Google AdWords Dynamic Search Ads (DSA’s) are a moderately recent addition to the Google AdWords landscape. They are a great way to target additional traffic beyond normal match types to your website. When a search query comes in with keywords that match the content on whichever pages you’ve set up to run dynamic search ads, Google dynamically populates a custom headline based off of the search term.  If you already have existing keywords active, Google holds back that keyword from showing, allowing your existing campaigns to serve ads unabated.

Why might you want to use DSA’s in your Google AdWords paid search campaigns? Perhaps you’re looking for:

• More traffic
• New, broader keywords
• A method to quickly update AdWords campaigns with frequently changing services or products
• A method to quickly update AdWords campaigns to take advantage of seasonal product changes
• Up to 5-10% more clicks and conversions with reasonable ROI
• Missing less searches that are relevant (16% of all Google daily searches are brand new terms)

Where might you not want to use DSA’s?

• Daily deal/coupon sites
• Smaller websites
• Comparison shopping engines/affiliates
• Customizable product/gift websites
• Anytime that  you don’t have time to add in negatives keywords(which bleeds spend)
• Setting Up A DSA Campaign Quickly

Getting setup with dynamic search ads  is pretty easy. In the Campaigns tab in Google AdWords, click on New Campaign > Search Network Only. Make sure you select the Dynamic Search Ads radio button. Give your campaign a name, select a geographic location, set your default bid and budget, decide to activate ad extensions, set a start/end date, and determine when you want your ads to show. Finally, select your exact and phrase match options, we choose to include plurals, misspellings, and other close variants.

Next, name an ad group, fill out description line 1, description line 2, a display URL, and allow the destination URL to dynamically select.  If this is a catch-all campaign, allow the auto-target to go after all pages, save the ad group, and your first DSA campaign will be good to go! Find out more about DSA’s here: https://support.google.com/adwords/answer/2471185?hl=en&ref_topic=1713901

On Tuesday, March 5^th IMI invited some of our local clients in house for an exciting thought-leadership event sponsored by Google called Google Engage. Our clients watched a compelling 2 hour live broadcast from Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, California. As a partner agency to Google, we were delighted to be included in the first ever Google Engage for Agencies event.  Speakers such as Lisa Gevelber, Google’s VP for Americas Marketing, discussed how businesses can grow in this digital age and reach more customers online.  Below are the key takeaways from this event.

Reach Customers at the Zero Moment of Truth

During the session, we were introduced to ZMOT – the Zero Moment of Truth: that instant when customers open their laptops, pick up their smartphones or their tablets, and search the web. They may read a review, look for a coupon, watch a video, or read a blog before making a purchase. With the right digital marketing strategy, you can reach shoppers more often at the right time, in the right place, and with the right content.

At the Zero Moment of Truth, today’s shoppers bounce back and forth at their own unique way in a multi-channel marketplace. They switch devices to suit their needs at any given moment.

The challenge for businesses today is to meet customers where they are online with exactly what they are looking for. For example, regarding YouTube videos, it is a much younger audience curating the content and determining what is cool. So if your target audience is on YouTube, running True View video ads would be a good way to reach them.

You also want to make sure your brand messaging is consistent across TV, tablets and mobile phones and create a good experience on all devices.  So, what can you do to appeal to this growing tablet audience at ZMOT? Find ways to give shoppers the information they want at the time they want it online. Do they want reviews and ratings? If so, a simple way to reach them is to write ad copy that boasts, “Five stars on Yelp.”  You want to give the users what they are looking for by answering  their questions in your content and ad copy. You can also build relationships with your customers through videos, Google Plus hangouts, and social media.

Reaching Your Customers through Mobile and Tablets

Website traffic from tablets and mobile devices increases every day. Therefore, you want to be sure to create tablet-friendly ads and use them in tablet-targeted campaigns. As the Google Mobile Playbook notes, a paid ad that states: “Shop now from your tablet” is a stronger call to action than “Shop online.”

While images on iPhone listings are very small, they also play a big role in leading to conversions. Through eye tracking, Google researchers could tell that users would pause on a listing with positive reviews, then look at the image before making their decision to click or not.

MAT™ – Multi-Attribution Technology

With customers finding your website through so many different channels, it is essential to segment out where they are coming from and trace the click path they used to see what made them buy a product.

If you’re just relying on the last click, you’re missing out on a whole lot of information about user behavior.  Our MAT™ , or multi attribution analytics tool  tracks all the marketing sources that customers are exposed to before making a purchase, thus measuring the success of each digital campaign.

Couples Resorts is a client of ours who has a successful fully integrated digital marketing campaign with Display, SEO, SEM, and Social Media campaigns.  Through using our MAT™ technology, we found that display media is a great introducer to the website.  MAT™ helps us understand the performance of each digital marketing campaign by reporting on the introducers, the influencers, and the closers.

How Our Google Partnership Can Help You

So what can IMI as an agency help you with?  We work with our Google Reps to help our clients reach their goals. Google provides us with a vast amount of data, tools, and education.  Our Google reps help IMI by providing us with their own market research and data of online habits across many industries. We use this information to create a strategy that leads to optimal results for our clients.  For example, Google researchers found that users really pay attention to social signals like reviews.  They found that listings that averaged three or more stars in reviews took 41 out of 47 clicks. Also, the volume of reviews matters. 29 of 47 clicks went to listings that had at least four reviews.

As Google releases new tools and research, we are the some of the first to know.  We help our clients implement these new trends and tools and link their campaigns together across multiple channels.

We also help businesses to engage with their users. At IMI we have a comprehensive data-driven approach to internet marketing.  With our tools, partnerships, and expertise we extract data from all of our clients’ digital channels to help understand user behavior, create content that meets their needs, and ultimately increase ROI and bottom line.

At our Google Engage event, our audience walked away with valuable knowledge and enthusiasm. We look forward for the next Google Engage event and hope to see you there.

In a growing world of SEO, SEM, social media and other forms of internet marketing, infographics are becoming more popular throughout the web. If you’re unfamiliar with infographics, they’re basically visuals that have information and statistics about a topic. You could also find charts, facts and predictions within the all-mighty infographic. By incorporating charts, facts, bold visuals, colors, and other eye-catching details, more attention is drawn to infographics. It is important to attract and hold the attention of the consumer these days with so many other distractions on the web like Facebook, email, Twitter, and a list of other links.

Now that you have a handle on the background of the infographic you’re probably wondering how to create an infographic that will get the people going. One of the key aspects when designing your infographic is to be creative and come up with a layout that will attract people’s attention. Make sure that your infographic is relevant content to your topic and also has some knowledge to send a message about your point. If you’re struggling to get your infographic going, start a flowchart of ideas and go from there. After you get some structure into your chart, start adding color schemes and bold visuals. Don’t forget to put in the research to make your infographic accurate with up-to-date information. Editing is the last key element. You want your image to be easily understood by whomever looks upon it.

Being far more interesting than just plain text and more informative than a picture with a caption, infographics serve as great online marketing tools. You’ll find that infographics have a large effect on your social media marketing as well as search engine optimization. Users intrigued by the infographic share it among friends and co-workers, bringing in those precious inbound links. So next time you consider what strategy to use to build up back-links to your webpage, consider an awesome infographic.

The May 23, 2012 update of the Google Search App for iPhone introduced multiple new features that will both simplify the way users experience the app and expand the capabilities through a vibrant re-imagined image viewer. Everything about the new edition of the app was dedicated to create a smoother, sleeker and more efficient version of the app. The redesign allows for significantly faster search results, higher quality image search and an organized storage space for all Google apps.

The autocomplete feature instantly loads search results with every input of a new letter, making finding information on the go faster than ever before. Navigating between multiple web pages and the search results page is also much easier and more manageable with the slide-in tab aspect that can be swiped to cycle through the various tabs. This is good news to online marketing agencies as it will increase the amount of time spent on websites since the user will not have to leave the page to return to their search results.

The new interface and more brilliant displays may provide internet marketing companies with a new outlet in mobile marketing, now that the image search feature can be viewed full screen in high resolution, with specific details available about each image when they are tapped.

The new organization of Google’s services into one central location on the iPhone may allow mobile SEM services to become more expansive, covering all of Google’s various search options in a single intuitive source. All the new features of this update are certainly something to take advantage of.

As blackouts roll across the web this week, some sites opposed to SOPA/PIPA legislation have kept the lights on in order to maintain their search engine rankings. As one of many tech sites to openly protest the bills facing Congress that would censor the web, Google first offered advice to webmasters on how to close or limit access to their sites without medium-term effects. Now taking it a step further, Google has slowed their web crawlers in an effort to support sites eager to participate in the online demonstration.

Google’s Pierre Far posted instructions on Google+ detailing how to update your site to join the protest of these bills. One such way is using a 503 HTTP status, telling spiders that the site is only temporarily unavailable. By using this code, the content is not designated as “real,” and will not be indexed. Googlebot’s crawlers are automatically slowed when there is a significant spike in 503 statuses. Paired with the manual configuration on Google’s end to reduce the crawl rate, more sites will be protected.

Mr. Far later emphasizes the importance of not altering the robots.txt file on your site  to block any crawlers, as this could affect the recovery of the crawl rate post-blackout. By keeping it simple and avoiding any drastic changes in coding, websites can be involved without severely adverse effects.

Craigslist, Wikipedia, and Reddit are among the list of prominent sites behind the massive social media effort protesting the proposed censorship of Internet data and policing by the Department of Justice. While Bing and Yahoo have not expressed any involvement, search results on these sites may still be influenced.

What do you think of Google’s actions in protest of these bills?

ComScore reported December 2011 U.S. search engine rankings this past week with, to no surprise, Google still in the lead. On a more noteworthy finding is Bing surpassing Yahoo, coming in at the number two spot. When Bing launched as a search engine in June 2009, they were at a mere 8.4 percent search engine market share. As of this past year they now account for 15.1 percent of internet searches.

Google still dominates the market with 65.9 percent market share, and Yahoo dropped to the number three spot at 14.5 percent.

The reported search engine rankings for December 2011, according to comScore, are stated below:

• Google – 65.9% (up from 65.4% in November 2011)
• Bing – 15.1% (+.1 change from November)
• Yahoo – 14.5% (down from 15.1%)
• Ask – remaining at 2.9%
• AOL – remaining at 1.6%

More than 18.2 billion explicit core searches were conducted in December, which is a two percent increase from November. 12 billion searches were placed on Google sites, 2.7 billion were through Bing (up 2 percent), and 2.6 billion on Yahoo! Sites. We are anxious to see if Bing will remain in the number two spot in following months, and maybe even further the gap with Yahoo searches.

Google’s latest tool  involves revamping the search algorithm to allow for a search, verbatim. A normal search on Google will auto correct misspelled words, and substitute synonyms (for example, automobiles to cars), but Google Verbatim will do neither. This will allow for you to search for your exact terms without all the fluff.

“We’ve been listening, and starting today you’ll be able to do just that through verbatim search. With the verbatim tool on, we’ll use the literal words you entered,” says Google.

The Google Verbatim search tool will be located under the “more search tools” on the left side of the Google search results page. Check it out!

It is no surprise that Internet Marketing will continue to grow and start taking additional budget dollars away from traditional marketing. It is surprising by how much the current market is expected to grow in size over the next few years. Check out this chart below. Overall Interactive budgets will soar to above $55 Billion. The Internet Marketing Agencies will continue to take business from traditional agencies as online begins to rule the advertising world.

According to our friends at Blogstorm and Forrester Research, a lot of companies are still not taking advantage of organic SEO. In fact, many companies spend 20 times as much on PPC over SEO even though SEO drives 75% of the traffic.  This will begin to change as more companies realize the benefits of organic SEO.

SEO drives 75%+ of all search traffic, yet garners less than 15% of marketing budgets for SEM campaigns. PPC receives less than 25% of all search traffic, yet earns 80%+ of SEM campaign budgets.