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Given the modern data environment, improving your PPC results will increasingly rely on processing quality data. Going from good to great PPC performance involves collecting and processing bigger data sets and using machine learning to find and select the best bids. But, despite what you and many other search marketers may fear, humans are an integral part of this process as well. Machines can’t do it alone.
You’re a talented search marketer, but you want to constantly improve, grow, and stay sharp on the latest techniques in digital marketing. Whether you’re the hands-on owner of a SEM program day-to-day, or you’ve stepped away to think more broadly about your digital acquisition strategy, the goal is still the same: turn your PPC channel into an efficient and predictable revenue driver.
But, once you’ve started hitting the ceiling, it’s time to put more of your data to work.
I’m assuming you’re a pretty advanced search marketer, so you have your ducks in a row regarding your program structure. This means you probably have strong campaign build-out, highly relevant ad groups matched with ad copy and keywords that are tested, kept clean, and aligned with a good landing page experience.
You’re also probably driving some significant volume. If PPC is a truly pivotal channel–generating forty, sixty, or eighty percent of your revenue–you’re willing to spend a lot with search engines. Lots of dollars leading to lots of clicks and revenue.
When you’re spending tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars on search engine marketing, you earn a valuable byproduct: data.
This data is a gold mine! Every click results in some set of actions on your website. Some clicks get further down the path towards revenue than others. Beyond that, every click is not only attributed to the keyword, ad, ad group, and campaign, but also to all sorts of attributes and dimensions that provide details about demographics, geographies, and habits.
The intricate customer journeys of the modern era make a “Conversion” in Google Ads worth less. Your own ability to track the path to revenue is so much more meaningful. Your data tells a better story, you just need to capture it, unify it, and process it.
Hip hop artist Drake makes the claim “I don't carry cash 'cause the money is digital”. This resonates with many of us search marketers these days, hosting most transactions (and therefore conversions) online. But an offline conversion in-store is part of the customer journey for a great many buyers. And the ensuing revenue may have come from your search ads. The customer journey isn’t as cut-and-dry as one may suspect in Google Ads 101.
Search marketers generating less volume from their PPC can probably get by adequately looking at impressions, clicks, and conversions in Google Ads for their optimization efforts. However, when you’re working towards being best-in-class for a scaled-up search program, the publisher metrics aren’t good enough. Performance marketers running huge programs require more to truly grow.
Collecting the data we’re discussing here will very quickly generate “Big Data”, which is all the rage these days. #BuzzwordAlert. But big data actually enables exactly what we’re looking at discussing here: a better optimization approach.
Big Data means you get the full picture. You get statistical correlations. You get to see reality, and no longer need to ask yourself “why” something is happening. You have the information necessary to tell you what is most likely to happen under any given circumstance. Seeing the actual numbers-based correlations between objects, segments, decisions and their outcomes is the real gold mine derived from your data! More information shows more precise trends from input to output. Which ultimately enables more specific and accurate decisions for search campaigns.
Generating a usable data set, though, isn’t that easy. You’re likely collecting quite a bit of data, and with some additional tags or tools you can collect even more. But it’s the unification and integration that is key. Unifying data to attribute the customer journey, the conversions events, and the revenue values back to the campaigns, keywords, and clicks that sourced them is required before any meaningful optimization actions can be used. It’s a necessary step to accomplish our goal: maximize performance.
Human beings, despite extreme intelligence and ability to reason through situations, aren’t capable of taking advantage of this big data set on our own. We need other tools as a “middle-man,” and I’m not talking about spreadsheets. We need something that can process data every day, note trends, and learn how the relationships are situated from click to revenue. I’m talking about letting the machines take over.
I’m a human, and if you’re reading this I presume you’re also a human. So you and I probably share the desire of not wanting machines to take over the world. Or take over our jobs. However, I feel very strongly that I do want machines to help make my life easier, through automation.
Machine learning is the type of artificial intelligence that should take over here. And it should automate specific parts of your program:
Machine Learning is the obvious choice when dealing with big data in a field like search engine marketing. However, other automation is super valuable to put those calculations to work. SEM automation crunches your online and offline data to learn. Then, it pushes bids, bid modifier adjustments for different dimensions, and a host of other efficiency tactics.
Don’t be fooled by all the discussion here of collecting data, processing it, and automating through machine learning. Nothing here can happen in a meaningful way without human intervention.
Human experience has been, and will be, the glue that keeps SEM programs running effectively. Machines enter to help save time, run more robust calculations, and execute better decisions from the available data. Machines take grunt work off of our plates, but not the strategic and directional elements that only humans can accomplish.
Frankly, it’s something we have to be thankful for! We getting better results when the machine is processing data and making bid calculations from the trends. And we’re also freed up to think more creatively about the art and strategy for hitting our marketing goals.
It can feel unfamiliar to not be “in control” of every bid decision. However, relinquishing that control need not be too difficult once you reason through the cost/benefit. It’s a simple calculus: algorithmic bidding executes far better for at-scale programs with big data sets. And better results benefit your business!
As an experienced search marketer, you likely focus on improving performance and increasing your bottom line. PPC has tremendous room for growth given the amount of data we can now capture about every stage of the customer journey. Your integrated data, particularly data pertaining to revenue, should be working for you.
The rapid advancement and proliferation of voice assistant technology are introducing exciting opportunities for companies in consumer-facing industries. The SEM industry is no stranger to this phenomenon. The rise of voice assistants is changing how consumers interact with devices and search engines, so digital marketers need to re-strategize how they approach their SEM optimization efforts to account for this up-and-coming voice commerce. Until the very day AI completely takes over our world, you should proactively leverage current voice search trends to capture the full potential of your SEM program. Before we dive into some methods to optimize for audible search queries, it is important to understand how voice search works and why it is becoming so prevalent.
In our efficiency-obsessed, FOMO (“fear of missing out”) indulging society, these voice-activated smart devices satisfy our thirst for efficiency, instant responses, and multitasking. At its core, voice search machines such as Google Assistant, Google Home, Amazon Alexa, Amazon Echo, Microsoft Cortana, and Apple Siri allow you to speak your search terms instead of typing them into your device. Then speech recognition transcribes those human words into text. Next, using natural language processing (NLP), the text is parsed out and analyzed for user intended commands. Once this determines which websites are most suitable for the voice query, it then uses text-to-speech technology to deliver search results verbally.
Given this sophisticated yet user-friendly process, it does not come as a surprise that ComScore forecasts that half of all searches will be voice searches by 2020. And thanks to trademarked algorithms developed by search engines such as Google’s PageRank, search almost always gives us the results pages we are looking for. Better yet, with improvements to machine learning and AI, search is becoming increasingly predictive.
Based on a study conducted by OC&C Strategy Consultants, last year’s $2 billion voice shopping market is expected to grow to $40 billion in 2022. At the rate at which consumers are adopting voice-activated technologies today, implications for retail businesses as well as local businesses are becoming more apparent.
Given this massive opportunity (or disruption, depending on how you look at your glass), how do you optimize your SEM program to account for this insurgence of voice search queries?
Voice search queries provide more information on consumer intent
Unlike text queries, voice search queries often contain question words, such as Who, What, When, Where, Why, and How. For example, when you are searching for a pet store on your desktop or tablet, you might type in “Affordable Pet Store in Manhattan.” This text query does not reveal whether you need dog food, catnip, or a hamster wheel. However, when you use your voice to articulate using audible search, you might say, “Where can I buy cheap chew toys for dogs?” As such, voice queries tend to be more intent-driven searches that often result in a higher level of bottom-of-the-funnel conversions. Moreover, the type of question asked often reveals the degree of intent. For instance, Who, What, Why, and How can be identified as lower purchase intent question words, whereas, When and Where are indicative of higher purchase intent. Therefore, adjusting for natural language and specificity of audible searches, you may want to raise bids for more relevant, action-oriented keywords.
Focus on long-tail keywords
The above pet store example highlights another key distinction between text and voice search: length of the query. The average text search is only 1-3 words, whereas its voice counterpart typically consists of 3-7 words. Since long-tail keywords often lack data volume, try using broad match modifiers to capture more traffic on voice queries. Bear in mind that voice search is prone to user mispronunciations; therefore, it is important to add in negative keywords of common misspellings and similar-sounding words relevant to your product.
Give some love to top-of-the-funnel
Digital marketers can capitalize on the way we unconsciously modify our query behavior given an opportunity to say it out loud. Aside from the obvious impact on the lower funnel, you can influence the rest of the funnel (i.e. your best marketing leads!) with informational content to drive more traffic to your site and overall engagement with your brand. This can be achieved by optimizing for natural, conversational language query version of the content in your newsletter guide, community forum, or FAQ pages.
Website load speed matters
Often overlooked in search engine optimization is website load speed. As with traditional text search, voice search places a higher priority on websites that load faster. There are plenty of free tools online to help you measure your website’s current load time and provide suggestions to improve the speed.
Be mobile and local friendly
One-fifth of all mobile queries on Google are voice search. Ensure that your website is mobile-friendly. If your web page is not mobile optimized and/or does not load instantly (millennials can smell that delay from miles away!), you are most likely to lose out on leads and conversions. And since mobile voice search is 3 times more likely to be local compared to text search, try adding in mobile ad extensions such as Click to Call, Location, and Offer extensions. This will enable the user to take their desired action without having to conduct further searches.
You may think this change is just around the corner. However, it is here now! More and more users are adopting the new technology into their lives and voice search is becoming just another part of their daily routines. Think of this as a tremendous opportunity and put in the effort now to optimize for voice search queries, and you will find yourself ahead of the competition!
Our people are a large part of what makes Centro such a great place to work. We’re excited to introduce you to some of Centro’s most interesting people in our newest blog series, as they share their ‘Centro stories’ and a variety of experiences that have impacted their work and life.
As VP of Talent Management, Centro’s Elles Skony is tasked with implementing Centro’s core ideology, which holds that a company’s investment in its team members is key to corporate success. Through its commitment to the wellbeing of its employees, Centro seeks to serve as a blueprint for an improved corporate structure and culture.
Read on to learn how this HR disruptor is transforming corporate culture one team member at a time.
Clare McKinley: What makes you excited about coming into work each day at Centro?
Elles Skony: Being part of a company whose mission is centered around investing in its people makes my job fun. Centro’s commitment to its people is right there in our mission statement:
“To create a successful corporation which contributes to the health and wellbeing of the community through continual dedication to the personal growth and self-development of every team member.”
Shawn (Riegsecker, Centro’s CEO and Founder) keeps me here by continuously reinforcing the mission I signed on for. We’ve been through a lot of ups and downs since I started here, but regardless of what stage we’re at, that mission has remained constant.
CM: Why is Centro’s investment in each team member’s personal development so important to our culture?
ES: It’s a core understanding of our leadership team—if our people are healthy and happy, that will show in quality of their work – and ultimately, result in more profitability for the company.
There are metrics that we correlate directly to the business to prove that out, but most of the time we look at engagement scores over monetary results. If we notice highly engaged workforce scores from our pulse surveys, that means the things we’re investing in are valuable for the company as a whole.
CM: How do you see yourself impacting Centro’s overall success as a company?
ES: I think my team and I create the most value for the company by constantly asking ourselves how we can improve each individual team member’s experience of working at Centro.
For example, let’s say we’re talking about a process we could implement that would benefit our business. The first question we always ask is, “How will an employee experience that process?” Will it create road blocks for them? If so, let’s figure out a different way to do it, even if it means doing more work on our end.
Essentially, my team’s work revolves around a strategic plan of employee experience that we are always looking to improve—and most importantly, that sets up the entire company for success.
CM: Part of Centro’s vision is to become a blueprint for an improved corporate structure and culture—how does your work tie into that?
ES: I’ve really taken to heart Shawn’s mission to create a model for great workplaces everywhere. That plays out in my work via my passions for networking and sharing Centro’s story. For instance, we’re constantly sharing knowledge with our competitor HR teams in order to improve things for everyone in the ad tech industry.
CM: Thanks, Elles! Anything else you’d like to add?
ES: You’re welcome, Clare!
Hmm. Here’s something I often mention to candidates who are thinking about joining our team:
If there was ever a day where I didn’t laugh at least once at work, that would probably be the day I would consider looking elsewhere. However, there hasn’t been a single day in almost 8 years when I haven’t had an authentic laugh with the people around me—that’s really important.
The word "innovation" gets thrown around a lot in advertising. Despite the desire to think outside the box, advertisers and marketers don’t always walk the walk as well as they talk the talk. How can we prioritize innovation to better serve our clients and our careers?
On this episode of AdTech Unfiltered, we talk to a seasoned marketer about how to make innovation happen. Rishad Tobaccowala, Chief Growth Officer at Publicis Groupe, has been a pioneer in the digital marketing space for over 35 years. He’s developed noteworthy agency teams and nurtured tech-first ideas for brands like GM, McDonalds, Disney and United Airlines.
Listen in, as Rishad shares various execution strategies, how to stay ahead of the curve when navigating a career in advertising, and why advertisers who ignore change always lose.
Advertisers have always prioritized position bidding over targeting impression share. Recently, though, Google Ads introduced a number of new metrics to help advertisers better understand the role of impressions and position in ad performance.
Forward-thinking advertisers can take advantage of this data to improve their bidding strategies and campaign performance. Here’s how to view and harness impression data for better search engine marketing.
Adwords provides a wealth of data about impression share performance, but most advertisers don’t look at it. To see if targeting impression share is an important performance goal for your account, you’ll want to get a clear picture of how many impressions your current ads are getting.
To view impression data in your Google Ads statistics table, you’ll need to modify columns in Adwords. Here’s how:
1. From the main page menu of Google ads, click Campaigns, Ad groups, Product groups or Keywords.
2. Select the column icon:
3. Then click "Modify columns".
4. Expand "Competitive metrics". Then you can check the boxes next to the different metrics you want to see.
5. Click Apply. Now the impression share data will appear in your statistics table.
Google offers a number of impression share metrics that can give you a deeper understanding of how your ads are performing. Here’s an overview of the different ways you can view impression share:
Search impression share: Search Network impressions divided by the number of impressions your ads were eligible for (campaign level).
Display impression share: Display Network impressions divided by the number of impressions your ads were eligible for (campaign level).
Search Lost IS (budget): Percentage of time your ads weren't shown on the Search Network due to insufficient budget (campaign level).
Display Lost IS (budget): Percentage of time your ads weren't shown on the Display Network due to insufficient budget (campaign level).
Search Lost IS (rank): The percentage of time your ads weren't shown on the Search Network due to poor Ad Rank in the auction.
Display Lost IS (rank): The percentage of time your ads weren't shown on the Display Network due to poor Ad Rank.
Search Exact match IS: The impressions you've received divided by the estimated number of impressions you were eligible for on the Search Network for search terms that matched your keywords exactly (or close variants of your keyword).
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In the past, advertisers would rely on average rank to understand ad position, but that metric isn’t truly meant to describe where an ad appears on a page. In 2018, Google Ads also rolled out four new metrics that can help you understand where your ads appear on the search engine results pages:
Impr. (Absolute Top) % - Percent of your ad impressions that are shown as the very first ad above the organic search results.
Impr. (Top) % - Percent of your ad impressions that are shown anywhere above the organic search results.
Search Absolute Top Impression Share - Impressions you’ve received in the absolute top location (the very first ad above organic search results) divided by the estimated number of impressions you were eligible to receive in the top location.
Search (Top) IS - Impressions you’ve received in the top location (anywhere above organic search results) compared to the estimated number of impressions you were eligible to receive in the top location.
Google provides this illustration to distinguish between absolute top and top impression share:
Having a clear understanding of ad positioning can help you diagnose campaign performance issues and make decisions to increase your bids and quality. For example, knowing what percentage of eligible top impressions your ads capture helps you determine if you should increase your bids. Search absolute top impression share and Search top impression share are valuable indicators of available opportunity to show your ads in more prominent positions.
Impression data can tell you why a keyword may be performing poorly. The granularity of impression share lost due to budget or rank explains exactly what changes you need to make in order to improve ad position.
Bidding too low on keywords can prevent your ads from appearing on the first page. In turn, this can lead to low impressions and conversions. Paying attention to impressions and position metrics can help you make sure your ads get enough visibility to meet your advertising goals.
Analyzing impression metrics and average position together can also tell you a lot about campaign performance issues.
There can be a number of reasons behind poor impression share. Key metrics provide insights into which factors are impacting performance. Then you can make the necessary changes to combat it. Here are the main areas you can focus on to improve targeting in Adwords:
Increase your budget
Your budget controls how often an ad is shown. If your daily budget is too low, it can reach its limit early in the day. This means missed opportunities for ad impressions. Experiment with increasing your budget to see if this fixes the problem.
Decrease regional targets
If you’re targeting a large regional area, it’s difficult to get your ads shown as much as possible. But, if you restrict your location settings to a smaller area, you have more control and potential to dominate impression share. Restricting your targeting to a smaller region will, of course, lead to fewer impressions overall, but it allows you to gain the impression share you need to drive clicks and conversions for your ads.
Improve ad quality
An important factor impacting rank and subsequent position is ad quality. If your ad is poorly optimized or irrelevant for your target keyword, this can negatively impact your Quality Score. Google details a number of strategies you can use to improve ad Quality Score.
Re-adjust your budget
If for some reason you decide to increase your regional targets, this can negatively impact impression share. To combat this issue, you can re-adjust your budget to cover the cost of targeting more potential impressions with your ads.
Increase bids
Probably the biggest opportunity to target impression share is through strategic bidding. Raising bids can improve the chances your ad will show in an auction. Advertisers can make these changes manually by increasing bids for keywords with poor impression share. Or they can use automated bidding strategies to target impression share overall.
Today there are lots of ways to target impression share as a bidding strategy in Adwords. Each has its unique features and benefits to automate account bidding optimization.
Scripts
Google AdWords scripts are a way of controlling changes in your AdWords account using JavaScript code. They can be used to automate all sorts of tasks, including controlling your bidding strategy.
Here’s an example of a script you can use to bid to impression share instead of ad position. It automatically finds keywords whose impression share is too low, then increases their bids. Next, it finds all keywords with a clickthrough rate better than 1% and impression share that’s too high and decreases those bids.
Scripts are a great way to operationalize a bidding strategy to target impression share. Just make sure the script you use has all the capabilities you need to control your account in the right way. For example, a script could completely disregard the budget constraints you need.
Automated Rules
Automated rules are another easy way to target impression share as a bidding strategy. Google’s automated rules can be used to automate all sorts of processes, such as ad scheduling, pausing low-performing keywords, controlling budgets and costs.
It’s also possible to use automated rules to target an average position with your bidding. But since Average Position doesn’t really reflect ad position on a page, you could instead target other impression share metrics, such as Search Absolute Top impression share or Search (Top) IS.
Here’s how to create automated rules targeting impression share metrics:
1. Click Keywords
2. Click the three-dot icon and select Create an automated rule
3. Under "Type of rule", select Change keyword bids
4. In the "Apply to keywords" section, choose All enabled keywords.
5. Under “Action”, select Increase bids.
6. In the "Condition" section, set an appropriate impression share metric.
7. Set a target percentage for your condition.
Here’s an example of what automated rules settings look like for Search lost abs. top IS:
Automated Bidding
Google Ads automated bidding offers a number of strategies to optimize toward specific business goals, such as maximize clicks, target ROAS, target CPA, and maximize conversions. In 2018 they introduced a new strategy: target impression share.
You can use Target Impression Share to automatically set bids to reach a specific visibility goal:
For example, if you set an Impression Share target of 70% on top of page, Google’s automated bidding technology will set CPC bids to ensure your ads appear on top of page 70% of the total possible amount of times they could show. You can use this automated bidding strategy at the campaign level, or apply it as a portfolio strategy across multiple campaigns.
Over the past year or so, Google has been making changes to depreciate the value of ad position metrics and encourage advertisers to focus on targeting impression share. Now that there’s a wealth of granular impression share metrics available, it’s easy for advertisers to use them to drive campaign goals.
At the very least, PPC managers should start paying attention to these metrics and how they’re impacted by campaign changes. Targeting impression share as an automated bidding strategy is the best way to maximize the value of this metric for PPC performance.
Before the days of digital everything, it was impossible to time advertisements in a way that targeted audiences at the moment that would make the most impact on their buying decisions. Today, it’s virtually impossible to realize success from campaigns that aren’t built to touch consumers at just the right time and place.
Get a leg-up on your competitors! Take a look at the reasons the clock should be an essential part of your campaigns, below.
Consumers are more inclined to make purchasing decisions on certain days of the week and during certain times of the day. Sending your messages into cyberspace without adhering to your audience's particular habits is a sure way to miss out on ample opportunities to be seen. On the other hand, utilizing tools that will talk to consumers when they’re most likely to pay attention, will allow you to optimize ROI and drive brand awareness.
Data analytics provide the insights needed, to ensure you're speaking to consumers when they’ll actually be listening. It’s all about understanding consumer behaviors and adjusting your outreach in a way that resonates with them. Pay attention to daily, weekly, and seasonal trends that affect your own unique business, as well as general best practices that will help bolster campaigns overall.
By understanding how consumers interact with your advertising, you’re optimizing marketing efforts without wasting interactions or compromising your bottom line.
No matter what your company does—business has certain ebbs and flows. Acknowledging these trends allows you to capitalize on consumers’ attention. Ignoring them means potentially leaving money on the table, regardless of the elements incorporated into your campaign.
Improperly timed messages put your brand at risk by:
Learn more about timing in relation to your campaigns, and more! Request a demo to see how you can automate and optimize your digital media with Basis! We're excited to show you all that Basis can do.
‘Ask the Expert’ is a series that breaks down the tools, tech, and trends you’ve been hearing about in the trade pubs and around the office. We ask our in-house experts the tough questions and write up the answers in bite-sized pieces for your reading pleasure.
This month’s topic? Amazon search. We brought in Centro’s national director of paid search, Lindsay Martin, to give us the breakdown.
How does Amazon search advertising work?
Amazon search advertising provides paid opportunities within the results that show up when a user searches a keyword on Amazon. Ads can be served on desktop and mobile browsers as well as on the Amazon mobile app. Unlike Amazon’s programmatic ad offerings, advertisers must sell products directly on Amazon if they want to use Amazon search ads. It is like paid search on Google, where campaigns are targeted through a combination of keywords and bids.
What ad formats are included as part of Amazon search?
Amazon search is inclusive of three different ad formats.
Should a brand create an Amazon store?
An Amazon store provides a more immersive experience for consumers to interact with your brand. Creating one is free and can be done based on templates within the Amazon search console. It’s like going to Target and looking at an entire display for a makeup brand.
What is ACOS?
ACOS is the advertising cost of sale. The goal of Amazon search campaigns is typically to drive the lowest ACOS. This is the inverse of return on ad spend (ROAS) and can be calculated as a percentage. ACOS = total ad spend / total ad sales x 100.
How much do Amazon search campaigns cost?
Ads are priced based on cost-per-click (CPC). Amazon search is a real-time bidding atmosphere. Demand is created by a combination of user interest (search volume) as well as the competitive auction. Sponsored product ads must also win the buy-box to be shown within the search results.
What’s imperative to success on Amazon search?
Advertisers need a strong handle on inventory to see success with Amazon search. If inventory is a challenge, it is easy to lose your spot in the buy box to a third-party seller. Ratings, reviews, and content are also important factors to consider. It is recommended that all advertisers have at least 3.5 stars and a minimum of 15 reviews before choosing to advertise an individual ASIN (product). High quality content integrates product descriptions, images, comparative charts, and copy to help customers make informed decisions. All of these impact ad campaign effectiveness on Amazon.
How would Amazon search ads synchronize with other advertising a marketer uses outside of the Amazon ecosystem?
Amazon search complements a full funnel digital strategy. Amazon campaigns focus on “in aisle” purchases. Users can filter for product features such as reviews, pricing, etc. Google is focused on exploration, where to buy, and perhaps pricing. There’s a strong case to be made that these platforms should complement each other, rather than be viewed as either/or.
While you can’t pixel an Amazon page, you can understand attribution of your other digital media by:
I’m sold. How does Centro help with Amazon search advertising?
Centro offers full-service management of Amazon search. This is inclusive of keyword research, copywriting, bid strategy, and campaign optimization, as well as reporting and insights around campaign performance.
Dynamic search ads, commonly referred to as DSAs, have been around for quite a while now, but they’re still not widely used by the majority of advertisers. Both Google and Bing offer DSAs as an option to automatically generate PPC ads for search campaigns, but contrary to popular belief, the feature offers many additional benefits beyond just automated ad creation. In this article, we provide a comprehensive guide to DSAs and insight into their value for performance marketers.
Dynamic search ads are ads automatically created by Google based on a user’s search query and the content on your website. Creating targeted ads is time-consuming, especially for businesses with a large inventory. DSAs can help you find customers on Google and present them with the most relevant offer for their needs.
When you opt-in for dynamic ad targeting, Google bots crawl your website, match search terms to your site content, and then create a dynamic ad. This ad type is ideal for advertisers with a well-developed website or a sizeable portfolio of goods or services. When someone searches on Google for terms related to your landing page titles and content, Google Ads selects the most relevant landing page and generates a related headline for your ad.
For example, say an advertiser owns a hotel chain and someone searches for “luxury hotel New York.” Google then creates a relevant ad with the headline “Luxury hotel - NYC” and links to the appropriate landing page. There’s no way to tell the difference between dynamic search ads and regular PPC ads in Google. They look exactly the same in search results:
DSAs, though, have the potential to deliver more relevant messaging based on search queries and your landing page content.
And Google isn’t the only search engine offering DSAs as a campaign option: Bing does the same with a few additional features to maximize ad targeting relevance.
All sorts of marketing initiatives are automated. This leaves some advertisers wondering if ad copy creation should be one of them. But using DSAs has many benefits beyond automating a time-consuming task:
Accurate keyword targeting is a powerful way to reach audiences through paid search, but even accounts with the most comprehensive keyword lists are bound to miss some relevant search queries. Since DSAs involve independently scanning your landing pages for suitable terms to target, they can fill in any gaps that come up in your keyword-based targeting campaigns.
With traditional ad targeting, there’s no way to create a headline that’s optimally relevant for every target keyword in an ad group. DSAs offer a unique opportunity to create the most relevant headlines every time, based on both your landing page copy and the exact search term people used to find your ad.
A major challenge for advertisers who sell many products is keeping their ads updated when inventory changes. DSAs address this issue by regularly crawling your website and adjusting your ads accordingly. As a result, Google will never show ads for products that are temporarily or permanently out-of-stock. Clicking through on ads for out-of-stock products is frustrating for users and results in wasted budget spend for advertisers. Using DSAs helps you automatically minimize campaign performance issues from inventory changes.
In the same vein, if you make changes to your landing page copy or product descriptions, DSAs will consider this in the new ad copy it creates. This ensures your headlines are always maximally relevant to your landing page content.
While DSAs are automatically generated, you still have complete control over who you target and with what content. Google’s DSAs offer several options for targeting:
Dynamic search ad targeting helps advertisers create more relevant ads that reach a larger audience of people beyond traditional keyword targeting. Automatically creating ad copy that optimally matches user search queries increases clickthrough rates on ads and ensures they’re directed to the most relevant landing pages, encouraging more people to convert on-site as well.
Keywords don’t always match search intent in the way advertisers expect, leading them to unintentionally target low-quality leads that aren’t interested in their products or services. By considering both your landing page content and search query relevance, Google Ads can help improve the quality and quantity of leads you attract from PPC ads.
Lastly, like with most marketing automation technologies, DSAs save significant time. Creating comprehensive keyword lists and matching them to relevant landing pages is a major undertaking for even the smallest Google Ads accounts. The same goes for creating relevant headlines that best match your keyword categories.
DSAs take on both of these tasks, freeing up account managers to focus on campaign optimization or pursuing growth initiatives. Automating tedious tasks empowers advertisers to spend more time improving budget spend, campaign targeting and performance, driving important business goals in the process.
Interested in trying out DSAs for yourself? Here’s how to create dynamic search ads in Google Ads. (For Bing dynamic search ad instructions, read this article.)
That’s all you have to do to create a DSA campaign and start seeing the benefits for yourself!
Dynamic Search Ads are automated, but there are still many campaign optimizations you can make to improve performance. Here’s how to create DSAs that maximize campaign performance from the beginning:
Google Ads offers expanded text ads as an option to add more descriptive text to ads on Search and Display. At first, this feature was only available to traditional ad types, but in 2017, they rolled it out for DSAs as well. Using the expanded description field gives you an opportunity to deliver a more relevant and meaningful message to your audience. It’s also the only part of your ad that isn’t dynamically created.
Expanded text ads is an important feature for advertisers who want more control over their ad messaging than what basic DSAs have to offer.
DSAs aren’t for every kind of business, but many can see positive results using this ad type to better target their audiences. To get an idea of how DSAs might perform, try targeting a specific audience to experiment. For example, you can use dynamic search ads to target Re-marketing Lists for Search Ads (RLSAs). If the campaign improves ad visibility and clicks, then you can expand to target more of your audience.
You can also experiment with different ad targeting strategies, such as landing pages, categories, or page feeds. Create exclusions for pages that might not perform well, and see how it impacts performance.
Lastly, you can also set bid adjustments to increase or decrease your ad target bids. This gives you more control over when you use dynamic ads to target your audiences.
One issue some advertisers have with DSAs is a lack of control over what search queries their ads are shown for. They have to depend on Google’s interpretation of their site content for keyword matches. There’s always the possibility Google will misinterpret meaning, showing ads for irrelevant search queries in the process.
One way to prevent this problem and improve DSA performance is by creating negative keyword lists. If you’ve run traditional ad campaigns in the past, you’ve probably already built a list of negative keywords that are equally relevant for DSA campaigns. Otherwise, you should take the time to consider how Google might misinterpret your landing page content to create negative keyword lists. If that’s too challenging, then the best option is to launch your DSA campaigns then closely monitor your Search Terms Report to see what kind of queries your ads are showing for. Then you can add negative keywords to your list when necessary.
You can use manual bidding with DSA campaigns, however, automated bidding and automated ad creation work quite well together. When both processes are automated, Google Ads can use auction-time signals to set bids and improve performance. For instance, it’s possible to set bids based on the exact wording of a user’s query to better match your bid strategy to what people are actually searching for. Target CPA, Target ROAS, or Enhanced CPC are good automated bidding strategies to use with DSA campaigns.
Apprehensive advertisers might think this is too much automation to really drive meaningful results from your ad campaigns, but automated bidding combined with DSAs allows Google to make more optimizations than even the largest PPC management team could manage.
Google conducted a case study illustrating the impact of combining DSAs with automated bidding. Trivago, one of the world’s largest hotel search engines, adopted this strategy with conversion-based automated bidding. The results were:
Of course, if you’re still not sure if combining DSA with automated bidding is the right choice for your business, you can always test it out with a new campaign experiment. Use automated bidding and DSAs to target a small portion of your audience, monitor performance, then see the results for yourself.
You can automate all sorts of marketing processes nowadays. But many advertisers agree that creating relevant ad copy is one thing that will always require human insight to optimize. It’s true that advertisers have a keen understanding of what kind of marketing message drives clicks and conversions. DSAs, though, offer a powerful option to combine great ad copy with ultra-relevant headlines tailored to the search queries of individual users.
Create a compelling message for your expanded search ad description and allow Google bots to create the right headlines for your landing pages. Make efforts to maximize the benefits of DSAs for your business to realize the value of automated ad creation for yourself.
Whenever Google rolls out a new feature to the search space, Bing is not far behind with almost identical functionality. This case is true with Bing Shopping Ads. When you’re seeing great results from your Shopping Ads in Google, why test out Bing and look to “fix something that isn’t broken?” In this article, we offer an answer and explore the main benefits of utilizing Bing Shopping.
We’re all familiar with the pros and cons of Bing Search that make opting in an easy choice. A couple of the most notable perks are lower CPCs and more affluent and typically higher education users, while some aspects that could be viewed as negative include an older demographic and only about 30% reach in the search space. Bing Shopping features all the same pros of PPC advertising, however, some of the Bing attributes seen as potential cons could actually be considered benefits. Let’s dive in to why.
One aspect that typically concerns those using Bing Ads is the user demographic skews older. Bing users have proven to be in an older demographic likely due to the default Bing settings on Microsoft devices. It is assumed that older users are unable to change the default web browser setting from Microsoft to Chrome as an example, or simply do not care which search browser they use, so long as the information is valid.
So how can an older demographic be considered a pro? Due to the simplicity of shopping ads showing actual product images, versus text descriptions, the decision to convert is easier, which is why shopping ads have proven to yield higher click-through rates and conversion rates than text ads. Skipping out on Bing Shopping ads because of the age demographic can be a costly mistake when considering the performance benefit of an older user base.
A common reason to pass on Bing for both traditional paid search and shopping is that Bing only accounts for roughly 30% of the search market. This percentage may seem insignificant in comparison to Google, but since the competition is much lower in Bing compared to Google, the average cost per click is also much lower. If budget is limited, Bing is a low-risk option for many advertisers. Lower reach is often a big disadvantage for brands and can be hard to sell as a positive, especially for those with a niche offering. It can be argued that even though the traffic is lower with Bing, it is still worth testing out because in most cases the overall spend is less on Bing. A huge selling point for Bing shopping is the lower cost per click, with on average, better conversions. Lower levels of competition will also allow you to stay online longer throughout the day. Higher impression share, or share of voice as it is called on Bing, is also something to consider as a benefit of Bing Shopping.
Referring back to demographics, another positive characteristic of the audience base in Bing is that the users are higher educated and more affluent than with Google. One new feature for dynamic search ads, text ads, and shopping ads through Bing is LinkedIn Profile Targeting. Utilizing LinkedIn Profile Targeting will give you higher control over your audience as you’re able to filter by company, job title, and job function. This feature builds upon the higher educated demographic. The tradeoff with Bing versus Google is that Bing has less traffic, but the traffic is of higher quality - given the more affluent audience, higher dollar conversions are typical of Bing, and yield a higher return on investment. If you are looking for quality over quantity, Bing is your best bet.
Bing Ads is now Microsoft Advertising. More than just a new name, Microsoft Advertising also comes with new advertising products and features as well! One new product worth mentioning is the Microsoft Audience Network, which uses AI and machine learning to better match customer intent and target a more relevant audience to improve performance. Microsoft also rolled out Sponsored Products to help advertisers boost traffic to their top products in shopping campaigns. Sponsored Products include new consumer experiences that help shoppers filter, suggest, and visually search and find relevant products, giving you more control over your bids and campaign structure.
With all of Bing’s new features and products, deciding to work with Bing Shopping has become a strategic necessity rather than an afterthought. Utilizing Bing Shopping is easier than ever, especially since Google shopping campaigns can be imported directly into Bing. With Basis, strategies and reporting across the two publishers sit directly in one single source of truth, allowing for a more holistic overview of performance.
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If you’d like to learn more about how we can improve your performance on Bing and indeed drive better outcomes across your entire digital media program, get in touch with us today.