Happy October everyone! And welcome to this week’s PPC News and Views. This week had some great posts covering call tracking, Google Analytics updates, product feed optimization, and more!
From the Experts
Neptune Moon
Our first post today comes from Julie Bacchini (Neptune Moon) and is a little different speed than some of our previous posts. She discusses the problems associated with Google’s announcement that all organic search is now encrypted, and how it applies to PPC. She makes great points about the new Keyword Planner and how we’re going to have to adjust our keyword research process. Check out the post. Moral of the story, all of our industries are interconnected. When something changes in one, it’s bound to change in the other as well.
PPC Hero
And now back to our regularly scheduled PPC program, Kayla Kurtz brought us her 9 Tips for Improving Cost-Per-Lead. Seriously, who couldn’t use a lower CPL? NO ONE. Quit lying. Anyway, hop on over to the PPC Hero site and check out Kayla’s advice.
Search Engine Land
Call tracking. It’s an important step for all PPC-ers, but it’s certainly not as cut and dry as most conversion tracking. But don’t worry, Frederick Vallaeys is here and he’s Demystifying Call Tracking In AdWords for us! In his post, he goes through the basics of call tracking, the different places your phone number can show, and how to properly report on resulting calls.
PPC Chat
In a continuing effort to have you ready for the holiday season, PPC Chat tackled the topic of Optimizing Google Product Feeds this week. Check out answers from around the industry on titles and description best practices, how granular to get with your product types, dealing with multiple variants of a product, correcting errors, and using images in your ads. Really good stuff in there from some smart cookies.
SEER Interactive
Hold on to your butts, we’ve got a recap within a recap. Over at SEER Interactive, Sunny Minorics wrote The September Google Analytics Recap covering all of the important announcements coming from Google Analytics and the best part, why they matter. Each update is given a link to the GA blog and a short description as to why the update is worthy of your attention.
From the Engines
Bing Ads
Oooooh, Bing. You guys are just killing it with announcements recently. And this week is no exception. We get filled in with Ambrish Verma’s post: Call Extensions and Continued Enhancements Come to Bing Ads. The gist, Bing Ads now has call extensions available across all devices via Skype. Check out the post for more detail and instructions on set up. Great stuff Bing Ads; keep it coming.
Google AdWords
New Flexible Bid Strategy and Webinar: Target Return on Ad Spend
This week, Google announced a new bidding strategy designed to target and designated ROAS metric rather than a desired CPA. This new setting is still very similar to Conversion Optimizer and Enhanced CPC, in that it takes many factors such as browser, location, operating system and more into account when choosing bids. Very interesting new strategy. Read the post to find out more details.
Estimated Total Conversions: New Insights for the Multi-Screen World
Continuing Google’s recent initiative to give more insights into the conversion process, they announced this week that they’re going to begin giving estimates on conversions that require more than one device to occur. For example, you search for something on your phone, click on an ad, then later convert on that site from your desktop. These are the types of transactions Google is going to capture and estimate for you in the AdWords interface. Sounds pretty cool. Check out the post for more details and specifics.
Well, that wraps up this week’s wrap up. (See what I did there?) Have a wonderful weekend and we’ll see you all back here next week!
