First things first, it’s harder than ever to succeed at Google Ads with a small budget. That doesn’t mean it’s impossible, but we can’t ignore the fact that it is harder to do than ever before. If you have been seeing your Costs and Cost Per Clicks (CPCs) rising faster than your ability to raise your budget, you’ve likely wondered if Google Ads is even worth it for you. Well, this is the entire reason ZATO started our Small Budgets Program! Not a “small business” but don’t have a lot of cash to burn on Google Ads? We objectively call our program the “Small Budget Program” and not “Small Business Program”. There are multiple reasons as to why an account may be smaller budget… regardless of business size. Maybe your company recently had to cut costs, maybe you run a small business that is just getting into the Google …
Free Google Shopping Listings?! What It Means for You
Google announced today that they are now offering Free Shopping Ads for retailers and brands. Here is a great article by my friend, Ginny Marvin, announcing it (and where I first heard of it): Google Shopping Opens to Free Listings. When I first started advertising on Google in 2010, I remember free Froogle listings and how bummed we were when it moved into the paid offering in 2012. Based on the announcement headlines, it seemed at first glance like we were circling back to those days of free access. Sounds great for SMBs, but the actual situation is a little more complex and I thought it fair to unravel the details of what is happening. I should be careful to not appear overly negative, this will certainly give SMBs and advertisers access to free traffic they didn’t formerly have access to. However, we’re not remotely back at the 2011 …
Keep Presenting Benefits. Or, How Marketing Hasn’t Changed in a Pandemic.
After being served my umpteenth “QUARANTINED, ALONE, AND DESTITUTE AMIDST CORONAVIRUS? BUY THIS TO CHANGE YOUR LIFE.” marketing pitch on Facebook, I decided I needed to scratch the itch of writing and get my thoughts down. Should you discuss the current pandemic in your ads, or not? Should you use the *gasp* coronavirus in marketing efforts at this point? What emails should you send? All of these are questions many advertisers have right now, and as I have been considering these same things, I think the thing we need to do is remain faithful to a core tenet of marketing: Highlight the ways your product/service benefits your customer, and they should purchase it (insert qualifications of other factors, for instance, they may not have the money to purchase it and in that case no perfect marketing message will work). In other words, our marketing shouldn’t change based on the crisis, …
More Free Stuff: The ZATO Microsoft Ads In-Market Audience List
We released our ZATO Google Ads Audience Targeting List FREE to the internet a little over a month ago and one of the questions we kept seeing in various social channels were “can you guys do this with Microsoft Ads?” Well… with the help of our awesome Microsoft Ads friends (thank you SO much John Lee and Christi Olson), we did! And just like the Google Ads Audience Targeting List, we want to share it with the PPC Community! Woo! BONUS: We included a targeting list for LinkedIn as well! Since LinkedIn is owned by Microsoft, you can target audiences via Company, Industry, and Job Function in Microsoft Ads… and now here is a FULL list of Industry and Job Function Audiences. To our knowledge, this is the only list on the interwebz of it’s kind, we’re biased, but we think that’s pretty cool! The ZATO Microsoft Ads Audience …
Here is A Coronavirus Placement Exclusion List for Google Ads
After a client requested that we pull their ads off of as many news sites as possible because of the increasing Covid-19 Pandemic, we thought it made sense to cease marketing to these unique web pages as people seek out information about the pandemic. Therefore we compiled this placement list from ZATO clients of various news organizations websites to exclude, and thought we would share it with the broader PPC community. Feel free to add them in as exclusions if you feel so inclined. PLEASE NOTE: these are by no means comprehensive lists and we are updating it as we go, and there may be holes in this list. If you have your own list that you think would be helpful to add and you would be willing to share it, please email it to [email protected] so we can investigate it. Excluding website URLs at the account level in Google …
Free Stuff: The ZATO Google Ads Audience Targeting List of Affinity Categories & In-Market Segments
I want to start this post by introducing myself. My name is Chris (that’s me in the picture), I’m fairly new at ZATO but I’ve learned so much about coffee (and PPC) in my time here. I have a background in team-management and sales and I love being organized, efficient, and relentlessly optimistic. Here at ZATO, I’m tasked with growing and developing our new Google Ad’s for Small Budgets Program… But enough about me… The ZATO Google Ads Audience Targeting List of Awesome Let’s make this quick and to the point. We love running audience targeting here at ZATO and sometimes we need a complete list of Google’s Affinity Categories and In-Market Segments. The problem is, a full list is very hard to find. Until now! Wait… What are Affinity Categories and In-Market Segments? What is audience targeting? Here is Google’s definition of audience targeting: …
ZATO Partners with Kuru Footwear
ZATO is excited to announce a partnership with KURU Footwear. KURU Footwear is a shoe brand whose revolutionary technology changes the way sufferers of plantar fasciitis and heel pain walk (as well as those of us just wanting a more comfortable shoe), and makes us all look good in the process! In this relationship, ZATO will overhaul and manage Shopping Ads campaigns to increase revenues and profitability through this channel. In order to accomplish this, ZATO will identify areas of improvement in the Google Merchant Center Feed, as well as design and implement a proprietary Shopping Ads campaign organization strategy to best position KURU to the ideal target audience. ZATO is known for its advanced Shopping Ads techniques and is delighted to get the chance to utilize this expertise on a household brand such as KURU. For more details about ZATO’s Shopping Ads, and to see how we can …
Google Shopping Clicks for Free? How to Get On Surfaces Across Google
EDIT 4-21-2020: Google today announced even more free clicks for Shopping Ads! Read our hot take on it here: Free Google Shopping Listings?! What It Means for You EDIT 5-7-2020: Want to track revenue from Surfaces Across Google? Of course you do! In this step-by-step walkthrough, we give you an easy way to do that: How to Track Surfaces Across Google (Free Shopping Ads) Revenue in Google Analytics ORIGINAL ARTICLE: We run a lot of Google Shopping Ads at ZATO, and I even remember the days before Google Shopping was a paid offering. Things have apparently come full circle, as Google maneuvers a free option for Google Shopping products back into SERPs… and we and our clients are definitely not upset about this! It will be interesting over time to monitor and see the inter-play between the organic Google Shopping listings (cough, excuse me, “Surfaces Across Google”) and the paid …
What is Automated Bidding and Who Should Use It?
Editor’s Note: This is a guest post by Corey Braccialini of HubSpot. Read more about Corey in his biography at the end of the post. Happy reading! The days of making an educated guess on how much to bid on your keywords and manually adjusting are behind us. With the help of machine learning, advertisers can take advantage of the wealth of knowledge that exists within the Google universe and use it to drive a stronger return on your paid ads investment. But let’s be honest – there are a lot of different automated bidding types to choose from. And choosing the wrong one can seriously hurt your advertising performance. Let’s explore what automated bidding is and how to use it to maximize your paid ads on Google. The insights included in this article are taken from HubSpot Academy’s free course on Paid Media Strategy, created in partnership with ZATO. …
How to Set Up a TrueView for Shopping Campaign in Google Ads
YouTube’s main benefit is building brand awareness. With TrueView in-stream ads, advertisers can run very cost-effective video campaigns in Google Ads. But we can use video campaigns to do more than just boost awareness. With TrueView for Shopping, ecommerce advertisers can promote their products with engaging video ads. Let me show you exactly what I mean. When a user is watching a TrueView in-stream video (typically the pre-roll ad a user sees before the video they actually intended on watching), there are visible products related to the video ad. Whether the user watches the video or skips it, product cards will still be visible for the user to click. In this post, I want to show you how easy it is to set up a TrueView for Shopping campaign in Google Ads as well as some ideas you may want to consider when structuring your campaigns. Choose the Right TrueView …