AdWords MENA Blog: May 2011

Geotargeting Puzzle

Monday, May 23, 2011

Its not a secret that the ability to precisely select a target audience is one of the major advantages of Google AdWords. By showing the Ads to the most interested users we are maximizing the return on investment and making it easier for the users to find information that is relevant to them. An AdWords tool that can help us do this is the Geotargeting tool.

It is extremely important that this tool be used properly as it allows us to precisely select our target audience. If used incorrectly however, it may harm the ad's impressions – or, even worse, show the ads outside of the target region.

In this blog post you will discover how to advertise a product or service located in a city to users located in another city, as well as gaining a deeper insight into the Geotargeting tool. To better explain this, we will illustrate it's use with an example – advertising hotels in Saint Petersburg to the users located in Moscow.

I. The Simplest Method

What is the simplest method that you can think of? Creating the keyword “hotel in Saint Petersburg” and targeting the campaign to Moscow? Well, it's not exactly that easy. Google detects the user's location, not only based on their IP address, but also through their search query, giving the search query a priority over the IP address.

So what happens in this particular example? The user from Moscow enters the query “hotels in Saint Petersburg” and the system, using the search query, determines that he is interested in the ads for Saint Petersburg – ignoring the physical location as search query has a priority. This is where it gets tricky! Since our campaign is targeting Moscow, not Saint Petersburg, we have a targeting mismatch and our ad is not serving, with the following keyword diagnostic message:

NB: In some rare cases, when name of the city is not in the beginning or end, but in the middle of a search query, your Ad may still appear – for example, the query “hotels in Saint Petersburg price”. However, this is not acceptable for us, as we are losing out on significant number of impressions – and potential customers.

II. Learn from our Mistakes

The first thing we are trying to do is to fix a problem by adding Saint Petersburg to our target locations – we are now prepared to show our Ads to the users both in Moscow and Saint Petersburg if this is the only solution. Initially this seems to work – we are checking if our Ads appear in Moscow, and they do appear – we are happy. But what happens next?

A user in another Russian city typed “hotels in Petersburg” and he has seen our Ad! This happened because the system has ignored his physical location and only looked at the search query. In fact, by adding Saint Petersburg to target regions we are now showing our Ads to everyone in Russia. This happens because system looks at the search query, determines it being related to Saint Petersburg and shows the Ad – irrespective of the physical location of the user.

This is disastrous – we don’t want to show our Ads to everyone, so go hunting for alternative solutions.

III. Working with exclusions

It is now clear that we will not get anywhere by including certain locations. But we also have the option of exclusions, maybe, we can use them? What is good is that we can now exclude users just by their physical location, but not by their search query – thanks to Advanced Geotargeting settings in the account. Here are the steps we shall follow:

In the Campaign’s settings we choose to target the whole Russia as a Country, and then by clicking “Exclude areas within selected locations” exclude all regions of Russia, except Moscow.
We make sure that our Advanced Geotargeting setting are set to default values and match the following settings:

Here we go! Our Ads are serving, and only to users in Moscow!

NB: Our Ads can also show to people, who search on google.ru website, but whose IP address does not belong to the excluded regions, but belong to, let’s say, Kiev or London – this is a very tiny risk we have to accept.

Conclusion

We hope that this article will shed some light on the logic of Geotargeting, will allow to solve this particular problem – but, most importantly, will give an idea on how to solve the other potential issues.

Written by Alexey Petrov - Google AdWords Team
Posted by Omar Selman - Google AdWords MENA

AdWords +1

Monday, May 16, 2011

Word of mouth is powerful. When you have a choice to make, it’s common to turn to the people you trust. But what about word of click? How can getting a suggestion from a friend or co-worker when you need it be as simple as having a hallway conversation -- or even simpler?

We want to make it easy for Google users to get recommendations from the people they trust right when they’re searching. That’s why we’re introducing the +1 button. With a single click, +1 lets signed-in Google users recommend the content they like on the web to their friends and contacts right when it’s most useful -- on Google search.

+1 is a simple idea. Let’s use a hypothetical Brian as an example. When Brian signs into his Google account and sees one of your ads or organic search results on Google, he can +1 it and recommend your page to the world.

The next time Brian’s friend Mary is signed in and searching on Google and your page appears, she might see a personalized annotation letting her know that Brian +1’d it. So Brian’s +1 helps Mary decide that your site is worth checking out.

We expect that personalized annotations will help users know when your ads and organic search results are relevant to them, increasing the chances that they'll end up on your site. You don’t have to make adjustments to your advertising strategy based on +1 buttons, and the way we calculate Quality Score isn’t changing (though +1s will be one of many signals we use to calculate organic search ranking). Think of +1 buttons as an enhancement that can help already successful search campaigns perform even better.

At first the +1 button will appear for English searches only on Google.com, but we’re working to add more languages in the future. You don’t have to make any changes to your campaigns for +1s to help you -- over the coming weeks, we’ll add +1 buttons to ads and search results on Google.com.

But the +1 button isn’t just for search pages. We’re working on a +1 button that you can put on your pages too, making it easy for people to recommend your content on Google search without leaving your site. If you want to be notified when the +1 button is available for your website, you can sign up for email updates at our +1 webmaster site.

The +1 button is the next step in our effort to find relevance through relationships on the web. We’re excited about using +1s to make search, and your search campaigns, more personal, relevant and compelling. And we hope you’re excited too!

To learn more about the +1 button and how it affects your search ads, visit the AdWords Help Center.

Posted by Omar Abou Selman - Google AdWords MENA

Let others know what you think about the AdWords MENA Blog!

Thursday, May 5, 2011

The Google AdWords MENA blog has added two new features: rating and sharing. These can be found below every post on the blog. We believe it is very important for our readers to be able to share the posts with their friends, family and whoever wants to read!
The rating feature allows you to rate the post on a scale from 1 star to 5 stars. This will help you know how good the post is and will help us know if we need to improve!

The sharing feature allows you to share the post via Google Buzz, Twitter, Facebook or any of the other available options.

The comment feature is also available, please sign up to the blog and comment on the posts.
So, what are you waiting for? Start rating and sharing!
Written and Posted by Omar Abou Selman - Google AdWords MENA

Year in review: Remarketing delivers better ads, better performance

Wednesday, May 4, 2011

Today we have a post from Aitan Weinberg, product manager for AdWords remarketing:

We’ve always believed that display advertising has the potential to be smarter, better performing and more measurable. Today we’d like to shine a light on one of the quiet stars of the display world that is enabling this transformation: remarketing. Remarketing allows you to reach your website visitors with a relevant message as they browse other sites across the web. We rolled it out one year ago across the Google Display Network, and we think we have a hit on our hands. In 2010, the total number of advertisers using remarketing grew an average of 113% every quarter after launch. A few examples of how some of you have used remarketing to great effect:
Yankee Candle Company used remarketing to re-engage shoppers and increased conversion rates by 600% while cutting cost-per-conversion in half.
Lenovo PC manufacturers increased sales by 20% and lowered their overall expense-to-revenue ratio by 14% in a campaign that included remarketing and display across multiple networks.
etrailer.com, an online towing parts retailer, saw twice the click-through-rate at a 75% lower cost-per-click with remarketing compared to their typical display advertising campaigns.
In the year since launch, we’ve boosted performance and scale with three key enhancements to make remarketing even more powerful for the largest to the smallest of advertisers. First, we now enable you to show a relevant ad right after a potential customer leaves your site, when our internal analysis shows they’re most likely to click. Second, we’ve improved the algorithm that helps determine, in real time, how much you should pay for each impression in order to maximize the possibility that a user will click on your ad. Finally, the growing reach of the Google Display Network means you can reach your customers on more and more sites across the web. On average, we reach 84% of the people on a typical remarketing list and we serve hundreds of billions of advertising impressions every month to over 500 million Internet users worldwide.

As we continue to show more relevant ads across more sites, this means more users and publishers benefit as well as advertisers.
Publishers are seeing significant revenue lift from serving remarketing ads on their sites. Our studies have shown that a remarketing ad brings in nearly 2X the revenue as other display ads.
Users have told us that they like the more targeted ad experience that remarketing provides. Marie DeOrio, Founder of Vintage Fashion Directory, calls remarketing ads “fascinating and fabulous. It’s that experience where ads don’t feel like ads. If they’re correctly targeted and it’s something you’re interested in, it’s valuable information.” Marie notes that she serves remarketing ads on her own website,vintagefashiondirectory.com as she believes that they "provide a better experience for users."
We’re not finished, either. In the coming months, we have plans to introduce a suite of new features that will make remarketing even smarter, faster, and more dynamic. We anticipate that interest in remarketing will only continue to grow, as advertisers, publishers and users continue to see the benefits, and as we continue to find new technologies that help satisfy the ultimate goal: showing the right ad to the right person at the right time.

Posted by Omar Abou Selman - Google AdWords MENA

AdWords for Beginners - Part 10

Monday, May 2, 2011

As the tenth part in our series for beginners or advertisers that just need some repetition in the basics of AdWords, we’re going to discuss the benefits with advertising in the Display Network. Where AdWords ads are placed is based either on searches or website content, so the Google Network has two components: the Search Network and the Display Network. On the Display Network you can target websites that have partnered with Google (display partners), YouTube, and specific Google properties.

Some rules of thumb that you should use when advertising in the Display network are:

Create a specific campaign for the Display Network. Keywords work in a different manner depending on if you’re advertising on the Search Network (relevance) or the Display Network (context/themes), and hence you can improve your Quality Score if you keep the campaigns separated.
Start with contextual targeting for your ads, which help you see where your ad show in the Display Network.
Run the campaign for 2-3 weeks before you start make any adjustments.

The benefits of running ads on the Display Network is that it’s cheaper than the Search Network, you can pause the ads at any point and you can use more dynamic ads. Also, it’s important to remember that it’s less competition on the Display Network comparing to Search, and through advertising with both networks you’ll have a reach of 95% among the Internet users! Furthermore, to keep campaigns for different networks separated will structure your AdWords account and make it easier to manage. Last but not least, remember that you can use managed placements in the Display network to decide on what webpages you want to be shown.

We hope that these tips will be useful for you when advertising with AdWords. Don’t forget to visit AdWords Beginner’s Guide in the AdWords Help center for further information and guidance.

Last but not least, remember to keep your eyes open for the next post in this blog series for beginners.

Posted by Omar Abou Selman - Google AdWords MENA
Author: Kristin Sarstedt – the Inside AdWords Team