Apple to introduce search ads to its App Store

In what seems like a stark contrast to Apple’s backing away from its longstanding mobile ad marketplace, iAd, the company will instead be getting back to the ad business, allowing app developers to pay for ads to appear on top of search results in the lucrative Apple App Store.

Taking note from both Google and Facebook, Apple is making many moves to make its ad offering more open and accessible than ever.

In the meantime, it is filling holes in its previous iterations of iAd, starting with a self-serve, second price auction-based platform with no initial minimum spends.

Apple’s plan to open up APIs for campaign creation, management, and reporting shows how the tech giant is serious about giving advertisers the tools to make a more automated and simple manual process.

Another smart move to create efficiency is Apple’s Search Match feature, which is similar to Google AdWords Universal App Campaigns in allowing an advertiser who is either more novice or strapped for time to set up a basic campaign in fewer steps.

Basic features such as age, gender, location and OS targeting are available, but they will still be much more limited than Google, Facebook and even Twitter’s capabilities.

Apple’s offering also include two areas that seem more limited than others: creative use and data measurement.

It seems like Apple will initially limit creative use to the assets that are already approved within the App Store. This will handcuff advertisers who are used to developing, testing and driving optimizations through custom designed creative ad iterations.

Apple’s stance to keep tight controls over its user data, however, is not surprising.

Although the company is allowing advertisers to track “clusters of users” by implementing “a few lines of code,” it is unclear if Apple will be partnering with standard third-party app attribution companies, such as TUNE, AppsFlyer and Adjust that would offer more sophisticated ad tracking to an individual user level.

Nevertheless, App marketers will now be able to fully capture search intent in both major app stores and promote their apps across both iOS and Android systems.

Though Apple Search ads will not officially launch until the fall, brands and marketers should immediately opt-in for the beta from Apple’s developer portal given participation is free and free downloads can be garnered now.

Along with Google’s announcements of updates to Google Adwords’ new features a few weeks ago, advertisers should also actively assign their agency partners to develop a smart App Store search strategy that takes advantage of all that both Google and Apple has to offer.

Tim Villanueva is the Head of Media Partnerships at Fetch and a contributor to Search Engine Watch.

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5 Sure Fire Tips For Using Images And Graphics To Build Better Links

Utilising graphics and images for link building is quickly becoming a preferred method for many businesses. They provide an efficient means of getting your message across in a way that interests your audience with a compelling and visually appealing piece of content. Graphics come in many forms but they can […]

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Eight most important PPC tips for online retail

With the share of digital ad spend at 29.9% in 2015 and expected to increase to 39.3% in 2019* the digital advertising marketplace is becoming increasingly competitive for ecommerce retailers.

With this in mind, optimising paid search should be a priority for all retail marketers in 2016. Let’s take a look at some of the most important pay-per-click tips for online retail:

1) Segment Campaigns

Google Shopping and AdWords allow you to bid at product or keyword level, however, this is a feature that many advertisers fail to adopt. It is particularly important in online retail to segment your Google Shopping campaigns to the finest level possible, because your inventory may be seasonal and individual items have different bidding values.

Let’s take ‘women’s clothes’ for example. You could easily just create a single ad group containing all women’s clothes ads; however, this could easily lead to poor performance. It would be a much better decision to segment your products into groups such as ‘blouses’ ‘jumpers’, ‘trousers’ ‘shorts’ etc.

Doing so will allow you to have much better control over bids and bid according to seasonality for example. However this could be taken a step further: it is actually possible to bid for each individual product, so if you know that yellow shorts sell better than the green ones, you can adapt your bids accordingly.

2) Focus on environmental factors

When reviewing your campaign performance, it is tempting to focus on the reasons why you are not making sales, but perhaps you should also be looking at when your campaigns are performing their best?

By looking at the reasons for “good performance,” you may find that your sales can be influenced by environmental factors such as the time of the day, the user’s device or the weather, to which you can also adapt your bidding strategy.

3) Use geographic bid modifiers

For both AdWords and Google Shopping campaigns, consider implementing geographic bid modifiers. Do you only deliver to a certain region? Restrict who can see your ads. Are there some areas that convert better than others? Bid up!

4) Use ad customisers

Resubmitting ads for review can take time and, as the saying goes, ‘time is money’. Ad Customisers, however, allow you to create an ad template containing variables from where a feed automatically updates the template without going through the approval process.

5) Find your unique selling point

The description text in AdWords gives you the opportunity to add a little something extra to your campaigns.

While many advertisers tend to focus on the product or category at hand, you can also focus on your unique selling point (USP) to stand out from your competition. Free delivery is almost a standard feature these days, so consider focusing on shipping times for example.

6) Add negative keywords

Adding negative keywords is an important part of campaign management. Not only does it help you to refine your audience and ensure that you get more qualified clicks, it can also help to revise your bidding strategy.

Using negative keywords to separate brand and non-brand traffic, for example, allows you to bid higher on branded products and therefore on users that are higher up the conversion funnel.

7) A separate strategy for campaigns on desktop

You can make an exact copy of your existing desktop campaign and set it for mobile. The first one will be -100% mobile bids, meaning that it is purely for desktop and tablets, while you set mobile bids in the second campaign.

Tip: Experience shows that ads on mobile tend to be a bit cheaper than those on desktop, so it may not be necessary to bid so high.

8) Provide a personalised experience

While RLSA has been available in AdWords for some time, this feature was only added to Google Shopping in October 2015. This is great news for retail advertisers as personalisation is becoming a necessary part of PPC strategies.

In particular, recent research from Quantcast shows that 37% of consumers expect adverts received on mobile phones to be more relevant than those on other devices. This means that it is advisable to use RLSA to target different audiences: cart abandoners, users that viewed specific products or pages, purchasers etc.

Personalisation in particular is becoming an important aspect in optimising PPC campaigns for ecommerce. However with a lack of knowledge and time as serious set-backs for a large amount of online retailers, advanced solutions are helping them to not only provide a personalised experience, but to do so in real time, according to a user’s different stages in the buying funnel.

*research from eMarketer.

Mark Haupt is UK Sales Director at Twenga Solutions and a contributor to Search Engine Watch.

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Five Fantastic Features Of The Yoast SEO Plugin

The Yoast SEO plugin is by far the best search engine optimisation (SEO) plugin available to WordPress. It offers excellent all round services to ensure that your site has solid technical and search engine friendly foundations. SEO is a key part of any web build as it ensures that your […]

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Digital travel and SEO: how Skyscanner dominates the SERPs

The digital travel market has grown rapidly over the last decade. Sales in Western Europe totalled $152 billion in 2015, with the worldwide figure more than $533 billion.

Taken from the PI Datametrics Digital Travel Report, here are some stats on digital travel and SEO, as well a look at the organic search dominance of Skyscanner in this market.

What do people search for and when?

Here are the major search terms by volume. As we can see ‘holidays to..’ and ‘flights to..’ dominate.

There are key seasonal trends here too. Searches tend to peak in January and July, the times when people are most likely to be planning ahead for the summer, or looking to pick up last minute deals.

SkyScanner’s dominance

One thing which comes out of the research is that Skyscanner is picking up much of the organic visibility around search terms in this sector, especially for flight-related terms.

The chart below uses the most valuable search terms in the online travel sector and looks at which sites are most visible across the range.

As we can see, Skyscanner is by far the most visible brand. TripAdvisor comes second, while British Airways is the only flight operator to make the top 10, the rest being aggregators.

The chart below shows a number of key terms where Skyscanner (mainly) tops the organic rankings, on Bing and Google.

It also has a large number of backlinks to its pages:

Here are the links to the Skyscanner New York flights page, for which it ranks at number one. Plenty of exact anchor text links there:

For comparison, here are the links to some of the rival sites for this term:

The caveat here is that organic dominance doesn’t necessarily mean that you become the most visible site. This is a sector where paid search plays a big role.

Indeed, though Skyscanner tops the organic rankings for many terms, it is often driven below the fold.

The recent removal of right hand side ads from desktop results and the addition of an extra paid result has made organic results less visible in competitive SERPs like these.

For the term below (flights to New York) Skyscanner has the top organic result, but has been pushed down by four paid ads and Google’s own comparison service.

According to Sam Silverwood-Cope from PI Datametrics:

“When you’re looking at individual markets (rather than just ambiguous total visibility scores, which is almost pointless), Skyscanner is possibly the best performer we have seen across any market in organic search. They own the flight sector and have near omnipresence. They’re obviously doing a fantastic job, and it’s up to the competitors to replicate the best practice and the elements behind Skyscanner’s success.”

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Google Expanded Text Ads: 10 things you need to know

Expanded Text Ads are coming to Google AdWords. Are you excited? But more importantly, are you ready?

Expanded Text Ads were one of several huge AdWords changes Google announced recently – if not the biggest. I still can’t believe that Google will soon actually increase its ad text limits by 2x!

So what exactly is changing? Here are 10 things advertisers need to know about Expanded Text Ads.

1. What are Expanded Text Ads?

Expanded Text Ads are 2x bigger than current text ads. The new ads are designed to maximize your presence and performance on mobile search results with a bigger headline and an extra long description. (And with a mobile-first mindset, whatever works on mobile is going to get applied to desktop too.)

Expanded Text ads will show across all devices – desktop and mobile – and will wrap automatically based on device size.

Google began testing Expanded Text ads in Q2 of 2016.

2. Why is Google making this change?

Google is calling this the biggest change to text ads since AdWords launched 15 years ago.

Several months ago, Google began thinking about what an AdWords ad would look like if they created AdWords in today’s mobile-first world, where more than half of the trillions of searches conducted on Google per year are done via a mobile device.

Google’s first move toward creating a unified experience across devices came in February when it killed off right side ads on desktop. Now with the constraints of desktop right-side ads gone, this change seems like a natural progression from the super-sized headlines introduced in 2011.

3. How much bigger are these expanded ads?

Expanded text ads are 2x bigger (math nerd alert: technically 47 percent bigger) from today’s AdWords text ads.

You now have a total of 140 characters of ad copy space to use, marking the end of the current 25-35-35 limits. No comment from Twitter as yet about their thoughts on Google adopting a 140-character limit. Here’s a little more info on the changes from the AdWords blog:

So make all those extra characters count. Create eye-catching and emotional ads that searchers can’t resist clicking on.

4. What do the new Expanded Text Ads look like?

Here’s a before and after of what the ads will look like on mobile and desktop:

And here’s what Expanded Text Ads will look like in the AdWords interface:

5. How much are headlines expanding?

Advertisers will have two 30-character headlines when Expanded Text Ads become available later this year.

Advertisers currently are limited to a 25-character headline.

That’s means our headlines will soon increase by 140 percent!

6. How much will descriptions expand?

Advertisers will have one 80-character description line.

Advertisers currently are limited to two 35-character description lines.

That means descriptions will increase by 14 percent.

7. What’s changing with display URLs?

AdWords will automatically extract the domain from the final URL.

Advertisers can then add up to two paths to enhance the display URL (using up to 15 characters).

8. Will this improve CTR?

Yes! More text means greater visibility. Early reports indicate that Expanded Text Ads are seeing CTR increase by as much as 20 percent.

At WordStream, we’ve observed CTR increase by around 12 percent by adding ad or call extensions to mobile text ads – so we expect increasing the character counts of headlines and description should result in more clicks.

Regardless, you can bet we’ll be closely tracking the performance of this new ad format as it becomes more widely available.

9.  When will the new ads roll out?

Google hasn’t officially revealed when all advertisers will have access to Expanded Text Ads. Keep an eye out and we’ll update when we know more details.

10. What should you do to prepare for Expanded Text Ads?

Raise your Quality Scores now! Quality Score is already the most important metric in your AdWords account, but it’s about to become even more important.

Businesses that occupy the top spots will take up the most valuable SERP real estate – especially for commercial queries. It could make anything below position 2 or 3 on mobile devices irrelevant!

Additionally, you’ve got a lot of ad text optimization ahead of you. You’ll need to make sure your text ads are all rewritten to take advantage of this new format. Google is giving you 2x more space with Expanded Text Ads – so be ready to use it to your advantage!

Find out how you’re REALLY doing in AdWords!

Watch the video below on our Free AdWords Grader:

Visit the AdWords Grader.

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Where do the biggest brands spend their marketing dollars?

Different retailers have different priorities when it comes to their marketing budgets, but the most valuable brands – Amazon and Apple – are banking on search.

We all know Amazon is the undisputed king of ecommerce. From November 2014 to November 2015, the company raked in more than $71 billion in online sales, which is more than Walmart, Apple, Macy’s, The Home Depot, Best Buy, Costco, Target, Gap Inc., Williams-Sonoma, Sears and Kohl’s sold. Combined.

What is Amazon doing that the others aren’t?

According to Fractl, a Florida-based content marketing agency which analyzed the marketing spend of these massive retailers, search gets the lion’s share of Amazon’s budget. During that year period, the ecommerce giant spent $8 million on TV and radio, a number that sounds very high in isolation. However, Amazon spent $54 million on print and $1.35 billion on search.

Among the other retailers, only Apple – called the most valuable brand in the world last year – and Etsy prioritize search to such a degree. Apple spent far more on TV and outdoor advertising than Amazon, though search still made up 86 percent of its spend. Search was an even higher percentage for Etsy: 91 percent, with 1.39 million going to search and $90,000 to other digital channels.

The Etsy finding was the most interesting to Lillian Podlog, project manager at Fractl, who noted that Etsy doesn’t have the same juggernaut status as Apple and Amazon.

“With Amazon and Apple, you can ask what came first, their success or where they put their marketing dollars. Maybe at this point, they can do anything, but Etsy has the same tactic and if you look at organic search rankings, it’s doing really well,” she says.

Etsy saw among the highest ROI in the study. For every $1 spent on marketing, the online marketplace saw $1,600 in sales. Additionally, Etsy, along with Apple and Amazon, had a disproportionately high SEMrush rankings compared with the others, which means they saw higher organic traffic.

That’s a common correlation among the brands analyzed by Fractl. Most of those with larger search spends have higher SEMrush rankings.

“So many people use ad blockers, so many people have blindness to display ads. Investing in search, whether its paid or building your SEO, requires you to really think about what kind of content you’re putting on the Internet that would appeal to users and boost your SEO,” says Podlog. “It requires you to be more thoughtful and considerate about what the customer really wants.”

Among the only exceptions to that rule are Williams-Sonoma and The Home Depot. Digital makes up 51 percent of sales – and 57 percent of the marketing budget – for the former. Nearly a quarter of that budget goes to search, but Williams-Sonoma still doesn’t rank particularly high. On the other hand, The Home Depot does, despite only spending 11 percent on search, instead prioritizing TV and radio.

Where do some of the other major players put their money?

• Best Buy puts the majority of its dollars in TV and digital, favoring network channels and display advertising over cable and search.
• Costco, on the other hand, largely eschews TV. Instead, the warehouse retailer allocates 57 percent of its marketing dollars to display and nearly all the rest to magazines and newspapers.
• Macy’s is another one with a heavy print focus. The brand spends $16 million on display and $32 million on search, which sounds like a lot of money, but is just a drop in the bucket by comparison. Macy’s spends 5.5 times as much on TV and more than 8 times as much on print.
  “Macy’s is one of those companies that has an established name and an established consumer base, but if it wants to take some of Amazon’s chunk of online retail, it has to invest more in those other channels,” says Podlog. “Macy’s has been around for so long, but I personally think that unless it changes the shape of its spending, it’s going to suffer.”
• Nordstrom’s priority is similarly on print – $27 million on magazines, compared with $6 million on search, $4 million on display, $5 million on TV and $2 million on outdoor – but the strategy is a bit different from that of Macy’s. While Macy’s spends most of its money on newspapers, Nordstrom goes for magazines, a medium that meshes better with the brand’s luxury focus.
• Netflix, despite being heralded as one of the premier digital disruptors, doesn’t spend nearly as much money on digital advertising as one would assume. The streaming giant spends $1 million each on display and online video, and $17 million on TV with a particularly heavy focus on network. It makes to sense to Podlog, who points out that “people are watching TV, they’re not on Netflix.”
• Target’s marketing budget is probably the most balanced. The retailer spends 46 on TV, 22 on print and 28 percent on digital. The majority of that digital spend is allocated to search, but $23 million is still set aside for online video.

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