Figuring Out Time Zones in PPC Campaigns Part 1

Have you ever had to run PPC campaigns outside the time zone you were in, but only for a specific time period.  For instance if you're targeting the entire U.S. with your campaign yet are based in New York, how would this work?  

Its called Adwords Dayparting or Ad Scheduling.  You can set the days or times of the day your ads show.  To learn how, go here:  http://support.google.com/adwords/answer/2404244?hl=en

P.S.:  This is Part 1 of a 2 Part Series

First of all, why would you want to do this?

1.   You can save money.  You might not want to waste money and clicks on people who are awake at 2 am and click on your ad when you're not at work to answer the phone.  

2.  You can get better performance.  People might click on your ads on Saturday when you're not there to respond, or your ads may show and show and no one is going to buy a new office IT system at 4 am.  So because you ad shows but no one clicks, your performance goes down and cost goes up.  

Things you might not know:

If you are using Adwords, you set up the the time zone when you set up the account.  And once its set, you can't change it.  

So taking the above example:  

Let's say you want to target the entire U.S., but only during normal office hours of 9am-5pm and again your based in NYC:  

You would look and see that Pacific Time Zone is 3 hours before you.  So to target the whole of the U.S. 9am-5pm you would schedule as follows:  9am Eastern Time to 8pm Eastern Time.  Why?  Because you're starting at 9 am EST but if you shut it off at 5pm EST that would be 2pm PST and your ads wouldn't show in Los Angeles all the way to 5pm L.A. time.  So to do this you'd have to figure in the addition 3 hours and based on your time that would be 8pm.  

Confused yet?  Wait till the next article when you see how to show your ads at a specific time in other countries!

Track Bing Ads Conversions in Google Tag Manager

Updated 12/16/14:

Bing has rolled out new tracking since they are getting ready to offer retargeting.  So the post below is now out of date. The new way isn't any harder, actually probably easier, or just different.  And it works fine with GTM.  

Here is the updated info with the basics, with detailed links with how to afterward:

1.  In Bing Ads you first set up a new goal.

2.  Then while doing that you generate the new Bing ads tracking code.

2.  You then drop that tracking code in GTM as a custom html tag.

3.  If you have old Bing ads code in GTM, be sure to delete it.

4.  Back in Bing ads, create all your other goals that you want track.  You might open your Google Analtyics account for a reference, using the same tracking tag you created during the 1st goal to track the all your new Bing ads goals/conversions.

For full info here are the links with screenshots:

 How to set up Bing Ads goals & tracking code:  

http://advertise.bingads.microsoft.com/en-us/uahelp-topic?querytype=keyword&query=ext53048&product=bing_ads&sku=

How to use with GTM: http://advertise.bingads.microsoft.com/en-us/blogpost/129502/bing-ads-blog/how-to-use-universal-event-tracking-tags-with-tag-management-solutions

Google Tag Manager (GTM) was rolled out last year.  Its really an excellent way to track just about everything on your site- Google Analytics, Remarketing, Adwords Conversions and many other things- with just one piece of code.  Just set everything you want to track in GTM, paste the GTM code in your site so it shows up on every page and you're good to go.  No more having to wait on the webmaster to add or change tracking codes.   Its really fantastic.  

But what about tracking your PPC campaigns from Bing Ads?  Can you use GTM to do this?  After all it would save your from adding the Bing Ads conversion code to the site.  Yes, you can!  It is really not that hard.  Here's how to do it:

Old Post, Now Out of Date, Please Disregard:

To Use Bing Ads Conversion Code in Google Tag Manager

1.  First, create your goal(s) in Bing Ads.  Login to your Bing Ads account, go to Tools and set up a goal for whatever you want to track.  Where you see the conversion code, copy and paste it into an editor such as Notepad.

2.  Next, Adjust Bing Conversion Tracking as follows:

Take the Bing Ads conversion code below and remove everything in bold, keep everything that's highlighted.

3.  Create a new Tag in GTM.  The tag will be a custom HTML tag. Paste the code above into the HTML area and save the new tag.

Important:  Create a rule for the url or page you want this conversion code to fire on.  For instance if your conversion is your thank you page, create a rule for this url and have this tag only fire when on this page.  (or else it will fire on every page because GTM is on every page). 

Important #2: To test that your new conversion tag is working you'll have to do one of two things:  1.  Wait until a PPC conversion from Bing Ads comes in.  You'll have to login to Bing Ads to see the conversions there.  Or, 2.  Click on one of your Bing Ads and make a purchase/signup so you end up on the conversion page.  Then check in Bing Ads to see if the conversion shows up.

That’s it!  What do you think?  Please me know if this worked for you.

Easily Add Remarketing Code to Your Site

Alot of people know how great Google Adwords Remarketing is but sometimes it can be difficult to get access to the site to paste the code in there.  Especially working with clients as they may not know that there are two different kinds of codes, one for Adwords, one for Analytics (never mind conversion tracking).  

Too Many Codes?

So, Google has tried to make things a little easier by allow you to adjust the Google Analytics (GA) code so that it can also be used as the Remarketing code.  This way its just one piece of code, not two.  Its pretty straightforward to do, just go to this link:  Set up Remarketing Lists in GA

This post isn't about setting up that code, its about a new feature that allows you to do this fast.  In the past, you had to chance one line of the code and that was it.  Not hard to do, but it was a big pain to get this across to the client or webmaster who was going to do this.  

New Options:

Now in GA, there's a number of options on the GA code that you can simply choose by clicking on the one you want:

Under Admin>Tracking Info there are now 4 options (See Picture):  Some are very cool like being able to track subdomains.  Just by clicking the button to "On" the code is updated and allows you to track across say for instance yourdomain.com & app.youdomain.com.  Nice.

For Remarketing you'll notice that there's a box for Display Advertiser Support.  If you're doing Remarketing you'll want to turn this on.  When you do your code is automatically adjusted to be able to track not only visitors to your site but also start building Remarketing lists.  Excellent!  Then in Adwords you can import your Remarketing lists from GA and you're good to go.

What does this mean for you?

 Instead of having to paste and keep track of two types of code, now its just one.  Also, for those of us with clients, we only have to ask them to adjust one piece of code.  If you're not using Google's Tag Manager, this is a nice alternative.  Also, when you're setting up a new client, make sure to make this change right from the outset so you're getting your Remarketing lists built from day 1.

How Import Adwords Campaigns Into Microsoft AdCenter (Part 4 of Series)

So, if you've read parts 1, 2 and three you've set up a main account, invited your clients and got access to their accounts and then created and assigned users to manage those accounts.  Now how do you get all the awesome work you did on their Adwords campaigns into Microsoft AdCenter?   Here's how:

1.  Download and Install Microsoft AdCenter Desktop.  If you're familiar with Adwords Editor, this is Microsoft's version of this.  Its basically a desktop program that allows you to make many bulk changes to your AdCenter PPC acounts quickly and effciently. 

If you're not using this program or Adwords Editor and are spending more than 1 hour a week in Adwords or AdCenter.  Download both of those programs now and start learning how to use them.  They will increase your productivity by a factor of at least 20, maybe 100 if you're a power user vs. going online and using the online interface.

That being said this assumes you already have downloaded Adwords Editor and know how to somewhat use it. 

2.  Once you install Microsoft AdCenter Desktop sign in with your user id & password.  This is the user you created to manage the account in part 3 or this series. 

3.  Search through All Accounts, and download this new account.  Even though its empty you have to download this account.

4.  Open Google Adwords Editor.  Export the campaigns you want to export as a csv.:  File>Export Spreadsheet>Export Selected Campaigns and Adgroups, Select the ones you want and click OK.  See this picture:

Very Important Note:  Adcenter accounts have a keyword limit of only 100K.  If you have more than that, you will first have to call adcenter and get them to upgrade the specific account's keyword limits.   Last check they will upgrade you to "self serve plus" with a 2 million keyword limit.

5.  Go back into Adcenter Desktop:  Import>Import from Google>Import from a File>  Find the file you saved using Adwords Editor and Choose file>Check over what is going to be imported carefully the different columns etc. > Import  See Pictures Below:

Note:  Adcenter will may import geo-targeting, languages and many other things.   Make sure you set these settings before activating the account.  See this picture:

6.  Check over the account for any errors.

7.  Set all campaigns to pause, then click Sync.  This will upload the campaigns to the web.

8.  Go into web interface and make sure all campaign settings are correct.  How to:  Click on a campaign, click on Edit Your Campaign Settings.  You may need to check geo targeting, language targeting, budgets and more.

9.  P.S.:  Be sure to set up conversion tracking!

Wow!  That's alot to set everything up and get your users going on Microsoft AdCenter!  But that's why they pay you the big bucks, right?

Please leave comments below if you need clarification.  Please let me know if this has helped you in any way.  Thanks!

How to Setup Up Microsoft AdCenter to Manage Clients Part 3

How to Setup Up Microsoft AdCenter to Manage Clients Part - Client Mangers and Users

In the previous two posts I showed how to 1.  Set up a main Microsoft AdCenter account to manage your clients with and 2.  How to invite a client to have their Microsoft AdCenter account managed by you. 

In part 3 you'll see how to set up users under that main account and assign them to manage your clients.  Note:  Even if you're the only person who will be managing the account you must set it up this way to have it work correctly. 

As we talked about before, Adwords has come a long way as far as being able to easily create an umbrella account where you can manage clients' account all in one place.  Microsoft AdCenter has made many strides recently in trying be easier to use so people will use their PPC platform. 

One source of frustration is how to set things up correctly so you can manage clients' accounts like Adwords MCC.  So, how do you do this?  To be honest, It took quite a bit of phone calls to Microsoft's AdCenter team, getting a person who actually knew what they were talking about and more to get this to work.  It's kind of convoluted, so much so that I actually wrote it down as I wouldn't remember it later.

So below is a brief, step by step account of how to do this.  Of course, Microsoft may change how they do things but this is the latest.  In the comments, please ask questions if you find something's not clear.

What you need to do:

1.  Set up a master account in MS AdCenter like yourbusinessname as the id & get a password. You're not using this to actually do any PPC, this is just a "shell acount".

2.  You need then create users that will be assigned to an account to manage it.  They won't need their own Microsoft AdCenter accounts. 

Here's how to do this:  In AdCenter:  

1. Accounts & Billing>Users>Create a User Profile>Account Roles>Client Admin>Select the Account(s) that you will manage.  Important:  Set the user who is a client manager as the following type of user:  Client Admin.  You'd think it would be Advertiser Campaign Manager since that's what you're doing but its not.  See this picture: 
2. 
3. Wait for the email verification.  When it comes, enter email verification code in, select password.  Sign into MS Adcenter.  You'll then see the accounts you'll have access to.  Select that account and you're in.

That's basically it.  Part 4 will show how to import your clients Adwords campaigns into Microsoft AdCenter. 

Did this help you?  Do you need clarification on this?  If so, please leave a comment below.