AdWords MENA Blog: March 2015

AdWords MENA Blog

Charge up your phones with call-only campaigns

Thursday, March 5, 2015

If you’re shopping for insurance or looking for storage space, chances are you’ll make a phone call. In fact, 61% of mobile searchers say that click to call is most important when making a purchase, as opposed to when researching. As a result, many businesses value these phone calls more than clickthroughs to their website. That’s why today we’re introducing call-only campaigns, an easy way to only drive calls to your business.
Call-only campaigns allow you to create mobile-ready ads that feature a click-to-call button and description text, so your customers can only call you from mobile search results.

Let’s say you’re a self-storage business where a majority of reservations are made over the phone. You can use call-only campaigns to drive people exclusively to your call center to take advantage of your higher call conversion rates. Or let’s say you’re a local business working to develop your mobile web experience. With call-only campaigns you can still reach your mobile, on-the-go customers on Google search and connect with them over the phone.
“Call-only ads have been a great tool for connecting us with customers at a specific point in their buying cycle, without having to send them through a website first. In the end, this leads to better performance for our ads and a better customer experience.” Josh Leibner Director of Paid Search at Red Ventures Optimized for calls

Simplified bidding Call-only campaigns are designed for and will only show ads on devices that make calls. You’ll only pay for clicks to call your business, as opposed to click to your site. That means you can adjust keyword bids and optimize directly based on the value of those calls -- no mobile bid modifier needed.

Customized for your business When you connect with customers over the phone, it’s important to provide the information they’re looking for about your business. With call-only campaigns, you can customize your ads to enhance the click-to-call experience. For example, your ad might say “Call to get a quote” to encourage more qualified leads, or “Speak with a specialist today” to let customers know they can talk directly to a real person.

If you are currently using a setting in call extensions to create call-only ads, details on how to upgrade to call-only campaigns will be shared in email communications over the next few weeks..
Learn more You can learn more about creating mobile call-only campaigns in the AdWords Help Center. If you want to be sure you’re doing everything possible to drive calls for your business, check out Driving Calls in AdWords, a new Best Practices guide.
Michelle The MENA Adwords Team

Google

Get faster and easier URL tracking with new Upgraded URLs

Thursday, March 5, 2015

URL management just got easier
Constant connectivity has increased the ways that people engage with your business, meaning more data and metrics for you to use to manage ad performance. That’s why we are introducing Upgraded URLs to provide an easier and faster way to manage and track important information about each click on your AdWords ads*.
Upgraded URLs offer several benefits for advertisers, including:

less time spent managing URL tracking updates

reduced crawl and load times on your website

new ValueTrack parameters that help you gain additional insights about your ads. Learn more.

Johannes Lipka, Product & Solution Manager at eProfessional GmbH, says: “Upgraded URLs have been one of the most time-saving tools we’ve used in AdWords. It’s allowed us to change custom tracking parameters for a group of URLs all in one place, without re-setting ad stats. We plan to upgrade our clients’ accounts over to upgraded URLs as soon as possible.”
Destination URLs today
If you use URL tracking today, you’ll notice that Destination URLs are made up of two components:

Landing page URL This is the URL that customers see in their browsers when they get to your landing page after clicking on your ad.

Tracking This section includes information like redirects to third party tracking services, ValueTrack parameters, or custom creative IDs.

In the example below, blue represents the landing page, and green represents the tracking information.
www.example.com?creative=12345
With destination URLs, anytime you need to adjust tracking, you have to update the entire destination URL. This triggers a re-review of your entire destination URL and your ads stop running while your URL is re-reviewed -- causing you to lose time and potential new business.
What’s changing with Upgraded URLs
Upgraded URLs let you enter the landing page portion of your URL and your tracking information separately in AdWords. Now you have the option to update your tracking information at your account, campaign or ad group without having to re-set your ad stats.
Let’s see how the example URL above could be constructed using the new upgraded URL fields.
Final URL is where you’ll enter your website’s landing page URL. Screen Shot 2015-02-04 at 17.06.47.png

The landing page ‘www.example.com’ is now entered in the Final URL field
Tracking templates are where you enter your tracking information and tell AdWords how to assemble your URLs. Now, if you’d like to scale your tracking updates across multiple URLs, you can use a shared tracking template at the account, campaign or ad group level. If you’d prefer to manage your URL tracking information at the individual URL level, you can use a tracking template at the ad, keyword, or sitelink level.
In the example below, we’ve used a tracking template at the account level to apply our tracking information across all of the URLs in the account.

Tracking information for all URLs in the account is placed in the account level tracking template
Custom parameters let you customize the information you’d like to monitor as well as the specific values that get inserted into your URLs when your ad clicks are triggered. For example, if you’d like to insert the value 12345 whenever this specific ad is clicked, you can set the custom parameter {_mycreative} in this ad. Screen Shot 2015-02-04 at 17.12.43.png

Enter ‘_mycreative’ in the custom parameter field to insert 12345 whenever that ad is clicked
New URLs, new insights
As part of this upgrade, you’ll gain access to many new insights about your ad clicks.
New ValueTrack parameters let you track additional insights about your business. For example, if you’d like to track how many ad clicks were triggered for your creative by location, you can use the new {loc_physical_ms} ValueTrack parameter. To optimally use the new ValueTrack parameters, you can set them up at the account level so you can track these values across all the URLs in your account. Learn about the new value track parameters. Screen Shot 2015-02-05 at 12.23.07_v03photoshop.png

Screen Shot 2015-02-05 at 12.23.07_v03photoshop.png

The valuetrack for location {location_physical_ms} is in green in the account level tracking template
Next steps
We’ll be rolling out upgraded URLs to all advertisers starting this week. We encourage all advertisers who use tracking in their URLs to upgrade to the new system by July 1, 2015. Starting on that date, your URLs will begin updating to the new structure.
If you're using a tracking platform to manage your URLs, we encourage working with them to manage these changes.
To learn how you can start using Upgraded URLs for your new ad URLs, please see our article on Help Center.
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*Everywhere we say ads, we also mean other targeting options available for the Search Network, Display Network, and Shopping.

Michelle The MENA Adwords Team