May 19, 2012

iPad News: AdWords to Offer New Targeting Options for iPad

You heard it here first, Google AdWords will allow advertisers to independently target the Apple iPad in AdWords!

Ok – so I made that up… completely fabricated… but it’s made me think.

On the 21st of January, Google AdWords blog announced that they’ve now release new targeting options for mobile ads. It’s a good read so go take a look.

I’m going to cover mobile PPC advertising in later posts, but the thing that caught my eye is this image that they posted…

mobile screenshot 1

In the ‘Devices’ section above you’ll note how Google now allow advertisers to target specific devices: – Android, iPhone/iPod Touch and Palm WebOS. This is actually huge for certain markets as it will allow precision targeting for platform specific applications.

Anyway, with the launch of the iPad today I thought, hmmm will the iPad just be another addition to the ‘apple’ targeting? eg. iPhone/iPod Touch/iPad, or will it be a device category in it’s own right?

My gut feel, and if what Steve Jobs has said is true, iPad may well open up a whole new level of possibilities for many different market segments. Surely then if this is the case, the iPad will indeed be an individually targeted device within AdWords because ultimately there are going to be products, services and applications that users will be more likely to interact with on a tablet type device than they would on an iPhone. Time will tell.

Search Engine Land, you make me laugh… Are Acquisio smiling?

So I’m at Search Engine Land today catching up on my daily dose of search news, and I see an article in the ‘Paid Search’ Column (A topic close to my heart) by  titled ‘Automated Keyword Bidding? More Like Automated Money Sink‘ (read article here if you’re interested) and it brought a smile to my face to say the least!

If you can’t be bothered reading the post just yet, here’s Nick’s intro:

Search Engine Marketing agencies scale not by creativity or innovation but by overhead. This is a fact that many agencies deny but is the cold hard truth. This is true even for agencies that have developed in-house technology or license technology from others.  Even the “advanced” agencies are not very sophisticated – they will use rules-based bidding that works half the time because they still require humans to double-check if they actually care about their client’s bottom-line.

With these bidding systems being rules-based, they require account managers to make customizations (I believe the term is “settings update” after hearing a recent sales pitch) depending on the account/campaign.

So why did this article bring a smile to my face? Well firstly – Nick, solid post and some good points around the pitfalls of bid management. It certainly pays to be aware of this if and when you use various automation tools.

And while you may have generalized a bit to much. I think you’ve got your point across well…

I laughed because of this… Tell me, what’s wrong with this picture?

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