advertising | Aqua Vita

4.06.2011
Serious Stuff

AdWords Tips & Tricks: Position Preference Ending Soon!

Published by Jessica Cox under Serious Stuff

For those of you who like to tweak AdWords for best performance and lowest cost, pay attention.

Change is in the wind for one of my favorite AdWords features, position preference.

What is position preference?

As you know, AdWords allows you to bid for ad placement in their search network. Top bid gets Spot #1, second place bid gets Spot #2, and so on.

Position preference allowed you to automatically adjust your bids for the position you wanted to maintain.

Why should I care about position preference?

For example, let’s say you want your ads to stay visible in positions #3 to #5. Let’s assume you have a limited budget, (or watch ROI like a hawk) so you want to avoid the shark-infested waters of position #1 & #2 bid competitions.

With position preference, you could set your ads to appear in positions #3 through#10+.

Let’s say money is no object to you, and you want top billing at any cost.

With position preference, you could set your ads to appear in positions #1 & #2.

What’s happening to position preference?

In early May, Google will be retiring the position preference feature in AdWords.

This decision was made due to low adoption and the existence of alternatives for this feature. To prepare for this change, we recommend that you disable position preference in your campaigns.

If you’re currently using position preference, expect to see the following changes in your account:

As of April 5th, position preference can no longer be enabled for campaigns in either the AdWords web interface or the API. Campaigns already using position preference will still have it enabled. However, if you turn position preference off in one of your campaigns, you will not be able to turn it back on.
Starting in early May, we will begin disabling position preference within all campaigns.

When position preference is disabled (either when you do so manually or when the feature is retired automatically in early May), the max CPC bids for those campaigns will be set to the bids that position preference used most recently.

Important Note: Before you disable position preference, remember export your manual bids by downloading a keyword report to back up any bids you set before you turned on position preference. This report will include keyword level maximum CPC bids.

3.01.2011
Industry News, Serious Stuff

Death of the Ad Network?

Published by Jessica Cox under Industry News, Serious Stuff

Traditional publishing industry finally awakes from the long dream? They’re planning to shake things up for Google & MSN/Yahoo! advertising.

Website Magazine added The New York Times Co., Hearst, Tribune and Gannett to the list of big publishers looking to push ad networks to the fringe.

Over the weekend, these companies thumbed their nose at big ad networks in favor of their own, private system to serve targeted online advertising.

"Do they come here to sleep? No, they come here to be woken up." (go see Inception)

The hope, of course, is to ultimately drive up ad rates. Surprise! Shock! But we *might* get better, more relevant targeting options.

Hopefully these companies and their respective online properties will be able to better serve their advertisers and cut out the middleman.

Instead of advertisers bidding on ad space based on targeted parameters – regardless of the website on which the ads will appear – you can bid for ad space on the New York Times website, or even down to the article level.

Yes I would like to see individual article advertisement options on New York Times, thank you very much.

It’s interesting to note that this announcement comes on the heels of Google’s latest algorithm update, dubbed “Farmer”, which seeks to downgrade low-quality websites in search results.

Quality content is still king – something The New York Times and the others can all but guarantee to prospective advertisers. Ad networks have a much more difficult time making such promises.

1.08.2010
Marketing Alchemy

Online Marketing: Google Adding Click to Call in Mobile Ads

Published by Jessica Cox under Marketing Alchemy

The wildly successful PPC giant Google AdWords unveils yet another addition to their arsenal of online advertising options.

In Google’s words:

We’re pleased to announce that beginning in January, your location-specific business phone number will display alongside your destination URL in ads that appear on high-end mobile devices.

Users will be able to click-to-call your business just as easily as they click to visit your website.

How will phone numbers appear in my ads?

Based on the customer’s geographic location, the phone number and closest business address will appear as a fifth line of ad text when the ad appears on mobile devices with full HTML browsers (e.g. iPhone, Android, Palm WebOS).

Where will I be able to see the results?

At launch, you’ll be able to view calls from your ads on your Campaign Summary page within AdWords from the “click type” segment option under the “Filter and Views” drop down.

How will I be charged for phone calls I get from my ad?

For now, the cost of a click to call your business will be the same as the cost of a click to visit your website.

Personally, I see prices increasing as the feature gains popularity and acceptance, then leveling off eventually. It’s fair to say this might take time: AdWords prices are still climbing, and these types of phones are still approaching market saturation.

Phone calls initiate much more personal contact. Clicking “back” on your web browser to close out of a website is one thing, but hanging up on a live human is quite another. The value of the contact is potentially higher.

What actions should I take?

If you’d like your ads to show location-specific phone numbers when displayed on mobile devices, make sure that your campaign is targeting iPhones and other mobile devices with full HTML browsers. You must also include phone numbers with your business addresses in the locations under your Campaign settings.

Aqua Vita Creative - Mobile Online Ads - Push to Call

If you would prefer your ads not show phone numbers, simply remove the numbers from your ad campaign locations or un-check mobile devices under the Campaign Settings tab.

Apparently they’ve been working on this feature for several years, filing a patent for click-to-call or “call on select” in 2004. They experimented briefly with the technology in 2007 with Google Maps, which was wildly popular with a small crowd of mobile users at the time.

In fact, Google’s wildly successful growth and innovations have driven Marketing Pilgrim to speculate on “intervention” from either competitors or government who view the search giant as “too pervasive and too powerful”.

Odds are, this new incarnation will be well worth watching! More good news for businesses interested in mobile advertising; you don’t even need a mobile-specific site to use these ads on smart-phones.