In 2019 the amount of data available to marketers on their customers is higher than ever. Which, in theory at least, should make targeting easier than ever. Tools like Google Ads and Facebook’s audiences tool are at the cutting edge of this, pushing how we can leverage collected data to speak with our customers. But what about more time tested targeting tactics like demographics?

User behavior is different depending on the device we’re using. Our habits and intentions are different when we’re looking at a website on our phone, compared to when we’re looking at the same website on our mobile. If user habits change, then so should our marketing tactics. That’s why you need to get to grips with device targeting if you’re running any PPC campaigns on Google Ads.

Google Ads’ Average Position metric is going away on September 29th. The average position metric will be replaced by two new metrics:
Impressions. (Top)%. 
Impressions. (Absolute Top)%

So any rules, scripts, reports, filters, scorecards in dashboards, or custom columns that include the ‘average position’ metric will be affected and should be updated accordingly. Because come the end of September, they’re all going to stop working!

An important aspect of advertising is being in the right place, at the right time. If you’re running PPC Ads you need to make sure they’re showing at the right times. But how do you work out what the right time is? And once you have, how do you set up Ad Scheduling on Google Ads? In this post we’ll explain why you need to set up Ad Scheduling and how to do it.

Google is always tinkering with their PPC platform. The newest tweak to Google Ads is that they will now be allowing their Broad Match option to: “begin matching to words within the search query that share the same meaning as the keyword”. But what does that actually mean?

Winning in paid search requires a tight relationship between your ad copy, ad extensions and landing page. Google Ads typically directs people from the search engine results page (SERP) to a designated landing page. But what if you want to send people somewhere else on your site? Or you want to add more than one option? Then you need to set up sitelinks.

Digital marketing can be a long and complicated process. So the faster you can get talking to a potential customer the better. One of the quickest ways we’ve found to do that is using PPC ads and call extensions. A lead can be looking at Google’s search engine results page one minute, and on the phone with you the next. No steps in between to get lost. If you want more calls from your ads, it’s time to learn about call extensions. 

As someone who’s worked in online marketing for a number of years, when I carry out a search I typically scroll down below the ads, and start reading the search engine results page from where the ads stop. Because of that I’ve often thought “who is clicking on the ads?” Well, judging on the amount of money Google makes from AdWords year on year, the answer is “lot’s of people.” So it was interesting to read some research from Clutch.co on why people click on ads.

Having spoken about AI earlier in the week, we’re back looking at the robots again today with Google Ads new smart bidding strategy. Google have been using AI to help their PPC customers get the best value for money, or performance, for some time now, so it’s an exciting time when they announce a new smart bidding strategy; target impression share.

Bing Ads is Microsoft’s Pay Per Click platform. While Bing may not have the market share that Google does, it’s still a big player in the search engine world, with around 20% of the market. So, when Bing Ads makes a change, it’s worth paying attention. Recently they’ve announced they’re going to be adding a third headline, and a second ad text to their ads.