Anyone involved in digital marketing will know that the landscape is always changing. At Screen Pilot we all dedicate a significant amount of our time keeping up with the latest industry news and trends. We download e-books, read e-blasts, keep up with online celebs like Matt Cutts & Pete Cashmore on Twitter, and follow an obscene number of blogs. So today we thought we would help you out and list some of the latest developments that everyone should know about and, if possible, be trying for yourself. All in a blog post that should take less than 3 minutes to read!Google Tag ManagerAdwords, Analytics, Re-marketing, Bing and many more. The number of tracking codes we are implementing in all sites, but in particular ecommerce sites, is growing all of the time. It’s time consuming and costly for teams to keep adding and changing code – Google Analytics seems to change their code once every year now. Plus the more code is added the bigger the potential for data inaccuracies.Google tag manager is a new way of managing these codes that removes those problems. It allows your marketing/ analytics team to add their own tags and create their own rules whenever they need. It completely simplifies the system. And best of all it’s 100% free and you can even add non-Google code.Bing SitelinksBing has finally caught up with Google here. Google have been using sitelinks within Adwords for a while now and in the last week Bing have done the same.
Adding sitelinks should be a no-brainer for any PPC professional. They increase your SERP real estate, increase CTR (in turn improving quality and lowering CPC) and just make it easier for your customers to find what they are looking for on your site. Like we said… a no-brainer!Bing is still lagging slightly behind Google though. For a few months now Adwords has allowed “enhanced sitelinks”. These give even more space for your ad and extra information about each sitelink.
I’m sure Bing will catch up by 2014!Re-Marketing For Google AnalyticsTraditional Adwords re-marketing is pretty simple – you show display ads to previous visitors that did or didn’t visit pages that you define. It’s a great way of marketing to your most relevant customers and gets superb ROI but there isn’t much that can be done to optimize it apart from stopping your ads being shown on certain sites.But that’s all changed. You can now build targeting lists in Google Analytics based on advertiser-defined segments. These can include bounce rate, time on site, from certain sources and completing goals that you have defined. Best of all the lists are integrated into Adwords.Communication Ad ExtensionsAt Screen Pilot we’re calling this the ‘email extension’ – much less of a mouthful! Right now this is a Google Beta that you can only access if granted by an Adwords rep. It allows you to grab an email lead from within the search ad itself. The cost of the click is the same as a regular ad link click so there are no extra charges to worry about.
Like site-links the benefits include extra real estate on a Google SERP. The real benefit though is an email sign up which allows you to continue marketing to the user – much more valuable than a simple visit to the site. When a user signs up you can either set it up so they get added straight to your database or have the leads sent directly to your inbox for you to add to the database manually.There you have it. 4 new toys for you to play with this October. If you hear of any others that we’ve missed out here be sure to comment below, we’d love to hear from you.
Anyone involved in digital marketing will know that the landscape is always changing. At Screen Pilot we all dedicate a significant amount of our time keeping up with the latest industry news and trends. We download e-books, read e-blasts, keep up with online celebs like Matt Cutts & Pete Cashmore on Twitter, and follow an obscene number of blogs. So today we thought we would help you out and list some of the latest developments that everyone should know about and, if possible, be trying for yourself. All in a blog post that should take less than 3 minutes to read!Google Tag ManagerAdwords, Analytics, Re-marketing, Bing and many more. The number of tracking codes we are implementing in all sites, but in particular ecommerce sites, is growing all of the time. It’s time consuming and costly for teams to keep adding and changing code – Google Analytics seems to change their code once every year now. Plus the more code is added the bigger the potential for data inaccuracies.Google tag manager is a new way of managing these codes that removes those problems. It allows your marketing/ analytics team to add their own tags and create their own rules whenever they need. It completely simplifies the system. And best of all it’s 100% free and you can even add non-Google code.Bing SitelinksBing has finally caught up with Google here. Google have been using sitelinks within Adwords for a while now and in the last week Bing have done the same.
Adding sitelinks should be a no-brainer for any PPC professional. They increase your SERP real estate, increase CTR (in turn improving quality and lowering CPC) and just make it easier for your customers to find what they are looking for on your site. Like we said… a no-brainer!Bing is still lagging slightly behind Google though. For a few months now Adwords has allowed “enhanced sitelinks”. These give even more space for your ad and extra information about each sitelink.
I’m sure Bing will catch up by 2014!Re-Marketing For Google AnalyticsTraditional Adwords re-marketing is pretty simple – you show display ads to previous visitors that did or didn’t visit pages that you define. It’s a great way of marketing to your most relevant customers and gets superb ROI but there isn’t much that can be done to optimize it apart from stopping your ads being shown on certain sites.But that’s all changed. You can now build targeting lists in Google Analytics based on advertiser-defined segments. These can include bounce rate, time on site, from certain sources and completing goals that you have defined. Best of all the lists are integrated into Adwords.Communication Ad ExtensionsAt Screen Pilot we’re calling this the ‘email extension’ – much less of a mouthful! Right now this is a Google Beta that you can only access if granted by an Adwords rep. It allows you to grab an email lead from within the search ad itself. The cost of the click is the same as a regular ad link click so there are no extra charges to worry about.
Like site-links the benefits include extra real estate on a Google SERP. The real benefit though is an email sign up which allows you to continue marketing to the user – much more valuable than a simple visit to the site. When a user signs up you can either set it up so they get added straight to your database or have the leads sent directly to your inbox for you to add to the database manually.There you have it. 4 new toys for you to play with this October. If you hear of any others that we’ve missed out here be sure to comment below, we’d love to hear from you.
