Mobile/Desktop URLs In Adwords Enhanced Campaigns: How To

​There's been alot of pluses and minuses to Google's new Enhanced Campaigns.  

One of the major problems is what if you have two different URLs one for people on desktop, sending them to your regular site and one for mobile, sending them to a mobile site or mobile optimized page?  

Before you'd just copy your desktop campaign, set it to mobile only and change all the destination URLs to send people to your mobile site.  But now that mobile, tablet and desktop are all in the same campaign how can you send the mobile people to the mobile page and the desktop people to the desktop page?

Yes, you can create new ads and set the device preference to "mobile", which is correct.  But what if you have hundreds of ad groups with thousands of ads.  Copy each ad in each ad group and then setting them to mobile optimized could take forever.  ​Well, there is an answer!

Thankfully, there's Adwords Editor, Google's desktop PPC management tool.  If you haven't started using this, start now.  ​This is what you'll be using to make the changes en masse.  Here's how to do it:

Setting up Ads for Mobile-Optimized Page using Adwords Editor

Basic Steps:

• Duplicate all the ads in your Campaigns/Ad Groups you want to set to mobile.
  
• Set these new ads all to mobile-preferred and edit the Destination URL.

To do this en mass within Adwords Editor:

• Go to the "Ads" tab for your entire account
• Select all ads you want to be mobile preferred ("Edit" > "Select All")
• Click "Edit" > "Replace text in selected Items"
• Put something generic next to 'Find Text' (e.g. "a"). You can put this same letter next to 'Replace Text'. 
• Make sure to uncheck "Match Case" and check "Duplicate Matching Items..."
• This will essentially duplicate all your ads in their existing campaigns and ad groups!
• Click "Find Matches" > "Duplicate and Replace All" 
• Sort these newly created ads by "All Local Unposted Changes", or clicking on the 'Changed Status' column (there will be a + sign next to all the new ads) 
• Highlight all the newly created ads and change the Device Preference to "Mobile", and the Destination URLs en masse.
• Upload your changes- done!​

Everyone who saved about a months worth fr work on this owes me a coffee!  ; )​

Figuring Out Time Zones in PPC Campaigns Part 2

In Part One I showed how to know how to adjust Adwords campaign scheduling for time zones in the U.S.   But what if your client says:  "Can you show my ads in other countries, but ONLY during their 9am-5pm business hours?"  

Granted, its pretty straightforward to show your ads in other countries.   Simply go into your campaign setting in Adwords, click settings tab and select the countries you want to show up in.  You can also show your ads to only English speaking people in those countries.  

But only showing the ads during a specific time?  That's a little more involved, but no impossible.  Here's a real life example:

I had to show the campaigns in ads in the following countries:  UK, India, S. Africa, Australia, Italy.  English speaking people only, 9am-5pm local time in each country.

1.  Use Adwords Editor and copy the campaigns you want to show in other countries.  This awesome tool allows you to make many changes to your Adwords account.  

2.  Change the name of the campaigns.  For instance if you campaign is Mens Shoes you might add Mens Shoes-UK so you know what country you're targeting.  

3.  Upload the campaigns to Adwords.  

4.  Figure out what 9-5 is in each country.  For little countries like UK, it has only one time zone.  Even bigger countries like India have one.  You may have to do a search for "India time zones" to see if they country you're targeting has one or more time zones, like the U.S. has 4, not sure about AK or HI.  For instance I found that Australia has more than one.  So I found the cities at each end of Australia (Perth to the west and Brisbane to the far East of the continent).

5.  Important!  You can't just make a campaign in Australia and put the scheduling at 9am-5pm.  That won't work because Adwords uses YOUR time zone as the basis.  So you have to use your time zone and then figure our what that time is in the country you want to run ads in.  For example, 9am-5pm in Chicago is 3pm-11pm in the UK.  

How to do this:  Use a cool tool to see what your time zone is in that country.  Here's a cool one:  http://www.worldtimebuddy.com/

Go to that page, put in the city your Adwords time zone is set to.  Look in your billing section of Adwords to find this out.  So for example for Chicago, if that's where you're Adwords time zone was set, enter it as a city.  Then enter the city you want to find the time in.   Let's do Mumbai, India.  Then drag the little green box on 9am-5pm for Chicago.  You'll see that it shows what 9am-5pm is in Mumbai...

Write this down.  Repeat for all the countries you want to target.  

Here's what I got for the countries I wanted to show the client's ads in at only 9am-5pm their time:

Australia:  10pm-11am

UK:  3p-11pm

Italy:  4p-2a

India:  8:30pm-4:30am

S. Africa:  5p-3am

Now in Adwords, go to your newly uploaded campaigns for your countries for each country.  So for UK I'd go to Settings, Advanced Settings, Ad Scheduling, Edit.  I see that I have down that 9am-5pm the clients Adwords account time is 3p-11pm in the UK.  That's what I'd put down then click save.  

That's it!  Too Easy!  That's why they pay us the big bucks.  ; )

Did this help you?  Hope so!

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.