Bringing intent, context, and audience together for better performing search campaigns

Along with a user's query, context signals like location, time of day, and device have become increasingly important in showing people the right ads with their search results. With enhanced campaigns, it's now easier to reach people in the moments that matter across all screens, with ads that are more relevant to a user's intent and context. Now we're incorporating another powerful capability to tailor your search campaigns for different audiences – remarketing lists for search ads (RLSA). With this feature, you can modify your search ads, bids, and keywords based on your visitors' past activity on your website. As we transition out of the beta test of RLSA, announced in July 2012, we'll be making the feature available to all advertisers using enhanced campaigns over the next few days.

Combining intent, context, and audience for better search ads 
Search ads work great because they're relevant to the user's intent and context. And users who have recently visited your website often find your ads to be even more relevant. RLSA brings intent, context, and audience together to let you tailor your search campaign when past site visitors are searching on Google for your brand, products, and services. Here are some ways to improve your campaign performance using RLSA.

1. Increase ad visibility for high value customers by adjusting your bids. For example, you could increase your bids by 20% for visitors who have previously researched high-end cameras while on your site when they subsequently search for ‘cameras’ on Google. And you could increase your bids by 40% for past site visitors who have previously purchased high-end equipment from your site. It's easy to set up RLSA bid adjustments and they combine with other enhanced campaigns bid adjustments for location, device, and time.


2. Expand your reach and results with broader keywords. For example, bidding on broad keywords such as ‘gifts’ or ‘presents’ during a holiday season might not convert well enough to meet your ROI goals. But if you use RLSA to run those keywords just for repeat customers, they may convert better and allow you to grow your total sales with a profitable ROI. 

Advertiser success with RLSA
Advertisers in the beta have seen strong results with RLSA. Here are some examples:

• Tirendo, a European online tire retailer, saw a 161% conversion rate increase with RLSA, leading to a 22% overall sales increase. And the incremental conversions were efficient, with a 43% lower average cost per order than previous campaigns. Read more.
• WorldStores, a leading UK home furnishings and garden store, increased total orders 8% by using RLSA to increase bids for past site visitors. Conversion rates for this segment were 130% higher and average cost per conversion was 43% lower, even with the higher bids.

Tags and list management
RLSA shares the same site-wide Google Remarketing Tag and list management tools as remarketing on the Google Display Network (GDN). So you can start using RLSA immediately if your website is already tagged for remarketing on the GDN.

Transparency and control for users
We believe users should have transparency and be in control their ad experience. That's why we provide adjustable Ads Settings and inform users when an ad has been influenced by a past visit to a particular advertiser's website.

Learn more
For help getting started with RLSA, check out this article in the Help Center. You can also join us at tomorrow's Learn with Google Webinar: Reaching the Right Audience with Remarketing on Wednesday, June 26, 2013 at 1pm ET.

Posted by Rahul Lahiri, AdWords Product Manager

Reconnect with site visitors using beautiful, customized dynamic ads

As we continue to expand our advertising solutions, our goal is to provide a great user experience for both advertisers and consumers. We know that advertisers are always looking for new ways to reach their customers with compelling ads that drive engagement and conversions. Today, we are excited to announce the launch of dynamic remarketing to all clients with a Google Merchant Center account. We are also currently piloting this new feature in the travel and education sectors and plan to expand availability to more sectors later this year.

Beautiful, tailored ads to reconnect with customers
Dynamic remarketing lets you automatically create beautiful, customized ads that connect with shoppers across the web, by reminding them of items they've seen on your site. You can build ads quickly with dozens of templates to choose from that you can customize to reflect the design elements of your brand. We have also made it easy to get started by automatically creating dynamic text and display ads for you.

Sample dynamic ads (see more here):

Click to enlarge

Advertisers have seen great results compared to their traditional remarketing campaigns:

• Sierra Trading Post, a U.S. retailer of outdoor gear and clothing, saw a 2x higher clickthrough rate and a 5x higher conversion rate
• As Europe’s premiere “heavy metal online shop,” EMP Merchandising grew conversion rates by 230% and decreased their cost of sale by 30%.

You can read more about other client successes on Think Insights.

Optimizing dynamic ads to drive performance
Dynamic remarketing delivers tailored ads across the web that combine the layouts, products, messages and offers that your customers are most likely interested in, based on what they viewed on your website. You can benefit from our:

• Auto-optimized layouts which predicts the best performing layout for each impression
• Product recommendation engine which optimizes the combination of related and popular products that show in your ads [Learn more]
• Real-time bidding algorithm which helps boost performance by calculating the optimal bid for each impression

For help on getting started reference this Help Center article.

Making it easy for advertisers
Managing campaigns more efficiently is just one of the many benefits of remarketing with Google. Last year, we introduced a site-wide remarketing tag and remarketing with Google Analytics that both made it easy to get started with your campaigns. You can also use the tag to discover new customers similar to your site visitors with Similar Audiences, which has been recently made available to all clients in AdWords.

Remarketing drives great ROI for advertisers, it can also bring publishers significant revenue lift, as studies have shown, and compelling ads for consumers. We’ve also given consumers options to exercise control over their ad experience with features like the Ads Settings and Mute this Ad.

To learn more about what remarketing with Google can do for your business, register for our upcoming Learn with Google Webinar: Reaching the Right Audience with Remarketing on Wednesday, June 26, 2013 at 1pm ET.

Posted by Aitan Weinberg, Group Product Manager

Building Display Creatives for Your Audience

If you’re audience targeting (or considering it), customizing your ads for your audience can yield better performance. Here are the top tips for audience targeted creatives learned through the collective experience of hundreds of Google AdWords account teams.

1. Make your ads a helpful step in the user experience

Make audience specific recommendations, differentiate yourself from the competition, and provide new information. For example remarketing ads could show complementary products that an existing customer may need. If you’re targeting new users, feature positive testimonials and reviews to highlight your good reputation.

Make better use of audience targeting by addressing different stages in the buying cycle within your ad.

click to view larger image

2. Be Transparent

This is particularly important if you’re using remarketing. Your audience may wonder how you knew they were on your site or interested in specific products. Be upfront; link to a description of why they’re seeing your ads and how they work from your landing page. Showing a variety of ads helps minimize overly-specific targeting and repetition.

3. Tailor ads to your user

To drive better performance: personalize ads based on the product or service your audience would be interested in. If you’re remarketing to a user who browsed your site, match your ads to content they viewed. For example, if a user viewed a variety of smart phones, you could show ads promoting individual phones, phone plans, or phone accessories.

click to view larger image

4. Landing Page Relevance

Seamlessly link your audience-relevant creative message to a landing page on your website with content pertinent to the product or service the audience is interested in.

To improve your audience campaign performance, ensure that your landing page is optimized for conversions. Tools like Website Optimizer or Google Analytics can make optimizing your landing pages much easier.

Creative and its relevant landing page

5. Call-to-Action

A compelling call-to-action is crucial for any targeting type or advertising goal. Use your knowledge of your audience to match your call-to-action to the user in both content and style.

Phrases like ‘See Offers’ perform double duty by communicating next steps and highlighting a promotion or benefit in clicking.

click to view larger image

6. Use All Ad Formats & Sizes

Not every site will offer every ad size and format – if you’re missing ad sizes you could be missing out on thousands of impressions. Remember, you want to reach your audience wherever they are online. Maximize your opportunity to reach your audience anywhere on a network and increase volume by utilizing all ad formats, text ads, and display ad sizes available.

We’d love your feedback. Let us know if this was helpful or how it can be improved at better-ads@google.com.

Posted by Katie Miller, Inside AdWords crew

Are We Spending Too Much Time on Social Media?

Many of us have spent numerous hours researching and learning about social media marketing along with keeping up with the trends, not to mention interpreting regulations, when in fact, only 22% of the time Internet users are actually on social media sites. (via Visual Economics) So what about other avenues of Internet marketing that can bring your company numerous benefits along with stretching your limited marketing dollars?

There are multiple Internet marketing avenues, including, but not limited to; remarketing, search engine marketing and various online ad opportunities. 

All of these tools give us many benefits over traditional marketing including tracking real-time results and instant conversion ability. In addition, you’re able to target your audience by demographics, geography (Geo-targeting), behavior and context, allowing you to place your message to a specific target in your specified trade area.

• Demographics – Age, gender, income, home ownership, and business ownership, are among a few of the options you can narrow down your audience target to include.
• Geo-targeting allows ads to be served based on a user’s geographical location whether by state, city, zip, radius to your branches, etc.
• Behavioral targeting is when ads are served based on the user’s behavior. These are based on a variety of online factors such as previous online purchases, searches, browsing history and can include demographic details as well. For example, if a customer recently visited a site looking for homes you could pinpoint this customer to receive your mortgage loan display ad.
• When ads are served based on related content a user is currently reading or browsing online, it is known as contextual targeting. For example, if you are reading an article on a news website about a bank charging for debit cards, you may see contextual ads for debit cards with no fees from other FIs.

Internet advertising is a smart option for you to consider stretching your marketing dollar and getting results. In addition, your cost per impression (CPM) for Internet advertising is lower than traditional media. If you haven’t targeted this avenue with your marketing campaigns, 2012 would be a good time to give this a try. The dollars you spend to get results will be less than you expect, often less than just one newspaper ad.

If you have questions or need help getting started, contact any of us at MarketMatch.

Cheers to you,

Melissa

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Life is not about how fast you run, or how high you climb, but how well you bounce.  – Unknown

MarketMatch is a full-service marketing consulting firm, dedicated to the credit union and community banking community.  We utilize knowledge-based strategies to help you FOCUS on the efforts that will generate MOMENTUM and yield the greatest RESULTS for your bottom line.

Year in review: Remarketing delivers better ads, better performance

Today we have a post from Aitan Weinberg, product manager for AdWords remarketing:

We’ve always believed that display advertising has the potential to be smarter, better performing and more measurable. Today we’d like to shine a light on one of the quiet stars of the display world that is enabling this transformation: remarketing. Remarketing allows you to reach your website visitors with a relevant message as they browse other sites across the web. We rolled it out one year ago across the Google Display Network, and we think we have a hit on our hands. In 2010, the total number of advertisers using remarketing grew an average of 113% every quarter after launch. A few examples of how some of you have used remarketing to great effect:

• Yankee Candle Company used remarketing to re-engage shoppers and increased conversion rates by 600% while cutting cost-per-conversion in half.
• Lenovo PC manufacturers increased sales by 20% and lowered their overall expense-to-revenue ratio by 14% in a campaign that included remarketing and display across multiple networks.
• etrailer.com, an online towing parts retailer, saw twice the click-through-rate at a 75% lower cost-per-click with remarketing compared to their typical display advertising campaigns.

In the year since launch, we’ve boosted performance and scale with three key enhancements to make remarketing even more powerful for the largest to the smallest of advertisers. First, we now enable you to show a relevant ad right after a potential customer leaves your site, when our internal analysis shows they’re most likely to click. Second, we’ve improved the algorithm that helps determine, in real time, how much you should pay for each impression in order to maximize the possibility that a user will click on your ad. Finally, the growing reach of the Google Display Network means you can reach your customers on more and more sites across the web. On average, we reach 84% of the people on a typical remarketing list and we serve hundreds of billions of advertising impressions every month to over 500 million Internet users worldwide.

As we continue to show more relevant ads across more sites, this means more users and publishers benefit as well as advertisers.

• Publishers are seeing significant revenue lift from serving remarketing ads on their sites. Our studies have shown that a remarketing ad brings in nearly 2X the revenue as other display ads.
• Users have told us that they like the more targeted ad experience that remarketing provides. Marie DeOrio, Founder of Vintage Fashion Directory, calls remarketing ads “fascinating and fabulous. It’s that experience where ads don’t feel like ads. If they’re correctly targeted and it’s something you’re interested in, it’s valuable information.” Marie notes that she serves remarketing ads on her own website, vintagefashiondirectory.com as she believes that they "provide a better experience for users."

We’re not finished, either. In the coming months, we have plans to introduce a suite of new features that will make remarketing even smarter, faster, and more dynamic. We anticipate that interest in remarketing will only continue to grow, as advertisers, publishers and users continue to see the benefits, and as we continue to find new technologies that help satisfy the ultimate goal: showing the right ad to the right person at the right time.

Posted by Dan Friedman, Inside AdWords crew

Learn how to remarket your AdWords ads to previous website visitors in a live webinar

This Wednesday, 4th May, we'll be hosting a live, online course on Remarketing as part of the AdWords Online Classroom (UK). This free, interactive presentation will be delivered by an Online Media Specialist and will take place at 3 pm BST (GMT +1), lasting for approximately one hour and including time for Q&A.

Remarketing is a simple way to connect with your website visitors. After driving traffic to your site with search ads, you can then remarket to those people who reach your site by showing them tailored ads as they browse sites on the Google Display Network.

This live course will take you through a step-by-step guide to remarketing campaigns. It'll cover how remarketing works, the best strategies to choose, and also campaign setup and optimization. This course is suitable for advertisers who are already running campaigns on the Google Display Network, as well as advertisers who have not yet used the GDN.

97% of new visitors do not convert the first time they arrive at your site. Can you afford not to have a remarketing strategy?

If you're interested, be sure to sign up now!

Posted by Lisa Shieh, Inside AdWords crew