My Digital Insight

Remarketing is one of the most effective and popular ways for advertisers.  It is only advertising to people who have previously interacted with the brand via an app or a website.  There are five types of remarketing inside the Google AdWords: #1: Standard The standard remarketing is the display network and display network apps. Someone came to your website to explore some information and then left, then you want to show your ads on the Google display network like Bloomberg as that person continue to browse the website. #2: Dynamic The dynamic remarketing is specifically useful for e-commerce. It allows you to show ads for that specific product as that person continues to browse the web. For example, I went to the American Eagle website and find a new dress and then left the site. Then, I went to other websites, the American Eagle ad is on the corner of the site, and most importantly, the dress I just viewed is on the ad. For advertisers, it is an aggressive way to ...

Whether your ad gets a top position is based on your overall quality score. Ad Rank is a number that determines what ad slot your ad will show in. The advertiser with the highest ad rank gets their ad in the very top position on the search engine result page. How does Google calculate your ad rank? There are four main components of quality score: Click-Through Rate (CTR) Click-through rate is the most important factor that affects your ad quality score. CTR is human feedback on the quality of your ad and keyword combination. The higher the CTR, the higher the quality score.  It's always a good idea to get in the habit of testing different displays or URLs within one Ad group to see which one has the best performance. Keyword/Ad Relevance In order for your ad to be relevant to the users, the text of your ad should talk about the themes that your keywords are present. Google will evaluate your ad text that is thematically related to the keywords in that ad group....

Google is the largest search engine in the world. It builds a very close relationship between advertisers and users. Users come to Google, then type their questions on the search box, and try to find good answers.  From a business perspective, Google wants users to come back and continue to use Google as their first or only search engine. Therefore, Google needs to have the auction for those ads and to make sure the ads are relevant to what users search for. By delivering relevant ads, Google will earn trust and credibility from users. The course instructor Isaac shares five key insights of AdWords auction:  #1: Always need to focus on relevancy Google's job is to send users to the most relevant landing page that contains the most useful information to answer their questions. Google really cares a lot about the user experiences with those ads. There are two subcategories regarding relevancy:  The first is the ad text. Google wants to make sure what your ad ...

The last stage of building a keyword list is the keyword organization. There are three basic components of the keyword organization: themes, buyer funnel, and match types. Themes Themes will build your ad structure. The most important of themes is relevancy. You want to make your ads are relevant to what the users are searching for. Make sure to send them to the relevant content page. Again, in order to accomplish that, you need to understand your ad structure or themes. Themes could be product-based, service-based, funnel-based or anything you think is relevant to your ads or campaign. It is based on what do you want to send the traffic to a specific place on your website or a landing page. There are two factors you need to optimize in the themes: human relevancy and Google. When you write the ad, you want to encourage users to click on it and take a valuable action. At the same time, you also want to have a good quality score on Google. Therefore, you need to create a good and...

When we are doing keyword planning, it is important to understand the psychology of search. We want to learn about how people express what they are looking for. People search for answers to their questions in different ways. They seek information in different ways and feel differently about the problems they need to be solved. According to the Google Ads course, Isaac summarized six main ways that people communicate with search engines.  Answer To The Question One of the most popular ways that people talk to the search engine is finding an answer to the current question.  It is also called a problem-based search. For example, if I want to find something that could support my back when I hold my baby, I would search "baby carrier with back support". I know my problem is back pain, and I know a baby carrier could help me relieve my back pain. Therefore, I need to find an answer by searching for my problem. The Question Itself A lot of people like to enter a question ...

Once we did all the keyword research, it's time to start keyword planning. Understand the buyer funnel is a very important process for keyword planning. The way a potential customer searches the internet can help us understand where they are in the buyer funnel. According to the Google Ads course, there are four stages of the buyer journey: awareness, interest, shop, and buy. Awareness There are two things in the awareness stage: one is being aware of the problem that you want to solve, and the other is being aware of a potential solution to that problem. The awareness is much more cognitive in nature, so it is hard to get someone to buy from your brand in this stage. Most people will enter a short term that describes their current problem. For example, when my baby is crying all the time, I start to look for anything that can stop baby cry. I will search "stop baby cry".  Awareness has the lowest click-through rate, and the bidding per click is also low. It is...

Keyword research is the first step for creating keyword lists. You can brainstorm some good ideas, but it is just too limited. The Google Ads course introduced four useful keyword search tools to get keyword ideas quickly.  Google Autocomplete Google autocomplete is usually the first place to find keyword ideas because everyone is searching on Google.  I go to the Google search page and enter "birthday gift", then there are drop-down relevant keywords ideas. I could see many good keyword ideas for a "birthday gift" like "birthday gifts for him", "birthday gifts for best friend", and etc. In the drop-down, it usually shows the top search terms on Google.   Google Suggestions Another way to find some good keyword ideas is from Google suggestions. Just type your search term on Google and enter the search result page. Then scroll down to the bottom, you can see the "searches related to birthday gift" which is my search term.   ...

The negative keywords are very important for the campaign because we don't want to spend extra money on irrelevant clicks. Therefore, we need to research and find negative keywords from the search report.  There are two important concepts to find keyword ideas from the search report: (1) From Data: the course instructor suggests that we filter out all the keywords with over 100 clicks, any keywords with less than 30 clicks are not valuable enough to analyze.  (2) See Conversions: if the keyword has a lot of clicks but a low conversion rate, it's better to add it to the negative keywords because of the high CPC.  Once we have done all the research, how to organize those keywords? The point of the negative lists is to create collections of negative keywords that you want to reuse for multiple campaigns, so you don't have to keep adding the same negative keywords to each of the different campaigns. According to the Google Ads instructor Isaac, the mo...

Phrase Match According to the course, phrase match uses quotation marks ("") to make sure your ad only appears for searches containing your exact keyword and close variants, with additional words or phrases before or after your keyword.  It still can generate many bad clicks for irrelevant queries. And the click-through rate is low. For example, a phrase match keyword could be "winter coat" , if someone is searching for "winter coat for sale" , the ad will show on the Google search result. Even though "for sale" is not included in the phrase, but the phrase keyword "winter coat" is included and also in the same order, so the ad will show.  However, if someone searches "coat for winter", the ad will not show. Even though it includes "coat" and "winter", but it is not in the right order, so it is not eligible to trigger the ad. Pros of phrase match: begin to get more control of your search terms s...

In the previous post, I mentioned that we need to carefully build keyword lists and to think about the queries that users are like to search for on Google. How to make sure your ad show when people are typing relevant search terms? The answer is match type. Google will match those search terms with your keywords based on the match types and relevancy.  Match types tell how much "freedom" Google has when pairing your keywords with search queries. It all depends on how strict or loose you define your keywords by using match types. Match types will seriously influence on which search terms will trigger any given keyword. There are five primary match types: broad, broad match modified, phrase, exact, and negative. The first four types are different ways of letting Google know how they should treat search terms in relation to those keywords. Negative match type is the keywords that you don't want to use. When people search terms match your negative keywords, your ad won...

There are three separate stages of building keyword lists: Keyword research Keyword planning Keyword organization Keyword Research Before you launch a campaign, we need to do some research to understand what keywords are going to be effective and profitable. Most importantly, you need to find out how much you want to bid on each keyword and how much revenue will be generated from those keywords. In order to do good keyword research, you need to understand your industry at first. What is your industry market size? What the main customers are you selling to? You need to know your industry, your customers, and product well.  Then, you need to put yourself in your customers' shoes. What questions might your customers have when they are looking for answers on Google?  You need to understand when your customers decide they need your products.  Finally, you need to think about the ad group and campaign structure. What is the theme of your campaign? Are dif...

Keywords are very important for any Google Ads campaign. According to the course, keywords are the "items" up for auction. They could be a description of your product, key feature of your product, or anything related to your product or service.  It's important to get your keywords right. Every single ad group has keywords, and every keyword that we select to our account represents an item that we want to bid on. Of course, we want to get some impressions when someone searches for something similar to the keywords. The keywords we add to our ad groups instruct Google as to which queries should trigger our ads. Google tends to refer to queries as search terms. Queries and search terms are exchangeable. Basically, queries and search terms are what the user enters into the Google search box. That's not necessarily your keyword. For example, if you are selling baby crib, your keywords could be " convertible baby crib", "4 in 1 baby crib", "li...

I learn a very useful model called B.J Fogg Model from the course.  This behavior model contains three important parts: motivation, ability, and trigger. Basically, in order for anybody to take the desired action, they need to have the ability to perform the behavior and need to be motivated to perform that behavior. Image from Medium As marketers, our job is always about influencing human behavior and trying to get people to perform the desired action to convert or to do anything that will ultimately lead to revenue. We need to increase ability, decrease the difficulty of the task, so it will increase motivation to perform. When customers know what they want to buy and clearly have high motivation, if they think it is complex to accomplish, they may give up. Therefore, marketers need to give a trigger to decrease the difficulty of the task or perceived ability.  For example, if a person wants to earn a college degree, he has high motivation, but he may not conside...

How to write a good ad copy is always a big question for every brand. For all those campaign settings, they are more likely rational things, but when it comes to ad creation, it becomes a more emotional context. How to write an ad that not only grabs users' attention but also take them to the final moves? Google Text Ads Basics The text ad includes two headlines. Each headline shows up at the top, and each headline has a maximum of 30 characters. Then, there have a display URL and two paths with 15 characters per path. The display URL doesn't have to be the website or landing page that a user is going to. Use some relevant keywords or search terms in the path will increase your quality score. Next, we have two descriptions with 90 characters for each. We can write some relevant information about the product or services. Try to keep it as simple as we can because most people don't read the description as much as headlines. There also have some compliance ...

Once we have done the campaign level settings, it's time to start thinking about ad groups. It's important to keep in mind your overall campaign structure ideas when you are structuring ad groups. A really good way to generate ad group ideas is to follow the navigational structure of the website. There are three great ways to structure your ad group introduced by the course: theme, match type, and top performers. Themes The first thing you need to think about is the theme of your campaign and your brand. The theme could be product categories, subcategories, locations, brands, colors of your product, services, event, and etc. Each of these categories represents a theme because there are a bunch of different keywords that are similar under the top-level category. You could do some competitor research by searching specific or certain keywords on Google and explore how your competitors are potentially breaking out their ad groups.  The most important thing to think about...

According to Google research, mobile already has more searches daily and more clicks on ads than desktop. But, it doesn't mean you must run your campaign on mobile. Desktop campaigns still work better than mobile campaigns in many businesses. The conversion rate is higher on the desktop because the sites are well optimized and giving users a better user experience.  If you want to run a mobile campaign, you should ask yourself four important questions: 1. Is your site mobile optimized? If your site is not mobile-friendly, you really SHOULD NOT advertise on mobile. It will potentially hurt your brand reliability because the users feel bad about their mobile experience. And, you are also going to be penalized by Google and have a very high cost for click. Before you advertise on mobile, test your website on the site evaluation tool such as MobileTestMe . Paste your website URL and to see whether it displays well on different devices. 2. Where are your customers when they s...

When will my ad show in order to get a higher conversion? It is a very common question to ask ourselves when we begin to schedule our campaign. In general, you could choose to run your ads throughout the entire day or throughout certain hours.  Image From Google By default, Google sets these ads to run 24/7. For a new campaign, it is a good default because you do want to learn how ads are performing at different hours of the day. In order to generate more data, it is better to schedule your ads to run 24/7. Then, you could go to the Google Ads dashboard to pull out the ad schedule report. The report will show the detail data about how your ad performs at different times. You could break out in segment hour of the day, day of the week, and the week of the month. By analyzing the data, you can make some bid adjustments based on the report. In most cases, it's worthwhile to bid on good traffic throughout the day at least. In order to make a rational bid adjustment, you n...

Location Extension If brick and mortar awareness is important, then location extension is good for local businesses such as fast food, fashion store, bakery and etc. If you have one location or multiple locations, you could get those multiple locations showing up in your ads . Even if you're trying to generate online sales, having an actual physical location will make people aware that you have a store nearby, so it also offers the users in-store shopping experiences and can drive in-store sales potentially. Parts of your location extensions will include business hours, Google reviews, directions, whether or not you are open or closed, and peak time. Unfortunately, you don't have control over what elements are shown. However, if you don't add a location extension, Google is going to automate that extension by showing a linked address associated with a business account. You can use filters at the campaign level based on your targeting location. You could select...

Structure Snippet Extension Structure snippet extensions are very similar to callout extensions but structured with a parent category. For example, Stitchfix's ad extensions are structured with a parent category "Styles", and it lists some main subcategories under styles.  Using this extension will give potential visitors more context and information about your product. Google actually does favor this extension over the callout extension because it is more organized and structured. It is better to use the structure snippet extension for practical product and services information. Save the callout extensions for benefits and promotions. App Extension If you are advertising apps and trying to get app downloads, the app extension is a good choice. You can use the app extension to send clicks directly to the app in the App store.  For example, when I search "book hotels" on Google, it shows me the Expedia ad which has an app extension. It has a call t...

When you create your Google Ads campaigns, you have the opportunity to really enhance your ads with all different sorts of ad extensions such as site link, callout, call, app, location, price, and etc.  Why should you use ad extensions? There are three primary benefits of using ad extensions: Get more space on SERP (Search Engine Result Page) Your ads will get more space on the search engine result page. It means that the size of your ad is actually bigger than other ads. The more space you get, the higher the CTR will be because of the visual impact is more powerful. Offer users more options This is a big thing. By giving people more options, you are letting people know more about your company and your product & service. Those extensions tell people more information and make them easy to click the one they want.   Increase quality score The quality score is made up of CTR, relevance, and landing page experience. If you have ad extensions such as site...