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Paid search marketers look to technology to provide them with a competitive advantage. AdWords is host to a range of increasingly sophisticated features, but there are also numerous third-party tools that add extra insight. Below, we review some of the essential tools to achieve PPC success. The paid search industry is set to develop significantly through 2018, both in its array of options for advertisers and in its level of sophistication as a marketing channel. The pace of innovation is only accelerating, and technology is freeing search specialists to spend more time on strategy, rather than repetitive tasks. Google continues to add new machine learning algorithms to AdWords that improve the efficacy of paid search efforts, which is undoubtedly a welcome development. This technology ultimately becomes something of an equalizer, however, given that everyone has access to these same tools. It is at the intersection of people and technology that brands can thrive in PPC marketing

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The human brain has evolved to instantly recognize images. Visual identification is a natural ability made possible through a wonder of nerves, neurons, and synapses. We can look at a picture, and in 13 milliseconds or less, know exactly what we’re seeing. But creating technology that can understand images as quickly and effectively as the human mind is a huge undertaking. Visual search  therefore requires  machine learning tools that can quickly process images, but these tools must also be able to identify specific objects within the image, then generate visually similar results. Yet thanks to the vast resources at the disposal of companies like Google, visual search is finally becoming viable. How, then, will SEO evolve as visual search develops? Here’s a more interesting question: how soon until SEO companies have to master visual search optimization? Visual search isn’t likely to replace text-based search engines altogether. For now, visual search is most useful in the wor

As you look to expand the reach of your business to customers in different countries , your website setup and the content you have in place will need to change and evolve. Before you even begin thinking about content localization and local keywords for each market, the technical setup of your website needs to be considered. The first step of this process is domain strategy. What domain you use when targeting local markets can impact how your site performs. There are a number of options for your domain structure : Country code top-level domains (ccTLDs) Subfolders or subdirectories Subdomain There are pros and cons for each of these. In this article, I’ll examine each of the different options, their benefits and drawbacks, and consider how you can find the best domain strategy for your individual situation. Country code top-level domains (ccTLDs) ccTLDs (or Country Code top-level domains) are specific to a country: for example, .de for Germany or .fr for France. Pros of ccTL

Earlier this month, Google rolled out the beta version of its new and improved  Search Console to all verified users. Google has been testing the new Search Console for some months now, with a select number of users given early access to the beta. We’ve had sneak peeks at the slick, clean interface, and heard about some of the notable additions, such as the much-vaunted 16 months of historical search data now available to SEOs. The new Search Console is still in beta, and Google says that it will continue to port features from the old Search Console to the new over the course of the coming year. Webmasters and SEOs will be able to use both versions of Search Console side-by-side until the transition is complete. So now that the new Search Console is finally here, what shiny new features does it boast, what is more or less the same, and what functionality are we still awaiting with bated breath? Let’s take a look. What’s new Search performance report The most powerful new functio

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Let’s set the scene. You’ve signed up to Google Adwords , entered your payment details, maybe even created a few ads and got to grips with the different types of matches for keywords . You may even have gone ahead and sent your ads live. Easy enough. But you are fully aware that it doesn’t end there. PPC can be an expensive hobby and you’re determined that your PPC campaign will become a valuable marketing channel rather than a resented, money-burning pastime. In order to make the most of your PPC investment, you are going to have to make use of both common sense and data to constantly tailor your ads. You want to hone in on specific buyer personas which, as a byproduct (or whichever way round you want to view it), rid your campaign of wasted clicks. You can do this by assessing quality score, A/B testing ad formats, revisiting your keywords and adding nice features such as call out extensions. But as the title suggests, we’re here to talk about negative keywords. In this articl

Organic success on Facebook may have become harder for brands in the past few years – and will become all the more so with the upcoming change to its News Feed – but the same doesn’t necessarily apply to its paid advertising options. Facebook has seriously invested in presenting a large number of options for marketers and business owners who want to promote their content to reach the right audience. It’s a highly effective tool for reaching out to audiences, as long as you’re willing to part with some funds. So if you’ve been considering making the leap over to paid Facebook promotion, here’s how to get set up with your first Facebook Ad. First of all, you need to visit the Ads Manager. It’s where you create new ads, get an overview of your current campaigns and measure their performance. 1. Choose your objective Facebook wants to make your advertising experience as specific as possible. That’s why it asks you from the very first step to decide on your marketing objectives. Thi

We all know by now that mobile has had a tremendous impact on our lives as consumers and as marketers. What we are still getting our collective heads around is what this change means for us as marketers. Consumers have different expectations of the information they want when they search for “running shoes” at 9am from their desktop at work, versus “running shoes” at 6pm on their iPhone two miles away from a store. We as marketers needs to consider these expectations and deliver uniquely for them. I wanted to take a look at some of the data across various AdWords accounts and understand how search campaigns are performing by desktop and mobile and different distances from the physical store location the search is coming from. The insights align with what you might expect, but probably don’t align with how you are managing your campaigns – yet. How distance impacts CTR, CPC and click percentage in local search advertising Let’s first start with click-through rate (CTR) by distance.

Earlier this week, Searchmetrics published its fourth annual Winners and Losers Report , which reveals how certain sites fared in organic search visibility on Google.com during 2017. Searchmetrics bases its analysis on a unique indicator known as ‘ SEO visibility’, which it uses to measure a webpage’s performance in organic search. This is not the same as organic search ranking, but aims to give an overview of how often a website shows up in search results, based on “search volume and the position of ranking keywords” (as explained in the Searchmetrics  FAQ ). Using this metric, Searchmetrics calculates the change in websites’ SEO visibility over the course of the year, and sorts the top 100 winners and losers by absolute change in visibility. Last year, we examined the winners and losers in organic search during 2016 , and concluded that social media and shopping were the overall “winners”, while online encyclopedias, reference websites and lyrics websites all lost out. How do

Paid media transparency has become an increasingly pressing industry issue over the last few years. In January 2017, Chief Brand Officer of Procter & Gamble (P&G) Marc Pritchard drew attention to the issue of dishonest agency advertising practices, after an unpleasant surprise in its dealings with one agency led to the company reviewing all of its media-agency contacts. Just two months later, the issue of transparency and brand safety in programmatic advertising came to a prominent head, when a number of major brands discovered their advertising being displayed next to objectionable content online. These are not isolated examples. Rather, these well-known cases are symptomatic of an issue endemic to the entire advertising industry. The budgets, metrics, processes and other dealings that surround paid media campaigns are shrouded in obscurity, preventing the brands which buy advertising from knowing exactly where this spend is going, what they are buying, and how it is be