Los Angeles Social Media Agency Notes from Google Agency Summit

In fact, “new” seemed to be the overarching theme of the day. For example, there is a new climate in the world of Internet marketing – one in which search still matters, but is no longer the only thing that matters. We learned that paid online advertising is no longer just search, but also display ads, YouTube promotions, mobile ads and re-marketing. More on that later.

A few of the most important topics from the 2011 Google Agency Summit addressed are listed here, along with a few key points we learned about each one:

Best Practices - We learned about the best practices for paid marketing, which will no doubt enhance the services our social media agency provides. One best practices standard Google emphasized is keeping mobile and non-mobile marketing campaigns separate. The optimization between these two mediums differs greatly, and users behave differently with a mouse than they do with their thumbs. This is important to remember as the popularity of mobile continues to soar. Another point we took away from this presentation was how to best distribute targeted keywords and ads for each Ad group within a paid marketing campaign. Google recommends up to 10 keywords and 5 actual ads for each ad group, but one campaign can contain multiple ad groups. In much the same way SEO is dependent on grouping relevant keywords together on a given website or web page, advertisers targeting many different keywords or regions would be well-advised to look at how keywords or areas should be categorized within a given campaign.

Mobile Campaigns – Speaking of mobile, there’s no denying that mobile advertising is hot right now – white hot. At the summit, it was explained that mobile and local go together, since users stick primarily to local searches when Googling on their phones. We were also reminded about the “double-peak” phenomenon that occurs right around black Friday and again before Christmas. During that month, there is a serious surge in shopping related queries coming from mobile devices. How does this apply to you? If you don’t have a mobile site, it’s important to get one now!

Quality Score - Quality Score (QS) is a mysterious metric Google uses to indicate the relevancy of keywords, display ads and mobile ads. Quality Scores are on a similar scale to another Google metric called “PageRank”, where keywords are assigned a number-based score from 1 to 10. Quality Scores measure how well advertising matches what users are looking for, and helps to make the AdWords system work better for everybody – advertisers, users, publishers and Google. We are always looking for ways to make keywords more effective for ourLos Angeles social media clients, so understanding Quality Score was an eye-opener for us. Presentations included topics on how paid advertising keywords can best be distributed throughout the scale of possible Quality Scores. As it turns out, the most successful campaigns have keywords spread out through the possible scale of Quality Scores, albeit with greater emphasis towards words ranking between positions 5-7, secondary emphasis on keywords with a quality score of 8 or better and tertiary emphasis on keywords with a score of 4 or lower.

We gathered tons of valuable information at the 2011 Google Agency Summit, and are glad to share what we learned with you. There’s more where that came from coming in the next post too, so check back again soon! Feel free to tell us which of these concepts and topics interest you the most by leaving us some comments.