Category

Google Ads

Google Ads’ campaigns are a primary traffic and sales channel for many ecommerce businesses. Our vast library of Google Ads’ articles addresses setup, tag management, Google Shopping, structured data, automated bidding, and more.

  • Google Ads

    24 Pay-per-click Advertising Tools

    September 16, 2013 •

    Managing a pay-per-click advertising campaign can be time-consuming and expensive. Fortunately, there is a wide range of tools available to create efficient ad copy and to optimize your budget. Here is ...

  • Google Ads

    5 Pay-per-click Filters to Avoid Drowning in Data

    September 3, 2013 •

    The amount of data available to pay-per-click advertisers can seem overwhelming. Advertisers have to find the optimizations that will make the most impact, as many won’t move the needle one ...

  • Google Ads

    Google Offers Paid and Organic Search Report

    August 23, 2013 •

    Paid and organic search work better together. Because searchers inherently trust that search engines are recommending the best pages in search results, when brands rank well in both paid and ...

  • Google Ads

    5 Pay-per-click Holiday Tasks to Do Now

    August 6, 2013 •

    The beginning of the holiday season is right around the corner. It is often the busiest and most profitable period of the year for ecommerce merchants. Now is the time to plan your holiday pay-per-click advertising campaigns. There are many pay-per-click initiatives that merchants can...

  • Google Ads

    4 Lessons from Google’s Dynamic Remarketing Ads

    July 9, 2013 •

    Google recently announced the launch of a sophisticated new ad feature called Dynamic Remarketing. It works much the same as general remarketing, but the ad units showcase products that visitors viewed. If a shopper came to your site and viewed, say, a specific running shoe, you can in...

  • Google Ads

    PPC: How to Calculate Maximum Bid per Click

    June 6, 2013 •

    "Customer Lifetime Value" is a critical metric that enables you to optimize the long-term profitability of your pay-per-click advertising. CLV answers the simple yet powerful question, "How much is a new customer worth over the long-term?" It’s an important concept that almost every l...

  • Google Ads

    How to Sell on Marketplaces without Harming your Store’s Brand

    May 16, 2013 •

    In "Third-Party Marketplaces: What Merchants Should Know" and "Marketplaces: How to Sell More in 2013," we addressed tactics — pro and con — for using marketplaces. Some merchants avoid marketplaces, believing they compete with their stores' brands. Others enjoy the additional revenu...

  • Google Ads

    PPC Advertising: 5 Daily Activities to Grow Profits

    April 2, 2013 •

    My company recently surveyed 100 small and mid-sized online retailers that do not outsource the management of their Google AdWords campaigns. We asked a simple question, "How often do you manage your AdWords account?" According to the survey results, which are summarized in the graphi...

  • Google Ads

    Surviving Google AdWords’ New Enhanced Campaigns

    March 4, 2013 •

    In "Cheaper Clicks from AdWords Coming?," my article from Feb. 2012, I questioned whether the then unprecedented decline in cost-per-click rates would be a blip or a trend. One year later, Google apparently thinks it's a trend, as Google is requiring all advertisers to adopt its new Enh...

  • Google Ads

    6 Rules for Pay-per-click Ad Profits

    January 28, 2013 •

    I often hear from merchants that have tried pay-per-click advertising, but it wasn’t profitable for them. So they abandoned it. In my experience, however, many merchants could turn unprofitable campaigns into profitable ones by adopting the six rules that follow. Rule 1: Commit to PPC...

  • Google Ads

    Pay-per-click Advertising: 7 Predictions for 2013

    January 3, 2013 •

    2012 was a big year for pay-per-click advertising. Many online retailers saw their PPC budgets, conversion rates, and return-on-ad-spend grow nicely. At the same time, cost-per-click rates dropped precipitously for Product Listing Ads and mobile ads. Looking forward, here are my top sev...

  • Google Ads

    7 Last Minute Holiday Marketing Improvements

    November 28, 2012 •

    Christmas is less than five weeks away. Here are seven last-minute holiday marketing improvements you can make to maximize sales. 1. Shop Your Site from Mobile Devices Smartphone and tablet users accounted ...

  • Google Ads

    Google Shopping: 5 Optimization Tips

    October 31, 2012 •

    With the Google Shopping transition completed on October 17, all of Google’s organic, free product listings — those that showed a product thumbnail and price in search results — disappeared. If you want your product listings to appear in Google, you now have to buy Product Listing Ads t...

  • Google Ads

    Primping Your Holiday Pay-per-click Promotions

    September 28, 2012 •

    A passive approach to pay-per-click advertising often results in missed opportunities. But achieving optimal returns from your PPC campaigns isn’t complex. For holiday PPC promotions, maximizing profits means doing three things well. Create a calendar. Plan your holiday promotions wit...

  • Google Ads

    Google’s Product Listing Ads: Cheaper, More Profitable

    August 30, 2012 •

    I’ve previously written about why you should make Google’s Product Listing Ads a priority. If you’ve followed my advice in "Cheaper Clicks from AdWords Coming?" and, more recently, "5 Steps to Prepare for Google Shopping," there’s a good chance you’ve observed a sharp increase in pay-pe...

  • Google Ads

    5 Steps to Prepare for Google Shopping

    July 31, 2012 •

    In "Cheaper Clicks from AdWords Coming?," I encouraged merchants to try Google's Product Listing Ads because they produce exceptional results. They are the paid version of Google’s free product listings, which for many merchants are a major source of sales. Google recently announced, in...

  • Google Ads

    Google Shopping’s Impact on SEO

    July 6, 2012 •

    Over the next several months, Google’s free Product Search feature will start costing ecommerce sites a lot more. Since the launch of Google’s Froogle in 2002, Google has provided a free product search service. The newly launched Google Shopping marks the first time that the company has...

  • Google Ads

    Remarketing Renaissance Helps Ecommerce Merchants

    May 30, 2012 •

    The idea of targeting ads to visitors who leave a site and continue surfing the web always made sense to me. Until recently, however, this "remarketing" was an afterthought. It just wasn’t producing enough traffic or sales to be valuable. That’s likely to change. When Google got into ...

  • Google Ads

    Google AdWords Ad Extensions Basics

    April 10, 2012 •

    Google AdWords extensions give potential shoppers more information about a merchant and more options to engage with that merchant before clicking a search ad. Although ad extensions have been around for a couple of years, Google recently added conversion tracking data to extensions, ma...

  • Google Ads

    Boost Pay-per-click Profits in 5 Easy Steps

    March 29, 2012 •

    The difference between a profitable and an unprofitable pay-per-click advertising campaign can be the post-click conversion rate. We've run hundreds of conversion rate optimization tests at my firm over the past decade. Below I’ll share five optimizations that have consistently driven c...

  • Google Ads

    3 Basic Ways to Improve PPC Advertising

    March 28, 2012 •

    Pay-per-click advertising is a staple of ecommerce marketing that can play a key role in increasing site traffic and sales when managed well. Pay-per-click advertising can also be very expensive and labor intensive as marketers seek to find the best combination of ad copy, audience, ke...

  • Google Ads

    How to Optimize a Pay-per-click Landing Page

    February 29, 2012 •

    A pay-per-click landing page should be a sales conversion engine, tuned to help consummate an order. Landing pages “are one of the strongest tools you have to convert visitors to customers,” wrote Brandon Eley and Shayne Tilley in their book, Online Marketing Inside Out. “Much of your ...

  • Google Ads

    3 New Google AdWords’ Features Worth Trying

    February 28, 2012 •

    Google continues adding new features to AdWords. "Enhanced Ad Sitelinks," "Offer Extensions," and "TrueView" video ads are three examples. I have tested each of these, and recommend them to merchants. Online retailers who use them first can start profiting before their competitors. The...

  • Google Ads

    Cheaper Clicks from AdWords Coming?

    February 1, 2012 •

    Google's average revenue per click from AdWords' advertisers dropped for the first time in two years for the quarter ended Dec. 31, 2011, according to Reuters. Analysts projected a 3 percent increase in cost-per-click revenue, but Google reported an 8 percent decrease. As a result, man...

  • Google Ads

    Creating a Killer Post-Holiday PPC Strategy

    January 5, 2012 •

    Now that the holiday shopping season is over, here are some New Year's pay-per-click advertising tips to help you continue the growth of your online revenue. Review Cost-Per-Acquisition Data on a Category Level It’s often a good practice for online retailers to organize their pay-per...

  • Google Ads

    Formatting a Product Spreadsheet for Google Merchant Center

    December 20, 2011 •

    Google has created a service that helps online retailers list and submit products to Google's Product Search, Product Ads, and Commerce Search offerings. This service, called "Google Merchant Center," can accept a data feed of product information. In this article, you'll find a descrip...

  • Google Ads

    The 20 Most Expensive Keywords

    December 8, 2011 •

    Google makes a lot of money from online advertising. In the twelve months ended June 30, 2011, Google made $33.3 billion in revenues. Of that, 97 percent ($32.2 billion) was from advertising. WordStream, a provider of software for keywords and pay-per-click marketing campaigns, has don...

  • Google Ads

    Pay-Per-Click Advertising Becoming More Important?

    November 28, 2011 •

    Ten years ago a business could thrive by focusing on organic search engine optimization. My rule of thumb then was that organic rankings garnered roughly 80 percent of the clicks on search result pages while paid listings garnered less than 20 percent. A smart SEO strategy seemed to out...

  • Google Ads

    Pay-Per-Click Ads: 5 Tips for Higher Clicks this Holiday Season

    October 28, 2011 •

    Google’s paid-click revenue grew by an astounding 28 percent last quarter, thanks in part to a 5 percent rise in click prices. It’s likely that Google will set ad revenue records this fourth quarter also, due to the increase in holiday ad spending. To online retailers, Google’s surge i...

  • Google Ads

    Paid Search: Can Anyone Challenge Google?

    October 12, 2011 •

    We can end the suspense right now. It's not likely that any other company is going to be a real contender in paid search anytime soon. The Search Alliance formed by Microsoft's adCenter and Yahoo! makes Bing the default search engine on Yahoo! pages. Although Microsoft has spent a good ...

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