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A short time after the advent of the Internet, early search engines set the stage for search engine marketing, commonly known today as simply SEM. OpenText Corporation debuted the first pay-per-click ads paving the way for an early form of SEM, but it wasn’t called that yet. In fact, it didn’t even have a name. It wasn’t until technologist and entrepreneur, Danny Sullivan coined the term search engine marketing in a 2001 article on Search Engine Land that the field became recognized in its own right.
A few years after the first PPC ads were launched, GoTo.com began an auction-based system that operates in a similar fashion to how the search engines of today run their paid advertising business. As more devices capable of browsing the Internet came into our pockets and into our homes, people began spending more time on the web, guided to the content they wanted by search engines. These cultural developments allowed SEM to explode in popularity.
But how did we get here? There were many steps along the way. In this article we dive into the history of SEM; how it came into existence and how it has developed into the billion-dollar industry it is today.
To better understand the history of SEM, it’s important to first understand what it means. Over time, the definition has changed: where once SEM was an umbrella term that incorporated search engine optimization (SEO) and paid search, it now stands alone. The term today is used solely in reference to paid search and includes marketing areas like display, shopping, and pay per click (PPC). SEO contrarily is all organic and is based on making changes to websites, specifically content and architecture, on the backend to help ensure web pages rank higher on the search engines.
Upon the invention of computers, the first question was how to connect them. The Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET) began working on what we now know as the Internet in the late 1960s. According to History.com, on January 1, 1983, researchers began to assemble the “network of networks” that became the modern Internet.
A need quickly arose of how to search through all the information available. The first well-documented search engine was originally named Archives, later shortened to Archie, debuting in 1990. Created by Alan Emtage, a McGill University student, Archie was used as a way to index FTP archives and it worked by curating a database of webfile names that it would match with queries.
Archie was soon followed by new search engines created at other schools in the United States, namely Veronica which focused on plain text files and a Jughead which worked similarly. These two got their names from characters in a widely popular comic book, Archie Comics. Later in 1990, computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web, and throughout the years that followed websites increased in number and became more prevalent in everyday life.
With the Internet growing by content and reach, more and more information was readily available and people wanted better ways to search and access it. Early search engine companies were working to monetize their businesses and this fueled OpenText, a search engine based in Canada, to run the first pay-per-click ads in 1996. The ads sold showed up on the search results page and were called preferred listings.
Fast forward two years to 1998 - a big year for search - and enter Larry Page and Sergey Brin, two graduate students studying at Stanford and the founding fathers of Google. GoTo hosted a TED presentation about the first auction-based PPC program, discussing their move to auction their results to the highest bidder of a word or phrase. Those paying the most would top the search rankings while lower bidders would be displayed further down the page. GoTo changed its name to Overture in 2001 before eventually selling to Yahoo! in 2003.
In little over a year, Google was processing 500,000 queries per day and at the turn of the Millennium growth skyrocketed when Google became the client search engine for Yahoo! Google Ads were on Google search results beginning in 2000, at first selling as a monthly service to advertisers. In 2004 Yahoo! ended the engagement with Google at a time when it was being searched 200 million times per day.
Google’s advertising system, Google Adwords was launched in 2000 with 350 customers. In 2018 Google rebranded this offering to Google Ads to better encompass the types of ads they work with, and it is today the leading publisher in the search space.
In 2005 Google, Yahoo!, and Bing Ads supported manual bidding which increased SEM’s popularity. According to an old article published by The New York Times, SEM was growing faster than traditional advertising as early as 2006. With new personal computing devices added to our lives and the introduction of the iPhone in 2007 and iPad in 2012, the web became more accessible to an increasing number of people. SEM was no longer tied to the desktop but open to people on the go via mobile or tablet.
SEM began changing as the way people were searching evolved, allowing segmentation between devices and geo-targeting. To assist advertisers, bid automation platforms like Google Smart Bidding were launched and this was later followed by bid optimization platforms. The next trend was incorporating big data in bid adjustments in 2015.
Today, at $40.6 billion, paid search holds the largest share of digital ad spend in the United States and it’s showing no signs of slowing down any time soon. Google’s market dominance in the search space is still maintained today, with more than 70% of worldwide online search requests being handled by Google, making it a significant part of how many people find content on the Internet.
Search advertising has become so pervasive it was even apart of crafting this article. As I write, I have been fact-checking and confirming information by using Google. It was written across three different devices and you can bet I encountered search ads along the way.
An increase in digital advertising spend is projected for 2019 with projections rising from $45.81 billion to $48.49 billion. If recent trends continue, spend will continue rising. While we don’t know exactly what is next for SEM there are some pioneering new techniques in the field such as applying predictive engagement, machine learning, and data science methodologies including natural language processing and bid-landscape data to the bidding process.
One thing is for sure, our devices are here to stay and, with them, SEM. SEM will continue to grow and evolve as our technology does.
During the employee lifecycle there comes a point where it’s time to move on—whether that’s to a new challenge within your current role, a new role within (or out of) your current company, or a totally new career change—is completely up to you. Too often, those discovery conversations are external interviews, versus networking within a current company. How great would it be if you could take a leap or make a career change, without the added risk of starting with a new team or company that doesn’t know your added value?
When employees focus on self-improvement, companies succeed. Review a few tips to consider before changing companies, below.
Chances are, you will not enjoy 100% of what you do every day. It’s always going to be a give and take. However, there are important considerations to assess—are you learning? Do you enjoy the people you work with? We have found that many of the employees who leave Centro have an average tenure of 1.5 years at their next job, with many returning as “boomerang” employees after reflecting on the above questions. Before making moves to see if the ‘grass is greener’ elsewhere, explore your options within your current company first! Making a move within can sometimes be a step in the right direction towards long-term career goals, even if it’s a lateral move instead of a promotion.
We don’t know what we don’t know. Not sure what that next move looks like? If you’re unsure of a particular role and are thinking of switching careers, consider reaching out to other colleagues or team members who have done it, or are doing it currently. Search your company intranet or directory—look for titles that pique your interest and reach out to those people; set-up a time to connect via phone or over coffee. Ask them about their position and what it entails; what do they enjoy or find challenging? Discuss the day-to-day, so you can determine if it may be a fit for you.
Every role requires some kind of subject matter expertise. Find a subject you enjoy that pertains to the role and learn more about it! For example, if you decide you’re interested in HR—take an online course about employment law, read articles about employee engagement and retention, or attend an event that caters to that specific industry. Ask questions, learn from peers, and reflect on your new skillset. Did you find the subject matter engaging? Or did it make you want to take a snooze? Pay attention to those insights, as they could potentially lead you to something great.
Once you have reflected, networked and done your research—make a mental commitment. If you decide a career change is what you need, then raise your hand; talk to your manager or executive leadership to express your interest in another opportunity at the company. Stay engaged in your current role to ensure consistent performance, and work with leadership to see what options may (or may not) be available at your current company—make an informed decision.
If you’ve determined that you’d like to stay on your current career path but are feeling unfulfilled in your current role, identify what it is that is making you feel disengaged. Are you not learning at the speed you were hoping? Is your manager not accessible? Take change into your own hands—seek out the challenging work and collaborate with those that bring you positive energy. Talk to your manager to see how they can better support you in this journey.
There may come a time where you and your manager decide that your current company may not be able to bring you what you’re looking for. In this case, you can feel secure and confident in knowing you’ve assessed all options to determine the best path forward and move into the next endeavor with a clear mind and fresh slate.
What happens when display advertising is freed from traditional ad placements, and instead, intertwined in the content or feed of a site? Enter the newest generation of display—native advertising, which connects with consumers in more meaningful, relevant, and less disruptive ways. While native ads have matured in functionality, driven by technology and industry adoption, these ads have also increased in scale with availability across every major site and app.
Native advertising is expected to grow over 25% this year (topping $41 billion) and enabling publishers to discover new sources of revenue, while marketers notice performance unrivaled by any other current display ad type.
In our March webinar, we share the various innovative opportunities that exist with native today and reveal how programmatic is driving increasingly effective media results.
Quality customer support for PPC optimization platforms is becoming increasingly important. Consider the impact of paid search programs on your revenue stream and the role bidding optimization tools play as key middlemen. Large amounts of money are relying on the flawless execution of PPC marketing, but we all know technology isn’t always perfect on its own.
Paid search has high stakes - and huge potential - for constant incremental improvement, particularly at scale. SEM is not your average marketing function: it’s a healthy mix of advertising expertise, copywriting, selecting business goals, statistics and analytics, big data, and the customer journey. It’s at the intersection of creative and technical skills. The keywords matter, the data matters, the integrations matter, and the budget matters. With the complexities that exist in the space, paid search technology needs a Customer Success partnership model – not simply a reactive support model. Advertisers need to be closely aligned with their PPC support team.
There is more to purchasing PPC bid management software than just the technology; it also benefits the advertiser to invest in a partnership. This works at two levels: the benefits of urgent problem solving when issues arise, plus strategic planning and execution based on knowledge of your business and goals. One is about quality customer service for PPC; the other about strategic alignment and insight. With these advantages, advertisers find much more success running at-scale programs in SEM.
The first level is all about the actual dollar costs. In an instant, on any day, you may open Google Ads to suddenly find a huge PPC performance drop. It could be your competition, it could be landing page or URL changes, it could be a broken data integration, or something else entirely unknown. Whatever the cause may be, paid search teams are familiar with this feeling, and the frantic auditing that follows. The costs associated with SEM performance drops like this can be substantial. Overspending can lead to paying thousands without understanding why. A drop in volume can cut your forecasted revenue by 10, 20, or 30%.
If that sounds bad, imagine introducing a third party PPC bidding technology into the mix; one that may introduce new power and data, but with additional complexity. When auditing, you need to be able to reach the vendor’s support team immediately to help troubleshoot. With the added complications involved, you may not be able to figure out what the problem is for an extended period of time, if at all. At that point, the dollar costs can really get painful. You need a relationship based on alignment around business goals and metrics, data integrity, and technical transparency. Not only do you need a support rep, but your dedicated PPC support rep – your Customer Success Manager.
The second level of importance lives in the opportunity cost. When you partner with an organization, you share goals; you understand the in’s and out’s of the data; you’re aligned on the tactical execution as well as the strategic planning; you’re mutually benefiting from one another’s experience and expertise. What is the potential opportunity cost of running a program without a partnership with experts?
Partners take risks for you, provide recommendations that address your business needs, and put in effort to transform those recommendations into action and results. They work alongside you, digging deep and caring as much about your business as you do. This is the kind of relationship you should have with your PPC optimization vendor. Weekly meetings and close alignment creates a proactive engagement that catches, or prevents entirely, the problems we’ve already discussed. It determines changes in strategy ahead of time with a team who knows the software, the data, and your business. It creates a platform to bounce ideas around with like-minded professionals.
Ask yourself a question: if you called up your provider now and asked them to explain your business to you, could they do it? Could they explain what business issues keep you up at night? Do they understand your personal goals?
As a company focused on big data and artificial intelligence, stereotypes would position QuanticMind as wanting to remove people from the equation. In reality, we’re working to get the best out of people and machines working together. AI and Machine Learning are powerful tools, but they need to be fed the right information and pointed in the right direction. That means partnering with subject matter experts to understand your business model, key goals and metrics, data structure and relevance, and the priorities of individual team members.
We discuss this topic further in the fourth installment of our Enterprise Paid Search Series: Is Poor Customer Support Undermining Your PPC Success? This download can help you learn what quality partnerships around SEM look like, and remind you of past engagements that had some pains or weren’t so successful. It pays dividends to invest in a strategic partnership with your PPC optimization vendor.
Centro just attended the ANA In-House Agency Conference in March—and we learned a lot. What was our main takeaway, you ask? Agencies should not be afraid of brands bringing marketing capabilities in-house. The good news is, there are still ways that agencies can work with those brands. Review the themes and findings discussed at the conference, below.
The in-housing of marketing is not abolishing of the agency model by any means—the brands we spoke to at the conference expressed their favor of agencies. Yet, agencies are realizing that they have to change their behavior towards brands in general. They need to build a trusted relationship with the brand’s marketing team to have a strong influence in its direction, and that ultimately, will translate to more work with the brand in the future.
For deeper insights about brands and in-house agencies - Centro's director of client development, Genny Drennen, explores the topic further in MediaPost.
A common headache for any account manager is a decrease in budget. It seldom feels that we’re faced with extra ad dollars, but every once in a while, miracles do exist. While it may seem like an answer to account limitations, there are some things to look out for concerning budget increases. Any large change to an account can require a secondary ramping up period. Much like when a new campaign launches, larger account changes need to build a history with Google to find a sweet spot in performance. Account managers often look at budget increases as a major change requiring special attention. This issue is magnified if the account was already struggling to spend the budget it had been allocated in the first place. In this article, we list four tips for increasing SEM spend without taking a hit, ensuring your performance stays profitable.
The first step to increasing campaign spend is to expand your keyword focus. Auditing the search queries report is the best place to look for new keywords to add to your campaign as it shows you exactly how people are searching for your business. If you’re not regularly auditing the search query report, you could be missing out on potential keywords, and phrasing of keywords, that would add great value to your program. Long-tail keywords are also a great way to broaden your keyword list, as well as increase traffic, for they typically have a slightly lower cost per click and the quality of traffic is higher. This report can further be utilized as a way to find new negatives that can help you avoid acquiring ad impressions for searches that won’t lead to sales. Implement these tactics and you’re a step closer to fully maximizing the effectiveness of your PPC spend.
When setting up any new search campaign, you must enter a target geography to serve your ads. If your account is limited by budget then your geography might reflect that by choosing only the most important radii, cities, or states. If your focus is niche, even when limited by budget, it’s best practice to start with a larger target area, then reduce as needed. Just be sure that you don’t let this run for too long without checking spend.
In cases where budget is not an issue and you have the freedom to leverage national targeting from the beginning, be aware that more isn’t always better. When given the opportunity to expand your geography to other desired areas, keep in mind your goals and needs, avoid adding cities and states you cannot serve just to ensure the budget is spent. You can also take into consideration geo modifiers. These give you the control to increase coverage on areas that have shown positive results and you can also add negative geo modifiers and area exclusions when expanding. Before adopting this method, though, have in mind the regions you do not want, or are unable, to market to.
Whether given a limited budget, or a sudden budget surplus, it is important to remember the goals of the campaign. Setting a campaign’s geography to national is a great way to gain traffic and increase your spend, but may not be what is best for your needs.
After a campaign has been running for a few months and it has hit its sweet spot in performance, you likely have enough data to begin a remarketing list. This is a strategic way to improve campaign performance and hit your spend goals. In essence, remarketing can help close the gap between customers that completed a conversion and those who dropped off in the process. The main benefits of remarketing include control over who sees your ads by use of remarketing to your audience list, improved brand recognition, improved ad relevancy, and, in many cases, higher conversion rates.
Audience lists are created in Google Ads or Google Analytics to help find people that have visited your site, or abandoned the shopping cart of your site, for example. Advertisers can utilize remarketing ads in either text ad or display ad format to communicate to their custom-created audience.
Brand recognition is important for any business, particularly smaller companies with a strong competitor base. By utilizing remarketing ads, you’re able to show your brand to browsers that have visited your site before, putting you top of mind. Display ads that match the look and feel of your website are especially helpful in capturing attention from previous visitors as well as new prospects. Remarketing with display ads can serve as an ongoing reminder of your brand.
Remarketing has proven to work well because it gives advertisers the control to create ads based on visitor behavior. If a visitor has shopped on a particular product page, then leaves before converting, you are able to show ads from that same page to that same prospect. By tailoring ads to previous site visitors, your ad relevancy will increase by communicating similar messaging, or images, from your site.
In many cases, remarketing ads produce higher conversion rates. While display ads may not be a good fit for every company, the option to utilize text remarketing ads with tailored verbiage to your target audience is a very powerful tool.
A mixture of brand recognition, compelling ad copy and/or display images have proven to increase conversions. However, it’s important to keep in mind that when setting up a remarketing campaign, it takes time to see an uptick in performance. It’s also worth noting that remarketing ads often have a higher cost per click than regular search ads, and it is strategic to set bids higher for better positioning. When looking for ways to optimize your account, keep remarketing ads in mind!
Bing is often overlooked by advertisers and eclipsed by Google Ads in the world of search. While Google Ads is still the clear leader, Bing has made big moves to bring value to advertisers in the space. Oftentimes, Bing is brought into the picture when advertisers feel they have hit the ceiling with Google, or when budget goals are not being hit. It’s important to look at Bing as an asset, and not a last resort.
Currently, Bing is responsible for approximately 30% of the search market, meaning if you’re not running your ads program on Bing, you are potentially missing out on 30% of ad traffic. A meaningful number. Besides opening your program up to new potential browsers, a significant benefit of using Bing is that the user demographic is older, more educated, and more affluent on average.
A common mistake advertisers make when launching a Bing program is treating their Bing account like Google. While it is easy to import your Google campaign straight into Bing, it is not best practice to mirror bids from Google. Typically, CPCs with Bing are lower, and so if you copy the same bids from Google, you could be setting yourself up for higher than necessary CPCs. If you do not have the same budget flexibility for Bing as you do with Google, it is recommended that you only add the main campaigns over to Bing.
When looking to expand on your traffic potential and spend goals, it is safe to consider the Bing engine as a quality over quantity solution. Do not expect the same volume as with Google, but if you optimize Bing appropriately, the traffic you do get will likely be high in quality.
Budget problems are a common issue in any search marketing program. Typically, the issue is not having enough budget, but occasionally the opposite is true. If you’re in the position of managing a program that is struggling to spend, or has recently been granted a higher budget, consider expanding on your keywords, increasing your geography, adding remarketing, and launching a Bing campaign to meet your account’s spend goals while simultaneously keeping performance trending upwards.
If you work in media, chances are a good portion of your day is spent on a computer, cell phone or tablet. Due to many years of exposure, my brain usually skips past banner advertisements on the top or sides of webpages, because I know that’s where they're typically placed. This is where the concept of Native Advertising comes into play - and what makes it so impactful. Explore native advertising and learn why it can be so effective, below.
Native advertising first came into fruition via magazine and print articles—remember those?! Think back to flipping through pages and finding an interesting “article,” only to notice the word “Sponsored” plastered on the page in very tiny, faded letters. That’s basically the thought behind a native ad; an advertisement that fits into the original content and doesn’t break the consumer’s flow of consumption. However, the evolution of the internet has led to a plethora of digital native advertising opportunities. Brands can now place advertisements within a news or social feed, a list of recommended stories and videos, or within the copy of an article—and they will appear as if it were a part of the content the consumer is already looking at.
Compared to traditional banner ads, native ads take the cake.
In the U.S. alone, millennials currently make up over a quarter of the overall population with $200 billion in annual buying power and $10 trillion to spend within their lifetime.** The kicker? According to Hubspot, 84% of millennials (note: that’s a lot of them) don’t trust advertising—they don’t enjoy feeling pressured into purchasing something. How do intelligent advertisers combat this and avoid the overwhelming impersonal approach taken by most?
Based on those numbers alone—native advertising may be the way to millennial hearts and pocketbooks.
Banner advertisements and pop-ups dominated the first phase of the Internet, but as consumer and advertiser mindsets have shifted, so has the need for innovative, digital, advertising options. Native advertising has a large projected growth over the next three years—its transition to the digital space and the visible growth that has followed is a perfect example of the digital advertising industry’s transformation in general. Don't let consumers skip over your ads—fit in (with native), in order to stand out. Create high-impact and thoughtful messaging as you cater to millennials—or request a demo to see how it’s done.
Learn more about Native Advertising with Centro.
Over the course of the last few years, marketing automation has become so sophisticated that it’s essential for success in today’s digital landscape. The benefits of automation are many: time savings, better audience targeting, better performance attribution, the elimination of wasted spend, driving increased revenue… the list goes on. The key to success in Google Adwords automation today is less about what you should automate, but how. In this article, we offer a complete overview of the best solutions for automating SEM in 2019.
Google AdWords (recently renamed Google Ads) is a frontrunner in developing solutions to automate and optimize advertising. They continue to roll out new tools that help marketers automate their PPC and display advertising efforts. While the key decisions are best made by PPC managers, the internal automation features of Google Ads can empower you to discover new targeting opportunities, improve ad performance, optimize bid strategies, and more. The growing list of Google Adwords automation features advertisers can take advantage of in 2019 include:
Responsive Search Ads
Responsive Search Ads, or RSAs, are a major new form of automation Google Ads rolled out in 2018. They’re still in beta and only available in a handful of countries. However, you can expect they’ll grow in use and importance in 2019.
RSAs can be likened to messaging optimization technology. For each ad you provide, multiple headlines and ad descriptions can be used in combination. Google automatically displays and tests different versions of your ad, using up to 15 headlines and four descriptions for each ad. This allows them to identify the content most closely matched to the search queries your target audience uses.
Smart Campaigns
Smart Campaigns are the new default campaign type when you sign-up for Google Ads. They’re designed to help small, location-based businesses optimize their advertising campaigns.
With this campaign type, you create your ad text and set a budget, then Google helps you with targeting. Smart ads appear when people in your target geographic area search for phrases related to your business on Google or Google Maps. They can also appear for people who search for terms related to your business and business location. Advertisers can forgo the default Smart Campaign option to choose which aspects of their strategy they want to handle manually or through automation.
At the time of writing, Smart Campaigns automate targeting and goal-based bidding. In the future they will also automate landing page generation based on Google My Business (GMB) data. This will be a valuable feature for businesses that don’t have landing pages on a native website.
Goal-Optimized Shopping Campaigns
The second major automated feature Google Ads launched in 2018 was goal-optimized Shopping Campaigns. This new campaign type automates ad creation and bidding, saving advertisers time on campaign management and optimization. All you have to do is set a specific marketing goal and Google will optimize your campaign to achieve it. Using automation and machine learning, Google can predict which search queries are the most relevant to your products. Google then presents your ad accordingly in search results, on the display network, YouTube, or Gmail.
Their algorithms take a number of signals into consideration simultaneously, including product characteristics, time of day, browser, geolocation, past search habits, and more. Realistically, goal-optimized Shopping Campaigns are able to make targeting decisions that would be impossible for a PPC manager.
AdWords Automated Bidding
Automated Bidding has been the most valuable AdWords automation feature for advertisers since its launch. Day-to-day practitioners don’t have time to manually adjust the max CPC for individual keywords to optimize their campaigns. Automated Bidding can take care of this task, optimizing max CPC based on specific goals. Google ads offers six major bid strategies based on different marketing goals:
Smart Bidding relies on machine learning and your chosen bid strategy to set the right bid for each auction. It also factors in important signals at auction-time, including location, time of day, device, remarketing list, and more.
Local Campaigns
Local Campaigns is another new automation feature that helps location-based businesses promote their stores and products in search, Maps, YouTube, and on the Display Network. Advertisers provide ad copy, a bid, and a few assets and the rest is automated. With the singular goal of driving in-store conversions, Google automatically optimizes ad placement, bids, and asset combinations. When people use Google Maps or local search to find businesses, your ads can appear based on your location and relevant queries. Local campaigns can even automatically display product discounts or other assets to maximize conversions.
Universal App Campaigns
Universal App Campaigns have been around for a while, and they’re one of the few fully automated advertising options on AdWords. With these campaigns you can choose between two goals: drive more app installs or more in-app conversions. App campaigns can automate:
Ad creation - It pulls information from your app store listing to create text ads. Google systems automatically create different ad versions and test to see which perform better.
Targeting - Google automatically displays your ads on different networks for the right audience based on your goals. They match your ads to relevant search terms and ads can appear on Google Search, Google Play, YouTube, the Display Network, AdMob, and more.
Bidding - Google will optimize bidding based on your marketing objectives: more installs, driving in-app actions, or driving in-app action value.
Other Features
These are just a few examples of the many Adwords automation features that advertisers can employ this year and beyond. Others include:
Dynamic Search Ads - Create targeted ads using Google's index of your website.
Automated Rules - Make account changes automatically using conditional settings. Change your ad status, budget, bids, and more.
Google Ads scripts - Use JavaScript code to automate changes in your Google Ads account, such as adjusting bids, pausing ad groups, and adding keywords.
Recommendations - These suggestions to improve your campaigns automatically analyze performance and derive insights for you.
The list will continue to grow. The options your business should choose depend on your niche, strategy, and many other factors. Businesses that take full advantage of Google’s automation features are well-positioned to optimize performance in 2019.
Google is encouraging automation as a default setting across the platform. However, as more businesses employ these features, it will become more difficult to stay ahead of the competition. What many advertisers don’t realize is that there are various automation technologies beyond what Google Ads has to offer. These unique solutions make it possible to better optimize ad creation, targeting, bidding and a whole lot more.
Here are some of the many benefits of using third-party tools for AdWords Automation in 2019:
Comprehensive Data Analysis
Google AdWords automation utilizes all the relevant PPC data in their arsenal to automate insights and optimize campaigns for their advertisers. However, consumer digital footprints reach far beyond Google properties. There’s so much more data relating to market trends and audience behavior that advertisers can use to create and optimize their advertising campaigns. It doesn’t matter how great your automation algorithms are if you don’t have the deep, quality data to analyze.
There are a great deal of internal and external factors that can impact the value, relevance, and targeting of your PPC advertising campaigns. If you want to truly maximize campaign performance based on data insights, you must be able to analyze and automate decisions on a centralized platform. Third-party automation technologies can use unified data analysis to make smarter bidding decisions for your efforts on Google, Bing, and other advertising platforms. Powerful solutions can use third-party data, offline information, and other deep funnel metrics, such as:
Unified data analysis empowers you to get a clear picture of the whole customer journey, the state of your business, and other important market factors. You can use this information to accurately infer the likelihood a click will lead to a conversion, and the value of that conversion.
Nuanced Bid Automation
Google already has sophisticated bid automation capabilities, leading many advertisers to ignore the third-party solutions out there. Yet while Google does allow you to customize your automated bidding by choosing one of six strategies, third-party solutions go the extra mile and offer more nuanced options that you can customize to your complex business goals.
In the real marketing world, there’s no single key performance indicator (KPI) that fully illustrates your progress in achieving a marketing goal. Instead of choosing a single metric for bid automation, the best third-party solutions allow you to use a custom combination of KPIs such as conversions, profit, or revenue.
You can also choose exactly what data you want bidding algorithms to utilize to calculate adjustments. Use integrations with other business tools or database upload to incorporate any relevant data into the system, including all publisher data regarding costs, Campaigns, Ad Groups, Keyword Type, historical revenue, deep funnel or offline revenue data, and more internal metrics.
Real-Time Adjustments
Google stress the importance of targeting micro-moments with your marketing message. Micro-moments are, they say, “intent-driven moments of decision-making and preference-shaping that occur throughout the entire consumer journey.”
In order to deliver the right marketing message to the right audience at the right time, you need to be able to act quickly on your data insights as they come in. Advertising automation technologies with machine learning capabilities can understand the intentions behind audience behavioral data and make quick changes to take advantage of them.
Solutions that take one or two days to incorporate new data into your bid calculations are going to fall behind. If you want your advertising strategy to stay competitive, you need to use best-in-class technology that identifies and acts on data insights in real time. Making instant adjustments to your AdWords campaigns greatly improves the efficiency and precision of your efforts. You can gain more opportunities and make your ads more timely. These quick decisions also help reduce wasted ad spend because you never operate without the latest data insights on hand.
Historical Performance Insights
Maximizing AdWords performance isn’t just about acting on changes and opportunities in your recent market data. How your advertising campaigns have performed in the past can provide major insights to improve your current efforts. By aggregating audience and performance data in a centralized platform, you can identify patterns in market behavior and advertising strategy.
You’ll be able to answer questions like:
Historical performance data is particularly valuable for bid optimization. Using the data and context of your past performance, automated bidding platforms infer future performance and make changes to maximize business value.
There are many solutions that keep and utilize a limited amount of historical data that can inform strategies moving forward. To gain the most value, though, it’s important to store and fully utilize all the past performance data available. Using machine learning technology, automation can improve progressively when it comes to understanding future bid optimization opportunities and make necessary adjustments to take advantage of them.
This is called predictive analytics, and it’s nothing new. The finance industry has been using statistical models of past historical data to effectively predict market changes for decades. Applying it to the advertising industry allows you to effectively see around corners and make quick decisions to maximize performance and stay ahead of the curve.
Full Automation Capabilities
Most advanced AdWords advertisers understand that they cannot automate certain aspects of their optimization strategy. They pick and choose which aspects they want Google’s automation features to handle, then make manual changes when necessary. For example, they can make manual bid adjustments after considering historical performance data that Google’s automation technology doesn’t factor in.
But when you combine a complete, quality data set with a decision engine based on machine learning technology, it’s possible to fully automate a much larger number of processes. The volume of actionable data available today greatly exceeds what a marketing manager or a whole team of data scientists can humanly process. That is not to say that PPC managers are being rendered obsolete. It simply means they can spend more time identifying new opportunities for growth. This makes full automation capabilities even more essential for SEM success.
Google Ads continues to develop a wide range of new automation capabilities that smart marketers will take advantage of. But all the useful data insights you need to drive automation success can’t be found on Google properties. If you want to stand out from the competition (who are also adopting automation at an alarming rate), you need a technology that can maximize data insights for nuanced campaign optimization.
Did you know location-based ad spending will reach $32 billion by 2021?
While location-based ads aren’t a new concept in digital, this popular advertising tactic continues to see growth, and there’s a good reason why. By combining heavy consumer mobile usage with improved data collection and heightened expectations from the industry, location advertising offers elevated advertising opportunities for marketers.