PPC is about innovating, testing, measuring and constantly improving. This means taking advantage of all the latest features and ad formats, exploring new ad networks, and implementing new strategies.
So what has worked for PPC marketers this year so far, in Google Ads (AdWords), Bing Ads and elsewhere? To find out, we asked four of the best to share what new things they've tried so far this year and had success with.
New Advertising Feature 1: Google Ads Message Extensions
In October 2016, Google Ads introduced Message Extensions, which allowed users to click through to text cell phone number list businesses directly from the SERP. Aaron Levy called Google Ads Message Extensions "our surprise hit of the year." Here's what Levy had to say: “We have a few customers whose conversion tends to distort mobile calls and to phone calls.
Implementing message extensions has led to some surprising results. When post extensions appear, we see the CTR nearly double in a very competitive category. The funny thing is that we don't see users clicking on the extension itself very often - a little more often than for sitelinks, but not by much - maybe 15% of the total number of clicks, but not necessarily on the extension itself. Maybe that's how we set it up (we say chat with an expert live rather than texting us) so that may have skewed the behavior.
New Advertising Feature 2: Account-Level Sitelinks
Lisa Raehsler said she took full advantage of this awesome new feature this year. This allows you to create a single set of sitelinks that are applied to all of your AdWords campaigns: “It allowed us to add a higher level of strategy to ad extensions, allowing us to focus on more general default account-wide messaging if we need to. 'Use default account sitelinks in smaller to medium-sized accounts or in branding campaigns.
It has saved a lot of time on ad management and I have seen that my clients using this type of ad experience average to above average CTR and below average CPC for this type of ad . Going forward, we plan to get more specific across the board with messages and images on responsive ads to further our testing of the best performing combinations. "