investment. Removing low search volume keywords from your list doesn’t mean you’ll have to miss out on this traffic. Make sure your ads qualify for all relevant long-tail keywords by creating two campaigns:
This way you can prioritize long tail through campaign bidding, and keep referring back to your Search Terms Report from your General Campaign to find new long-tail keyword opportunities.
Relevance is key to maximizing the value of long-tail keyword targeting for PPC. Optimize your ad copy by including your full keyword. With Google Shopping ads, include images relevant to your keyword targeting as well. For example, an ad targeting the keyword “olive green hiking boots” shouldn’t have an image of brown boots.
Targeting long-tail keywords in Adwords is a great way to optimize ad spend and attract more paid search traffic back to your business. By creating separate campaigns, it’s possible to measure the performance of long-tail keyword targeting against broad match keywords. Monitor performance, then add and remove keywords as necessary. Building an optimized long-tail keyword targeting strategy can bring you long-term returns from relevant, targeted ads.