BrightStar Care came to us with a very simple, but very common, marketing challenge – how do we leverage corporate digital advertising efforts to drive growth at the local level? Continue reading “[Case Study]: BrightStar Care – A Search Marketing Success Story”
The Federal Communication Commission (FCC) voted last week to repeal net neutrality regulations. In 2015, the FCC passed the net neutrality mandate classifying internet service providers (ISPs) as “common carriers,” which required them to treat all internet traffic equally. This latest decision reversed that by classifying ISPs as “information services” which means they can block even lawful content (blocking), slow down specific services (throttling) and speed up service for businesses that pay more (paid prioritization).
In the time between the two votes, the topic of net neutrality went from relative obscurity to an all-out donnybrook pitting ISPs against a coalition of various groups backed by bipartisan public opposition.
To read how these changes can impact local advertisers, check out the full post on LSA Insider.
In an effort to help advertisers continue to reach mobile-first consumers, Google recently launched three features for the new AdWords experience.
According to Google, seven out of 10 internet users look for sales or discounts before visiting a store. With that in mind, Google introduced promotion extensions.
This new extension helps advertisers manage and serve up their promotions without having to create new ads. They can include a percentage off, a promotion code and offer period. Advertisers can also select one of 12 occasions to make seasonal offers stand out more. In the example above, “Black Friday” is one of the occasions available.
Photo credit: Google
Marketers know the importance of testing to understand performance and implement strategic optimizations. This is why Google announced ad variations in AdWords. This feature allows advertisers to easily test ad text across thousands of ads. The results are available when they are statistically significant. If an ad variation is performing well, advertisers can quickly replace the original ads.
Custom intent audiences for the Google Display Network are another way for advertisers to target the right consumers. Google says advertisers can “reach people who want to buy the specific products you offer–based on date from your campaigns, website and YouTube channel.” Google can automatically create an audience that matches advertisers and provide planning data like reach and performance estimates.
As we learn more about these announcements and new features, we will continue to bring you updates. In the meantime, reach out if you have any questions.
Below are highlights of Google announcements we covered throughout the year.
Mobile searchers can click to text a message to businesses within mobile search ads. To set it up, advertisers need to use a phone number that can accept texts, create a call-to-action message (limit of 35 characters) and create a pre-populated text message for users to easily connect after they click the extension.
Advertisers can target using age and gender for search campaigns, can exclude specific demographics from seeing ads and customize bids for certain demographics. Advertisers need to think about intent and how to serve the right ads at the right times. Remember to strategically use this type of targeting to reach the desired audience and not exclude a significant segment.
Location extensions for display adsIf you are familiar with location extensions on search, the display version works the same way. Ads can include photos, store location and business hours like the example shown here. Location extensions can be created at the account, campaign or ad group level and only text ads, responsive ads and 300×250 image ads will show them. Advertisers can opt out of this extension for their display campaigns.
In an effort to help advertisers understand how many consumers they are connecting with through video ads, Google introduced Unique Reach in AdWords. This new feature shows the number of unique users and average impressions-per-user across devices, screens and platforms. Unique Reach also launched for Display and DoubleClick earlier this year .
The exact match setting in AdWords went through a significant change. Exact match transitioned from a syntactic match type (matching the search word for word) to a semantic match type (matching the meaning or purpose of the search).
Google took A/B testing to another level with Optimize. Without coding, marketers can now create landing page versions for any combination of AdWords campaigns, ad groups and keywords. Google Optimize can automatically identify which pages are performing and get more value from campaigns.
The Surveys 360 tool allows for survey creation and specific audience sampling. Through the integration with AdWords, advertisers can target surveys to consumers in remarketing audiences.
Google My Business has the ability to display posts on listings. For multi-location brands, this new addition provides local business yet another way to connect with consumers, share information about their products and services and stand out from the competition.
Google launched location extensions, callout extensions and structured snippets for call-only ads on mobile. Advertisers are able to deliver more information that is readily accessible to searcher’s fingertips with the goal of convincing consumers to choose their business.
In October, Google announced a major shift in the way AdWords budgets are managed. AdWords campaigns are able to spend double their daily budget limit each day. The reason behind the change, according to Google, is that “internet traffic is like an ocean. Some days, there will be small waves. Other days, there will be great big ones.” Google’s theory is that campaigns perform better when spending is focused on high-tide periods that get enough impressions and clicks to drive growth.
To reach the right audiences, brands need to look beyond demographics and target display campaigns based on consumer intent and behavior – including the searches they conduct, the content they read and the places they visit. This allows brands to deliver messages that align with consumers’ needs at each stage in the buying cycle to turn unaware consumers into loyal customers.
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