A new update is coming to Google Adwords in the middle of 2013. It’s hoping to address the massive increase in popularity of smartphones, and how people who surf the internet on these devices display much different user behaviour than those using PC’s.
It does stand to reason that a person who’s using Google to look for local businesses and services would be more interested in an immediate solution, such as phone number or address, as opposed to a person using a computer, who would more likely be interested in further information on the topic, such as the product range or pricing.
Other factors have also been included in the update to help bring users results that are more suited to their needs and allow advertisers to optimise on their PPC campaign.
Market to Multiple Devices
Bids can now be adjusted based on a larger variety of variables. This will allow advertisers to push certain advertisements harder on their campaign if they fill certain requirement, including:
* Device type
* Geographic location
* Time of day
So a tyre store, for instance, can set their campaigns up so that bids 50% higher on searches coming from a mobile device, 20% higher during business hours and double for searches that come from within a 5 km radius. So you can ensure that your ads are seen by people in the best position to buy from you.
Advertise Differently Based on Context
Single campaigns can be adjusted so that different types of advertisements are shown to different users based on the device they’re using and the time of day. With this, users will be able to affect:
* The headline on the advertisement
* Ad copy
* Landing pages linked to
This will allow you, as an advertiser, to use different text for your ad when users are on a mobile device. Perhaps linking through to a page that has phone number as a call-to-action so that they can contact you immediately.
Also, you’ll also be able to adjust the campaign so that the ad links to your store locator or contact details during business hours and informational pages outside of them, for example.
More Advanced Reports
Of course, the effectiveness of the above could be called into question without more sophisticated ways of measuring their performance. So advanced reporting has also been added to measure a online marketing campaign’s ROI.
Different conversion criteria can be set up so that certain elements of your paid search campaign can measured. So you can count the number of phone calls that came from the advert that lasted longer than 60 seconds or visitors that downloaded brochures from you, to name a couple.