SEM - Search Engine Marketing Guide

This afternoon, we gave a keynote address at the Interactive Advertising Bureau’s MIXX Conference in New York, entitled “Display 2015: Smart and Sexy.”

As you know by now, we’re investing significantly to make display advertising better for users, advertisers and publishers. Display advertising really is at the heart of what we’re doing at Google these days. 99 percent of our top 1,000 clients are now running campaigns on the Google Display Network. And last year, they increased their spending on display advertising by over 75 percent.

Today, we explained why we think display advertising is about to go through the biggest and most important revolution in its history. We made seven predictions about where display advertising will be in 2015:

 50 percent of ad campaigns will include video ads bought on a cost-per-view basis (that means that the user will choose whether to watch the ad or not, and the advertiser will only pay if the user watches). That’s up from very little today.

 Today, advertisers are starting to deliver ads that are tailored to particular audiences. Many are using real-time bidding technology, so that they can bid on the ad space that they think is most valuable. In 2015, 50 percent of these ads will be bought using this real-time technology.

 With smartphone growth skyrocketing, mobile is going be the number one screen through which users engage with advertisers’ digital brands.
 Today, the “click” is the most important way that advertisers measure their display ad campaigns, but it’s not always the best measure—especially if an ad campaign is designed to boost things like brand awareness or recall. With new measurement technologies emerging, in five years, there will be five metrics that advertisers commonly regard as more important than the click.
 Just like most news articles on the web today can be commented on, shared, discussed, subscribed to and recommended, in 2015, 75 percent of ads on the web will be “social” in nature—across dozens of formats, sites and social communities.

 Rich media formats work. They enable great creativity and interaction between users and advertisers, but today they only represent about 6 percent of total display ad impressions. That will increase to 50 percent, for brand-building ad campaigns.

 All the investments that are making display advertising smarter and sexier will help publishers increase their revenues. Display advertising is going to grow to a $50 billion industry in five years.
We also wanted to visualize the face of the display advertising revolution, so we demonstrated four exciting new technologies:
 We demonstrated some new video ad formats we’ve been testing on YouTube that we’re calling “TrueView.” These will roll out later this year. These ad formats give people the option to skip an ad if they don’t want to watch, or to choose from multiple ads the one they want to watch. Importantly, advertisers only pay if the user chooses to watch their ad.

 We showed some of the things that are becoming possible with our new Teracent technology. This technology can dynamically alter the creative elements of an ad in real-time to make it more relevant and effective, depending on factors like geographic location, language, the content of the website and the time of day.

 You might be familiar with Google Goggles, a way to search the web on mobile devices just by taking a picture. We gave a preview of some experimental uses of Google Goggles that could one day enable advertisers to deliver great display ads to users. Imagine pointing your phone’s camera at an ad for a car in a magazine, and having the car appear in 3D in your mobile device. Or pointing at a movie poster and having the movie trailer play in the device, right in your hand. No QR codes, no downloads!

 We even showed a fun example of what rich media can do—our speech was broadcast live in a number of expandable ad units across the web, and was updated with tweets in real time.

The Ad Extensions tab shows you detailed data about the ad extensions that you've created within a specific campaign. It also allows you to add, edit or delete your ad extensions.

The tab automatically appears in your account when you've enabled ad extensions in at least one campaign.You can enable or disable the tab for your account view by clicking the arrow button next to your existing tabs above your performance table. When enabled, the tab appears in three places in your account:

• The "All Online Campaigns" overview screen: The tab will show all extensions for all your campaigns (or "rollup view").
• The campaign details page: The tab will show all extensions for the selected campaign (or "campaign view").
• The ad group details page: The tab will show all campaign-level extensions that apply to the selected ad group. You'll also see ad-specific extensions, if applicable.

Whether you're new to search engine marketing (SEM) or if you simply need to brush up on your optimization skills, you can use the below list of key performance indicators and possible solutions to troubleshoot any issues that you may spot in your own campaigns. Keep in mind that the bullet points below aren't meant to be used all together as an across-the-board cure-all; you will need to use your own discretion to determine which adjustments may be most beneficial to your particular campaigns.

Low Click-Through Rate (CTR)
• Test multiple ads
• Use dynamic text
• Make ad groups more focused
• Make ads more relevant (to keywords and landing pages)
• Adjust match types:
- Use phrase match instead of exact match
- Use broad match instead of phrase match
• Add negative keywords
• Implement demographic targeting

Previous posts on low CTR:

1. SEM Beginner Series: What is a Click-Through Rate (CTR)?
2. SEM Intermediate Series: Increasing Click-Through Rate (CTR) in Microsoft adCenter
3. Low Click-Through Rate Culprits and What You Can Do About Them (Part I)
4. Low Click-Through Rate Culprits and What You Can Do About Them (Part II)
5. Low Click-Through Rate Culprits and What You Can Do About Them (Part III)

High Cost-Per-Click / Low Return-on-Investment (ROI)
• Ensure landing page URLs are current (no broken links)
• Revise ad copy; make it more concise, mention special offers, use calls to action (e.g. “buy”, “shop”, etc.)
• Adjust bids (lower)
• Match types: bid on broad, phrase, exact
• Add negative keywords
• Set daily limit to monthly budget

Previous posts on cost-per-click and ROI:

1. SEM Beginner Series: What is Cost-Per-Click (CPC)?
2. Lowering CPC with Match Types and Negative Keywords
3. Five Tips to Improve Your Microsoft adCenter ROI
4. SEM Intermediate Series: Calculating and Improving Return-On-Investment (ROI) in Microsoft adCenter

Low Page Position
• Increase base bid
• Review keywords and ad copy relevancy
• Dynamic text in ad title, text, display URL

Previous posts on page position:

1. Clarifying Base Bids: Enhancing and Optimizing for Position in Microsoft Advertising adCenter
2. SEM Beginner Series: Why is Ad Position Important?
3. SEM Intermediate Series: Strategies for Improving Ad Position in Microsoft adCenter
4. Ad Position Best Practices for PPC

Low Traffic
• Shorter keyword phrases
• Expand keywords (try Microsoft Advertising Intelligence)
• Increase bids to improve page position
• Use broad match
• Remove or expand geographical targeting

Previous posts on traffic:

1. SEM Intermediate Series: Troubleshooting Low Traffic From Your Microsoft adCenter Campaigns
2. Qualifying Traffic with Negative Keywords
3. Microsoft Advertising Intelligence - Using the Traffic and Demographic Tools for Market Trends

Low Conversion Rate
• Update landing pages
• Bid higher on the keywords that perform the best

Previous posts on conversion tracking:

1. Conversion Tracking: 5 Improvements Scheduled for the Fall Release of Microsoft Advertising adCenter
2. Conversion Tracking: What It Is and How to Enable and Disable It in Microsoft adCenter
3. Improve Conversion Rates and Maximise ROI

Google Health launched a bit over two years ago, and since then it's been listening to the users, analyzing feedback and conducting research. google’ve learned a lot from You! You’ve confirmed that having a central place online to store and share medical data with whomever you want is important and a step in the right direction. And google’ve added a number of features based on what you’ve asked for so far. But you’ve also told to google that it’s not enough; that you’re also looking for tools that will help you act on all your health and wellness concerns. Google’ve heard you ask for easier data tracking, more personalization and the ability to set and track progress toward your health goals. Google listened, and today they’re announcing a new design and new features for Google Health.







So what’s new? Well, Google’ve developed an easier-to-use dashboard that brings together even more of your health and wellness information in one place and makes it easier for you to organize and act on that information. they’ve also heard from you that focusing on wellness, and wellness goals, is a big part of the solution, and that it’s important to record your daily experience and set goals









So our new re-design better organizes your medical information, while creating a more welcoming place to set goals for yourself and check in daily on your progress. For example, you might want to set a goal around walking more each day or to lower your cholesterol over time. With our new design, you can easily monitor your path to success with a visual graph that shows your progress towards your personalized goal. You can even create custom trackers for other things that you want to monitor like daily sleep, exercise, pregnancy or even how many cups of coffee you drink a day.



We’ve also integrated with several new partners to make it easier for you to collect the data you need to track your progress, including Fitbit, maker of a wearable device that captures health and wellness data such as steps taken, calories burned and sleep quality; and CardioTrainer, one of the top mobile apps for tracking fitness activity and weight loss. In the two weeks since CardioTrainer’s integration went live, CardioTrainer developer WorkSmart Labs reports that users have already uploaded more than 150,000 workouts to Google Health, where they can more easily view, track and set goals around their workouts and monitor them along with other health and wellness information.



Besides tracking progress toward your health goals, our new design also gives you the ability to take notes or keep a journal on your progress for each health condition or medication you’re taking. The new design also delivers information that is more personalized to your particular set of medical conditions or specific medications. You can access improved content links for each medical condition, medication or lab result you have in your Google Health profile. And they’ve made the Google Health profile easier to read and customize, with the ability to hide past items or sections that are outdated or no longer relevant. All of this helps you keep your dashboard up-to-date with current, relevant information, while still letting you maintain a complete health history.



In addition to redesigning the product and forming new partnerships with device and mobile apps developers, they’ve continued to expand our more traditional integrations with hospitals and other healthcare data providers. Three recent highlights include Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital at Stanford, University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC) and Sharp HealthCare.



With this update, they’ve made Google Health an even more powerful tool for organizing all your health information online, and also for achieving your health and wellness goals. We think you’ll find that organized, measurable and engaging information helps make it easier to achieve better health and wellness.



http://www.google.com/intl/en-US/health/about/