Central Perk

vineri, 9 ianuarie 2015

PPC in 2014 – The Year in Paid Search

Posted: 23 Dec 2014 12:00 AM PST

Paid search is always changing: platforms are always bringing out new features or changing old ones. So here's a reminder of all that's happened in PPC in 2014, the year in paid search.

AdWords

Flexible Conversion Counting came in February. The most obvious change was in naming: Conversions (one-per-click) and Conversions (many-per-click) columns turned into Converted clicks and Conversions. But it also means you can count only the unique conversions for one conversion action and all the conversions for another – for example, count only one conversion if someone signs up to a newsletter twice, but count every time they buy a product.

On April the 9th Google announced that search queries weren't going to be passed onto websites in the referrer data from secured searches. This is a bit awkward for third party tools, who generally coped by focusing on keywords rather than search queries (which can easily be sent to a website by tagging URLs with {keyword}). Search query data is still available in AdWords, so the impact of this change wasn't too major – especially compared to the woes of (not provided) for organic traffic – but it's still a reminder that you should try and get as much of your traffic as possible covered by exact keywords, for more accurate reporting.

On April the 22nd Google made a mass of announcements on live webcast:

Targeting people based on what types of app they have installed, and to have ads take people directly to an already-installed app – these became available on the Display Network in June, and on the Search Network and YouTube in August.
Tracking conversions from apps, like install, re-engagement and in-app purchases.
More bulk actions directly inside AdWords – came in October
Advanced reporting and a 'lab' in which you can draft changes to your campaigns and test them. (According the livestream in December, these are coming in 2015.)

In June Google brought out a white paper, 'Settling the (Quality) Score'. This reignited the old PPC argument about whether to optimise specifically for QS. Larry Kim felt Google weren't telling the whole story.

Website Call Conversions came in August for the U.S., Australia, France, Germany, Spain, Sweden, and the UK. This means rather than putting your number on your website, you use a Google forwarding number: then if someone clicks an ad and then calls you, it counts as a conversion.

Google did another live webcast on the 10th of December, mostly recapping the announcements of the year. But it did have something new: the release of AdWords Editor 11.0: now you can have multiple views of the same account, or view multiple accounts at once (and drag and drop between them!). As Kirk Williams points out, CTRL-Z now actually undoes the last action (rather than reverting whatever you have selected). But there's still no support for labels or shopping campaigns. Also CTR is shown wrongly, although hopefully that will be fixed quickly…

Search Network

Consumer Ratings Annotations were announced in March, but only for the US, UK and Canada and later Australia. This is an extension that shows ratings based on Google Consumer Surveys.

Dynamic Sitelinks were announced in July. These are like sitelinks, except they're made automatically – you have to opt out rather than set them up. If you have set up your own sitelinks, the manual ones should show rather than the dynamic ones.

'Close variant' matching has been around for two years, but previously you could turn it off at campaign level. In September you couldn't turn it off – all exact and phrase match keywords will show ads on searches which are similar. This is one of the bigger changes in the year – now you need to worry about negative keywords even in exact match only ad groups.

Another major event in September was the launch of Callout Extensions. Like sitelinks without the links, callouts give you extra characters to show off your selling points. (Note you need to make at least two for them to work.)

Ad Customizers also came in September: you enter a CSV full of attributes and Google spits out ads that use them. This means you can create ads at scale, and that you can update details without creating entirely new ads. So you can expect everyone and their dog to be making countdown ads.

Since October, mobile ads may skip the second description line in favour of showing ad extensions. This means you'll just see the first line with an ellipsis – you should write your mobile ads so they make sense in this format!

Display Network

+Post ads became available to all in April: If your Google+ page has at least 1,000 followers you can turn any publically shared post into an engagement ad on the Display network.

In September campaigns that were showing on both the Search and Display networks were automatically changed to 'Search and Display Select' campaigns. This means AdWords is more selective on which Display sites your ads appear on. Note that it still isn't best practise to combine Search and Display in one campaign, and if you have a 'Search and Display Select' campaign you won't be able to use features like demographic targeting.

Estimated cross-device conversions are now available for display campaigns: this gives an estimate of the conversions made on one device after clicking an ad on another device, based on people logged into Google accounts on multiple devices.

Dynamic remarketing was available for retailers, but rolled out to all verticals in October. This lets you show remarketing ads related to the specific pages visited (using an item feed rather than having to set up lots of audiences manually).

Custom Affinity Audiences came in October: this means you can target people on the Display Network by listing keywords they are interested in, or listing URLs of sites featuring subjects they find interesting. On the flip side, this means 'other interests' targeting is being taken away in January.

Shopping Ads

Google Shopping

The main change was the upgrade of all Google PLA (Product Listing Ads) campaigns into Google Shopping campaigns in August. Previously PLA ad groups were based on attributes or labels from the data feed, limiting users who couldn’t set up unique labels, and data feed was in the Google Merchant Centre rather than AdWords itself. In Google Shopping campaigns, ad groups are based on product groups, which are set up in AdWords by specifying combinations of product attributes. There is also better reporting by product attributes and impression share data.

Other changes:

Shopping campaigns became available worldwide on the 18th of February, and the Google Shopping API came out in March.
Changes were made to the feeds: unique product identifiers were required in March, and updates the feed specification in June
In July, Google Shopping campaigns could be uploaded in bulk in the web interface. Bids could be edited in AdWords Editor (but nothing can be created).
Product ratings were added in July, but only in the USA – like seller ratings in text ads, these appear if you have enough positive reviews in an approved aggregator, and fill in the application form.
Shopping campaigns could opt into the Search Partner Network in September, and local inventory ads became available in more countries.
Automatic item updates also came in September – this updates your PLAs using data from your site, if you have the right schema set up. This means your ads will be corrected rather than disapproved if they become out-of-date.
Merchant Promotions, previously only available in the USA, were launched in more countries in November
In November PLAs got a few features previously only available to text ads: an Auctions Insight report, search impression data, device and time segmentation and a bid simulator.
Also in November there was a new Diagnostics tab, for finding problems with your product feed.

Facebook

The biggest change was the new campaign structure in March – previously there were just campaigns containing ads, but now there are campaigns containing ad sets containing ads. Then in September things were changed again – targeting and bidding, previously at ad level, are now at ad set level. Note that unlike AdWords and Bing, budgets are at ad set level rather than campaign level.

In April changes to the right hand column ads were announced: rather than a square image, there is now a 254 by 133 pixel rectangle (the same aspect ratio as News Feed ad images). This gives a bit of extra space, and is "more visually consistent" with News Feed ads.

Facebook's Audience Network was announced in April and made available worldwide in October. This lets your ads be shown on mobile apps outside of Facebook, but still using the same targeting as you would for advertising within Facebook.

In November Facebook deployed its ‘Edgerank’ algorithmic update. Early observations highlight a drop in reach for Organic and drop in Likes for Organic and Paid.

The main reasons for this are:

Organically, thousands and thousands of posts are posted by companies everyday to their followers, now as more followers like and follow more and more companies it became impossible for Facebook to show posts to users that it felt would drive engagement. Driving the need for an algorithm update.
In both paid & organic, we have for a long-time been faced with ‘click farms’. These are offices based mainly in India and Egypt who sit all day ‘liking’ ads and pages in order to get paid roughly $1 per 100 likes. This is the primary reason we do not recommend ‘like’ campaigns as the ‘real’ return on these ‘likes’ is effectively non-existent. Click farms hid themselves from Facebook’s eye for a while by hitting ‘like’ on an organic post once in a while. But the new algorithm update has targeted click farms by using their own Facebook presence. You would typically see that offending pages ‘like’ thousands of other pages but never post anything themselves. The algorithm update was designed to target and shutdown these pages, in essence wiping out the click farms.

So, the question that we have been asked by our clients is “how do I regain my reach?”

Well, to put it simply (and in-line with Facebook’ algo update):

Post better content
Buy ads

By better content the following should be used as a daily guideline:

2 text updates (either asking a question or fill-in-the-blank)
1 photo (lighthearted to make people laugh, share & comment)
3 blog posts (1 newly published post, if possible, and 2 evergreen posts — which are older posts that are still valuable & relevant)

Bing Ads

There have been numerous changes to the web interface and Bing Ads Editor (although still no Mac version).

In January sitelinks came out in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Southeast Asia.

In March Bing announced 'universal event tracking': you put the same code up on all pages of your site, then define goals or remarketing audiences within Bing's interface (like you do with Google Analytics).

A great time saver for those of us using Google Analytics: auto-tagging came out in June. This can be set to replace all tags or just to add missing ones (making it compatible if you have custom or non-GA tagging in place).

In July, Bing Ads online insertion orders were made easier – you can create and manage your orders yourself, online.

Bing Ads Express was discontinued in July – it had been created (like AdWords Express) to be a simpler alternative to Bing Ads, but Bing have decided instead to concentrate on better campaign management tools and reporting rather than have a separate product.

In August Bing Ads followed Google's enhanced campaigns; tablets and desktops cannot be targeted separately. Unlike Google you can still have a bid adjustment for tablets, but it can only reduce bids by 20% (also unlike Google, you can still choose to only target mobile).

As of September, you can schedule ad bids down to every 15 minutes. (To compare, in AdWords you can only schedule by the hour.) There were also improvements to location targeting, and the option to target people solely by the location they are searching for (rather than people searching for or located in the location).

Also in September you could share negative keyword lists between campaigns (and unlike AdWords, the feature was included in Bing Ads Editor from launch), and dynamic sitelinks were announced.

Copying Google, Bing Ads also have close variants, but only in the US (since September), UK and Ireland (in December) – and you can still opt-out using the campaign advanced settings. Note that Bing Ads has always had keyword normalisation, which already meant its exact match wasn't precisely exact.

In the US only:

Product Ads came out in March
A Top Movers report came out in August
Enhanced sitelinks came out in September
Auction Insights came out in October

What's Next for 2015?

In some ways 2014 was a continuation of 2013 for AdWords and Bing; Google gives us extra features, but takes away a bit more of our control (in 2013 it was tablet targeting; in 2014 exact match keywords). Bing continues to follow Google, although it has its own spin on some of the features – bids can be modified for tablets, ad schedules are more precise, and AdWords does not have an equivalent of universal event tracking.

From an advertiser's point of view the biggest change was Facebook's ad sets, but that's a change that's entirely invisible to Facebook users (unlike the changes to the right hand column). Hopefully better account structure will lead to better ads in the long run, as management and testing become simpler.

What did you think was the biggest change in 2014? And what do you think will happen in 2015? Let us know in the comments below.

The post PPC in 2014 – The Year in Paid Search appeared first on White.net.

Seth's Blog : Lulled

Lulled

Everyone has a comfort zone.

Worth considering: How hard (and how often) are you willing to work to get out of it?

You can turn that into a habit if you choose.

• Email to a friend •

joi, 8 ianuarie 2015

Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis

Get the H* Out OR Shut the F* Up
Wading Through Molasses: "Did the Real Economy, Not Counting Government, Expand in Last 20 Years?"
Eurozone Retail PMI Sinks Again

Get the H* Out OR Shut the F* Up

Posted: 08 Jan 2015 04:52 PM PST

If you live in Saudi Arabia, Iran, Iraq or any nutcase country with no freedom of speech (many of which the US supports), you need to do one of two things ...

Get the H* Out
Shut the F* Up

If you don't the consequences are likely to be severe.

For example, please consider the plight of Saudi Arabian blogger Raif Badawi. He was sentenced to 10 years in prison and 1,000 lashes.

His crime was "insulting Islam" in his "Free Saudi Liberals" website.

The Guardian explains in Saudi blogger to be publicly flogged on charges he insulted Islam.

A Saudi blogger who was sentenced last May to 10 years in prison and 1,000 lashes will be publicly flogged for the first time after Friday prayers outside a mosque in the Red Sea coastal city of Jeddah, according to a person close to his case.

Raif Badawi was sentenced on charges related to accusations that he insulted Islam on a liberal online forum he had created. He was also ordered by the Jeddah criminal court to pay a fine of 1m Saudi riyals, or about $266,000.

Amnesty International has said that Badawi is to receive 50 lashes once a week for 20 weeks.

Third Moral

In an even more preposterous ruling, his lawyer was sentenced to 15 years imprisonment and barred from traveling for another 15 years after being found guilty by an anti-terrorism court of "undermining the regime and officials", "inciting public opinion" and "insulting the judiciary".

So not only had you better shut up or get out, the third moral to this story is "you better not defend someone who doesn't shut up."

Following his arrest, his wife and children left the kingdom for Canada, most likely so they can say what they want about this travesty of justice.

Fourth Moral

For appealing the ruling, Badawi will be in prison ten years, up from the original seven.

Thus, the fourth moral to this story is "If you elect to stay but don't shut your mouth, don't appeal absurd decisions or the result will be even worse."

Where's Obama?

Inquiring minds may be asking "Where is President Obama on this?"

The answer is "The same place George Bush would have been: Silent."

As a musical tribute to this entire ridiculous affair, I offer ...

Link if video does not play "Silence is Golden".

Mike "Mish" Shedlock
http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com

Wading Through Molasses: "Did the Real Economy, Not Counting Government, Expand in Last 20 Years?"

Posted: 08 Jan 2015 12:30 PM PST

I received an interesting question from reader Michael yesterday. Michael asked "Did the Real Economy, Not Counting Government, Expand in Last 20 Years?"

Reader Michael did not think so. Take a moment before reading further to think about how I might answer and how John Williams at Shadowstats might answer.

My Response

If the average standard of living has gone up, then we have had growth.

Better cars, more cell phones, bigger houses, better stuff in general, says we have had growth. In spite of inane inflationary policies of the Fed and corruption in politics everywhere, rising productivity over time was the enabler of growth.

However, some of that growth has been at the expense of debt (and future expansion). We have borrowed growth from the future. Those expecting a return to high growth are mistaken.

Wading Through Molasses

I asked Pater Tenebrarum at the Acting Man blog if he agreed with my response. He chimed in as follows:

Yes, I would agree with that, absolutely. However, monetary inflation has so distorted prices and made the growth look far bigger than it really was. Essentially the problem is that the market economy must constantly battle against the destructive policies of governments and central banks. It is like wading through molasses.

If you look at the actual improvements in the standards of living in more detail, most of it has to do with the computer industry in the widest sense. Even improvements in health care can be put down to increased computerization. Hi tech remains the one area that develops so quickly, the political class is too slow to regulate it to death, and the central banks cannot keep it from providing better things at lower prices, because its productivity growth is so fast it more than balances out the negative effects of money printing and credit expansion.

In virtually every other aspect, there are at most a few improvements due to the expansion in international trade, but little else.

Spotlight on Trade

To Pater's comment I would add that protectionists in Congress, countless Keynesian economists, and unions everywhere seek to label China a currency manipulator, then add tariffs.

Doing so would instantly kill any growth due to trade expansion. Also recall that Republican nominee Mitt Romney ran on that destructive platform.

Krugman "Was" Right

In 1997 Krugman wrote a brilliant article "In Praise of Cheap Labor", stating "Bad jobs at bad wages are better than no jobs at all".

I wrote about Krugman's position in Fair Trade is Unfair; In Praise of Cheap Labor; Are Bad Jobs at Bad Wages Better than No Jobs at All?

Please check it out. Krugman "was" right. However, the definition of "was" requires one to go back to 1997. Somewhere along the line Krugman acquired the "conscience of a liberal" and he has been wrong ever since.

Theater of the Absurd GDP Proposal

Let's also take a look at GDP as measured using Shadowstats CPI as the deflator. Please consider GDP, Real GDP, and Shadowstats "Theater of the Absurd" GDP.

Shadowstats GDP

click on chart for sharper image

Doug Short Writes ...
I find this "alternate Real" GDP to be interesting (in a bizarre sort of way), but I personally see no credibility in the hyper-negative GDP it produces. On the contrary, I see this chart as further evidence that the alternate CPI, despite its popular among many critics of government data, is a misguided concept.
Alternate Nonsense

Bizarre is a polite way of putting things. I would call it total nonsense. For Williams to be correct one would have to believe the economy was in a recession the vast majority of the time for the last 25 years.

Williams has a huge following, mainly by the hyperinflationist crowd. Williams himself has been predicting hyperinflation for some time.

December 12, 2010: Williams Calls for "Great Hyperinflationary Great Depression"; A Very Easy Rebuttal

May 25, 2011: Hyperinflation Nonsense in Multiple Places

All of the hyperinflation calls have been missed by a mile.

I wrote that back on May 31, 2012 so the chart is dated. But it would not look much different now, adding only another two years of recession.

Further Debunking Shadowstats CPI

On March 25 2013, Doug Short wrote Regression to Trend: Debunking the Alternate CPI.

Doug's post contains a more recent version of the above GDP chart. It also contains additional commentary well worth a look. Here is a chart and some of Doug's comments.

I'll close with one more example of why I completely reject the Alternate CPI as a valid metric. Let's consider real median household incomes since 1967, the year of the earliest Census Bureau data. Adjusted for inflation using the government's CPI, the $7,143 median household income has only risen 4% from 1967 to 2011, the latest full year of Census Bureau data. If we make the inflation adjustment using the Shadowstats Alternate CPI, the median household income has declined by 70%.

As I commented when I originally posted this household income chart last year, the Alternate CPI is a completely bizarre outlier. What this deflator is telling us translates into something like this: If we chain the 1967 median household income of $7,143 in 2011 dollars, it would have had the purchasing power back then of $166,683.

Yes, Virginia There Has Been Growth

Unless one buys the shadowstats CPI theory, there has indeed been growth. Perhaps that growth has been overstated by a little, perhaps by a lot.The fact that the central banks including the Fed have so distorted pricing mechanisms makes it hard to tell. Regardless, there are easy-to-see implications of past actions on future growth.

Future Growth Implications

Growth came in spite of central bank policies, not because of them
Growth was at the expense of mountains of debt fueled by poor monetary policies at the Fed and poor fiscal policies by governments
The existing mountain of debt at every level (government, personal, corporate) is 100% guaranteed to slow future growth

Effectively we have borrowed current growth from the future. Looking ahead, growth surprises will be predominantly on the downside for years to come.

Addendum Comments

Here's an interesting observation from reader Charlie Smith at Fort Pitt Capital Group: "The average US citizen is living 5 years longer than 35 years ago. What is more valuable than life?"

Lacy Hunt at Hoisington Investment Management responded "Some people are going to have a real hard time when the CPI prints zero or possibly even slightly negative over the first half of this year. I see that you did not forget the inflation/deflation debate at the Casey Conference last September in which you and I participated on the deflation side. Warm regards, Lacy."

Mike "Mish" Shedlock
http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com

Eurozone Retail PMI Sinks Again

Posted: 07 Jan 2015 11:49 PM PST

Markit reports the Eurozone Retail PMI shows further drop in sales at year-end.

Key Points:

Retail sales fall at faster rate in December
Rates of contraction accelerate in France and Italy , while growth eases in Germany
Wholesale price inflation remains close to November's recent low

Summary:

Latest PMI® data from Markit showed deteriorating trends with in the eurozone retail sector in December. Sales decreased a cross the big-three euro area economies combined, reflective of further contractions in France and Italy , as well as a growth slowdown in Germany. Adjusted for seasonal factors, the headline PMI dipped to 47.6 in December, from November's 48.9, signalling a solid and accelerated decrease in overall sales. Trade was also down sharply compared with the corresponding month of 2013, with the year-on-year rate of decline faster than in November.