Adwords Changes - What They Mean For You

At the end of February Google removed the Adwords ads from the right hand side of Google search results. If you search now you’ll see three, maybe four, ads above the organic results, and PLAs and Knowledge Graph results on the right hand side. PPC results on Mobile will be largely unaffected.

So far there is very little data on how the changes will affect PPC/SEO. We’ve put together a checklist for you to make sure you are ahead of any seismic shifts in the PPC landscape.

What does this mean for my PPC campaigns?

• Check your average position - You should already be targeting the top three positions in the paid results. Increase your bids if your average position has dropped in the last three weeks.
• Improve your targeting - The big winners will be advertisers who aren’t bidding on generic keywords. If you are in a small niche, bid on long-tail keywords. Your brand terms won't be affected.
• Improve your ads - More ads will now show ad extensions. This is a great opportunity to update your Sitelinks and Callout extensions.
• Invest in Google Shopping - These change don’t affect PLAs. Now is a good time to set up Google Shopping as these ads will now be more prominent.
• Don’t neglect your reporting - It's easy to set up Adwords and never check in to see how it's doing. Use this opportunity to make sure you are getting the most bang for your buck from your Adwords.

Need help updating your PPC or making it work? We can help. Drop us a line at info@moneyspyder.co.uk.

Google Shopping Specification Changes - 30 September

On 30 September Google is updating their feed specifications. They are adding some  extra fields to improve search accuracy and making some changes to fields that you should already have.

These changes won't impact the majority of feeds, but they may make your feed more accurate and more useful to Google, and therefore, more valuable to your business. 

It can be difficult going through the Google help guides, so we've condensed the changes here:

• Availability attribute - this is being simplified by combining the 'available for order' value with 'in stock'. If you use the 'available for order' for pre-orders this should be changed to 'in stock'.

• Character length limits - Google are adding limits to how much you can write in your titles, descriptions and other attributes. These limits are quite generous and shouldn't affect too many people. Your Merchant Centre reporting will notify you if any products exceed the limit. You can see what these limits are here: https://support.google.com/merchants/answer/188494. 

• Mobile landing pages - if you have a non-responsive site (an m. site) you can now specify landing pages. This cuts out the time taken for normal URLs to redirect to mobile sites and improves the mobile shopping experience.

• Merchant-defined bundles - if you sell products as part of a bundle you can now specify that some products can be bought together. 

• Apparel attributes - to make searches for clothing more accurate new categories have been added to the 'age_group' attribute and new size attributes  have been created. These are 'size_system' and 'size_type'.

These are the main changes. If you have any doubts about whether your feed will continue to work, please get in touch and we'll help you work out what you need to do.