AdWords’ new extra headline: 7 ways to make the most of it

Google announced expanded text ads at its recent Google Performance Summit. Columnist and Googler Matt Lawson explains why the change was made and what you should do about it.

Last Tuesday was a big day for AdWords. During our annual Google Performance Summit Keynote, we introduced a wide range of exciting new stuff. What got me most excited was expanded text ads. I think it’s one of the most significant updates to AdWords since the invention of Quality Score.

To recap, we’re currently testing ads that have two 30-character headlines and one 80-character description line. These test ads also contain two customizable 15-character path fields that will be appended to your Display URLs automatically. Compared to your existing ads, it’s 45 extra characters in text, plus an additional URL path field.

To someone unfamiliar with PPC, 35 characters in a headline and 10 characters of description text are basically nothing. To us in the industry, though, those 45 characters are everything. They’re freeing. They’re Andy Dufresne in the rain at the end of The Shawshank Redemption. More characters = better messaging; more chances to highlight why your business is the best; an extra clickable headline. The good news goes on and on.

Earlier this year, we removed ads from the right-hand rail of results. That was to improve the search experience and make it consistent across devices. That newly-established consistency meant that ads no longer needed strict character limits to fit in that right rail, which paved the way for expanded text ads. It allowed us to rethink and rebuild for mobile-first. In fact, expanded text ads are designed to fit beautifully on the screens of the most popular mobile devices.

I should probably mention that this should be a big boon to performance. Based on early testing, some advertisers reported increases in click-through rates of up to 20 percent compared to current text ads.

Now, exactly how big a boon to performance this will end up being is still up in the air. Our systems are still learning about expanded text ads, so metrics like percent served and CTR will continue to change. Be patient when judging results, but take advantage of these new ads as soon as you can.

It’s a brave new world out there, and you can now write about that world with two headlines. So what does this mean for your campaigns?

1. Rethink your entire creative.

You have an extra headline to play with. That doesn’t mean you should simply add a new headline to the ads you’re already running. Use this update as a chance to re-evaluate your entire creative. Whatever ad text was most successful for you can be instructive, but this is a chance to craft something new and more compelling than ever before.

2. Focus on your headlines.

Your headlines are the clickable space on your ads. You now have more than twice as many headline characters as were available before. What you put into that space will be a big indicator of how enticing your ad text is — big blue headlines tend to be more prominent than your description text. The content and quality of your headlines matter and will determine how well your ads perform.

I imagine that you’ve found out about the importance of headlines in your years of writing and testing ad text. But if you haven’t, you should know now: your headlines should receive the majority of your testing attention. As you go about instituting and testing new expanded text ads, it’s a good idea to focus on writing the best headline possible. Implementing great headlines has the most potential to make a big difference to performance.

3. Craft messaging that focuses on user needs and benefits.

We’ve noticed based on internal data that people like ads that focus on their needs. Calls to action like “call us today” can work in some instances, but try to find more specific actions that center on users. People care about things like reliability or selection. They like the authority of official sites. They like sales/discounts and respond to urgency when there’s actually a reason for that urgency (like in a countdown ad).

Think about your users and why they would want to click your ad. It’s not enough to just have a clear and compelling call to action. It’s what you offer that can make their lives better.

4. Prioritize which ad groups to test by volume and impact.

When working with a completely new ad format, you’re likely to discover new and creative ways to drive performance. As always, it’s important to prioritize your testing efforts on the places that matter most. Think about areas of your account that drive a lot of volume or value for you. You can also focus on ad groups that would benefit the most from a new set of creatives.

If you’re prioritizing your tests, think about where you can see the most improvement. Ads on things like brand terms might already be doing well, so test first on non-brand campaigns. I should also note we’re working on things like support in AdWords Editor, which will be coming soon to help scale your efforts.

5. Adjust your ad rotation settings.

Your competitiveness in the auction will be impacted by the ad you are showing. During the beta, serving of expanded text ads will be capped. Following the beta, however, expanded text ads will serve based on your ad rotation settings.

If you still have standard text ads in your account, don’t allow them to drag down your performance by rotating evenly. Instead, try using the optimize for clicks or optimize for conversions settings. That way, if one of your new, shiny expanded text ads outperforms your older copy, it will serve more often.

6. Keep using ad extensions.

Your ads have a lot more room, but that doesn’t mean that extensions are any less important. Implement any and all ad extensions that make sense for your business. Try for at least four so that the system has plenty of choices when assembling your ad unit for each auction. Extensions add cool, user-friendly features to your ads. They also tend to drive even more clicks for you. All of our existing extensions work with expanded text ads.

One consideration is that you should double-check that your ad extensions avoid overlap with any new creatives you add to your account. Extensions that repeat what you already say in your ad text may not serve, so scrub your callouts, sitelinks and other extensions for overlap.

7. Monitor lost impression share due to budget.

While the specific uplifts you could see from expanded text ads will vary, chances are good that you’ll start driving more clicks. If you’re close to any campaign budget caps, be sure to revisit your budgets after uploading new, longer ads. There’s also the chance that your budget is static, and if that’s the case, you can shift your budgets from less valuable campaigns over to your most valuable. (That’s something you should be doing already, really.)

And if you’re budget-capped without any budget to shift around, consider lowering your bids. It’s too deep a topic to get into here, but profit-based bidding can often work wonders for your long-term account health.

Google To Use Mobile Page Speed In Mobile Friendly Ranking Algorithm Soonish

At the Search Marketing Summit in Sydney today, Gary Illyes from Google has been reported as saying that page speed ranking factors for mobile, will be mobile specific, in the upcoming months.

Currently, Google doesn't separate out many desktop signals for mobile rankings even when it makes sense. Such as how fast your page loads is based on your desktop site page load, not your mobile site page load. Same with accordions and hidden content and other factors.

But as we reported over a year ago, Google is looking to add mobile specific page speed to the mobile friendly ranking algorithm. Jennifer Slegg reported that Gary Illyes from Google said it is now "months" away. But later on, on Twitter Gary said it is still just in the "planning phases," so I am not sure if "months" is a realistic number here? Gary has given general timelines in the past and ended up not happening, but either way, I am glad they are "planning" it now.

Gary Illyes ‎@methode

@jenstar as I said, we're still in the planning phase so I can't give you a concrete answer.

Gary also was asked how fast does the page need to be? He said aim for the highest speed you can. Green is great he said but like desktop, I doubt it will be that important. If your site is incredibly slow, then yea, see a negative impact but if you are a tiny fraction faster than your competitor, I don't know if that will make much of an impact.

7 Essential Google Analytics Reports Every Marketer Must Know

You may be using Google Analytics, but are you using it to its full potential? Contributor Khalid Saleh lays out 7 key reports with which every marketer should be familiar.

For marketers, there are few skills more important than a deep understanding of Google Analytics and its conversion measurement capabilities.

After all, this is the tool that tells you whether your efforts are actually translating into results.

Unfortunately, mastering Google Analytics can be challenging, even for experienced marketers. There is far too much data and too few easy-to-follow dashboards to sort it out.

To help you out, I’ve put together a list of seven custom and standard reports you can use right away to get better insight into your marketing performance.

1. Mobile Performance Report

You know this already: Ours is a mobile-first world. The total number of mobile users now exceeds the total number of desktop users…

... and mobile e-commerce is nearly 30 percent of all e-commerce in the US.

In fact, mobile is so important now that Google even penalizes websites that are not mobile-friendly.

For marketers, knowing how their sites perform on smaller screens is vital to staying alive in the SERPs and winning over customers.

The mobile performance report shows you how well your site (not app) is optimized for mobile and where you need to make improvements.

You can even segment the report further to see which mobile devices/browsers customers are using to access your site. This will tell you if your site is performing poorly on some devices.

Accessing this report is easy: Just go to Audience -> Mobile -> Overview.

This will show you how your site does on different platforms:

You can add more dimensions here as you see fit. Take careful note of bounce rate, time on site and page views to see whether your user experience is failing on one or more mobile channels.

2. Traffic Acquisition Report

Want to know if people are actually clicking on your ads? That guest post you published earlier — is it generating any traffic to your website? How about your SEO strategy? Is it actually working?

The traffic acquisition report will tell you all this and more. For many marketers, this will be their first step in the reporting process.

This is a standard report, so you can find it by going to Acquisition -> Overview.

This will give you a quick breakdown of your traffic sources.

Of particular insight here is the “Referrals” tab (Acquisition -> Overview -> All Traffic -> Referrals). This will tell you which external sites are driving traffic to your site.

Clicking on a referring website will show you the exact pages visitors used to enter your site.

3. Content Efficiency Report

Do you generate a lot of content on your website and find that tracking it is getting a little overwhelming?

Avinash Kaushik, author of Web Analytics 2.0 and a Digital Marketing Evangelist at Google, created this report to solve this exact problem.

This report tracks entrances, page views, bounces and goal completions to help you answer questions like:

Which content is engaging your audience the most?

• What type of content (images, videos, GIFs, infographics, reviews) performs best with your readers?
• Which content converts readers into customers?
• Which content is shared most by your users?

Here’s a quick overview from Avinash himself:

You can get a more detailed explanation of the report here. To grab a copy for yourself, check this link (you’ll need to log into Google Analytics first).

4. Keyword Analysis Report

Getting organic traffic from Google is great. Unfortunately, ever since Google started encrypting search data in 2012, your organic traffic keyword report has mostly shown this:

However, you can still gain a ton of insight about your visitors by tracking the performance of unencrypted keywords.

This report created by eConsultancy analyzes the most popular (and available) incoming keywords to your site. It shows visitor metrics, conversion rates, goal completions and page load time for each keyword.

Use this data to figure out what keywords are working best for you, how many of them are actually contributing to your goals and what keywords you need to optimize for in the future.

5. New vs. Returning Visitors

Getting a user to come to your site for the first time is great. Getting them to visit again is even better. After all, it is the returning visitors who usually end up becoming readers, followers and customers.

This standard report in Google Analytics will tell you what percentage of your users are coming back to your site.

You can find it by going to Audience -> Behavior -> New vs. Returning in your Analytics account.

Usually, the metrics for new and returning visitors are quite different. Returning visitors tend to stick around longer and have lower bounce rates.

6. Landing Pages Report

Your users will enter your site from all sorts of pages. Some will type in your home page URL directly, some will find a page through search engines, and some others will click on a link shared on your Twitter feed.

This report will tell you which pages visitors are landing on when they first enter your site. Based on data from this report, you can figure out how users are interacting with your site.

For example, if the report shows that some pages have a substantially higher bounce rate than others, you can take steps to make high bounce rate pages more engaging.

Find the report – Behavior -> Site Content -> Landing Pages.

7. Bounce Rate vs. Exit Rate Report

“Bounce Rate” is the percentage of visitors who don’t take any action and leave from the same page they landed on.

“Exit Rate” measures the percentage of your visitors who browse more than one page on your site before leaving.

This report compares the bounce rate vs. exit rate for different pages on your site.

You can find it by going to Behavior -> Site Content -> All Pages:

Next, select “Bounce Rate” and “% Exit” in the Explorer tab.

This will give you a visual comparison between bounce and exit rate for all your pages. You can drill down further to get this data for each page.

Use this report to find pages with low engagement and detect UX problems on your site. For example, if visitors are exiting a three-page article after reading only the first two pages, there’s probably something that is causing them to leave on the second page (too many ads, bad copy, a distracting link in the sidebar and so on).

Does Google Look at Anchor Text in Internal Links?

Internal linking is a key SEO tactic, one which allows websites to send clear signals to Google on the relative importance of various pages.

It also works from a user experience perspective, helping visitors find pages that are relevant or potentially useful to them.

It’s something I place great importance on as an editor, as it’s one part of SEO that I can control, and I’ve seen the benefits for sites I’ve worked on.

Internal linking: examples

Let’s take an example from Search Engine Watch. I wrote this article on internal linking, with examples and tips, back in September 2015.

I’ve since linked to it using that exact anchor text (and variations on it) on at least 10 occasions. Essentially, I’m telling Google that this is the page I want Search Engine Watch to rank for that term.

As we can see, it’s worked well. Third on Google, and first for related terms (internal linking best practice for example).

Then there’s Mail Online. The most visited English language newspaper on the web had a relatively haphazard approach to internal linking until recently.

For common, high traffic terms (world leader’s names, celebrities etc) would be used regularly in articles.

The result was that each article would end up competing against previous articles for the same keyword or phrase.

The chart below shows its rankings for ‘David Cameron’ over a six month period. 80 different URLs were returned from the Mail for that search, but it didn’t rank consistently for the term.

The answer was a consistent internal linking and hub page strategy. Mail Online created hub pages for common terms and consistently linked to them.

The result is a more consistent ranking from November 2015 onwards, when the changes were implemented.

There have been some fluctuations, perhaps due to inconsistent implementation of the linking strategy, but the page is performing much more effectively. As a result, the site will pick up more traffic for that term. Applied across the whole site, this can make a big difference.

Does Google count anchor text in internal links?

This is the question Shaun Anderson from Hobo Web sought to answer recently.

In the examples above, the pages targeted with internal links all contain the keywords used in the anchor text. So, Google could be using the content of the page, and the fact that several pages link to it to decide on the ranking.

In other words, this doesn’t prove that Google is taking note of the anchor text when choosing to rank a particular page.

So, Shaun set up a test. He added an internal link to one page on his site using the target keyword as anchor text.

It’s important to note that the target page did not contain the keyword used, so the only signal that it was relevant to said keyword was the anchor text on the link.

As we can see from the chart, a number of days after the test was implemented, the page ranked for the target term. When it was removed, the page dropped again.

As that page had no other relevance to the term other than the link, the anchor text appears to be the only reason for the page’s ranking.

It’s worth reading Shaun’s blog post for more detail, and for further variations on the test, but the indications are that the answer to the question in the headline here is yes.

It would be good to see other tests to back up this with more evidence. In fact, I’ll see if I can devise one on this site along similar lines.

Article Source - searchenginewatch.com

The Most Important Thing SEOs Overlook: Internal Links

Most search engine optimization practitioners are familiar with the benefits of internal linking, but columnist Patrick Stox insists that we should be working a little harder to maximize their value.

The best way to define an internal link is that it is a link from one page on a website to another page on the same website. If I could impart just one piece of wisdom to the current crop of SEOs, it would be this: Add internal links to related content where it makes sense.

I can imagine every reader just rolled their eyes or sighed because the last statement made too much sense, and, of course, you’re all already following best practices.

Think for a second, though — you may be frequently producing new pieces of content in which you add internal links, but are you remembering to go back to your older pieces of content and link to your new and related content?

One piece of content on a subject is good, ten pieces of content on the subject is great, and by the time you reach a hundred pieces of content on that subject, you’re likely viewed as the expert by most people and the search engines, as well.

The problem is that if you don’t add links between these pieces of content, none will be as strong or rank as well as they could. By adding internal links, you are directing the flow of your website authority to the best content, which in turn signals to search engines which pages you consider the most important.

Internal Links And Your Site Architecture

While a logical site architecture (and the reason everything should not be a blog post) is a topic for another day, it’s an important subject when considering your internal linking strategy.

Siloing content around topics is far better for internal linking than having your important pages on one part of a site and then writing about those topics in a blog on a completely different part of the site. It doesn’t make sense, but this is what most SEOs do.

Instead, try to plan your site architecture in a way that will group topics together and allow for a tighter group of related internal pages to link to each other.

Improving your relevancy and authority on a topic is what every SEO hopes for, so stop overlooking internal link opportunities. Links on your site are a lot easier to get than links from other sites, and they can be just as effective.

You are given the opportunity to identify and link to relevant content and pass value to that content, so take advantage of this opportunity and add internal links.

But Wait, There’s More!

What if I told you that you shouldn’t focus on internal links just on your website. In SEO, it’s the little things that matter, and everything adds up to the whole. Internal links on every other website can make your profiles on those sites and links back to your site stronger.

You’ve probably heard advice along the lines of, “You should be active and participate in different networks.” On top of building all-important connections, being active and involved in various communities helps to build internal links to your profile and content on those websites.

It depends on the network, but in general, people you follow, people following you, comments, lists, subscriptions, groups, shares and more (pretty much any activity) can create internal links back to your profile — thus strengthening it and potentially any links to your website or content. There is a reason being active on different social platforms and networks is effective, and it’s not just because of relationship building.

Internal linking on these networks can have a direct impact on your rankings. To use Google+ as an example, I would say the strength of your Google+ profile plays a role in the position of your local and organic rankings.

Your strength can be increased through internal links from people who have you in circles, people you have in circles, communities you have joined, posts you have made in these communities, posts you have made on your profile, reviews and more.

Nearly every network has these internal linking opportunities, and each helps to paint a bigger picture in the world of SEO. Every little bit matters, and adding these internal links on other websites will make the links back to your website stronger.

Summary Of Internal Linking

Internal linking on your site where it makes sense is important to establish relevance and topical authority. You can’t forget internal links on websites and social profiles that link back to you, either. These links come with being active on a website and help to establish your relevance and authority.

Guest Post : Google: That May Have Been A Core Ranking Algorithm Update; Which We Won't Confirm

Google's Gary Illyes said on Twitter, in response to my reports of the Google Halloween Zombie update that Google does not confirm core ranking algorithm updates and this may have been one of those.

Here is the set of Tweets:

Note, Gary is at the Google headquarters, I think for the TC summit but also for other things. So he is pretty close to the algorithm push people. Not that it says much.

He is not confirming that there was or was not an update. He is not confirming if there was one, if it was core algorithm related or search quality. He is just saying, that if this was core algorithm, then they would not confirm it.

I know I have emailed Google twice on this and Google has not confirmed anything. So maybe it is core algorithm ranking related or maybe we are all dreaming?

Forum discussion at Twitter.

Seven Ways You Might Be Losing Out On Search Rankings

SEO is increasingly becoming more closely aligned with user experience (UX) and content value, as Google sharpens up its algorithms to retain its primacy as a search tool. Now, you can expect to be penalized more frequently by Google in the form of less traffic. Also, you can anticipate being penalized by users in the form of more bounce for the same issues: weak content, unfriendly user design, or attempts to game Google and feed people ads they don’t want. If you feel like you’re doing everything right, but you’re still not ranking for the searches you’re targeting, maybe one of these is the problem?

1. Your Website Isn’t Optimized for Keyword Search

That’s optimized, not maximized. You want the ideal keywords and a number of keyword incidences, not the biggest collection of keywords. Stuff your website with keywords and Google will penalize you for it. Leave them out and you are neglecting one of the simplest ways to increase organic traffic.

Diagnosis:

One way you can end up in a keyword-free environment is if your headers and other key text are part of graphics because they're not crawled as text. Aside from that, it’s a pure copywriting issue and a clear sign that you need a new copywriter. Keyword optimization should come as standard.

Treatment:

In order of importance, your target keywords should appear in:

1. Page title
2. H1 and H2 header tags
3. Content
4. Meta description

A Word About This: Google doesn’t care that much about keywords anymore. Rather, it cares about key meanings. 

Let me elaborate. According to Jason DeMers, "It doesn’t matter that you used the phrase 'auto repair shop' exactly several times throughout your website. You could use 'auto repair shop,' 'car repair specialists,' and 'vehicle repair facility' on different pages, and Google could theoretically put you in the exact same category."