Attention local business owners and marketers: Check out these winning tips by PPC Blog’s Geordie on quickly generating leads for local businesses on Facebook. Facebook’s advertising platform has advanced user interest and demographic targeting that can really assist in reaching your local customers. Like with any good PPC campaign, you’ll want to first look into optimizing your landing page(s) to make it easier for visitors to convert after arriving at your site. Geordie provides a great step-by-step instructional for setting up Facebook ad campaigns. Using locally- targeted Facebook ads is a great way to bring in leads when your business sees downtime.
It’s official! Google’s ads are changing format again. In a statement released on Monday, Google announced on its Inside AdWords blog that they will now start showing the domain portion of all display URLs in lowercase letters. Google is even going to go back and change all the existing ads (but don’t worry, this won’t change their history). The change will roll out sometime in the “next week or so,” so keep your eyes out!
According to Jack Marshall of ClickZ marketing blog, over a third of online shoppers also browse via mobile. From the end of November till December 15th of last year, ForeSee polled holiday shoppers, and the results were pretty surprising. Thirty-three percent of those polled said that they used their mobile phones to access an e-commerce site, 11% said that they made a purchase from their mobile phone and 26% say that they plan on visiting an e-commerce site from their mobile device in the future. Also, with smart phone usage predicted to outpace traditional mobile phones this year, this may mean that advertisers may not need to make separate mobile websites for mobile campaigns, as smart phones typically have full web browsers.
One of the Internet’s greatest strengths is that it is truly the “city that never sleeps.” As Melissa Mackey of Searching Beyond the Paid points out, e-commerce stores are open at all hours of the day. In spite of this opportunity for 24/7 sales, it’s important to consider on a case-by-case basis when sales are actually coming in. Mackey explains how to use dayparting to control your PPC spending and maximize valid conversions. Dayparting will allow you to manage what time your ads show. Of course, you will want to first take a look at the analytics to see what hours of the day you get traffic, but it can be an effective way of managing your spending.
