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The travel industry has evolved considerably over the past decade, driven principally by the digitalization of travel services and a growing worldwide travel trend. The sector is becoming ever more ingrained in the digital space and the social media landscape, with the proliferation of mobile devices further supplementing this evolution. In the world of modern travel, people are regularly - almost religiously - tapping into a maze of online media: they use their smartphones to research and book hotels; they provide daily updates on their latest adventures via Instagram, and then, when they return, they turn to review sites to give a commentary on their experiences. As these technologies unfold and new ones emerge, the rate of change will accelerate faster than at any other time in history, and travel brands will need to assess what strategies will empower them to engage with consumers at every step of their journey.
The market today is undoubtedly undergoing a period of consolidation as leading OTAs quickly snap up any burgeoning start-ups and small players disrupting the space. The result of these monopolies is tough competition; a field of extremely thin margins. The core challenge arising for those in the travel industry is gaining the attention and loyalty of consumers of all languages across the globe. The solution is multi-dimensional and lies in the implementation of frictionless technology, leveraging socio-demographic targeting, and designing highly optimized booking experiences. Together these trends are shaping how consumers expect to connect with brands in 2020 and beyond. In this article, we take a look at the ways travel marketers can get ahead by thinking user-first and delivering more relevant interactions at scale.
New societal behavioral patterns have contributed to the emergence of a more complex customer journey in the present era, and this is none more prevalent than in the travel industry. As smartphones increasingly permeate our everyday lives, buying cycles have become progressively comprised of collective on-the-go micro-moments. Long gone are the days when one would simply walk into a brick-and-mortar travel agency and plan a high-flying getaway or exclusive weekend break from start to finish in a single sitting. Travel planning is now all based around short, relevant research sessions over an extended period of time that typically cover all the stages of planning a trip - right from reading up on dream destinations all the way to booking tours and activities. As a result, people are becoming more demanding with brands - they want all the insights they need at each specific phase of their journey right at their fingertips.
The problem for those of you managing travel sites, then, is that if you’re not visible for any one or more of these micro-moments, your chances of winning the conversion at the end of the cycle swiftly diminish. For many, this is an impossible challenge to solve: only the big players in the space have the financial clout to remain ever-present each step of the way. Those not blessed with a massive budget to spend need to claim search engine real estate in the moments that really matter - the booking stage - and the best way to do this is to be highly selective about who you are targeting and when.
This begins with exercising high-intent keywords. In such a competitive space, online travel marketers should look to avoid users who are performing informational or navigational searches and clicking on ads without the design of purchasing. Instead, you want to be employing transactional verbs like buy, purchase, book, or reserve: a niche where there exists a strong indication that when those terms are hit, the searcher is ready to take action with their credit card digits in front of them.
To illustrate, a tour company based in London is unlikely to see great returns from the keyword, “things to do in London”. The intent here is low: the term is broad and implies the user is still in a process of consideration - the dreaming stage. The likelihood is that they are early in their initial research phase, weighing up destinations, running comparisons with other cities in western Europe, or checking to see if London meets the criteria of their desired holiday. Take, in contrast, the keyword, “book tour to kensington palace”. This is much more likely to yield positive click-through rates and conversion percentages. The visitor is expressing, quite clearly, that they want to book a tour and that they want to visit Kensington Palace specifically. If your ads appear here, you’re maximizing your chances of success and ensuring your budget is being spent efficiently.
The second key strategy comes in the form of time and geo-targeting. In today’s hypercompetitive ad marketplace, taking a deep dive into your account and identifying past trends can be an invaluable exercise. You should be able to determine what times of day and days of week users are more likely to convert on your website in addition to any specific geographic locations that are bringing in the majority of your business. Once meaningful insights have been derived, you can create campaigns for specific places using targeted ad copy and targeted landing pages that together make for a unified journey along a customized funnel, which will undoubtedly translate into higher conversions. A further benefit of running targeted operations is that relevance is a key determinant of your Quality Scores. The more thematically consistent your advertisements are with your landing pages, the better your Quality Scores. The better your Quality Scores, the lower your cost-per-click (CPC) will be. Essentially, by cherry-picking the best search opportunities for your business, and compounding that with precise messaging, you’re ensuring a reduction in spend and a program running at its peak.
Smartphones have become the primary device of choice when we research and book our holidays online. Throughout the past five years, the volume of travel website visits on mobile has been growing exponentially, and, because the convenience of smartphone searching is helping people discover what they want more quickly, mobile web conversion rates in the industry have increased by more than 85%.
Unfortunately for advertisers, getting ads to appear on mobile screens poses a serious challenge, chiefly because there is less ad real estate to compete for. In a recent study conducted by wordstream, it was found that mobile CTRs drop off a massive 45% between positions 1 and 2, and positions 3 and 4 are the equivalent of landing spots 4 and 6 on desktop respectively. In essence, if your ads are not occupying the top position, they’re going virtually unseen.
So, what does all this mean and how can you pinch that highly-coveted top spot. In all likelihood, you’re simply going to have to loosen the purse strings and bump up your bids on select keywords. Since the beginning of 2012, CPCs have risen by a whopping 150% on mobile - three times the growth seen on desktop during the same period. The bottom line is - it’s pay to play. To help negate the financial effects of such necessary bidding upgrades, marketers can look to employ lofty mobile bid modifiers on those high-intent keywords we discussed earlier while simultaneously reducing - or eliminating entirely - bids for search terms displaying low intent. By adopting these approaches, you can ensure you’re taking part in the great game of mobile advertising and staying visible across multiple online touchpoints.
Having done all the heavy-lifting in terms of helping users navigate their journey to the point where they’re on your page ready to take the plunge, the final element you must take into account is providing a seamless booking experience. Simply put, if a user on your website is ready to invest their money in your services, you need to make it as uncomplicated as possible for them to do so, and this applies across all devices.
The first thing you must do to safeguard against losing easy conversions is establish mobile-responsive web pages. There’s nothing worse for consumers than awkwardly trying to navigate a website that does not adapt to a smartphone and this will doubtless lead to the loss of sales if not implemented properly. Thereafter, it becomes a question of applying a series of straightforward tweaks and experimenting with A/B testing across all device types to surface what combination of design and text yields better results. A few components to consider include:
These practices may all sound simple, but there are still players in the space not adhering to them. Stay on top of your buying environment and you’ll be reaping the benefits in the form of improved conversion rates and a better return on ad spend.
The labyrinthine world of digital advertising is shifting at an unprecedented rate and so, too, are the demands of travelers. This dual transformation is bringing about new marketing trends that you need to be cognizant of in order to get ahead of your competition. From doubling up on high-intent keywords to segmenting your audiences with greater precision and building a mobile strategy - together these tactics will ensure you’re unlocking new insights and delivering more relevant experiences at scale.
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If you're a travel marketer looking to level up your campaigns, our omnichannel DSP has all the tools you need. Connect with our digital media experts today to learn more.
It’s a looming fear in various industries that artificial intelligence will one day take over jobs, making human input obsolete. It’s true that search advertising is one area where AI and automation have had the biggest impact. So many PPC tasks that weren’t automated 10 years ago are now run by AI.
But that doesn’t mean that artificial intelligence is on the way to replacing human PPC teams. People will always be necessary for paid search success, no matter how much is automated.
There are lots of ways that artificial intelligence can help improve PPC. Many capabilities expand beyond what normal people can accomplish, even if a whole team of data scientists works on a paid search account. Here are a few examples of the ways AI can outperform human PPC managers today:
Addressing Data Scarcity
Most advertisers don’t realize how much they rely on historical data to make bidding decisions. Add a new keyword to your campaign that doesn’t have a lot of search volume, and you have no idea how much to bid. A single low search volume keyword might not seem particularly important, but these keywords as a whole can make up a significant portion of your campaign targeting. With artificial intelligence, there’s no need to ignore low search volume keywords or simply guess at their value.
That’s because bidding technology can harness artificial intelligence to infer the value of data scarce keywords. Many automated bidding technologies use Natural Language Processing (NLP) to identify semantically similar keywords that have sufficient data. It can then estimate the value of long-tail keywords and bid accordingly.
The same technology can be used to improve location targeting, audience targeting, or other dimensions. Say an advertiser wants to target specific counties within a region, but only some of them have sufficient data to assign value for bid adjustments. Advanced bidding technologies can utilize audience demographics to supplement data from similar audiences in different locations around the country.
Strategy Optimization
Artificial intelligence that you see in PPC technology today relies heavily on statistical analysis to make decisions. Machine learning technology can look at past performance and the current competitive landscape to make accurate predictions of how ads will perform. This includes considerations of numerous dimensions like device, audiences, time of day, or location. Advertisers can then use these insights to make targeted decisions to improve targeting, bids, and ads.
Google’s Quality Score metric is a good example of this in action. It considers historical click data to estimate the quality of your ads, keywords, and landing pages. Quality Score can offer insights into how to improve your ads, and impacts ad rank in search results.
Forecasting technology is another valuable way advertisers can use AI for strategy optimization. In the past, advertisers needed to create their own statistical projections of potential performance. Now Google Ads and many third-party bid optimization tools can do this for you, using current bid landscape data.
Automated Ad Creation
Artificial intelligence helps with more than just targeting, but also ad creation. Google Ads regularly introduces new ways to automate the development and optimization of ad copy creation. A great example of this is responsive search ads. These use the power of machine learning to help advertisers deliver the best ad for a search query.
Responsive search ads allow you to create different combinations of headlines and descriptions, then automatically test them to see which are most effective:
This helps advertisers save time creating and optimizing the best ad copy, and allows Google to show the most relevant combinations for customers.
Improving Spend Efficiency
Advertisers today have potentially thousands of bidding decisions to make, even with small paid search accounts. There are keywords to bid on, as well as audiences and dimensions to target with bid adjustments. Even if PPC managers could analyze all the relevant data, calculate cost per click (CPC), and bid accordingly, the competitive landscape is constantly changing. Any optimizations made will quickly become out of date.
That’s why AI is so valuable for improving spend efficiency. Automated bidding technology can analyze relevant bid landscape data in real-time, then make quick changes to optimize bids. This ensures you only spend what you need on each keyword to reach target marketing goals.
It’s true that artificial intelligence is changing the way paid search advertising works. Automation has taken over many time-consuming tasks and can optimize campaign elements with more speed and precision than a human could. But that doesn’t mean AI is on the path to replacing human PPC teams.
People still have an important role to play in paid search management. This includes tasks that AI will never be equipped to take on, no matter how advanced it gets. Here are a few reasons humans will always be necessary for paid search success:
Creating a Strong Marketing Message
Artificial intelligence can help a lot with ad creation, especially when it comes to testing. While AI can determine the best possible ad copy, it can’t infer why an ad is effective with your target audience. That’s one major reason why advertising will always need people, no matter how advanced AI gets. Once you understand why a certain headline or description works so well with your audience, you can replicate that message across ads and campaigns.
Humans are still creatives. AI can test ads and ad components, but it’s people who need to come up with the most relevant ideas in the first place. No matter how intelligent a machine is, it can’t understand how or why an ad is effective. For example, one ad description could have a much better clickthrough rate than others not because the wording is better, but because it promotes a better deal. An advertising manager could evaluate an ad and infer this, while AI and machine learning never could.
Campaign Management
It’s a common misconception that AI and automation are designed to run your campaigns for you. Google Smart Campaigns are designed so inexperienced businesses can take advantage of Google Ads features without the knowledge of professional advertisers. But that doesn’t mean competitive advertisers should simply “set-and-forget” their campaigns.
If you want to stay ahead in a competitive market, making regular campaign adjustments is a necessity. Automating various processes just makes this a whole lot easier by freeing up your time to work on optimization and exploring new opportunities for growth.
Say, in the future, 100% of PPC advertising was automated. All people needed to do was select their goals, set a budget, launch their campaigns, then walk away. Since everyone is using the same technologies and strategies for optimization, there’d be no way to truly beat out the competition. Other than raising your budget, the only way you could stand out in a competitive market is by making manual changes to take advantage of different opportunities. This potential will always be there, no matter how much of your campaign is already automated.
Prioritizing the Right Business Goals
AI-powered bid optimization technologies are designed to help businesses work towards their most important marketing goals. Google’s Smart Bidding, for example, uses algorithms that optimize for different strategies, including:
Selecting the right automated goal is valuable, but it isn’t nuanced enough for most business objectives. Most companies want to target ROAS, but they may also care a lot about maximizing conversions, for example. How are they supposed to reconcile these needs with 100% automation?
That’s why human input is always necessary. You can use automated bidding to save time optimizing towards a main marketing goal. Then you can make manual keyword and bid adjustments to also prioritize secondary and tertiary goals.
Diagnosing Performance Issues
Another major application of AI is anomaly detection. Automation tools can predict future performance based on historical data. If actual performance ends up deviating from expectations, then it’s possible to automatically pause campaigns to address the issue. This can be done using Google Ads scripts or another bid automation technology.
It’s a very valuable feature because it can prevent wasted spending on ads when a data or performance issue could be causing problems in an account. But detecting anomalies is one thing, diagnosing them is another. A PPC manager still needs to go in and figure out what’s behind the performance issue and fix it. It could be something as simple as using the wrong campaign setting or targeting the wrong dimension. But AI doesn’t have the ability to reason and infer why performance might deviate from expectations. That will always need human intervention.
These cases are just a few of the many reasons humans will always be necessary for PPC. Even as artificial intelligence becomes more advanced and takes on new optimization tasks, it will always require people to manage it. AI is nothing more than an opportunity to streamline and optimize tasks that PPC managers have always been in charge of. Improving campaign accuracy with AI can free up more budget as well. This gives PPC managers more money and time to pursue new growth initiatives.
With this in mind, forward-thinking search advertisers can embrace what AI, machine learning, and automation have to offer for PPC. They also have peace of mind knowing the technology can never replace their critical role in the advertising business.
When I walked into Centro’s office on the first day of my internship, I was extremely nervous, but also filled with excitement! I felt ready to spend the summer in Centro’s amazing Chicago headquarters.
I was (and still am) excited about the unique opportunities that come with working at a growing company, such as meeting Centro’s CEO, Shawn Riegsecker and contributing articles to the blog. My nerves eased when I finally sat at my desk, met my amazing bosses, and got to work.
Being a Centern (or an intern at Centro) has been unlike any job experience I have had before. Even as an intern, I’ve been able to play a large role in Centro’s content marketing efforts. Most importantly, I have learned a lot about the ad tech industry and developed my skills as a content creator. Here are just a few things I have learned from my 11 weeks at Centro:
Going to Work Can Be Enjoyable
Before starting this internship, I thought people who had office jobs sat miserably at their desks, staring bleakly at their computer screens. Centro quickly proved my preconceived notion incorrect!
Whether it’s taking a break to get a fresh cup of cold brew, or having a quick chat at someone’s desk, Centrons (Centro employees) make the work day anything but boring. To reward all of the hard work, happy hour gatherings usually ensue on Fridays, where even the (21+) interns are able to mingle with full-time employees to enjoy a few laughs and beers on tap!
Centro Is Growing… Fast!
With every article I wrote, I learned more about Centro’s many areas of growth—from new partnerships to unique features in Basis, Centro is quickly expanding its offerings.
Throughout my internship, I always felt like I was in the midst of something new and exciting. Basis is still a relatively new product, but it has already been rated the #1 DSP by G2 Crowd for two years running! It was amazing to see exactly how this company is growing from the inside out.
Anyone Can Understand Ad Tech
I’ll admit, when I accepted the internship at Centro, I didn’t completely understand what their tech platform, Basis, was. Initially, it was intimidating to begin writing for Centro and about the ad tech industry!
Yet, with the help of my mentors and colleagues, I soon learned more about Basis and how vast and complex the ad tech industry truly is. I also learned about content creation specific to the ad tech industry—this type of writing was new to me, but I was able to meet with a variety of subject matter experts across the company to learn about emerging trends and relevant topics.
Snacks Are Vital to the Work Day
Centro definitely understands the importance of a mid-day snack. The snack closet is always stocked with the best treats like trail mix, popcorn—even Pop Tarts! There are always healthy options like fruit, yogurt, and oatmeal too!
Let’s not forget about drinks—there are so many types of tea it took me a couple weeks to finally try them all! The free coffee (and cold brew on tap) is always a plus too.
Making Friends at Work Is Easy
At the beginning, I was mostly nervous about meeting new people. Would anyone want to talk to the new intern? From day one on, it was clear that my co-workers were interested in talking to me. They didn’t treat me like an intern, but instead, as their equal. While I thought I would find my boss and mentors intimidating, they ended up being my biggest supporters! They wanted to get to know me as more than just an intern.
Of course, it was also a huge plus to have other interns in the office. Every single intern was friendly and helped make my experience even better.
Self-Care Is Important
One of the best qualities of Centro’s culture is their value for self-care. After all, there is a yoga studio and meditation room in the office! There’s even a sign in the kitchen with tips on how to breathe, relax, and stretch at your desk.
All of the employees (including the interns) get a free subscription to Headspace. I had never meditated before working at Centro, but quickly began to love it. At the end of every team meeting, the Content team and I would meditate for three minutes to refresh our minds before continuing our day.
Hard Work Goes a Long Way
At Centro, you get back what you put in. Centrons want you to walk away having learned something—there’s no coffee-fetching in this internship! It was different any other internship I had previously experienced, because I felt like a real employee! I wasn’t given busy work, and truly felt like I was able to make a difference!
Interns have the freedom to choose which skills they want to build on. If there was a project I was interested in, my boss always looped me in. The Centernship experience is far more than an internship—it’s a way of improving skills—such as team building, content writing/creation, and leadership in my case—and building new ones!
Centro is not only a unique place to work, but also a special place to intern. Interns are always busy learning and having fun! Learn more about other internships that Centro offers, or apply by visiting our Careers page today!
When was the last time you saw an ad that provided an experience worth remembering?
Many advertisers prioritize technology or targeting for their media campaigns, over their actual campaign messaging. Too often, marketers obsess over reaching the right audience, without equal consideration for the experiences they’re delivering.
As VP of Business Intelligence for The Basement—Ira Maher oversees media strategy, operations and analytics disciplines, while he focuses on customer experience associated with every account.
In our latest episode, Ira shares how his teams leverage marketing, technology, data, and automation to ensure that ads aren’t merely endured, but rather, experiences worth remembering.
Consumers are constantly inundated with video ads from a multitude of brands both large and small. Whether they're on a PC, tablet, or laptop, they're exposed to one ad after another—which makes it easy for them to ignore what doesn't connect or stand out. This creates a unique challenge for brands, and poses the question: How do companies capture the short attention span of consumers in an entirely saturated market?
Below, read five proven advertising techniques to help your brand break away from the pack:
In-your-face branding is a turn-off for today's consumers. They've become desensitized over the years, making consumer advertising with heavy-handed branding largely ineffective. Instead, consider a technique called brand pulsing. This technique strategically knits branding through an advertisement in an understated way. It ensures that your brand is seen, but in an effective, understated way.
Ad placement can impact the effectiveness of messaging and affect how consumers think about the brand. Ads must be relevant not only to the audience, but also the space in which they’re located. For example, if you own a company that manufactures dog toys and your ad appears on a website dedicated to maintaining saltwater fish tanks—it’s probably going to miss the mark. Utilize a demand-side platform to help discover ad space that is most relevant to your brand and vice versa.
Establishing a personal connection is crucial to effective advertising in a saturated market. One of the most valuable advertising tips for companies in any industry is to find a way to empathize with their target audience. This is less difficult than it seems. Think about it—most companies are created because they offer a product or service that solves a problem or satisfies a need. Show that you understand their challenges and frustrations and that your product or service is the solution.
Create highly shareable video content that’s appropriate for a wide range of audiences. Avoid segregating some markets to appeal to others. For example, the use of crude humor for shock value may increase your number of views but is likely to isolate certain segments of your audience.
Today's consumers value rich, interactive experiences on and offline. Avoid talking at them—instead, provide your audience with educational and actionable content. Deliver a full experience. Do that, and they will remember your brand. Content that’s extravagant for the sake of being extravagant is easily forgotten, while content that cultivates a positive learning experience is usually the most effective.
There are a myriad of advertising techniques and tactics that can be utilized to increase brand exposure, however, many of them fail to take into account that online channels are now very saturated with ads. What worked a few years ago, may not work now. Stay on top of the latest advertising tips to maximize exposure and make your ad dollars work harder for you.
Centro offers a performance-driven, demand-side platform designed to help you streamline media campaigns across a multitude of online channels. For more information about how programmatic can transform your consumer advertising, contact us today.
When I moved into my house, the kitchen’s crowning glory was the chef’s stove. This is not the kind of appliance you use to just boil eggs or cook a frozen pizza—it has more burners and settings than I know what to do with! I tried to step up my cooking game, but it just wasn’t the same as having a chef at a restaurant serve up my favorite dish.
I believe that social media has the same underrealized potential for marketers as the chef’s stove had for me when I moved into my new house. Here’s why:
We’ve all read about the impact social media can have on a campaign. Most marketers have translated those basic insights into a cadence of paid and organic content that is published in the hopes of achieving campaign success. But even after you’ve incorporated Facebook into your strategies, it can be hard to determine if it’s being used to its fullest capacity.
Enter the Managed Services team at Centro. They know their way around Facebook like a chef knows their way around a chef’s stove.
Centro’s team is a Facebook Preferred Partner, a level reached by performance thresholds set by Facebook itself. Partnering with Centro’s Managed Services team means you have full access to their expertise in terms of optimizing for KPIs, ensuring a perfect balance of media mix, and understanding your customer journey.
Their secret sauce? Our team utilizes Facebook’s Measurement Solution Tools and applies best practices to use them in service of your campaign goals. These tools include the following:
These tools are people-based and cross-channel. That means that the data provided spans individual customers across all digital marketing efforts—not just within the walled gardens of social media. The resulting information can be used to personalize for customers throughout your digital media campaigns to help move them down the funnel.
Our team has the tools and expertise to produce results comparable to a 5 star meal. Why waste any more time using your chef’s stove to make frozen pizzas? Learn more about Centro’s Managed Service Solutions!
Search and SEM are so synonymous with Google that it even permeates the language we use. Instead of searching for something, we 'Google' it, and SEM practitioners often reference making changes in 'AdWords' despite Google's rebranding. But although Google is the undisputed king, Bing's market share and reach continue to grow. According to data provided by Microsoft in September 2018, in the United States alone, Bing and Yahoo combined accounted for 5.5 billion searches from 137 million unique users and represented a 34.7% market share for desktop searches. With the transition of all Yahoo traffic to Bing in March 2019, adopting a Bing-specific strategy is more key than ever to a successful PPC program.
Most people's first instinct when launching on Bing would be to copy over their entire Google program and continue with strategies they had already seen success with on Google. While this is a good starting point, not refining your strategy to be Bing-specific and leverage additional functionality available on the Bing platform can lead to lost opportunities and efficiency. Continue reading for some specific areas to consider when defining your Bing strategy and program setup.
The difference most often cited between Google and Bing PPC programs is cost. With fewer searches and fewer advertisers than Google, Bing is definitely the less competitive of the two search engines. As a result, CPC is likely to be lower, although to what degree will vary from program to program. To account for this difference and avoid needless overspend, follow these steps when copying new campaigns from Google to Bing:
1. Set starting bids at ~20% of the current Google Max CPC. From there, refine up/down based on performance. This is where machine learning simplifies things as the algorithm can more quickly calibrate optimal bids based on performance and the bidding landscape.
2. Start with a low budget and scale-up. Pay attention if any of your campaigns are limited by budget or are losing impression share due to budget so you can adjust accordingly. Also, consider how costs are generally lower when defining your overall budget for Bing. For most businesses, the budget for a successful Bing program will be roughly 20-35% of their Google Ads budget.
3. Keep an eye on how conversion rates and your optimization metric (e.g. CPA, ROAS, Margin, etc.) differ for Bing versus Google. While conversions are also often cheaper in general on Bing, the difference in user profiles between Google and Bing, which we will cover next, may lead to some surprising insights.
In addition to a less competitive playing field, Bing also differs from Google in terms of user demographics. According to a March 2018 report published by comScore, Bing audiences tend to skew older than Google, with 38% of users aged between 35 and 54. They also tend to be better educated and more affluent, with 55% possessing at least a Bachelor's degree and 33% with a household income of $100,000. Google users, on the other hand, tend to be younger and education and income vary more widely.
Due to this demographic difference, you will often see different behavior on Bing versus Google. For example, as touched on above, cost per conversion tends to be lower on Bing for most advertisers. Although there are likely many factors at play, the fact that many Bing users are higher income may mean they are less likely to be bargain hunting and have a clearer purchase intent. Regardless of the cause, if you do find your Bing program benefiting from lower-cost conversions, bake this benefit into your strategy. Consider upping your target CPA for Google to reap more conversions on that platform while still hitting your overall CPA goal. It may also be worth re-evaluating your Bing budget to allocate more spend to that platform if you are not yet at the point of diminishing returns.
In addition, depending on the variety of products you sell and their target audience, you may find that some campaigns that perform very well on Google don't do as well on Bing and vice versa. Take advantage of any learnings like this and allocate spend accordingly. Increase budgets for higher-performing campaigns and, if the delta versus Google is that great, consider pausing them on Google entirely and allocating that spend to Bing instead. In short, take advantage of any performance differences to benefit your program as a whole.
As opposed to Google, Bing also offers more granular targeting options that you should consider leveraging to further drive efficiency for your program. The first area to consider is ad scheduling. Bing actually allows you to set different timezones per campaign (as opposed to the account as a whole), and apply ad schedules to your campaigns accordingly. Particularly if you run campaigns in multiple countries, the ability to localize ad schedules should lead to increased performance without the need to create multiple Bing accounts.
In addition, Bing also offers much more control over search partner targeting. As opposed to Google where you can only choose between targeting search only or search and search partners, Bing enables you to create search partner-specific campaigns and even exclude particular search partners. So, for example, if you are generally seeing good performance via Bing Search partners but aol.com specifically has a much higher CPA, you can simply exclude it from the list, ensuring search partners only benefit and do not hinder your program's performance.
Lastly, Bing enables you to specify whether or not you wish to target close variants, such as plurals and misspellings. Google, however, recently enabled close variants for all exact match keywords without the ability to opt-out, essentially turning them into phrase match keywords. Particularly if you are seeing search queries for close variants that are driving up spend without resulting in conversions, include this setting in your Bing setup.
Bing also offers several extension options not included in Google Ads that may help to increase click-through and conversion rates. Released in April 2019, action extensions consist of 70 pre-defined calls to action that can be applied at the account, campaign, or ad group level. For example, if you run a travel booking site, you can add a 'reserve' extension that includes a calendar icon and, upon clicking, takes the user directly to the reservation page. Or, for a quote comparison site for insurance, home repair services, etc., you could include a 'Get Quote' button that leads directly to your lead capture form. According to Microsoft's official blog, beta customers who tested various action extensions saw, on average, a 20% increase in CTRs. Consider what type of actions make the most sense for your products or services and incorporate them into your Bing strategy.
In short, Bing's differentiators versus Google both in terms of typical performance and demographics and unique features provide an opportunity to drive efficiency. While copying over what has been successful in Google is a great way to quickly get Bing up and running, refine your strategy as data begins to roll in. Look for areas where Bing's typically lower costs and different demographics benefit your program and adjust your budget allocation and goals accordingly. In addition, take advantage of Bing's more granular settings and value-added features to better optimize your program. By tailoring your setup to Bing's performance and features, you can make your overall SEM program more successful.
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To learn more about how you can drive improved performance on Bing, connect with our digital media experts today.
Thought leaders, assemble! We recently hosted a roundtable discussion with the Centro Industry Advisory Group (CIAG). The CIAG is aimed at gathering valuable input from thought leaders to help shape the future of advertising technology and services.
Digital creative is up against a lot of hurdles. It can be difficult to stand out while creating a positive experience between audience and brand. On top of that, digital creative is often an afterthought. Many brands repurpose TV spots and print assets for digital vehicles that are capable of so much more.
In our latest Centro Industry Advisory Group (CIAG), we discussed how advertisers can think about digital (both media and creative) first. Planning ahead is key, but you have options even if you’re short on time. Here are our top three digital creative tips you can use no matter what your timeline looks like:
Get approval to send a social strategist or digital planner to the production day. Your talent is there, so take this opportunity to capture tons of extra content! It won’t all be gold, but the team can sift through it to find the moments worth repurposing when time isn’t such an issue.
Make sure the person you send is very comfortable with social media as well as the brand’s voice and standards. Instruct them to take vertical video as well as horizontal video. Mix up the aspect ratios. Take videos, take photos, take Boomerangs, apply filters. Just capture content.
If you’re confident in the abilities of that person, give them permission to go live on various platforms or post to your stories in real time. When you’re back in the office, take some of the content and build mock ups of your raw content in a digital environment. Most platforms have WYSIWYG tools that anyone can use for free.
The simplest example of this is online video. We all like to think of media consumption as the stock photo experience:
We idealize that our audiences look like the picture above: Comfortably sitting on a couch with their phone, sound on, viewing a full-screen video of your ad with no distractions. But when is the last time YOU fit that image?
Mobile video in particular is often consumed with many distractions (i.e. TV, kids, the zombie apocalypse), on various devices, and regularly muted. To have a chance at stopping the scroll, try adding subtitles to mobile video.
TV is typically bought in :15 and :30s, but digital is much more flexible. In the analytics world, just because you can measure 50 metrics doesn’t mean you should measure all 50 metrics. In video creative, just because you have :30, doesn’t mean you should use :30.
Think about users’ attention span. If you can tell your story in :09, tell it in :09. YouTube now has a standard :06 format called the bumper ad. Creative folks may not think this is enough time to tell the story, but there are many world-class brands doing a great job with this format.
These very short-form videos also discourage ads that build to a big reveal at the end. These ads sometimes have low brand recall since attention has moved on and the viewer doesn’t even make it to the reveal.
At the end of the day, digital is a fast-moving and unique medium. It’s full of potential for advertisers who can harness its power. Additionally, digital is one of the only mediums that can provide rapid feedback. We’ve given you three tips here, but we encourage everyone to test, learn, iterate, and improve.
We are currently forming a junior industry advisory group comprised of future media and marketing leaders with 7-10 years of experience. Our advisory groups provide guidance on best practices and where the industry is headed in a conversational, round table format. If you are interested in joining our group, please fill out our quick form!
In SEM, past performance data alone does not tell us everything we need to know about future performance. Even the smartest machine-learning algorithms backed by years of prior data are fundamentally limited. You often need to also know something about real-time present conditions, and these are just as often unpredictable by nature.
For example, you need to know about your current competition. If you bid the same way every day and it results in exactly the same performance, then you will bid the same way tomorrow, too. But what if tomorrow your competition intensifies? Or what if it slackens? Your historical performance data won’t clue you into this. To react to this effect, savvy marketers use “Auction Landscape Data” to divine the prevailing relationship between you and your competitors.
In the roiling industry of Lead Generation, there is another present condition that must always be accounted for: Lead Capacity.
At its core, every Lead Generation business is a conglomeration of contracts with local partners. I’m a small business owner in the service industry and I need to find people who need my service, but I don’t have a robust advertising network to do so efficiently. Multiply that story by a thousand or so and you have yourself a case for a Lead Gen business.
But this is where it turns sensitive. At your scale, you’re set up to supply way more leads than your partners are able to support. How do you make sure you get each partner exactly as many leads as they require in a given time frame - no more and no less - and that you pace those out at peak efficiency? In this sense, Lead Capacity can be thought of as analogous to its retail cousin, inventory. Whereas inventory is products on the shelf, Capacity is leads to-be-delivered across your partner network. Think of Capacity like inventory that must be put on the (figurative) shelf over some agreed-upon span of time. What, then, are the constraints of such a model?
1. The shelves are only so big
You’re picking up leads from your large-scale ad network and carrying them over to your local partner’s shelf. What happens if you pick up a lead and carry it over to the shelf, but the shelf is full? That’s a wasted lead.
2. Leftover shelf space is bad
While you can’t put too many leads on the shelf, you also can’t leave it sparse. You must keep your partners’ happy with well-stocked shelves.
3. How much stuff is already on the shelf matters
It costs you something to pick up each lead. If you’re running out of time before the shelf needs to be full and there’s still a lot of empty space, you’ll grope for even the most overpriced leads. Conversely, if the shelf is almost full and you still have lots of time left, you probably reached on a few overpriced leads too early.
These are the challenges that Lead Capacity Bidding is designed to solve.
The Shelves Are Only So Big
The Level One solution is a cost-saving measure. Let’s call it the “On/Off Switch”. Very simply, when a partner can no longer support any leads (or more accurately, per your contractual agreement, they won’t pay you for any more leads), you cease spending for that partner. The goal is to minimize wasted leads.
In practice, there are some restraints that make this slightly complicated to implement. How do we shut down for one maxed-out partner and not for his lead-starved neighbor? Since SEM is moderated by the publishers, we have to play by their rules. We can’t pre-filter for only those searches with intent to use a particular partner, nor decide after the lead matures whether or not we want to pay for the clicks that caused it. In other words, there is no “On/Off Switch” at the individual per-partner level. And we certainly can’t tell Google “I wasn’t able to monetize this lead, can I have a refund on my clicks?” So, we have to abstract within the edifice of location bid adjustments, under the assumption that more proximal leads are more likely to monetize.
That is, instead of toggling traffic for a particular partner, we have to do so by geo-target using bid adjustments (0% for On, -90% for Off). There are a couple of ways to do this, each with their own intricacies.
1. By Location (Zip Code, City, metropolitan area, etc)
The publishers support traditional location targeting (and bid adjustments) per campaign as granular as the zip code level. If you have several partners within that zip code, then you’ll have to treat their Capacity as a combined total. With this approach, a question to ponder...
What happens when a partner is willing to accept leads from more than one Zip Code/City/metropolitan area? How would that factor into the aggregate ‘total capacity’ of those Zip Codes/Cities/metropolitan areas?
2. By Radius (Location Extensions)
Google offers “Location Extensions”, by which you can target a radius around a coordinate pair (i.e. the exact physical location of a partner). In concept, this more directly allows you to adjust for the capacity of each individual partner, without aggregation. What if, though, you have partners that are close to one another such that their radii overlap? And what if those partners have very different capacities from one another such that their respective radii have very different bid adjustments? And then what if I’m smack dab in the middle of them searching for a plumber? Which bid adjustment will I receive: the 0% for the guy who’s dying to plumb or the -90% for the guy who’s already plumbed plenty?
As long as you can approximate your partner network to a set of geo aggregations, the “On/Off Switch” is a quick, high upside win. Where you were previously spending money on leads that can’t monetize, now you aren’t. Less cost, same return.
Leftover Shelf Space Is Bad
Now that we’ve saved all that money, we have to attend to our partners. We do this, of course, by fulfilling our contractual obligations to them, which most likely takes the form of providing them with all the high-quality leads they ask for. We don’t want to give them excess leads they won’t pay for, but - perhaps of equal or even greater importance - we don’t want to give them too few. The long-term health of our business relies largely on a happy partner network.
Doing this is super easy. Assuming the demand exists in the market, all we have to do is go and get it. And we can ensure we’ve got it by ratcheting up to +900% all bid adjustments to geos with remaining ‘total capacity’. Position 1.0, 100% Impression Share, 0 antsy plumbers.
But alas! For you have budget and efficiency goals.
How Much Stuff Is Already On The Shelf Matters
‘Lead Pacing’ is optimizing for a minimum spend to acquire a certain number of leads per geo (Capacity) over some time frame. Implicit in this definition is the priority that you do still need to get all those leads, no matter the cost. If a geo is slow, pace up. If it’s hot, pace down.
There is a fundamental paradox in this: what might be good for your business long-term may not necessarily be the best thing for it in short-term. Put another way, it’s a competition between happy partners with high lifetime value and peak SEM performance efficiency now. To illustrate this, consider the following example of two cities.
Let’s say your contracts with your partners are to provide ‘Starting Total Capacity’ of leads per ‘Fulfillment Period’. And let’s say our ‘Fulfillment Period’ is the week. Then if we’re 70% through, it’s roughly Thursday. Los Angeles has only received 20% of its Capacity for the week whereas New York already has 80%. Using Capacity as our guide, we would give Los Angeles a high bid adjustment and New York a low one - all in service of our partners getting the number of leads they asked for.
But how much will those marginal leads cost us? Counterintuitively, a lot more in the area where we’re getting more aggressive. If we were instead to apply bid adjustments based on cost per lead, they’d be in reverse: Los Angeles would get the low bid adjustment and New York the high. And because it’s increasingly more expensive to manufacture leads where demand is low, this scenario can be fairly common.
For this reason, it’s imperative that you know where these priorities balance for your business. Are your partner contracts sensitive to leads left on the table or is there some leeway? Is your SEM efficiency largely at odds with your Capacity pacing or is there some harmony? Expected Revenue must be at the forefront of every decision you make. Only then can you appropriately optimize to your particular medley of considerations.
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For those who want to dive deeper, here are some additional questions to grapple with:
1. What happens if a partner is right on the border between Zip Codes/Cities/metropolitan areas? More commonly, what happens if they’re anywhere but the exact center? How would that factor into the expected value of leads originating from adjacent Zip Codes/Cities/metropolitan areas?
2. What is the relationship between ‘Remaining Capacity’ (either as an absolute or a percentage) and Conversion Rates? Based on this, at what points in the ‘Fulfillment Periods’ is it advantageous to bid higher or lower?