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Category: Analytics

Google’s Performance Summit

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Hold onto your seats, because Google just made considerable changes to the way they create your ads. On Tuesday during the Google Ads & Analytics Innovations Keynote, Google speakers announced that they will be adopting a “mobile first” strategy, anchoring advertising strategies in mobile instead of on desktop computers and laptops. If you’re wondering how this may affect you and your digital marketing strategy, read on for the important changes announced and what you need to know about them:

The Google Rationale:

“Shift to mobile has happened” – more mobile searches made than on other devices last year.

They summarise the new environment of fast and easy searching and browsing with smartphones as “micro-moments” – essentially encapsulating intent with context (what do I want to do, where am I and what device am I using).

Google collects data from over 1bn users in each of their products (Youtube, Search, Gmail, Maps, Android etc.). That’s 1bn x 7! In Analytics alone, they collect over 500bn site interactions per day.

Google is, therefore, on the basis of the analysis of this huge data-set, going “Mobile first” – Mobile is the starting point from Google Analytics and AdWords perspective.

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Google is introducing expanded text ads:

Expanded text ads, one of the most prominent changes Google announced, are mobile-optimized ads that are designed to help you maximize the success of your advertisement in a mobile-first environment. Some of the new features and changes within this area are:

1. 50% more ad space and a more eye-catching headline size to feature your product.

2. The previous, single headline 25-35-35 character limit has been changed to a new, two headline 30-30-80 limit.

3. There will be changes to the Display URL to incorporate path fields, allowing 2 fields of 15 characters each (e.g. www.website.com/field1/field2).

4. The display URL field has been removed, and Google now extracts the domain automatically from the final URL.

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What’s in it for you?

1. Advertisers can control the new second headline.

2. The platform is more conducive to longer, creative messaging.

3. There is a clear landing page within every ad.

4. There is up to a 20% CTR uplift to existing text ads depending on each advertiser and how the individual account is set up.

5. The experience is optimized for mobile, an increasingly important platform today.

6. There is an additional line over existing text ads.

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Google AdWords:

1. Demographic targeting for search ads.

2. They are introducing similar audiences for search, which focuses on searchers who have not been to your site but with the same characteristics as visitors on your remarketing lists.

3. Device bid adjustments allow you to anchor your main keyword bids to a certain device of your choice and use percentage adjustments for the other 2 devices.

4. More ad format testing is coming for industry verticals.

5. In-store tracking via GPS – they claim over 99% accuracy.

6. Completely rebuilt UI for AdWords with easier navigation to key targeting options and insightful overview charts.

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Changes to the Google Display Network:

1. Google is now creating native ads for you within the GDN once you enter the headline, image, description, and URL.

2. The program does the heavy lifting for you, customizing the displayed layout for each device, website or app.

3. Google is extending the reach of GDN campaigns with access to cross-exchange ad inventory. Much broader reach on remarketing than just the Google Display Network.

4. Lastly, Google is introducing Individual bid adjustments for each device type.

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Changes to Google Maps:

1. More relevant ads within google maps.

2. There are now promoted Pins with promo text and customizable business pages in Google Maps.

3. As an expansion of Local Inventory Ads already available, customers can now view local inventory and search within it to find what they need before they visit the store.

Much of these changes are rolling out over the next 12 months, but you will want to be ready to go as soon as possible.

If you would like an expert’s opinion on how Google’s changes will affect your marketing strategy, tweet at us @ESV_Digital_UK or follow us on LinkedIn.

Customer Lifetime Value

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Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) is one of the most important metrics for shaping your customer acquisition strategy. CLV gives advertisers the big picture beyond just a last-click and first sale model that many e-commerce operations work to analyse.

Specifically, CLV is a prediction calculation of the net profit attributed to the entire future relationship with a customer or the known revenue value of customers since their first purchase fitting different user profiles from which one can derive an average. CLV is also an important business concept because it encourages companies to shift their focus from profits and revenue on a single sale to developing long-term customer relationships.

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How do you calculate Customer Lifetime Value?

The most basic way to calculate CLV is to take the revenue you earn from a customer (or cohort of customers) and subtract the money spent on acquiring and serving them.

The total average is from dividing the total net revenue (after the costs of acquiring customers) by the number of customers.

Because you as a business are, via CLV, looking at the full value of acquiring each user, you can have more room to push bids and budgets for new users in the knowledge of how many times they are likely to buy and how much revenue you will probably get from them over time.

Using this metric and your collected user data from both internal and other analytics sources, you can slice and dice this collated information in many ways for extremely useful insights such as:

  • What product, when bought by a new user, tends to be linked to a high CLV?
  • What coupons bring you the highest CLV customers?
  • What times of day or days of week yields users with the highest CLV?
  • What geographies bring the highest CLV customers?
  • What channels are involved in the most repeat buyers?
  • How well do remarketing ads to existing customers work and through what channel (email, display, search etc.)?

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What does CLV mean to Multi-Channel Attribution?

A lot of money is spent on a range of advertising channels by medium-to-large businesses and much of it is being delivered to people who have already been customers. Determining what such customers have seen prior to repeat buying is as valuable as knowing what new customers have encountered before becoming a customer.

Through this tracking of both online and offline advertising and sales, multi-channel attribution can help you accurately determine the customer lifetime value. If you track offline sales too, this extra data could lead to higher budgets on certain marketing channels because users who shop both offline and online are likely to have a higher CLV.

ESV Analytics, our multi-channel attribution and analytics tool can help you track users across devices and channels through combining their interactions with your website and messaging data with both online and offline sales to give you as complete CLV picture.

If you want to know more about CLV and how we construct that picture for our customers, let us know! Follow us on LinkedIn or Tweet at us!

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Why 3rd Party Tracking

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Tracking web data, such as clicks and conversions, is important to the success of any company with a digital presence. It’s most common for agencies and advertisers to choose just to use Google’s own conversion tracking to determine how their PPC efforts are performing. However, this option (particularly when not also using Bing and Yahoo tracking) is limited in effectiveness and is less flexible than you might realise.

Since Google has a large market share over the digital advertising world, some advertisers do not see the value in using Bing Ads or Yahoo Tracking, and instead often use the shortcut of duplicating any changes they make on Google over to the other search engines. The advertisers who use only one Search Engine tracking platform are missing out on the real behaviour patterns of users and, in some cases, mis-counting conversions. But even if you do use tracking from all three major search engines, much user behaviour is obscured or misreported. For example, for any ad campaign there can be a lot of cross-search-engine traffic and, if an advertiser only uses Google tracking, they will find that someone who clicks on a Bing Ad will register as converting on a Google ad if they have also clicked a Google ad recently. Or, for the same reason, if you have both Bing and Google tracking, both search engines could register a conversion for one user if that user had clicked on ads for both search engines. This is where 3rd party tracking (like ours) comes in to save the day and help advertisers make sense of their mounds of web/search engine generated user data.

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Tracking your data + ESV Digital = maximising your ROI

 

We at ESV Digital, have always had our own 3rd party tracking system but in recent years we’ve evolved it into the EasyTrack system. This tracking solution not only functions on all websites and browsers, because it uses 1st party cookies instead of the often blocked 3rd party cookies, but it allows us to change tracking behaviour without changing website code and to track user actions beyond purely a click on a search ad should a client wish to add our cross-channel Analytics platform solution.

We, at ESV Digital, understand campaign data at a granular level because it is something we specialise in:

  • We offer an end-to-end customer acquisition, conversion and retention service tailored to your exact needs – and all designed to help you turn your digital marketing budget into sales, and your sales into profits.
  • Our team of Google AdWords and Bing Ads qualified analysts are experts at optimizing PPC campaigns. Our Account Management team has excellent analytical skills and can dive into the conversion funnel to get full insight into the true value of each of your marketing efforts.
  • We have a single tracking solution for multiple search engines and channels.
  • Tracking and understanding web data is often the bread and butter of 3rd party tracking solutions providers similar to ours, however, we set ourselves apart from the rest of the pack by owning our own cutting-edge PPC platform.
  • Our proprietary Platform is one of the most efficient, and powerful automated bidding platforms in the SEM industry. We are constantly investing in the research and development that provides us with an edge over our competitors. Thanks to the platform’s built-in revenue attribution across SEM campaigns, our Account Managers can analyse conversion/revenue performance and implement optimizations based on this data in a unique and streamlined way.

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At the end of the day, money is made through understanding the power of behaviour tracking and revenue attribution. Using our 3rd party tracking in concert with our management technology enables us to improve our clients’ conversion rates. While billions are spent each year in customer acquisition, all steps of the customer journey are often forgotten and the last click is given too much weight. Our EasyTrack solution provides the capability to optimise the effectiveness and quality of the traffic on your site and therefore, drive your conversion rate. By understanding where your visitors come from and how they behave, you can learn how to improve your website and user experience and focus your acquisition budget on the most profitable visitor sources.

Bottom line, the more informed your bidding and budgeting decisions are, the better the performance you will see. Want to know more about how 3rd party tracking like ours can help? Send us an email at contact_uk@esvdigital.com.

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