With 2015 wrapping up, let’s take a look at what articles related to AdWords got the most social sharing activity. I used BuzzSumo to look up the combined number of shares on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Pinterest and Google+. Judging by the most shared articles, here’s what people in the PPC world thought was noteworthy in the past year.
New Features
AdWords is constantly changing, and while most updates seem to get a shockingly low number of social shares — for example, an article about AdWords Scripts support for shared negative lists was shared just 31 times — there were a few topics that stood out and got thousands of shares.
Customer Match
This new type of audience list was the most shared new feature in AdWords (shared 7,500 times) and also one of the top shared topics about AdWords in general.
One of AdWords’ strengths has always been its ability to target searchers at the moment of relevance when they’re searching for the right keyword. Now, with Customer Match, targeting gets even better by layering in who the user is. With Customer Match, advertisers can show different ads or set different bids for a user who’s already in their sales pipeline or who’s already purchased from their site in the past.
This was one of the topics I covered in a webinar about six ways to scale PPC results (Get the slides or watch the recording).
Upgraded URLs
It seems that at least once a year, Google rolls out an update that requires all advertisers to make a big change to how they work with AdWords. In 2013, that was Enhanced Campaigns; in 2014, it was the change to how exact match keywords worked; and in 2015, it was Upgraded URLs, a change to how destination URLs work.
Because this was a change that every advertiser had to think about (even if they decided to leave their URLs as they were), this launch understandably picked up a lot of social sharing activity.
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