Digital Marketing Agency | Barracuda Digital

Over the last few years Google has made great efforts to expand the range of targeting options advertisers have when using the Google Display Network.

The full list is:

*the original keyword based targeting: where Google matches your ads to web pages that contain a blend of keywords within your campaign.
*Site targeting: allowing advertisers to specify the URLs they want their campaign to run on
*Remarketing: reaching those people who have been on an advertiser’s website in the last 30 days
*Interest based targeting: reaching users whose surfing behaviour has indicated to Google that they’re interested in particular subjects

And of course there used to be category targeting, where Google grouped together lots of websites into category (business, sport, football etc.) and advertisers could target the whole lot.

Category targeting was retired, as it often spread campaigns too wide and delivered poor ROI. But now it’s back, renamed as ‘Topics’.

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A few weeks ago Google announced a new form of pre-roll Video Ads that would run on YouTube.

TrueView video ads are unique in the market since they give viewers the choice whether to watch them or not. Advertisers only pay when the ad gets watched, not just for a video impression.

Only Great Ads will get watched

Google cite this innovative use of video as an opportunity for truly great video ads to shine, since they are the only ones that’s end up being watched. This also overcomes the TV advertisers’ fear that people leave the room to make a cup of tea during the ad breaks. And for consumers it’s good too, since they will only watch the adverts that they actually want to.

Tracking hotspots & engagement is easy

And because it’s part of YouTube – and therefore integrated with a large part of an advertisers AdWords search and Display activity, this means that tracking the effect of the ad is so much easier. The response to the ad – whether it’s a search or a click through to a merchant site – will be all part of the same online user journey, whether in this session or the next.

At the moment the only cost per view format is InStream. Viewers can choose to skip a video after 5 seconds, or watch it. The advertiser gets charged after 30 seconds, or the full ad if it’s shorter than that.

At the moment TruView is only available for the US, although it’s coming to the UK soon. Find out more here.

In a throwback to banner advertising of the 90s, Google have just started testing leaderboard image ads appearing above the Search Engine Results on Google images. This is what they look like:

Currently just appearing on a small fraction of queries in the US and UK, Google say that this give advertisers “a great opportunity to reach users with engaging ads, whether your goal is to build brand awareness, or to drive clicks and conversions”.

These leaderboards are triggered by the category of the search term that the user enters. Let’s say you want your ad to appear for auto-related searches, it will be triggered by searches for images of particular vehicles, racing tracks, or even car parts.

To advertise on Google images you just add Google images as a placement to your campaign. Pricing is in either CPM or CPC.

Innovation or Monetization?

Google claim to want to introduce ‘new, innovative placements and formats on the Google Display Network to help you reach your advertising goals’, but this seems like a backwards move. We learned 10 years ago that image ads above the SERPs didn’t really work, and although this matches images with image ads the concept is still flawed.

A cynic might point to the huge number of image searches that Google is failing to monetize, and find this new idea has roots there. As ever with AdWords it’s easy to try out new things, and the cost of testing is low, so the proof will definitely be in the pudding.

If you want find out more about this format, or want Barracuda Digital to help expand your Display campaign, get in touch.

Google display campaigns are structured differently from search, and that all starts with the keyword list.

Shorter, More General

Whilst search campaigns need very tightly themed use of keywords and match types, built out to include thousands of combinations, display takes a slightly wider view. Keyword lists still need to be themed, but they can be more general, and often shorter.

For the display network its best practice to leave your keyword lists in broad match; and have no more than 20 to and ad group. Whilst you can still focus on product areas, it’s good to consider the type of your content your audience is interested in that isn’t necessarily product related.

From Bulbs…

For example, let’s say you sell plant bulbs. You’re obviously going to want to include all the bulb types that you stock, plus all the purchase related keywords. But you might also, for example, want to include keywords around other areas such as the National Trust gardens, or Chelsea Flower show since these are other events your audience is likely to be interested in.

To develop these keyword lists take a look at the Wonder Wheel, a useful way to develop and expand your themes. The Wonder Wheel can be found in the left hand column of options from the Google SERPs, and it looks a bit like this:

Now Google have come up with another useful tool to help this process. Enter stage left: the Contextual Targeting Tool.

This helps you build tightly themed keyword lists for display campaigns, and it does it quickly too. You can use it to build hundreds, of ad groups in just a few minutes. This is a great way to quickly scale your campaign, whilst retaining tight control of the targeting.

…to Inkjet Cartridges

Let’s say you sell ink cartridges. Normally you’d take time to build out lots of ad groups covering each product line, including originals & compatibles; brands; cheap; bulk; and so on. If you add each product category to the Contextual Targeting Tool it will generate even more specific ad groups, including cheap inks, cheap inkjets, cheap bubblejets, cheap laserjets, cheap toners, cheap carts, cheap refills and so on.  These are all placed in separate ad groups helping you generate more good-quality traffic and sales, combinations that you wouldn’t necessarily have thought of.

Take a look at the contextual targeting tool and let us know what you think. If you need help building out your display campaign be sure to get in touch.

Here’s video for those who are more visuall minded:

The Display Campaign Optimizer is a display advertising tool that’s been in Beta for about the last two months. As an agency on Google’s Beta list we’ve been one of the first to try out this exciting new system – initially called the ‘explorer’. And this week Google announced that it had removed the Beta label and made it available to all advertisers.

What is it?

This tool tests out placements, demographics, geo-targeting, and interest group combinations to try to find new sources of leads for your campaigns.

It automatically manages both bidding and targeting with a view to increasing conversions.

Advertisers supply creative, budget and CPA goals and to start with the system does the rest. It chooses placements for the campaign and monitors performance in real time, adjusting the campaign accordingly. The longer the campaign runs the more the optimizer learns what works and what doesn’t, and the better it gets at finding new placements likely to convert.

How many conversions?

Beta tests have shown that where advertisers already have a CPA of less than £10 and more than 10 conversions a day, the Explorer beta can expand the number of conversions to the point where they make up 30% of all conversions for the campaign.

And that’s it?

Not exactly. As an advertiser you can work in conjunction with the beta by removing poorly performing creative and adding new creative more likely to convert. You can also test out the receptiveness of offers by testing offer creatives within the Explorer Beta.

From a placement performance report you can identify the best performing placements and choose the manage them manually by adding them to your placement targeted campaigns and bidding up.

And of course if you already have lots of data about specific sites or categories in which you don’t want to appear, then these are good to add in as negatives.

Here’s a video that shows you a bit more about the Campaign Optimizer:

If you want Barracuda Digital to use the campaign optimizer to boost conversions from your display campaigns, please get in touch.

YouTube as a media property is the fourth largest in the UK. In its own right YouTube is also the second largest search engine.

To that end, no AdWords campaign can be complete without an element of traffic coming from YouTube. Thankfully, Google have developed lots of tools to make advertising on YouTube really easy.

When it comes to creative, there are lots of options, including text ads, overlays, accompaniment videos, pre and post roll and more. Here are a few examples:

As for targeting tools, you can pick and choose placements on YouTube with the Google Ad Planner. And now there’s the Video Targeting Tool that lets you choose individual videos or channels on YouTube onto which you can overlay your text ad.

Google have now enhanced their targeting capabilities with the option to excluding individual videos or channels from a campaign.

All you need to do is to identify the individual videos or channels that you don’t want your ad to appear on then exclude them under the “Networks” tab.

For example, let’s say run a bakery. You might have decided to run a keyword based campaign on YouTube on bakery related keywords. But you might also have noticed that most of  FoodNetworkTV videos are about cooking meat dishes.  Just add in their channel URL as an exclusion.

If you want to find out how a PPC campaign targeting YouTube can help boost your brand, traffic and conversions just get in touch.

The Google Display Network (GDN) is the new umbrella name for what used to be called the Google Content Network. Having been seen by many to have saturated the commercial upside of search, Google has rebranded to make it clear that it has big growth plans for content, display, and graphical advertising options.

There’s lots of ways to go about adding a campaign to the GDN. These include:

Keyword based targeting
Site and page-specific targeting
Category based targeting
Audience targeting
Remarketing

And you can use a combination of these targeting tools to improve your targeting options. For example, if you only want to target people who have been on your website previously, who are into travel, and who are reading a travel article on the News site, then you can choose:

Remarketing with audience targeting, and then select keyword based category targeting.

The Google Ad Planner

Google also lets advertisers make use of their (previously agency focused) Double Click Ad Planner. With this tool you can identify sites where you can reach your audience.

To start with, research sites that you know your audience spends time on, or target them by location, interest, demographic or keyword search.

You can choose from pre-defined audiences that are commonly used by marketers. You can also make use of subdomain or ad placements to target by greater detail. You can also use the Ad Planner 1000 to find the largest sites on the web.

The tool is interactive which means that you can rank the sites according to the criteria. And with lists you can note the best sites and placements for use in the future.

You can also use the tool to plan non-Google campaigns by just filtering to those sites not in the GDN. And if you’re fixed on just one or more forms of creative – such as video – you can filter to just those too.

Once you’ve drilled down to just those sites that you’re interested in, you can then grab detailed information from the planner, including traffic stats, demographics and unique visitor metrics.

When you’ve found the sites that fit your criteria, you can add them to your media plan, and either export it straight into your Adwords account or download it as a CSV.

Here’s a video that takes you though the whole process:

That’s it

The Google Ad Planner is an effective tool to plan online campaigns both on and off the GDN. Take a look and let us know what you think.

According to recent stats, 1 in every 5 display ad is served within Facebook. That’s an incredible achievement for the social networking platform, which now boasts over 500m users.

There must be a reason why there’s so much advertising money pouring into Facebook, so if you want to find out what all the fuss is about, and would like to try it out, read on.

Set your expectations

Before you get going with Facebook, you need to set yourself some realistic expectations about the environment. If you’re from a search background, you need to radically downgrade your opinion of what a good Click Through Rate or Conversion Rate is.

With search, you’re giving people a product they’re actually looking for. Within Facebook, you’re catching them whilst they’re doing something else. They might fit your target market – and be potential buyers of your product – but they’re busy speaking to friends, looking at photos, spending some leisure time. So they’re much less receptive to your ad, and are less likely to be impressed by it. And they’re not in the environment to be ‘warmed up’ to your message.

So whilst your PPC search campaign may well achieve a CTR of 5% and a conversion rate of 5%, Facebook Ads are more likely to have a CTR of 0.05% and a conversion rate of nearer 1%.

Set some goals

There are plenty of ads within Facebook that have traditional goals. These ads lead to traditional websites, with a message and a call to action.

But some of the more successful Facebook advertising drives traffic towards a brand’s social media, be that another Facebook page, a group, or even an application.

Here the goal is more long term: the creation of a relationship between the brand and the individual, and the hope of some longer term sales. Marketers may well set their goal as a specific increase in the number of Fans or Follows.

For either method, you need to set your goal and relate it back to some financials. That’s easy for the traditional ad linking to a website – you should set a CPA and ROI value you want to hit. But for the latter, you need to place a value on having a fan, and what those fans do in terms of either buying from you or recommending you to others.

Set a CPC and a budget

Integral to defining your financials is setting a budget and maximum CPC. You should set the CPC much lower than the amount you are prepared to pay for a click from search, since the conversion rate will be lower. Once the system works out how many clicks your ad generates it may well push up the CPC you have to pay in order to get traffic.

As with AdWords, set the budget at a level that will not limit your exposure. A campaign that gets suspended because it hits a daily cap is not making efficient use of the platform.

Creative must-haves

This might be obvious, but ads with images get a much higher CTR than those without. Try to make the image intriguing – not just your logo – but at the same time it’s got to relate to your brand and product too.

Your message should follow similar rules to AdWords creative. Avoid excessive punctuation. Write clearly in correct English. Highlight benefits. And add urgency with your call to action.

Make sure you track your ad with a parameter. If you measure your campaigns with Google analytics just use the URL Builder. The chances are that you will be testing out a variety of creatives with a range of targeting options. Be sure to give each ad a unique tracking link to make optimisation much easier.

Reaching the right target market – demographics

Facebook lets you target your audience using some very precise targeting tools. You can choose from:

location
demographic
language

and you then get to delve into the keywords that people use to describe what they like.

Reaching the right target market – likes and interests

If your target market should be into fashion, it might be that they include words like ‘fashion’ and ‘clothes’ in their interests, so make sure you add them. But also try adding brand names too, even if they compete with your own. As you type your keywords, Facebook will make suggestions – so where relevant try to include those too.

Reaching the right market – Connections

Within Facebook, you can choose to target particular people who are only connected to a group or Facebook page that you look after, which means that you can actively reach out to your current audience.

Unless you’ve got a new product and want to get people back to your page or site, you might consider this a waste of money, so try excluding users with this connection.

Another option is to target ‘friends of connections’, so that your will be reaching out to those users who are connected to people that are already fans of your Facebook page. This is a really powerful feature: your users have probably mentioned you and your products in passing, which will have spiked their friend’s interest. When they see your ad, it acts to jog the memory and get them to your site. You’ve reached that user through word of mouth AND advertising, and they will be much more likely to buy.

Testing

The great thing about having so many targeting options is that you can test the performance of one audience against another. If you’re not sure whether you want to target web designers or web developers, then set up identical campaigns, creatives and targeting options but focus one around web designers and the other for web developers. Then measure the results you get from each.

This example is just a simple A/B, but the chances are that you have lots of different targeting options to test. Sketch out all the different options and go through testing each one.

This might seem laborious, but the prize is large: If you crack Facebook as an advertising platform, the potential to scale is huge.

Do you like my advertising?

You may have noticed that it’s possible for users to ‘like’ adverts without actually clicking on them. Aside from adding that advertiser to the list of likes within a users’ profile, it’s not completely clear what it means to an advertiser whose adverts are ‘liked’. Facebook themselves don’t say, but the chances are that if not already, it will have an impact on a ‘quality score’ that means your advert has a greater chance of being shown, and at a lower CPC.

Given this, ask your friends or followers to ‘like’ the ad if they see it – you may see the benefits later on.

That’s it

Facebook advertising can offer you the potential to reach a huge audience with some quite advanced targeting tools. Follow this guide to give you campaigns a good start. Think I’ve missed something? Leave us a comment below.

You’re probably reading this text because you’ve clicked on one of our adverts.

Last time you were on our website we attached a cookie to your browser, telling us which pages you visited.

We then used Google Remarketing to reach you when you were off doing other things online.

We can use Remarketing to get users back to your website too.

If you want find out more about Remarkeitng, or if you want to stop seeing our adverts (we can do that too!), get in touch.

Back in 2003 Google launched their Google Adwords professionals program. Barracuda Digital took the exam on the first day, becoming the first UK agency to gain AdWords professional status.

Barracuda Digital have done it again

We’ve now taken part in a new exam Beta designed to test applicants on their ability to make the best use of Google’s growing list of display advertising tools.

Google published the results today. The pass rate is 70%. Barracuda Digital achieved 96%.

Commenting today Nick Leech said: “In the last 24 months Google have massively increased their ability to deliver effect display advertising for response led customers. They’re keen to make sure agencies can make best use of these tools for their clients. We’ve demonstrated that Barracuda Digital are on the leading edge of this exciting new area”

Google content campaigns  now include:

*Keyword based content

*Placement targeted

*Placement and keyword targeted

*Audience targeted

*Audience, placement and keyword targeted

*Google Remarketing

*Remarketing and audience targeted

*YouTube promoted videos

*YouTube pre and post roll, and in-video

*YouTube overlays and transparencies

*Video ads on third party publishers

To find out how Barracuda Digital can boost your display advertising campaigns, get in touch.