What’s New In PPC
New Options in The World of Paid Search
Apple Search Ads
Apple launching its Search Ads in the UK is big news for companies which want potential customers to discover their app when they are actively searching for similar apps on the App Store of their iPhone and iPad devices. Ads are automatically populated using the metadata and imagery from the App Store listing with the default ‘Search Match’ feature matching an ad to relevant searches in the App Store which is why the quality of an app’s metadata is hugely important.
Like most other paid advertising platforms, Apple Search Ads allow the user to define their daily budget (there’s no minimum spend) and max cost per click (or cost per tap as it’s called), add relevant keywords with the help of a popularity index, exclude keywords by adding them as negatives, schedule the ads to run during specific days and hours and layer various audience targeting criteria such as demographics, location and customer types. The pricing model used in Apple Search Ads is called cost-per-tap (CPT) instead of the cost-per-click but it still means that the advertiser only pays when a user taps (or clicks) on your ad.
The reporting view in Search Ads interface provides data about the performance of the ads as well as trends across the advertiser’s key metrics, to help the user evaluate the return in advertising spend and optimise the campaigns accordingly.
Adwords Call Bid Adjustments
Seven years after introducing the click-to-call ads, Google are now rolling out call bid adjustments to help advertisers generate more calls from potential customers. The bid adjustments can range from -90% to +900% and are used to control how often the call option (call extension) shows with a search ad. It is ultimately a way of optimising campaigns which may already be performing well in terms of the number of high-value calls they are driving.
Call bid adjustments are going to be more valuable to advertisers in industries where selling or cross-selling is more effective when done during a call. In the official announcement Google gives the following example ‘if you’re a travel advertiser, you may see higher order values from calls because it can be easier to cross-sell rental cars, group tours and other vacation add-ons during a live conversation. Raise your call bid adjustments to show call extensions more frequently and drive more of these high-value call conversions’.
Call bid adjustments are just one of the many new features which are exclusive to the new AdWords Experience, the new interface which has been gradually rolling out and will be available to everyone by year-end. Other features include the Promotion Extensions and the household income reporting with more features such as the integrated Google Attribution product rolling out over the next months.
Instant Search
Google announced that it is dropping the Instant Search feature and although this one is not an update directly linked to PPC, it may impact the performance of AdWords campaign to some extent.
Instant Search was launched back in September 2010 and was aimed at making the search process faster by providing users with relevant results in real time while they were typing their search query. The decision is part of Google’s efforts to align desktop search more with mobile devices. Moving forward when a user types a query, they will have to click or select one of the search suggestions of the drop-down menu (example shown below) to see the search results.
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