Technology
Basis Platform
Advertising Operating System
Communication Portal
Intelligent Collaboration
All Channel Activation
Activate Media on Every Channel
Consulting
Resources
As business leaders, you face an array of challenges every day. How can you put marketing at the forefront of other responsibilities, let alone make time to manage multiple digital platforms simultaneously? We’re here to tell you that—it is possible! The biggest challenge is to start now, and not let it fall to the wayside.
Multi-channel marketing might seem overwhelming at first, but when it’s set-up correctly from the beginning, each channel will feed into one another—which automates the process and effectively, does most of the heavy lifting for you. Getting started is the hardest part.
In short, multi-platform marketing creates several touch points between the brand and consumers, optimizing engagement along the way. It allows you to meet your audience(s) where they “live” online and tap into the communication channels and social media platforms that facilitate that conversation most effectively.
Many consumers engage with multiple social media platforms in one sitting—meaning, copying and pasting the same message across several sites doesn’t work. It's not only boring, but it can also decrease credibility. Instead, home in on the specific posting specs (i.e., optimal number of characters and/or hashtags) in each platform to deliver visually appealing and engaging content that meets audience expectations.
It’s important to note that not all platforms will generate engagement for your business/brand, which means you should only focus on the ones that really matter. Once you figure out where your customers are “living,” (i.e., the platform(s) with the most engagement) refine your focus to those few platforms. This will enable your voice to be heard and allow you to create the most impact.
For example, a cross-platform marketing strategy may include the following:
It’s important to understand each of these platforms in order to build on strengths and opportunities—and avoid weaknesses and cutting into valuable time.
Set goals in order to measure progress. Know exactly what you’re trying to achieve before you begin the multi-platform journey. For example, some goals may involve:
Start with a baseline. From there, set metrics and analyze how well campaigns are performing.
A campaign isn’t a ‘set-it-and-forget-it’ marketing tool. They require constant attention and analyses to ensure the audience reach is in the right place. If the idea of testing and adjusting makes you nervous, consider hiring a team of digital marketing professionals to do this work for you. Once you find the sweet spot, you'll be able to converse with consumers on the platforms that make the most sense for your unique business.
Basis is your go-to place for all things that make digital marketing less confusing. From programmatic ad buying to solutions that enhance consumer engagement, we’re excited to show you all that our automated and comprehensive digital media platform can do. Don't hesitate to reach out today!
PPC competition is a huge factor when it comes to advertising performance. Most advertisers perform paid search competitor analysis when first setting up their campaigns, but few revisit it as a long-term consideration in campaign performance. When you only focus on your account strategy, you overlook opportunities to adjust to competitor changes. If your campaigns aren’t performing the way you expected, changes in your PPC competition could be the cause. Here’s how to consider this in your Google Adwords audit, and make the right changes to optimize.
Google Ads provides free internal tools you can use to see how your ads are performing compared to the competition. To access these reports:
The Auction Insights report includes valuable data such as:
If changes in PPC competition are responsible for your performance issues, these metrics will likely show it. Impression share data shows how much visibility your ads are getting compared to your competitors, including Search Impr. share, Search Lost IS (rank), Search Lost IS (budget) and Search. If your budget, Quality Score, or bids are preventing your ads from getting impressions, they’ll perform poorly on these metrics.
For example, if your Search Impr. Share is 80%, that means you’re capturing the majority of impressions. If your Search Impr. Share is 40%, then there could be a lot of competitors bidding on the same terms, or your budget is too low. Search Lost IS (rank) and Search Lost IS (budget) will help you understand which of these issues are responsible for low impression share.
Overlap rate will show you how often you and your competitors are appearing in the same auction for search results, while Outranking share shows you how often you outrank competitors when you appear in the same auction.
Auction Insights allows you to segment these statistics by Device or Time as well. So if competitors are performing better in auctions on mobile devices, that gives you a clue as to their device targeting strategy. Same applies to performance differences at different times of day.
Bid strategy and keyword targeting could be responsible for performance issues with your PPC competition, but it could also easily be your ad copy message. If their ad copy is more relevant and better at driving clicks, this can affect your relative ad rank and performance immensely.
One way you can evaluate competitor ad copy is using Google’s Ad Preview and Diagnosis tool. It shows you what ads are appearing for a keyword you’re targeting. There are also many third party tools that can show you competitor ad copy and give insights into their strategy. Spyfu and SEMrush can show you competitor ads from as recent as a month ago.
Here are some important points to pay attention to with your competitor ad copy:
While landing page content isn’t an element of their ad copy, it does have a huge impact on bounce rate. This is an important metric Google Ads uses to calculate Quality Score, which in turn affects ad rank.
Most marketing managers ignore PPC competitor keyword targeting when building their own keyword lists. They focus on including all the most relevant terms that align with their ideal customer’s needs. But often the best keywords have a lot of PPC competition, and targeting too many highly competitive keywords will use up your budget quickly, leading to a high cost per acquisition (CPA) and poor performance overall. Auditing PPC competitor keywords is important when building keyword lists and when evaluating campaign performance down the road. As competitor targeting strategies change, keywords can become more or less difficult to effectively rank for.
The metrics mentioned in the Auction Insights report can help you determine if a lot of other PPC marketers are competing with you for the same keywords. Third party tools can also provide more insights into the competitive landscape of keyword targeting.
In addition to ad copy insights, Spyfu shows you which keywords your competition is bidding on and how they perform. All you have to do is type in a competitor URL and it will bring back their Google Ads budget, paid keywords, ad position, and clicks per day. If you use the paid version, you can also see keyword overlap and other advanced statistics. KeywordSpy is another helpful tool that shows you competitor keywords, domains, and ad copy. It also suggests new keyword and ad combinations based on competitor analysis.
Having some idea of your competition’s strategy and targeting can provide valuable insights to improve your own campaigns. It’s a bad idea to simply copy competitor strategies - instead use paid search competitor analysis to inspire new ways to optimize.
For example:
There are lots of ways to use your knowledge of PPC competition to improve paid search performance. Here are a few examples:
If competitor ads are consistently outperforming yours, it could be because they have a better, more targeted campaign structure. In general, the more specific your campaigns are to promoting different products or services, the more relevant your targeting.
It makes sense for even the smallest businesses to have more than one campaign to target audiences. Having too many ad groups and targeting too many keywords within one campaign makes it difficult to prioritize promoting your most valuable products or services.
Creating separate campaigns also makes it easier to optimize for different audiences you want to target. For example, having different campaigns for different countries you target allows you better control over country-specific bids. You can also include relevant location-based keywords for each campaign.
If your account currently only has one or a few campaigns, consider how you could create more. Is there anything you would change about your bidding or targeting strategy if some of your current ad groups were in different campaigns? This could be the key to outperforming the competition with more relevant, targeted ads.
If you find PPC competitor keyword targeting is a problem in your Google Adwords audit, then you need to make changes to your keyword lists and targeting strategy. Start by identifying your highest cost keywords. Are they driving a good number of acquisitions? Is their CPA acceptable for your marketing goals? Outliers could be pushing your overall CPA up, and should be removed from your keyword lists.
You can also beat out the competition with keyword targeting by creating better ad groups. If all the keywords in an ad group are closely related, they’ll also be more relevant to the ad copy your PPC ads deliver to audiences. Creating intelligent ad groups can improve click-through rates, ad rank, and overall performance.
One aspect of competitor strategies that changes most is bids. Thanks to automated bidding technologies, advertisers can make many micro-changes in their bidding strategy to take advantage of the market.
As mentioned earlier, the Auction Insights report can give you some idea if competitor ads are outranking yours because of their bidding strategy. If they’re using time of day, device, or audience bid adjustments to outperform your ads, you can adopt a similar strategy to beat out the competition. Say competitors are outperforming you on mobile, for example. Create a campaign experiment, then create a +15% bid adjustment for mobile.
Use this bid adjustment with a portion of your audience to see if it improves your search impression share or conversions. If it doesn’t, then likely ad quality and relevance are a problem.
If you can’t identify any clear patterns in how the PPC competition is outbidding you, it could be because more of them are adopting automated bidding. Bid automation tools can process large amounts of relevant business and bid landscape data to make informed changes to your bidding strategy. To see if this is the case, you can create a duplicate campaign in Google Ads and choose an automated bidding strategy to see if that improves your ad rank compared to the PPC competition.
If competitor ad copy outperforms yours, then making changes to improve ad copy targeting could fix your PPC performance issues. Here are some important areas to focus on when assessing your own ads:
The goal here is not to emulate your competitors, but to take advantage of opportunities to stand out from them. Is there anything you can incorporate into your landing pages to improve conversions that your competitors haven’t thought about?
You should also make sure you’re using ad copy elements to their fullest extent to drive conversions. Clickthrough rate is another important factor impacting Quality Score and ad rank.
Consider what ad elements your competitors are using, and which ones would be relevant to your business:
Ad extensions is one area where you really should emulate the competition if they’re outperforming you. For example, if your competitors have a higher impression share on mobile devices, it could be because they’re using call extensions or other copy elements to optimize their ad for mobile. You should test out using the same extensions with a unique call-to-action to stand out from the competition.
It’s easy for account managers to forget about paid search competitor analysis after launching a new campaign. But if you want to stay ahead of the PPC competition, it’s important to conduct regular audits of their changing strategies. Understanding how competitor strategies affect your own campaign performance offers invaluable insights to improve targeting and budget spend efficiency. So incorporate competitor analysis into your campaign audit routine overall. You can also take advantage of bidding technologies to automatically make adjustments based on constant changes in the competitive landscape.
Google’s mobile search has a new look. They have rolled out a mobile search redesign with a black ad label replacing the previous green ad label. You can see the official announcement here.
Search results for “Visit San Francisco” taken on 6/6/19 on both mobile and desktop. Mobile shows the new black mobile label in contrast with the current green ad label on the desktop. The green ad label you see on the desktop was previously used on mobile up until this change. If you take out your phone and do a search on Google you can see it for yourself.
Mobile Search Results
Desktop Search Results
For paid search, the word “Ad” appears bolded and in black. Before the word “Ad” appeared in a green box. The box has been removed and black is the new green. This change provides a more modern look in line with recent web design trends. It is also intended to make it even easier to read and ingest the search results.
This new look brings some branding to the organic search results such as the website icon and the publisher gets top billing. To get your organic search icon or favicon updated, follow Google’s instruction here. Be sure to follow their guidelines so your favicon has a better chance of being displayed.
According to TechCrunch, the branding may even help users better understand where the results are coming from such as identifying if it’s from a well-knowing site or news site. Overall, providing a better search experience.
Advertisers should be watching carefully over the next few months, monitoring mobile click-through rates (CTRs) for any changes, positive or negative. When looking at performance on mobile, keep in mind this recent change.
While there has been no mention of desktop yet, if the mobile rollout goes well, you should keep an eye out for similar tests and changes on desktop.
While it’s still early, Google has reported that a majority of users found it easier to identify websites, and more than two-thirds said it was easier to scan results more quickly.
It’s been reported that some advertisers are already seeing an increase in CTRs. However, it's still too early to know if these early results are sustainable or seen across the board for all types of accounts.
According to the FTC’s business blog, in 2013 they sent a letter to search engines reiterating the original guidance they set in 2002 and updating the guidelines.
In the 2013 letter, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) mandated search engines to clearly and prominently differentiate between natural results and advertisements. This resulted in removing the shaded boxes around ad and making moves towards the green ad labels that were introduced in 2017 and were in use until this new change in spring 2019.
The guidance provided by the FTC in 2013 states, “visual cues, labels, or other techniques to effectively distinguish advertisements, in order to avoid misleading consumers, and it makes recommendations for ensuring that disclosures commonly used to identify advertising are noticeable and understandable to consumers.”
The FTC’s goal is to make it clear when content is an advertisement and when it’s an organic result. When search engines make changes to results they have to ensure they are compliant with the FTC guidelines. This change does fit within the guidelines and goes above and beyond, particularly since it is easier to identify websites than it was before. Companies using competitors' names in their ad headlines, which you're not supposed to do, will have a more difficult time fooling users into thinking their ad is from someone else. This will make the user's experience better, which is the whole point.
For a more detailed history with images check out Search Engine Land’s Updated: A visual history of Google ad labeling in search results. They have images of Google Search ads from 2007 to the present.
As mentioned above, this change could expand to include desktops. Google is an industry leader and other publishers may follow.
Since this is a change to both paid and organic listings, it's assumed Bing will copy but maybe not right away. As technology continues to develop, the search advertising landscape will develop along with it. The history of search and its relationship to advertising confirms this. For more on SEM history check out our blog on A Brief History of SEM.
Looking to the future, Google has mentioned including Augmented Reality 3D models in search results as well as indexing podcasts so they can be included in search results based on content, not just title. One thing is for sure, search and the associated advertising will continue to evolve with technology to create an even better experience for the user.
Expectations that are not said are expectations that are not set. As managers, we often find ourselves holding people accountable for things that they may not even know they are accountable for! It’s important to ask ourselves, “am I withholding feedback? Is there something I'm leaving unsaid?” and course correct accordingly.
Going into the second half of the year, we've compiled a few best practices on how to conduct effective check-ins. Read on for the when’s, where’s, and how’s of employee feedback!
When?
Annual performance reviews are a thing of the past. At Centro, we encourage managers to continuously provide feedback to their teams, and to schedule a formal check-in at least twice a year (we call them "development check-ins.") Whether or not your company has a system like this for you to use, it’s important to check in with your employees as you turn the corner into H2.
Where?
When you do check in with your employees, make sure you meet in person whenever possible! This conversation is too important for it to live in emails or performance management tools alone.
How?
Have the employee start by asking them to tell you how they think they’re doing. Use questions like these:
Make sure you take the time to be thoughtful and respond to their answers. Then, provide your honest feedback—both constructive and, even more importantly, positive! It’s important to reinforce the behaviors you want to see.
For instance, if your employee thinks they’re exceeding expectations, but you think they’re simply meeting expectations, give them specifics as to why you think that. You could say:
“You’re doing a fantastic job, and I marked you as meeting expectations. I did that because based on the expectations I have of this role, including X, Y, and Z, I feel you are doing really well.
If I were to mark you as exceeding expectations, I would look for you to be doing things that are not included in your role—really going above and beyond and stretching into that next level on this team.
I imagine in the next 12 months I’ll start to see you doing more of those things and I will help you to identify what those opportunities are. But right now, I am extremely happy with the work you’re providing for the team.
Do you understand how I view those differently? What questions do you have?”
Our CEO, Shawn Riegsecker, has always said “if you think something three times, then say something.” It's important to remember that if your employees are not aware of your feedback, they cannot improve—and it’s your job to help them be successful!
If you have thought about something three times, no matter if it’s big or small, find an opportunity to communicate it. We can all agree that this isn't an easy task—it's often incredibly difficult—but with practice, it will become more comfortable for you and your team.
Cheers to a successful second half of the year full of candor and feedback!
Whether or not you think you do, you actually do need health insurance
No matter how healthy you are, you will always be prone to catching a cold, falling victim to the flu, spraining your ankle, etc… As a result, you will have to visit a doctor at any given moment. The expenses associated with visiting a doctor can be high, and because of this, it’s wise to invest in health insurance, which covers, at the very least, a portion of a person’s medical expenses. Most companies will provide health insurance plans for employees. For everyone else, they have to find a health insurance provider that gives them the most value for as little money as possible.
Whether or not you think they do, health insurance companies need people who need health insurance
On the flip side, if you are a health insurance company, your goal is to maintain fair ownership of the available market for health insurance. With only a finite number of people at any given time who are eligible for your health insurance plan, you need to make sure you are optimizing your bids in such a way that you give yourself the best chance to maintain the highest amount of market share you can. However, with the ever-changing bidding landscape, along with the constantly changing competition, it can be difficult to scale your program from year to year to ensure your bids are optimal every single day. This is because every day, you need to:
Although the first bullet point above can be hard to address at first, it can be handled through proper audiences and demographic bid adjustments. The second bullet point is a bit harder to fulfill, given not only do you need to maintain optimal bids on your current set of keywords, but you need to regularly expand your keyword list to expand your program. On the surface, this can be a daunting task since you need to guess the starting bids on these keywords with zero historical data.
The future will happen, and it's getting closer. Fast.
2020 is rolling around, and you need to start thinking about expanding your keywords to keep up with search demand. There are likely a lot of keywords you won’t think of at first, however, you do know you will need to generate keywords specific to the year 2020. A sample of keywords you will create might include:
[best health insurance for 2020]
+2020 +health +insurance
+why +is +health +insurance +so +expensive +in +2020
While a bit arduous, the easy part of ramping up for 2020 is figuring out which 2020-specific keywords to add to your accounts (this can be done in a multitude of ways, with the easiest way being to take your top-performing 2019 keywords and replaying ‘2019’ with ‘2020’). The hard part comes in estimating what the starting bids should be.
Considerations for setting bids on new keywords
With bid landscape tools available, you might be able to figure out which starting bid gets you a certain amount of clicks. However, you need to understand the value of the keywords to get a sense of which starting CPC will help you meet your overall business goal; whether that’s maximizing profit, hitting a certain ROAS, CPA, etc... This is where natural language processing (NLP) comes in, which will help you estimate the value of a brand new keyword, and help you jumpstart your bids and get you ahead of the competitive landscape curve.
NLP will help you enjoy the future faster than ever
To estimate a keyword’s worth (whether that’s revenue per click, conversion rate, etc…), you will need to use its historical data to calculate its value. For brand new keywords with zero historical data, you will need some sort of data aggregation method to use outside data to estimate the value of these keywords. One such aggregation method is NLP, a method used to calculate the similarity score between two strings of characters. There are lots of different flavors of NLP (TF-IDF, Cosine, etc... ), and you’ll have to find the correct method for your particular use case.
Once you figure out the correct NLP method, you can use this to find semantically similar keywords to the brand new keywords that you can use in order to estimate the values of the new keywords.
Example: [2020 health insurance]
The following chart shows a handful of keywords, and their similarity scores (on a scale of 0.00 - 1.00) relative to [2020 health insurance]:
The keyword ‘2019 health insurance’ has a relatively high similarity score to [2020 health insurance], while ‘health insurance for me’, has a relatively lower similarity score.
Factors to take into consideration when utilizing NLP
NLP can be powerful, but only if used on the correct data. When determining which higher-volume keywords to compare to keywords without data, you need to:
Only use high-volume keywords for the NLP calculation
The higher volume a keyword is, the more representative its known value will be. Because of this, you only want to base NLP on keywords you are VERY certain have accurate known values. You don’t get this with low-volume keywords so you wouldn’t want to use low-volume keywords to predict the bid for a brand new keyword.
Make sure the keyword you are estimating the bid for is grouped in an apples to apples manner with the keywords it will use for NLP
You need to make sure the keywords your using to estimate the brand new keyword are a fair representation of how that keyword SHOULD have its bid calculated For example, if your campaigns are segmented by county, the high-volume keyword [2019 health insurance near me] might behave differently depending on which county this is being searched, i.e. it might be a more expensive keyword in San Francisco relative to Fresno.
Natural Language Processing was built for Health Insurance paid search marketers who are trying to get an edge
In the paid search marketplace, health insurance is a tough field to compete in. With tools such as NLP at your disposal, though, you can give yourself a clear edge by getting the most value out of your new keywords before your competitors do.
At Centro, we know that keeping up with the trade pubs and latest trends can be tough and time-consuming. To make that easier, we’ve compiled all the articles, reports, and other bits of awesomeness you may have missed, but should definitely read. Enjoy our latest list below!
Mary Meeker’s Most Important Trends on the Internet [:20]
The annual report from Mary Meeker is a must read every year. Chock full of trend data across the internet from a savvy VC perspective, the report covers a focus on particular business categories, and of course online advertising. For the first time last year, the time spent with mobile and share of media investment reached parity.
But while digital advertising is growing (primarily through increased programmatic buying), it is not growing at nearly the rate seen previously (though there was some acceleration from last year). Watch for privacy concerns continuing to impact targeted advertising, and for more traditional media to blur the lines with digital. Bonus—check out eMarketer’s top 5 trends from the report.
Magna Global + IPG Media Lab + Pandora Present: Ad Receptivity, Deconstructed [:03]
New research from IPG Media Lab points to factors that drive our willingness to see ads before we’re exposed to them as audio listeners and video watchers.
Why Pernod Ricard favors the hybrid in-house model [:03]
Beverage company Pernod Ricard takes a slower approach to creating an in-house team.
WTF Is The ICO? (And Why Ad Tech Should Worry) [:06]
Data protection is becoming an ever important conversation as more companies are having to familiarize themselves with all the data regulations. The ICO is one of the biggest and best-resourced data protection authorities in Europe. People who work in ad tech should worry because the ICO will set the bar for how strictly it will enforce GDPR.
New York’s Privacy Bill Is Even Bolder Than California’s [:08]
The New York bill is different than the California bill in some major ways. While the California law leaves enforcement to the state’s attorney general, the NY Privacy Act would give New Yorkers the right to sue companies directly over privacy violations. This will most likely set up a slew of individual lawsuits.
83% Increase in Customers Due to Location-Based Advertising, According to Factual's 2019 Report [:04]
Location data continues to be an effective tool for marketers — almost 9 in 10 marketers said location-based advertising and marketing resulted in higher sales, followed by growth in their customer base (86%) and higher customer engagement (84%).
Three Things DTCs Have Learned As They Get Into TV [:03]
eCommerce and Direct to Consumer brands are driving in droves towards ad spending on TV while bringing a new data-focused angle to their buying strategies.
How Walmart Is Building A Delivery Operation To Rival Amazon [:04]
Walmart is testing out new delivery capabilities that will rival with Amazon’s grocery delivery subscription service. This adds to the already lengthy list of delivery initiatives Walmart has undertaken over the past year, which includes delivery partnerships with Ford, Udelv and Deliv, and the announcement of next-day delivery.
The Smart Audio Report [:07]
With more than 53M smart speaker owners in the United States, new research from NPR and Edison Research reveals how smart speaker owners are settling in with their devices and the factors the industry will have to solve for in order to grow further.
What Advertising Means in the Age of Spatial Computing [:06]
Advertisers today are starting to look towards technologies such as virtual and augmented reality (VR and AR) as a way of getting closer to their customers and delivering those all-important immersive experiences. See also YouTube’s new AR offering announced last month.
Paid search automation has become increasingly popular in the past few years, striking a huge debate over the merits of manual versus automated bidding in Google ads. Advertisers have managed PPC optimization manually since the beginning of Google Adwords. As a result, many push back against automation technology as a tool for people who don’t know how to optimize campaigns themselves.
On the surface, manual bidding would seem to give advertisers the most control over their accounts and campaigns, allowing them to make any necessary changes to improve performance. But paid search automation technology has a lot more to it than providing shortcuts for campaign optimization. You can automate ad creation, market research, bidding, and more. The truth of the matter is that automated bidding is likely the most valuable and necessary feature for search advertisers in 2019 and beyond. Here are some of the benefits it brings.
There’s a wealth of data out there that advertisers can leverage to improve campaign performance. First, second, and third-party data can tell you more about your target audience, their needs, points in the sales funnel, and more. Data can also help you discover new audiences and understand how campaign elements are performing.
Market data provides valuable insights that advertisers use to adjust bids for different audiences and ensure their max CPC is optimized for every keyword. But there’s simply too much relevant data for PPC managers to work through manually.
Automation solves this problem completely. Paid search automation technology can process large amounts of data and make necessary changes to bids in real-time. Google’s Smart Bidding technology considers your historical performance data and competitor bid strategies to make the optimum bids to maximize campaign performance. Third-party PPC automation tools like QuanticMind by Centro can take this benefit even further by utilizing all relevant market data you provide, such as first and third-party data.
Even if you had a team of data scientists working around the clock to make manual changes, they wouldn’t be able to keep up with automation capabilities. This leads to inherent inefficiencies in campaign optimization that weren’t a reality before bid automation was invented.
Even modest advertising campaigns include a long list of keywords to target. Calculating the optimum cost-per-click (CPC) for each keyword is time-consuming, to say the least. If you work in e-commerce or have a lot of product groups, the task becomes even larger.
Advertisers that rely on manual bidding can simplify things using keyword filters or automated rules to make changes when necessary. But these are limited in scope and are still dependent on manual changes from a PPC manager.
On the other hand, paid search automation technology can calculate the best CPC for every keyword in real-time. The ability to make changes quickly and at scale ensures you don’t spend any time under or overbidding. Instead, you receive the best margins for each conversion, improving your cost per acquisition (CPA) immensely.
Paid search automation not only saves you time but also saves your budget. By calculating the best CPC for each keyword based on the latest market data, PPC automation tools can reduce unnecessary ad spend.
When you use Google Ads Smart Campaigns for PPC management, you select a bidding strategy based on your specific advertising goals. Some strategies include:
Google’s Smart Campaigns use artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning technology to bid towards the goal you select. Their algorithms can also make strategy changes based on past performance data to better allocate your budget spend.
Say, for example, your goal is to improve return on ad spend. Through manual bidding, you set a higher max CPC for high converting keywords and a lower CPC for low converting keywords. By analyzing historical performance data and the competitive bid landscape, automation technology could discover that actually increasing bids for more low converting keywords brings better ROAS than your original strategy.
Rather than optimizing spend on individual keywords, automated bidding algorithms consider keyword performance overall to improve budget spend. Advertisers who traditionally rely on manual bidding for Google Ads can see the improvements themselves when they try out paid search automation. Improving spend efficiency, in turn, frees up more budget that you can reallocate to new advertising initiatives.
Paid search automation isn’t just about optimizing budget spend to meet advertising goals. You can also improve audience targeting with automated bid adjustments. As you may know, bid adjustments allow you to optimize performance by showing ads more or less frequently based on where, when, and how people search. Most advertisers set bid adjustments manually, increasing or decreasing bids based on relevant circumstances.
Google currently offers the following bid adjustments:
For example, you could infer from your performance data that click-through rates from mobile devices are higher. So you create a +20% bid adjustment for mobile in order for your ads to show more often.
Optimizing bid adjustments manually is often about trial and error. Advertisers create an experiment, increasing bids for a certain audience to see if it improves conversions or other campaign goals. But this can all be automated using technology for PPC management.
Google Ads allows you to apply bid modifiers to Smart Campaigns with automated bidding. It will automatically make the necessary bid adjustments to prioritize an audience and target your set campaign goals.
Third-party PPC automation tools can also handle automated bid adjustments. QuanticMind by Centro allows advertisers to create bid adjustments for all audience types, including Remarketing, Custom Affinity, Affinity, and In-Market. It also uses all your relevant business data to create granular bid adjustments to improve performance and maximize the value of audience targeting to drive advertising goals.
Manual bidding for Google Ads gives advertisers complete control over their accounts, but also the responsibility of fully managing them. Analyzing performance and making necessary campaign improvements is a never-ending task for PPC managers.
On the other hand, paid search automation can handle the majority of bid optimization tasks for you. Rather than eliminating the important role of account manager, it provides them with an opportunity to focus more on strategy development. When advertisers aren’t spending all their time executing campaigns, they’re able to search for and pursue new growth opportunities. They can discover new keywords or audiences to target, create better ads or ad groups, or make other account adjustments to improve campaign performance.
PPC managers need to forecast future performance in order to secure and optimize their budget spend. Creating accurate forecasts can seem like a challenge when you use paid search automation. You can’t predict what changes your automation software will make and can’t factor them into your forecasts.
But you can actually avoid this problem altogether using PPC optimization technology with forecasting capabilities. You can create automated reports that are more accurate and actionable than those you’d create manually.
QuanticMind by Centro is one example of bid automation software with internal forecasting features. It considers historical performance, seasonality, bid landscape data, and other important data to create an accurate forecast of predicted performance up to 100 days into the future. The tool’s algorithms also rely on these forecasting insights to make informed bidding decisions automatically.
Paid search automation can outperform manual bidding in a lot of ways. But if you want to get the most out of the technology to meet your business goals, here are a few tips for starting out:
Try Experimenting with Automated Bidding
If you’re still not sure if automated bidding is the right choice for your advertising efforts, there’s no need to take everyone’s word for it. Test out the technology yourself and see if it brings better results.
Instead of switching an entire campaign over to automated bidding, you can create an experiment to compare the performance of automated vs manual bidding for Google Ads.
For example, you can spend a month comparing how your manual bidding strategy performs versus an automated strategy targeting ROAS.
Here are the steps to create an experimental campaign:
1. Go to Drafts & experiments from the side menu bar
2. Select + NEW DRAFT
3. Select the campaign you want to duplicate
4. Name your campaign draft
5. Hit SAVE
Then go back to Drafts & experiments and click +NEW EXPERIMENT.
On the next page that comes up, you can name your experiment, select what date range you want it to run, and how much traffic you want to direct to it (e.g. 50%).
Once you set this up, you can make any changes you want to your experimental campaign without affecting your original one. So you can test out an automated bidding strategy for a short time to see if it drives the results you’re looking for, and with more spend efficiency than manual bidding.
Choose the Right Bidding Strategy
Another very important thing to consider in the beginning is which automated bidding strategy you should choose. All seem to shoot for valuable campaign performance goals, but they approach bidding very differently.
Different bidding strategies will be more valuable for you depending on your current campaign performance and composition. For example:
If you’re not sure which bid strategy is most valuable to reach your business goals, you can also experiment in creating different automated campaigns to test and compare performance.
Use Scripts to Expand Your Automation Capabilities
Google Ads offers a lot of internal automation capabilities for PPC management. But there’s a lot you can do beyond these features to automate and improve campaign performance. Google ads scripts are a way to make custom automated changes to your accounts using JavaScript code.
There’s a wealth of premade scripts available that advertisers can use to automate actions in their Google Ads account, such as adjusting bids, adding keywords, or pausing ad groups. Scripts can also address some of the challenges of automated bidding, giving account managers the control they need. For example, Google’s automated algorithms are able to overspend by up to 200% in order to reach campaign goals. Advertisers who want to cap or control overspending can do so using scripts.
Scripts can also prevent poor campaign performance due to data quality issues. If there’s a problem with your campaign data and automated algorithms refer to it to make bidding decisions, it can hurt performance without your knowledge. But a script can automatically pause problem ad groups or campaigns when performance deviates too far from forecasts. This gives account managers the chance to address the issue.
Consider Third-Party Tools to Improve Precision
Advertisers who use manual bidding in Google Ads find it easy to switch over to automated bidding options on the same platform. Google has a strong solution that continues to introduce new features, but it’s not the most powerful solution for automated bidding. Third-party tools are uniquely capable of considering all relevant business data in calculating bids, giving advertisers an important advantage over everyone using Smart Campaigns today.
Third-party tools like QuanticMind by Centro can also integrate an array of automation features to work in unison to improve campaign efficiency and efficacy. Automatic built-in forecasting, performance reports, and anomaly detection technology eliminates much of the manual optimization necessary with Google Ads automation.
There’s no denying that automating paid search offers many more opportunities to improve campaign efficiency than manual bidding. It allows you to utilize all relevant market data to make quick, accurate changes to improve CPA, reduce wasted ad spend, and more.
Still, some advertisers cling to the idea of manual bidding because it offers one thing: complete control over campaign decisions.
But once you learn about how automation works and the flexibility of options available for utilizing it, the choice becomes more clear. Automation offers all the control you need to utilize the power of artificial intelligence and machine learning to meet your business goals. Meanwhile, the number of advertisers adopting paid search automation continues to grow, making it more of a necessity than an option to keep up with the competition in 2019.
Centro commissioned Forrester Research to assess the economic impact of implementing Basis across digital ad agencies. The results were transformative across multiple areas of the business, including media performance, time savings, agency income, and more.
In June's webinar, we were joined by Forrester’s Principal Consultant, Jonathan Lipsitz, to learn how agencies are automating business processes, increasing revenue, and boasting happier clients and employees. Learn how agencies are seeing a 35% increase in their digital team efficiencies by using Basis.
This infographic provides an overview of running through a root cause analysis on your SEM program, plus touches on two other types of audits you’ll want to keep in mind when assessing and solving PPC performance troubles.
While auditing poor performance isn’t anyone’s dream job, it’s simply a requirement for SEM managers–and can really make a big difference if caught early and addressed correctly. Regular audits are a healthy part of program maintenance.
Sometimes an issue is truly from a “root cause”: business changes, landing page issues, competition in the market, or culturally irrelevant keywords. However, often you’ll find more holistic drops that can be better explained by dimensions or segments that may just need to be adjusted with bid modifiers. Beyond that, sometimes your entire optimization strategy may be built on incomplete data or metrics, or just missing a key step in the customer journey that could drive value.
Addressing PPC issues isn’t fun, but this infographic can help you look into a few elements. However, you can learn even more about all of these topics in our new eBook: Advanced PPC Auditing Guide: Determining Root Causes, Bleeding Dimensions, and Optimization Strategy.
To download this infographic on solving PPC performance issues, click here. The full eBook is also available, digging into all aspects of the infographic. Alternatively, if you’d like to talk to our team about how to improve performance on some dimensions, or get more out of the metrics you’re optimizing towards–get in touch here.