As the great Ferris Bueller once said, “life moves pretty fast”—and Ferris never ran an e-commerce campaign on Google Adwords!
The platform is regularly updated and if users don’t stop and look around once in a while they could miss something really important.
Fortunately, we’ve rounded up five major recent updates which could be critical to the success of your campaign, so you can quickly read up on them here, then take the rest of the day off.
1. Call-Only PPC Campaigns
According to Google’s official Adwords blog, 70% of mobile search users call a business directly from the search results. It’s one of the biggest ways search has changed in the era of mobile.
If you know that your audience prefer to call than click, you should quickly take advantage of call-only campaigns, which allow you to create new ad content that favours telephone info and a large, prominent call button.
Every click you pay for is a call to your sales team and you can model your bidding strategy around for CPA [cost per acquisition] or ROAS [return on ad spend] goal for calls. If you’re going to use call-only campaigns, you’ll need a strong, focussed call to action. It might even be a simple as “call now.”
2. Upgraded URLs
Another way that search has evolved in the era of mobile and constant connectivity is that there are more ways than ever for customers to engage with your business. But this in turn means that you have a lot more data to pore over.
Upgraded URLs allow for quicker and easier tracking and management of what happens when people click on your ads. With upgraded ads, you can update the landing page URL and the tracking information separately on Adwords. This in turn means you can update your tracking information without having to re-set your ad statistics.
But in addition to making life simpler, upgraded URLs have given users access to even more information than before and it’s important to make the most of it. You could track the number of clicks you received by location and much more. This is known as a ValueTrack parameter and there are more where that came from.
3. Google Trusted Stores
Shopping online is all about trust and users aren’t going to click on an ad if they don’t recognise the brand or don’t have confidence in it. That’s the potentially bad news, but the good news is that it’s now easier than ever to join Google Trusted Stores.
This completely free certification demonstrates that your website offers a consistently brilliant ecommerce experience. When you are qualified you earn a badge that can be displayed proudly on your website and your Google Shopping but, perhaps more importantly, customers will be offered free purchase protection by Google. This is a massive boost, and something you should look to get for your ecommerce site. It couldn’t be simpler to do.
Simply create an account and add two small snippets of code to your website.
Reviews collected via Google Trusted Stores can also help you to qualify for seller ratings which can be displayed on your Adwords ads and Google Shopping. You can also add review extensions to your ads, based on this information. It’s free, it’s easy and it could help you to gain the competitive edge over other advertising real estate in the SERPS.
4. Ad Customizers
At the end of last year, Google introduced a brand new tool to Adwords which allowed users to show more relevant text ads to individual customers in real time, even if the company offered thousands of products, services and promotions.
One customisation which has proved extremely popular with users is the countdown widget. By dynamically counting the number of days left in a sale or promotion, you can create urgency and encourage more clicks and you don’t have to do it by exhaustively changing your ad copy every single day. Google will essentially do it for you.
All you have to do to set up a countdown in your ad text is head to the Ads tab and type “{=” into any line of the ad text. You can preview what your countdown will look like before going live too.
You will also find ad customizers for updating customers on daily deals and brand new promotions, and ensuring the most up to date inventory of your products possible. It’s a powerful tool which could make your ads more compelling.
5. New Adwords Editor
Perhaps the biggest update of late 2014 was the all new Adwords Editor. Google has enhanced the features of what is easily one of the most popular tools on the platform. Users are now able to open multiple windows in order to view different parts of their account at the same time. This means they could have their keyword list open while simultaneously making more ad copy. It also means you can manage multiple accounts at once and even drag and drop content between them.
We’ve all experienced the frustration of navigating through large accounts, but new ‘find’ functionality makes it simpler than ever to find whatever you need. This includes a new advanced search bar which allows you to use multiple search criteria at once and even save particular searches for later use.
This isn’t a physical change you can make to ad copy or ad structure but it could revamp the way you manage an ecommerce campaign. If time really is money, the new editor will ensure that you spend less of it to run a successful campaign. Combine that with a better managed campaign that draws a better return and you’re making better business sense all around.
Hit Search is a digital marketing company based in the UK. This article originally appeared on HitSearchLimited.com.