Jenny Phu, Author at Four15 Digital

Age Targeting in Microsoft Advertising (Bing Ads) Explained

Did you know that performance metrics by age are readily available in the Microsoft Advertising (formerly Bing Ads) user interface? Unlike Google, Microsoft Advertising does not require the advertiser to set up this targeting setting in advance in order to access this information. Advertisers can also drive traffic to or away from certain age groups using bid adjustments available. In today’s blog we’ll go over the basics of Microsoft Advertising’s age targeting feature and how it differs from that of Google Ads. Age Group Segments in Microsoft Ads Like Google, Microsoft segments their audience into various age brackets. Unlike Google, Microsoft also segments their audience into the 13-17 age bracket and can provide basic performance metrics on this age group. Note that Microsoft Advertising does not allow advertisers to target this age group. Below are the age brackets that Microsoft provides insights on: Ages 13-17Ages 18-24Ages 25-34Ages 35-49Ages 50-64Ages 65 and aboveUnknown Note that the Unknown age group encompasses traffic that does not have age data available. Availability of Age Group Data in Microsoft Ads It is worth mentioning that age group data is available for most of your Microsoft Ads traffic in the Microsoft Ads user interface. This is beneficial for advertisers that want readily accessible age group data without having to apply the age groups in observation mode as users would in the Google Ads interface. You can find the age group performance metrics through the following steps in the Microsoft Advertising UI: You can find the age group performance metrics through the following steps in the Microsoft Advertising UI: 3. Under the dimension select, select Age and gender. Following these steps, you will now be able to see the age and gender data for your Microsoft campaigns. Targeting and Excluding Age Groups in Microsoft Ads Microsoft Advertising provides advertisers performance metrics on age groups and makes them easily accessible in the Microsoft Advertising UI. It also allows advertisers to add bid modifiers to those age groups to help drive traffic to or away from select age brackets. As mentioned before, Microsoft does not allow bid modifiers on the 13-17 age group. You can drive more traffic to a particular age group by adding positive bid adjustments to the age group you want to target. For example, if you wanted to drive more traffic to the 65+ age group, you can apply a positive bid modifier of your choice to this age group. To exclude particular age groups from your campaign targeting, you would need to make negative bid adjustments on the age group, up to a -90% bid adjustment. Microsoft does not allow negative bid adjustments beyond -90%. If you want to drive traffic to only a particular age group, you would not only add a positive bid adjustment to this age group but negative bid adjustments of up to -90% to all other age groups. For instance, to drive traffic only to the 65+ age group, you would apply a positive bid modifier of your choice to this age group and add negative bid modifiers to all other age groups. You can access the age group targeting settings through the following steps in the Microosft Advertising UI: All campaigns> Settings > Advanced settings > Targeting > Demographic Below is what you should see when you access the age targeting settings: You now have the basic information on age targeting in Microsoft Advertising to change the age targeting settings in your Microsoft campaigns. You can use these tips too pull the age group performance metrics and to make changes where you see fit to help improve your campaign performance!

Search Lost IS (Rank) Explained

As a search marketer, you have more than likely come across a metric in Google Ads called search lost IS (rank). This is the search impression share lost due to Ad Rank, or the percentage of time your ad was not shown to Google searches that matched your keywords. You may wonder, “How is this metric calculated for my campaigns?”. In this blog we will explain how search lost IS (rank) is calculated by Google and ways you can improve your Ad Rank. What is Ad Rank? To begin, we need to understand what Ad Rank is. Ad Rank is a score that determines your ad position relative to other ads. According to Google the rank is calculated using a combination of the following: How do I find the search lost IS (rank) for my campaigns? Reports in the Google Ads interface will show you your search lost IS (rank) based on various components such as campaign, ad group, keyword, and audiences. If you do not see this metric in the Google Ads interface, you will need to modify the columns in your report to include search lost (IS) rank: You can find search lost IS (rank) in the competitive metrics option: If you decide to add search lost IS (rank) to your reports, we’d also advise adding metrics such as search impression share and search lost IS (budget) to your report. The search impression share indicates your impression share and the search lost IS (budget) indicates the impression share lost due to budget. These metrics will give you a better sense of how strong your impression share is in the ad auction and what portion of your impression share can be improved by adding more budget. Note that your search impression share combined with your search lost IS (rank) and search lost IS (budget) will add up to 100%. How do I reduce my search lost IS (rank)? Reducing your search lost IS (rank) means improving your Ad Rank score. We’ve summarized a few tips that can help you increase your Ad Rank so that your ads can have a higher ad position: You now have the knowledge to lower your search impression share lost to ad rank. Use these steps to improve your ad rank and increase your search impression share on your Google Ads campaigns!

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How to Use SEM For a Small-Scale Business in a Localized Area

Most small businesses will face the decision of what marketing channels to utilize to help grow their business. In this blog we will discuss how these businesses can use search engine marketing (SEM) to market to a local area using various methods available in Google Ads and Decide Your Campaign Goal Microsoft Advertising. Below are some steps to take and features to utilize to do so: It’s important for businesses to define their campaign goals with SEM marketing. For many small businesses, their goal is to generate leads, whether that be a website visit, a form fill or purchase on their website, or a call. The campaign goal must be well-defined and measurable in order to track the success of the campaign. Set up Lead or Conversion Tracking Once you have defined your business goal, you will need to implement tracking of those goals. If your goals are tied to your website, you will need to implement tracking on your website to tracking those goals, whether that be through Analytics or conversion tracking through Google Ads or Microsoft Advertising. If your goals are tied to tracking calls to your business, you will need to instrument call tracking via Google Ads or Microsoft Advertising. Many businesses will utilize a third party call tracking service such as Call Tracking Metrics to the source of the call, the duration of the call, caller phone numbers, call recordings and more! If your goals are tied to store visits, you will need to find a method to link store visits to your SEM marketing campaign. Some businesses will feature special promo codes in their ads for customers to use in-store. Call Extensions If generating calls from potential leads are important for your business, you would need to utilize call extensions so that potential customers that see your ad on mobile can call your business directly. It is advised to use a dedicated phone number for your SEM campaigns to help you determine which of your calls came via an SEM ad. You can set up a dedicated phone number via a third party tracking service. Location Targeting Setting a target radius is important in SEM to ensure your ads are targeting the areas of interest to your business. Most platforms will allow you to set a target radius of an area starting at 1km. It is also important to add location negatives to your campaign to ensure your ads are not showing for geolocations that are not of interest to your campaign to avoid spending on clicks that will likely not convert. Google allows you to adjust your location targeting method to target or exclude people who have been in or shown interest in your target location, people in or are regularly in your target location and people searching for your target location. More details on these options are shown below: Keyword Targeting and Ads Keyword targeting and relevant ad copy are crucial for your ads to show in response to search queries relevant to your business and to attract potential leads to click on your ads. What would someone in need of your business services search for? How would you prepare your ad copy to be relevant to your keywords and to attract leads to click on your ad? Ad Scheduling Small businesses in the service sector will most likely want their ads to run during their business operating hours so they receive leads during operating hours. It would be a less efficient use of ad spend if a lead tried to visit or contact your business and find that your business is closed. Be sure to schedule your ads to run during the times when your business will be available to respond to messages and phone calls. More Information on SEM These are just a few of the various ways that a small service-sector business can use SEM in a localized area to market their business. You can find out more information on using SEM for your business in our blog on how to supercharge your local business with paid search.

Parallel Tracking in Google Ads

If you have experience using Google Ads, you may have heard of Parallel Tracking. This feature is required on Search and Shopping campaigns and will be required for Display campaigns starting July 31, 2019. Parallel tracking will be made available to Video campaigns towards the end of 2019. So what is Parallel Tracking? Parallel tracking is a feature offered by Google Ads that loads your landing pages more quickly by sending visitors directly from your ad to your final URL without redirects. This is intended to reduce potential lost visits, improve ad performance and as a result potentially increase conversions in your campaigns. How does parallel tracking work? Parallel tracking is designed to direct users to your landing page as quickly as possible while also loading tracking URLs in the background. Here’s what the user flow looks like with parallel tracking: Here’s what the user flow would look without parallel tracking: The intention of parallel tracking is to drive visitors to your landing page as quickly as possible. Should I use parallel tracking? Parallel tracking is already enabled and required for Search, Display and Shopping campaigns and will be available for Video campaigns later in 2019. All advertisers that are eligible to use parallel tracking for Video campaigns should enable this feature when this feature is available. Note that Google states this feature is currently not available for Hotel campaigns. Important note: If you are using third party click measurement tools such as TruEffect or Firebase, be sure to check that your third party tool is compatible with parallel tracking to ensure that the feature will work properly for your campaigns. How do I turn on parallel tracking? As mentioned earlier, parallel tracking is already required for Search, Display and Shopping campaigns. This feature will be made available to Video campaigns later in 2019. Below are instructions on how to enable parallel tracking in your Google AdsDisplay campaigns: Now that you know about parallel tracking and how to use it, we encourage you to enable this feature in your Google Ads account to enable this for your Display campaigns today and for your Video campaigns later in 2019!

What is Yelp Strict Category Targeting and Does It Work?

If you currently run ads on Yelp, did you know that Yelp Ads offers a feature called strict category targeting that allows advertisers to strictly target their Yelp ads toward one business category? What is Strict Category targeting? With this feature, advertisers can list up to three business categories on their Yelp profile but limit their ads to target only one of their listed categories. This is a benefit for advertisers that only want to target their paid ads towards a single category but at the same time want their profile to feature other services they may offer. The strict category targeting can be beneficial for certain uses cases. For example, a law firm may want to feature their contract law, employment law and personal injury law services on their profile but may only want to run ads targeting personal injury law services because it is the most lucrative. Note: This feature is not offered in the Yelp Ads user interface but can be enabled by sending a request to your Yelp Ads representative. Testing Strict Category Targeting At the suggestion of our Yelp representative we tried the strict category targeting feature for one of our clients who wanted to receive more leads in a particular business category. This was intended to increase sponsored actions and generate more ad clicks from Yelp searches related to their target category. As a test, we ran this feature for a one month period. Our hypothesis was that it would help increase their number of leads for the targeted category and reduce leads for the other categories. The first week after turning on the strict category targeting our client received one sponsored action related to this target category. No keywords related to their target category appeared in their Yelp keywords report which means that their ads did not show for Yelp searches related to their targeted category. Our client did receive fewer sponsored actions related to the business category they were not targeting. Surprisingly, for the remainder of the month our client continued to receive sponsored actions related to the business categories outside of their strict target category. They received these sponsored actions at the same volume they had received them prior to turning on the strict category targeting. What is also important to note is that during this period their Yelp ads did not receive clicks related to the target category. We contacted our Yelp Ads representative to inquire on why our clients’ ads kept appearing for categories outside of their strict target category and why our client was still receiving sponsored actions for outside categories. We also wanted to find other ways to generate more leads related to their target category. We learned there is actually little else we can do to help our client generate more leads in their targeted category other than Yelp’s suggestion of changing the client’s profile category and ad copy to only feature their strictly targeted category. This is intended to give Yelp users the impression that our client specializes only in this category in hopes of attracting a higher volume of potential leads. We decided not to move forward with this suggestion as we felt this would not appropriately reflect our client’s range of services and expertise. Results Ultimately, the strict category targeting on Yelp did not provide any leads in the long term in the targeted category and we continued to receive leads outside the target category. If you are running Yelp ads and only want to feature your ads towards certain user searches, we recommend frequently updating your list of blocked keywords that appear in your Yelp keywords list that you do not want your ads to appear for. As for receiving more sponsored actions related to your target category, it is important to note that there is little you can do to help generate more leads for your target category other than increasing your Yelp ads budget to generate more traffic and hopefully more leads. In a future blog we’ll go over Yelp features that may help improve your Yelp Ads performance.