By Rosemary Dempsey, Senior Storyteller

Plan to target tablet users better than ever with your pay-per-click (PPC) advertising campaigns.

Tablet targeting is now available to all Google AdWords advertisers. So, now you can better control how you reach the growing number of tablet users. (165 million tablets are expected to ship over the next two years!)

In your AdWords account, find the “Tablets with full browsers” option under the “Networks and devices” section of the Settings tab. In the past, advertisers found the Apple iPad option under “Mobile devices,” but now tablets have their own category with additional options. For example, to reach iPad users, you’d choose “Tablets with full browsers” and then select “iOS.” Other OS options include Android and webOS.

Be aware that with the launch, your ads will automatically start running on tablets. If you don’t want your ads to appear on tablets, you must change your settings.

Insider tip: our Google rep has recommended replicating campaigns to target tablets and manage budgets separately. We can expect to see higher click-through rates (CTRs) and generally lower cost-per-clicks (CPCs) from implementing this type of campaign.

We’ll be watching analytics accounts to note any rises in traffic percentages from tablet users!

Learn more from this Google blog.

By Elyse Jarvis, Account Coordinator

Google announces it will no longer offer the Position Preference feature for its popular PPC advertising platform, AdWords.

Google announced this month that it will be discontinuing its Position Preference feature in AdWords. The search giant will replace Position Preference with an Automated Rules function that allows for automatic changes to a keyword’s bid, budget or status based on user specifications.

Position Preference has allowed users to designate desired placement for keywords and limits ads from appearing when bids were not high enough to secure the user’s preferred placement. For instance, if position one was selected as the intended placement, ads matching a user search query would only appear if the bid for the keyword was high enough to place it in position one.

While this capability was helpful for bid management, Google explained on its blog that it is important to understand that there are two processes effecting positioning, and that understanding these features is key to using positioning functions as success measurements for Google ads.

According to Google’s Chief Economist Hal Varian on Google’s blog, the term page position refers to an ad’s location on the search results page. An ad’s auction position is its position in the auction for top positioning for a search query—which is essentially based on the bid for the keyword and the quality score. The average position AdWords reports is based on the auction position.

It is vital to understand the difference between the two. Although bidding high enough and maintaining a quality score high enough to secure auction position one will always mean your ad is the first shown on a search results page, the ad can be displayed in two different page positions on the page. The first position (shown in the top photo below) is the first ad above search results. The ad can also appear as the first ad on the right-hand side of results (shown in the lower photo). Ads appearing above search results typically encourage more user interaction.



By Elyse Jarvis, Account Coordinator

As users become more aware of the nature of the “search,” it is important for marketing and advertising programs to implement strategy accordingly.

As marketers, we distinctly understand the benefits of SEO practices, but, as a U.S. survey by Performics concluded, user search behavior and awareness of search tactics are changing.

According to the survey:

More than 75 percent of respondents use search to further research a product or service after seeing an ad. And, contrary to common understanding of search users as only willing to delve so far to find information they are looking for, Performics found:

•    If a searcher doesn’t find what he or she is looking for on the first try, he/she will try, try again.
- 89 percent will modify their search query and try again.
- 89 percent will visit a different search engine.
- 79 percent will sift through multiple results pages to find the inf

Posted by: Rosemary Dempsey, Senior Storyteller

Quality Score. Everybody knows it’s an important part of paid search programs run through Google AdWords and the content network. But how does Google calculate these scores, and why are they so important to our pay-per-click (PPC) advertising campaigns?

According to Google, “A Quality Score is calculated every time your keyword matches a search query – that is, every time your keyword has the potential to trigger an ad.” It’s important because it influences your keywords’ actual cost-per-clicks, determines if your keyword is a potential result for a user’s search query and even affects how high your ad ranks.

What’s the best way to improve your quality scores? Optimize your account! As Google recommends, your ad groups should have descriptive ad text relevant to each keyword in the group.

Visit Google’s AdWords Help section for more information about quality score and tips for optimizing your paid search programs.

Posted by: Shannon Denny, Project Manager

Google has recently launched a new feature for pay-per-click (PPC) advertising that inserts customized site links beneath the ads. At this time, this feature is readily available to PPC advertisers with high quality scores. Google allows advertisers to enter up to 10 sitelinks, and all sitelinks can point to different pages within the site. The higher the quality of the PPC ad, the more site links will be displayed. Below is an example of these sitelinks (highlighted in green) in action:

Sitelinks take up valuable real estate in the Google search results allowing advertisers to “own” the space which will likely lead to an increased click-through rate (CTR). As these links can be modified any time, it is a good idea to keep seasonality and new promotions in mind when planning them out.