Redfly Online Marketing, Dublin, Ireland

The Ultimate Enhanced Ecommerce Tracking Implementation Guide

Arnold Majlath — Fri, 29 Jan 2016 01:19:23 +0000

Looking for a secret weapon to kick your ecommerce reporting into overdrive and improve the conversion rates of your sales funnel? Google Analytics has an amazing suite of features that are rarely used. This secret weapon is free and incredibly valuable. There’s a catch though. It’s quite difficult to set up/implement. That’s about to change. In this article, we’ll discuss Enhanced Ecommerce features of Google Analytics and take a deep dive into the implementation using the standard implementation guide as well as the Redfly Google Tag Manager implementation (coming next). A guide like this has never been attempted before so if you’re already aware of the benefits of Enhanced Ecommerce reporting in GA (and even if you’re not), let’s jump on in.

In addition to tracking ecommerce transaction details on your website in Google Analytics, Enhanced Ecommerce allows you to track product impressions, product clicks, viewing product details, adding a product to shopping cart, checkout process steps, transactions and refunds. Let that sink in for a second. integrated into your standard Google Analytics reporting, your attribution models/reports and your Google Ads data, that’s an incredible set data right there. Before we get stuck into setting this up, let’s take a moment to see how that might look like in your GA account.

Enhanced Ecommerce Reports

Let’s start with the finished product. When you complete this guide and have everything set up and tested correctly your ecommerce reports in Google Analytics will change to look something like below.

Think about that. Whether you’ve got a single page checkout, no checkout or thank you page at all, or a complex sales funnel spanning multiple steps, days, devices and CRM systems, now you’ve got complete visibility into the behaviour of your customer before they converted, or worse, left your site. You can now tell what product list your customer filtered down to in a particular search before converting, what areas of the screen they were focused on before abandoning, how the placement of a competing or complementary product affected your conversion rates. Google Analytics just became infinitely more powerful. Let’s take a closer look at some of the new reports available.

The Ecommerce Overview report:

Shopping Behavior report:

Checkout Behavior report (this is from a site with a single page checkout):

Product Performance report:

Sales Performance report:

Standard Setup

The first step is always the easiest. You need to enable enhanced ecommerce tracking for your view in the admin section of your Google Analytics account.

Because enhanced ecommerce is tracking so many details about the purchase process it is quite complicated to implement. It also requires server side coding to get the values into the tracking script. You’ll have to pick and choose each of the features that you want to implement and each feature needs to be implemented separately.

If you are using traditional ecommerce already you need to create a new property for testing. You cannot run traditional ecommerce and enhanced ecommerce in the same time for the same web property. For tracking multiple properties please check Working with multiple trackers

First you need to load the enhanced ecommerce plugin. It should be loaded after the tracker object is created and before the enhanced ecommerce specific code.

The order should be like this:

The ecommerce data is sent to google analytics together with a hit – pageview or event. You need to send the hit after the enhanced ecommerce command.

Measuring Product Impressions

Whenever a product is displayed on your site on anything other than it’s dedicated product page, a product impression occurs. A product can appear on product category pages, search result pages, a top sellers list in your sidebar etc…

You can track these impressions using enhanced ecommerce!

Here is a sample html page with a fully working example code snippet for sending two product impressions to Google Analytics:




Product Impressions

Tracking user interactions

Tracking product link clicks

You can track when a link to the product details page is clicked anywhere on the site.

The code below is for tracking product links clicks.




Product Click





Product Details Page

Tracking Product Details Views

On each dedicated product page visit we are sending the product details to Google Analytics with a pageview.

In order to measure the number of views of a product details page you need to use the code below:




Product Details View

Tracking product addition or removal from cart

Each time a product is added to to the shopping cart we are sending the product details to Google Analytics together with an event.

For measuring product cart additions or removals you need to use the code below:




Add To Cart





Add To Cart

Tracking the checkout process

After the product has been added the cart you can track the checkout process steps. First you have to configure the checkout steps in the in Admin -> View -> Ecommerce Settings.
If your checkout process consists of two steps then you need to create two steps here and label them. These labels will appear in the Checkout Behavior report.

The example below shows the setup for a two step checkout process. The first step will be the shipping details page and the second step the payment details page.

You can find a complete working example below:




Checkout Step

Tracking Ecommerce Transactions

An ecommerce transaction can be tracked on the checkout success or thank you page where the user is notified about the successful transaction.

The ecommerce transaction is sent with a page view.




Ecommerce Transaction

Debugging Your Enhanced Ecommerce Implementation

There are tools for checking if your enhanced ecommerce implementation is working properly. We’ll check our sample codes using the Google Tag Assistant and Google Analytics Debugger Chrome plugins.

Debugging using Google Tag Assistant

When you have Google Tag Assistant installed you need to enable it for your domain. Click the small Google Tag Assistant icon when you’re on a page you want to test and click “enable”:

Once enabled, reload your page so Google Tag Assistant can analyze it. You should see your Google Analytics listed in Google Tag Assitant:

Click your tag to continue to see the details about your tag:

Now Click “Pageview Requests” at the bottom and on the next screen click URLs at the top.
You’ll see the request URL sent to Google Analytics. To see the request details arranged in a table click the small table icon above the URL:

On the next screen you will see the parameters and values sent to Google Analytics arranged in a table.

Debugging using Google Analytics Debugger

Install the Chrome extension from the Chrome Web Store

To use the extension please follow the steps below:

– Go to the page you want to test your Google Analytics tracking code on
– Click the extension’s icon next to the address bar to enable it
– Go to Menu -> More Tools -> Developer Tools or press Ctrl+Shift+J
– Select the console tab
– Reload the page you are on

You will see the data being sent to google analytics:

Go Forth & Multiply

So there you have it. Now you’ve got a brand new suite of free tools to play with to squeeze those extra percentage points out of your conversion rate. We have clients that have improved their conversion rate 100%-150% on an already optimized conversion funnel. The more you understand about what your visitors are doing on your website before they leave (or convert), the more you can identify problem activities that, until enhanced ecommerce, were simply unknowable, the more you can improve your customer experience and ultimately your bottom line.

The post The Ultimate Enhanced Ecommerce Tracking Implementation Guide first appeared on Redfly Online Marketing, Dublin, Ireland.

How To Track Conversions Without a Thank You Page

Arnold Majlath — Wed, 22 Apr 2015 07:04:45 +0000

Not all conversions and not all websites are created equally. Sometimes, your website or what you class as a conversion doesn’t fit neatly into the box that Google thinks most conversions fall into. Sometimes you need to get creative in how you tell Google Ads and Google Analytics that a conversion has occurred. This article will detail three ways in which you can trigger a conversion with Google Ads and Google Analytics when you don’t have the luxury of a thank you or receipt page.

There are three relatively simple ways to trigger Google Ads conversions without a thankyou/receipt page. These are using Google Tag Manager, Using Google Analytics (in a roundabout way) and by manually coding the conversion into your web page code. Before we attempt any of these though, it’s important that the conversion in Google Ads is set up correctly first.

Setting up a new conversion in Google Ads

You need to create a new conversion in Google Ads. In order to do this, log in to Google Ads, go to your account and select “Conversions” from the “Tools” dropdown menu in the top navigation.

Click the red “+ Conversion” button to create a new conversion.

On the next screen enter the conversion name, select “Webpage” and click “Save and continue”. On the next screen select the details you want to use and click “Save and continue” at the bottom.

On the next screen under “Who makes changes to the code on your website?” select “I make changes to the code”. The code will appear in a textarea. We’ll need the “google_conversion_id” and “google_conversion_label” values for our examples.

Now we’re ready to rock. Once this is done, pick the method you’d like to use to trigger this conversion from 1, 2 or 3 below.

1) Using GTM V2 and auto event tracking

First you have to go to the “Variables” section in the left sidebar and enable the built-in variables for the type of events you want to track. For our examples we’ll need “Click ID” under “Clicks” and “Form ID” under “Forms”, but you can enable them all if you need them in the future.

In the below examples we’ll set up tracking for a link click and for a form submission.
In the examples we’ll use a link with an id selector “trackLink” and a form with id “trackForm”.
The html markup for the link will look like this:

Track Conversion

And for the form like this:

On the “Overview” page create a new tag, choose “Google Ads”.

Choose the “Adwords Conversion Tracking” tag type.

For link tracking: Under “What triggers this tag to fire?” select “Click” “Add filters” “Some Clicks”
For form tracking: Under “What triggers this tag to fire?” select “Form” “Add filters” “Some Forms”

For link tracking: From the dropdowns select “Click ID” “equals” “trackLink”
For form tracking: From the dropdowns select “Form ID” “equals” “trackForm”

For link tracking: Name your trigger, we named it “Conversion Click” and select “Link Click” under “Trigger Type”. If you want to track clicks on a non-link element select “Click” here instead.
For form tracking: Name your trigger, we named it “Conversion Submit”

You have two options here that you can check:

“Wait for tags” – this delays opening of links until all tags have fired or the specified timeout has elapsed, it decreases the chance you’ll miss some hits
“Check Validation” – the tags are only fired upon a successful form submission

Here you can set filters to specify when the trigger we created should listen for click events.

Click “Continue” and enter your conversion tracking code details into the fields.

Finally click “Create Tag” at the bottom of the page.
Publish your changes. You should begin seeing conversions in your Google Ads account within hours.

2) Using GA virtual Pageviews and importing them into Google Ads.

a.) jQuery solution

On your webpage the markup for the link you want to track the markup should look like this:

Track Conversion

(you need to have the jQuery library included in your page for this to work)

Create a new tag, this time choose “Custom HTML Tag”.

Under “What triggers this tag to fire?” select “More” then “New” “Custom Event”

Under “Add filters” “Event name to match” type in “gtm.dom”. This will get your tag triggered when the DOM is ready
Select “All Events” and click “Continue”.
You can set up additional filters to trigger the tag only on selected pages for example, if you want to do this choose “Some Events” and set up the conditions you want.

Name your trigger, I named it “Gtm dom” and click “Create Trigger”.
You’re ready to continue with setting up your custom html tag for generating a virtual pageview.

Name your tag, I named it “VPV Clicks”

Add the code below to the HTML textarea:

#trackLink is the ID of the element that I need to generate a virtual pageview when clicked.

When the element with ID #trackLink is clicked, two variables will be pushed into the data layer:

‘event’:’sendVPV’
‘vpv’:’/conversion-click

We’ll use the event “sendVPV” to trigger the analytics tag that will record the virtual pageview and we’ll use the vpv variable for recording the virtual page path.
We need to set up an Universal Analytics tag that will be triggered when the element with ID #trackLink is clicked and it will track the virtual pageview.

b.) javaScript solution

On your webpage the markup for the link you want to track the markup should look like this:

Track Conversion

After choosing either solution a. or b. above we need to set up a tracking tag for the virtual pageview.

On the GTM overview screen click “Create Tag”.
Create a new Universal Analytics tag, pageview type.

This tag will be fired on the event “sendVPV” that is generated when our element is clicked.
We need to set up the trigger. Under “What triggers this tag to fire?” select “More” then “New” and “Custom Event”
Under “Add filters” “Event name to match” type in the event we created in the previous step “sendVPV”

Optionally you can set up additional filters here too by selecting “Some Events”.
Click “Continue” and name your new trigger, I named it “Send VPV”

You are ready to continue setting up your Universal Analytics tag. Name your tag, I named it “Track VPV”
Enter your GA Tracking ID.

Leave track type on “Page View”. Click “More settings” -> “Basic Configuration” and click the + icon next to the “Document Path” field.
If you are using GTM V2 click “More settings” -> “Fields to Set” and under “Field Name” click the field and select “Page” from the dropdown list, then click the + icon next to the “Value” field.
We need to set up a variable for reading the document path from the data layer. Select “New Variable” from the bottom of the list. Select the “Data Layer Variable” type, enter “vpv” as the variable name and “vpv” as the Data Layer Variable name (as we defined it in the JavaScript Snippet) Click “Create Variable” and it’s ready.

Click “Create Tag” and your Universal Analytics tag fro tracking virtual pageviews are ready.

Publish the changes.

Now we need to set up a goal in Google Analytics.
Go to your Google Analytics account, select your proeprty and click Admin -> Goals
Click “New Goal”. Select a template if you want to start with a pre-filled configuration or select “Custom”

Click “Next step”.

Name your Goal and select “Destination” as Type.

Click “Next step”.
In the destination field type in your virtual page path, “/conversion-click” as we defined it above.

If you want to assign a monetary value to the conversion, enter it to the optional “Value” field.

Click “Save Goal”

Now we are set up our goal based on the virtual pageview we’ve created and we are ready to import the goals to Google Ads as conversions.

In order to import the goals we need to do the following:

– To link our Google Analyitcs and Google Ads accounts
– To enable Data Sharing with other products in the Google Analytics account
– To turn ON auto tagging in the Google Ads account

Once the above is done we need to do the steps below:

1. After linking the accounts wait about 1 hour for the data to be ready. Then in Google Ads go to “Tools” -> “Conversions”. There will be a message that you’ve goals ready to be imported.
2. Click “Import from Google Analytics”
3. Select the goal you want to import from the list
4. Select “Import” at the bottom

3) Manually coding the “button” to trigger the Google Ads conversion.

Add the code below to the section of the page you want to track conversions on.

Just replace the XXX… with your actual conversion id and label.

Then call the adwTrack() function we created above in your link’s onclick event:

Track This

So there you have it. While these methods are no means the only methods to track conversions without a thank you or receipt page, they do represent a few of the easiest ways to do it. Sometimes it’s not always possible to modify your site or CMS code and sometimes it’s not always possible to even edit your site at all. Hopefully, these solutions have covered all possible scenarios. If you’d like for us to add a method specific to your situation, let us know in the comments section below so we can add it to the list and hopefully someone else will get some value from it. If you’ve any questions on how these are implemented, please feel free to ask in the comments section too. Finally, if you found this useful, we’d really appreciate if you could give us a like or a share on the post.

The post How To Track Conversions Without a Thank You Page first appeared on Redfly Online Marketing, Dublin, Ireland.

How Safe is Your CTR With Google Ads? – Not Very! – Google Sheds the Bold

Stephanie Courtney — Thu, 20 Nov 2014 15:31:52 +0000

Have you done a Google search lately?

If you work on Google Ads, probably not. We tend to work on the UI or in Editor and too often we miss the forest for the trees. Go on, do a search for a competitive product like ‘car insurance’ or ‘cheap flights.’ Notice anything different? None of your keywords are bolded in the headline anymore. If only Renée’s look had changed so inconspicuously. Google quietly removed bolding a couple of weeks back and initial relative CTR metrics across all accounts that we manage indicate that this isn’t a minor change and if you don’t act now, you’re in for some heartache shortly. With the holidays fast approaching, addressing this now could mean your best holiday season ever.

While search query bolding in the headline has been removed like the mole on Cindy Crawford’s face, bolding is still in effect in both description lines and the display URL.

If you believe, like millions of Cindy’s adoring fans, that the mole made her sexy, you probably see this change in AdWord’s headlines as an affront to eye-catching, advertising sex appeal – and you might be right. The lack of bold in the headline does flatten the page, but that might just be because no one who is writing ad text has caught on and made the adjustments necessary to make the rest of the ad pop.

What the Hell is Google Up To?

Sometimes it’s hard to tell when the Google geniuses are on to something or just screwing the pooch, but let’s give them the benefit of the doubt.

Let’s face it search query infected headlines are as boring as a Google blog. Eye catching? Maybe. Interesting, creative, innovative? Never. And as repetitive as a two year old – almost every headline is the same – especially if every advertiser is using dynamic keyword insertion – and therein may lie the reasoning behind this oh so subtle face lift.

So maybe Google has realised that in order to foster a bit more creative freedom, they needed to release us from the shackles of bolded headlines.

On the other hand, if this is the brainchild of the newest zit faced tween hired from Stanford who hasn’t a clue how Google Ads serves the advertising world, this may cost a lot of high performing campaigns as CTRs wane and conversion rates suffer.

One thing is obvious; this change allows organic results to blend more with paid advertising – and that means game on for the SEO/PPC world cup. While both SEO and PPC mechanisms and strategies mature, one thing is clear: copy is still king and it will be those who can create great tag lines that will win this competition with searchers.

What Does This Mean for Ad Formatting in Google Ads?

For those of us who toil in ad copy R&D, this change creates some interesting options with which to play.

Enhanced headlines will either give you a lot more space to play or they might become less useful. If you have a great tag line, use the keyword phrase in the second description line for maximum affect. If the keyword only works in the first description line, you’ll get the eye catching bold if you don’t use the title enhancement. The trick will be in understanding which use will have the best draw on the eye of the searcher.

Dynamic keyword insertion in the title no longer matters. (Can I get a ‘Hallelujah!’) Keywords matter more in the display URL than in the headline now so move your dynamic {KeyWord :Insertion} accordingly.

Encouraging us copy hacks to use keywords in the descriptions actually makes sense now that callout extensions are in play. If your client or business offers ‘free shipping for orders over $50,’ don’t waste space in the description lines, use callout extensions – and now that callout extensions are available at the account, campaign and ad group level, you can callout special offers on specific products and services while saving precious space in the description lines to do exactly that – describe the product/service.

What might be the most intriguing part of this change is that Google has yet to announce it. It makes sense that Google doesn’t want the public to notice the change, a good facelift should always be invisible, but why they haven’t informed the advertising community is a bit baffling -unless we’re giving them too much credit for having reasons for the change.

Take Advantage

Now is your chance to differentiate your ads, improve your CTR and improve your Quality Score. There’s some great books that can help improve your short form ad copy writing. You can also join in the conversation over on the official Google Ads forum. Finally, it’s important to remember how your ad copy impacts on your ROAS. The (newer) version of the Google Ads auction overview should be required viewing for any Google Ads advertiser.

Get the Flash Player to see this Google Ads tutorial about building your keyword list.

The post How Safe is Your CTR With Google Ads? – Not Very! – Google Sheds the Bold first appeared on Redfly Online Marketing, Dublin, Ireland.

A Comprehensive Guide To Tracking Google Ads Call Conversions Using Google Tag Manager

Dave Davis — Fri, 12 Sep 2014 14:48:17 +0000

Earlier this month, Google released a much needed tracking feature in Google Ads. Website Call Conversions. We’ve been playing with it in beta for quite some time and I’m surprised that it didn’t get much fanfare. Google effectively destroyed the Google Ads call tracking industry. We have clients who, overnight, saved thousands of dollars/euros a day in call tracking fees. If you speak to your customers by phone at any stage of the buying cycle, you need this. This is not Google Ads call extensions (although they are required, see below) or click to call; this is actual call tracking. So how does it work? Easy. Wherever your phone number appears on your website, Google will display that phone number as normal. However, if that visitor came from Google Ads, Google will replace that number with a custom number that it ties to the visitor (and keyword/ad combination). Google then forwards that number on to your regular number. So how do we set this up? Surprisingly, there has been a lot of confusion over this. In this article, I’ll go through each step and then show you how to implement this manually or by using Google Tag Manager (because who’s not using GTM these days?).

WHERE THE TRACKING NUMBER DISPLAYS

The tracking phone number or “the forwarding number” is displayed anywhere you place the code to dynamically generate it. Think of it as a magic widget. You copy and paste the widget code that Google provides and wherever that code is placed, the tracking number displays. If the user didn’t come from Google Ads, your default number displays. There are some occasions where the number will not display however.

The display network (display network only campaigns)
Outside of an Google Ads “interaction”
Ads with low traffic

These have caused some confusion. The first is pretty obvious, dynamic numbers won’t be displayed on the Google display network. Also, if your visitor doesn’t click on an Google Ads ad, they won’t see it. Finally, if your ad doesn’t receive an undisclosed minimum traffic volume during a 4 week period, it wont show either. This brings us to the most important point of this article.

**** CALL EXTENSIONS ARE MANDATORY FOR CALL CONVERSION TRACKING ****

This has caused a lot of confusion, even with myself. You can’t just set up the “dynamic number” on your website, it needs to have a call extension or a click to call extension associated with it. After hours of frustration when first setting these up, and official confirmation from within Google, this actually makes sense. If you don’t associate the call conversion with a call extension, you are likely to get a fragmented visit. So, with all that in mind, let’s get to the setup.

STEP 1 – SETTING UP THE CALL EXTENSION

Before you will even be able to see the call conversion in your account conversions section, you need to add at least one call extension. If you don’t have any call extensions yet, you won’t see the call tracking conversion option that we’ll need later on. If your business takes phone calls, you’re crazy not to be using call extensions anyway so now is a good time to start. You can either create a new call extension or edit any existing one. Go to any campaign and select the extensions tab. Click the red “+Extension” or edit an existing call extension. You should see this. It’s vitally important that you do this once, that you select the “A Google Forwarding Number” in the “Show my ad with” option and that you enter your country and your business phone number and not the country of your target audience. Many hours have been wasted trying to get call tracking working because the necessity of this step is not documented by Google (that I could find). I’ve just saved you a lot of frustration! Here’s a quick walkthrough.

Get the Flash Player to see this Google Ads tutorial about building your keyword list.

STEP 2 – SETTING UP THE CONVERSION

So now we can get down to the real meat of the setup. The next step, we need to set up the actual conversion event in the conversions section of your Google Ads account. This is done exactly like you would any other type of conversion. In your Google Ads account go to Tools ->Conversions and click the red “+ CONVERSION” button to create a new conversion. As the conversion name type “Calls from website” and select “Calls to a Google forwarding number on your website” as the source and click the “Save and continue” button. On the next screen, select a conversion value, window, category and call length and click “Save” Select “I make changes to the code” and copy the generated code. Keep the code handy, you’ll need it soon. Obviously these options are custom to your business and your business needs. If you’re selling insurance, a converted phone call might be a minimum of 5 minutes to you. If you’re selling a phone directory service, a 20 second call might be all you need. Likewise with the value of the conversion here. This is up to you and how you determine the value of a call. I would encourage you to enter something real here. Don’t use “1” or leave it blank. Work out the average value of each of your phone calls or use a points based system. Like other Google Ads conversion values, this too can be populated dynamically using either server side scripting or Google Tag Manager. I wont be covering that in this article.

STEP 3 – SETTING UP THE NUMBER TO DISPLAY

So now onto the real magic. This can be a little bit challenging. ***bonus*** As long as the demand isn’t too high and as long as you’ve made an effort yourself, we’ll assist, for free, anyone who needs this part done for them. Just get in touch. From here you have two options: If you are not using Google Tag Manager you need to copy the javascript code you generated in step 2 above and put it into your website tag, enclosed in a tag.

You also need to add the following javascript to your tag: onload=”_googWcmGet(‘number‘, ‘X-XXX-XXX-XXXX’)” (where the X’s represent your regular/default office number) so it will look like below. Remember, “number” is the class of the element that holds the phone number in the html code like number“>X-XXX-XXX-XXXX.

If you are using Google Tag Manager, things are a little trickier but well worth putting in the effort to configure. It is assumed that you have the Google Tag Manager code snippet added to all pages on your website. Using this method, you don’t have to edit the code on your site at all. You’ll need to follow the below instructions exactly.

Log into Google Tag Manager
In the Google Tag Manager UI, create a new Custom Html tag and name it “Call from website”
Set the firing rule to “All pages”
Paste the javascript code you generated in step 2 above into the HTML text area enclosed in tag. –
Before the closing tag add the following javascript: jQuery(document).ready(function() { _googWcmGet(‘number’, ‘X-XXX-XXX-XXXX’); });

So the whole code will look like this:

You need the jquery javascript library included on your site for this to work. Whether you are using the regular method or our custom Google Tag Manager method, you need to define your phone number on your site in this format: number“>X-XXX-XXX-XXXX. So every instance of your business number on your site in this format will be replaced with the Google forwarding number. That’s it. Pretty painless right? Now, at long last, you can now track all phone calls as conversions and not just mobile click to call ads. The call tracking loop has finally been closed. So what’s next? Well, viewing and optimizing your call conversions of course!

STEP 4 – CONFIGURING ADWORDS TO SHOW CALL METRICS

Once your call conversions start rolling in, you can see the conversions in the conversions page in Google Ads. But that’s not really very useful. Fortunately, you can now add all your fancy new call tracking metrics throughout your reports. Simply add the columns as outlined in the video below.

Track phone impressions, calls, and phone-through rate

You can see the phone impressions, phone calls, and phone-through rate by adding special columns to the statistics table of your campaign or ad group.

Phone impressions are the number of times your ad was shown with a Google forwarding phone number.
Phone calls are counted when calls to your custom Google forwarding phone number are received, either through a call button or through manual dialing.
The phone-through rate (PTR) is the number of phone calls received (the figure in the “Phone calls” column) divided by the number of times your phone number is shown (what’s shown in the “Phone impressions” column).

STEP 5 – OPTIMIZE ‘TILL THE COWS COME HOME

Now that you can see all sorts of useful metrics like call start time, end time, status (missed or received), duration, caller area code, phone cost, call type etc., you can really start to optimize your call conversion rate. This is especially exciting for those of you who usually close sales over the phone (you can use the likes of HubSpot to score these leads too!). The best thing about this new call conversion tracking? You can utilize all of the wonderful and powerful advanced and custom bid strategy features like ROAS bidding, enhanced CPC bidding and of course, everyone’s favourite… Conversion Optimizer ;)

NEED SOME HELP?

So there you have it. The conversion leak has finally been plugged. It’s an exciting time, especially if you’re a digital marketing agency! If you’ve been wondering how to set this up in Google Tag Manager, now you know. If you’re having difficulty and would like some free help setting this up, please get in touch and I’ll be happy to help walk you through it (GTM implementation only). Any questions? Feel free to reach out on social media (we’ve removed our comment section for now) or drop us an email.

The post A Comprehensive Guide To Tracking Google Ads Call Conversions Using Google Tag Manager first appeared on Redfly Online Marketing, Dublin, Ireland.

The Google Shopping Upgrade Simplified – What You Need To Know (The Short Version)

Dave Davis — Mon, 18 Aug 2014 12:43:19 +0000

You’re Product Listing Ads are getting upgraded to Google Shopping whether you like it or not. This really is not a bad thing. In fact, it’s a great thing. As many of you who run PLAs know (Sorry Irish readers, so soup for you!), the deadline to upgrade your PLA campaigns is looming. If you don’t upgrade yourself, you’ll be forcefully upgraded at the end of the month. I cannot recommend manually upgrading enough. It should only take a few minutes. In this article, I’ll cut through all the fluff and explain only what you need to know to upgrade successfully. Alternatively, jump the end and let us do it for you for free!

This article should take you no more than 4 minutes to skim through & you’ll know all you need to about the migration. Anything not essential, I’ll leave out. I’ll also outline the quickest way to upgrade.

Why Is This Happening?

As many of you know, product listing ads are clunky and don’t fit with the general workflow of an Google Ads manager. Many of you like to simply set up PLAs and forget about them (I’ve seen it, don’t spoof yourselves!). Product listing ads always felt like they were just shoved into Google Ads without any afterthought. Now, PLAs are getting proper integration with Google Ads and they’re changing name.

What are The Benefits?

Previously, there was very little accountability with PLAs. Now, you’ll get proper, in depth reporting on every product, attribute and custom attribute where this was not available previously. So you’ll get so see all the usual Google Ads metrics for each field in your feed. You’ll be able to attribute value at a much more granular level now. You’ll be able to run an entirely new ad group for each product and you’ll also be able to create your own attributes to bid on that are a little more comprehensive than the old Google Ads labels. (Click image to inbigulate)

Anything Else?

Actually, yes. Now you’ll be able to see really amazing competitor benchmark data like impression share and benchmark CTR. This was painfully absent in PLAs. (Click image to inbigulate)

With all this additional insight, you’ll now be able to properly attribute value to your shopping campaigns and you can even start to implement advanced bidding strategies and ROAS bidding. While advanced audience targeting is not available yet, I expect it will be soon. Finally, you can see where your shopping spend deficiencies are!

Product groups have replaced Ad Groups and now, you can view manage all your products and segments directly inside the Google Ads UI. No more switching over between merchant center and Google Ads. (Click image to inbigulate)

There’s also loads of other goodies like campaign prioritization, SKU and exact product, brand and profit targeting. On top of all that, unlike the rest of Google Ads, your historical product data will be preserved even as you mix and match them.

What Do I Need to Do?

Great question. The answer is, not much. If you’re using any Google Ads specific labels in your feed, you’ll need to change them to “custom label 0”, “custom label 1″… You get 5 free custom labels to work with for targeting plus you can use 5 attributes in your existing feed for targeting too. If you’re not using any Google Ads labels, then all you need to do is create a new shopping campaign (If you are using Google Ads labels, find out how to switch them over here). It’s pretty straight forward:

From the “Campaigns” tab, click +Campaign.
Select Shopping from the drop-down menu.
Choose your campaign settings. The “Load settings from an existing campaign” option will not create a Shopping campaign from your existing regular Product Listing Ads campaign, so don’t select this option. .
Click Save and continue.
On the “Create ad groups” page, Give your first ad group a name and add any promotional text (optional).
Click Save and continue. This will create one enabled ad group containing one “All products” product group with one bid across your entire inventory included in this campaign. You’ll be taken to your new ad group’s “Product groups” tab where you can create additional product groups and customize your bids. Learn more about using product groups.

That’s pretty much it. If you’re not comfortable switching and waiting to see what happens, you can always use the campaign priority setting to slowly move your traffic from your PLAs to your new shopping campaign. To change your the campaign priority for a campaign:

Go to the Settings tab of the campaign you want to edit.
Select Shopping settings (advanced).
Next to “Campaign priority,” click Edit.
Select the priority setting you want: “Low” (this is the default), “Medium,” or “High.”
Click Save.

Is That It?

For the short version, yes. There’s quite a few other nuances to Google Shopping but they take days to spot and master. The benefits of upgrading to Google Shopping from PLAs is evident in the almost immediate increase in performance we’ve been able to get for our clients. The less fiddling around with the feed the better to be honest. Now you can go and upgrade your PLAs without worry and without the potential disaster that’s waiting to happen when you’re automatically forced to upgrade in two weeks time.

Google Shopping, coupled with some nice RSLA coupon targeting and some creative remarketing and dynamic remarketing have reduced 100% of our clients CPAs and across the board increased their return on ad spend. After a couple of days working with Google Shopping, you’ll forget what PLAs even looked like. They’ll be another thing we’ll bring up during shop talk nostalgia sessions, along with device targeting, manual location extensions and of course that mythical “do not include close variants” exact match option. Future generations will never believe what we once had the option of working with in Google Ads. Maybe that’s for the best.

One More Thing

For the month of August, 2014, if you have less than 200 products in your merchant center account, we’ll upgrade you for free. No obligation to sign up to any of our other services. We’ll simply migrate you, set up and optimize your new shopping campaigns and then give you some free advice on how to continuing improving your shopping campaigns. If you’re interested, just get in touch and we’ll get back to you with details.

The post The Google Shopping Upgrade Simplified – What You Need To Know (The Short Version) first appeared on Redfly Online Marketing, Dublin, Ireland.

Google Analytics Ecommerce Tracking Using Google Tag Manager

Arnold Majlath — Wed, 13 Aug 2014 04:58:57 +0000

With the introduction of Enhanced Ecommerce Analytics in Google Analytics this year, having even rudimental ecommerce tracking set up in GA is now essential. It still surprises me how many Google Analytics accounts that we start work on that don’t even track their own revenue or some sort of return on their ad spend. So many GA users simply use GA as a “hit counter” and not the powerful free insight generator that it is. It’s absolutely vital to attribute monetary value to each of your traffic sources so you can see exactly what digital marketing channels are generating revenue and how much exactly. All sorts of additional insights and ideas can be generated from this core set of data. Google have of course gone one step further in making this easier with the availability of the free Google Tag Manager tool. In this article, I’ll show you how to implement Google Analytics standard ecommerce tracking using Google’s free Google Tag Manager tool.

Collecting The Transaction Details For The Data Layer

Before we begin, we need to understand how GA collects data and what data we need to give it to populate the reports. It’s vital that we get this right as ecommerce reports permeate throughout every report in GA. Google Analytics can collect almost every piece of data about a transaction that you can imagine. For the purposes of this article, we’ll only look at the bare minimum, the required values.

When a user successfully completes a transaction on your site, they are usually directed to a “thank you” or receipt page. The receipt page shows the details of the transaction and we can use this opportunity to send the transaction details to Google Analytics via the Google Tag Manager dataLayer. The minimum required values to trigger a transaction and record it in GA are:

Transaction ID
Total Price
Tax
Shipping

You’ll also need some info about the items that were purchased:

Product Name
SKU
Price
Quantity

With some coding you can use this useful information for tracking the transactions in Google Analytics. We’re now going to take those values and pass them to Google Tag Manager who will in turn, pass them to Google Analytics.

Setting up Google Analytics

This part is easy. You simply need your tracking ID and to flick the ecommerce tracking switch. The only info you’ll need from your Google Analytics account is your tracking ID. You can get this in the admin section of your GA account.

Within your GA admin settings you’ll also need to enable eCommerce tracking – in the top navigation bar go to Admin >> View Settings (in the right column) Switch “Ecommerce tracking” ON under “Ecommerce Settings”. That’s the beauty of using GTM. That’s all you need to do. You’re now done with Google Analytics!

Setting up Google Tag Manager & The DataLayer

You need to be logged in to your google account in order to use Google Tag Manager. Go to the Google Tag Manager site and click “Sign In” in the upper right corner.

If you don’t have an account yet, you’ll be taken to the “Get Started Screen.

Type in your account name – we’ll use “Your Company” in our example – an account can contain multiple containers, so your company name can be the account name and your websites can have their own containers.

Click next. On this screen enter your website name where you’ll use this container. We’ll use “Your Website” as example

Under “Where to Use Container” select “Web Pages”, you can add your domain (optional) for useful suggestions throughout the interface. Set the time zone and click “Create Account and Container”. Accept the policy in the popup window, and on the next screen you’ll get your Google Tag Manager code.

This is the code you need to add to your website, immediately after the opening tag. Now when you access Google Tag Manager, you’ll see your account “Your Company” on the account list.

By clicking your account name “Your Company” you’ll be taken to the screen with the list of your containers.

To manage a container, click its name on the list. The next screen is for managing the tags in your GTM container.

We’ll need to create two tags, one basic analytics for tracking pegeviews and another one for tracking ecommerce transactions.

Click “New” and select “Tag” from the dropdown.

For the basic analytics tag add name “Basic Analytics”, select Tag Type -> Google Analytics -> Universal Analytics
For Tracking ID put in your tracking ID from Google Analytics
Under “Track Type” select “Page View”
This tag must fire on all pages. On the right where it says “Firing Rules” click add and select the pre-defined “All pages” rule. Click Save
Save your new tag and create the eCommerce tracking tag using these details:

Tag Name eCommerce tracking
Tag Type -> Google Analytics -> Universal Analytics
Tracking ID – again your tracking ID from Google Analytics
Under “Track Type” select “Transaction”

This tag must fire on your receipt page, where the data layer is located (we’ll add that in the next section). You need to create a rule for your receipt page. On the right where it says “Firing Rules” click add and select “Create new rule”. As condition set {{url}} equals and type in your receipt page URL.

Save your rule and your new tag. You’ll be taken back to the container management screen. In the top right corner click Publish, then in the small popup click “Create Version and Publish”

Once you add the GTM container code to your website after the opening tag, the analytics tags we’ve added to the container will be live. You’re now tracking regular Google Analytics.

Creating the dataLayer

The dataLayer is a small javascript JSON object that holds a list of key-value pairs to be used in Google Tag Manager. Actually Google Tag Manager pulls the data from the data layer on your website for the Google Analytics eCommerce tracking tag that will send the data to Google Analytics.

The below code is based on Google’s example, but rewritten to output the dataLayer instead of the Universal Analytics snippet

You can use this on your thank you page or receipt page, simply change out the sample data to match your own data and you’re good to go. You’ll need a programmer or someone that’s comfortable with php/javascript and coding to implement this for you. Alternatively, contact us and we can get installed for you in an hour or two. We’ll be doing a follow up post here to show you how to implement this on all the common WordPress ecommerce plugins.

'1234', 'affiliation'=>'Acme Clothing',
               'revenue'=>'11.99', 'shipping'=>'5', 'tax'=>'1.29');

// List of Items Purchased.
$items = array(
  array('sku'=>'SDFSDF', 'name'=>'Shoes', 'category'=>'Footwear', 'price'=>'100', 'quantity'=>'1'),
  array('sku'=>'123DSW', 'name'=>'Sandles', 'category'=>'Footwear', 'price'=>'87', 'quantity'=>'1'),
  array('sku'=>'UHDF93', 'name'=>'Socks', 'category'=>'Footwear', 'price'=>'5.99', 'quantity'=>'2')
);
?>

The World Is Your Oyster

Once you have the above code correctly installed, you can then see the ecommerce data flow in as transactions mount up. If you’ve never had this data in your account before, it will be a big change. The whole way you look at Google Analytics will change. So where to from here? I’d recommend the Digital Fundamentals course that’s free at the Analytics Academy. When you’re done with that, the Ecommerce Analytics course (also free) is well worth investing a few hours in.

Get the Flash Player to see this Google Ads tutorial about building your keyword list.

The post Google Analytics Ecommerce Tracking Using Google Tag Manager first appeared on Redfly Online Marketing, Dublin, Ireland.

Google I/O Live Stream – Watch the 2014 I/O Keynote & Events

Dave Davis — Wed, 25 Jun 2014 15:49:59 +0000

One of the benefits of being an Google Ads Top Contributor is that we get invited to big events like I/O without having to enter the lottery. Unfortunately, I couldn’t make it this year due to a combination of workload and injury. Fortunately, there have been many neat advances in live streaming technology in the past few years with Google at the forefront of that technology. You can now watch the live stream of the Google I/O keynote and subsequent events below. I’ve also included a schedule and timetable for those who don’t have a whole two days to watch every minute. What do you hope is revealed this year? For me, I’m hoping that we get some extended Android widget functionality and some greater API access. Keynote starts at 5pm GMT.

What do you think of the announcements?

June 25

9am

Keynote
Level 3 Video

11am

Android Studio startup station
Code Lab
Taking on accessibility challenges in complex web applications
Develop Sandbox: Accessibility
Android and cloud
Develop Sandbox: Android
NVIDIA tooling and performance
Develop Sandbox: Android NDK / Gaming Performance
Jank-free performance audits
Develop Sandbox: Chrome
Predicting the future in the Cloud
Develop Sandbox: Cloud
End-to-end testing and continuous integration with Dart
Develop Sandbox: Dart
Organizing code and managing dependencies
Develop Sandbox: Go
Developer workflow around Docker containers
Develop Sandbox: Cloud
Europe meetup
Community Lounge
Live UX review: Wearables
Design Sandbox
DevOps power tools
Develop Sandbox: Cloud
Testing techniques
Develop Sandbox: Go

12pm

Nest API startup station
Code Lab
North America meetup
Community Lounge
Accessibility developer tools in Chrome
Develop Sandbox: Accessibility
Framework for device storage and SD cards
Develop Sandbox: Android
The power tools of Chrome DevTools
Develop Sandbox: Chrome
Optimizing Dart Applications
Develop Sandbox: Dart
Intel tooling and performance
Develop Sandbox: Android NDK / Gaming Performance
Containers on Google App Engine
Develop Sandbox: Cloud
Google Developers Group women meetup
Community Lounge
Making your code faster: benchmarking and profiling
Develop Sandbox: Go
Large scale data processing in the Cloud
Develop Sandbox: Cloud

1pm

Google Cloud Platform startup station
Code Lab
South America meetup
Community Lounge
Making your cloud apps Google-fast
Room 1 Video
HTML5 everywhere: How and why YouTube uses the Web platform
Room 3
Making money on Google Play
Room 4
Perf culture
Room 5
Polymer and the Web Components revolution
Room 6 Video
Who cares about new domain names? We do. If you want happy users, then you should too.
Room 7 Video
What's new in Android
Room 8 Video
Accessible web components
Develop Sandbox: Accessibility
SDK tools for performance
Develop Sandbox: Android
Building set-top box UIs with Dart
Develop Sandbox: Dart
Keys to successful distribution of Android games
Distribute Sandbox
Open-source technologies from the Hadoop ecosystem as part of your Cloud toolkit
Develop Sandbox: Cloud
Design community panel
Design Sandbox
Google I/O first-timers meetup
Community Lounge
Unity tooling and performance
Develop Sandbox: Android NDK / Gaming Performance
10 things I learned from the Chrome OS source
Develop Sandbox: Chrome
Camlistore: Android, ARM, App Engine, everywhere
Develop Sandbox: Go
AdMob and Google Analytics office hours
Distribute Sandbox
Massively scalable backends for MMO and mobile games
Develop Sandbox: Cloud

2pm

Polymer startup station
Code Lab
Robotics meetup
Community Lounge
Google Play services Rocks!
Room 1 Video
Android power performance primer
Room 3
Google Play power session
Room 4
Making sense of online course data
Room 5
Polymer and Web Components change everything you know about Web development
Room 6 Video
Zero to hero with Google Cloud Platform
Room 7 Video
Cross-platform design
Room 8 Video
Introduction to Android accessibility
Develop Sandbox: Accessibility
SDK tools for layouts
Develop Sandbox: Android
Unlocking the potential of GoogleAnalytics logs using Google BigData services
Develop Sandbox: Cloud
Using Polymer with Dart and JavaScript
Develop Sandbox: Dart
How crashing my startup taught me to work at Y Combinator
Distribute Sandbox
Building a web app on App Engine
Develop Sandbox: Go
Scaling NoSQL performance on Google Cloud Platform
Develop Sandbox: Cloud
Meetup for Chinese speakers
Community Lounge
Enable Google Cast for your application
Develop Sandbox: Chrome
Qualcomm tooling and performance
Develop Sandbox: Android NDK / Gaming Performance
Building a Lambda Architecture in 10 minutes with BigQuery, CEP and Docker
Develop Sandbox: Cloud

3pm

Android Studio startup station
Code Lab
Build better products, not more features: UX design for developers
Workshop Room 1
Google [x] presents: Solve for X - Accelerating moonshot projects
Workshop Room 2
Biologically inspired models of intelligence
Room 1 Video
HTTPS Everywhere
Room 2
Perfectly executing the wrong plan
Room 3
Connecting Cloud and Web: Deploying end-to-end apps with Dart
Room 4
The design sprint: from Google Ventures to Google X
Room 5
Achieving more with Mobile Cloud
Room 6 Video
Big data, the Cloud way: Accelerated and simplified
Room 7 Video
Wearable computing with Google
Room 8 Video
Live UX review: Web
Design Sandbox
Accessibility for Android custom views
Develop Sandbox: Accessibility
Debugging Dart apps with WebStorm
Develop Sandbox: Dart
3 days of building useless stuff - the makings of the world's craziest makers conference
Distribute Sandbox
Sourcegraph: A code search engine in Go
Develop Sandbox: Go
Continuous integration with Google Cloud Release Pipelines
Develop Sandbox: Cloud
Build for the multi-device Web
Develop Sandbox: Chrome
Google Play office hours
Distribute Sandbox
BigQuery logs analysis
Develop Sandbox: Cloud

4pm

Google Cloud Platform startup station
Code Lab
Quantified Self meetup
Community Lounge
Bridging the gap between the web and apps
Room 2
Grow your app with Google identity: Engaging users wherever they are
Room 3
Unlock the next era of UI development with Polymer
Room 4
Containerizing the Cloud with Docker on Google Cloud Platform
Room 5
Android fireside chat
Room 6 Video
Ignite
Room 7 Video
Designing for wearables
Room 8 Video
Designing for Google Cast
Design Sandbox
Android accessibility updates
Develop Sandbox: Accessibility
GC and Jank in Art
Develop Sandbox: Android
ARM tooling and performance
Develop Sandbox: Android NDK / Gaming Performance
Building end-to-end apps with Cloud, Mobile, and Dart
Develop Sandbox: Dart
Authentication and third party APIs
Develop Sandbox: Go
Silicon Valley startups and incubators vs. global ones
Distribute Sandbox
Putting out fires in your production application
Develop Sandbox: Cloud
Korean developers meetup
Community Lounge
#AccessibilityMatters
Design Sandbox
Building App Engine with Gradle in Android Studio
Develop Sandbox: Cloud
Google Play office hours
Distribute Sandbox

June 26

9am

Google Cloud Platform startup station
Code Lab
Glassware design sprint
Workshop Room 1
Google [x] present: Solve for X - Accelerating moonshot projects
Workshop Room 2
Going responsive with the Google Play Apps Suite
Room 1 Video
Casting to the future
Room 3
How we built Chrome Dev Editor with the Chrome platform
Room 4
The next five billion gamers
Room 5
A 3D tablet, an OSCAR, and a little cash. Tango, Spotlight, Ara. ATAP.
Room 6 Video
Going global with Google Play
Room 7 Video
What’s new in Android development tools
Room 8 Video
Introduction to Android accessibility
Develop Sandbox: Accessibility
Renderscript
Develop Sandbox: Android
ARM tooling and performance
Develop Sandbox: Android NDK / Gaming Performance
Predicting the future in the Cloud
Develop Sandbox: Cloud
Tips and tricks for upgrading business critical web apps to Dart
Develop Sandbox: Dart
Building a web app on App Engine
Develop Sandbox: Go
Don't Listen to Users, Sample Their Experience!
Distribute Sandbox
Live UX review: Android
Design Sandbox
Optimizing for the user experience with WebPagetest
Develop Sandbox: Chrome
Developer workflow around Docker containers
Develop Sandbox: Cloud
Driving login velocity across multiple platforms with Google+ Sign-In
Distribute Sandbox

10am

Polymer startup station
Code Lab
Android Wear: The developer's perspective
Room 1 Video
Field of view
Room 2
Instant Buy everywhere
Room 3
The ART runtime
Room 5
Making the mobile web fast, feature-rich, and beautiful
Room 6 Video
The dawn of "Fast Data"
Room 7 Video
Cross-platform interaction design
Room 8 Video
Accessibility for Android custom views
Develop Sandbox: Accessibility
SDK tools for performance
Develop Sandbox: Android
DevOps power tools
Develop Sandbox: Cloud
Server-side Dart programming in Google Cloud
Develop Sandbox: Dart
Making Google Cast apps discoverable
Distribute Sandbox
Sourcegraph: A code search engine in Go
Develop Sandbox: Go
Nordics meetup
Community Lounge
Optimizing the mobile experience with PageSpeed insights
Develop Sandbox: Chrome
Google Play flipped panel
Distribute Sandbox
Qualcomm tooling and performance
Develop Sandbox: Android NDK / Gaming Performance
Containers on Google App Engine
Develop Sandbox: Cloud
Authentication and third party APIs
Develop Sandbox: Go

11am

Android Studio startup station
Code Lab
Middle East meetup
Community Lounge
Design sprints with Google Ventures
Workshop Room 1
Inspirational design
Room 1 Video
Transforming democracy and disasters with APIs
Room 2
Upgrading the engine mid-flight: How Google improves its web apps without downtime
Room 3
The future of Apps and Search
Room 4
Less code, more services, better Android apps
Room 5
Mobile Web performance auditing
Room 6 Video
Views from Everywhere: Bringing developers the world's largest geo photo library
Room 7 Video
Advanced Android UI
Room 8 Video
Android accessibility updates
Develop Sandbox: Accessibility
SDK tools for layouts
Develop Sandbox: Android
All-in: Using Dart for everything
Develop Sandbox: Dart
How to distribute on Chrome Web Store
Distribute Sandbox
Francophone meetup
Community Lounge
10 things I learned from the Chrome OS source
Develop Sandbox: Chrome
Large scale data processing in the Cloud
Develop Sandbox: Cloud
Distributing Native Code on the web using PNaCl
Distribute Sandbox
Camlistore: Android, ARM, App Engine, everywhere
Develop Sandbox: Go

12pm

Nest API startup station
Code Lab
Meetup en Español
Community Lounge
Prototyping with Polymer
Design Sandbox
Taking on accessibility challenges in complex web applications
Develop Sandbox: Accessibility
Android and cloud
Develop Sandbox: Android
Request quest: Test your knowledge of obscure browser behavior
Develop Sandbox: Chrome
Open-source technologies from the Hadoop ecosystem as part of your Cloud toolkit
Develop Sandbox: Cloud
Building composable server-side Dart apps with Shelf
Develop Sandbox: Dart
Our favorite prototyping tools
Design Sandbox
Nippon meetup
Community Lounge
Intel tooling and performance
Develop Sandbox: Android NDK / Gaming Performance
Massively scalable backends for MMO and mobile games
Develop Sandbox: Cloud
Go compilation complexities
Develop Sandbox: Go

1pm

Google Cloud Platform startup station
Code Lab
Africa meetup
Community Lounge
You want me to measure what?! Turning qualitative information into quantitative data
Workshop Room 1
Accessibility developer tools in Chrome
Develop Sandbox: Accessibility
Framework for device storage and SD cards
Develop Sandbox: Android
5 Chrome DevTool tricks for a faster mobile website
Develop Sandbox: Chrome
Mobile Dart workflows in Chrome Dev Editor
Develop Sandbox: Dart
Saving time and money with Google Wallet office hours
Distribute Sandbox
Cross-platform design panel
Design Sandbox
Unlocking the potential of GoogleAnalytics logs using Google BigData services
Develop Sandbox: Cloud
Organizing code and managing dependencies
Develop Sandbox: Go
Asia meetup
Community Lounge
Integrating your app with the Knowledge Graph office hours
Distribute Sandbox
Scaling NoSQL performance on Google Cloud Platform
Develop Sandbox: Cloud

2pm

Android Studio startup station
Code Lab
Australia and New Zealand meetup
Community Lounge
Nest for developers
Room 1 Video
Google Play Games: A developer perspective
Room 2
How 20% engineers built Santa Tracker
Room 3
Making music mobile with the Web
Room 5
Taming your cloud applications with intelligent monitoring
Room 6 Video
Maximize app engagement, monetization and distribution
Room 7 Video
Graphical Android: Rich effects for great user interfaces
Room 8 Video
Faster mockups with design resources
Design Sandbox
Accessible web components
Develop Sandbox: Accessibility
Frameworks for enterprise and device management
Develop Sandbox: Android
Using JavaScript libraries with Dart
Develop Sandbox: Dart
Distributing your Glassware
Distribute Sandbox
Unity tooling and performance
Develop Sandbox: Android NDK / Gaming Performance
Building a Lambda Architecture in 10 minutes with BigQuery, CEP and Docker
Develop Sandbox: Cloud
Testing techniques
Develop Sandbox: Go
Smartphone websites: UX review
Design Sandbox
Your first look at Polymer
Develop Sandbox: Chrome
Google Play office hours
Distribute Sandbox

3pm

Nest API startup station
Code Lab
Deconstructing the user journey
Workshop Room 1
Cross-platform visual design and imagery
Room 1 Video
Security at scale at Google
Room 2
Building great multi-media experiences on Android
Room 3
Play Games: Evolution of our beloved form of entertainment
Room 4
Developing across Devices - DevTools in 2014
Room 5
DevOps at the speed of Google
Room 6 Video
Maps for good: Saving trees and saving lives with petapixel-scale computing
Room 7 Video
Innovate with the Glass Platform
Room 8 Video
Live UX review: Android
Design Sandbox
API case study from IDEAL Group
Develop Sandbox: Accessibility
Continuous integration with Google Cloud Release Pipelines
Develop Sandbox: Cloud
Accessing Cloud Datastore from Dart
Develop Sandbox: Dart
How to get, keep and monetize users on Google Play
Distribute Sandbox
Making your code faster: benchmarking and profiling
Develop Sandbox: Go
Best practices and common mistakes in SEO
Develop Sandbox: Chrome
BigQuery logs analysis
Develop Sandbox: Cloud
AdMob and Google Analytics office hours
Distribute Sandbox

4pm

Google Cloud Platform startup station
Code Lab
Maker meetup
Community Lounge
Redesigning Google Maps
Room 1 Video
Strengthening communities with technology: A discussion with Bay Area Impact Challenge finalists
Room 2
Design principles for a better mobile web
Room 5
Robotics in a new world - Presented by Women Techmakers
Room 6 Video
Predicting the future with the Google Cloud Platform
Room 7 Video
Cross-platform motion design
Room 8 Video
Accessibility Q&A, consulting, and demos
Develop Sandbox: Accessibility
GC and Jank in Art
Develop Sandbox: Android
NVIDIA tooling and performance
Develop Sandbox: Android NDK / Gaming Performance
Putting out fires in your production application
Develop Sandbox: Cloud
Distributing appealing apps: How to make them love your apps
Distribute Sandbox
Building App Engine with Gradle in Android Studio
Develop Sandbox: Cloud

The post Google I/O Live Stream – Watch the 2014 I/O Keynote & Events first appeared on Redfly Online Marketing, Dublin, Ireland.

Quickly Create Keyword Lists with the RedFly Keyword Manager Tool

Sinead — Tue, 05 Nov 2013 17:10:34 +0000

The most time intensive and tedious task when using Google Ads is creating your keyword lists for new ad campaigns. Not only can it take hours putting together your keywords lists, on top of that you have to make sure to include as many variations and misspellings of each word that you can think of and at the same time make sure not to have duplicate keywords or characters.

With problems such as this in mind we came up with a practical and simple solution – the RedFly Keyword Manager Tool, a tool we use every day that is so useful that we thought we would share it and hope others would benefit from it too. It’s completely free so download it now and play around.

Use Case: Setting Up a Google Ads Ad Group

To demonstrate how we use this tool lets us consider a real world example of setting up a new ad group in Google Ads.

If I wanted to run ads for the Apple iPhone 4 and quickly needed keyword ideas I could use the Amazon.com listing for this product combined with the Google Ads Keyword Tool to produce a list of 300 keywords.

The Google Ads Keyword Tool extracts information from the content of the webpage that you input and gives you back related terms that people actually search for. There are various geographical, language and category adjustments you can make to this tool which means that it produces slightly different results based on these, so make sure to choose the settings that apply to your own Google Ads campaign. This tool can produce up to 800 suggested keywords at a time, but if you’re not logged into Google Ads you will only get 100.

Armed with your list of keywords the next step is to figure out which keywords you want to rule out. Working with a list of a possible 800 keywords this could be a daunting task, but using the RedFly Keyword Manager Tool makes this task that much easier.

The first step is getting your suggested keywords into our tool so you can manipulate that list in an efficient manner.

Download all of the keyword ideas from the Google Ads Keyword Tool. Open this Excel file and then copy the first column (all of your suggested keywords) into the RedFly Keyword Manager Tool by clicking + Add under the Create List menu. The Add Keywords dialogue box will ask you to input the keywords one entry per line, but copying direct from the Excel file will allow you to do this simply by copying and pasting directly into the input box and clicking ok. You can also import a keyword list from a text file by clicking Import on the Create List menu.

Once you have your keywords list added to the RedFly Keyword Manager Tool you can then begin removing the unsuitable keywords. In our example we want to advertise the iPhone 4, so it’s necessary for us to remove any keywords relating to the older models of the iPhone. Though it’s tempting to keep all of these keywords intact because some might yield a significant number of monthly searches, don’t forget that the more targeted your keywords and ad text the better it is for your quality score.

Without the RedFly Keyword Manager Tool you would need to sift through this long list of keywords and delete the unsuitable ones manually, instead it’s simply a matter of batch modifying or cleaning the keywords. By clicking on Clean under the Change menu and selecting Unwanted Terms we can remove all instances of the term “3G” and “3Gs” from any keywords in our list. This does not delete keywords containing the terms we select, it deletes the term from the keyword. So, for example the keyword “16gb iPhone 3G” now becomes “16gb iPhone”.

However, we may already have the keyword “16gb iPhone” somewhere in our keyword list, so the next step is to make sure we have no duplicate keywords. By clicking on Delete under the Create menu we can choose Duplicate Entries, which will automatically remove any keywords which were exactly the same. In this example we were able to remove 32 duplicate entries quickly and easily. Here we would also want to remove any instances of the words “refurbished” and “used”, and again we use the Unwanted Terms option.

We might also want to highlight certain keywords in order to decide whether to modify or delete them from our list. In our example we might want to search for keywords containing the words “generation”, “1st”, “2nd” etc. as this relates to the language used to describe the various versions of the Apple iPhone. By clicking on Highlight under the Handle Output menu, and choosing Entries That Contain and Word Anywhere, we can easily view any keywords that have these words in them and then delete or modify them accordingly.

When you are happy with your cleaned up keyword list we recommend you export this keyword list and save it to a text file. Under the Handle Output menu choose Export, and All To Text File to permanently save your keyword list. Once this is saved you will then have the freedom to create additional keyword lists, so if you make a mistake you can go back to the original set of keywords and experiment with the RedFly Keyword Manager Tool freely.

For example you may wish to massively increase your keyword list by adding misspellings. You can add misspelling by choosing Multiply under the Change menu and selecting Add Misspelled Words. You have a variety of options here, the more boxes you tick the bigger your keyword list will be expanded. In this example we select all of the options and turn our 200+ keyword list up to a massive 24,000+ at the touch of a button, covering all your bases for this particular product.

You can also use the additional tabs to experiment with the various other options the tool offers. Under the Handle Output menu, selecting Export and All To Another List allows you to replicate your primary (List A) keyword list into the other tabs. Or you can choose to Export only the highlighted keywords.

When you’re happy with any of the results of these other keyword lists you can then use Export option to add them to your primary (List A) keyword list. If you make any changes to your primary keyword list that you are happy with, make sure to save it to a text file or you will lose all your work when you close the tool. Using the additional tabs and saving as a text file is a great way to ensure you can build your list without losing any of your work.

In our example, the 24,000+ keyword list we created is actually too large for this particular campaign and a large keyword list such as this probably isn’t suitable for everyone. What we recommend is that instead of creating misspellings of your entire keyword list that you use the RedFly Keyword Manager Tool to create misspellings of specific keywords in the additional tabs space and then add them into your primary (List A) list. If we wanted to add some misspellings of just the word “iPhone” we could use the List B tab to create these and then use then Export them into List A.

Or we could use the Replace Words and Duplicate option found under the Multiply menu, which would allow us to replace specific words while also retaining the original keywords. So all our keywords that contain the word “iPhone” would remain, and would be duplicated, but with the word “iPhone” spelt “iFone”, effectively doubling the keyword list.

Overall, the best feature of the RedFly Keyword Manager Tool is its ability to batch modify keywords, such as adding misspellings, removing unsuitable terms from keywords and more. You can also add words to the beginning or end of all your keywords. This could come in handy when you have multiple campaigns targeting different locations and you want to include the location name at the end of each keyword in each ad group. You can also use this tool to turn your keyword lists into keyword tags for SEO, using the handy Export all to Clipboard (Comma Separated) option.

There are quite a few other features which are outlined on its official page (this post would be three times as long if I was to cover each and every one) and you will also find the installation details there too.

Share This Tool

Like any of our free tools we love to hear feedback about it, so if you download it and find the RedFly Keyword Manager Tool useful to you, please do let us know.

We work hard to maintain all of our free tools, and in exchange all we ask is that you help us spread the word about them. Any retweet, stumble or Facebook share or share to any social network at all would make us very happy and motivate us to add to our growing list of internet marketing tools.

The post Quickly Create Keyword Lists with the RedFly Keyword Manager Tool first appeared on Redfly Online Marketing, Dublin, Ireland.

Make Last Month’s Questions This Month’s Content Strategy

Dave Davis — Sat, 26 Oct 2013 12:36:15 +0000

So many clients tell us that they don’t know what to write on their company blog or that their topics are boring and will not attract links. Matt Cutts put it nicely at a talk I attended at Google in Dublin last year that “Everybody in this room knows something or knows how to do something that nobody else does. Everybody in this room knows something that someone else WANTS to know”. The problem is, how do you find out what that “something” is and how can you tell in advance what the pay off for answering that question will be?

Not only is there an easy answer to that question, with a little bit of savvy, you can also be sure that your time isn’t wasted and that the content you create will almost certainly convert into a new lead or sale. In this blog post, I will outline a method of generating content that will involve a bit of practice to get right, but once mastered, you’ll never run out of content ideas again. Seriously.

Background

A lot of our blog posts are inspired by questions that clients ask over and over again but also by questions people had before arriving at our site. For example, Arnold wrote an excellent post on why you may need to redesign your website to benefit from SEO. This post was created after we found out that someone found our site after searching Google for the phrase “do I need to redesign my website to rank in google?” The person looking for an answer for this question found us at least a few pages deep so must have been quite frustrated after not finding an answer to their question. We know that when they found us, they converted into a lead (GA goal tracking).We know now that we should be number 1 or at least first page of the search results for that term, even if it doesn’t bring much traffic.

This week, the 2013 B2B Content Marketing Benchmarks, Budgets and Trends [Research Report] was released. Scott Brinker highlights something interesting though:

Coincidentally — or perhaps not — the biggest challenge for B2B content marketers last year was “producing the kind of content that engages.” This year, the biggest challenge is “producing enough content.” Now, I wouldn’t want to confuse correlation with causation, but one possible narrative is this: to create engaging content, you need to create it (mostly) yourself. And that takes quality time and effort, a trade-off to some degree in volume.

Jennifer Van Iderstyne wrote a great post about link building with answers here. However, this is only one piece of the puzzle. Jennifer is using more general and unverifiable data for her questions, which is perfectly fine. I wanted to go into a little more detail on how you can use your own data to create content that not only generate interest and traffic, but are practically guaranteed to convert.

So, how do you do it? You do this using the plethora of conversion data that you already have from Google Analytics and Google Ads.

Step 1

The first step is to find out what content your potential customers are looking for. Better yet, the questions your potential customers are asking before buying. Knowing what questions or concerns your customers have means that you can reach out to them and answer their concerns for them in a blog post or video before they get a chance to find your competitors offering. So how on earth do you find out what content your potential customers want to see? The answer, as always, is in the analytics.

Open up Google Analytics (if it’s not already permanently open) and navigate to the “Traffic Sources -> Search -> Organic” report. You’ve probably seen this report thousands of times and are quite frankly unimpressed with the data/crumbs that Google gives you here. Fortunately, for the purposes of generating content ideas, we’re in luck. All you need to do is type a question mark in the search box as shown below. Hit enter and voilà. Instant content ideas!

The report shows the search terms that your site appeared in search results for when someone typed in a question (bonus points for spotting the 81 people REALLY i. These are all visits so you know that your product or service is somewhat relevant. It gives you the ideal list of common questions, concerns and problems that your potential customers are having and need solved. Hopefully by you. Why create blog post or video content based on flimsy public keyword research when you can demonstrate that you and your company can solve their exact problem? They wont need to look elsewhere. But hold your horses, let’s fine tune this a bit more.

If you have low volumes of traffic, try expanding your reports to a longer date range. Don’t be afraid to go back and see what people were asking last year. Additionally, you can fine tune by replacing the question mark with question words like “who”, “what”, “where”, “when” and “how”.

Step 2

Now, most of us are busy people. Rather than spending weeks/months churning out masses of content, why not make sure that you’re answering/solving the most profitable questions/problems? Let’s do some cross referencing with Google Ads.

Log into Google Ads and pull your actual trafficked keyword data from Google Ads. To do this, go into your Google Ads account and, without selecting a campaign (or selecting one, depending on how specific you want your keywords to be), click on the “Keyword Details” option. Then select “All”. This will give you a list of all the actual keywords that sent traffic to your site and not just the keywords that triggered your ads.

After Google Ads goes away for a minute and pulls the data, you should be presented with a nice list of sortable keywords This is one of the most valuable pages you will find in the Google Ads interface. Since Google did away with providing most organic keyword data in Google Analytics, even using Google Tag Manager, this is where you get it now. Unfortunately, you have to pay for it.

As you can see, this is pretty valuable data. For the purposes of this exercise, what we’re looking to do is find some keywords with a decent conversion rate and high ROI (Conversion Value/Cost). We need to pick 2-3 keywords that not only convert well, but match the topic/question asked in step 1 above. What’s even more important is that you pick keywords that you are not already ranking in first place for. I’ll be covering the real value of these particular keywords in my next post, so stay tuned.

In the screenshot above, you can see that the two keywords that we selected in the previous step are ranking in position #4 on Google.com. Those are what we’re looking for.

So at this point, we have:

A list of valuable topics that are actively being searched for. Not only that, but topics that you’re currently ranking somewhere for already.
A (cross referenced) list of keywords that you can use in your content for internal anchor text linking and stemming.
A list of proven valuable keywords that you can sprinkle into your content to improve your search rankings for.

From here, with sets of topics paired with multiple keywords, you can start to build out your SEO/Content Strategy. A handy tip is to perform the above searches and researches based on this month’s data and pop the topic-keyword paired sets into the WordPress Editorial Calendar for next month’s posting schedule. If you’ve got a bigger team, you can assign topics out to multiple team members. Perhaps the team member who could write most authoritatively on the topic. The new content is bound to generate more search data and the cycle continues helping you become an authority in your niche.

The title of the post(s) should be the question itself to help with the link anchor text. If people link to you with the exact question as the anchor text, you should have no problem ranking organically for the question itself and it’s very common for people to link to sites using the title of the post or title tag of the post (Yes, they can be different and in most cases should).

You can use the questions being asked to build out individual articles, a series of articles or even a whopper ebook or whitepaper. When people link to an article, they sometimes link to the article with the entire title as the anchor text, Aaron made a fantastic point about this in his post Using Site Search Keyword Data to Create Related Content. The links are self self-reinforcing (how’s that for perfectly illustrating the point?)

Bonus

Use Site Search. Go to the “Content -> Site Search -> Search Terms” report in Google Analytics. Here you’ll get a slightly more general idea of the questions potential customers are asking when they’re on your site, but you’re not answering.

Conclusion

So there you have it. No need to to guess what content you need to be producing. Your potential customers are already telling you. This is the very reason that we here at Redfly created the extremely popular Google PPC tutorials series. They now drive almost 40% of our site traffic and have resulted in hundreds of conversions. All from typing a question mark into a search box! What questions are your customers asking that you could be answering?

If you’ve found this article helpful, you should probably like and share it using the buttons below. Please also subscribe to our blog for future posts and follow me on twitter. If you have any topics you’d like covered, just ask :)

The post Make Last Month’s Questions This Month’s Content Strategy first appeared on Redfly Online Marketing, Dublin, Ireland.

What Every Google Ads Advertiser Should Know About Quality Score – The Ultimate QS Improvement Guide

Dave Davis — Sun, 20 Oct 2013 00:30:00 +0000

Do you need to improve your Google Ads Quality Score? Do you want to understand what Google wants from you as an advertiser in exchange for a decent Quality Score and lower click prices? Today I will teach you the ins and outs of the algorithm and show you how you can tweak your account and site to influence each Quality Score factor.

*Update: I have been contacted by a source inside Google and updated two points in the post accordingly*

I am constantly surprised at how little advertisers really understand Quality Scores. If you put in a little effort, you can reap some very tangible benefits and come out leaps and bounds ahead of your competition.

SECTION 1: QUALITY SCORE BASICS

While Quality Score is relatively simple to grasp as a concept, it’s a little more complicated in practice. Stasia, an Google Ads Seminar leader, gives you a nice introduction to the basic concept of Quality Score in the video below:

Get the Flash Player to see this Google Ads tutorial about building your keyword list.

The Opportunity.

Back in the good old days, Google Ads was based on a pure auction-based model. If you bid more than another advertiser on a keyword, your ad would appear higher and ultimately get more clicks (and hopefully sales). Back in 2005 when Google introduced the Quality Score, it changed everything.
No longer could search results be flooded with irrelevant ads of those with massive budgets. Many advertisers were very upset, but a unique opportunity arose for those with smaller budgets and the inclination to put in a little hard work — perhaps people like you. With the refinement of the Quality Score algorithm and the great scam / affiliate flush of late 2009, there has never been a better opportunity for those advertisers with a quality product or service and a little time to try to understand Quality Score to really reap the rewards. Are you ready to learn more about Quality Score? Let’s get started.

Why Quality Score Is Important.

Quality Score is extremely important because it can make or break your campaign (and in some cases, your business). Quality Score determines how much you pay for your advertising on Google and how much exposure you get. You wouldn’t place a TV or magazine ad without knowing how much you have to pay or how much exposure you would get, would you? Brian Carter, a humorous motivational speaker and the Director of Search for Online Marketing Agency Fuel Interactive shares some interesting client information over on Search Engine Journal on the inverse relationship between Quality Score and cost per click (CPC). I have reformatted the data below:

As you can see, the higher your Quality Score, the lower the price you pay per click. Also, as you will see below, the higher your Quality Score the more exposure you will get as Google Ads uses Quality Score to determine what Ads are placed in the coveted 1-3 search results above the organic and local search results.

SECTION 2: QUALITY SCORE FACTORS

Types of Quality Score And What They Impact.

According to Google, there are two “types” of Quality Scores. The Google Ads help documentation goes into a little more detail, but the guys over on PPC Hero pretty much nailed it in their Quality Score Handbook (Essential reading by the way) when they said:

Search Network Quality Score is different from Content Network Quality Score. Also there are different Quality Scores for setting minimum bids and ranking ads for the Content Network, Quality Score and the maximum cost-per-click determine the ad rank on content pages. For search, Quality Score, along with maximum CPC, determines ad rank and determines promotion to top of page.

The Google & Search Network Variations/Exceptions.

There are slight variations to the Quality Score formula when it affects ad position and first page bids:

For calculating a keyword-targeted ad’s position, your landing page quality is not a factor. Also, when calculating ad position on a Search Network placement, Quality Score considers the click through rate (CTR) on that particular placement in addition to the CTR on Google.
For calculating first page bid, Quality Score doesn’t consider the matched ad or search query, since this estimate appears as a metric in your account and doesn’t vary per search query.
CTR on Google network, CTR on Google Network impacts QS on the Google Network, not on Google.

The Content Network Variations/Exceptions.

The Quality Score for calculating an ad’s eligibility to appear on a particular content site, as well as the ad’s position on that site, consists of the following factors:

The quality of your landing page
The historical CTR of the ad on this and similar sites

The Quality Score for determining if a placement-targeted ad will appear on a particular site depends on your campaign’s bidding option.

If your campaign uses cost-per-thousand-impressions (CPM) bidding, Quality Score is based on:

The quality of your landing page

If your campaign uses CPC bidding, Quality Score is based on:

The historical CTR of the ad on this and similar sites
The quality of your landing page

Brad Geddes of bgTheory has a handy Quality Score chart with all of this information (reformatted for this post) :

SECTION 3: IMPROVING YOUR QUALITY SCORE

Now that you know as much as Google is prepared to share about Quality Score, how it is calculated, and roughly how much weight is given to each factor, what factors can you as an advertiser realistically influence? As it happens, quite a lot! Let’s go into each of the major factors and look at what we can improve.

Improving Your Quality Score for the Search Network

The CTR and historical CTR of the keyword and the matched ad on Google

The CTR of your ad / keyword pair is by far the largest factor in determining Quality Score. The important thing to remember is that the CTR is normalized to your position so your CTR is judged good or bad for Quality Score reasons based on the performance of other ads currently and historically in this position.
Bidding more to move up to the number one position will more than likely improve your CTR, but it will rarely do you any good if your ad doesn’t get a better Quality Score than other ads have received in that position in the past. The goal here is to make your ad so relevant and enticing that the searcher just has on click on it. You can explore the topic of Improving CTR in more depth in some of my previous posts.

It is also important to aggressively research and add negative keywords. This will increase your CTR and reduce your exposure to those searching for something you do not provide. Consider running an Google Ads Search Query Performance report daily or weekly, mining your server log files, or checking your Analytics account for negatives and add them to your campaign negative list. Matthew Mierzejewski has also written a fantastic post on this topic and detailed how negative keywords impact Quality Score.

A final historical CTR improvement tip: always bid (and bid high) on your company or brand name. You will get a massive boost in historical CTR because 70%+ of the time, your ad is what searchers are looking for. You will pay pennies per click and decrease the normalized Quality Score and historical account CTR of any competitors bidding on your brand or company name!

TIP: Here is an extremely important article showing the importance of CTR when determining quality score and reinforces where you, as an advertiser, should be focusing your efforts.

Your account history, which is measured by the CTR of all the ads and keywords in your account

Account history is a tough one and is subject to a lot of speculation. Unfortunately, I believe a lot of it to be true. Advertisers with older accounts which have performed well in the past have a huge advantage over advertisers with new accounts. It can take anywhere from 1 week to 4 months to “shake off” a “bad history.”
This is also what some people refer to as the account level Quality Score. It is not so much a type of Quality Score as it is a factor. Unfortunately, there’s not much that can be done here with a new account apart from making sure that you have a solid understanding of the factors to get your account off to a flying start (ie: a high CTR off the bat).
If you have an old account with a poor historical Quality Score, you might feel tempted to create a new account to counteract this. This is against Google Ads’ policy. If you want to be on the cutting edge and have an appetite for risk, you can beta test new Google Ads search ad formats. New formats generally show huge CTR improvements before they settle into the consciousness of Google users. It’s also important to note that the Google Ads system treats an edited ad like it’s brand new and has no performance history. According to the FAQ here:

Ad position is partly determined by an ad’s relevance to the search query as well as its historical performance on Google. Editing your ad, therefore, can affect its position.

The historical CTR of the display URLs in the ad group

A relatively new addition to the QS family, historical CTR of the display URL in the ad group is an easy one to get right. Make sure you initially split test the hell out of your ads/display URL and make sure you stick with the one that drives the highest CTR. Adding keywords to the subdomain and subdirectory of display URL can give massive improvements. Especially if the keywords are trademarks. Frank Pipolo has some good tips on using test domains for this.

The quality of your landing page

This is another subjective topic. However (and this is very important), Google has hired thousands of what are called “Ads Quality Raters.” These are actual humans outsourced by Google who sit at home and rate your ads and the quality of the pages those ads go to. To improve on this factor, it is important to pay very close attention to the Landing Page and Site Quality Guidelines here. I wrote a quality score post years ago on this exact factor, and a lot of the tips are still relevant.
Google also has thousands of Search Quality Raters, not to be confused with Ads Quality Raters, who look at and rate pages for classification in the organic search results. While I don’t have the Ads Quality Rater operations manual, the Quality Rater document is out in the wild for all to see. I’ve heard there is an awful lot of crossover.

Remember, you should ensure your landing page is capable of passing a human check. Make sure it follows the rules and never forget that once it is reviewed, it will be reviewed again.

The relevance of the keyword to the ads in its ad group

You’ve heard it many times before. Make sure your base keyword is in the ad title, ad text and display URL. Easy peasy, even for the tiny fraction of weight it carries.

The relevance of the keyword and the matched ad to the search query

This one is a little trickier. Again, attack your negative keyword research aggressively — consider it an essential daily task. This is a more advanced area where going through some detailed buying cycle analysis and segmenting search phrase intent can really pay off. The effort-to-reward ratio will vary here. Getelastic has an amazing post on something very similar here.

Your account’s performance in the geographical region where the ad will be shown

This factor is a relatively new addition to the Quality Score algorithm. I wrote a post about using geo-targeting to improve CTR previously, but the important takeaway is not that blanket geo-targeting is the right way to go, but that you should pay attention to the geographic areas that are performing poorly and consider creating a dedicated campaign or adgroup for this area or remove it completely. Run an Google Ads Geographic Performance report to see where you could improve. Consider using local colloquialisms in your ad text for those specific areas to help improve performance.

Other relevance factors

While there is no way to know for sure what all potential factors are, some common sense can be applied here. The first thing to work on is your bounce rate, or more specifically “back-bounce-rate.” Yes, you read that right. Google has mentioned throughout the years that if a visitor clicks your ad and immediately hits the back button, this is an indication that the page was not relevant. In fact, Google explicitly prohibits the disabling of the back button functionality in their policies.

We also have anecdotal evidence that adding your root or base keyword to your landing page title tag and the other keywords in the adgroup around your copy improves Quality Score marginally. If you have the time, it would be ideal to create a landing page for each individual keyword. When this is not possible, a landing page dedicated to each adgroup usually does the trick.

Page Load Time/Other Factors
You may have noticed “page load time” or “site speed” left out of the factors above. To be honest, I’ve never seen a poor Quality Score due to slow page load time. From my experience, as long as your page loads in a reasonable length of time, you don’t even have to worry about this for now. If increasing your page load by a half second has any impact on Quality Score, it is minimal. There are also many other marginal factors I won’t go into, but Bradd Libby does.

Improving Quality Score For Content Network

There is a lot of crossover in the areas where you can improve your Quality Score on the search and content networks. Let’s look at the factors we can influence to improve Quality Score on the content network. In most cases these are a little harder to influence and take a lot more time and resources, but they are worth the effort if you want to succeed on the content network.

The ad’s past performance on this and similar sites

You can do a little or a lot with this one — from site and site section targeting all the way up to joining the community (if it is a forum for example) to get to know the users of the site and what makes them tick. As a member of the site, what ads or ad text would you find most relevant? I have seen some people even targeting the site users themselves (ie: an ad headline that says something like “Attention Redfly Blog Readers! Want to know more about increasing your keyword Quality Score? Click here!“

Another tip is to try image ads and compare their performance against your text ads for each site (if the site accepts image ads). Many advertisers still don’t use image ads, so there is a huge opportunity to jump straight to the top of the pile.

The relevance of the ads and keywords in the adgroup to the site

Consider using Google AdPlanner to get the demographics of the site, and target your ad copy to those demographics. Also have a look at what other AdSense ads are showing on the site and make note of ads that are consistently displayed over time. In general, those ads are what Google finds most relevant to that site (at the time). If you can’t beat them, join them.

The historical CTR of the ad on this and similar sites

Again, use Google AdPlanner to see the “Other sites Visited” section of the site you are targeting. Run a site targeted campaign on some of the lower trafficked related sites. This will improve your “related performance” on similar sites. It might be a lot of effort but not only will you improve overall content network performance, but you will gain significant long tail content network leads or sales.

SECTION 4: Troubleshooting Quality Score

There are numerous things that can cause a sudden drop in Quality Score or a slower, more gradual decrease. Here are some of the most common Quality Score problems and what you can (or cannot) do about them.

Sudden 1/10 Quality Score on all (or most) Keywords & Huge First Page Bid Estimates

This is an extremely common problem and is characterized by an advertiser noticing a very sudden drop in traffic from Google Ads. In a lot of cases, your search network traffic stops first and is followed shortly by your content network traffic. This unfortunately is known as a “Google Slap” and occurs when a review has taken place on your account and you are no longer deemed to be complying with the outlandishly opaque landing page and site quality guidelines.

Cause: You are linking or deemed to be linking to a bridge page, a get rich quick scheme, an affiliate page that’s only purpose is to redirect traffic to another domain, an affiliate site that provides no added value, a data collection site (a site that collects users’ email addresses or other info in exchange for a free product / whitepaper, etc.), a “poor quality” comparison shopping site, an arbitrage site, or a scam site.

Solution: Despite what you think about your own site, Google, the Ads Quality Raters, and the QS Algorithm/Bot feel differently. They more than likely feel your site falls into one of these categories. In this case, there is very little that you can do. If your site falls into the “scam site” category, expect to be banned permanently or investigated by authorities.

If you feel that your site absolutely does not fall into any of the categories, request a quick look over of your site on the Google Ads Help Forum and then request a manual review by contacting Google here.Note that it should be a 100% false positive if you are to get this reversed so be completely sure that your site doesn’t even fall remotely into one of those categories. Remember, Google Ads does not run on auto pilot. Real people will look at and inspect your account.

One High Volume Keyword has a Quality Score Of 2-4

This problem happens when a specific high volume keyword, usually a single word or two-word phrase, slowly drops its Quality Score and starts costing more. Because these keywords are usually high volume, they can generate a lot of traffic, and a low Quality Score on these keywords can cause a significant drop-off in exposure and sales.

Cause: High volume and low CTR.

Solution: Add negative keywords to the campaign, use exact match, remove the keyword (be careful as this can impact an adgroup “theme” on the content network) or place the keyword in it’s own ad group and optimize the ad copy and display URL aggressively.

Very High (Even 10/10) Quality Score but a Huge First Page Bid Estimate

Unfortunately, this is not a problem with your Quality Score. When it comes to certain keywords, there are quite literally hundreds of advertisers. Assume all advertisers also have a 10/10 Quality Score. What determines which ads show? That’s right, good old fashioned bid price.

Cause: High volume of advertisers.

Solution: Bid higher and use the backend to improve ROI and increase lifetime customer value (LTV) so you can afford to bid higher.

In Conclusion

Google Ads Quality Score is still a closely guarded secret, as is Google’s organic search algorithm. While it may not be possible to figure out every factor, just like the organic search ranking factors, it is possible to extract enough meaning to understand them and make them work for you. The great scam / affiliate purge of 2009 may have made things easier for existing advertisers, but at the current growth rate of PPC and online ad spending, it’s only a matter of time before the paid search results become as competitive as they used to be. Those of you who understand Quality Score will be in a far better position to get more from your Google Ads advertising spend than those who do not.

I hope you got some value from this post. If you did, please share it with others who might get something from it via Twitter, Facebook or Google+

The post What Every Google Ads Advertiser Should Know About Quality Score – The Ultimate QS Improvement Guide first appeared on Redfly Online Marketing, Dublin, Ireland.