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Happy Mental Health Month! We’re taking time this May to examine how we can better promote mental wellbeing in ourselves, our workplace and communities. Like anything else worth doing, maintaining mental health takes effort, diligence and a certain level of honesty—both with ourselves and the people around us.
When it comes to maintaining mental wellbeing in the workplace, it can be a struggle to strike a healthy balance. Work can be fast-paced and demanding, and with these demands come anxiety and stress—it’s inevitable! One thing that sets Centro apart from other companies is the variety of resources available to employees that help address and manage these emotions.
Think about it—if we were to walk into work with a fever and a runny nose, there would be no hesitation to let peers know that we weren’t feeling well—maybe we’d even stay at home and rest, or make an appointment with a doctor, depending on the severity of symptoms. Why shouldn't the same apply to mental health?
Anxiety and depression are common mental health struggles. According to Assurance (Centro’s insurance provider), nearly 6.8 million Americans live with Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD), which is characterized by “persistent and excessive worry.” Anxiety disorders alone affect 57 million adults in America, while depression affects more than 300 million worldwide, according to the World Health Organization (WHO).
Here’s why Mental Health Month is so important: Although anxiety and depression are considered "highly treatable" by WHO, only 36.9% of individuals suffering from them reported seeking treatment in 2016. On the other hand, according to the CDC 77.8% of people diagnosed with sinus infections sought treatment by a medical professional. Interesting, right?
So, why is it that when our physical health needs attention we're comfortable seeking help, but when our mental health is suffering, we're less likely to reach out? Unfortunately, the stigma surrounding mental illness has a lot to do with it. Luckily, we know how to combat that stigma—by having open conversations that normalize mental health and mental health treatment.
Part of what makes Centro so great is the company’s consideration for our employees’ mental health and wellbeing. For example, Centro offers the option to take “Ferris Bueller Days”—a personal day (or two) to use however you see fit, with the intention of taking space from work, to relax and find time for yourself. Centro also provides on-site (and remote) yoga and meditation services to provide an additional outlet, and help employees manage stress and anxiety. Our robust benefits package also allows employees to seek affordable mental health care as needed.
Over the course of May, we will continue to highlight the significance of mental health and wellbeing, and how we work to manage it in our daily lives. It’s important to acknowledge mental health in our workplace and is just one of the many ways Centro is always striving to cultivate a better you.
Big things are happening at Centro in 2019! Learn more about our unique culture and check out our careers page, to see how you can grow with us.
Balancing your SEM budget is one of the major challenges of marketing management today. You put a lot of effort into PPC budget forecasting to secure the funds you need and so the last thing you want is to mismanage it through overspending or underspending.
Poor Adwords budget management can lead to missed performance targets. It can also frustrate the leaders who put you in charge of SEM in the first place. That’s why it’s important to balance optimizing your campaigns for budget caps as well as performance goals.
Numerous factors can contribute to poor SEM budget spend. And even the smallest inefficiencies in your maximum cost per click (CPC), targeting, and overall bid strategy can add up to serious budget management issues down the road. Here’s how to address some of the biggest problems that cause Adwords overspending or underspending.
Setting Your Budget Too Low
The most common reason for SEM budget underspending is setting your budget too low. Small businesses often have this problem, but even larger enterprises are known to set very low budgets when trying out new campaigns and strategies. What they don’t realize is that their cautious approach is the origin of their performance issues.
When you have a small war chest, it becomes more difficult to bid on more relevant (and competitive) keywords. As a result, your impression share will suffer. Bidding low on competitive keywords significantly reduces the chances that you’ll win bid auctions and get visibility for your ads in search results. To see if insufficient budget is your issue, use Auction Insights in Google Ads. This tool breaks down how your ads are performing in bid auctions compared to your competitors.
Auction Insights will show you:
If your ads are performing poorly on these metrics, then an insufficient budget could be the culprit. To fix this, you’ll need to either increase your budget or reduce the number of campaigns you’re running. Then you can reallocate more of your budget to make the remaining campaigns more competitive.
Low Conversion Rate
Another common reason you might underspend your SEM budget is if your conversion rate is too low. Failing to use your full allocation doesn’t mean you’re saving money, it means you’re missing out on clicks and conversions.
If your ads appear to be performing well in Auction Insights but your conversion rate is low, then that means there’s something wrong with your targeting or ad copy. You’re spending budget for your ads to rank well in search results, but nobody is clicking on them. Maybe your ad copy isn’t relevant enough to the keywords you’re targeting, or, maybe the keywords you’re targeting aren’t relevant enough to your business.
Take a look at keyword performance as well as your ad copy. Then you can pause certain ad groups or remove keywords that aren’t generating enough clicks. You may also want to adjust your bids to prioritize spend for keywords or audiences that get the most clicks.
Seasonality
Seasonality is a factor that can influence both budget overspend and underspend. Seasonal changes in the search volume of certain keywords impact performance and spend for most PPC advertisers. In order to prevent poor Adwords budget management, it’s necessary to factor seasonal variations into your PPC budget forecasting and budget pacing month-to-month.
Marketers can use Google Trends to see how, and to what extent, seasonality affects the SEM landscape for their business niche. If you type in target keywords, you can view trends in search volume each month of the year as well as long-term trends since 2004. For example, the keyword “snow tires” shows a predictable spike in search volume during the winter months over the past five years:
An increase in search volume means more opportunities to get impressions and spend your budget. It also marks a time when PPC advertisers will bid more competitively, just like e-commerce businesses do during the holiday shopping season. Failing to make adjustments to these changes can cause Adwords budget management issues.
Seasonal decreases in search volume can also lead to budget spend problems. Say, for example, you’re allotted a $5,000 monthly PPC budget with the goal of keeping your cost-per-acquisition (CPA) below $20. This is easy enough to maintain until a seasonal decrease in search volume leaves you underspending by $1500 on your budget.
To fix this, you could include more (less relevant) keywords in your campaign targeting. This could end up attracting less qualified traffic, increasing your CPA in the process. Retrospectively, you should have factored seasonality into your annual campaign forecast in the beginning. $5,000 a month means a $60,000 annual budget. So, you could allocate more budget for high volume months and less budget for low volume months, averaging out to your $5,000 goal.
Google Ads Features
The daily budget you set in Google Ads doesn’t constitute a spending cap. It’s the average spend Google’s algorithms want to shoot for when bidding. Sometimes you’ll end up bidding less, and other times you’ll end up bidding more, but it’s common for PPC advertisers to log in to their account and discover they’ve significantly overspent their daily budget. Campaign settings could be the culprit.
Back in 2017 Google announced a mandatory change to how daily budgets are handled. Adwords daily budgets can now overspend by 200% to reach advertiser goals. This announcement was frustrating and confusing for advertisers because budgets are set for a reason. Now, though, it can still feel like you don’t have control over how much you end up spending daily, weekly, or monthly.
To address this issue, you could just accept the wisdom of Google’s algorithms and rest easy knowing you’re not really overbidding by 200% in the long run. Google will balance out your bids and never charge you if your overall budget is exceeded. Or, you can make some changes to get more control over your budget pacing. Currently, there’s no way to stop Google from overspending your daily budget in the settings, but you can use scripts to control overspend in Google Adwords and Google Shopping.
Poor Ad Rank
If your ads aren’t ranking well, you may find yourself regularly increasing your bids in order to beat out your competitors. Inadvertently, you can end up spending a lot more than necessary to get the ad position you really want. However, the reason behind your poor ad rank might not be the stiff competition, but rather because you’re simply targeting bad keywords or audiences, or there’s something wrong with your ads entirely.
Here are some important Google Ads metrics you can look at to see if poor ad rank is causing you to overspend your budget:
There are many factors that can contribute to poor ad rank. When you target less relevant keywords, it impacts your click-through rate and Quality Score: an important metric Google uses to decide ad rank. So, go through and eliminate problematic keywords from your campaigns that have a low CTR.
You should also look at audiences, other targeting dimensions, and your ad copy as potential factors in poor ad rank. Pause poorly performing campaigns until you can narrow down the issue, and in the meantime reallocate your budget spend to better performing campaigns.
Dimensions with Poor ROI
As a PPC manager, your goal is to keep your average cost per click (CPC) and cost per conversion as low as possible while still maintaining campaign performance to meet your marketing goals. How much you need to spend for a conversion, though, will depend on a great myriad of factors, including dimensions like location, ad schedule, and device. Allocating too much of your budget to dimensions with poor ROI leads to spending much more than necessary to get conversions.
Look at devices, for example. If you analyze past campaign performance, you may find that your average CPC and cost per conversion are lower on phones than desktop computers. Naturally, you wouldn’t want to eliminate mobile devices from your campaign altogether, but you could introduce an adjustment to bid more on searches from desktop computers. This way you can focus more of your budget on getting cheaper conversions and reduce wasted ad spend in the process.
To identify bid adjustment opportunities, check out your devices, ad schedule, and locations tabs in Google Ads. Important metrics to pay attention to are:
You can also reduce unnecessary spend by adjusting your bids for different audiences that have a good ROI. Audiences can be based on demographics, purchase intent, remarketing, and other factors that make them more relevant and valuable for your business to target.
An Aggressive Bidding Strategy
It’s easy for PPC managers to get caught up in the key performance indicators (KPIs) and forget about the underlying goals they represent. Sometimes when you focus on using your ad spend to maximize campaign performance, you end up spending more than you need to meet business goals.
Using an aggressive bidding strategy to maximize impression share or obtain the top ad position is an example of this. You’re going to need to bid significantly higher if all you want is to get your ad in the #1 spot in search results. Ranking in the second, third, or fourth position, though, can still drive a lot of clicks and conversions for your business. Maybe it’s not necessary to target the first position and still get conversions. The only way you can find out is by reigning in your aggressive bidding strategy, and once you do reduce your bids, you’ll have more budget to reallocate to new initiatives.
There are countless ways to accidentally overspend or underspend your SEM budget. The reasons outlined above are just a partial list of the most common causes of budget pacing issues. Addressing them requires paid search practitioners to consistently monitor campaign performance and budget spend. And, even if you follow all the best practices, you’ll still end up with some inefficiencies.
If you want to make SEM budget management a priority, then technology is key. PPC optimization tools provide a comprehensive solution to eliminate Adwords overspend and underspend overall.
Calculating Optimum Cost Per Click
Setting the best maximum CPC to meet your advertising goals with your SEM budget is a major challenge. The value of each keyword varies by relevance and performance. It takes time and a lot of historical performance analysis to set the best CPC for each keyword you target. Even then, the competitive market changes so quickly that your optimum bid settings become outdated very quickly.
Automated bidding strategies are the solution to this problem. Google Ads offers free automated bidding technology powered by artificial intelligence (AI). It’s designed to process Google’s latest market and competitive data, making necessary changes to your bids to maximize performance and minimize unnecessary ad spend.
Automation can make micro-changes to your bids at a rate and efficiency level beyond what a human can accomplish. However, if you want to take full advantage of automation for SEM budget management, you should invest in a third-party bid management tool. Google’s AI only gains insights from data gathered from Google properties. With external technology, it’s possible to include all sorts of relevant data into bid calculations, including historical revenue, LTV data, and other internal metrics that are important to your business.
PPC Budget Forecasting
Using accurate PPC budget forecasting technology is the best way to understand the impact of spending on performance before you implement it. Some PPC managers calculate budget forecasts by hand, but it’s worthwhile to use an advanced technology that can consider seasonality, the competitive landscape, and other factors that impact necessary spending.
Google Ads technology can help you with forecasting CPC. Go to Keyword Planner, then click “Get search volume and forecasts” to see for yourself.
Upload the keyword terms you’re targeting, then Keyword Planner will return forecasting statistics:
The report includes your estimated average CPC, cost, and other important information. You can break down the cost and performance of individual keywords, devices, and other dimensions. The forecast also automatically considers seasonality and other performance factors based on Google’s own data.
Creating accurate forecasts allows you to evaluate the impact of potential bid changes on performance before applying them. This way you can pinpoint exactly what targeting and spending strategies will help you achieve your PPC goals, allowing you to avoid inefficiencies that lead to SEM budget underspending or overspending.
Some third-party bid automation technologies also have forecasting features you can use. This is beneficial to help you create a more detailed and accurate forecast based on all relevant business data.
Automated Bid Adjustments
As mentioned earlier, improving the targeting of dimensions and audiences is a huge opportunity to reduce wasted ad spend. Even for the most basic PPC accounts, there are countless ways to target and adjust bids to make your campaigns more efficient, so optimization is a huge task to take on.
Setting bid adjustments by hand also leads to some inherent inefficiencies. Say after analyzing your campaign performance, you discover that a 20% bid increase for in-market audiences reduces your cost-per-conversion by 10%. You know that increasing your bid is the right strategy, but how do you know that 20% is the perfect adjustment? What if a +15% bid increase provided the same results? You’d have to test your campaign performance at different bid points to find out.
The best way to ensure you take full advantage of these targeting opportunities is with automated bid adjustments. Bid automation technology uses AI and machine learning to determine the exact bids required to meet your goals. It can also make changes to your bids over time, adjusting to changes in your market, business, and the bid landscape.
Avoiding Adwords overspend and underspend is the key to growth in the PPC world. Securing SEM budget is a challenge, and you want to ensure you maximize spending value to reach performance goals.
Effective Adwords budget management means constantly being on the lookout for opportunities to improve campaign efficiency. Your bid strategy, ad copy, seasonality, conversion rate, ad rank and more can all impact how well you spend your SEM budget. The smartest approach is to manage these factors with PPC budget forecasting and automation technology. This frees up more time and resources to scale your Adwords strategy. Improving efficiency also frees up budget you can reinvest in new advertising initiatives.
Whether your PPC program targets users in many countries or is solely domestic, how to best optimize toward a bilingual or multilingual audience is an often overlooked question. According to the US Census Bureau's 2017 American Community Survey, 21.6% of Americans speak a language other than English at home, and depending on the metro area, that percentage can be much higher. Along with considerations like keyword selection and location targeting, if your campaign's target area has a large population of bilingual or non-English speakers, it is important to consider how your overall SEM program's structure and specific settings you employ could mean missing out on potential revenue opportunities and increased efficiency. This article will provide some best practices for PPC marketing in multilingual areas.
Let's start with the first Campaign setting that likely comes to mind when considering this topic: Language. Which languages should you target if at least some of the people in your market may speak more than one? Only the language that corresponds to your ad copy? Only the languages you know are common in that area?
In general, targeting all languages is the ideal method for any campaign to ensure you’re not missing out on potential impressions. The reason is that the Publishers decide whether or not an ad is eligible to show, per its language settings, based on the user's browser language. However, just because the user chooses a particular language for their browser doesn't mean that's the only language they’re searching in. For example, my browser is in English but I regularly search in Spanish as well. By always choosing all languages, you can make sure you’re capturing these additional impressions from bilingual users.
Depending on the region and demand for your product or services, creating language-specific campaigns can be an excellent strategy for capturing untapped segments of the market. If you’re considering whether this is a good option for your program, checking your search queries for terms in the language you’re considering targeting can be a good first step. When running this analysis consider:
On the other hand, even if there’s a decent conversion rate associated with those keywords, you’re still likely to benefit from increased efficiencies by creating a language-specific ad group. Firstly, having ad copy and landing page that better match the user's search queries will help to increase your overall ad rank. In addition, rather than having search queries trigger translated phrases or broad match keywords, you can include common search queries as exact match keywords, making spend more efficient.
If you decide that language-specific campaigns make sense for your program, creating an initial or expanded keyword list isn't as simple as plugging the list from your English campaigns into an online translator. There may be idioms unique to your target language that would make excellent keywords but do not perfectly translate. In addition, just like British versus American English, all languages have dialects, so the most appropriate translation may vary if one dialect is more common in one area versus another. If possible, leverage the help of someone proficient in the language, ideally a native speaker, to help inform your keyword list.
In addition to leveraging keywords from existing campaigns and input from native speakers, short, controlled tests with broad match keywords (based on the English versions of the campaigns) can also help with keyword expansion. Run your language-specific campaigns for one to two weeks with limited daily budgets (to control spend) and monitor search queries for terms that are generating clicks and conversions. Once you have a decent list, refine your ad group structure to follow best practices with a mix of exact, phrase, and broad match modified keywords.
Moreover, don't forget about negative keywords. Along with adding unrelated search queries in the target language as negatives, make sure to add your English keywords as negatives for the language-specific ad group and vice versa to prevent cannibalization.
Once you have keywords and ad copy for your non-English campaigns, it’s time to consider how far down the funnel to go when it comes to translation and localization. At the minimum, you should implement landing pages in the target language as a mismatch between ad copy and landing page language is likely to lead to user drop-off and may negatively impact ad rank given the disconnect between the ad and the user's experience.
But what about the rest of your website? Or, if applicable, your call center? Should you make investments there? The answer is: it depends. If you’re operating in an area where users are primarily bilingual, for example in Scandinavian countries or Switzerland, offering the initial experience in the user's chosen search language but then having the rest of your site and the customer experience in English is a sound strategy. Monitor your conversion rates closely through each step of the funnel to gauge if your level of localization is appropriate or may be leading to drop-off pre-purchase/sign up. If you notice a large percentage of abandonment once the user arrives at an English page on your website or a support phone line only in English, evaluate whether the amount of potential revenue lost merits further investment in translating your website or even hiring additional resources that speak the language fluently.
Lastly, when creating campaigns for a specific language, make sure not to leave retargeting out of the equation. If a user originally clicked on an ad in a specific language or visited a translated version of your website, any retargeting campaigns you place them in should also be targeted to that language. This is especially true for display retargeting. If any of the URLs you are targeting are in another language, make sure the ad's language matches up!
In summary, managing PPC marketing in areas where more than just English is spoken poses special considerations when it comes to program structure and settings but also potential opportunity in terms of increased revenue and efficiency. By following these best practices and taking a gradual, data-driven approach to rollout, you can implement a multilingual strategy that yields significant returns.
Most PPC marketers today would agree that technology is the key to success in 2019 and beyond. Today, there are countless PPC Martech tools available that can help marketers manage, optimize, and grow their advertising efforts. With the PPC Martech landscape growing year after year, though, the possibilities are becoming overwhelming.
Scott Brinker of ChiefMarTec creates a now-famous annual supergraphic summarizing the number and category of Martech solutions available each year. The 2019 version includes 7,040 options, up from a mere 150 in 2011.
As more Martech solutions become available, the problem is no longer if you should use PPC technology to enhance your efforts, but which solutions you use. Some combinations of tools are likely to be more effective, more valuable, and less costly to businesses, helping them get ahead of the competition.
Even ignoring the rest of your Martech stack and just looking at PPC technology, there are still many tools that could be relevant for success. Categories include (but are not limited to):
All marketers need to carefully build a Martech stack of compatible technologies that work together to help them reach their business goals. PPC marketers, in particular, have some critical choices to make regarding a new category of technologies driven by artificial intelligence (AI). These are poised to change not only the number and type of technologies required but also how advertising efforts are managed overall.
Artificial intelligence has been around as an idea and a technology for more than half a century, while PPC is one of the oldest digital marketing strategies on the internet. So why has AI PPC management only just recently become an important topic?
The answer lies in exponential growth in technological capabilities. When AI was first integrated into PPC management technology, applications and potential were limited. Fast forward to 2019 and AI is now so useful to PPC management that it became essential before many businesses even realized they truly needed it.
Take Google Ads, for example. Google is one of the earlier embracers of AI, actively seeking out new ways to incorporate it into their advertising platform. A few years ago their AI-powered solutions were optional; rarely-used beta features for novice advertisers who needed help to optimize their campaigns. Now, Google’s Smart campaigns are the default campaign type. Many in the industry today argue that AI-driven features easily outperform optimizations a PPC manager could make manually.
To understand just how essential AI PPC management is for your PPC Martech stack, just consider the applications. AI can serve many important roles in PPC campaign creation, optimization, and more:
1. Targeting Audiences and Keywords
AI and machine learning PPC technology can learn from search practices, demographics, web browsing behavior, and other relevant data points to identify which audience targeting strategies are likely to convert. It can also deduce the value of certain keywords to help determine which queries lead to the most conversions. Using this knowledge, AI can automate keyword and audience targeting decisions for you.
2. Automated Bidding
By inferring the inherent value of keywords to meet specific marketing goals, bidding technology can calculate the optimal cost-per-click for keywords and implement this bidding strategy automatically. Using historical performance and market data, it can also surface performance opportunities in real-time, automatically adjusting bids to take advantage of them. Automating bidding rather than relying on manual adjustments from PPC managers reduces wasted ad spend and improves campaign efficiency, freeing up more budget for other advertising initiatives.
3. Forecasting Future Performance
Using predictive analytics models and learning from past performance, machine learning technology can effectively predict the future performance of your bid policies. There are many solutions that can forecast performance up to 100 days into the future. Forecasting is a valuable tool for PPC managers who want to either understand the outcomes of new strategies before testing them out, or illustrate PPC potential to clients and business leaders, or both.
4. Improving Ad Re-targeting
AI can drive insights from diverse sets of data about your audience and prospects, using it to improve retargeting efforts. For example, call tracking and analytics solutions can use call tracking data to identify offline leads and better retarget them online. AI-powered call tracking can also identify when conversions happen in real-time. Then it can automatically stop retargeting efforts for leads that converted, even when the purchase was made offline.
5. Addressing Performance Issues
PPC management technology driven by AI can identify performance issues and make the necessary changes to minimize their impact. For example, if an ad starts performing poorly, AI will flag and pause the ad, giving PPC managers time to diagnose and fix the problem. Continuing to bid on a misbehaving ad, even for a short while, can impact your quality score and waste valuable advertising budget. AI offers a safety net to help advertisers minimize the impact of account or campaign issues on performance.
6. Creating and Improving Ad Creative
AI can automatically improve your PPC ads as well as targeting. Google’s Dynamic Search Ads feature is a great example of how AI can help you create the most relevant and effective ads. Dynamic Search Ads refer to your product landing pages then automatically generate relevant headlines and subheadlines based on your page copy. Machine learning can then test out different headline/subheadline combinations and identify which ad copy combination is most effective when it comes to driving clicks and conversions.
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These are just a few examples of the growing number of AI applications for PPC management today. AI can also help with competitor analysis, identifying growth opportunities, split testing, scenario modeling, and many other important tasks.
All these AI-enhanced PPC advertising benefits are powerful reasons for PPC marketers to add this key technology to their Martech stack. But it still leaves two important questions unanswered:
The answers to these questions depend on a number of factors and the goals laid out for your business. For many CMOs today, investment in technology is high enough before even considering expensive machine learning PPC solutions. Indeed, according to Gartner's CMO Spend Survey 2018-19, chief marketing officers are spending significantly more on marketing technology year after year. In 2018, Martech made up nearly one-third of CMO budgets.
Google Ads already offers a variety of free AI-powered solutions that PPC managers can take advantage of without breaking the bank. On the other hand, though, paid third-party solutions offer unique value that can improve your PPC Martech stack even more:
1. More Features
Google Ads' AI solutions are more limited in capabilities and scope. Look at Google Ads automated bidding, for example. It draws on market and audience data from the Google network to make informed bidding decisions for advertisers, yet the business world isn’t limited to Google properties. Third-party automated bidding solutions can draw on relevant business and market data from across the web to make smarter automated bidding decisions.
2. More Compatibility
If you prioritize choosing a PPC technology that’s compatible with other key tools you use, you’re able to avoid PPC Martech overload. It’s possible to minimize the number of technologies needed to optimize your PPC campaigns when you use a comprehensive solution. For example, the ability of some third-party bid optimization technologies to aggregate, analyze and optimize based on all relevant business data eliminates the need for additional data analysis tools to derive insights.
3. More Customization
A big challenge advertisers face is deciding how much of a role AI and automation should play in their PPC strategy. Google Ads offers options to partially and fully automate different aspects of PPC campaigns, but when you allow automation to fully run your optimization strategy, you have less control over what kind of goals to optimize towards.
Third-party automation technologies tend to offer more customization options, giving you more control over how you use automation. Advanced analytics and forecasting capabilities give you the control you need to make strategic optimization decisions while benefiting from full automation. You can also set automation technology to work towards more specific and nuanced key performance indicators that are unique to your business goals.
Third-party options for AI PPC management require financial investment, but their benefits and features offer more growth potential in turn. Improving the efficiency of your budget spend and the effectiveness of your campaigns allows you to invest more in new initiatives, growing revenue, and offsetting the cost of PPC Martech in the process.
How much PPC technology advertisers need really depends on their unique business goals and budget. The key to building an effective PPC Martech stack that brings ROI is balancing the number of tools you use and the value they offer as a whole.
If you just keep adding on new PPC technology to a growing list of necessary tools, you’re going to end up spending far too much of your budget on technology without seeing worthwhile results. Instead, always be on the lookout for comprehensive solutions that cover different business needs. And remember that AI-enhanced PPC advertising technology is essential for businesses that want to improve performance, save time, and stay ahead of the competition in 2019 and beyond.
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To learn more about how you can drive improved PPC performance through Centro’s automated technologies, connect with our digital media experts today.
Manual PPC bidding versus automated PPC bidding. It’s not really an age-old question, but there are certainly plenty of people on both sides of the discussion who have passionate views. But… let’s call it an important dialogue, one that can have a meaningful impact on business results. (It certainly shouldn’t damage any relationships!)
While tactically there are breakdowns of each automated bid strategy available for advertisers - from Google and plenty of others - with pros and cons, we aim here to join the conversation from a different angle. Let’s take a look at the needs and the philosophical goals of search engine marketing and PPC bidding.
With Manual bidding, what are the core byproducts we should extract for discussion?
The first is control. One of the most powerful ideas behind manual bidding is that control falls into the hands of the advertiser, and not into the hands of a search engine ad-publisher or a third party tool. The advertiser has control and visibility into the decision making, the data, the performance, and the outcomes.
Why is control important? There are two primary reasons:
The second byproduct of manual bidding: effort. The other primary idea inextricably coupled with manual bidding is that effort is required, and often a lot of it. Time investment is needed. Continuous analysis, review, and mental energy must be applied on the same set of tasks. By definition, manual bidding takes time and effort!
Why is the effort discussion-worthy? We’ll dig in:
What are we really after here? We want to merge the best that “control” can offer with the best that “effort” can offer.
Obviously our underlying goal is to set and accomplish business outcomes: to have program results be acceptable, or better yet, excellent. We believe control is powerful. We should have the right amount of control. However, we are also limited in the amount of effort we can meaningfully exert.
How do you accomplish this balance?
Well, it starts with reflection (or analysis - whichever word you align with more). Spending a bit of time evaluating your desired level of control (for you personally, and for the programs you manage) and your current versus desired level of effort and time investment.
If you’re reading this article, you’re probably the type of person who is interested in learning and improving the way you operate, and thus likely to take a meaningful shot at reflecting on your present methods (which is a great thing!).
This reflection and analysis should help you to identify options for automating sections of your program: First, where you can take advantage of the elements of control (tactically or strategically). And second, where you can invest effort into places it best serves you, your goals, and your business goals.
No article or blog post can tell you that exact mix of manual versus automated for your specific program, but it can act as a catalyst to begin that reflection process!
Where does automated bidding fit into this type of conversation?
Control has psychological elements, but ultimately the aim is to understand and control performance. You feel and know that you are getting the best performance possible because you are seeing the inputs, “turning the screws” yourself, and seeing the outcomes. Performance and results are ultimately the goal of having all this control.
The reality in many, many cases is that performance will be better when automated processes and calculations take care of the bidding. There are times when automated use cases may not apply as much (when thinking about impression share, or page position, or match type benefits, etc), but where there is data on conversions or revenue, the right strategic goal, and enough volume to merit it, automated bidding will optimize PPC campaigns better than manual human efforts ever could.
The second point, effort, is completely flipped on its head when using automated bidding. The day-in and day-out effort and time investment to manually analyzing performance and making bid adjustments is removed. Yes, you’ll still be reviewing your performance often, but in the world of at-scale paid search, that’s a given.
You create time savings by removing the pain of manually managing countless ad groups and keywords and products, and can use that time on more strategic activities to grow your business. Time and effort will be required, and required in abundance. However, those hours will be worth more. Assuming one doesn’t thoughtlessly apply a single automated bidding strategy to an entire paid search account, the campaigns and portfolios that have specific bid strategies will be operating at a much higher clip, creating time for people to focus on the other parts of the program that need the human touch.
Automation in SEM goes far beyond just doing a process automatically, it gets deep and complex quickly with optimization techniques. This is where artificial intelligence, machine learning, and other engineering and statistics innovations are attacking the process of improving performance in paid search. Automating some campaign management and workflow tasks are helpful to save time - but from a dollars-in, dollars-out perspective, big data applied to bid management has the most potential.
There are obvious places where a human’s manual thoughtfulness is better suited than any sort of machine or automation. Some of those are:
In the past, other items would have been on this list (like where device and audience bid adjustments should be made), but those specifically are now being automated fully by automated providers (from data ingestion, modeling, calculation, and execution). “Machines are taking our jobs” is real; but in the best of ways. You (the human, I presume) get the job of thinking, planning, and deciding, then the robot gathers the data, performs the calculations, and executes hundreds of thousands of actions for you.
Machines (a fun way to name any automated software or system) are obviously better at the niche, nitty-gritty analysis, calculation, operating at scale, and executing at ridiculous speeds. Bidding is one of the best places for automation to take over; it’s a problem that’s based in statistics and numbers that correlate directly from higher funnel (position, impressions, and clicks) to lower funnel (conversions, LTV). The machine’s platform will have a U.I. to make big or small tweaks and test the performance, providing control to the PPC bidding optimization effort.
Then, there’s the data...
Data is the other element that takes the benefits of automation and exponentially amplifies it. With an increase (almost every week, it feels) in the amount of data we can capture about the customer journey, there is so much more to feed the machine! That statistics problem can be worked with a much more robust data set, over a longer and more nuanced customer journey. The requirements from a human to piece that data together to make meaningful decisions for optimizing performance at scale just isn’t feasible.
Automation applied to huge data sets is a beautiful thing.
But how do we maintain control; the type of control described early on in this article? There are three points to make clear at this stage:
Clearly the stance offered here is that automation can add significant value. Nothing works without humans captaining the vessel, but we do believe that the cooperation of humans and machines is the best way to achieve (and exceed) goals in paid search. Machine learning PPC algorithms and automated bid management have tremendous potential, but shouldn’t be unleashed without preparation and thoughtfulness.
Now is as good a time as any to reflect on where it makes sense to invest your time, effort, and hours. In smaller programs where the overhead isn’t enormous and there simply aren’t many huge strategic decisions to make, the decision to proceed manually is likely a great option.
Alternatively, working with a program with over five hundred thousand keywords and a monthly budget around that $500,000 range as well may have much more to gain from automating bidding, and putting that manual, human effort in other areas that allow the machine to perform better at automating, and ultimately allow the business to prosper.
Try to maintain the optimal control and get the best return on effort, but don’t fall into a false sense that full control by a person is better than joint control with an automated solution.
Digital went from just a sliver of the media mix a decade ago, to a majority of ad spend today.
This shift in the advertising industry’s focus can be largely credited to a heightened programmatic mindset, and with that—a pressing expectation for more automated processes in advertising. Centro’s Founder and CEO, Shawn Riegsecker, discusses the impact that automated systems have had on the way advertisers buy media, client expectations around transparency, the advertising job market, and predictions for the future of digital advertising.
Most business leaders today know the importance of investing in search engine marketing (SEM) to reach target audiences and desired goals. But what they might not realize is how much PPC budget they need to succeed, or the value of their ad spend. Whether you’re an independent marketing agency pitching to clients or an in-house SEM manager, you need accurate PPC forecasting to succeed in your role.
It’s simply impossible to build a solid PPC strategy without buy-in from your leadership team. And you won’t get a lot of investment if you’re asking them to allocate funds based on guesswork about future revenue. PPC forecasting gives you hard numbers to prove the value of ad spend to those controlling the finances.
Google Ads forecasts can also help SEM managers understand the impact of different campaign adjustments on future performance. Creating accurate forecasts empowers marketers to evaluate new optimization opportunities before testing them out in the real world. This will ultimately reduce wasted ad spend and maximize the efficiency of SEM efforts overall.
In this article, we present everything you need to know to forecast CPC and project other important PPC performance indicators.
The amount, and quality, of data you have is the most important aspect when it comes to creating an accurate PPC forecast. Using just a few key data points to extrapolate future performance greatly increases the chances that your forecast will be inaccurate. If you’ve already run PPC campaigns in the past, you’ll have a wealth of valuable data that can help you. Important data to include in your forecasting reports includes:
Much of this data can be downloaded from your Google Ads account. Just go to the Account > Export menu, where you can select whether to export your whole account, selected campaigns, or ad groups. There’s a lot of information here, so narrow your selection down to the data points and time ranges most relevant to you.
If you’re creating a brand new Google ads forecast and don’t have any historical data to work with, then you’ll rely on impressions and suggested bid data to make your calculations. Determining your cost per click (CPC) is an important PPC forecasting task, especially when working with new clients or launching campaigns for new products. Getting an accurate estimation of your CPC will inform the necessary budget and monthly ad spend needed to reach business goals.
Forecasting CPC is easy using new features Google added to Keyword Planner last year. Go to Keyword Planner and rather than clicking “Find new keywords,” chose “Get search volume and forecasts.”
You’ll see an option to add in, or upload, new keyword terms you want to target. Simply import them, click “Get Started,” then Keyword Planner will give you a detailed forecast and your average CPC:
The report shows you details of how certain keywords impact performance. Once you create a campaign, you can also adjust max CPC and see how that affects future outcomes. This is a powerful tool to gain insights into how your ads could perform given a certain budget.
One major issue with PPC forecasting is that calculations are based on static market performance. You can only expect your bidding approach to play out exactly as forecasted if your competitors make zero changes to their own strategies. PPC optimization involves auctions. There’s no accounting for how strongly competitors might bid on the same keywords as you. This can have a huge impact on performance.
While there’s no way to predict how your competition will act, it is worthwhile to consider their past behavior as part of your forecasting efforts. Comparing competitor campaigns to yours can help you make necessary adjustments to optimize your campaigns. A helpful tool for this is Google’s Auction Insights. This report details how your previous campaigns performed compared to your competitors. Auction Insight metrics include:
Impression Share: The percentage of impressions you receive versus the total amount of impressions your ad was qualified for.
Average Position: The average position of your PPC ad compared to others.
Overlap Rate: How often another advertiser’s ad received an impression in the same auction that your ad received an impression.
Position Above Rate: How often another advertiser’s ad in the same auction shows in a higher position than your own when both of your ads were shown at the same time.
Top of Page Rate: How often your ad (or a competitor’s ad) was shown at the top of the page in search results.
Outranking Share: How many times your ads outranked your competitor’s ad in the auction.
Google Auction Insights can give you a good idea of how aggressive your competitors are in the auctions and reveal patterns in their strategies. Run frequent reports and see how they change at different times of the day or days of the week. When you’re able to observe certain tendencies in your competitor’s ad schedule or bidding strategy, you can reflect this in your forecasts.
Seasonal trends can have a big impact on bidding, CPC, and ad performance overall. They’re also important to factor into PPC forecasting. For most businesses, seasonal factors can include holidays (like Black Friday shopping), or, they could be related to the weather, such as a towing business wanting to increase bids during the snow season.
There’s no reason to assume that seasonal changes will remain static year after year. Say, for example, you run an e-commerce business that sells bathing suits, and you saw interest quadrupled in “tankini swimwear” between April and June of 2018. Factoring this spike into your 2019 forecasts might lead to inaccurate predictions about future performance. That’s why it’s important to factor in long-term seasonality data for SEM forecasting.
Google Trends is the only tool you need to consider this. Just type in a relevant keyword you’re researching, then you can visualize both short and long term search volume (2004 - present):
This will show you if a seasonal trend is predictable enough to factor into your PPC forecasting calculations. If a seasonal spike looks abnormal compared to previous years, then you’ll need to use contextual information to decide if it’s a fluke or a new trend that’s here to stay.
Gathering important data inputs is the easy part of accurate PPC forecasting. The hard part is analyzing and developing your projection. There are a few different ways to approach SEM forecasting. Each has its own benefits.
Manual Reports
Undoubtedly the most difficult way to forecast CPC and spend is by creating manual reports. PPC forecasting is possible with nothing more than a data set, a spreadsheet, and a few calculations. At a minimum, you’ll need impressions and bid data to create your own reports. If you have no previous campaign data, you can rely on suggested bids and cost per click from Google Ads. If you have previous campaign data, you can also include historical click-through rates, conversion rates, and conversion value.
With your manual report, you should be able to project:
All these calculations will depend on what ad groups, placements, targeting, and budget spend you allow to drive conversions. If you’re presenting projections as a proposal to business leaders, you’ll want to adjust all these factors to determine the best possible combination to drive conversions given your allowance.
An important adjustment to make for your PPC forecasting is impression share. You can’t assume you’ll buy all possible impressions. So calculate impression share to avoid overestimating projected performance. You can use past impression share from Google’s Auction Insights as a guide.
The biggest benefit of manual reports is that they’re completely customizable. You can include whatever data inputs you want, create projections the way you want, and adjust projections based on qualitative insights you gain about your business, market, seasonality, etc. The challenge of creating manual reports is sophistication. If you’re not a statistics whizz, it’s difficult to create highly accurate projections using just a spreadsheet. You can enlist the help of data scientists to do this for you, or turn to other SEM forecasting solutions.
Third-Party Reporting Tools
If you don’t have the skills or resources to create your own reports, then you can use a third-party reporting tool. There are a variety of options out there that will automatically import past performance data from Google Ads as well as consider other relevant data to summarize performance. This is beneficial because you don’t have to continuously download and analyze historical data to forecast spend and CPC. It automatically does this for you.
Third-party reporting tools also come with a variety of SEM report templates designed by PPC professionals so you can create customized forecasting reports beyond what basic spreadsheet analysis can provide.
PPC forecasting will always be a challenge for SEM professionals. There’s no way to really predict future performance with complete accuracy, regardless of how much relevant data you use. That said, if you invest in creating a sophisticated Google Ads forecast, the benefits are many. The better you predict future performance, the more confidence clients will have in your strategies.
Understanding how strategy changes impact future performance also helps you create more effective campaigns overall. With that in mind, investing time in creating manual PPC forecasting reports is a minimum requirement. Taking advantage of advanced tools to automate insights and adjustments can do even more to maximize the value of forecasting for SEM success.
From the podcast on your morning commute to asking Alexa to replenish your dish soap—we are shifting from an onslaught of screens to a new world of digital media powered by audio. Nearly two-thirds of the U.S. population has tuned in to digital audio, with podcasts commanding the largest share—followed by Spotify and Pandora.
In April's webinar, we explore the paid media opportunities that exist for audio today and share how programmatic advertising is driving growth and enabling smarter ways to target desired audiences.
How do you determine a search keyword’s value? Are you making data-driven bid optimization decisions based on keyword data? Should you be focused on keyword revenue-per-click in your PPC campaigns?
Search keywords. They’re valuable. Some are really, really valuable! Others have little to no value. Others you simply don’t know the value of for one reason or another.
What we do know is this: keywords are the lifeblood of paid search. Building a keyword list and then collecting data about keywords is paramount in search engine marketing, especially if you’re looking to optimize PPC campaigns.
If a keyword is generating a lot of traffic and clicks, it’s seen as important - but it may or may not be valuable to your business. You need to understand if it actually drives revenue and conversions.
If a keyword is a “monetizer” - or a high-revenue driving keyword - you’ll want to evaluate how much impact the keyword has on your business. You would look at it and say: “If we pause this keyword, how much will revenue decrease? By how much? If we decrease the bid, will we lose a lot on conversions - or if we increase bids, will we still only generate the same number of conversions?” There are many questions to ask to determine how valuable a keyword can be to your paid search program.
Evaluating a keyword’s value can be a challenging task. Some methods are more simple; some get deeper but may not be actionable; some are totally automated and drive action automatically! What we’re really after is the revenue-per-click metric that truly informs a bidding strategy.
Your keywords drive impressions, they drive ad-clicks, they drive conversions… and hopefully repeat purchases! They’re obviously worth quite a bit, and qualitatively and quantitatively are one of the most reviewed areas within SEM ad campaigns.
The dollar value of a keyword is, in short, the amount of money you can expect to generate from each click from a given keyword. A keyword may have only generated one click, or it may have generated hundreds of thousands of clicks; zero conversions, or dozens per day!
Conversions lead to dollar-driving outcomes. Dollars are our interest here. How much revenue can we earn from each click on each keyword?
Some of those dollar-values are actual and calculable (online or offline purchases for goods; lead form fills that lead to purchases), while others may need to be understood in aggregate based on metrics within your company (subscriptions or lead forms that don’t have a purchase, but create other dollar value).
Google Ads makes it easy to report on keyword performance and rank by impressions, clicks, costs, conversions, and even the aggregate revenue for certain conversions that can be tracked and directly tied back to the Google Ads platform. However, estimating the value of a keyword for a more specific use case (such as using that value for PPC bid optimization) requires a different view of keyword value, which we’ll dig into shortly.
To analyze a more nuanced value of each keyword on your business, you may need to do some serious spreadsheet wrangling. Why? To understand the impact of historical bid changes on conversions over time! (Those time-dependent reports are always hard, aren’t they?)
A method we’ve witnessed involves exporting large change history reports and large historical keyword performance reports, and then stitching them in Excel to look at the trend analysis. To do this, you would map the dates of bid changes on specific keywords to the keywords historical performance on given days on or after that bid change. Then you can get a historical understanding of the impact of that keyword’s bid on revenue, and see how changes impact your business.
Now, is that actionable? Depending on your team’s level of sophistication, it may or may not be - but with sufficient analysis you should have an understanding of how increases or decreases in bids create more efficient CPA or ROAS numbers on your keywords.
The keyword’s value can be understood in many ways, but ultimately you want a keyword valuation model that gives you something actionable to work with. Even more ideally: something that can drive action without you needing to apply all those changes.
In a large program with many keywords, the data export we’ve described may be fairly arduous. Without a program or tool to calculate these keyword values for you automatically, you would need an internal process for calculating the revenue per click on each keyword, which is a significant investment.
Keyword value estimation requires data. Having your conversion data (with revenue numbers) tied back to clicks and keywords is a prerequisite to being able to meaningfully calculate an “estimated keyword value”. However, with more and more data tied back to those keywords, on multiple dimensions, and over time, the true value estimation gets more and more accurate!
When you map all the data about costs and clicks and conversions back to each keyword, you can build a graph of revenue values–what we call “revenue-per-click” (RPC). The RPC graph provides a visual representation of the clicks vs revenue for that keyword. Automated bidding automation tools calculate RPC graphs for every keyword regularly to review data and discern if the value has changed enough to merit a bid change. The RPC calculation at scale enables a mechanism for taking that estimated keyword value and immediately putting it to work in a bidding calculation process.
Revenue-per-click is calculated in a meaningful way only because of large data sets and machine learning models. Without a machine learning powered process, these calculations - and the actions they drive - would lack serious optimization potential.
What is significant about a very granular and specific keyword value? So glad you asked!
When all the conversion data (whether immediate click-to-sale, or LTV from latent and repeat purchases) is used to model a highly accurate keyword value, then acting in a “data-driven” way naturally follows. The data provides a story of how much this particular keyword is worth across other variables, so that the information can be plugged into cost, volume, and bid landscape data to model the optimal bid calculation for any conceivable segment.
For instance, when person A from North Carolina searches for your exact match keyword in the morning on a Tuesday at work using a desktop computer and makes an immediate purchase… the bidding decision made for other similar search queries are valued in a similar light. On the other hand, person B from Los Angeles searching for your keyword in the late evening on a Saturday using a mobile device, and then purchases the next week, has a completely different value. The similar attributes should be accounted for in bidding decisions based on the dollar value calculated from those correlations in the data points.
Estimating the value of a keyword is an important and fundamental step in the process of calculating optimal PPC bids on keywords.
At the start of the process for any bidding optimization solution, the dollar value of each keyword must be determined. There are two notable pieces at play here: the “machine” that builds the model, and the data you feed that machine.
In the highest caliber optimization tools, the calculations for this revenue-per-click model are generated using various types of machine learning algorithms. Clearly processing at this magnitude is an issue with any standard approach (a multitude of keywords x a multitude of data points), so the infrastructure and scalability of the tool is important.
The data fed-in is likely even more of a secret weapon than the algorithms and modeling. The more sources the better, particularly as they relate to stages of the customer journey and revenue. (Imagine not only online purchases and lead forms, but also delayed transactions and CRM information being utilized).