pay per click advertising Archives - Beasley Direct and Online Marketing

Pay Per Click Advertising

wpadmin — Mon, 24 Aug 2015 19:57:30 +0000

Pay-Per-Click Advertising

Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising is powerful because it reaches web users as they are searching for the exact product or service that you can offer them. This ability to get in front of searchers when they are looking for a solution makes it much easier to turn them into customers. You can make sure they see your ad by using the right keywords—but keywords can be expensive, so you need to know which are worth paying for and which are not. You also need to know how to write relevant ads that get response and get high marks on Google’s quality score, which rewards better performing ads. There are tools that can help, but it’s an art as well as a science that Beasley Direct and Online Marketing as a PPC agency has perfected.

Beasley has been doing PPC services advertising since 2002, a lifetime in Internet years. Our PPC services clients have included B2B and B2C ecommerce, hardware, software, healthcare, and financial services among many others. Our differentiator in this highly automated medium is the human factor—as a PPC agency we have the skill, experience and instinct to test ads and keywords, and use the tools in a way that maximizes your results while keeping you on budget.

We have PPC Services clients that spend $1,500 per month and clients that spent $250,000 per month on pay-per-click advertising. Each gets personal service from a senior person and not just an auto-generated report at the end of the month. Our philosophy is to “never settle” and continually test, because the marketplace is always changing and there is always room for improvement.

Focus Product Design presented Beasley Direct with the challenge of reducing spend on PPC advertising while maintaining lead quality and lead flow. Beasley Direct was able to achieve a 50% reduction in PPC advertising spend while maintaining both quality and quantity of inbound leads.

— Andrew Cain - Digital Marketing Manager - Libratone

PPC Campaign Optimization

A major franchise organization transferred its PPC account to Beasley for PPC optimization. We analyzed traffic patterns and discovered that, while the existing keywords were getting plenty of clicks, these weren’t translating to profitable activity once visitors arrived at the site. We also found that reports were not provided in a format that local franchise owners could understand. Beasley, a leading PPC agency, quickly fixed both of these deficiencies: an example of existing PPC optimization.

In a typical optimization engagement, our PPC management services include performing an overlay of traffic patterns and net response goals, then matching this against your budget to find the sweet spot where traffic volume and conversion cross. You won’t win on every search (an expensive budget choice) but you’ll get the traffic you need without exceeding your daily budget. Often, through PPC optimization we’re able to further fine-tune the campaign by adding geographical and/or time-of-day variants. The end goal of our PPC management services is always the same: get your product or service in front of the right people at the right time and at the right cost per sale.

We do this with smart keyword bids, reflecting your unique selling proposition, then create well-written responsive ads which we continually test, revise and improve. We also work with you to build strong, actionable landing pages that pay off the promise of the ads.

As a PPC agency, Beasley is certified in Google AdWords, Google Analytics and Marin Software. We have PPC management services experience on the local, national and international level.

Campaign PPC Landing Page Design

The campaign landing page is where your prospect ends up when they click on your PPC ad. It can be an existing page on your site or a new page developed for the campaign. A PPC landing page should deliver on the promise of the ads that drove the users to it and provide just enough information that the reader will take the desired action—making a purchase, registering for an offer, or proceeding with a guided path to discovery.

Beasley excels at landing page development and landing page optimization, creating pages that satisfy visitors’ expectations when they click on your link. They’re subtly reminded of why they were interested in the first place and provided with benefits for interacting with you further. We can also work with you to optimize PPC landing pages created in-house, and can perform multivariate testing to fine-tune your landing pages in the same way we optimize PPC advertising.

Landing page development and design is key to catching the reader’s attention and directing their eye flow toward your offer. Don’t try too hard to make it look just like the rest of your website—if it doesn’t engage them, then they’ll never see those other pages. Ask Beasley to help you design your landing pages with landing page optimization that can get more leads and sales.

Retargeting, Remarketing and Content/Display Networks

Retargeting is the process of “following” a prospect with online display or text ads on the Google search network using AdWords remarketing for a page or product they have already seen on your website. Content/display networks are alternatives offered by Google and other search engines that place your ad on a variety of partner sites next to relevant articles.

Both of these ad strategies are generally considered variations of pay-per-click, but they have different design and strategic requirements because they are interruptive—intercepting a web user in the process of doing something else such as reading an article—rather than engaging someone who is currently searching for the product or service you offer.

When you work with Beasley remarketing services, we’ll screen the partner site options for retargeting and content networks, and recommend only those which fit your audience profile and make the most sense for your budget. We’ll also ensure that your AdWords remarketing/retargeting/“follow-me” ads don’t follow the prospect so long they’ll build a negative impression of your company. The ads themselves are simple and straightforward, designed to remind a viewer of why they were interested in the first place.

Best of all, when you work with Beasley remarketing services we can manage retargeting and content networks alongside your PPC and other advertising. So you have just one AdWords remarketing partner to deal with and one consolidated report to make your life easier.

Mobile PPC Advertising

According to a recent Google/Nielsen study, most mobile research starts with a search engine vs. a branded website. Approximately 69% of consumers expect a business to be within 5 miles of their current location, and over half go on to make a purchase within an hour of using their smartphone for research. This means your mobile PPC campaign requires a very different strategy than desktop PPC.

In mobile marketing, we’ve found that the two most useful features on mobile ads are click-to-call and map-to-location. Both features used in mobile PPC advertising attract the mobile user who’s actively trying to find a business like yours. But they’re much less valuable on the desktop. Time of day may also figure into your mobile PPC bidding strategy. If you’re selling drive-through coffee, you might pay extra for that keyword during the morning rush hour.

Beasley has been doing mobile marketing advertising since 2004, increasing our own capabilities as mobile platforms have increased in reach and sophistication over the years. The key to cost-effective mobile PPC today is understanding how information is used on the device, and bidding in such a way that your mobile PPC advertising ads appear only when and where they might be relevant. Ask us how we can do responsive cost-effective mobile PPC campaigns for you, either mobile-exclusive or as part of a larger campaign.

Advertising on Social Media

There’s a shortcut to getting noticed on social media: pay for it. As a leading social media advertising agency, Beasley focuses on three platforms that allow our clients to market with ads that appear in the conversational stream, looking very much like the individual updates from users of that social media platform.

But you need to be careful. You’ll be connecting with community members based on information they have volunteered about themselves, and you can’t violate their trust by over-marketing. Consumers can easily opt out of seeing your ads, and a poorly conceived social media campaign may backfire with negative mentions that hurt you.

Facebook now has well over 1 billion users, of which 80% are outside the U.S. and Canada. That means you can reach more people—in almost any country—with Facebook vs. television or radio advertising. Interestingly, Facebook has a very low CPM (cost per thousand impressions), yet allows advertisers to micro-target their audience. While Facebook has easy-to-use ad creation tools for the small business, it’s not much harder to create highly targeted campaigns with rich selects using the Facebook Power Editor. As a leading social media agency, we’ll be happy to tell you more.

LinkedIn is the premier business network with 270,000 members who have provided extensive information about themselves and their job history. You have the choice of advertising within the newsfeed or with a variety of right-column ad formats. Similar to Facebook, LinkedIn has self-serve advertising options but also provides a much more powerful and flexible ad creation and tracking interface through its client services team.

Twitter has the benefit of immediacy. A trending topic will be inescapable for a few hours or days, then it will be forgotten almost as quickly. If immediacy is a component of your advertising mix—whether it’s for an event, a limited time offer, or a product launch—then Twitter makes sense. As an experienced social media agency we focus on Promoted Tweets, which appear in the user’s timeline, capture the essence of current conversations, and appear at the exact time you request.

For these as well as other social media advertising campaigns, the most important considerations are to think conversationally, create an ad that matches the property, and the audience. Beasley is your social media advertising agency, ask how we can help by calling us now.

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Beasley Direct and Online Marketing, Inc., is Selected to Provide Digital Marketing Services to The National Constitution Center Using a Google Ad Grant and Other Paid Media

Andy Hoover — Tue, 08 Jan 2019 16:00:15 +0000

Providing Digital Marketing Services for the National Constitution Center.

Beasley Direct and Online Marketing, Inc., a full service direct and online marketing agency, is selected by The National Constitution Center to provide digital marketing services. The initial work will involve managing paid advertising on Google Ads, the Google Display Network, Facebook and LinkedIn. We will be writing and trafficking new ad campaigns using a Google Ad Grant as well as other paid media. The ads will promote new exhibits premiering in 2019 as well as the current exhibits.

About Beasley Direct and Online Marketing, Inc.

Beasley Direct and Online Marketing, Inc., is known for bringing the latest marketing strategies to online and direct marketing. Beasley provides services in inbound and outbound marketing including: content creation, email marketing, search engine optimization (SEO), print advertising, social media advertising, pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, Amazon Marketing Services (AMS), website design, media planning/public relations, direct mail marketing, lead generation and nurture campaigns, and database management. Beasley Direct and Online Marketing, Inc., helps clients in both B2B and B2C marketing and is privately held and headquartered in the Silicon Valley suburb of Morgan Hill, California. For more information, go to www.BeasleyDirect.com .

About The National Constitution Center

The National Constitution Center in Philadelphia inspires citizenship as the only place where people across America and around the world can come together to learn about, debate, and celebrate the greatest vision of human freedom in history, the U.S. Constitution. A private, nonprofit organization, the Center serves as America’s leading platform for constitutional education and debate, fulfilling its Congressional charter “to disseminate information about the U.S. Constitution on a nonpartisan basis.” As the Museum of We the People, the Center brings the Constitution to life for visitors of all ages through interactive programs and exhibits. As America’s Town Hall, the Center brings the leading conservative and liberal thought leaders together to debate the Constitution on all media platforms. As a center for Civic Education, the Center delivers the best educational programs and online resources that inspire, excite, and engage citizens about the U.S. Constitution. For more information, call 215-409-6700 or visit constitutioncenter.org.

Get started with a free PPC Advertising audit. Contact us for a free consultation!

Find case studies and white papers at https://beasleydirect.com/resources/white-papers

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Join John Thyfault, Vice President, Search Engine and Social Media Marketing for Beasley Direct and Online Marketing, Inc., in a Live Online “Advanced Pay-Per-Click Advertising” Workshop

Laurie Beasley — Tue, 11 Dec 2018 05:37:20 +0000

Advanced PPC Workshop.

John Thyfault, Vice President, Search Engine and Social Media Marketing for Beasley Direct and Online Marketing, Inc., will be teaching a live online Advanced Pay-per-Click (PPC) Advertising workshop for the Direct Marketing Association of Northern California.

Advanced Pay-Per-Click Advertising

(Friday, December 14, 2018. 10:00 AM to 12:00 PM Pacific Standard Time)

Google AdWords and the other search engines are offering much more advanced, sophisticated ways to target your prospects and customers. This session will help you to drive your performance to the next level through mastering the AdWords interface.

What you’ll learn:

Advanced ad writing strategies including dynamic keyword insertion
Writing top performing mobile search ads
Advanced campaign targeting strategies
Using the Google Content Network to build off of your search success
Remarketing on the Google Search and the Google Content Networks
Setting up your remarketing audiences based on user behavior
Time-based optimization of your remarketing campaigns
Best practices for lead generation
Best practices for ecommerce websites
How to take full advantage of Google Shopping Ads

Learn more.

About the DMAnc (www.DMAnc.org)

The DMA of Northern California was formed to educate, inform and provide networking opportunities for Direct and Online Marketing professionals in the San Francisco Bay Area.

We hold monthly luncheon meetings, workshops, periodic half-day seminars, and provide opportunity for the best in learning and job networking in the Northern California marketing community.

About Beasley Direct and Online Marketing, Inc.

Beasley Direct and Online Marketing, Inc., is known for bringing the latest marketing strategies to online and direct marketing. We provide services in inbound and outbound marketing including: content creation, email marketing, search engine optimization (SEO), print advertising, social media advertising, pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, Amazon Marketing Services (AMS), website design, media planning/public relations, direct mail marketing, lead generation and nurture campaigns, and database management. We help clients in both B2B and B2C marketing and are privately held and headquartered in the Silicon Valley suburb of Morgan Hill, California. For more information, go here.

Get a Free PPC Audit! Learn more here.

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Beasley Direct and Online Marketing, Inc., Becomes a Google Premier Partner for Google Ads

Andy Hoover — Tue, 16 Oct 2018 15:01:35 +0000

Google Premier Partner

Beasley Direct and Online Marketing, Inc., a Northern California-based full-service direct and online marketing agency, has been awarded Google Premier Partner status for achieving the highest requirements to manage client Google Ads accounts. Google Ads awarded us Premier Status based on successful client account performance, ad spend, up-to-date knowledge of and certification in Google Ads. We have specialists in Search Advertising, Display Advertising and Mobile Advertising.

About Google Ads

Google Ads is Google’s digital advertising platform that allows businesses and non-profits to reach their target audiences with their message. Google Ads offers Search, Display, Video and App ads. Ads can be targeted based on:

Audience:

Demographics
Affinity
In-market
Custom intent
Similar audiences
Remarketing

and/or, Content:

Topics
Placement
Content keywords
Display expansion for search

About Beasley Direct and Online Marketing, Inc.

For a Free Google Ads (Pay-per-Click) PPC audit, click here.

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Fintech Payments Technology Provider, Alacriti, appoints Beasley Direct and Online Marketing as their Search Engine Marketing Agency

Laurie Beasley — Tue, 05 Sep 2017 15:00:19 +0000

Fintech Payments Technology Provider, Alacriti, Hires Beasley Direct as their Search Engine Marketing Agency.

Beasley Direct and Online Marketing, Inc. a full service direct and online marketing agency, has been appointed as the search engine marketing agency for Alacriti, a fintech payments technology company. The initial work will focus on setting up a pay-per-click campaign (PPC) to generate new leads and validate which keywords are performing best. Beasley Direct and Online Marketing will then optimize the website by: removing technical obstacles from being indexed by the search engines, conducting keyword and key phrase research, writing new optimized web content, writing new meta descriptions and titles, and inbound link building.

About Beasley Direct and Online Marketing, Inc.

Beasley Direct and Online Marketing, Inc. is known for bringing the latest marketing strategies to online and direct marketing. Our agency provides services in inbound and outbound marketing including: content creation, email marketing, search engine optimization (SEO), print advertising, social media advertising, pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, website design, media planning/public relations, direct mail marketing, lead generation and nurture campaigns, and database management. Beasley Direct and Online Marketing, Inc. helps clients in both B2B and B2C marketing and is privately held and headquartered in the Silicon Valley suburb of Morgan Hill, California. For more information, go to www.BeasleyDirect.com.

About Alacriti

Alacriti provides fintech payments technology solutions to companies in the financial services, healthcare, insurance and utility industries. Alacriti offers payment processing solutions and provides software, services and outsourcing of the technology for their clients. Alacriti has a successful track record in delivering several technology solutions for some of the world’s largest financial services organizations.

Press contacts:

Laurie Beasley, President, Beasley Direct and Online Marketing,Inc.
lbeasley@beasleydirect.com

Ruhsora Magruf, Marketing Manager, Alacriti
ruhsora.magruf@alacriti.com

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Beasley Direct and Online Marketing, Inc. Appointed as Search Engine Marketing Consulting Agency for First Northern Bank.

Laurie Beasley — Thu, 24 Aug 2017 15:01:53 +0000

First Northern Bank Appoints Us as their Search Engine Marketing Consulting Agency.

Beasley Direct and Online Marketing, Inc., a full service direct and online marketing agency, has been appointed as the search engine marketing consulting agency for First Northern Bank, an independent community bank serving Solano, Yolo, Sacramento, Placer and Contra Costa counties in Northern California. The initial work will focus on setting up a pay-per-click campaign (PPC) to generate new mortgage and small business loan applications, and creating new landing pages. Follow on work will include creating re-targeting and display ad campaigns.

About Beasley Direct and Online Marketing, Inc.

Beasley Direct and Online Marketing, Inc., is known for bringing the latest marketing strategies to online and direct marketing. Beasley provides services in inbound and outbound marketing including: content creation, email marketing, search engine optimization (SEO), print advertising, social media advertising, pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, website design, media planning/public relations, direct mail marketing, lead generation and nurture campaigns, and database management. Beasley Direct and Online Marketing, Inc., helps clients in both B2B and B2C marketing and is privately held and headquartered in the Silicon Valley suburb of Morgan Hill, California. For more information, go to www.BeasleyDirect.com.

About First Northern Bank

First Northern Bank is an independent community bank that specializes in relationship banking. The Bank, headquartered in Solano County since 1910, serves Solano, Yolo, Sacramento, Placer, and Contra Costa County, as well as the west slope of El Dorado County. Experts are available in small-business, commercial, real estate and agribusiness lending, as well as mortgage loans. The Bank is an SBA Preferred Lender. Non-FDIC insured Investment and Brokerage Services are available at every branch location, including Dixon, Davis, West Sacramento, Fairfield, Vacaville, Winters, Woodland, Sacramento, Roseville and Auburn. The Bank has a full-service Trust Department in Sacramento and a commercial lending office in Walnut Creek. Real estate mortgage and small-business loan officers are available by appointment in any of the Bank’s 10 branches. First Northern is rated as a Veribanc “Blue Ribbon” Bank for the earnings period ended March 31, 2017 (www.veribanc.com). The Bank can be found on the Web at www.thatsmybank.com, on Facebook and on LinkedIn.

Press contacts:

Laurie Beasley, President, Beasley Direct and Online Marketing, Inc.
lbeasley@beasleydirect.com

Diana LaPoint
Vice President/Marketing Manager
First Northern Bank
2270 Douglas Blvd., Suite #100 | Roseville, CA 95661 | (916) 787-8507

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Call Conversion Tracking: Connecting Offline Telephone Leads to Pay-Per-Click Leads Traffic.

John Thyfault — Wed, 07 Jun 2017 15:41:01 +0000

Call Conversion Tracking and Connecting Offline Telephone Leads to PPC Leads Traffic

Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising through Google and Bing is one of the strongest direct response mediums available today. Often though, a higher touch and more personal approach via a telephone conversation is needed to complete the sale for higher priced, complex sale products. This is the case for a recent regional mortgage lending client. They saw a much higher historical conversion from telephone lead-to-loan applications than from web form-to-loan applications. Our client wished to take advantage of this and drive more telephone leads via PPC. Driving these calls through PPC is a great way to increase call volume. It can be challenging to attribute the right call to the right campaign or ad group if you are using a third-party call tracking system. Our agency has dealt with call conversion tracking on several occasions. And, have developed a good approach to maximize our client’s return on ad spend for inbound calls.

Situation:

In this particular case, our client used a third-party call tracking package that reported weekly calls results via a spreadsheet. The client was using Google Analytics to track their AdWords. The AdWords call extensions were turned on, however it not was not counting completed calls as conversions. Because of this, there were no bidding rules set up to maximize call volume.

Our Solution:

We were able to provide a much tighter, more integrated attribution model for this client through the following steps:

Step 1

We implemented use of AdWords’ native call tracking. It counted the phone calls as conversions and shared the data with Google Analytics. AdWords offers a few different options for call tracking. The most powerful one involves using AdWords’ forwarding numbers for each call. It captures the broadest amount of data from the call. It will give you the time, date, area code and length for each call. Be sure to set a minimum length of the call before it can be counted as a true conversion. In this case, we selected 90 seconds based on call history supplied by the client.

Step 2

At this point, the client did have that call effectiveness tied to each campaign, ad group, ad and keyword. A decision had to be made if we were going to use AdWords’ automated bid strategies. Strategies included, “Enhanced CPC”, or “Target ROAS”, or if a third-party tool was going to brought in for a more robust solution. Marin Software Pro Edition was selected as the bid management tool at this point. Marin offers a great combination of bidding rules and tracking. Marin can import conversion data from Google Analytics seamlessly and allowed for the best results for the client.

Step 3

As the call conversion data was imported, the client was able to improve the call conversion rate by 15%, drop the cost per call lead by 20% and optimize campaigns to meet the monthly lead volume goals.

Step 4

The next step was to look at the final results of which calls were most likely to move from a lead to a loan application. Optimizing the campaigns for this aspect required a more manual analysis of the existing call tracking software reporting for conversion to a loan application, and comparing the date/time info with the AdWords results on a call-by-call basis. This led to an improved understanding of which ad copy and keyword combination drove the best quality phone calls. Over time, trends were identified that showed areas where the client could split campaigns into call only and onsite form only campaigns for more effectiveness.

Call Conversion Tracking: The Value of a Deep Review

By going through a deep review of the client’s offer, their customer profile and historical performance, we could blend diverse data streams and deliver improved performance to the bottom line. A little creativity and willingness to look for solutions across different tracking platforms such as AdWords native, Google Analytics and Marin Software allowed for an understanding of the full picture and achieving the best performance for the client’s ad dollars.

Download the Case Study on call conversion tracking.

By John Thyfault, Vice President of Search Engine and Social Media Marketing, Beasley Direct and Online Marketing, Inc.

John Thyfault

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Google Ad Extensions and How To Use Them

beasleydirect — Mon, 26 Oct 2015 08:00:26 +0000

Google Ad Extensions are offered in AdWords as a set of extensions intended to make your advertising more effective by refining reach and targeting. Google ad extensions also allow extra information about your business to display with your Google ad. This extra information may provide prospects with more reasons to contact your business.

The first thing to understand about Google ad extensions is they display automatically. But, only when your ad and keywords’ Quality Score allow you to appear in the top two positions in the search results. These extensions include seller ratings, consumer ratings, social extensions, and previous visits to the business’ site. Advertisers don’t have to do anything for automated extensions to appear.

Second, some Google ad extensions do not show unless your ad has achieved a high enough Ad Rank. This allows your ad to appear high enough up on the Google search results page. You earn this spot by making sure that your keywords have a high quality score. And, you are bidding enough per click to be competitive for the first two spots on the page. We’re going to cover each of the ad extension types here, and briefly discuss how to use them.

Ad extensions are available at no additional charge beyond your cost per click. So, you may as well take advantage of them. Google is not providing these tools out of charity, of course. The more successful your pay-per-click (PPC) ad is, the more money Google makes.

Google Ad Extensions

Site Links Extension

Site Links Extensions are designed to provide additional relevant links to your website beyond the one associated with the ad. One of our clients uses Site Links to point to catalogue and product support pages. This is one of the extensions you can take advantage of, But, only if you have a high quality score and appear in the first two ad spots on the search results page. Site Links show additional resources from your website, which increases click through significantly because the user may be looking for a variety of things. Furthermore, Site Links help you to showcase more of your offerings.

Figure 1: Example of Site Links Extension

Source: Google

Location Extensions

Location Extensions are designed to boost the effectiveness of local search. This is done by tying your ad to Google Maps, making your ads more relevant to the local searcher. Type in your retail locations and Google will serve up information on these locations along with the ad when somebody is searching nearby. Location Extensions are effective at driving traffic to local stores. Store location will appear within Google Map searches and help with positioning in locally based searches.

Figure 2: Example of Location Extensions

Source: Google

Call Extensions

Call Extensions allow you to add telephone numbers to your ads on an ad-group-by-ad-group basis, allowing people to call your business directly through the ad (particularly on mobile devices because of the click-to-call function). When you have a live salesperson interacting with your prospect, it makes for a more efficient sales cycle with fewer touches.

Call Extensions also allow you to collect details on length of call, area code of the call, time of day, and which campaign is associated with each call.

App Extensions

App Extensions allow you to promote your mobile app and drive customers to the website, to GooglePlay, or to the App Store for a download (note that this works with Android, but not with the Apple Store). You can use App Extensions to start the app download immediately by taking the purchaser directly to the appropriate page on the App Store or Googleplay, accommodating impulse buys of your new app.

Review Extensions

Review Extensions display reviews with your ad (but not from all sources). The best source of reviews (from Google’s perspective) is from your Google+ page, but many major ecommerce review vendors are also accepted as legitimate sources such as BazaarVoice. (Yelp! doesn’t share reviews with Google, unfortunately.) Additionally, Review Extensions can be powerful because they provide third-party endorsement of your business. Ratings stars can boost click-through.

Callout Extensions

Callout Extensions include additional descriptive text of 25 characters in standard text ads. The Callout Extensions have some restrictions with respect to trademark requirements, depending on the preferences of the trademark owners. For instance, if you sell athletic shoes and you want the callout to say, “Lowest cost Nike shoes,” your ability to use the phrase is gated by Nike’s willingness to allow their trademarked brand to be used in that context. Google enforces by exception. If somebody complains about an ad based on trademark violation, the trademarked word or phrase is removed from the allowable keyword list.

Callout Extensions are great for short-term offers or special promos. You will need to create multiple callouts for a campaign to give Google choices. The more specific the callout, the better. Be concise; two words are better than four. Google gives the example of using “Free shipping” instead of “We offer free shipping.” When composing a Callout Extension, use normal sentence case structure. The descriptions cannot feature excessive hyperbole, all caps, or exclamation points, and cannot duplicate the ad text.

Structured Snippets.

When you activate Structured Snippets, Google will review your site and look for snippets of information that apply to various sections of your site. They automatically generate these along with your ad. You have less control here than over other Ad Extensions. You can turn it off if you don’t like what Google does, but generally Google does a good job of pulling out the key points. Structured Snippets do increase click-through rates, and they also Increase the conversion percentage once prospects arrive at your page.

Figure 3: Example of an Ad with Structured Snippets

Source: Google

Why You Should Take Advantage of Ad Extensions

Ad Extensions help to improve the visibility of your ad in various ways, and you can use more than one extension with every ad, customizing these additional functions to suit the purpose of your campaigns. The extensions often appear above the search results, rather than along the sidebar. If your ad is in competition with another ad and your ad has extensions with it that add to impact and meaningful results for the user, your ad will appear higher than your competitor’s.

Ad Extensions have demonstrated higher click-through rates than ads without extensions, increasing traffic to your site by qualified customers.

Finally, Google Ad Extensions are free. This makes them one of marketing’s rare great opportunities to improve performance without increasing expenses. Who could resist a deal like that?

* * * *

John Thyfault

This post was authored by John Thyfault, Vice President of Search & Social Strategy, of Beasley Direct & Online Marketing. Contact John at jthyfault@beasleydirect.com.

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