Marketing as a whole has some core prerequisites to be successful (measurable goals, a united and clear message to convey, smart budgeting). Paid Digital Marketing is no different but a unique strength of the digital space is a central factor in making all forms of digital advertising work. It’s not keywords, it’s not bids, it’s not directly being able to track and attribute conversions - for the latter, many advertisers don’t care about conversions so much. It is audiences.

Audience tracking, targeting and managing is Paid Digital Marketing’s secret sauce

There are certainly those who may claim the website is the real common denominator but you can have the best website in the world; if the users visiting it are low quality (poor intent, the wrong type of user in any way) it can’t get you results.

It is true that below-par websites will generally perform poorly but they’ll perform far above their fighting weight with good audience strategy.

Many advertisers are starting to get to grips with this fact, as PPC Keywords get diluted and many forms of control on search, shopping and display recede, because the biggest remaining lever of control (and insight) that seems to be surviving all this change is audiences.

What do we mean by audiences?

When speaking about audiences, I’m referring to literally any aspect of a user’s profile or behaviour that can be categorized, measured and targeted. This can include:

• Location
• Device
• New or returning visitor
• Prospective or returning customer
• Engagement behaviour with the site or ads (e.g. video ads)
• Age
• Gender
• Life stage/event
• Content topics of interest
• Occupation

This is by no means an exhaustive list and these are all beyond the basic audience segment of those who search on a search engine and self-select to be an audience member of “people who searched for product x.”

Many of these have long been used by Facebook advertisers or on LinkedIn but now marketers have a host of powerful options on both Google and Bing Ads plus other Display networks.

Uses

What is the value and what are the potential applications for all these audiences? Before anything else, you need to look at the data you have pertaining to these audience types. Without this we cannot know if it’s salient to even do anything with age groups, for instance. Maybe all ages convert about the same rate. And don’t forget to review how they may impact your CLV (Customer Lifetime Value).

To gather data about audiences that are not sourced internally, you can sometimes just run a report with these segments - normally the most generic user properties, like demographics or location - but for the more advanced and granular audience types, you may be able to add those audiences as “observed” audiences for a time to gather data. Google Ads is a great example of this. Once you have allowed time to pass and the data to accumulate, you may be surprised by some audience correlations and conversions on your site.

Once you have an idea of where performance opportunities lie, you can then decide how to segment targeting, auto-bidding and messaging to address them.

Not all audience uses must be hard-data-led, however. They can also be used simply to segment messaging. Decide what USP of your offering will ring bells with a certain audience (or layered audience) but also position the brand and set an appropriate call-to-action, imagery etc. In addition, you can identify your core target audience per your business plan and shape your strategy, in part, that way. If nothing else, it’s a good way to focus your budget on the user profiles through which you fundamentally want to gain market share.

You can leverage your CRM data to segment existing customers in a limitless number of ways and target them (subject to audience size) in PPC and Facebook/Instagram.

An extra bonus of the latter is that some platforms can take your audience and make look-a-like audiences to expand your penetration of people similar to those who convert on your site. You can take this further by buying email address lists of curated people and upload them as customer match lists.

Conclusion

When you come to choosing digital marketing platforms to use, ask yourself (and the platform in question) what audience targeting features it offers. Then ensure audience segmenting, messaging and management is core to your digital marketing strategy. This may involve many internal stakeholders and partners to do it right (web development, app development, data warehouses, data analysis, CRM teams and so on) but without making efforts to leverage audiences your competitors are going to eventually eat your lunch.

For more information about ESV Digital’s search marketing strategy, get in touch.

You can also follow us on Twitter and Facebook for the latest updates.

In part 1 of this blog series looking at the new PPC management landscape after Google Ads’ redesign, Bing’s takeover of Yahoo Search PPC, and the emerging ad and campaigns types we’re seeing, we looked at the top-level issues and questions you should address before embarking on adopting these new features. In this part, we will look at the keyword (and keywordless) environment in terms of search (including Shopping ads).

There are many parts to this subject because there are a number of different campaign/ad group types in Search and Shopping and there are many types of advertiser. So precisely how you might use them in combination is ultimately up to you.

Campaigns using keywords

Only “Call-Only” and “Standard” search campaigns involve keywords on which you can bid directly. They operate on potentially 4 match types (depending on how you might wish to categorise them):

• Exact
• Phrase
• Broad Match Modifier (BMM)
• Broad

The complicated part in 2019 is explaining and controlling the range of searches that now match against these keyword match types. Exact match, in particular, has evolved and morphed from the purest form (absolute alpha-numeric character matching) to almost semantic match. It’s not impossible that we’re approaching the dying days of keywords, in fact.

A pretty good summary is found here in the interests of saving inches on this post.

In practice, Broad match is a near-meaningless match type since we now how Dynamic Search Ads (keywordless) but the other 3 continue to have a purpose in terms of traffic control.

What is “traffic control?” It’s ensuring that you can be confident in the nature of searches that will trigger any given ad group. This means you can understand both the intent and how qualified that traffic is. An example would be if you have a set of keywords for “reviews” and one for “prices”. You would want to prevent “reviews” ad group(s) triggering for “prices” searches so the respective ads can concentrate on the stated priority of the keyword/search.

So you should certainly continue using keywords in the interest of traffic control but mainly concentrate your keyword-based efforts on the highest-volume terms by traffic and revenue/conversions. The less voluminous keywords can come via the keywordless options.

Keywordless campaigns

Campaigns that deliver on search (and beyond) that do not use any keyword bidding are:

• Shopping Campaigns (including Smart Shopping campaigns)
• Dynamic Search Ads (DSA) and can be special ad groups within standard campaigns.
• Hotel Ads Campaigns

Despite the lack of keywords, there are still plenty of levers of control on these, except for the “Smart Shopping” campaigns. The latter will display ads across Google properties as the platform sees fit, aiming for an efficiency goal and using a budget you provide.

Shopping

Traditional shopping campaigns are a terrific outlet for retailers, provided you know what you’re doing. If you use auto-bidding, you can assist the effectiveness of this by structuring your campaigns based on theme, device and performance and including impactful audiences in the targeting (such as remarketing but also in-market, similar audiences, etc.).

The ultimate way to shape the traffic across your shopping structure is using negative keywords, sometimes at the ad group level, sometimes at campaign level and sometimes shared as lists across multiple campaigns.

Structure and performance can be greatly affected by the quality of the feed (as is the case with Hotel Ads) in that the titles, images and categorising needs to be very good, compelling and concise. A muddled feed will only cause problems in all kinds of ways.

Hotel Ads

Hotel ads have a different general look and feel but, because advertisers can choose to only pay for sales, the efficiency is built-in. It becomes, then, more of a reach challenge to maximise sales.

Dynamic Search Ads

DSAs are most effective when the site in question is large and complex, and there are many searches which could be potentially relevant but harder to predict. You can use audiences, auto-bidding, negative keywords and excluded website segments to help you sculpt the traffic to your desires.

DSAs do not use keywords to bid on and instead match searches to the URLs or segments of your site they are set to target. They then complete the ad copy that you haven’t already written based on content from the page chosen as the landing page for that query. A key takeaway here is that the website must be content-rich, well organised and be full of text of relevance for when Google Ads crawls it. The URLs you submit can be from a feed or manually configured.

Tip: Give the DSA a better chance at gaining conversions by submitting specific URLs that show the same page using different sorting, filtering, and layout configurations. These configurations won’t be crawled if you don’t manually submit them. For example, if a page listing lots of products can be sorted by popularity, price and user ratings, submit the same page sorted in all 3 ways as separate entries. This can only be done if such layouts are coded into the URL (which is quite common).

This ad type is on both Google and Bing Ads.

All of the above campaign types have multiple messaging options, sometimes exclusive to the ad type, and we’ll address these in the next part of this series.

For more information about Digital Advertising and ESV Digital’s Paid Search strategy, get in touch.

You can also follow us on Twitter and Facebook for the latest updates.

As promised, we’re starting our series of articles about advertisers can adapt their accounts to the new PPC platform landscape. We’re looking at structure, campaign types, bidding types, ad types and ad extensions. Many of these are available on Google Ads and Bing, although Bing has currently far less to offer in the way of auto-bidding strategies.

In the last post, we discussed the background to why you should be reassessing how you’re managing your PPC accounts. Here we will discuss where to begin with this.

First Questions

The first matter to address is what new features and tools make sense to the business you are advertising. These are the sorts of questions to answer to help you decide:

• Does the account handle just a few conversions or hundreds and thousands per week?
• How complex is the website, just a few pages or is more e-commerce based with many product pages?
• Are your sales impulse-based and have short lead-in times or can it take a long time from first research to a customer choosing to buy?
• How comprehensive are your customer-facing support teams? Is there the infrastructure to handle text messages as well as calls?
• Are you able to remarket to users (i.e. you’re not advertising in a restricted industry)?

And now?

For all of the above, you must refer, and be subservient, to your advertising goal or goals. Otherwise, you’re basically improvising. The answers to these questions may not result in you deciding not to use any single tool or feature but they can help you prioritise your efforts in order of impact magnitude.

If you are dealing with a site that is low in volume, many of the bidding features, in particular are going to be unreliable at best. This is because algorithms thrive on data and so the less data, the less accuracy.

With the enhancement of Dynamic Search Ads (they have more text you can include and the targeting options are better), the dilution of reliance on keyword-based traffic is continuing but these types of ads are most suited to complex sites. If you have only a handful of pages, they probably won’t add much value to your account.

If your site is making its money mainly through quick hit visits then this will mean you don’t need to think about remarketing options but audience targeting can still be very valuable. In-Market audiences, Youtube category audiences and Gmail can all be useful.

In terms of customer-service related options, if you can handle round the clock messaging with customers, try the message extension on Google Ads. This works alongside Call Extensions to help users communicate with the business. Call Only Ads are also potentially a way for a business that is not focussed on its website (either for it’s offering, such as a taxi firm, or for its customer acquisition) to attract customers using Google. Location and device-based customisers can also be used to be attractive to audiences.

If you’re in an unrestricted industry - nothing that is legally sensitive or health-related - you can remarket people who have already been to your site. This can bring back users who are either very hot leads or have faded and forgotten your brand. In addition, you can remarket to those who purchased before with return offers on Display, Gmail, Shopping, and Search.

To do this in search or display, you can use ad customisers that show specific text or offers to a user depending on the audience to which they belong. There is also dynamic remarketing, which will show the products a user a last viewed to them in a display ad.

This, as ever, is a brief summary and cannot be exhaustive, but hopefully it will set off on the right foot. We will, over the course of this series, dig deeper in some of the tactics above - and elements of them not mentioned here - to give you a more thorough understanding of what opportunities are now open to you through the new PPC features.

For more information about Digital Advertising and ESV Digital’s Paid Search strategy, get in touch.

You can also follow us on Twitter and Facebook for the latest updates.

If you look back over the last 18 months to 2 years, you’ll see that, bit by bit, PPC (Pay Per Click otherwise called Paid Search) has changed dramatically. The sum of the smaller changes have aggregated to result in a night and day difference in so many areas. Here are just a few:

• Google AdWords rebranded to Google Ads (accompanying a rebrand of virtually all of Google’s Marketing brands).
• Exact match has been made ever looser as a match type. Firstly, to allow “close variants”, then to match when terms are in a different order in a keyword vs the search phrase and where “function words” are ignored (like “in” or “to”), and finally to match with similar intent using AI.
• Several more audience types were introduced (custom intent, for example).
• Google Ads pushed machine-learning based auto-bidding strategies and made them query level, as opposed to keyword level. They can push ROI/ROAS, CPA or click traffic and brand awareness goals.
• Google Ads introduced conversion attribution (including cross-device).
• There are a range of new ad types available on Google Ads, some of which Bing Ads also features.
• Side ads disappeared, so the number of Page 1 slots shrank from up to 10 to just 4 at most (plus shopping ads).

This only scratches the surface in the changes that make the task of managing PPC accounts so different versus 2 or 3 years ago.

Will all of this make life easier?

To some extent but it will still be possible to make very consequential mistakes without proper account management. The overall way one should manage PPC accounts, however, does need to change to compensate for how these platforms have evolved. This is true whether you’re involved in e-commerce, lead generation, brand awareness or have any other Search Engine Marketing goal.

We will be publishing a series of posts over the coming months to review what the most impactful changes to managing PPC accounts might be for advertisers, how to decide what new tactics to apply and in what context.

Stay tuned and we’ll start off soon with a post about the basic questions to ask yourself and, over the series, we’ll go deeper into each ad type, campaign type and bidding strategy options available.

For more information about Digital Advertising and ESV Digital’s Paid Search strategy, contact us using the form below.

You can also follow us on Twitter and Facebook for the latest updates.

Keywords and their management have historically been a central plank of managing Search Advertising campaigns for all search engines. But all the evidence suggests that this is changing, slowly but surely. It is at the point now where, if you haven’t begun to act, you may already be behind the curve.

Even in the realm of keywords, the impact of selecting any single keyword to bid on has been softened in a number of ways:

• Exact Match and Phrase match will now match to the terms in the keyword regardless of the order they appear.
• Exact and Phrase match will match to “close variants” of each term in a keyword, such as plurals and misspellings.
• Words typically regarded as linking terms, like “the” and “for”, are now “invisible” to Google Ads for the purposes of matching.

The aim of the above is to vastly reduce (in theory) the population of separate keywords an advertiser must manage to maximise
their reach.

Beyond this, on the bidding side, Google have been developing automated bidding based not on your keywords but on the search at the time - specifically, how likely that search is going to turn into a click by a user and a sale or conversion.

The main outcome of this is that, even if you have no keywords (e.g. you use Dynamic Search Ads) Google can bid toward an efficiency goal of your choosing (ROI, Cost of Sale, CPA) and advertisers are left just to exclude searches they don’t want.

There are, in fact, a number of optimisation steps you’ll need to take with DSA - not least is structure as it relates to landing pages.

But the bottom line is still that keywords are becoming increasingly optional. They’d not dead yet, for sure, but their days seem
to be numbered.

For more information about Digital Advertising and ESV Digital’s Paid Search strategy, get in touch through the contact form below.

You can also follow us on Facebook and Twitter for the latest updates.