Google Ads is a largely daunting and confusing platform. There’s no way to just ‘hop in and try it out’ with Google Ads, forcing new people on the platform to use their Ads Wizard, a tool better used as a cure for insomnia.
For those of you who want to bypass the training and get stuck into it, here are the essential need-to-knows for planning and running a successful Ads campaign first time. So with that, we’ve assembled a list of 10 essential features you didn’t know you could use with Google Ads.
Whether you’ve heard about the Keyword Planner before or not, it’s important to know how to use it effectively. We’ve already covered some of the ways you can use the Keyword Planner when it comes to writing website copy and a content strategy for SEO, but its actual purpose is for Ads. The Keyword Planner shows you search volumes and bids for the keywords and phrases you’re thinking of adding to your campaign – but it also shows you a large list of other, similar keywords and phrases that you can add to your list. It’s worth investing time into looking through the Keyword Planner – if you think you know every search term used to find your business, think again! Some keywords and phrases might not have the search volume you thought they did, or you might find that bidding on certain keywords will blow your budget.
These are equally as important as your keywords as you don’t want your Ads showing in searches that aren’t relevant to your business. The Keyword Planner tool can bring to your attention keywords that might be similar but aren’t what your business offers. For example, your business might be offering space for a ‘workshop’ – is this the kind of studio workshop where someone could create their art, or is it a meeting room for training? Using the Keyword Planner, Search Console, ‘Searches’ data in your Ads dashboard (if you are running or have run a campaign), and your own knowledge, you can compile a pretty good list of keyword search terms you definitely don’t want your Ads to appear on. Again, these have the same rules as keywords in that you can apply broad match, phrase match, and exact match modifiers to refine your keyword. Don’t know what that means? Check out our blog on keywords here.
Yes, you can target by location, but did you know you can also target by radius? This little trick is perfect for businesses who know that they have a local audience, such as a restaurant or hairdressers, or a flower shop with a local delivery option, and will therefore want to target those in the area. It’s a rather unique feature in the sense that not a lot of advertising platforms have this option. You can also set bid adjustments to increase depending on how close the person making the search is to your location – getting comfortable with bid adjustments, and knowing whose view or click is worth paying more for, is an important key to success.
Everyone wants their Ad to stand out which is why Sitelink Extensions are essential. With those you can add a phone number, locations, special features and direct links to pages of your website. All of these are totally trackable, so you’ll be able to see how many people clicked on your telephone number to give you a call based on your ad as well as having data that shows where on your ad people clicked through to.
Did they click on the main link to your specified landing page, or did they click through one of the sitelink extensions because it was more helpful? Sitelink Extensions are really easy to set up so we suggest they become a staple of your Ads.
You may have heard of the Display Network, but what is it exactly? The Google Ads Network is split into two: The Search Network: where your Ads are displayed in Google and Google partner search results, such as AOL and Yahoo (if you opt-in) The Display Network: where your Ads appear on websites across the internet There’s a couple of major differences. The Display Network requires you to create image ads as well as text ad so they can be shown across their network – image Ads have an average of 0.1% higher click through rate than text Ads alone, so it makes total sense to ensure you have Display Ads created for each variable so you can maximise the reach. Ads are also charged based on Cost per Click not by impressions. According to Google, Display Ads are said to reach 90% of internet users, as the vast majority of websites seem to host Ads, but with this reach comes complex management – such as placements and audiences – if you really want to maximise your reach.
With Display Ads you do get some say as to where those Ads will be placed, but you need to manage it. If you have specific websites in mind then great! If not, we suggest you use the Audience targeting options to get an idea of where your audience is and where your Ads might go. You can start by adding your competitors to the exclusions list and keep a close eye on where Google is placing your ads. Always check out your placements’ website and be in control of where your ad goes.
Under the Audience’s tab you’ll notice that you can add audiences – this is only applicable if you’re running Ads on the Search and Display Network. Audiences can be targeted based on their interests and will ensure that your Ads appear on websites that are hosting content that matches the interests specified in the Audiences tab. They work alongside keywords, so it’s not a case of one or the other. We recommend you have a look through all the different interests available. Some might be an obvious choice for your campaign and some may spark inspiration. If in doubt, run the campaign with the Observations setting so you’ll gain more insights into the interests your audience may have, and set bids for these accordingly.
Bid Adjustments are one of the most important features you need to be comfortable with. It might seem like an ‘advanced strategy’ but it’s really not. Bid Adjustments ensure your bid is increased on platforms, placements, locations and keywords that you want your ad to place highly on, and decreased where you aren’t so fussed about having your ad place at the top. You can run an automatic bid strategy, where you can set an upper cap on the maximum bid, and use bid adjustments, ie +10% or -10%. But in order to manually bid on keywords you must have a manual bidding strategy set up overall. We don’t suggest this for beginners or for those testing a campaign as it’s hard to know what you’d expect to pay for clicks/impressions on those keywords without having any real-time data based on your actual budget.
Setting the times of day you want your Ads to run is necessary to ensure you’re maximising your budget and Return on Investment. If you’re a B2B company, you can safely assume that employees of other businesses will likely be working between 9am-5pm when making a search relevant to your business – but remember, if your audience is global, you’ll need to take into account time zones. However, we’ve found that office workers, particularly within tech, will be searching between 8am-8pm, Monday to Friday. For B2Cs it’s harder to predict the time of day when search volumes will be highest; we’ve found that people aren’t typically searching between 2am and 6am but, as always, when in doubt… test!
It’s really easy to overlook Quality Scores when it comes to writing Ads. You might think that your amazing Ad copy is sure to get your bid low and your placements high because that’s the ultimate goal, but, in some respects, you have to forget what you know and instead write your Ads based on the keywords in your campaign. It’s really the keywords that dictate your entire campaign and what you pay, so your keywords need to be present in your Ads – headlines and descriptions – and on your landing page (the page you want people to click through to). Otherwise you’ll get a low Quality Score meaning higher bid cost, lower overall placement, and Ads not being placed frequently. You can check the quality score of each Ad in the Ads and Extensions tab. If it’s anything less than a 7 you need to take a look at your keywords, ad copy, and landing page to ensure that they’re cohesive.
We hope that this beginner’s guide to Google Ads has taught you some things that you didn’t know before. You can head over to your Ads account and try some of these features out for yourself, or we’re more than happy to take the stress out of Ads for you. The OggaDoon team have done the hours and certifications, and have worked on a number of successful Ads campaigns for clients across a range of businesses. If you’d like to discuss Ads for your business, we’re more than happy to set up or manage a campaign for you – just get in touch.
Advertising in 2030 will be fundamentally different to how it has been for the past 10 years.
Of course, we accept that for the most part, the same tried and tested methods will continue to work for a while yet – entrenched approaches don’t change overnight.
But individuals and organizations that fail to adapt over time will gradually fade out of relevance. They will slowly become less equipped to support and grow their employees, to help them in their careers and, therefore, the business they are part of.
As customers increasingly embrace digital platforms, the challenge is on.
The challenge is on for business owners to embrace the changes in advertising over the coming years. Doing so enables us to remain relevant and able to foster enduring relationships with customers in cost-efficient ways.
“All failure is failure to adapt, all success is successful adaptation” – Max McKeown
The one thing I will say before I get into these trends is that they are exactly that…
It is critical we monitor how advertising evolves, but a lot of these topics are fueled by folklore.
These topics change as the facts become clearer. We are in danger, as an industry, of creating that folklore through loud herd debate, which then becomes misunderstood fact.
It is our job as an agency to monitor these topics, contribute positively to the conversation, establish our own stance through investments and ensure we can support our clients as the future becomes clearer.
But be in no doubt – these trends and topics are driving the future of advertising and we need to embrace the conversation.
Marketing clouds will become indispensable elements in the advertising processes of the future. They control the creation and management of marketing relationships with your customers and manage campaigns.
This is already best practice, but it will become standard to integrate solutions for customer journey management, email, mobile, social, web personalization, advertising, content handling and analytics.
AI is ubiquitous in the advertising space. It supports our decision-making and analyzes consumer behaviour.
Enriched with data about how consumers interact with advertising, it substantially optimizes campaigns to perform better. Implemented consistently and to its full extent, AI understands consumers better than they do themselves.
This is very clearly tied to the performance improvements that we have seen in recent years by increasing our adoption of AI within campaigns.
The large tech vendors will continue to embrace artificial intelligence because of the opportunity to scale and, in the future, perform better than humans.
As an agency, we will spend less time in the future on the implementation of administration (eg search query reports) and more time on strategic conversations with our clients to support their business growth.
Programmatic will be standard for digital advertising. It is also the future of more traditional advertising methods.
Think first-party data collected through radio stations (like Sonos radio) and how that could be used over time for programmatic purchasing of audio.
It’s already used for TV and outdoor. Expect to see this more.
Digital advertising is predominantly contextual. This will grow – cohort advertising, for example, is still contextual.
Ads will be selected and placed by automated systems, based on ever more detailed user-profiles and the content displayed. There will be a continued increase in mobile and location-based advertising, which will strengthen this trend.
The fragmented supplier landscape within adtech will consolidate. Large adtech players will acquire almost all their smaller but highly specialized competitors that manage to evolve.
Alternatively – and more likely in my view – is that these smaller vendors will be rendered redundant through policy and legislation evolution.
The desire for improved services, additional scale and more first-party data will be the main driver behind any M&A activity.
The agency model is changing and the type of people we need in our agency will change over time too. Client-side, supplier-side, agency-side – everyone will be competing for the same kind of job profiles.
It will create a battle for the best talent and create a requirement to deliver the best training.
Employers will compete for experts with scarce, specialized skill sets.
As is the case now, agencies and vendors will be breeding grounds for some of the best talent and we have a responsibility to embrace that change and train people in their careers to create the best outcome for clients, but also the best opportunities for our colleagues in the future.
Demand for data scientists, analytics experts and creative minds is huge at present and will remain high or become more competitive in the future.
After print, traditional linear TV will lose its importance.
Large digital platform companies generate similar reach through video-on-demand, social or messaging functionalities.
This reach combined with first-party data and artificial intelligence will create incredibly efficient opportunities to reach audiences at scale through digital platforms.
It goes without saying, 2020 was just a small departure from the norm for most of us. But there were a few silver linings peppered throughout the year.
Here at Proctors, for example, our video department experienced the highest growth we’ve ever seen. We’ve been moving into new markets, offering entirely new products and generally adding more polish.
So better late than never – yes, we know it’s a quarter of the way into 2021 – here’s a look at some of 2020’s more notable projects.
Cast your mind’s eye back to the heady days of January 2020. After months of planning and strategic plotting, we’d just begun to organise a full contact rugby-inspired shoot for Panasonic TOUGHBOOK. What could possibly go wrong?…
We’ll let you fill in that particular blank.
Not to be defeated, we turned to industry union BECTU’s superb COVID webinars and guides to get ourselves up to speed on how to plan and run a COVID-safe shoot.
Shooting under COVID restrictions comes with its challenge, but that doesn’t have to mean bloating up a lean budget. So, we set a small, tight-knit group to work. Clear communication is key, and after a quick socially-distanced scrum we formed a new plan: turn the shoot into a training day, and put ex-British and Irish Lions Captain and all-round rugby legend, Sam Warbuton, through his paces, alongside our leading Panasonic TOUGHBOOK tablet.
One risk assessment, a few tracing forms and a quick change into PPE later, we were ready to go. Shot across two days, we produced a huge amount of video content –enough for a full, multi-channel campaign showing how TOUGHBOOK and Sam ‘Lead from the Front’.
Fourth-best performing Panasonic landing page ever
Outperformed main TOUGHBOOK website
After getting to grips with COVID shooting, we met our next challenge: to produce a TV ad which would promote Daikin’s range of eco-friendly heat pumps.
This time, we had a number of parameters upfront: A list of features we needed to advertise, a total run length to the frame, the need to push content through Adstream and Clearcast to ensure it was TV-ready, a Mosaic profile of consumers to target, plus the need to make the ad look like it was shot in the winter months, whilst filming it on one of the hottest days of the year.
Oh, and did we mention we had just four weeks to turn it all around?
A solid team effort pieced the ad together in record speed: it was written, prepped, casted, shot, edited, titled and graded, ready for delivery in just under four weeks. The result is testament to our team’s perseverance and the great relationships which allow them to accomplish huge amounts, together.
Second most-viewed Daikin YouTube video ever
630,000 page views from 216,000 visitors
How do you make a film about software that’s akin to a Mary Poppins’ magic bag of employee training – without losing your viewers’ attention by explaining every last detail?
Bud’s training management platform is built to solve the pain points that training providers are up against. But with online attention spans sitting between the 2 to 3-minute mark, our challenge was to wrap up the platform’s benefits into a succinct, engaging video and encourage people to book a demo for more info.
Luckily, we had the Bud team’s great branding to work with as a jumping-off point. Their bold, clean appearance meant we could use some technicolour flair to design an equally bright and brilliant visual style. We extended Bud’s multi-coloured logo form into a visual suite of colourful geometric shapes and key lines which would simply and elegantly represent the simplicity of the platform. We then brought these shapes to life with various motion techniques and sound editing, interspersed with shots of the platform in action.
The resulting video echoes the vibrancy, enthusiasm and enjoyment Bud’s users rediscover in their work with the help of this all-in-one platform. It’s not just any old, animated infographic. It’s a masterclass in engaging video.
Bud have only just launched their film, so right now we can only wax lyrical about how chuffed they were with our work. But watch this space for soon-to-come results…
2020 was the year of video calls and streaming. The working day became a flurry of Zoom calls, Teams meetings, Skype sessions, webinars and virtual conferences – not to mention the evenings spent helping your nan figure out FaceTime.
But there was something missing: a way to professionally and consistently brand your self-generated videos, ready for recording, live-streaming and sharing. So we put together a video toolkit for our clients.
These toolkits pull some of the most commonly required and useful assets into one package; from lower thirds, to intro and outro sequences, title screens and transitions, along with a few extra, bespoke assets depending on what our clients need. We provide them in an editable format, so they work with pretty much any software you use, meaning you’re always on-brand.
They’ve proven truly cost-effective – both to produce, and for our clients to deploy. Meaning less room for errors (like accidentally becoming the world’s first Lawyer Cat).
A comprehensive Video Toolkit for Panasonic, Sanlam and P+S
Fully-branded virtual conferences for Panasonic and UKHO
2020 was a struggle for any business. But some services were hit harder than others.
Rather than produce our typical Christmas video of jolly japes, we donated our time and resources to local charity, Caring in Bristol. Their amazing work includes providing hot meals, shelter, medical care and support to people experiencing homelessness within Bristol. But donations often suffer during times of national hardship, so we needed to rally the local troops and call them to donate to this well-deserving cause.
So we created a film. But don’t expect your typical ‘pulling on the heartstrings’ donation message. We wanted to celebrate Bristol culture: the edgy, vivacious spirit of our city, calling our Bristolian family to action, and secured their much-needed donations in the run up to Christmas. But with COVID restrictions meaning we weren’t able to film the city and its people in action, we had to get creative.
We went full force with a script and art direction that entertained, with plenty of nods to local celebrities, inventions and fabulous quirks, while delivering the cold hard stats about people experiencing homelessness. Using graphics and animation to make the message as uplifting and entertaining as possible, we were able to create a powerful film which called for an end to homelessness in our city – for good.
Over £20,000 funds raised in under two weeks
60% of all social engagement in December
At Proctors, our team of videographers, animators, motion designers and script-writers have been making award-winning, show-stopping video for decades. And we believe each of our clients has something to say.
From the tech behemoths and the multi-international market leaders, right down to local, grassroots charities changing the world one view at a time. Whatever story you have to tell, we’ll help you share it with the world. Talk to Proctors, today.
Bristol-based reforestation and climate action platform Ecologi has teamed up with purpose-driven agency Enviral to launch a powerful campaign for Earth Day 2021.
Featuring the award-winning spoken word artist, George The Poet, the campaign aims to raise awareness around collective action and highlight the role of natural solutions in solving our climate crisis. The powerful video script, which was crafted by George The Poet, reflects the themes of hope and momentum and celebrates the role of nature in safeguarding our home. Watch the full video here.
Having taken Ecologi nine months to plant its first one million trees, it took less than ten days to plant its last million, and the platform plans to plant over 3 million trees this Earth Week.
Launching on Earth Week, Ecologi and Enviral are looking to bring a hopeful and optimistic narrative to climate action, showcasing the power we have if we all work together.
Elliot Coad, Co-founder of Ecologi comments: “It’s been amazing to team up with such an incredible artist in order to shine a spotlight on global climate action. Over the last three months, we’ve grown by over 25% with nearly 18,500 subscribers and over 5,100 businesses now on the platform, our impact is increasing and our voice is getting louder. We wanted to use this campaign to amplify our messages around climate action and raise awareness of the benefits of these natural solutions on both our planet and local communities around the world. This Earth Day, we’re planting hope.”
Joss Ford, Founder of Enviral comments: “As a communications agency we spend our days communicating the ways in which we can tackle the climate crisis and empowering brands and consumers to act. This campaign and the message its conveying is the reason we exist. We loved working alongside Ecologi and George The Poet to help bring together a powerful piece which reflects the feelings of hope and optimism and shows the power of collective action.”
It’s hoped the impact of this campaign lives on long after Earth Day and works to inspire people to join the movement.
Throughout Earth Week, Ecologi will plant 100 free trees for every new sign-up. If 1,000 people were to sign-up, over their lifetimes, every 100 trees planted would absorb the CO2 equivalent of:
Sign up or find out more about Ecologi here.
Ever since my career took a turn towards what people were calling ‘conversion rate optimization‘, I’ve disliked the inclusion of the word ‘rate’ in the label of what I do. And when I discovered some people pronounced the acronym CRO as ‘crow‘, my dislike reached a level of epic proportions.
The main problem with CRO? It can lead people to focus on the wrong thing.
After all, who really cares what your conversion rate is? What’s a good conversion rate anyway? Isn’t it more important that you maximize your profit? That your most profitable customers return repeatedly and buy more? That you’re taking action to grow your business?
In the same way that ‘bounce rate’ is a misused vanity metric and ‘last click’ attribution dismisses the value of upper-funnel touchpoints, you miss the bigger picture by focusing on ‘conversion rate’.
You can end up chasing only the small group of visitors who are most likely to convert immediately, or you start promoting only your discounted products, or you’ll start quickly removing landing pages that don’t hit your most stringent targets.
All of these are ways that a focus on ‘conversion rate‘ can accelerate the race to the bottom.
Indeed, one of our most recent client testimonials ended: “…ultimately, they’ve improved our customer experience and, as a result, achieved significant, measurable business growth.”
The use of ‘customer experience’ and ‘measurable business growth’ shows the client understands we’ve delivered much more than just conversion rate optimization (CRO).
But if not CRO, what?
We’re not the only ones to think the movement away from CRO is building momentum.
Among others, VWO now refers to itself as an ‘experience optimization platform‘, industry-leading specialist Speero has rebranded itself as a ‘customer experience optimization agency‘ and at the heart of the privacy-first, cookie-less tracking developments, Google talks of ‘optimizing customer experiences‘.
It’s pretty obvious why elevating the principles of conversion optimization up to a broader, more strategic level, can have a far greater impact.
Widen the funnel. Instead of focusing on improving the performance of a segment of traffic, find ways to improve the journey for a wider audience.
Strategy, not tactics. Instead of gathering customer feedback to generate a compelling landing page headline, use the feedback to help steer strategic decisions (product development, value proposition, pricing).
Quality, not quantity. Instead of running a/b tests with the goal of selling more units, run them to generate more profit.
Acquisition and retention. Instead of thinking the journey ends at the point of acquiring a customer, ensure insights are used to improve the experience as a customer too.
All of the principles mentioned here are transferable to any sector, business model or market. In fact, if you work in a business that has an international presence, delivering a fantastic, joined-up customer experience becomes arguably even more important.
Despite its drawbacks, a positive consequence of the label ‘conversion rate optimization‘ has been a focus on data. Whether a small UK business or a large international business, in order to apply these principles, you’re going to need to be confident in and understand your data.
Understanding your audience data will allow you to widen your funnel. Confidence in your user feedback data will enable you to apply it to strategy, not just tactics. Analysis and modelling of your customer data will allow you to take quality, rather than quantity, based decisions. Connecting your customer journey data, along the full lifecycle, will allow you to improve the experience for all.
So, whether you think it’s CRO, conversion optimization, UX, CX or something else, we should be able to agree that, in each case, a focus on data is key.
Services Used: Photo
“We’re really pleased with not only the end product but also the entire process of working with JMPUK. The team led by Joe clearly understand our industry and demonstrated why they are regarded as industry leaders throughout the journey. The final videos have gone down really well with clubs and fans alike, and deliver on all of our initial objectives and beyond.”
– Ben Rigby, iFollow Marketing Manager
“As football league fans, we were absolutely honoured to be approached by the EFL to produce this piece of content. We feel it shows the good work we have done within the football world to be recognised by such a huge organisation within the sport. With this project, there were challenges in regards to what we were and weren’t allowed to shoot, but we were really pleased with the emotive narrative of the piece – it’s always a joy to collaborate with Ian Holloway. Every member of the JMP team played a part in this successful production and it’s truly rewarding to see the capacity and skills that our agency has to offer.”
– Joe Meredith, Managing Director at JMPUK
“JMP is a true partner for us at Sky Bet. They have embraced our ambition and are able to offer us a full service right through from research to pre and post-production. In a world where brands are looking more and more to fast turnaround ‘premium social’ output that is affordable, JMP could not be better placed.”
– Kevin Brain, Head of Social & Content at Sky Bet
“On The Inside is a really exciting series for us to work on, because it requires us to be reactive to the day’s events. Whereas a series such as Football Real’s Stories will focus on a particular narrative or storyline, On The Inside is much more unpredictable as it typically depicts a real day in the life of a football club. While we always start shooting with a schedule and structure in place, the nature of professional sport is that these things can change as the day progresses. The access we get is fantastic, as is the opportunity to show the inner workings of a professional football club,”
– Steve Cotton, Director of Communications
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