What’s Important with Paid Ads

If you’re interested in getting started with paid advertising, I cannot stress enough how important it is to understand some basics.

You may be tempted to just get started to try and get some leads or see if it “works” but the problem is if you don’t have a decent understanding of best practices, you are going to fail.

And you’ll waste a lot of money and you’ll be tempted to just say “that didn’t work for me”.

It’s like putting a 15-year-old behind the wheel of a car without ever having had any driver’s education.

Sure they’ve been in a car and may have seen some things, but they have no ideas of the laws or how to avoid trouble.

We’ve got a whole section of tutorials devoted to paid ads in our Six Degrees Digital Media Marketing Academy.

We thought you also may enjoy seeing what other people found most interesting to read about last year. Check out these top ten articles from Search Engine Land.

The Secret To AdWords Success, Told By A Former Googler

Before we get into the methodology and my checklist for success, there’s a fundamental question that needs an answer first: How do you know when you’re successful at AdWords? That may sound like an overly simple question to most readers, but it’s still worth pondering it for a moment because other people in your organization may not give you the answer you’re expecting.

Here’s An AdWords Script That Lets You Optimize Bids Every Hour Of The Day

Optimizing your keyword and ad group bids in order to maximize performance can be a tricky affair. Setting up a schedule to manage your bids is a great way to make sure that you’re not spending too much at the wrong times and more importantly that valuable traffic is getting to you at the right times.

How To Track Your AdWords Competitors Over Time Using Auction Insights

There are third-party tools that provide some competitor information, but their data on average position, impression share, outranking share, etc., will never be as accurate as the actual AdWords data that you can get from the Auction Insights report. The only issue with this report is that it isn’t easy to see changes over time, which is what you want to do if, say, you’re trying to understand changes in cost-per-click (CPC) or average position.

Site Speed & PPC Performance: Why You Can’t Ignore A Slow Site Anymore

As Web marketers, all aspects of the user experience must be considered, no matter what channel is driving a visitor to the website — be it SEO or PPC. And since Google is in charge of the AdWords product just as much as its organic search product, page load time matters just the same – and Google will tell you it can impact the performance of your ads, too.

10 Things People Want To Know About AdWords, Direct From Google

There are multiple things that can affect the average CPCs in your account. Changes in CPC over time are expected behavior because of how dynamic the auction is. If you’re seeing big changes over certain time periods, look at a longer window and see how those numbers are stacking up historically.

Most Googled Products On The Planet In One Epic Map

Google’s auto-complete function is designed to help searchers save time by suggesting queries as you type. These suggestions are, according to Google, based on “what other people are searching for and the content of Web pages.” If you get bizarre autosuggestion as you’re typing your search query into Google, the simplest explanation is that other people have already searched for that very thing.

3 Crazy PPC CRO Hacks To Boost Conversion Rates Right Now

The truth about PPC ads and conversion is that, on average, most PPC ad copy optimizations have absolutely NO impact on conversion rates. The best way to improve your PPC conversion rate is to leverage new ad innovations that actually bias people towards converting prior to clicking on your ads. How do you do it? Here are four things you can do today to create higher converting PPC ads.

The Minimum Quality Score That Can Save You Money In AdWords

Advertisers are often curious about what Quality Score they should target so that they can confidently report to their boss or client that their account is “well managed.” In other words, what QS number is indicative of an account that’s at least average? While this was not something we were looking for in the data, we got an answer anyway.

10 Top Retargeting Tips For AdWords Users

Dynamic remarketing isn’t just for retail sites that have merchant center accounts. You can now upload your own custom feed into AdWords in the business data section, and presto! You can make these amazing ads that showcase areas such as travel, recruitment, education, real estate, jobs, and local deals! Details on how to create a custom feed can be found here.

Why You Should Be Using Google Analytics Smart Lists For Remarketing

A Smart List is a type of remarketing list that Google creates for you based on your conversion data in Google Analytics. Using machine learning, Google looks through this data for indications that a user is likely to convert on a subsequent visit to your site. You need to have adjusted your Google Analytics code to enable remarketing and advertising reporting features.

If you need assistance for a successful marketing campaign, contact Six Degrees Digital Media today.