Google announced last week they have re-named and created a new “umbrella name” for the previously known AdWords Pay Per Click (PPC) Advertising stream, the Content Network, to the Display Network.
The Display Network will incorporate Google’s Adsense, Ad Exchange, You Tube, Google Finance, Gmail, Google Maps and Blogger properties under the new ad platform name. It will also compromise millions of Web video, gaming and mobile display partners. The Display Network on Google differs from the Search Network in Google Adwords, are the options to have text, image, rich media and video ads on various sites, compared to the text ads present on the Google Search Results Pages.
The beauty with Display Ads, is that it allows the advertiser to be creative with the Ads they wish to present.
Google have said the Adwords interface will be changing over the next couple of weeks to reflect the new branding, however the way the Content Network Ads were previously worked runs the same way. It had also been revealed moving forward that they will be testing and adding new features on the Google Display Network to help “reach your advertising goals”.
It will be interesting to see how these new features affect the current Adwords platform and this blogger would love to hear your thoughts on how you think these changes will affect your ads.
Twitter launched its ‘Promoted Tweets’ advertising system earlier this month, in a long-expected move by the staggeringly popular micro-blogging platform to attempt to monetise the global reach of its information exchange service.
The system is similar to Google AdWords: keywords receive bids from advertisers, and if successful, the advertiser’s ad is triggered as a ‘Sponsored Tweet’ when that keyword is typed into Twitter’s search field. How often the ad appears is figured on its relevancy and popularity, a performance metric reminiscent of Google’s Quality Score.
If the advertising model does do well, then lucrative deals with the likes of Google, Microsoft and Starbucks are surely not far off.
How will this affect the lives of Twitter users? Hopefully not much, beyond inflicting a mild sense of irritation upon someone seeing a largely irrelevant ad within their usual stream of largely irrelevant tweets.
So many people tweet as a means of unpaid, unofficial advertising anyway that it’s entirely possible that the most prolific Twitter users will be the least impacted by the switch.
Appropriately, Twitter is handling the change with a delicacy intended to avoid alienating its user base. Netizens don’t take to change well, especially the kind that’s glaring (Facebook layout changes) or obviously aimed toward diminishing their experience for the sake of corporate profit (pop up ads).
Twitter’s transparency in announcing its intent to introduce search, and the relative subtlety of its text-based ad format – 160 characters max, just like a regular tweet – may just make this one a success.
From today, Google has started testing a new AdWords feature that is currently available to a selective few in the US called AdWords Comparison Ads. It allows users to compare multiple, relevant offers within your sponsored link on Google.
Even though AdWords uses a number of things to show relevant ads to users when they send through a search query, sometimes the ads aren’t targeted enough to provide the right information for the visitor. This is where comparison ads comes into play.
With Comparison Ads, you can also target your offers at a more granular level, leading to more valuable, qualified leads…If they click the promotion, users are taken to a page with more detailed sponsored results. They can choose directly from the offers listed on that page, or they can further refine their search by providing additional information like income and home value. By giving users the ability to refine their search on a number of relevant attributes, we are able to show more targeted ads and provide you with more valuable leads.
Here’s what a sponsored results page could look like:
It’s hard to say when this feature will be available to Australian advertisers as it is still in its early-stages. But if Ad extensions was any indicator, it could take up to 2 years before we get our hands on it. Stay tuned! If you’re a US advertiser and would like to know more, click here.
In the coming weeks, Australian advertisers will be able to conveniently drive more viewers to their YouTube videos with the use of their AdWords account. Known as Promoted Videos, it was launched as a search advertising program on YouTube so that you could promote your video to users. But in the past year it has expanded to a level where Google will now make it easier for you to set up and manage your campaigns through AdWords
This integration will allow you to create campaigns and buy ad space from the one place, with the assistance of familiar campaign tools. From today, this will be available in Canada, the U.K., France, Italy, Germany, Spain and the Netherlands. You can learn more about this here.
To get a better understanding of Promoted Videos, watch this!
If you haven’t already checked your email, last night you would have received an email from Google AdWords, telling you that you have at least 30 days before they permanently switch over the current interface to a new version that has been designed to make life easier for you.
If you are like many out there that have been working with the current AdWords interface and have become comfortable with it, in particular those who have tried doing PPC themselves instead of through an agency, this new change can be daunting to say the least. It sort of looks familiar, yet it’s completely different and you wonder why they changed it in the first place when the current interface was working fine. Welcome to the ever changing world of AdWords!
Some of the changes include:
- The way you add/edit ads and keywords
- The way you edit budgets
- The way you create/edit campaign settings
- The layout in reviewing your campaign
Previous Interface
New Interface
If you have started using the new interface, you’ll notice that there are still a number of things missing in it, along with it taking significantly longer to load than the current interface. It will take some time getting use to the new interface (even with it’s similarities to Google Analytics). With this transition, it’s a good opportunity for those who have been thinking of outsourcing their PPC management to do it now rather than later once this change becomes permanent, and you are forced to invest in time that you may not have to learn a new system.
For more information about the new interface, click here.
E-Web Marketing is a Google AdWords Qualified Company and a Yahoo Certified Local Ambassador. If you are interested, please contact us on 1300 785 122 to discuss maximising your campaign to meet your objectives!
