If questions lingered about Google’s commitment to lead gen, the world’s most popular search engine answered them this week with the launch of Google Compare for mortgages.
The service, which helps consumers shop for a mortgage from multiple lenders, was announced earlier this year and is now available in California. Google plans to launch in other states soon.
Despite the significant innovations that have taken place in online ads in the past several years, advertisers still largely rely on metrics like CPM and CPC to quantify their digital ad spend.
To a large extent, the use of these metrics makes sense. They are simple and for many channels, are reasonably meaningful. But that doesn’t mean that there’s no room for innovation.
Mobile and desktop paid search ads vary wildly in terms of the use case and the UX.
Fewer ads are displayed on the mobile screen and advertisers have less copy to work with.
If you’re new to the search marketing world or just want a plain-English description of certain phrases and tools in digital, then you’ve come to the right place.
Here we’ll be looking at Google AdWords, Google’s own advertising service which allows you to place search results for your website on a search engine results page (SERP) by paying for them.
There’s no need to wait for your new site to work its way organically up the rankings. By using paid search you can see immediate results and it’s not nearly as difficult to use or expensive as you may think.
With spring having well and truly sprung and temperatures reaching a balmy 20 degrees this weekend, it’s hard to remember that this winter it rained for almost three solid months.
But we were quickly reminded during our annual review of travel search data, when we spotted a huge leap in CPC and impression figures over January and February 2014.
It’s not unusual to see an uplift in impressions and CPCs at the start of the year as the British public looks to escape the freezing winter but such a significant leap was certainly worth a second look.
Covario has just issued its Global Paid Search Spend Analysis for Q4 2013, revealing that global spend on pay-per-click (PPC) advertising has increased by 13% from Q3 and 7% year-on-year.
Paid search on mobile also had an incredible 2013, with impressive numbers recorded for Android, iPhone and iPad activations. Total advertising spend on mobile grew 23% in Q4 2013 from Q3. This is 55% up from the same period in 2012.
Keyword pricing wise, the average cost-per-click (CPC) came down in Q4 2013, however the average CPC rose 10% versus the same period in 2012.
In the paid search world, 2013 was as busy at it gets. Major changes to Google included the Enhanced Campaigns migration and rise of Product Listing Ads (PLAs) not to mention the maturing of Facebook as an advertising platform.
However, one of the biggest shifts was outside of paid search with Google’s move to [not provided] on SEO keyword data removing visibility for advertisers in the SEO channel, boosting paid search in the process.
This is fantastic for those of us who work in paid search, but what is next? Looking forward I’ve been thinking about what will be the hot search marketing topics in 2014.
Back in my early days of running websites and trying to forge a living online, I stumbled across PPC in the form of Google AdWords.
I liked the idea of driving traffic to a website nigh on instantly. That was until I ran a few of my keywords through the old Keyword Tool and saw exactly how much the estimated CPCs were: upwards of £5 per click!
I broke into a cold sweat because I knew all of my biggest competitors were using PPC, I just didn’t see how it could be profitable and I knew right there and then that my sites were going to fail.
I just couldn’t afford to pay £5+ per click.
Paid search marketing has many names, wears many guises and works alongside many other nebulous terms.
Search engine marketing (SEM), search engine optimisation (SEO), pay-per-click (PPC), cost-per-click (CPC), cost-per-impression (CPM) search engine advertising, sponsored listings, paid for placement, and that’s before you get to services provided by the search engines themselves – Google AdWords, Yahoo Bing Network.
It’s a lot to wade through.
As a relative newcomer to the digital marketing world, I’ve decided to begin a series of ‘beginner’s guides’ to uncover what is meant by certain terms, trends and technological advances in digital; being both a travel guide and a personal investigation.
Last week I covered Native Advertising, this time I’m going to take a look at paid search. If you’re an expert in the field, this article may not be for you, however please feel free to leave any advice or guidance in the comments below.
The 2012 holiday shopping season was one for the online retail records and that led to a very merry Christmas for Google, which reported its fourth quarter earnings yesterday.
All eyes were on the search giant, which failed to deliver in the third quarter, much to the disappointment of Wall Street.
But there was no disappointment this time as the company delivered $14.4bn in revenue, a 36% year-over-year increase, and earnings of $2.9bn, up from $2.7bn in the same quarter a year ago.
Despite the fact that social ad spend is expected to double by 2016 and analysts are increasingly bullish on native social ads, search continues to be the go-to channel for advertisers looking to drive ROI.
The record-breaking holiday shopping season is making that abundantly apparent. While sales driven by social referrals have thus far been miniscule, early analysis of Black Friday sales data by search and analytics consulting firm NetElixer finds that search ads are killing it.
Paid search CPCs in the US were around 50% cheaper on smartphone than on desktop in Q3, according to data from The Search Agency.
CPCs on smartphones stood at 31 cents compared to 49 cents on tablet and 59 cents on desktop, meaning the level of discount offered on smartphone is roughly the same as Q3 2011.
This is despite the fact that smartphone ads apparently have a much higher CTR than both computers and tablets.
The Search Agency’s report, which is based on client data from search engine advertising tools, shows that smartphone CTR has increased from 4.48% in Q3 2011 to 5.71% in Q3 2012.