Google Engage for Agencies 'Box of Tricks' Event – London November 2012

On 23^rd November 2012, Google Engage for Agencies held their latest Box of Tricks event at Marylebone One, in London. This event allows agencies to join together and keep up to date with the latest Google news. Below are some of the key topics that were covered that may be of general interest.

The 7 Habits of Successful Agencies

    Constant Experimentation
    Understand client objectives
    Make sure you set goals
    Measure it – add metrics for everything
    Educate your customers
    Find the project your employees want to work on
    Have fun!

Best Practices for Mobile

• Consumers are in love with mobile. 51% of people in the UK have a mobile device.
• Bandwidth is limited
• Users are highly task orientated
• 40% of consumers abandon a site on a mobile device which takes more than 3 seconds to load.
• More clients need optimized mobile sites. Only 10% of Google advertisers have a mobile site.

YouTube

• YouTube users have an average 2 hours viewing time per week.
• Skipable trueview ads allow you to target everyone, but only interested visitors will continue watching. The first 5 seconds viewing are free and the advertiser pays for longer views.
• You can then remarket on YouTube to visitors who watched your video ad. This can be sequential advertising.

Google+

• This is the social spine that underpins and strengthens all of Google
• 400M users have now upgraded to Google+
• Research shows that +1 social extensions on ads increase the ad click through rate by 5-10%
• Recommended actions for Google+ include
• Create a Google+ page and verify it
• Optimise your search ads with social extensions
• Add the Google+ badge to your pages to increase followers

Possible New AdWords Features for 2013

• There have been 103 new features in AdWords over the last 12 months. These include
• Improved planning tools
• Google Trends
• Dynamic search ads
• Product listing ads
• Communication extensions
• Call extensions – using Google voice numbers

• Potential future changes include:
• 3D images are available for Google shopping in the US
• Some US companies are now providing next hour delivery
• The AdWords keyword tool and traffic estimator will probably merge next year.
• Customer support may become available in search engine results pages (i.e. chat from ads)
• Dynamic remarketing
• Remarketing in search ads – combine audiences with your search campaigns
• Semantic targeting – 350 airports have been defined (perfect for taxi companies)
• Google Analytics adoption of Universal Analytics for cross device tracking will make a huge difference in understanding the customer journey.
• Skipable ads will increase on the Google display network
• Pay per engagement ads which will expand when you hover over an ad for more than 2 seconds

In summary, the afternoon provided tips and advice on developing accounts for clients. A lot of time focused on mobile as this is seen as pivotal for 2013. Clients with mobile websites are expected to see huge returns in this area.