Earlier in the week we looked at some of the reasons you might want to out-source your Adwords campaigns. The article, available here, talked about some of the more basic elements an agency might be able to help you with, which predominantly comes down to time, and experience.
Today we want to look at some of the more complex Adwords features you should expect an Agency such as ourselves to implement for you. Most of these involve changes (coding) to your website, and as such might be out of reach for most people running their campaign in-house, or who don’t have coders on hand. Regardless of running your own campaign, or outsourcing it, you should certainly have an understanding of some of the latest and more complex techniques listed below.
Re-marketing
An absolute gem when it comes to gaining quality and low-cost traffic. It essentially means that when someone visits your website, your can advertise to them for the next 90 days, encouraging them to come back. This is ideal if your product or service has a long sales cycle, where the customer may spend weeks or months deliberating. You might have seen this happen if you have been on our website for example.
You visit our homepage, 2 days later you are on the Guardian newspaper website, and see an advertisement like this;
This is remarketing in action. It improves your brand awareness, and has an extremely low-cost per click. This means you gain a lot of exposure, for very little cost.
You can also implement some robust rules when it comes to remarketing. For example;
Show a certain promotion to visitors who came to your site, added a product to their cart, but did not check-out.
Show a certain banner to people who visited a certain category on your website.
Show a certain banner to people who read your blog.
These rules can be created using Audiences within your Google Analytics account.
You will also need to add some code to every page of your website. This is called a ‘tag’ and is what allows Google to track the visits and store information about your visitors.
Skills needed: Create audience in Google Analytics, add remarketing code to your website’s code, design suitable banner images at multiple resolutions.
Dynamic Re-marketing
Very similar to remarketing above, it adds a new layer of complexity, but is ULTRA COOL! Have you ever been on Amazon looking at a product like this…..
Then ten minutes later, surfing around the web you see an advert like this one…
That is dynamic re-marketing in action! The advertiser took reference of the product(s) you looked at, and then displayed an advert to you based on the information contained in a cookie on your computer. This is proven to bring people back to your site, and to give you a second bite of the cherry to actually purchase something from you.
Skills needed: Create audience in Google Analytics, add remarketing code to your website’s code, design suitable banner images at multiple resolutions, create a Google Merchant Centre account, create a shopping feed file every day, add code to your website which identified products on your site, to products in your feed file.
Video
Video adverts statistically have a lower cost and higher engagement rate. A video advert can used in a number of different ways, which allow you to reach different audiences, and with different goals in mind. For example, you goal may be to gain more visits to a product page… or it may be to generate more subscribers on your Youtube channel.
With Google Adwords, the ideal place to upload a video is Youtube. It allows you to create captions, cards and calls-to-action within your advert using the Youtube Editor.
Google Adwords can then call upon this information when displaying your ads. Once you have created videos, and ads, you can then assign them using ‘Placements’. These placements could for example determine that your video is displayed on Business Channels, Health Channels or Shopping Channels. By monitoring these audiences you can build a picture of those people most likely to engage with your videos, and fine tune the placements accordingly. Clever eh?
Skills needed: Youtube channel setup, video creation, Youtube editor, Adwords display advertising placements
Phone tagging
A recent feature of Adwords is the ability to have a changeable phone number on your website. This phone number simply redirects the called to your main number. What use is that you might be asking?
Improving an Adwords account is all about Analysing the data within it. This essentially boils down to sales. That’s all well and good on a sales/eCommerce website, but when your sales funnel is more complex, it might not be feasible to track sales so easily from within Adwords or Google Analytics. this is where phone tagging comes in. By adding some special code to your site, you can replace your phone number with a trackable Google number. When someone calls the number they still come through to you directly, but with the added bonus that it tracks as a conversion within your Adwords account. So, for example, you can then see that a certain advert cost you £x and resulted in Y phone calls.
Skills needed: Depending on your website, this may require PHP, HTML, and/OR CSS coding.
In Summary
Adwords is more than just creating a few text ads and letting it roll. It’s about creating a truly dynamic set of adverts, images and placements which co-exist. Furthermore it is about tracking the performance of these adverts, and being in a position to dynamically react (sometimes automatically), to clicks, sales and your competitors. The above tools all enable this, and should be a part of any major Adwords campaign.