Search ad revenues continued to rise in 2013. The record-breaking revenues last year totaled $18.4 billion, accounting for 43 percent of all Internet ad revenue, compared to $16.9 billion and 46 percent in 2012, according to the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB).

Search accounted for more revenue than display and mobile combined in 2013, and that declines in the overall share is due "to growth in Mobile and Mobile Search, which is included in the Mobile category," according to the latest IAB Internet Advertising Revenue Report, which is conducted on behalf of the IAB by PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC).

Just in Q4 2013, search revenues totaled $5 billion, 41 percent of all ad revenue, up from Q4 2012 when search revenue totaled $4.6 billion.

Overall, the IAB reported total U.S. digital advertising revenues of $42.8 billion for 2013 – up 17 percent from $36.6 billion in 2013. That figure is also noteworthy because, for the first time, more ad revenue was generated via Internet advertising than broadcast television. Also, after a record-breaking first half of 2013, In Q4 digital ad revenues surpassed $12 billion.

Display advertising accounted for $12.8 billion (30 percent) in 2013, up 7 percent from $12 billion in 2012.

Mobile advertising continues to grow rapidly, as mobile revenues hit $7.1 billion (17 percent) in 2013, a 110 percent increase from $3.4 billion in 2012.

Source Link:-  Search Engine Watch

Globally, mobile advertising cost per click (CPC) is up nearly 60 percent year-over-year (YoY). Here in the U.S., smartphone CPC is down YoY on both Yahoo and Google by 56 percent and 31 percent, respectively.

Two reports highlight the state of paid search for the end of Q1 2014; one by Covario, which looks at global trends, and one by IgnitiionOne, which focuses on U.S. data. We'll look at highlights of those now.

IgnitionOne looked at YoY search trends by vertical. Particularly interesting was the decrease in impressions for the automotive industry by 46 percent, but the increase in click-through rate (CTR) by 106 percent. 

Here in the U.S., Google accounted for about 77 percent of paid search spend. Yahoo/Bing made up approximately 23 percent. 

Globally, search engine market share in terms of paid search spend was awarded to Google at 84 percent. But not to be ignored is Baidu, which dominates the China market and accounts for approximately 8 percent of spend globally.

When it comes to mobile advertising, paid search spend increased 8 percent compared to both Q1 and Q4 2013, IgnitionOne reported. Smartphones in the U.S. saw YoY growth in impressions (131 percent), clicks (217 percent), and CTR (37 percent), but a decline in CPC (35 percent). Tablet numbers were up in all categories.

Across the globe, mobile advertising grew 35 percent from Q3 2013 to Q1 2014, and 135 percent YoY. CPC was up globally quarter-over-quarter, and the Covario report notes some interesting findings: 

"CPCs on smartphones increased 9% over a quarter ago, while CPCs on tablets remained stable. On the flip side is the discounted price on mobile, where at times the gap seems to be widening with smartphone CPCs 44% lower (-3% change) and interestingly tablet CPCs coming in a full 20% lower (-8% change). Before enhanced campaigns, tablet CPCs sometimes were higher than the same keywords on the desktop campaigns. With this migration, our previous assumption was that the two would be at parity within a few months, something that has not happened."

Source Link:-  Search Engine Watch

Understanding how your competitors leverage data and manage campaigns is important, especially for competitive advertising platforms like Google Shopping.

Digital marketing software company Kenshoo has released a study outlining how 89 search marketers use product listing ads (PLAs) in their marketing campaigns. Below are some of the key findings, and how they impact your Google Shopping ads.

What Are Marketers Doing on PLAs?

Most Marketers Think PLAs Are a Good Investment

• 83 percent of marketers find PLA performance to be on par with, or better than, traditional text ads.

Of the Google advertisers polled, only 17 percent believe PLAs perform worse than traditional paid search text ads, while 67 percent think PLAs perform better than paid search ads.

What Does It Mean for You?

For most merchants, PLAs will bring much more traffic and spend due to the nature of the PLAs in a retail-based search on Google. Advertisers are using PLAs to generate revenue, often more than their current paid search campaigns.

If you aren't running Google Shopping ads, you're in the minority. Be sure to continue to test PLA structure, bids, and budget for optimal performance.

More Than Half of Google PLA Marketers Don't Have a Separate PLA budget

• 62 percent of marketers bundle PLA budgets in with their traditional search budgets, while 29 percent allocate new, incremental budgets to support PLAs.

So while 83 percent of advertisers think PLAs perform as good as or better than paid search, only just more than half of them are allocating a portion of their total paid search ad budget to Google Shopping ads.

What Does It Mean for You?

Only 29 percent of Google PLA advertisers have a separate budget for product listing ads, even though most admit the program has a better ROI than paid search. It's easy to create a separate budget for PLAs within AdWords with a separate campaign, and PLAs are likely to perform better for you. If you can afford it, you most likely want a separate PLA ad budget.

Note: This isn't always true for merchants with very large PPC campaigns that are built out and mature or websites which are selling specialized products (e.g., FSA Stores) or services.

Almost 60 Percent of PLA Merchants Use Mobile PLAs

• 56 percent of Google Advertisers are using mobile PLAs.

Among Google's newer features, mobile has a significant adoption rate for advertisers, which notes how valuable advertisers deem mobile. In comparison, 67 percent of advertisers aren't using local storefronts, another newer feature. Local storefronts aren't widely available to merchants yet, but 17 percent of advertisers don't even know they exist – compared to 7 percent for mobile PLAs.

What Does It Mean for You?

Advertisers are using mobile PLAs to increase traffic and conversions across devices. Depending on your site and inventory, you may want to test mobile for your PLAs. If you are eligible, you should also experiment with local storefronts, as most advertisers aren't yet using that Google feature.

What Marketers Are Doing Wrong on PLAs

Including Their PLA Budget in Paid Search

The majority of Google advertisers include their PLA budget as part of paid search, even though 83 percent of those marketers admit PLAs traditionally perform better.

Having All Products in One Product Group

Ten percent of Google advertisers are still using one product group for PLAs (e.g., all products). While this is a good introductory structure when you're first testing PLAs, you should build out your campaign structure. Only 42 percent of the advertisers polled have multiple category levels for ad groups, which is the type of campaign structure you should have for PLAs.

Conclusion

Product listing ads are transitioning into Google Shopping Campaigns in less than 100 days, which is how long you have to learn how to use the new campaign structure, and figure out what your competitors are doing on Google.

Source Link:-  Search Engine Watch

Many of us has been concerned about the potential of Google expanding "(not provided)" to also encompass paid search. Until now, AdWords advertisers have gotten full access to keyword data, whether it's through Google itself or through one of the third party tools using the API for this data.

When Google made the move to secure search, and effectively turned off the ability for webmasters to know exactly which keywords were driving organic traffic to their websites from Google, the next obvious question was when would this hit AdWords advertisers, and how Google would handle it.

That answer came today. In a blog post, Google said the following:

Today, we are extending our efforts to keep search secure by removing the query from the referer on ad clicks originating from SSL searches on Google.com.

Advertisers will continue to have access to useful data to optimize and improve their campaigns and landing pages. For example, you can access detailed information in the AdWords search terms report and the Google Webmaster Tools Search Queries report.

Some felt it was double standard where AdWords got to keep their keywords while organic did not. However, while the loss of this data would be felt – and has largely been expected – the change isn't as doomsday as some are making it out to be. The impact with the loss of organic keyword data was significantly greater.

Advertisers will continue to have access to keyword data within the Google AdWords dashboard – it isn't a case where advertisers would be flying blind without any data at all. Advertisers who don't use a third party management tool likely won't notice a difference, aside from potentially needing to utilize AdWords tags if they aren't already.

At SMX West last month, Amit Singhal from Google hinted in his keynote that we would be seeing some changes to paid versus organic when it came to "(not provided)", although he was light on details.

Over a period of time, Sridhar [Ramaswamy], the Head of Ads, my friend, and I we have been looking at this issue. And we're also hearing from our users that they would want their searches to be secure. A lot has happened in the world, as you all know. And keeping user's searches secure is really important to the users. We really like the way things have gone on the organic side of search, because we are hearing and responding to what our users want. We really like where we are at.

Sridhar and I are looking at our world, and finding the right solution for our users who want their searches secure and are advertisers, so I have nothing to announce right now, but in the coming weeks and months as Sridhar and I find the right solution, expect something to come out of us.

Discussion about this change began earlier this week when A.J. Ghergich published a blog post detailing that AdWords will no longer be supplying third parties with paid search query data.

Because of the way Google AdWords does their tracking, they can still easily remove the referral keyword string from the referring AdWords URL, to provide secure search in regards to preventing those keywords from showing up in the website logs. But Google still has all that data within the AdWords dashboard, and can provide that information to advertisers.

Regardless of how they provide the keyword data within the Google AdWords dashboard, we won't see a day where advertisers get no keywords whatsoever, because the price would drop down as advertisers lose confidence in the transparency of what they're bidding on and what they're getting traffic from.

Ghergich reported that an anonymous source provided him with the information regarding the change to paid search query data. The details from the memo include:

• Google will cease supplying 3rd parties with paid search query data
• Reports within AdWords will remain unaffected
• This will also have an affect on website analytics packages but we've not yet heard about anything with Google Analytics
• Services that use this query data may have no way to access it anymore

Could they turn off access within Google Analytics? It's hard to say because some third parties use Google Analytics data, if they are truly trying to tighten down on any of that data for privacy concerns.

There is the possibility that they could be changing the API where Google would charge for paid API access, under the guise of "keeping it secure", or simply tightening down the number of companies that have access to the data currently.

What other reasons could Google have besides privacy concerns, which was the reason for the organic "(not provided)" change? According to Ghergich, his source feels that "another possible motive for the change by Google is that less data leads to less accurate AdWords decisions which increases ad spend."

Prior to Google making the change official, Search Engine Watch reached out to several companies who are currently using this paid search query data from Google AdWords, to get their take, and their thoughts if Google was to make a change to their current third party access to paid search query data.

Marc Poirier, Acquisio co-founder & EVP, business development told us:

This information is critical for search marketers, it helps them see how search queries map to keywords and to make the necessary adjustments such as adding negatives or exact match keywords to help continuously improve performance. Taking this away will seriously impede the discovery process and will promote the massive proliferation of exact match keywords and the accelerated death of broad match and even phrase match keywords. In other words, if this is true, it will likely have a dramatic impact on the number of keywords needed to find success in paid search.

Jon Henshaw, Raven Tools co-founder, told us:

We keep a close watch on the AdWords API to make sure that Raven complies with its terms of service, which Google takes very seriously.

We have not heard from Google about changes to their AdWords API related to search query data. But I really can't speculate or speak for any other third party provider about this.

In our case, online marketing agencies use Raven to manage AdWords campaigns and report campaign performance to their clients. The AdWords data that our customers value most in Raven is related to that, not whatever paid search query data that they may use for research. If this specific rumor turns out to be true, any impact on Raven's customers would be minimal.

All that said, our software evolves as the industry does.

Matt Ackley, Marin Software CMO, also told Search Engine Watch that they won't be greatly affected by the change.

We are aware of the reports circulating that Google may cease to provide search query data to third parties. The bulk of Marin Software's services involve keyword data. While search query data is related to keyword data the two are distinct. As such, bidding, reporting, tracking, and campaign management - the features and capabilities that set Marin Software apart as a powerful digital marketing platform - would be unaffected should Google no longer provide search query data to its paid search API partners.

Source Link:-  Search Engine Watch

Last month, I wrote about free PPC tools for success. Sometimes, though, free tools aren't enough.

In enterprise PPC, or for tougher tasks like landing page optimization, paid tools are necessary to make an impact – and they usually pay for themselves many times over in improved results.

Remember, most paid tools offer free trials, so there's little risk in testing them out. Here are 18 must-have paid tools for PPC success, suggested by eight PPC experts.

Bid Management Tools

There are several great providers out there, such as:

• Marin Software
• DC Storm
• Acquisio
• Kenshoo

If you're managing one or more large PPC accounts, a bid management tool is crucial, and will save you time and money.

Competitive Intelligence Tools

Want to know what keywords your competitors are bidding on, and an estimate of how much they're paying for them? With competitive intelligence tools, that information and more can be yours.

Spyfu, AdBeat, Keyword Spy, and SEMrush are all useful tools for competitive positioning and keyword research.

• Visual Website Optimizer: This landing page optimization tool creates multiple landing pages for testing with no coding required. If you've ever had to wait for IT to create landing pages, you'll love Visual Website Optimizer.
• Supermetrics: Ever wished you could create great-looking reports automatically in Excel or Google Docs? Supermetrics does this for an affordable yearly fee.
• Next Analytics: This Excel plugin is for downloading and analyzing data, and creating reports. Next Analytics creates dashboards with data from search and social media.
• CallRail: If you're using click-to-call, or if a significant number of your sales come via phone, it's important to know which keywords and ads closed the sale. Good for measuring the total impact of click-to-call ads, CallRail can track online and offline calls in one interface.
• Bizible: Use Bizible to combine AdWords and Google Analytics data with SalesForce to close the loop between your online marketing efforts and your lead nurturing system.

Affiliate Monitoring

Have you ever searched on your own or your client's brand, only to see affiliates outbidding you and potentially taking your traffic? Brand Verity helps you keep tabs on rogue affiliates. There's also Search Monitor for serious affiliate tracking and monitoring.

• Screaming Frog: Screaming Frog is usually thought of as an SEO tool, but you can use it for PPC to help with mapping and gapping in ecommerce accounts. Say you have thousands of search links in an e-commerce account and want to know the number of search results for each link. Screaming Frog helps with that. Then you can see which links you should be promoting in your product listing ads or shopping campaigns, for instance. Screaming Frog has a free version, but it's limited to 500 links. The paid version allows crawls of unlimited links – crucial for large ecommerce catalogs.
• Basecamp: Basecamp isn't a PPC tool per se. It's project management software. It's a useful tool to coordinate PPC projects across a team. When you're working on an enterprise-level client, you might have one person doing bid management, another doing keyword research and ad copy, another doing reporting – or you may have multiple people tag-teaming it on each task. Basecamp keeps everyone accountable and makes sure work gets done without overlapping unnecessarily.
• ClickTime: Time tracking is a necessary evil for PPC agencies. You can use ClickTime as a time tracking solution. It's simple and cloud-based, so time can be entered from any Internet-connected device.

Huge thanks to the PPC experts who contributed their suggestions for paid tools for PPC success:Luke Alley; Andrew Bethel; Arianne Donoghue; Lisa Sanner, Aaron Levy, Tim Jensen, Dave Rigotti, and Chris Gutknecht.

What are your favorite paid PPC tools?

Source Link:-  Search Engine Watch

The paid search landscape has rapidly evolved over the last 18 months. Some might even say it has completely transformed.

With new ad features, enhanced campaigns, and the evolution of search behavior, many advertisers are struggling to see performance results like they have experienced in the past. If you fall into that category don't fret! It just means it's time to reset.

Here are four surefire ways to breathe new life back into your campaigns.

1. Campaign Structure Review and Reset – Every 6 Months

Your campaign structure is nothing more than a data structure that should be used to gather business intelligence that fuels your paid search optimization decisions and also provides valuable market level information to feed into the overall business.

Hopefully you have restructured your accounts since last October with the introduction of enhanced campaigns. But even beyond changes in the engine, you should periodically review your structure.

First, a structure should support the overall business objective so that spend is focused on the most profitable assets and segmented by business goals. As those goals change, new products are introduced or new profitability targets are set review the campaign to make sure it aligns with the overall business objective.

The structure should also allow for maximum control of creative, keyword relevance, and bid optimizations. Accounts can get really messy when neglected over time.

2. Search Engine Parity – Every 3 Months

Make sure you have the same assets represented in both Google AdWords and Bing Ads. By practicing this discipline you can maximize performance potential, by maximizing exposure and discerning KPI changes across a larger data set, which can in turn infer both macro and micro performance factors.

Google and Bing also have different audience profiles such that the performance might be stronger in one engine vs another depending on the keyword target and user intent.

To maximize your keyword portfolio, you can control efficiency via bid optimization rather than lose out on exposure and possible conversions by not having representation of all terms in both engines. For example, when we performed this audit for one client and expanded into Bing, we witnessed the program ROAS increase by $3 within two months following the addition of keywords to Bing because the engine converted at a higher rate than Google for the same term.

3. Search Query Analysis – Every 30-90 Days

The power of search query analysis and implementation is often underestimated. Not only can you substantially save on cost-per-click (CPC) by mapping queries to bid terms, but also search queries give you a preview into the consumers search intent.

The best way to go through search queries is to organize them alphabetically. From there you can organize them into themes and prioritize them based on impressions, cost, CTR or return.

If you have more than 30 percent of the queries not mapped to bid terms, then you're likely paying a premium on your clicks.

Also, reviewing search queries over time can help you understand changes in search behavior and might provide intelligence on merchandising, new product development, or foreshadow in-demand changes to product features.

4. Low/High Volume Keyword Analysis – Every 90 Days

Over time, an account can accumulate 100,000 terms that do nothing but take up space in an account. Keywords should be group based on return profiles, themes but also volume.

I've seen several accounts bleed, or what I like to call "death by 1,000 clicks." Long-tail terms will always be the best performers; however, due to low volume, you often won't realize their potential until months or even years later.

If you're bidding at the keyword level, which is most efficient, these terms will often be pushed out of the auction due to lack of performance data. Also, the magnitude of an account with more than 1 million terms is very difficult to manage and hard to identify true performance factors.

When reviewing low and high volume terms, analyze the factors around low volume terms as well as outlying high volume terms and whether the causes are intended or due to one of the following:

• Broad Match mapping.
• Unqualified traffic from search partners.
• Broad match.
• Click fraud.
• Minimum bid disparity.

If low volume is caused due to low searchers in the space, allocate a budget specifically to the items and keep them at prime positions so that your ad is at the forefront of the search. For higher volume terms, which tend to be upper funnel, make sure to routinely mine these queries and negating or adding them to their appropriate groups.

Source Link:-  Search Engine Watch

Brands integrate into the fabric of people's lives, and it's the marketers job to make sure the brand is there when people need it – like when they're staying inside from the cold.

Dubbed the "polar vortex," this past winter's storm system was a brutal one for many in the U.S. Marin Software data released today suggests that online shopping was up in response to the cold, but that there was plenty of missed opportunity for advertisers.

"Paid search impression volumes were 1,500 percent higher than historic trends for retailers during the coldest week of the polar vortex (January 19 to 25)," Marin said in its announcement. Click volume and spend also increased by 268 percent and 79 percent respectively, "but only at a fraction of the search impressions, indicating advertisers missed out on a captive audience."

In order to help brands stay relevant to their audience and become a solution in their consumer's lives, Marin announced today "Context Connect," allowing advertisers to "incorporate weather, television, inventory, sports scores, stock market fluctuations, and other contextual data into their digital marketing campaigns."

Context Connect lets marketers evaluate search, social and display performance alongside "contextual attributes to quickly identify trends and take immediate action by adjusting audiences, creative and bidding across campaigns. Paired with Marin Software's Dynamic Actions, Context Connect further empowers advertisers with the ability to automatically adjust keyword bids and visibility based on custom criteria."

"Digital marketers can't see into the future and predict for every factor that may affect a digital marketing campaign," said Matt Ackley, chief marketing officer at Marin Software. "Context Connect and the open-stack nature of the Marin platform allow advertisers to integrate contextual sources of data and optimize their digital campaigns based on their unique external factors."

Source Link:-  Search Engine Watch

There are far more than 1 million Google advertisers. Even if your products are priced competitively, you have flawless SEO, and your PPC campaigns (Product Listing Ads Campaigns and text) are optimized, you have some steep competition on Google.

Here are some easy ways to get a leg up on your competition that don't require too much work.

1. Highlight Google Special Offers

Google special offers (merchant promotions), are the promotions you see next to products or merchant sites on Product Listing Ads and on Google. Merchants can use to promote store or product sales, which is an easy way to increase conversion and click-through rates, drive traffic to your site, and differentiate your listings.

If you aren't familiar with Google Special Offer promotions,check out how to get started here.

Recently, Google updated the functionality on Google Shopping comparison pages so shoppers can filter the comparison page by special offers. This filter option shows merchants who are running a special offer first, then all other normal listings.

Merchants who are running a special offer but are listed on the third page comparison will have the advantage of being on the first page. This is an easy way to boost your visibility on Google with relatively little work.

Here's an example of how Google special offers appear in search with Product Listing Ads:

2. Use Google Consumer Surveys

Like Google Special Offers, Google Consumer Surveys(Google Consumer Ratings) have been around for quite some time (since 2012), and are a useful tool for online advertisers.

Google Consumer Surveys allow website owners to poll their audience on Googleto gauge customer satisfaction.

Additionally, earlier this month Google's Consumer Surveys began appearing in search alongside AdWords ads in the form of Consumer Ratings Annotations. Consumer Surveys now appear automatically if Google has Consumer Ratings for your business, similar to the existing seller ratings for ecommerce advertisers.

Here's how Google Consumer Surveys show in search:

Google Consumer Surveys populate automatically based on the information Google is gleaning from the survey's in place. If there are ratings for your business, they will appear in your AdWords ads.

Google Consumer Surveys are a home run for advertisers outside of ecommerce who may not be able to feature Seller Ratings or Review Extensions, but also can appear in addition to that customer feedback in search. Initial Google Consumer Surveys are generated from Google's Consumer Surveys platform, but retailers have the option of submitting a consumer ratings annotations interest formto try and get a jump on the competition.

Google's preliminary studies indicate consumer ratings annotations can boost click thru rate by an average of 10 percent.

3. List All of Your Products on Google Shopping

Once you cut a product from your data feed you are removing it from Google search. Even if that product converted poorly, you've now obliterated it from the face of Google. It can't be found on Google search. Ever.

It's a good idea to decrease visibility to products which convert poorly, but removing products from search isn't the answer. It's much easier and smarter for your campaign to put poor performing products in a product group which has a low bid (you can bid as low $.01 PLAs).

You should demote SKU visibility for products that fail to meet your ROI requirements while maintaining inexpensive coverage on the deeper Google Shopping Network for long tail search.

With Product Listing Ads, be sure to continuously test your product groups, and use Analytics data to drive all of your segmentation. In addition to cutting out products from their PLA campaign, here are some bonus things you shouldn't do with your Product Listing Ads:

• Break out ads for every product or SKU
• Bid aggressively on any product which you haven't seen perform in Analytics
• Using Analytics data without a decent sample size
• Using only one PLA strategy (e.g SKU, best sellers, etc)

Source Link:-  Search Engine Watch

Earlier this month, Google AdWords officially launched Flexible Conversion Counting, a new type of conversion that allows advertisers to track the types of conversions that are most valuable to their business.

This change changed how conversions appeared in our AdWords interface – “Conversions (1-per-click)” changed to “Converted Clicks” and Conversions (many-per-click) changed to “Conversions”. For many PPC professionals, we just made a mental note, updated some reporting templates or our data warehouse and moved on.

For other advertisers, this update opened up the door to consider, or reconsider, which conversion types best suit their business. With that in mind, we wanted to give a refresher on what types of conversions you should be tracking and why, while also reviewing some of the new conversion types available in AdWords.

Below, we’ve broken out conversion types into three areas – Hard Conversions, Estimated Conversions and Percent-of Conversions.

Hard Conversion Types

These are your hard numbers, the bottom-line numbers, and likely what you’ve already been reporting on, assuming all of your conversion tracking is set up accurately.

Converted Clicks

This is how many clicks resulted in one or more conversion actions. The actual number of conversions will be counted separately in the "Conversions" column. The number of converted clicks can help you approximate how many unique customers you're acquiring.

For example, a customer clicks on your ad and makes two purchases. You’ll see only one converted click in this column, but you’ll see two conversions in the “Conversions” column. Converted Clicks are helpful for tracking leads, when more than one action (i.e., two sign-ups) from the same customer does not provide any additional value to your business.

Conversions

This column reports total conversions, across all the conversion actions you're tracking. However, this conversion type also takes into consideration how you’ve chosen to count your conversions (unique or all), which affects the number shown in this column.

In the AdWords interface you will see the following example: You track two conversion actions: leads and sales. You decide to count "Unique" leads and "All" sales. When one ad click turns into two leads and two sales, it's counted as three conversions: one for the unique lead, and two for the sales.

As the example shows, this is a solid conversion type to track when you have a mixed model of success and are tracking multiple actions.

Phone Call Conversions

If you’ve set up call extensions, your Phone Call Conversions column will represent the number of phone calls that were longer than the call duration specified for that call extension. Keep in mind that in order for Google to track Call Extensions, you must use a Google Call Forwarding Number.

Estimated Conversion Types

These are fairly new conversion types provided by Google and based on estimated data. There is no additional conversion tracking needed on your end to view these conversion types, as they rely on Google’s sophisticated tracking to provide you with more information about how your customers behave.

Estimated Cross-Device Conversions

Estimated Cross-Device Conversions take place when a customer clicks on an ad on one device, then converts on a different device or browser. Using this conversion type, you can see how your ads impact conversions that happen across multiple devices and browsers.

Cross-Device Conversions will be included in your Estimated Total Conversions, outlined below.

You don't need to be serving ads on multiple devices for this column to populate – it’s based on how the user completes the conversion.

his conversion type is most helpful when trying to understand how your customers behave and how to reach them. For example, it may enlighten you so much that you start serving ads on mobile.

Estimated Total Conversions

This is Google’s best estimate of the total number of conversions that AdWords drives all together. This metric will include Estimated Cross-Device Conversions, Conversions (previously many-per-click) and Phone Call Conversions. According to Google, you can use this column to understand your return on investment and make better decisions about your bids and budgets.

Percent-Of Conversion Types

“Percent-of Conversions” in an entirely made up name. However, I’ve named the conversion types below “Percent-of Conversions” because when optimizing and adjusting bids, many PPC professionals take a percent of these conversions into consideration. While many advertisers won’t fully rely on these metrics, many will understand their value and use a percent of them to dictate their actions.

Click-Assisted Conversions

Appearing only for search campaigns, Click-Assisted Conversions is the total number of conversions for which a particular keyword contributed one or more assist clicks. Assist clicks can be defined as the total number of clicks a keyword received prior to a conversion, excluding the last click.

Basically, this keyword “assisted” with the conversion, but was not the last click a user made prior to the conversion.

Typically, advertisers take into consideration 50 to 80 percent of their Click-Assisted Conversion metrics to optimize and adjust bids and budgets. This reason being that if your data is relying on last-click activity, the conversion has likely been recorded by another channel – direct load, SEO, etc.

However, it can be said that the click on your PPC ad “helped” the user convert – gave them a boost if you will. Therefore, in order to keep all other channels running smoothly, I like to keep mind how my keywords may have “assisted” with conversions on other channels.

Impression-Assisted Conversions

The Impression-Assisted Conversions column shows the total number of conversions for which a particular keyword triggered assist impressions prior to the last click. This is the same idea as Click-Assisted Conversions and is only shown for Search campaigns, with the difference being that it relies on assist impressions rather than assist clicks.

For this conversion-type, advertisers usually take a much smaller portion into consideration when optimizing and adjusting bids and budgets – typically 10 to 20 percent. Click-Assisted and Impression-Assisted conversions help advertisers better understand the conversion funnel that leads a user to take a given action.

View-Through Conversions

Appearing only for the Display Network, View-Through Conversions happen when a customer views your image or rich media ad before converting, but never actually clicks on the ad. If these customers later convert, this metric counts their conversions as “View-Through Conversions.” This conversion type automatically excludes conversions from people who've also clicked your Search ads.

Since a user never actually clicks on the ad, it is likely that the View-Through Conversion is being counted elsewhere in your data (SEO, direct load, etc.), just like with your Assisted metrics. Because of this, we don't take View-Through Conversions into account 100 percent, but rather use a percent of them to help with optimization efforts. Typically, advertisers will take into account anywhere from 10 to 50 percent of View-Through Conversions when optimizing, but won't showcase the numbers as hard conversions.

Summary

Choosing the right conversion type for your business can seem overwhelming at first. Hopefully reading through this article has helped you further understand the types that are available, and how they are used by advertisers today.

In most cases, the road to success starts by simply defining what success looks like – and with Google now offering conversion types for nearly every business model, it's becoming easier for businesses to see the bigger picture and attain their goals that much faster.

If you need more information on conversion types or tracking, please visit the AdWords Helpwebsite or comment below.

Source Link:-  Search Engine Watch