Seasonal Text Ads, Bing ETAs & More

AdWords Tip We’re Recommending: Don’t be afraid to run more seasonal ads. It’s a great way to set yourself apart from your competitors and make your ad copy more appealing. Don’t believe me? Expanded Text Ads have been in place for nearly two months now, and the majority of ads that we see on Google SERPS are still in the old text ad format. Plain and simple, your competitors are not updating their ads as much as they should, and it’s a huge opportunity for you.

I performed this search earlier today for kids sneakers.

It’s a shame that none of these advertisers are highlighting a Back To School sale. What’s more, each of their websites feature Back To School branding, but it appears that their PPC team either didn’t get the message or are too lazy to push through new text ads that will only be relevant for a few weeks.

Important: Make sure you have a system in place to phase them out at the right time. Nothing will hurt your brand like running a Back To School ad when the holidays roll around… or worse. We recommend setting up automated rules to pause the ads as soon as your seasonality is over. Either create labels for each of the ads or find a common denominator for your automated rules (filter by “Ad Text Includes:Back To School,” for example).

Life Hack We Discovered: Access Netflix In Hotel Rooms. If you’ve ever brought an Amazon Fire Stick, Apple TV, or HDMI cord to a hotel you were staying at in hopes to stream Netflix, Hulu or whatever service you’re using these days, you’ve probably been disappointed to find that most hotels have disabled the input selector on their television… an attempt to force guests to rent movies from them. Well, one of my esteemed colleagues found a workaround for this earlier this week and we are delighted to share it with you.

All you need to do is unplug the white RJ-11 Cable from the back of the TV. It looks like an ethernet cord and is probably attached to an external box mounted on the back of the television. Check out this reddit post for a picture and more info.

Bing Update We’re Relieved About: Expanded Text Ads in Bing. In June, Bing Ads announced that they would continue to follow in the footsteps of Google by introducing Expanded Text Ads into their platform, and we’re finally starting to see this in some of our accounts. This is a huge relief for PPC managers that have long enjoyed the ease of importing existing ads from Google AdWords, and have had to manually duplicate their efforts over the last few months.

Question We’re Pondering: How Do You Respectfully Market After A Disaster: Last week, this post came on our radar on inbound.org and really got us thinking. The member that posted the question is a business owner in the Baton Rouge area that has been plagued with terrible flooding in the last few weeks. The post and comments were insightful, with the resounding theme to provide useful resources and make the public aware that you are there for whatever they might need. In an age where it seems like every other week there is some sort of global disaster or conflict that requires a level of sensitivity in your messaging, this is definitely something that we all need to be thinking about more often.