Google Adwords

Google announced that as of yesterday, interest categories are now available to all AdWords advertisers. Interest categories are a good way of exposing your content campaigns to more users within the display network. We always recommend that client set up a re-marketing in order to get more data and understand the creative performance

How interest categories work? According to Google “the system looks at the types of pages a user visits, taking into account how recently and frequently those pages have been visited, and then associates their browser with relevant interest categories. Using these categories, you can show ads to the people most likely to purchase your products or services, and you can reach them across all types of sites in the Google Display Network in addition to contextually relevant sites.”

There are over 1,000 interest categories from very niche to very broad interests/themes.  Once more Google is helping advertisers to use the Google Display Network.

Google last week introduced the addition of some new tools and metrics for the Display network. By far our favourite is the Content Ads Diagnostic Tool (CADT).  One of the most frustrating things running a display advertising on Google was the fact that you didn’t know if your ads appeared on a site. As a result you had to wait for some data to come back and then optimise the account. For example now with the Content Ads Diagnostic Tool you can see that your placement-targeted ad groups are not running because they lost the auction or that they are running fine.

The next metric introduced is the Impression Share (IS) which represents the percentage of times that your ads were shown out of the total available impressions for which your ads were eligible to appear on the Google Display Network. Again very good addition as it can help advertisers to add more budget if they feel there is more space.

The last addition is the Relative CTR, Relative CTR shows you how your ads perform relative to other competitors ads running in the same website  on the GDN. A great way to benchmark your performance across the Display Network. How do they calculate that? If your display ads have a CTR of 0.08%, while other ads in the same places on the GDN have a CTR of 0.04%, your Relative CTR is (0.08)/(0.04) = 2x.

Overall the new additions offer more transparency that can help advertisers understand more on the GDN and help them to optimise the placements better. Google the last few years is actively pushing Display but so far it was in some case like a black box. Not its very clear and give us a lot more options.

The last few days we have noticed that Google +1 button appears more often on the search results. We noticed that we can see the button on both Paid and Organic listings. Its still not 100% of the time we started seeing this on a few users.  Google released a few weeks ago the new feature and made it very easy for webmaster to add the code on their websites. You can find out more here.

Google announces a series of  search improvements today on the “Inside Search” event. A few days ago Google emailed journalists inviting them to Inside Search for ”an under-the-hood look at Google Search, share our vision, and demo some of our newest technology and features.”

There where several improvements on the mobile  search improvements but the three main annocuments are the following:

Voice Search

Now you can speak your web searches instead of typing them! A small microphone will appear on the search box, once you click the microphone your results will show up just as they would if you’d typed the query!

Search by Image

You can also search by using an existing image.  Users can drag and drop an image into the search box, or instead choose to upload it or copy and paste it into the field. There is also a very handy Chrome extension where you can right click on an image in order to do a search.

Google Instant Pages

This is by far the best improvement. With Instant Pages, Google will pre-load websites from the search result pages, not only the HTML code but even images.  According to Google this will save seconds off the search process by loading Websites before you even click on them.  Instant pages is currently available only on Google’s Chrome browser. Once more Google proves that really want to speed up the internet!!

A video by Google on the effect of online advertising for offline sales.