Week 6 - MKTG 3349: Automated Bidding

What exactly is automated bidding? This is a strategy that automatically sets the bid for your ads based on its likelihood of activity. The key idea of implementing this into your search engine marketing strategy is that it takes some of the stress off the process. After setting performance goals, the automatic bid process does the hard work in order to meet them. Therefore, there it is not necessary for you to manually reset bids!

Why is this important? There are many factors that play into the success of online marketing, and the ability to have one less focal point allows creators to put a better effort into other areas. For example, if a creator is struggling with planning next quarters budget for marketing and bid prices, using a automated bid would allow the creator to put more time into producing a budget that will succeed.

After all, the more responsibilities taken incurs more chance for error. So take advantage of unique tools such as automated bidding!

Week 5 - MKTG 3349: Ad Extensions

What are ad extensions? They allow advertisers to display additional information along with a running ad. The purpose of doing this is to make the ad more relevant to viewers while also aiming at grabbing attention. Note that there are many different kinds of ad extensions. Below are some examples.

• Location Extensions
• Call Extensions
• Social Extensions
• Product Extensions
• Seller Ratings
• Sitelinks
• Offer Extensions

More often than not, ad performance increases when extensions are used. Why not take advantage of this simple input since it is free to utilize! Using an ad extension for running advertisements is another simple way to maximize your potential return. Although, there is a charge on clicks for extensions excluding seller ratings extensions. 

Make sure that the budget set for search engine marketing is estimating potential costs from every area! 

Week 4 - MKTG 3349: Google Ads Auction

Today I will be discussing how the Google ads auction works and its benefits. How an ad shows up from search results is based off of a quality, relevance and bid price. The bid price is the maximum amount that an advertiser is willing to pay for ad clicks. This can be a huge factor for determining the order in which ads appear. Also, note that the bid price is not typically the true price paid as it is often less. One huge benefit of using this is that advertisers can modify their bid price at any time of their marketing plan. Below is a simplified table showing the main three factors in an auction and the expected outcomes.

Google ads closely examines relevance and overall functionality of the add to determine the quality of the ad. Advertisers can track this assessment in the quality score under the account. It is a great advantage to be able to access information like this as you are able to make decisions to help improve the impact and quality of your advertisement. Another aspect that Google ads assesses is the potential of extensions. For example, if an ad has an extension in smaller font towards the very bottom, then it will be less likely that the audience will notice the extension. Therefore, if the impact of an extension is projected to be low, advertisers will have a difficult time in achieving a better position in the ad auction.

Week 3 - MKTG 3349: AdWords and Keywords

Google AdWords was one of Google's largest advancements as a company. How so? AdWords is Google's ad creation that allows you preview how your content would appear in the search engine and even track the effectiveness. This is a great outlet for business to utilize as its fairly simple to run an ad. Also, more people are abandoning old forms of advertising such as newspapers or magazines simply because our generation is more concerned with technology. This is not just an advertising trend, but a multi-industry trend.

After creating the advertisement, Google allows you to enter some keywords. These are guesses of popular searches closely related to your ad. For example, if I searched for baseball bats, it would be likely to see and ad from a company such as Easton. Tracking performance is a huge concept in search engine marketing because we want to prevent continuous declines. Identifying what area(s) may have caused a downfall and actively looking for ways to improve the results is the best way to sustain success.