Google Gives AdWords Users New Alert Options

Google has introduced a couple of new alert options for AdWords advertisers. Users can of course use account alerts, and can also use custom alerts. Now Google has added new alerts for keyword and budget ideas, which are personalized tips to help users improve their campaigns' effectiveness. These are in the "opportunities" tab.

"New ideas are usually generated for campaigns and ad groups every few weeks, but you may miss ideas that can expand your coverage and boost your traffic if you don't check the Opportunities tab regularly," explains Google's Dan Friedman. "Now, when there are new ideas available for your review, you'll see them highlighted along with the rest of your campaign alerts."

Google has also added the ability to create custom alerts for changes in conversion volume, conversion rate, and cost per conversion for users using AdWords conversion tracking.

"By setting alerts for your conversion data, you can make sure that you're quickly notified about fluctuations in your key metrics," says Friedman.

Google says it is still working on bringing custom alerts to all linked accounts for My Client Center (MCC) users, but until then, you can just set custom alerts for individual accounts if you can log into them directly.

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iCrossing Launches Social Media App For iPhone

Digital marketing firm, iCrossing has released a free iPhone social media monitoring application called "Say What?"

The app works by scanning the most active social media networks for a keyword or phrase, and returns a real-time snapshot of what is being said.

Users enter a search term on an interface, and the most current conversations from the various social media sites are returned. Say What? displays the most recent conversations in aggregate, so users don't have to search social networks or blogs with a mobile browser.

Users have the option of finding out more on a particular topic, and a search his saved so they can receive updates for their regularly-searched terms.

"iCrossing developed Say What? to demonstrate how search, social media and mobile can work together to provide users with information that is real-time and relevant," said Rachel Pasqua, director of mobile strategy, iCrossing.

"Our goal was to put one-click social media monitoring in the palm of the user's hand."

Don’t Lose Yahoo Traffic By Not Optimizing for Bing

As you're probably aware, the plan for the deal between Microsoft and Yahoo that dominated many of the headlines this summer, is for Bing to take over Yahoo search, in terms of algorithmic ranking. Basically, Bing will handle the back-end, while Yahoo will handle the front-end design of the new Yahoo Search. That should be happening next year sometime. Are you ready for Yahoo's switch to Bing? Share your thoughts.

With Bing taking over Yahoo Search, webmasters are going to need to evaluate their need to address their own sites with regards to optimizing for Bing. While optimizing for Bing is generally a good idea anyway, those who see a good deal of traffic from Yahoo Search, are going to want to give this some special attention.

Presumably, it doesn't matter if you rank well in Yahoo now, if you don't rank well in Bing. At least it won't matter when the change comes. If you're ranked number 1 in Yahoo, but you're on the 7th page in Bing, you've got some work to do.

iCrossing Search Strategist David Shapiro gave some good advice in a recent blog post. To summarize, he said if Yahoo is driving a significant amount of traffic to your site, you need to determine what keywords you rank well for in Yahoo, but not in Bing, and before next year, you need to work on raising these rankings. He also said you need to determine which Yahoo terms you rank 6-10 for that may return "Quick Tabs". 

"With the way Bing displays search results for these queries, ranking 6-10 is significantly less valuable," says Shapiro. "Bing returns the top five results for the primary keyword you entered, then displays the top three results for up to five related terms, providing a list of 20 possible listings for the user to select."

"If you currently rank 6-10 for any of these keywords you should work on building links to move up into the top five, and focus on achieving top three results for the terms that Bing has chosen for the Quick Tabs, especially considering these terms are more targeted and likely convert better," he adds. 

There are differences between Google and Bing, but Microsoft's stance on SEO isn't all that different than Google's. There are different algorithms at play, but both like quality, relevant links and good content. In fact, if you've optimized for Live Search in the past, you should be happy to know that Bing's not that different from that either.

"There have been no major changes to the MSNBot crawler during the upgrade to Bing," Microsoft says in a Bing white paper (pdf) for webmasters. "However, the Bing team is continuously refining and improving our crawling and indexing abilities. Note that the bot name hasn't changed. It will still show up in the web server access logs as MSNBot."

Do yourself a favor and read that white paper. As Shapiro says, you would also do well to make sure your sites are listed with Bing Webmaster Tools. He also suggests that in some cases, it may be a good idea to increase your paid budget, just to circumvent any lost organic traffic in the transition period.

There is a good chance you are getting a lot more traffic from Google than from Yahoo, so if that's the case, luckily you still have that going for you. In addition, social networks like Twitter and Facebook (not to mention blogs) are driving a lot of traffic to websites as well.

Read this for more tips on optimizing for Bing. On a semi-related note, you may also find this article on getting more traffic from Bing's Image Search useful.

Are you concerned about losing Yahoo traffic once it switches to Bing? Talk to ArisYulianta and Friends....

AdWords Opportunities Expanded to More Advertisers

Earlier in the summer Google began beta testing the Opportunities Tab in AdWords. This is a feature in advertisers' accounts that tries to point them to additional cost-effective traffic for their search campaigns.

Google is now expanding the beta to more advertisers in the United States, as well as in the United Kingdom and Australia. Google says over the next few business days, they will expand the beta to all English-language accounts.

"You can think of the Opportunities tab as your homepage for account optimization. You can use the tab to get a quick overview of Google's customized keyword and budget ideas for your campaigns and ad groups," says Amanda Kelly of Google's Inside AdWords crew. "You can also compare the impact of different ideas before making changes. So, if you're looking to increase your keyword coverage for a specific product, or have your ads appear more often for your existing keywords, the Opportunities tab is a great place to start."

Ideas in the Opportunities tab change, so just because you see a list of ideas one day, does not necessarily mean that you'll see that same list all the time.

Google is not getting rid of any other AdWords tools, but they've changed the location of some. Those who are included in the beta test won't see the Tools tab, but instead will be able to access AdWords tools by clicking on the Opportunities tab, and scrolling down the menu. There is a "more tools" link that will show the full list.

"Ultimately we want the Opportunities section of your account to evolve into a single destination you can visit whenever you want to get new ideas for increasing your ad coverage on relevant search terms, capturing additional clicks in your most profitable campaigns, or simply improving your overall ROI," says Kelly.

Google says it hopes to provide a broader set of optimization tools in the future, and that the Opportunities tab is just a starting point for this. Users can expect more changes to come, and the plan is to take the beta testing to advertisers all over the world in the coming weeks.

 

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