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In this Shark Bite, Andrew talks about 6 Google AdWords features you should take up in 2015. Some features were rolled out recently; some have been there for a while. Either way, learning about them will turn you from a bystander to an expert, consequently leading you to improve your AdWords campaign performance.

The features Andrew will discuss in more detail are:

1) Callout Extensions

2) Bid Strategies

3) Remarketing Lists for Search Ads

4) Mobile Strategies

5) Third Party Tools You Should Be Using

6) Ad Customizers

We hope you enjoyed this week’s Shark Bite, stay tuned for more about the latest AdWords features and more by reading our blog. See you next time!

Video Transcription

Hi, my name is Andrew Lolk and welcome to 2015’s first Shark Bite. Today, we will be talking about the six Google AdWords features that you should finally embrace in 2015. In 2014, we saw dozens of new tools, features, and otherwise improvements in Google AdWord’s platform.

One of the things that I want to start off the year with is that you should finally figure out what of these tools and features we should actually implement and which ones we should skip out on. So the six features that I want to talk about today are callout extensions, bid strategies, remarketing List for search ads. We’re going to talk about mobile strategies, third party tools, and finally we’re going to try to go into what this whole ad customizer search is all about.

Callout Extensions

The first one we’re going to talk about is something that I believe you might be tired of hearing about, but it is callout extensions. David Szetela, among others, said that callout extensions was the biggest addition to the Google AdWords platform last year and I agree. You get another line of ad text and it frees up your ad so you can write… You can simply just include more selling points and more benefits. It’s like site links just without links, so you’re much more free.

Bid Strategies

The next feature I want to talk about is bid strategies. Google last year implemented these bid strategies where Google would manage the bidding for you, so the benefits of implementing bid strategies is, first of all, it’s free. It doesn’t cost you anything. Second of all, there’s no implementation cost either. You don’t have to sign up for a third party tool. You don’t have to implement other links or URLs or other things to a campaign. You just click a button inside AdWords and it’s there, and there’s a lot of documentation about it.

There are four main bid strategies that you can implement:

• There is target by page location
• There is maximize clicks
• There is the target CPA
• And then there’s target return on ad spend.

In the last six months of last year, I tested out the different bid strategies on various accounts. I saw a lot of success the second we started implementing the return on ad spend and it just grew throughout the year. Yes, we had Black Friday. Yes, we had Christmas shopping. But still, when I compare it to campaigns that had this strategy implemented versus the campaigns that didn’t, we saw much greater success with the bid strategies.

One of the other advantages of using bid strategies is that you get less outliers and more consistent results. Just don’t think that it’ll solve the problem for you, because if you have an account that’s not performing well, it’s not going to solve what keywords you’re running/ It’s not going to solve what negative keywords you have, or the ads you’re running because that’s not what it’s meant for. It’s just supposed to fix your bid so if anything else in your account is wrong, then it won’t fix that. So you still need to work on our account and don’t see it as just a set and forget tool. You still have to be on top of it.

Remarketing for Search

The next feature I want to talk about today is remarketing for search. When I look back at 2014, in most of my client’s accounts, my remarketing for search campaigns outperformed my regular campaigns by two to one.The CPAs were 50% of the regular CPA and it still generated about 20% of the overall revenue in the account. As you heard me say last year time and time again, Google will start replacing keywords with the audiences in the targeting.

So unless you really start embracing remarketing which is the simplest format of audience, it’s just people who’ve been on your site before. If you don’t start embracing it now and start learning to do it now in January, in February maybe, then you’re going to be left behind because I promise you in 2015, Google is going to expand on the audience tab in Google AdWords.

Otherwise, you’ll be like an e-commerce store who is not running a shopping campaign. You’ll be left behind. If you can show an ad for NFL here and you know it’s a huge super NFL fan that is searching the net, then why not show your ad? Like, that’s audience targeting instead of keyword targeting and I know for a fact, no, I don’t, but it’s very, very eminent that Google would get more out of the searches.

And it’s very clear that Google wants to get more out of the searches on Google. So by enabling audience targeting like they’ve done a little bit so far, they would be able to get much more revenue out of Google.

Mobile Strategy

The fourth feature I want to talk about is not as much a feature, but more like a strategy, and that’s mobile strategy. During the holidays… So one thing I want to show you is I got a new phone. I got an iPhone 6+ and what do you do when you get a new phone? You start using it for everything. I didn’t browse that much on my phone before but now I did I was using it for everything and I was checking out e-commerce stores. I was checking out news sites, I was checking apple.com. Nobody have mobile websites, I don’t know what’s going on.

If you don’t have a mobile website, and you’re trying to sell something to someone who’s on a mobile device, which 50% of all searches on Google is, you’re leaving money on the table. It’s that simple. So the first step in getting a real mobile strategy is to finally get a responsive website. There’s websites at White Shark Media, you can go to ThemeForest and get one for $49. There are no excuses anymore to not have a responsive website.

The second step that you have to take is just write mobile preferred ads. You just click new ad and then you click on a checkbox and you say, “This should only be shown for mobile” and then you write for mobile. You say call, or you say visit, just something that has to do if somebody is actually on the go. The third step is simply just to ad bid adjustments to your campaign. That way, whenever somebody is searching on a mobile device, you can either bid more or bid less, depends on your ROI. You don’t have to enter right now, just know it’s there so you can determine the ROI afterwards.

Adalysis

The fifth feature I want to talk about is, again, not a feature, but it’s this trend with third party tools. In 2014 I tested several of these new third party tools. There was Optmyzr. There was Hero Pro that came out of Hanapin Marketing. There was Word Stream. That’s not new but it’s a tool. Then I tried AdAalysis from Brad Geddes and then a bunch of new call tracking providers.

The one I want to highlight the most in this video is AdAlysis or ad-alysis like analysis from Brad Geddes. I looked at it about six months ago. I came in and I saw it. I looked at the interface and I was like “Yeah, it looks like something from the early 2000s,” but once I really started using it, I forgot everything about the design because it streamlined my workflow when I worked with ad optimization incredibly. Like, I wrote Brad and I told him, “You have created a gem here.”

This is one of the best things I’ve ever seen come out to Google AdWords. It costs a little bit of money from $49 to $199 per month, depending on how many ads you have, but try it out, it is great. I’m going to come out with a presentation video about it next week which will explain everything about AdAlysis and how I personally use it. I have no affiliation other than I know Brad, so I just say it’s a great tool and you should try it out.

Ad Customizers 

The sixth feature I want to talk about which is an actual feature is ad customizers. This is something we’re actually all super excited about and I’ve seen everybody on the web write about it. They are a godsend to advertisers that have a lot of products or if you have a lot of services, if your prices change on a daily basis, then this is something that will save you so much time and it will make your ads more productive. One of the things we’ve seen at White Shark Media when we tested it last year is that some of our clients actually doubled conversions without spending any more money We didn’t think it was possible to make that big an improvement on an account that’s been running for two years. Overnight don’t double the conversions. The only thing I’ll say about ad customizers is that it’s a big mouthful for advertisers.

You need to create an Excel sheet, you need to put in data, you need to upload that Excel sheet, and then you have to create ads with parameters in them that pull in this date from the Excel sheets in. That tends to be a little much for advertisers.

So I recommend we have a blog post coming up about ad customizers, and we have a video coming out that will explain everything. In order to round up this video, I just want to talk about where to go for now. One of my most complimented tips last year was that I wrote one tip, one thing you should do at the end of the blog post. So I’m going to try to do that today and in every single video moving forward. If you’re only doing one thing as you see in this video, you should do two things. First thing you should do callout extensions because that’s the standard default, you should just do it. By doing it, it’ll literally take you 10 minutes. Check out other video on how to do it. The second thing you need to do is embrace mobile strategy. Like I said, 50% of traffic in Google is from mobile so you’re missing out if you’re not optimizing for it.

So thank you for watching this edition of Shark Bite, the first Shark Bite of 2015. It was great having you. If you have any questions or comments, just put them in the section below and make sure to subscribe to the channel.