Last week I was putting together a tactical digital media and marketing plan for a retailer and I thought I’d share some ways that businesses can use their Google Adwords paid search campaign budget to expand into new channels and find potential new audiences. Google is always trying to provide their users with the best possible experience, because if they provide accurate and helpful search results, people click and find what they’re looking for and that menas they keep coming back to Google. Because Google has the largest amount of users, that also attracts advertisers. Similarly, Google wants advertisers to provide their users with the best possible user experience because the more clicks an ad gets, the more money Google gets. So, Google has been working hard to provide advertisers with more options to help them target their desired audiences. Below are just some of the options for advertisers to employ to expand their search engine marketing (SEM) budget across more than just text ads.
In this example you can see 4 different YouTube advertising options.
1. in-video banner advertising overlaid at the bottom of the video
2. Right side Sponsored Video ads
3. Featured Videos
4. Display banner advertising through Google’s content network
Since Google purchased YouTube, there have been many strategic integrations that give advertisers and marketers more opportunities to target their desired audience more accurately. Most of these paid advertising options are based on keyword targeting based on search queries within Google Search or YouTube search. Advertisers can also re-target users that have visited their own websites or partner websites and then visit YouTube searching relevant content. Advertisers can also target by behaviour. As I was searching for examples, I was working my way through retail and telco and car manufacturer keywords trying to find advertisers employing these tactics. As you can see, the adidas and BMW ads followed me because of my search behaviour and served me the advertising that matched my behaviour.
In this example you can see that Adidas are actively targeting users who are looking for smartphone reviews. This video Pre-Roll is a 15 second ad that plays before the video starts
Video pre-rolls are not advertising formats. I’m just trying to outline all the options open to advertisers. The video pre-roll is followed by a post roll banner that allows the user to watch the video they were trying to find on YouTube and then click later if the advertising message that resonated with them.
As you saw above, advertisers within YouTube can also use display banner ads and run them across Google’s Content Network, using their paid search budget to run some display online advertising and track the results through Google’s reporting tools such as Google Analytics.
On the top right side of the page you can see that Adidas has used a post-roll banner leave behind to try and still capture users who viewed their pre-roll video ad
For search advertisers who don’t have the budget for banner production but already run text ads in Google’s Adwords paid search product, they can still use their adwords text ads to run across relevant youTube videos, as shown in the example below.
Google Adwords text ads can be overlaid on YouTube videos to expand your search budget into new website audiences
But the paid search advertising product that I like most is also the most straight forward, in my mind anyway. If you’re an eCommerce online retailer who sells products on your website, you most likely have a data feed of all of your products, with descriptions, images and prices. If you do, then you might want to set up a Google Merchant Account so that you can plug your product feed into your Google adwords campaign. If a user does a search that you have a relevant ad for and a relevant product image and description, you can show the user the actual product image so they can click straight through to buy. This is called Google Adwords Product Extensions. As I said above, all you need is a Google Merchant Account and a feed from your eCommerce store.
eCommerce retailers can set up a Google Merchant Centre account to be able to feed images into Google Adwords search ads
The Google Adwords Product Extension ads can show in various forms. Like other adwords paid search ads, Google constantly changes the format of their ads and where they show up on the search results page, because they don’t want users to become accustomed to certain ad placements and learn to ignore them. You can see two different examples of how the product image feeds from your eCommerce store can be displayed within Google Adwords Product Extensions tool.
Google Product Extensions allow online ecommerce stores to show images in their google search paid ads
And for those who are seeing an increase in visitors from mobile devices such as smartphones and tablet devices such as iPad and iPhone, you may want to consider targeting mobile devices through your Google adwords campaigns. Google now offers in-app mobile ads, such as search ad pins dropped in GPS maps. Pretty cool!
For businesses with bricks and mortar stores, location targeting within mobile Google map apps will be a smart way of targeting
As you can see, there are many options open to Google Adwords paid search advertisers. If your search agency are not employing even half of these advertising options, I suggest you give Parachute Digital a call.