Following the success it had early last year SphinnCon is coming back to Jerusalem, on March 7, 2010.

SphinnCon Israel is the premier networking event designed for SEOs, SEMs, SMOs and affiliate marketers to exchange ideas, influence the industry and build their networks.

Hosted by Barry Schwartz, it will be held at the Jerusalem College of Technology. Make sure you register early and not be among those who couldn’t get a seat last time.

During this one day event you will be able to join sessions on SEO, PPC, Web Analytics, Social Media and much more. With both global and local experts in search marketing, including representatives from Google, Search Engine Land and other well-known companies – there is nothing like this event anywhere.

Sponsored by the Jerusalem College of Technology, the tickets are only $50 per attendee, but space is limited to 200 attendees.

Compucall Web Marketing is among the sponsors, and Mr. Ophir Cohen, CEO, will be speaking at the event.

Don’t miss out, follow this link to find out more details and book a seat.

So here we go again. A full new release of our favorite Google PPC editing software, Google Adwords Editor, was released covertly in the middle of the night. So let’s see what’s new and we’ll also go over what we think is still missing!

New features available:

First page bid estimates: First page bid estimates for all the keywords in the campaign. There is no longer “Minimum cost-per-click” (CPC) bids. Yay!

Keyword Quality Score: A new tab for the quality score of every keyword in the account. About time this feature graced us. We don’t have to go back and forth with the web version to find out what where we went wrong.

New feature for Keyword Opportunities: Tailor your keywords according to location and language. With all the international clients we have, we’d been begging our local Google representative for this for a long time. This is a big deal for us.

The ‘Volume’ column on the Keyword expansion tab of the Keyword Opportunities tool is now showing absolute numbers (traffic for the last month) instead of scaled values.

Campaign targeting in the data view: You can see the location and language settings on the data view. These columns are hidden by default, but you can select them with the column chooser on the campaigns tab.

What I think is still missing?

• Changing the delivery method: when setting up a campaign I still miss the ability to determine if the delivery method will be standard or accelerated.
• Device platform: show the campaign on desktop or laptop computers or on mobile phones (or both).
• Ad serving: optimize or rotate ad texts.

This is a great step forward from Google. I’m not sure if it’s a full version upgrade, but I’ll take it. The location and language options are a huge plus. This is a better morning for the PPC team here.  Way to go Google.

You can read the official Google Release for Adword Editor 7.0 here.

Google AdWords is now enabling advertisers to decide on which devices their ads will appear. Advertisers can now opt out of showing ads on desktop and laptop computers and target only mobile users with full browsers.

Full browsers can show standard HTML pages and support an online purchase process from start to finish (like the Iphone). There are not many mobile phones that have this feature. Most mobile phones today have WAP browsers that require a special mobile AdWords campaign.

Google states: “Until recently, this was the default setting on all campaigns. However, we’re now able to allow more granular control of what devices you’d like your ads to appear on. We offer the option to opt out of showing ads on desktop and laptop computers for those advertisers who want to target only mobile users, or for those who want to break out their campaigns for each targeting option.”

This new feature in AdWords is giving the advertiser the option to decide if they want to create two different campaigns: one for mobile users and one for desktop and laptop users.

Following their successful passing of the accreditation and the results we see every day from the PPC campaigns they manage, I have asked them some key questions about the way they use web analytics to improve the campaigns’ ROI.

During our conversation we started to compare the various ways people advertise their products today. Whether it be by “traditional” methods like TV, radio and print or by online campaigns like Adwords, advertisers are constantly looking for ways to increase their conversion rates and ROI. This is when the discussion took a turn towards behavioral targeting and the possibility to retarget visitors. So I decided to write about retargeting and PPC instead.

PPC – How Does the Google Adwords Content Network work?

Google Adwords metrics are centered around keywords and websites that relate to those keywords and allow Google to place your PPC ads on them.

According to Google:
“Using your keywords, Google’s contextual targeting technology can automatically match your ads to web pages in our content network that are most relevant to your business.”

Google Adwords - contextual targeting technology

Google Adwords placement performance reports also allow you to refine the placement of your ads in order to improve your ROI:

“With the Placement Performance Report , you have visibility into where all your ads appear. Review your ad’s performance on a site-by-site basis to see impression, click, cost, and conversion data, and use this data to identify well-performing sites to target more aggressively and low-value placements that require content optimization or exclusion.”

Google Adwords - placement performance report

Retargeting and PPC

The basic idea behind Retargeting is that by visiting a website, the visitors are showing that they are interested in what that website has to offer. Retargeting uses a website visit — or a search ad that led a web user to a website — as a behavior that can be targeted. This behavior can then be used to serve relevant ads to the visitors after they leave the website.
 
For example, if I search for digital camera reviews and click on a PPC ad for a site that is relevant, then by using retargeting methods I could be served PPC ads for digital cameras sold on that site after I already left it. If I click the PPC ad and go back then I am more likely to purchase a camera because I have previously shown an interest in the products. Moreover, I placed interest in a brand, and the retargeting re-enforces the marketing message of the brand I already met (“oh, I already saw that nice site… let’s come back and buy the camera…”)

PPC data – Relevancy or Recency?

As the interview with my colleagues progressed we discussed such web analytics metrics as search queries, top referrers and time on site. But then the conversation turned to retargeting.

One metric that is available in Google analytics but is currently underused by PPC managers is “Visits to purchase”.

Google Analytics - visits to purchase

Right now it is less useful to them because the Adwords PPC ads are arranged by ad groups and not by visitors. This means that you can track a certain Ad’s performance right down to the keyword level and see which keywords perform better than others. But you can’t track visitors that clicked the PPC ads after they leave your site. Google however, can and does.

The Future of PPC?

This is where the conversation got interesting. We all read about the fact that Google has started to serve PPC ads that are targeted to the searchers based on their previous search queries. Google also knows how long it takes for a visitor that came from PPC to convert. Basically, this is the way Google calculates the “Visits to Purchase” metric. This means that using cookies, and Google search history (if you are logged in) Google knows if and when you visited my site before.

Wouldn’t it be great if Google was to add a new feature which allows you to create special ad groups to be shown specifically to user that visited your site before?

Now this is COOL!!! We have keywords campaigns, content campaigns, placement, radio, print, TV, local, mobile – why not “retargeting ads”!

Think about it, you could serve highly targeted and personalized ads for your would be returning visitors. Imagine being able to have an ad on the lines of:

“Remember your last visit to our site www. oursite.com?
You won’t believe the things we have to show you now!”

Hey, I don’t create PPC ads I just analyze them . The above example may be a little simple but you get my point.

 Targeted PPC traffic – would you use it?

After going over the idea several times I finally asked both PPC managers the following question:

If you could create ads targeted specifically for visitors that saw your site before, would you?

One answer was a quick “yes. For sure” while the other one was “probably not. I’m not sure it’s worth the time or even if it will be productive. But it might be interesting to test.”

We all agree that it’s better to make this distinction on the site itself and have special welcome messages and pages for returning visitors, but most sites today can not do that.

I am interested to know what you think on the subject:

If you could retarget visitors that saw your site before, would you?

That being said, where should we take this? Should we dedicate it to SEO? To Analytics? To Pay Per Click? To venting about our frustrations with our clients and Google policies? That’s a good question that took me a whole of 20 seconds to answer. Compucall as a company (and as I wrote exactly 76 words ago) does a bunch of things, and that being said, I think the blog should reflect everything we do.

So what’s going to happen is that the majority of the team at Compucall will be contributing on a weekly basis to the blog to offer you a little insight into how we 1) feel about things 2) see things related to what we do 3) give you a little guidance into our practices that hopefully you find helpful.
So with all that out of the way, Welcome to the Compucall Blog. Subscribe, comment and visit often!

The Compucall Team