It’s time for the newest edition of PPC News and Views! This week we’ve highlighted everything from Auction Insights, to YouTube TrueView, to what’s going on with the search engines themselves. We enjoyed reading all of these posts and found them all to be very helpful and informative and we hope you will too!
Search Engine Watch: At the end of May 2012, Google launched their new Auction Insights feature. You’ve probably seen it somewhere in your accounts and maybe even checked out the stats a few times. But with almost all Google launches, there’s the time when everything is new and shiny, then there’s the time to figure out how to make it work for your campaigns. In his article Google AdWords Auction Insights: How to Take Your PPC Campaign From Good to Great, Alistair Dent gives some good suggestions as to how you can use this tool to your advantage and gain insights into your competitors strategies.
Search Engine Land: We all know and love (at least I do) the graphs at the top of our data in Google AdWords and Bing Ads. They allow us to visually interpret how our campaigns are performing, one or two stats at a time. But do we always take full advantage of what these graphs are telling us? This week over at Search Engine Land, Matt Van Wagner provided us with a great guide on How to Look for Trouble & Find Opportunity in PPC Campaigns by interpreting these graphs and listening to what they’re saying about our accounts.
aimClear: Ever been curious about targeting your customers on YouTube? Well here’s your chance to learn how. Over on the aimClear blog, Manny Rivas has put together the Definitive YouTube TrueView Ads Guide: What Smart Marketers Need to Know. This is a great, in depth article that walks you through set up, ad units and specs, benefits and tips for each section, and targeting and campaign options. So let’s go through the checklist. Are you interested in putting your ads on YouTube? Yes, check. Are you a smart marketer? Yes, double check. Excellent! Enjoy!
We’re going to close out this week’s PPC News and Views with a few bits of info from the engines themselves.
Bing Ads: On Tuesday morning, Bing Ads announced the release of their new Keyword Suggestions tool. In a format very similar to what we’ve become accustomed to with Google AdWords, Bing Ads now provides bid suggestions, budget suggestions, and keyword suggestions based on areas of your account. With continued updates to the user interface, desktop tool, and account insights like this, it’s clear that Microsoft is working very hard to earn your respect and business.
Google AdWords: As PPC managers, you’re almost always given a daily or monthly budget to stick to. But it’s not always easy to find the optimal breakdown of budget percentage to campaign because of traffic fluctuations throughout the week. Enter Shared Budgets. AdWords now lets you create one budget for the entire account, and it will automatically allocate funds to each campaign according to that days traffic. As with any automation measure, we strongly encourage you to read through all areas of this feature before making any changes. Here is the original announcement post: New AdWords Budget Option: Shared Budgets. And it’s corresponding help center information: About Shared Budgets.
*Bonus Round*: We wanted to share WordStream’s How to Set Your AdWords Budget: New Shared AdWords Budget Option from Larry Kim. The beginning walks you through the set up and basics of the option, but he also makes some good points to think about before making the switch. A must read before enabling this new option in your accounts.
One last note: Don’t forget about the AdWords system maintenance on September 22nd. This is scheduled to take place between 10 am and 8 pm Pacific Time. YOU WILL NOT BE ABLE TO SIGN INTO YOUR ACCOUNT TO MAKE CHANGES. No announcements have been made as to what is being changed, fixed, etc. Our guess is as good as yours, but we’ve got a few things on our wish list.
That’s all we’ve got for you this time. We’ll see you next week!
