Articles in The 'automated-rules' Tag

Last-minute SEM Tactics to Target Online Holiday Shoppers

by Anne Garcia

The holidays are quickly approaching and you may be strategizing on new tactics to increase sales before the year ends. Below are several strategies for Google AdWords that don’t require too much heavy lifting so, that you can implement before the online shopping season ends.

• Google Shopping: Implement Product Listing Ads to appear in Google Shopping search results. If you have a Merchant Center account already created, sync it to AdWords and create a new campaign to target all products.

• Offer Ad Extensions: Enable offer extensions for last minute promotions. Works great with Green Monday (December 10th) and/or Free Shipping Monday (December 17th) and can be used both online and in brick and mortar locations.

• Automated Rules: Just because your ecommerce store is open 24/7 does not mean you need to be awake and working 24/7. Create automated rules to enable and pause those free shipping and discounted promotions you’re offering.

• Remarketing: Create remarketing campaigns to target users who come to your site but don’t complete a transaction. Studies have shown that 70% of users place items in their shopping cart but abandon the site without finishing the sale. Target your ads to these users to ensure that you’re not leaving transactions on the table.

How to Use Automated Rules for Holiday Promotions

by Anne Garcia

Do you have promotions that end at 11:59 PM and you don’t want to burn the midnight oil pausing ads with special promotions? Do you want to be more efficient in managing your promotions for the holiday season? Automated Rules are the answer.

Automated Rules in AdWords let you schedule automatic changes to specific parts of your account based on the criteria you specify and save you time by efficiently managing your paid search efforts. Some examples of criteria that you can choose can be based on campaigns, ad groups, keywords, or ads.

For example, you have an upcoming promotion offering a 20% off discount and include this verbiage within your text ads. The sale is set to start at 6:00 AM. With Automated Rules, you can set a rule to enable all ads that contain “20% off” at 6:01 AM, without having to manually enable all of the ads within your account.

In addition, you can have the advertising platform automatically alert you when your automated rules have run, insuring you that all the necessary changes have been made.

To implement Automated Rules, find the “Automate” menu within one of the following tabs within AdWords: Campaigns, Ad Groups, Ads, or Keywords.

How to Use the New “Raise Bids To Top Of Page CPC” Automated Rule

by Anne Garcia

So you’re totally psyched about Automated Rules and you have implemented them in your current Google AdWords pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns. You will be happy to hear that AdWords has recently introduced a new automated rule that will increase your keyword cost-per-click (CPC) bids so that your ads will be shown at the top of the search engine results page (SERP).

You will want to utilize the “Raise Bids To Top Of Page CPC” automated rule for your branding campaigns, campaigns with well-performing Sitelinks, or any campaigns that have a tendency to perform better in the first paid position on the SERP.

You can choose what keywords within your campaigns will be affected by the automated rule by selecting the different requirements. You can sort by different CPC bids, click-through rates (CTR), average position, or even all the keywords within the campaign.

To enable this automated rule, in your Campaigns tab, select “Raise bids to top of page CPC when…” underneath the “Automate” pull down menu.

Here is a screen shot of how to set up this rule:

Please note that you can not use the “Raise Bids To Top Of Page CPC” automated rule for campaigns that are utilizing Conversion Optimizer or advanced ad scheduling.