Google’s keynote took place in San Jose, California, last Tuesday and for those of us unfortunate enough not to be there (believe me, I tried) – they livestreamed the whole event.
It’s unusual for Google or Bing to make announcements these days without an automation-focused theme, the PPC ship continues to be guided towards fully automatable campaigns. This keynote didn’t break that trend.
Here are a few key takeaways from the event;
Site speed is now more important than ever
We stress the importance of a quick load-time, users are becoming increasingly impatient. Whilst this would typically involve having a quick landing page to decrease the number of users bouncing, pages along the buying process are just as if not more important – people don’t trust slow sites.
Half of consumers have abandoned a purchase because the site took too long to load.
It was earlier this month that Google rolled out a significant change to its mobile ranking factors. Since mobile traffic now exceeds that on desktop, it’s time to pay attention.
There are a number of tools available to see how your site stacks up, Google recommend their own version of this; TestMySite.
It’s good to be local
Head of Ads, Sridhar Ramaswamy, gave us the insight that there has been a 10x increase in people searching for the phrase, “..open near me tonight”. This isn’t exclusive to cinemas and restaurants.
If you have a local store/s then you could benefit from the new Local campaign, aimed at increasing footfall from people searching terms that trigger your ads.
It’s a way of connecting shoppers who are researching your products/services at certain times of the day and don’t want to risk a store being closed or too far away. You are therefore able to compete for potential customers who are deciding between stores without them having to walk past the shopfront.
Responsive Search Ads to make traditional A/B testing redundant
With the BETA running for a few months now, advertisers are making use of the new responsive ad format.
So why are people excited about these ads? Well it’s been much discussed across the industry that some advertisers (tut, tut) take shortcuts when it comes to traditional A/B testing, whilst others have been so slow in reacting to the results that they become redundant.
To help sweeten the deal, Google has increased the character limit of these ads with the description line now capable of holding 90 characters.
Adding 8-10 headlines is recommended to maximise optimisations without it being overkill. All of best practises we’ve worked with over these still apply, such as keeping relevancy between keywords and ad copy as well highlighting key business features.