Posts Tagged ‘Adwords’

Adwords Announces Expandable Ads

Friday, March 6th, 2009

Google Adwords team has announced the launch of its new Expandable ad format on 4th of this month. These are rich media ads that would be served via Google's content network. This ads can expand to become double their original size to provide more information to the users. These ads can also include streaming videos and other multimedia element to give users a more interactive experience.

These ads would expand only when clicked and this would be a great way to measure actual user engagement by avoiding expansions due to accidental mouse overs. At present expandable ads are in Beta phase and are available only in the U.S. to advertisers and agencies participating in our 3rd Party Ad Serving program.

Expandable ads might be an excellent option for advertisers and it would definitely enhance the user engagement thereby providing Adsense publishers to offer a better user experience. However one critical factor that needs to be checked is whether Google is going to pay the publishers when a visitor clicks on the ad to expand it or would Google pay only when the visitor does the second click to move onto the advertisers website.

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Posted in Search Engine Marketing | No Comments »

Adwords Changes Display URL Policy

Saturday, February 21st, 2009

Google has announced that beginning the week of February 24th, they will implement a change in their Adwords policy in regards to the usage of multiple display URLs in same ad group.

From next week onwards all display URLs within an ad group must have the same top-level domain and this would be applicable for all advertisers irrespective of previous exceptions or acceptability of any ad groups.

Also, they have made it clear through an example that this restriction is very specific to the Top Level Domains and sub domains can definitely be used. To quote the example..

  • www.example.com
  • www.widgets.example.com
  • www.example.com/widgets/redwidgets/
  • www.example.com/index.html

All of these  are valid display URLs to be used in the same ad group.

Also an essential part of the policy requires that the display URL should mach the destination URL ( Landing page URL )

While this change in the display URL policy might require many advertisers to recheck and reorganize their Adwords accounts, it would probably help them with better tracking and also help Google to provide better user experience thereby benefiting the customer, the advertisers and also Google as well.

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Posted in Search Engine Marketing | No Comments »

5 Tips for an Effective Landing Page

Friday, January 30th, 2009

For those of you who have tried your hands in Paid search campaigns like Google Adwords, MSN Adcenter etc must have felt the importance of a good landing page. A good landing page can make a huge difference to your campaign's performance by drastically improving your conversion rate. Here are some quick tips for improving your landing page..

a) Don't distract your visitor : Focus the entire page on one objective and set up everything towards it. Multiple options would distract the users and none of the objectives would be achieved. If you want to have multiple objectives, use separate landing page for each of them.

b) Content flow: It is typically observed that a vertical content flow through the center of the page works best for sales pages. Use the right and left column for supportive information like testimonials, SSL support, customer support phone number etc. This will build confidence in your visitors when they reach the "order now" button.

c) Avoid Extra Elements: Each element of the landing page should contribute towards guiding the visitor towards your objective. If there are graphic elements, animations, images that does not contribute to this, get them off the page - they can take away your visitor's attention.

d) Navigation: Try to put the navigation to the far right column or even better in the footer only. Putting the navigation infront of the user gives them the option to click off to another page and even if they come back after that you will need to establish the user's attention again. For any supplementary information that the visitor might need try to provide passive pop-up or CSS based slide down content.

e) Testing is the Key: Yes, even if you get a considerably good conversion rate don't be satisfied, keep a copy of that page and do further testing. Testing must be a continuous process and you should maintain complete record of the campaign for each landing page to see which performs the best.

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Posted in Online Marketing, Online Marketing Advice, Search Engine Marketing, Social Media Marketing, Web Marketing | 2 Comments »

Google Text Ads in Image Search

Tuesday, January 20th, 2009

Google have been experimenting about displaying ads in image search for a long time now and finally now they have started showing text ads over image search result pages.

We are not sure how useful these ads would be for the users to find the images that they are looking for or how beneficial would it be for the advertisers at this point. However, as Google has always said that the basic principle behind all their activities is to show the most relevant results to the right people in right time, we would assume that there has been considerable research before this feature has been rolled out.

text ads in image search

text ads in image search

Also, from the other perspective we would need to think if Google would give the option to its Adwords advertisers to select if they would like their ads to be displayed in the image search pages or not.

Ask.com is the only other major search engine that displays text ads for image search results.

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Posted in What's New | 1 Comment »