New and Refreshed Reporting Tools

 On Monday 20 April, Jon Diorio, the Group Product Manager at Adwords,  posted a roundup of the “New and refreshed reporting tools” that Google Adwords   have made available. It discusses how the new and improved tools “Campaign Details Report”, “Custom Columns”, and the “Top Movers Report” can be used to optimise your campaigns.

Some of the enhanced capabilities these tools offer include the ability to recognise settings that are placing limitations on your campaigns’ performance, more flexibility in analysing the business metrics that are most important to you and more in-depth insights into the biggest changes regarding the costs and clicks of campaigns and ad groups, so that it’s easier for you to figure out that all-important “why”.

 

How To Drive Phone Conversions With PPC

 On Thursday 23 April, Mona Elesseily, Vice President of Online Marketing Strategy at Page Zero Media, points out how many of us, in the digital age, have  forgotten about the phone (or “at least the actual phone part of the phone”) when it comes to acquiring leads and the importance of driving phone conversions with PPC.

She lists some important reasons on Search Engine Land for why you should not forgot about this micro conversion’s value in pushing potential clients further along the sales funnel. It also explains how to optimise your ads and other relevant factors to make the most of this often forgotten lead generator.

 

Attention Keyword Hoarders: You Need to Delete 98% of Your AdWords Keywords – Here’s Why

 In Search Engine Watch, on the 23^rd of April, Larry Kim, Founder and CTO of WordStream, attempted an intervention to help Adwords advertisers shake  a very common addiction – Keyword Hoarding. He sympathises with this tendency but makes a very compelling argument for why this habit does not  benefit you or your campaign endeavours. ‘

Some of the factors of his argument are that exact match keywords are dead and gone. He also explains the ways in which having tens of thousands of keywords, that aren’t working for you, can negatively impact your quality score.

 

3 Days After Mobilegeddon: How Far Did the Sky Fall?

Dr Peter J. Meyers, cognitive psychologist and resident Marketing Scientist at Moz, provides some insights and statistics on Moz to try and gauge the amount of damage done by Mobilegeddon as Google’s Mobile Update has come to be called. The data he provides gives pause to consider the possibility that, after all the hysteria, the effect of this update was not so bad – which is actually kind of obvious, since, once again, the world did not come to an end. He does not discredit the fact that it might be too soon to let out a sigh of relief and explains how Moz intends to keep track of the effects of this rolling update.

 

 Local SEO: How To Rank Your Local Business

 On April 22 Matthew Braby, digital marketing consultant and Digital and Content Strategist, shared a very useful  breakdown on Search Engine Land of some of the things entailed in Local SEO. He emphasises the fact that your  usual SEO campaign is still equally important and that the Local SEO factors are additional considerations to take into account and actioned. He explains how Local SEO relies less on the type of link building you are used to with your usual SEO-campaign and he highlights the following broad categories of important elements with optimising your online business presence which are local NAP citations, local reviews and My Business signals.