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As we round out the final quarter of another successful year, I am reminded of all the stresses that come with the holidays. Slowing down, reflecting, giving back, and showing gratitude are some of my favorite tools for relieving that stress.
As I take a moment to reflect and show gratitude, I’m especially thankful for Centro’s philanthropic organization, The Giving Tree. The Giving Tree is our outlet for encouraging corporate social responsibility among our employees, and we have been hard at work all year long.
Our goal is to partner with a diverse group of charities to drive positive change where we live and work. We’ve made an impact with various organizations across the country, including Rosie’s Place, Volunteers of America, Girls on the Run, Habitat for Humanity, and The Birthday Party Project.
Did you know that volunteering is good for the soul? Here are four ways volunteering or giving back can improve your work and life:
1. Volunteering helps mitigate depression and anxiety.
The social connection that comes along with helping others has a profound effect on our overall psychological well-being. Formal research has shown that volunteering results in lower rates of depression, especially in people 65 years of age and older.
2. Volunteering makes you happy.
By measuring hormones and brain activity, researchers have found that volunteering is correlated with better mental and physical health. Human beings are hard-wired to give to others—the more we give, the happier we feel!
3. Volunteering increases self-confidence.
There is a natural sense of accomplishment that comes with helping your community. The better you feel about yourself, the more likely you are to have a positive view of your life and future goals. Surveys have confirmed that volunteering is correlated with greater self-esteem and life satisfaction.
4. Volunteering provides a sense of purpose.
According to Project Helping, 96% of people say that volunteering enriches their sense of purpose. Whatever your age or life situation, volunteering can help take your mind off your own worries, keep you mentally stimulated, and add more zest to your life.
There’s still plenty of time to make an impact before the end of the year! Don’t forget that it’s far better to give than to receive this holiday season. Learn more about the Centro Giving Tree here.
Google Conversion Optimizer, automated bidding, smart bidding. Google Ads’ free-to-use, in-house bidding tools have been labeled different names over the years, with one overarching design concept: to alleviate PPC managers from the complexity of bid management using tools built-in to Google Ads.
Google offers many bid strategies and has continued to expand that list over time. Current hallmark strategies include Maximize Conversions, Target CPA, and Target ROAS, among others. Requirements? The more important, conversion-based strategies require accurate conversion tracking using the Google pixel, but outside of that Google strategies are available to any program.
Why would Google want advertisers to use their own bid optimization options? Is it to offer an out-of-the-box convenient solution to inexperienced advertisers? Or is it to straddle the line between improving conversion rates and increasing CPCs? The speculative answer is both. Rumor has it that Google poured development resources into their bidding capabilities (once viewed as a poor strategy) to accommodate the many thousands of small-time advertisers who may not know much about digital ads and who have more important things to focus on. Mission accomplished; so well, in fact, they got the attention of large advertisers with dedicated PPC teams and vendor relationships. Where do things stand now?
Auction time bidding (or ATB) is a type of real-time bidding based on specific user in a particular context, such as on a certain website or within a mobile app. This feature has gained recent publicity, but it’s been the case for a long time. Google rightfully recognizes it as the premier benefit of their own bidding solutions. As the publisher serving the ads, Google can interact with search queries, including bidding on each unique search query, rather than having a single bid per keyword like all other bidding options are tied to. This means the relevance of every search query is evaluated and bid on in real-time, leading to more effective and efficient campaigns and helping advertisers hit their KPIs.
For broad match keywords, this capability can be especially valuable, since the relevance of search queries can vary widely.
Example:
| Search Query | Keyword | Auction Time Bid | Keyword Bid |
| ‘household maid service’ | ‘household cleaning service’ | $3.50 | $1.50 |
| ‘best household cleaning supplies’ | ‘household cleaning service’ | $1.10 | $1.50 |
Google claims to use the full suite of user data. There are still many limitations to Google’s array of user data, but it grows every day. The majority of that data is available to utilize by anyone via bid adjustment modifiers. However, much like with auction time bidding, there are some data points that only the publisher serving the ad can interact with at the time of auction. A couple of examples are browser and operating system. There’s no consensus about how impactful this data may be, but since only Google can make use of this data in real-time, it is another bidding advantage.
This is also related to auction time bidding. Because Google can bid on each search query, there’s no need for the use of different match types. A campaign with only broad keywords would theoretically perform as well as if that campaign also had phrase and exact match. This may be especially valuable to smaller advertisers that lack budget or resources to build and maintain a larger, more sophisticated, ad account.
With Google uniquely bidding on every search query, an advertiser has no access to the complete bid history of any keyword or any individual auction. Keyword level CPCs are not reflective of auction dynamics, given that the bids for each search query may be incredibly wide-ranging, even for the same keyword. So, the CPC for a given keyword acts as the average of all the unique bid auctions, and that is the most information available. For advertisers looking to analyze granular performance, the possibilities with Google are limited.
Using Google bidding means relinquishing control across different market segments to what Google interprets as the most likely to convert. That’s fine in a vacuum, but an advertiser will commonly know more about their business than what’s reflected in historical online conversion metrics. For instance, a business is set to release a new mobile landing page or has a call center with variable staffing availability. Google can only react to how those efforts change conversion rates over time, which is too late, and businesses miss out on influencing website traffic based on important information that Google cannot incorporate.
Google bidding is restricted to relying on conversion data tracked by the Google pixel. This means a user is unable to incorporate extraneous or contextual data into bid optimization. Manual or vendor bid strategies can layer in BI data such as product inventory, or contextual data such as weather. For many businesses, performance is closely tied to external influences, and it’s best to take advantage of that data wherever applicable.
Included in the Google Recommendations tab is a recommended list of campaigns to apply smart bidding (typically with Target CPA). This list can be downloaded and includes an estimated performance impact for each campaign. The catch is that not every campaign will be recommended for smart bidding, usually because Google requires a minimum threshold of conversion volume to achieve confidence in performance. Google projects when it’s unlikely to be effective and it’s not designed to accommodate campaigns with limited volume. Depending on campaign size and conversion rates, this gap in coverage can make up a significant portion of spend.
We at Basis have seen time and time again a pattern that Google bidding increases CPCs. Belief is that Google is aggressively targeting and bidding up relevant searches, but if that increase in CPC is not met with an increase in conversion rates, CPAs go up and margin goes down. This inflation is also everlasting. Hypothetically, if more and more players in the auction rely on Google bidding, the net impact on auction dynamics results in a higher cost to generate the same amount of clicks, and everyone simply pays more to Google.
It’s best to understand the trade-offs using smart bidding versus a manual strategy or a bid management platform. Know what is being given up by relying on Google bidding using only Google tracking. There’s an obvious theme to relying on smart bidding - you bought a car from Google and you are having them drive you around in it. If you’re an inexperienced driver or aren’t sure where you want to go, this is an effective solution, but for anyone who wants the ability to input direction, you’re ceding complete control.
The seasoned advertiser will likely understand what bid strategy to utilize for different segments of their program and business. With a proper understanding of the Pros and Cons of Google automated bidding, an advertiser can test and recognize the ideal strategies. To achieve peak performance, that may include the use of myriad strategies. And it makes sense, X + Y is better than X or Y in isolation, once you understand where X > Y and Y >X. Rarely is a bidding solution one size fits all. Keep on learning. Google may or may not be the right solution.
To achieve your ROI goals, you need to target the right Advertising Cost of Sale (ACoS), the key metric Amazon uses to illustrate how your ad spend leads to targeted sales.
Here’s how it’s calculated: ACoS= Ad spend/Sales
Say, over the course of a month, you spend $170 on advertising which generated $680 in revenue. ACoS = 170/680 = 25%.
So, what’s a good ACoS? It really depends on your profit margin. Your profit margin is your profit per unit sold divided by the price. If for example you sell a $100 product on Amazon and it costs $75 to produce, your profit per unit is $25.
Profit per unit / Product price = Profit margin
$25/$100=0.25
Your profit margin is 25%.
So, how high can your advertising cost of sale be in order to break even and eliminate wasted spend from your advertising efforts? In this case, 25%. But of course, you want a profit. So your ACoS needs to be lower. Maybe 10% or 15%. It all depends on your pricing point and business needs.
The good news is there are many changes you can make to improve your ACoS on Amazon. Spending less money on ads is not the only way to lower your ACoS. Here are 9 areas to focus on to optimize your ads and improve performance.
Amazon offers both manual and automatic campaign options. Each strategy has its benefits. With automatic campaigns, you allow Amazon to determine when to display your ad based on keywords identified in the title, description, and other aspects of your listing. Automatic campaigns are easy to set up and can help you identify relevant long-tail keywords to target.
With manual campaigns, you define your target keywords and set your own bid rates. This allows you complete control over strategy and targeting.
If you’re just getting started with Amazon advertising, it’s recommended to begin with automated campaigns then gradually switch to manual. Automated campaigns will help you understand how the system works and hopefully identify some important keywords you should target. Once you do switch to manual, make sure you have a precise campaign structure that improves targeting. Creating relevant ad and keyword groups allows you to better control bidding on different product types to improve ACoS.
Your cost of advertising and ACoS performance ultimately depends on how much you bid on the keyword, ad group, or campaign. As with Google Ads, Amazon will show you the average bids for keywords. Use this as a starting point for setting your bids. In general, you should bid lower on low converting keywords and higher on high converting keywords. If your impressions are too low, consider increasing your bid or referencing the buy box status to ensure your Amazon Standard Identification Numbers (ASINs) are eligible to serve.
Optimizing your bids is really a balancing act. Bidding high improves your product rankings and can drive more clicks, but also potentially increases your ACoS. Bidding low decreases your product rankings and can cause you to lose clicks, or worse, not qualify for the auction at all. The best strategy is to test different bid levels and see how they impact performance.
If you already run campaigns with Google AdWords Shopping, resist the urge to simply copy over keyword lists from Google Ads. Amazon is a completely different platform, where different keywords may be more or less valuable for campaign success.
The best resource for finding relevant keywords to target is Amazon itself. Type a base keyword into Amazon’s search bar and take a look at suggested results to get ideas:
There are also quite a few third-party keyword research tools out there that can help you build keyword lists specifically for Amazon.
Whatever keywords you find, just make sure they best represent the intent of your target audience when looking for your products. Some keywords are more relevant than others, especially for different products and ad types. Look at Sponsored Products, for example. Specific, long-tail keywords are the most relevant to target because you’re showing ads to people who are looking for something specific. With Sponsored Brands, on the other hand, your goal is to build awareness for your brand and its product offerings. In this case, targeting more generalized keywords is most relevant.
Similar to Google and Bing Ads, Amazon allows you to target keywords and specify different match types. Here are the three main match types you can use:
Here’s an example of how match types work:
| Keyword: Hiking boots | Keyword match type: | ||
| Search Terms: | Broad | Phrase | Exact |
| Hiking boots | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Hiking boots for women | ✓ | ✓ | ? |
| Women’s boots for hiking | ✓ | ? | ? |
| Hiking shoes | ? | ? | ? |
| Women’s boots | ? | ? | ? |
It’s difficult to know which match types will be the most valuable for your campaigns. In general, targeting phrase or exact match keywords can lower your ACoS, because you’re limiting your ad visibility to people who are searching for something very specific. But, leaving out broad match keywords means you miss out on more click opportunities that can lead to sales.
It’s best to create different ad groups for each match type so you can test and see which ones are converting better. You should also look at the search query report on a regular basis. These search terms indicate what queries are currently triggering your ads. You may want to add any converting search terms as exact match keywords to generate more conversions. You should also add irrelevant queries as negative keywords.
As with Google Ads, you can add negative keywords to your Amazon campaigns. Negative keywords are irrelevant keywords that you don’t want your ads showing for. Say, for example, you sell beard grooming and trimming kits and want to target the keyword “shave kit.” You can add “shave kit for women” as a negative keyword because the keyword is irrelevant to your product.
To get some ideas of negative keywords to add, you can download Amazon’s Search Term Report. This is a report of all the search terms people use to find your ads. Go through the terms and see if there are any queries that are misleading or irrelevant to your product.
Some businesses like to include brand keywords as negative keywords in their campaigns. If someone’s using your brand name in their search query, they are much more likely to click on your product from organic results anyway. Showing an ad would just encourage them to click on your sponsored product, wasting your ad spend.
That said, some advertisers like to target brand keywords because they have a high conversion rate. You can test out the value of targeting or eliminating brand keywords by creating a separate campaign and monitoring performance.
In January 2019, Amazon rolled out bid adjustment features similar to Google Ads. You can adjust your bids manually, or use dynamic bids to adjust bids up or down.
Automated options use machine learning to determine the likelihood an ad click will convert, then adjust bids accordingly. You can allow dynamic bids to adjust up and down, or down only. Amazon also allows advertisers to set placement bid adjustments to reach the top of the search page or product page placements. You can set up to a 900% increase.
Bid adjustments are a powerful tool that can help you prioritize targeting certain ad positions that are likely to convert. You can always create a test campaign to try out different bidding strategies and monitor results.
Succeeding with Amazon advertising isn’t just about targeting the right keywords and setting the right bids. Your product listing itself needs to be optimized to get visibility. Amazon uses a search algorithm known as the A9 algorithm to rank products in search results. Even if you’re promoting a product, Amazon still has to consider its relevance for a specific search query when ranking your ad.
That’s just one reason why it’s important to optimize your product listings. After clicking on your ad, consumers are also much more likely to convert if they land on a highly optimized product page. Optimizing your product listings can improve ad rank, clickthrough rate, and conversions.
Here are some important factors to consider when optimizing your Amazon product listing:
Keyword Placement
It’s very important to include target keywords in both your product name and description. This shows both Amazon and shoppers that your product is relevant to what they’re looking for. Of course, you’re likely targeting many keywords for the same product. Prioritize the most valuable (high converting) keywords and put them at the beginning of your product title. You can include other relevant keywords at the end of the title and in the description.
Images
Include high-quality images that illustrate the value of your product. The primary image should have a white background. Additional images can show different sides of the product, different varieties, or use cases. Use all 7 image slots. Optionally, the last image slot can include a video of the product.
Bullet Points / Description
The bullet points section is an important place to illustrate the value of your product. Focus on features that matter to your target audience the most. In the description, you can go into more detail about specifications and include more relevant keywords as well.
Product reviews are probably the most important factor shoppers consider when making a purchase decision. But they also have a huge impact on whether or not someone clicks on your ad. Product title and reviews are the most prominent aspects of an ad:
It doesn’t matter how well you target your keywords or how high you bid on placement, your products won’t get clicks if they don’t have positive reviews.
So, as part of your marketing efforts, encourage your audience to leave reviews for your products. You can do this easily by emailing your current customers, asking them to review their past purchases. Of course, even the best products will get some negative reviews, but you can mitigate their impact by addressing customer concerns. Try to make dissatisfied customers happy so they will remove their negative reviews. If someone has left your product a negative review and it seems unfair, then you can also request Amazon to remove it. Having a high number of positive reviews for your product can improve click-through rates on your ads and reduce necessary ad spend to drive results.
ACoS is an important performance metric, but it isn’t the only thing you should be paying attention to. Other important campaign metrics include:
These metrics can tell you a lot about which areas of your advertising campaign need improvement. Look at the click-through rate, for example. If you have a very low CTR, then it’s likely there’s something wrong with your targeting. Maybe your ad is showing up for irrelevant keywords. Experiment with narrowing down your keyword lists to see if CTR improves.
Whenever you want to make major changes to your ad, ad groups, or targeting, it’s easy enough to set up a new campaign. Then you can test these changes and see if they have the desired impact on key performance metrics.
Investment in Amazon advertising is growing exponentially. If the trajectory continues, it could become more popular than Google Shopping for eCommerce sellers. If you want to get the most value out of your investment in the long run, now’s the time to start investing in performance marketing tactics for Amazon advertising.
Amazon is becoming more important for eCommerce advertising every year. In 2019, marketers will spend $11.33 billion on Amazon advertising. Forrester predicts that in 2020 this number will grow exponentially. As competition rises, it will become more difficult to get visibility for your products while meeting budget and profit goals. To stay ahead of the game, now is the time to start optimizing your Amazon ads for better eCommerce results.
Here’s an overview of how Amazon ads work, and how to start optimizing them for performance marketing.
Right now, Amazon offers four main ad types:
These ad types are designed to help marketers reach their target audience at different points of the shopping process and to target unique business goals. Below we offer a quick insight into how they work:
Sponsored Products
Sponsored Products are ads that appear on the first page of Amazon search results and product pages. They aim to help you boost product visibility and drive sales. These ads are run on a cost-per-click model, so you only pay when someone clicks on your ad. You set your ad budget at a campaign level and designate how much to bid per click.
Sponsored Brands
Sponsored Brands are ads that appear in the search results, typically as a banner at the top of the page. They’re designed to reach customers before they know exactly what they want to buy, ultimately helping them to discover new brands and product offerings. For example, a Sponsored Brand ad can target generalized keywords such as “baby care” or “sporting goods.” Shoppers can click on a brand logo or product in the ad. The brand logo takes them to your store page or a custom landing page while clicking on a product takes them to your product page. These ads are also cost per click-based and can be customized for campaign strategy.
Sponsored Display
Sponsored Display ads are designed to reach audiences both on and off Amazon. These ads are automatically generated based on shopping activities and your business objectives. Visual aspects of the ads are also auto-generated to aid the promotion of your product catalog. Sponsored Display ads can be used for product awareness, consideration, and driving conversions.
Video Ads
Video ads allow you to deliver high-quality video content on Amazon sites such as IMDb, Fire TV, and other places around the web. Their purpose is to empower businesses to capture audience attention, as well as influence and engage people with their brand. Video ads can be used to deliver a specific brand message or to demo your products and services.
The popularity of Amazon today is indisputable. And for good reason. Where else can you buy high-end clothing, technological gadgets, cleaning products, and home furniture all in one place? According to emarketer forecasts, 51.3% of American households will be Amazon Prime members by the time 2019 draws to a close. A quite staggering statistic.
Of course with this number of customers, it stands to reason that Amazon will be packed with vendors. With this in mind, then, it’s never been more important to take advantage of the various ad options on Amazon to optimize your output and ensure you’re standing out in front of your competitors.
Digital marketers, brace yourself, the holiday season is on its way! Although autumn is just a few weeks old, now is a pivotal time to outline your digital approach for the holidays. Nowadays, most consumers have shifted from the in-store holiday shopping madness to shopping from the comfort of their home or in front of their personal devices. In 2018, consumers spent over $120 billion during online holiday shopping (across 61 days 11/1/18 - 1/1/19), which was up 16.5% from 2017.
This blog post is designed as a guide to help digital marketers prepare their programs effectively and help capitalize on the increased seasonal consumer demand while maintaining performance goals. We’ll run through key tasks that all digital marketers should be checking-off prior to the holiday up-tick to ensure a well-rounded strategy and the best chance for success.
One good method of benchmarking and level-setting expectations is by reviewing last year’s performance to gauge how you should approach the program strategically this year. When reviewing last year's performance, make sure you’re comparing days of the week and isolating pivotal days like Cyber Monday, Black Friday, and Christmas Day. We know that these days act differently to other days throughout the year, so you should treat them like the special cases they are. Other questions you should be asking yourself to help make strategic decisions are:
It’s essential to understand and leverage last year’s performance and data to help make informed decisions on this year’s approach. As the saying goes, “If it ain’t broke, don’t try to fix it”; this can be applied to your digital marketing holiday strategy as well. Look for key areas that showed strong performance against your KPI last year and approach them in the same manner as the last holiday season.
Just like Good Ole’ St. Nick, you need to make sure you’re building your audience lists to help set yourself up for success. If you already have an expansive list of audiences you’re remarketing - great! You’re a step ahead of most marketers. One thing you may want to consider is recycling last year’s holiday audience lists to see if you can garner the less frequent purchasers. However, be aware of any site or program changes over the last year that could’ve impacted those lists.
For readers that don’t have any remarketing lists from last year that remain open (or any at all for that matter), I recommend using the list of ideas below as thought starters.
Once you have your RLSA strategy mapped out, you should begin building lists as soon as possible to allow the audience segments sufficient time to garner members.
As mentioned, this time of year is great for e-commerce, but it’s also a very unique time in itself. Given this known variable, digital marketers should approach all campaigns with a different lens. If you have any campaigns with active ad schedules, ask yourself - do these ad schedules still set us up for success?
If you’re not sure, a good exercise is to analyze last year’s performance (especially on pivotal days like Black Friday and Cyber Monday) by the hour and date. See how your key campaigns performed throughout the hours of the day, and devise schedules that bid up during top-performing and key times of the day. Keep in mind you’re limited to how many windows of time you’d like to optimize against - so choose strategically.
Ad copy is always an important part of any digital marketing campaign, and when the competition heats up on the search engine results page it becomes even more important when you're fighting for the consumer's attention and click. In order to gain the consumer’s attention, make your ad copy compelling and tap into their emotions. Do you have a unique selling position to leverage? What special promos are you running?
Creative should be captivating enough to arrest scrolling, but also show the value your website is bringing by answering the searcher’s query. You can try to show the value that sets you apart from other advertisers by utilizing ad customizers.
If you’re running a promotion, try utilizing Countdown Ads and Promotion Extensions within your campaigns to give consumers a sense of urgency. If you also have the extra time, we recommend saving your holiday time for your family by applying labels and automated rules to these ads to schedule ads with coinciding promo periods.
One last strategy to consider would be to leverage a reactivation campaign with previous purchasers and associating relevant ad copy with these audiences to attract repeat customers.
Hybrid metrics can seem complicated at first glance. But once you have a basic understanding, you can leverage them to assist specific types of SEM programs in experiencing more controlled success. In this post, we break down what hybrid metrics are, when to test them and how to align them with your business goals. For specific cases, understanding and correctly implementing hybrid metrics can be the key to driving improved SEM outcomes.
It’s important to keep in mind that a hybrid metric is not a fit for every program. It’s essential to only employ them when needed or you risk overcomplicating your metrics and results.
A hybrid metric is based on two or more conversion or revenue metrics that you wish to optimize towards. It’s often a combination of a higher-funnel metric that has an abundant amount of data and a lower-funnel metric that generates less data. In most cases, the higher in the funnel the metric is, the more volume and less accuracy it will have. Conversely, the lower in the funnel the metric is, the less data is available, but it is highly accurate.
This enables you to prioritize a lower-funnel metric that has scarce data by bidding towards it and the higher funnel metric. The hybrid metric gives you more control over your results by letting you pull certain levers to focus on specific parts of your conversion funnel.
“Hybrid metrics are most useful when your business goal is too low in volume to optimize towards.” Scott Brunstein, Sr. Data Analyst at QuanticMind by Centro.
In most cases, when you have enough data it makes sense to optimize towards just one metric. However, in some situations—for example, when you have complex business goals or low conversion volume—it can be valuable to approach optimization using a hybrid metric.
If you’re curious, and you’re confident you have adequate data, you can employ this general rule of thumb: if the minimum volume is double-digit conversions in a day, then you have enough data. Depending on the program and goals, the threshold can be even lower. But generally, if the data is lower than double digits, then look into leveraging a hybrid approach.
If you think your SEM program could benefit from a hybrid metric, the first step is aligning your business goals with the proposed metric. Once you do that, select a subset of your program to test it on.
If you know your business goals, you can move on to the next section as you will use your goals to determine which type of hybrid metric to test. If not, take some time to think about what you’d like your SEM program to achieve this quarter and whereabouts in the funnel you might need some additional focus.
There are two main types of hybrid metrics:
1. Various Conversion Paths: When a program has a bunch of different conversion metrics that don’t have a true revenue value or are valued differently. You can combine and weight different styles of leads such as email, phone call, items in a cart and checkouts into one hybrid metric.
Example: Email Signups + 2*Phone Calls
2. High and Low Funnel Optimization: Allows you to leverage multiple sections of the conversion funnel and optimize towards that. A good case to use this is in SEM programs with expensive products of low volume that are optimizing to conversion metrics. If you know something higher in the funnel leads to the lower funnel conversion, you can combine those two things together.
For instance, look at email leads as part of a shopping funnel. One could optimize towards leads and conversion amounts. This lets you give the algorithm more data by optimizing to something that is close to what you want. You can boost the lower funnel one by multiplying it by a constant.
Example: Hybrid Metric = Leads + (10 * Conversions).
As mentioned earlier, if you’re going down a hybrid route, it’s important to align important business goals with the metric. Creating a priority list of what you value is a good place to start. If you need help assigning values to target towards, you can derive it from historical performance.
It can take a bit of trial and error to confirm the hybrid metric that is right for your SEM program. You can focus on a higher funnel metric such as a click on a "learn more" button instead of the actual conversion.
It’s important to go through all four steps before you start testing. This allows it to be well thought out and provides a better foundation for testing, ensuring you have accurate results.
1. What Section to Test: Determine the subset of your program that you’re willing to test on.
2. Bucket Split: Perform a bucket split of that section so you have both a control and variable bucket. The buckets should be split evenly and without bias or judgment.
3. Determine the Time Period: Set a proper pre- and post- period to assess whether or not the metric of interest (sales volume or cost per sale) has improved. Ensure you control for seasonality, latency, and other external factors.
4. Defining Success: Determine how you’re going to define success before you begin. In most cases, you’d look at conversion volume and cost per acquisition. Have an idea of what you’d consider successful even if it’s a range and then you’re ready to start the test.
After your test, you have one last thing to do: fine-tune your hybrid metric. Based on the results you can change the metric as needed. Perhaps you’d like to adjust how it’s weighted or test additional parts of the funnel. Once you’ve selected the final version of your metric, it’s important to keep it up to date.
Now that you understand the fundamentals of a hybrid metric, let’s explore a fictional example together. Let’s say you’re a bookstore selling a series of books online through your website and your goal is to hit a specific number of conversions efficiently every month. You’d like to spend a certain number of dollars for someone to purchase a book from your online store.
In this example, the book store’s online book retail program is comprised of the following:
Looking at the historical data for ad clicks over the last six months or longer would help you determine a ratio of leads to sales that you can expect. You can use this to determine a hybrid metric that you can apply to all the other keywords in your account.
This example is a good candidate for a hybrid metric as there is a large number of keywords being bid on with low sales conversions. It also has two different conversion path options.
When a hybrid metric is set up correctly, it will help you bid high enough on keywords that have strong sales volume, helping shift sales to be a larger portion of your optimization strategy than leads. It will also work to reduce bidding on the keywords that drive zero to low sales. It can also help you bid on cheaper keywords that drive more sales volume.
While a hybrid metric is a good fit in this example, keep in mind they are not suitable for every program. When they are a good fit, they can be a helpful tool to optimize toward different parts of your funnel.
If you’ve made it this far, you should have a basic understanding of hybrid metrics including, the two main types, when to use them and how to test them.
Folks, winter is coming and I know it’s a scarily busy time for all marketers.
The aim of this article is to provide a source of information that you can use to help deal with the upcoming seasonal assault. I conveyed these insights at eTail: The eCommerce and Omnichannel Conference at Boston in August earlier this year and would like to share with you here as the eTail audience found it incredibly helpful.
I’ll begin with the much-discussed topic of data.
Data is a big investment for all companies nowadays. CMOs are spending a significant portion of their budget on market research, analytics vendors, software, and technologies, as shown in recent research by Gartner.
This investment has increased YoY and a majority of the decisions coming from business leaders are data-driven based on analytics.
However, and many of you can relate to this fact, marketers are mostly stuck in data collection and queries. Data analysts and scientists are spending their time in the management, integration, and formatting of data or even mundane tasks like creating dashboards and reporting. Only 29% of their time is spent on data advanced modelling.
If we look at the current state of publisher data, there are obvious challenges ahead of us. Namely;
If you look at all of the customer-level data that you’re processing currently, you’ll no doubt have some powerful data on repeat purchase value, call surge and capacity, and lifetime value or average order value. To beat out your competition, you’ll want to be smart about your advertising strategies with all of this data.
If you look at contextual data, there are so many signals available out there regarding how your prospects are finding you - think about device, location, time of day, day of week, weather, etc.
The real question, then, is how do you integrate all of this rich data coming from various sources and channels to enhance your advertising and marketing efforts. Many of you may say a “Customer Data Platform” is the solution! And many of you may have been working with a CDP vendor. Raise your hand if you have one or are talking to a CDP vendor currently?
Well, I can’t see a show of hands here but just having all of this data in silos doesn’t make it usable. Smart advertising is all about integrating this data and modelling it to get the best results from your advertising efforts, and that’s what QuanticMind has been helping customers with.
We’ve been integrating all of this data even before the term CDP was born 🙂
But how do we use all of that unified, integrated data for optimization?
This flow chart simply captures how we apply all of your rich data to achieve a potential use case or business application. I call it smarter advertising.
Our platform processes all of these online and offline data signals and calculates the revenue for each of your keywords. It then optimizes bids based on said revenue. We call it revenue-per-click optimization. The result is peak performance. And I am borrowing this line from our co-founder Brian Bird: “Peak Performance is a beautiful thing”
My father used to work at a Radio station. Growing up, I used to hate the holiday season. While all my friends were with their fathers, mine was busy as it was the time everyone would tune-in to listen to him on the Radio (He was a popular host and had a fan following back then).
I couldn’t automate his busy work but maybe I could help you automate your busy work so you can enjoy more time with your family this holiday season.
I can go on and on as I’ve been doing all of this manually at some point in a very restricted way before using QuanticMind. I joined this company founded by data scientists and digital marketers to provide my fellow marketers with a better way to achieve superior results. Please cut down on the busy work and focus on business strategy and results.
We would love to tell you all about the beauty of our platform and smarter advertising. Request a free consultation now.
A company is only as good as its leaders. Recently, low unemployment rates have made finding and retaining the best leaders difficult for businesses. When unemployment rates are low, the excess of opportunities usually leads to increased rates of job hopping.
Job hopping isn’t ideal, because employee turnover is expensive. It also means that more leaders are being hired externally, rather than cultivated from within.
Independent research firm, Bersin & Associates, states it quite perfectly: “It is hard to find a company which has survived many economic cycles that does not have a sophisticated leadership development strategy in place.”
At Centro, we know that leadership development is an antidote to today’s job-hopping culture. A good leadership development program will boost employee engagement, reduce turnover, and increase an organization's ability to deal with gaps in the talent pipeline.
Here are our top two tips for cultivating and retaining leaders:
1. Invest in self-improvement.
Self-improvement is one of Centro’s core values for a reason: “lasting happiness is achieved through continuous personal growth.” In other words, the success of our leaders depends on the opportunities we provide for learning and advancement.
LinkedIn’s 2018 Workforce Learning Report found that 93% of employees would stay at a company longer if it invested in their careers. Further research shows that 80% of employees consider high skills training a top benefit.
Ongoing training and development programs can help your team become more skilled in every part of their job. Providing additional opportunities for continued education is also a great way to prime team members for leadership roles.
2. Create a plan.
If your employees aren’t sure how, when, or why to take advantage of self-improvement programs, then those programs aren’t being fully utilized. It’s important to create a strategic plan around leadership cultivation, in order to track the progress of each individual.
For example, Centro made the investment to boost our own leadership development program based on the teachings of the Conscious Leadership Group. Our leaders are enrolled in a 10-module program that includes reading materials, in-person coaching, online courses, and cohorts with peers. Content includes topics such as hiring for fit, value alignment, emotional intelligence, and the power of feedback.
Investing in people follows one of the oldest rules in the book: You get what you give. We’ve seen that every dollar we put into our leaders comes back to us in measurable benefits.
Curious about the perks and benefits of working at Centro? Learn more about our total compensation package here.
In 2019, the paid search bidding process is more complicated than ever. Making accurate and optimized keyword bids is only the first step. There’s also a growing number of bid adjustment options you can utilize to improve the efficacy and efficiency of your campaigns. Automated Google PPC management appears to be the most comprehensive solution to take advantage of these benefits. Intelligent bid management is not only preferable to manual CPC calculations, but it’s also completely essential.
In general, automated bid management involves optimizing your cost-per-click (CPC) for marketing campaigns. This can be done on different advertising verticals, including PPC and display advertising. Automating the bid management process offers a number of benefits for advertisers. Here’s an overview of why every business needs intelligent PPC bid management today:
Google Ads is constantly introducing new dimensions that advertisers can use to optimize their campaigns. There’s dayparting, devices, geographic locations, demographics, audiences, and more. Within geotargeting, there are neighborhoods, zip codes, cities, regions, and states. With audience targeting there’s also remarketing, affinity audiences, in-market audiences, similar audiences, and more. You can use these dimensions for direct targeting or simply adjust bids to prioritize certain audiences and locations. To take full advantage of this, you could end up making more than 10,000 bids on a single account. This is only possible if you can keep up with data analysis and discover all these opportunities as they arise.
It doesn’t matter how many data scientists you have on your PPC team, or how much time/money you spend on bid adjustments - there’s no way to take full advantage of these data opportunities using manual bidding. Intelligent bid management uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to process large volumes of relevant bidding data.
A third-party bid management tool like QuanticMind by Centro is also uniquely positioned to utilize other important data to make more precise bidding decisions. Google relies solely on data from the search bid landscape and other Google properties to make bids. Our solution considers this and other relevant business data, such as:
Making full use of available data helps advertisers make more targeted bidding decisions to optimize their campaigns and beat the competition.
Google automated bidding and third-party bid management tools can make informed decisions faster than individual PPC managers ever could. And the truth is the bid landscape is constantly changing. Even if you make accurate bids based on the latest data insights, it will quickly become irrelevant because of changes in the bid landscape. Industry trends, seasonality, and competitor changes all impact how much you need to spend targeting keywords and audiences to reach your business goals.
Google bid management technology is able to quickly react to these market changes by analysing data inputs in real-time. It’s possible to make daily micro-changes to your bids to take full advantage of changes in competition, seasonality, and the market landscape. Some third-party bid management tools also have intelligent forecasting capabilities. This employs historical performance data, seasonality, and more to predict how bidding decisions will perform long-term.
Automated bidding isn’t just about maximizing campaign performance overall. Intelligent PPC bid management can help you make targeted changes to your strategy to work towards specific business goals.
Google Smart Bidding offers many different automated bid strategies:
Enhanced cost-per-click (CPC): Designed to help you increase conversions while staying in control of your keyword bids. This is available at the campaign, ad group, and keyword level.
Maximize Conversions: Allows you to maximize possible conversions within a set budget. Available at the campaign level.
Target cost-per-acquisition (CPA): Designed to help you get more conversions at your target CPA. Available in campaigns and ad groups.
Target return on ad spend (ROAS): Allows you to meet a target ROAS while valuing each conversion differently. Available at the campaign, ad group, or keyword level.
Maximize Clicks: Designed to increase the number of visitors to your site.
Target Impression Share: Automatically sets bids with the goal of showing your ad on the absolute top of the page, on the top of the page, or anywhere on the page of search results. Designed to increase ad visibility.
Target Search Page Location: Designed to help your ads show in one of the top positions in search results, increasing visibility in the process.
Target Outranking Share: Designed to help you beat competitor ad rank and increase ad visibility in search results.
Using the bid strategy that best aligns with your business goals allows you to make more specific optimizations to meet said goals. Some Google bid management platforms also allow you to target specific marketing goals at the account level instead of campaign level. This is called using a portfolio bidding strategy. Portfolio strategies are advantageous because they optimize keyword-level bids to reach overall marketing goals.
Using all valuable market data including competition and seasonality to make bidding decisions ensures you only spend what you need on specific keywords to reach your marketing goals. Improving keyword bids as well as dimension and audience targeting allows you to improve budget spend efficiency.
Say, for example, you want to allocate more of your budget targeting in-market audiences because they have a lower cost-per-conversion (CPC). How much should your bid adjustment be? 10%? 15%? 20%? To answer the question with manual CPC, you’d simply need to test out different bid adjustments to see which drives the best results with the least spend. You’ll have to spend some time spending your budget inefficiently in order to get the answer. And by the time you do, the market landscape may have changed entirely.
Google bid management technology uses AI and forecasting capabilities to figure out just how much you need to bid on specific keywords or audiences to reach your advertising goals. Using technology like this to reduce wasted ad spend frees up more of your budget that you can then reinvest in new keywords, ad groups, and campaigns.
Manual CPC bidding offers advertisers one main benefit: complete control over keyword bids and bid adjustments. But in the age of AI and automation, this benefit only serves to leave advertisers behind their competitors. The bid management process is too complicated, with too many options to accurately and efficiently handle manually. Meanwhile, the competitive landscape is changing so quickly that even the most talented PPC teams could never keep up with these opportunities as they arise. But intelligent Google bid management technology can.
Beyond making quick bidding decisions, Google bid management technology has a number of additional benefits as well. Accurate forecasting and automating time-consuming tasks frees up more time and budget for PPC managers to work on other important initiatives, such as identifying new audiences or growth opportunities.
As more advertisers continue to adopt intelligent PPC bid management solutions, it will only become more essential for success in 2019 and beyond. Google continues to roll out and promote automated solutions for advertisers. But there are also a number of third-party bid management tools that can give PPC managers the extra edge they need to beat out the competition, even when everyone starts using automated bidding in the years to come.