Alistair Dent, head of PPC at Periscopix, gives advice on how to make the switch to enhanced campaigns
With the introduction of its ‘enhanced campaigns’ Google is moving towards understanding the context of a search, rather than targeting by device and keyword.
Google ads are now targeted by situation, rather than by device. In the past, when you put together a Google Adwords campaign, you thought solely by device, creating campaigns for desktop, tablet and mobile. But Google’s trying to move us away from that, and towards thinking in terms of situation and context. What information does the person want to see? That’s not necessarily informed simply by what device they’re using, but also by the situation they’re in: whether they’re at work, at home, researching, on the move and so on.
Google’s doing a lot to improve its understanding of what we mean when we search for something. What is the context in which we’re searching? If you know more about the background to a search, you can target your results much more effectively.
1. Use layers of filters
For a while now, we’ve had filters that allow us to show ads to certain groups of people, including location, time of day, and what device they’re using. But with the switch to enhanced campaigns, you can layer these filters over each other. For example, you might want to target a person in London, who’s in their office, using a desktop computer, between 9am and 5pm. As you add each different layer, you can push more (or fewer) ads to people based on how many of the layers they match.
2. Find your audience
Google is pretty good at knowing where you are, particularly when you are on a mobile device. Whatever device you’re on, if you’re in one place most days between 9am and 5pm, Google can make an assumption that you’re at work. If you’re in another place overnight, it can assume you’re most likely at home. Anywhere else, and it will assume you’re out and about. Whenever you search on a mobile, your location information informs the results you get back, and it’s exact.
3. Think about situation
Your layering filters will help you decide what someone’s looking for. If they’re at home, they might be researching your services; if they’re at work, they might be looking for information to use right away. If they’re searching for your brand on a mobile phone at 6pm, and they’re not at home, they’re probably commuting. If they’re searching from home in the evening, they might be a business owner or senior team member who’s really busy and working long hours from home. Different layers will help you make an assumption about who they are, what they’re looking for, and what’s going to deliver the most value.
4. Set your bidding strategy
Your basic keyword might be where you start. Then, with each layer you build, you can increase your bid as your targeting is increased. Equally, you can decrease your bid with certain modifiers, such as if someone’s looking for your contact information at a time when your call centre is closed. Variables like this inform your bidding strategy. The more you know about what someone wants from you, the better able you are to decide where to send them on your site, and what to bid for them.
5. Google Display Network
Apply the same targeting principles to your ads on the Google Display Network (GDN). Look at context: keywords, topics and the subject matter of the website; and by audience, interests, whether they’ve visited you before, and what similar users have done. What really gives you good results is when you take all these things and layer them together. As with Adwords, you can do this with multipliers: take your base (such as your keyword) and decide what that bid is worth; then add in other layers; and multiply the bid accordingly. Say you’re an insurance firm. If someone is looking for ‘office insurance’, you might want to show them an ad for your relevant insurance product. But if they have a history of looking for insurance products, they might be further down the line in their research, and closer to buying. If they’ve visited your website before, they’re showing a sustained interest in your product and are worth a higher bid.
6. Use remarketing lists
Google has improved targeting again, with its Remarketing Lists for Search Ads (RLSA). This means that within enhanced campaigns, you can identify people who have already visited your website, and retarget them based on what they looked for on your site and their subsequent search history. You can bid on new terms just for these groups, or increase your bid on specific terms, perhaps within a set timescale. For example, if you’re an IT firm, you might bid on a generic term like ‘outsourcing’, but only targeting people who have already browsed for specific IT services on your site, and only those people who’ve visited your site within the last 30 days. This lets you be incredibly precise about who you’re retargeting.
7. Use Google+
With enhanced campaigns, social extensions are no longer opt-in, they’re default. That means your AdWords account will automatically link to your Google+ page, and your ad will show ‘social annotations’ – the number of people who have given you a +1. The impact on your search results of getting social annotations is massive. There’s a five–10 per cent increase in click throughs if you have social annotations on. If the person searching for you sees someone within their social network has given you a +1, that number goes up to a 17 per cent increase in click throughs. That’s a lot of extra traffic, for very
little effort.
