One of the biggest challenges of PPC advertising is delivering the right information to the right audience. Utilizing Google AdWords ad extensions is an effective way to offer additional information by adding links to your ads with no additional cost. Ad extensions offer improved visibility and can be customized for different campaigns.

AdWords will show one or more of your extensions with your ads when it calculates that they will improve your campaign’s performance.

Common Types of Ad Extensions:

An App Extension links directly to your mobile app so users can quickly use or download it.

A Call Extension allows users to easily call your business directly from your ad with the press of one button.

A Location Extension helps nearby users find your business by providing an address and adding a map pin to your ad.

Sitelink Extensions add links to specific pages of your website to your ad, so users can find the information they need faster.

Seller Rating Annotations and Review Extensions can showcase positive reviews and ratings of your business.

Social Annotations show how many Google+ followers your business has.

Each ad extension is setup a little differently, but you can add them to your campaign, edit them, or remove them at any time.

What Is Local Finder and What Does It Mean For My Business?

When searching for a local business or service on Google a map pops up with what’s known as the three-pack. The three-pack is elusive and exclusive.

But like most Google users, I will never be satisfied with just three options, so I inevitably click into More Places.

Here I can scroll and search through various shops to my heart’s content until I find something that speaks to me. Often I’ll look for a name that sounds familiar or is closer to my home. Say I’m looking for a dentist, I would keep scrolling until I found something with hours suitable to my schedule, within a reasonable distance, and good reviews.

This all sounds good and well, but the search process I just described, which relies solely on organic search content, is a thing of the past. Now, once you click into More Places, advertisements will replace the top few suggestions. Paid search now trumps organic results and gives the savvy businessman a leg up.

What’s New?

So what’s caused this shift of epic proportions? Google Maps has transitioned to an integral part of Adwords Google Search. This now means that ads that feature a location extension can benefit from this prime real estate. A well-targeted ad can now beat out any competitors’ organic search results.

What Does This Mean?

This change has two major implications for people using Google AdWords:

1. Advertisers who use location extensions but don’t use search partners will likely see an increase in both impressions and clicks.
2. Advertisers doing the inverse, using search partners and not location extensions, will likely see a decrease in impressions and clicks.

Search Partners refer to the sites within the Google network that partner with Google to show various ads, this includes sites like ask.com, aol.com, and CNN.com. Search partners are constantly changing and shifting.

Basically, if you’re doing a good job with your Adwords account you should already be using BOTH location extensions and search partners. This new feature will likely lower the clicks that inexperienced Adwords account users receive and increase those of the experienced.

So what does this mean for the big picture?

Google is shifting to include and seamlessly integrate more and more paid advertising in with organic search results and blend the two. For people who are actively marketing on Google, this is great news. It’s getting easier and easier to get your ads out there and seen by the right people. But Google is making it abundantly clear that just implementing SEO and organic marketing is not going be enough for your digital marketing mix.

What’s Next?

With these changing times this leads us to ask, what should we be doing to capitalize on this shift? Well, opening an account for Google AdWords is step 1. But just doing this is not enough. It is important to have your AdWords campaign managed effectively and integrated with your Google places account and location extension. So far we’ve seen some businesses able to take the first paid spot and show up just below organically, which means if you’re on top of your marketing game with a blend of both paid search and SEO.

As Google continues to blend the worlds of paid and organic search it will become more and more difficult for consumers to avoid paid search and Google AdWords strategies to capture necessary traffic.

This white paper discusses the disadvantages of enrolling in and using Yellow Pages as an effective advertising and marketing medium, both in print and online; as well as the subsequent benefits of working with a firm whose expertise and competence lies principally in online marketing.

1.   With Yellow Pages, a business must enroll in both its print and online services simultaneously.

With the major shift in the past decade to online advertising and marketing from consumer and business perspectives, Yellow Pages now forces businesses to subscribe to its print advertising services in order to subscribe to its online services, and vice versa; therein, businesses are forced to split their budget between two contrasting marketing methods, greatly reducing ROI. To make matters worse, businesses must commit to an entire year of advertising and marketing with YP.

2.   Primarily, Yellow Pages outsources their online services to third-party providers. Conversely, an online agency like Enlightened Media is personally committed to and invested in the success of its clientele.

The Yellow Pages Outsourcing Affiliate Program offers off-shore representatives to monitor and maintain your business’s account. The many disadvantages of such an arrangement include but are not limited to having an account manager: who is not personally or emotionally invested in the success of your business, who cannot be a dedicated and hands-on resource for your business, and who will not be able to offer the best customer service possible. With an online agency, however, your business has direct and instant access to a specific account manager who can make himself or herself available to you 24 hours / 7 days a week, and who knows your account inside-and-out.

3.   With an online agency, your Return on Investment tends to be much faster and more instantaneous than with an outlet like the Yellow Pages.

It is much quicker to get started on a marketing campaign when working with an online agency. If a business decides it needs to ramp up its marketing and advertising efforts with an ad-buy online, the online agency can move immediately and almost always deliver results within the same day. Furthermore, internet marketing and advertising through a dedicated online agency has the potential to offer cumulative results; i.e., as your site spends more time online, and as you drive more traffic to your site through your advertising, search engines will trust your site more and benefits, such as more preferred placement in search engine results, will slowly build on each other.

4.   Businesses receive wide-ranging consulting when doing business with an online agency; whereas, with a company like the Yellow Pages service is inclined to be more one-dimensional and less aggressive in its tactics.

A reasonably-sized online marketing and advertising agency has the benefit and the capacity of being able to diversify its services, more so than a big conglomerate like the Yellow Pages. An agency like Enlightened Media can choose to focus its priorities on methods it has mastered, such as:

PPC (Pay-per-click advertising). Landing page development.

Conversion optimization. Call and lead tracking.

Social advertising. Facebook advertising. Mobile advertising.

SMO (Social media optimization). Lead generation.

Website builds.

  5.   Advertising and marketing with YP tends to be much more expensive than with an online agency like Enlightened Media.

When partnering with Yellow Pages a business must pay a series of costs throughout the duration of its subscription, including initial costs, monthly hosting costs, outsourcing costs, and costs for additional services. Additionally, when comparing pricing in terms of how many people would see your ad per dollar spent, online advertising will almost always provide better value. Lastly, working with an online agency is more cost-effective because your business is not paying for the account to be outsourced, as with Yellow Pages; and so, your business is not paying two sets of markups.

6.   In addition to the above advantages of working with an online marketing and advertising agency, with a firm like Enlightened Media you have the added benefit of working with aGoogle AdWords Certified Partner agency.

To become a Google AdWords Certified Partner agency, one must pass rigorous exams that test one’s knowledge of Google products, advertising best practices, and campaign management. AdWords advanced certification exams test one’s expertise and specialized knowledge of AdWords features and concepts. If your business chooses to work directly with a Google Partner agency, you reap the benefits of working with an agency which is:

1. Shaping the future of AdWords and other Google business solutions.
2. Among the first in the world to try new Google features and products.
3. Up-to-date with industry insights, case studies, and fresh marketing resources directly from Google.

7.   Print advertising is essentially dead.

It doesn’t take a genius to know that now more than ever when a consumer or prospective client is looking for a particular good or service, he or she turns to the internet (i.e., search engines) to locate or discover what he or she is looking for, as opposed to using an actual Yellow Pages book. This fact, coupled with the ever-dwindling readership of traditional print publications, signals the end of an era for print advertising.

There has been much discussion recently over recent Google changes and their subsequent impact on the SEO world – well I suppose the updates haven’t been too recent, but, we have received an influx of client inquiries in the last couple weeks as to how SEO is impacted and how clients campaigns are impacted.

1 – Google has updated their Algorithm with a recent update referred to in the SEO world as the Penguin update. (more information can be read in regards to this update here)

2 – The truth – Google updates their search algorithm DAILY. About once a year for the last 2 years an update makes some major noise in the SEO world. Last year a similar update called the Panda update was released. Some SEO firms using these Animal updates as a poor performance scapegoat simply had a bad campaign plan going in or used outdated methods as a whole.

3 – Algo updates target by far and away mostly spam. Updates by Google usually target low level, robotic, and, process based SEO methods and these recent updates are intended to drop rankings of listings which have been achieved mostly through poor and low quality links.

The fact remains that what these updates have made it more difficult to achieve top rankings on search engines, as social media factors have become increasingly more relevant in determining a given websites overall value. However, the answer to Google updates is quality. Quality writing, quality link building, quality user experience on websites. Online Marketers need to think that they are not optimizing a site for a machine but a person. Producing quality content, building relationships with real people and building links that would entice someone to actually click have all the necessary elements of creating “social” relevancy. If you are doing (or even making a concerted effort in doing) the above, promising results should take care of themselves.

A few other things to keep in mind:

-Many advertisers recommend starting a campaign with broad match to reach the largest audience.

-Keywords are not case sensitive.

-Match types can be used on the search and the display network.

PPC advertising can seem daunting at first, but it is necessary to build an online presence for your business.  To successfully reach potential new customers online, marketers must understand how to use match types in their digital campaigns.

Utilizing different match types is a great way to control which searches trigger your paid search ad. Match type determines how similar keywords and search terms must be for your ad to appear.

Google offers four main match types:

Broad Match:

-Your ad appears for relevant variations of your keywords including synonyms, singular/plural forms, misspellings, extensions, and related searches, even if these terms aren’t on your keyword lists.

Broad Match Modifier can help narrow the audience your ad reaches. Add a modified to any of the words in a keyword phrase to ensure that your ad will only show if search terms include the modified term or a very close variation. Enter a plus sign in front of a word to make it a modifier. For example, if your keyword is New Orleans +restaurants, a search for new restaurant in New Orleans will trigger your ad, but a search for New Orleans diners will not.

Phrase Match:

–Your ad appears for the same categories as broad match except synonyms and other words in the middle of search terms.  For example, if you use phrase match with the keyword “New Orleans restaurants”, the search term New Orleans fancy restaurants will not trigger your ad.

–Utilize phrase match by entering quotation marks around each of your keywords.

Exact Match:

–Search terms must be almost exactly the same as keywords for your ad to appear. Words can be slightly misspelled or vary in singular/plural form.

–Utilize exact match by entering each keyword in brackets.  [Keyword]

Negative Match:

-Use this match type to prevent your ad from showing to people who include specific words in their search terms.

-Negative match is especially helpful to prevent unwanted clicks and reduce irrelevant traffic.

-Negative match can be used in conjunction with another match type.

-Enter a minus sign before a word to indicate negative match.  For example, if you are trying to raise brand awareness for your restaurant, you might use the keyword New Orleans restaurants –jobs, to filter out some irrelevant searches.

A few other things to keep in mind:

-Many advertisers recommend starting a campaign with broad match to reach the largest audience.

-Keywords are not case sensitive.

-Match types can be used on the search and the display network.