26
Feb2016
What Is Bing Ads’ Market Share In The UK?
I read this article http://www.stateofdigital.com/new-generator-electric-world-search/ recently which says that Bing’s market share in the UK is now 17.8%. Here’s an old article of my own using 2014 data – https://www.ppcni.com/worth-setting-bing-ads-account-uk/3531/ which showed it was pretty close to 10%. This is a bit out of date now, so let’s look at the last full six months of e-commerce PPC only data for the UK from 1st August 2015 to 31st January 2016. Bing Ads Sessions = 20.87%! Bing Ads Revenue = 15.45%! (Transaction value up 15% from the same period the previous year compared to only a 5% increase from AdWords). *The Bing Ads and Google AdWords accounts for this e-commerce site are not directly comparable (different amounts of brand traffic and shopping traffic to name just 2 factors) and lots of factors outside my control can affect results. Even so, it does look like Bing is starting to take market…
24
Feb2016
Negative Keywords List Updated With Postcodes
Now with postcodes for Northern Ireland and Great Britain, so you can exclude people searching for a product or service within a postcode to which you cannot provide that product or service. e.g. I have seen a campaign where England was explicitly excluded as a location in campaign settings, but ads were still shown when someone searched using an English postcode (something that Google should really have a better handle on but there you go). https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1pwTTFH714InYersKDjScTmAaCv-GdXq4bFkJ6Md9S_4/edit?usp=sharing When I get time I’ll try and segment postcodes by England, Scotland, Wales also. Feel free to copy and paste from this (click on the image below to open the Google Spreadsheet and hover over column heading to view comments).
19
Feb2016
Bar Code (GTIN) Reminder For Google Shopping UK
You should all be doing this already. But here is a wee reminder:-
4
Feb2016
PPC Negative Keyword List Updated
Feel free to copy and paste from this (click on the image below to open the Google Spreadsheet and hover over column heading to view comments).
11
Jan2016
Google Analytics Tagging And Website Redirects
Google Analytics is a brilliant tool. It’s only as good as the data you pass back to it though. AdWords and Bing Ads make it easy to auto tag your PPC traffic for analytics, but you need to put a lot of effort into making sure that all your traffic sources are tagged correctly. See https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1033867?hl=en for an intro to tagging your traffic correctly. But even if all your traffic is tagged perfectly, it is not guaranteed that your web site will not destroy these tags in some situations e.g. 301 and 302 redirects. I had seen this happen with a Magento site which had an SEO plugin which when implemented, appeared to reduce conversions from Google Shopping traffic in Analytics to zero (though it took a while to work out what was happening as it only affected Shopping campaigns and not other AdWords campaigns, because 301 redirects were only…
7
Jan2016
Bing Ads Now Showing On AOL UK
It’ll be interesting to see how AOL performs compared to Yahoo, Bing and Google though it’ll be a long time before you can be sure if you are in the UK as their market share is so tiny. Bing reckon you should be able to increase Bing Ads clicks by around 5% by including AOL in your search network campaigns. Though it’s not clear if they are talking about worldwide or just USA when they say this (Bing tend to think the world revolves around the USA more than Google)… You don’t need to make any changes to existing campaigns / ad groups for them to start showing on AOL. In fact there doesn’t seem to be any way of stopping them from showing on AOL! Also, this doesn’t apply to the Republic of Ireland. Full details – http://advertise.bingads.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/40010/details-on-bing-ads-changes-with-aol-partnership
23
Dec2015
AdWords Negative Keyword List Updated (Again)
This is still a work in progress – but has gotten to the point where it is actually useful now. Feel free to copy and paste from this (click on the image below to open the Google Spreadsheet and hover over column heading to view comments).
18
Dec2015
Mobile / Tablet / Computer Stats 2015
You’re probably all tired of hearing about how mobile traffic is so important these days, but here is some actual data from a UK account which proves the point. From 2013 to 2015 You can see how much mobile traffic is closing up with computer (desktop+laptop) traffic, but perhaps more interesting is the fact that mobile (non tablet) traffic has closed the gap on tablet traffic compared to a few years ago. Smart phones have been getting bigger, better and more usable for surfing the internet over the last few years, so this must be having an impact on phone use relative to tablet use. For 2015 E-Commerce conversion rates are still a lot higher for computers, even though this site works really well on mobile devices. Hence, the revenue from mobile hasn’t caught up with computers as much as the visits / sessions have. Does this matter if you…
20
Nov2015
AdWords Top vs Other & Search Partners Clicks
Does conversion rate vary by ad position? Yes (but not usually very significantly). Does it matter? No. Is it worth paying to stay ‘Top Of Page’ all the time? No.* Will the lower CTR from Google Search ‘Other’ affect your quality score? No. Will the lower CTR from Search Partners affect your quality score? No. Will the lower CTR from Google Display Network affect your quality score? No. Should Search Partners be excluded? No. * Lead generation example: E-commerce example: *There are exceptions to every rule. :-)
13
Nov2015
Bing Shopping Ads In The UK
These still have some way to go with regards to relevance compared to Google Shopping in the UK. Better start looking at those negative keyword lists…