Just because you want to target website visitors in the search results using Google Ads remarketing for search (RLSA) – you may not be able to.
Google sets a threshold of needing over 1,000 remarketing cookie sets in a 30 day period to show remarketing for search ads. For many advertisers this bar is just too high. You will only need 100 cookie sets in a 30 day period to show remarketing ads in the Google Ads display network, but the bar is much, much higher for search ads.
I recommend that you try to lengthen the period of your cookie set from 30 days to 90 days to see if this will make a difference in your ability to use RLSA.
RLSA ads can be a great way to target in search results advertising shopping cart abandoners and other site visitors. Consider bidding a minimum of +30% to get action if you do have enough cookies.
Consider setting up a separate program for RLSA and use general keywords so your ads will appear on more queries, set the bid low, but boost up with a bid adjustment, and consider a -100% bid adjustment for mobile to start to keep your costs low until you know the program will generate a return for your needs.
Showing ads to people who have visited your website already using a target and bid strategy can be very good to add conversions to your monthly plan.
For more information on our services for Google Ads advertisers please visit our website at www.mccordweb.com.
With over 10 years of experience in professional management of AdWords account, I wanted to share tips on an often overlooked yet important item in conversion tracking – attribution.
First to see what I am talking,(in the old interface) about go to Tools > Conversions. Click one of the names of the conversions you have set up. Look to the bottom to Attribution Model. If you’ve done nothing it has defaulted to Last Click. Click Edit and change your conversion model to Position Based.
Position Based is my preferred attribution model. Over time you will be able to see keywords in your account that you might have pause that are actually a part of the conversion path.
The first click and last click will be weighted to 40% each and the middle clicks will split the remaining 20%. What happens is important for your keyword monitoring. You will start to see keywords that previously in the last click model may not be driving as many conversions as you had thought.
Your data drives your decisions in AdWords, put your data to work for you by changing your Attribution Model to the right one for you.
To get to the prior interface if AdWords defaults to the new interface, click the three vertical dots next to the gear in the top right and click go to prior version.
There are just some things that are easier to see and faster to do in the old interface.
If you are not budget restrained, meaning that you have additional marketing dollars to spend, here is a quick primer on how to know if it makes sense to increase your Google Ads spending budget.
First, look at your campaign level results and sort the data for yesterday. If you did not spend your full budget yesterday, raising your daily budget will have no impact. Make sure to check a few days on top of just yesterday to assure that you are seeing enough results to be sure.
Second, if your program is profitable for you meaning are getting leads which leave room for profit, then the rule of thumb is to increase your ad spend as long as you have a positive ROI or return on investment. Make sure to look at the average cost per conversion when you evaluate what your leads cost versus what you make per lead.
It is important to have an awareness of important facts that are unique for your business such as one out of every ten leads makes a purchase or becomes a regular customer and regular customers typically will stay five years with us and have a lifetime value of X.
I do not recommend raising your ad spend budget without thought to assure that Google Ads is an investment in your growth and not an expense.
That being said for accounts that have taken the approach of increasing the ad spend without a limit while there is still positive ROI, the results can be absolutely, positively, mind boggling and wonderful.
When you start advertising on Google Ads, how do you determine your starting budget?
There is no mystery to deciding your budget for Google Ads. I use the Keyword Planner to determine the best budget for starting out. Here are my tips.
Create a list of 10 two to three word phrases that you feel will help drive qualified traffic.
Go to your Google Ads account or ask your Google Ads consultant to run the numbers for you, but putting each keyword in the Google Keyword Planner to check for traffic, competition, and typical bids.
Plan on these potential bids being about 20% lower than the real auction for clicks when your account is set up.
Take the average of these ten keyword’s click costs and then decide how many clicks you would like to have a day before your ads stop showing.
Look at the number generated in step 4 and determine if you can realistically live with this number. Never get over your head in regards to a budget that is way beyond your means. It is not typical to get leads in Google Ads the day ads serve. For some account it can take as long as three weeks for optimization to start to see the first lead conversion.
Remember a lead conversion or beneficial action you are recording as a conversion is not always a sale. Sometimes it is just the first step in the sales process.
Understand that it takes time for a Google Ads account to become profitable. Google Ads is a dynamic auction with bids changing for each query and many factors determining if your ads show or not.
Work with a professional Google Ads account manager or consultant like McCord Web Services to get the most out of Google Ads.
In our new world where over 65% of all Google.com searches are done on smartphones, what happens to a website that is not mobile-friendly in regards to lead conversions, store sales, and organic placement?
The PPC Picture
Google has lots to say on this topic of mobile friendliness. For sites that are not mobile-friendly and the business owner is advertising in Google Ads, Google flags the account with messages such as this:
“Avoid losing customers on mobile devices by improving your mobile site. Recommended because 98.57% of your mobile clicks go to non-mobile-friendly pages on your site. 68.97% of clicks from all devices come from mobile. 98.57% 138 of 140 clicks go to pages that are not mobile-friendly.“
As Google Ads is incredibly focused on relevance and offering the best user experience, I expect in the future ads that are not showing mobile-friendly pages to start to receive very poor quality scores driving up the click cost and reducing exposure due to a low ad rank.
Google has been pretty forthcoming in regards to page speed as well. A 1-second delay in page response can result in a 7% reduction in conversions. For a store generating $60,000 in sales a month, that is a loss of $4,200 in monthly sales. In a year, that translates into $50,400. A non-mobile friendly site is not optimized for speedy download and may be virtually impossible to use on a smartphone driving away potential customers. Many will never come back to visit. This is a very serious impact for Google Ad activity.
For sites that do not have a mobile-friendly website, conversion numbers are dropping in Google Ads. Mobile activity is a very big part of the conversion path now for sales and leads.
For some websites that are not mobile-friendly using Duda Mobile to do a scripted redirect to a Duda Mobile mini site worked – but no longer. Google Ads is aggressively disapproving ads for our clients that are using this approach and we are now having to remove the code from those websites effectively making them now not mobile-friendly for organic or for pay per click activity.
The Organic Picture
For organic traffic, know that Google now spiders the mobile version of a website and this is the content that now determines your site’s organic ranking on Google.com for all devices, not just mobile.
Additionally, Marketing and Growth Hacking states “Based on the blogs Google is putting out, we can confidently assume companies who don’t optimize for mobile will see their rankings disappear. At the same time, companies who adopt and take advantage of mobile-friendly sites early-on have and will continue to see higher rankings.”
I agree that if you mean to be in business, grow sales, and compete effectively, your website and store must be mobile-friendly.
For more information about our services please visit us at www.McCordWeb.com.
AdWords Broad Match Modifier Keywords – this is my preferred match type, although I use all in our client accounts. The syntax of this keyword is as follows +GPS +Fleet +Management. Note the +’s directly in front of each keyword that MUST appear in the user’s search query for the AdWords ad to show.
It’s also important to note that you don’t have to + every keyword, only the ones you have determined must in the user’s search query.
Here’s what Google AdWords says about broad match modifier keywords.
“Broad match modifiers help control when your ad can appear for closely related keywords. Broad match modifiers can help your keywords achieve a higher clickthrough rate (CTR) with a more targeted audience, which in turn can help your site get more paying customers or other conversions.”
Here is a real world example: if my term is +GPS +Fleet +Management a search query like dispatch and fleet management fleet management gps programs will trigger my ads. Sometimes I will remove some of the pluses to get more activity and do keywords like +GPS +Fleet management or GPS +Fleet +Management. Each variation will have a different impact in regards to what keywords will show your ads.