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When it comes to improving quality of life and work, most think about reducing stress and increasing productivity. But how? Keeping a diverse exercise routine is a fantastic way to ‘kill two birds with one stone.’ Below are five exercise activities that can significantly improve your work/life blend.
Group classes are a great way to try something on to see how it feels and connect with your community while contributing to your health. Grab a friend and hop into a yoga, martial arts, or kickboxing class—all of these activities boost the immune system, foster positivity, build self-discipline, and clear the mind. Cycling, aerobics, and HIIT are some other great examples that will increase your heart rate.
Get outside! If you live in a big city, you know just how refreshing it can feel to take a break—whether you take a long walk or play frolf (frisbee golf) in the park, or just step outside—whether that’s for a quick few minutes of fresh air or a week-long trip, it is always a good idea. Create a team or join a league—softball, kickball, flag football, you name it! Live in the Rocky Mountain area? A group trip into the hills, trees, snow, and sun on a board or ski can also provide peace of mind and a great workout.
Save time and money – by working out from the comfort of your own home! Whether you invest in P-90X, an online yoga video subscription, a set of free weights, or – go big – and spring for a Peloton, you can bail on that 40-minute round-trip commute. All too often, the hardest part of going to a gym is actually attempting to get out the door—working out at home takes out an additional layer of morning stress, and makes the whole process that much easier.
Is there anything more exciting than accomplishing a challenging feat? Ask anyone who has scaled a 14,000 ft mountain or run a marathon—devotion to a goal that pushes your limits further than you could’ve ever thought possible, is usually a goal worth pursuing. Joining a 5K for a cause or running a marathon in support of a friend or family member makes it all the more rewarding.
When it comes to workout form and spinal alignment, a personal trainer can be your new BFF. Target and activate different muscle groups and learn new methods or variations. Keep an open mind, and then bring that mindset into the workplace! Your self-discipline, clear mind and broad vision and will take you far in both lines of interest.
We understand that taking care of employees goes far beyond a paycheck. Centro’s ‘Buff to Get Buff’ Program reimburses employees for fitness-related expenses such as online/offline exercise programs, personal trainers, group classes, and race and team sports fees—ski passes are included too! What new types of fitness can you add to mix-up your routine? Learn more about Centro’s other benefits and current open positions here.
At this point, you should be a wizard when it comes to troubleshooting PPC performance issues. Identifying root cause and pinpointing dimensions that are dropping your numbers should be second nature. However, you might find that there are no large-scale problems and yet you still aren’t meeting your business goals. You’re starting to get pressure from your superiors to figure out a way to turn things around. So what now?
If you find that root cause and dimensional analyses aren’t leading to actionable insights, the issue might be bigger than you realize - you might not be optimizing to the correct metric altogether.
An optimization metric is a metric you use in order to determine what bid you would like to place on a keyword, which bid adjustment you would place on a device, etc... Optimizations will always, to some degree, be related to your business goal. As an example, if your business goal is to achieve a monthly ROAS of 150%, revenue should be a part of your optimization metric, meaning you would increase bids on keywords generating more revenue, and decrease bids on keywords generating less revenue. If your goal is to hit a CPA of $20, conversions would be a part of your optimization metric. Taking the same principles as ROAS, you would bid higher on keywords generating more conversions, and down on keywords generating fewer conversions.
These are low-funnel metrics, which sometimes aren’t enough to get you where you need to be. For example, if your goal is CPA, and you only sell a small portion of conversions per month but have tens of thousands of keywords, you would only be able to effectively bid on a handful of keywords, when realistically, there are a plethora of keywords that might give you similar, or better, opportunities to capture cheaper conversions. Utilizing higher-funnel metrics would help uncover these keywords, which could potentially be cheaper in the long run, increasing your efficiency.
Revenue and conversions. These are the metrics that matter. In a perfect world, these should be the only numbers worth optimizing towards, but in reality, your program might have a very low-volume, low-funnel metric, such as a low volume of conversions. In this case, you need to dig a bit deeper.
Hybrid metrics are a mix of high-funnel and low-funnel metrics. These are extremely valuable when your lower-funnel metric is what you ultimately care about yet too low volume for it to make sense to optimize toward.
For example, let’s say you’re selling a computer game, and your goal is to hit a certain number of conversions efficiently each month (i.e. you want to spend x amount monthly for someone to purchase your game). However, you have tens of thousands of keywords you are bidding on, and historically you only sell 100 computer games each month. This means that at most, only 100 keywords in a given month will lead to someone buying this computer game. It’s more likely that there are only a handful of keywords driving conversions, and they might be doing so inefficiently.
Now let’s say your click to conversion path is the following:
From this, you can see there are actually two ways a user can make the journey from a click to conversion:
In this case, the higher-funnel metric is the button that lets you learn more about the game (let’s refer to this as a lead) and there is a lower-funnel button that is directly responsible for your purchase (let’s refer to this as a sale).
If you were to collect data on ad clicks over a long period of time, you would likely see that a subset of all sales came from leads, and a large proportion of your leads drove zero sales. This information should be enough to give you an indication of what ratio of leads to sales you would expect, and this should help you determine a hybrid metric that you can apply to all the other keywords in your account.
To illustrate: you might find on average that for every 40 leads you generate, you make a sale, and there are a great many keywords that are generating leads for a cheaper sum than some of the keywords you are currently bidding higher on that are generating little to no sales. With this information, you could do two things: first, start bidding higher on cheaper keywords that historically generate high lead volume and have a good chance of leading to a sale; and second, spend less on keywords that generate low sales volume. By employing this tactic, you’ll achieve the same number of sales, but at a lower price, ultimately improving your CPA with the same sales volume. Alternatively, you could use this as a springboard to maintain efficiency at a higher sales volume to grow your paid search business effectively.
If you set up the hybrid metric correctly, you should still be bidding high enough on keywords that have solid sales volume, to a point that sales themselves weigh more in your optimization strategy than leads, while also preventing you from spending too much money on keywords that led to a sales by random chance.
When looking at the users who interact with your website, some will be inherently more valuable than others. Users who buy certain products might be more likely to come back and make further purchases in the future. As an example, if you are selling a subscription-based service, and someone buys a certain subscription that lasts three months with certain features. This user might be likely to come back three months later and buy a six month subscription.
Ideally, you’d like to spend the majority of your budget targeting people more likely to consistently buy products from your website. If you collect this type of information in your CRM, you can create a Lifetime Value (LTV) Model to determine what types of users are more likely to buy a product from your website again in the future, and consequently spend more money targeting them.
In terms of keyword-level bidding, if your CRM attributes a user’s purchase to the last click, you can tie values of your LTV model back to the last click of the keyword and subsequently use the LTV metric as a tool for bidding.
The only caveat to this type of bidding is when assessing the value of a keyword, you are more prone to bid too high or too low on a keyword if the LTV model isn’t accurate, so you would have to recalibrate your LTV model on a consistent cadence, especially if seasonality plays a role in the LTV model.
What type of metric you optimize to is dependent on how much data you have readily available, how your click to conversion operates, the behavior of your users, and so on. Questions you should ask yourself when determining which type of metric to optimize towards are:
Asking these types of questions will guide you towards the best optimization metric you can utilize in terms of giving yourself the best shot of reaching your overall business goals for PPC.
This article brings to a close our mini-series looking at the intricacies of why your PPC performance may not be at the desired levels. In Part I, we touched upon the need to understand all aspects of your program including your weaknesses and how, with the right approach and the right tools, you can effectively identify the root cause and begin making effective changes to ensure your numbers are back trending in the right direction. Part II delved into the specific dimensions (device, location, audience, etc…) that might be causing problems and how to troubleshoot them.
Addressing the weaknesses in your program by understanding which campaigns, ad groups, keywords, and product groups are driving bad performance can help you not only resolve your performance issues in the short-term, but help you determine which segments need more attention in the long-term to help achieve - and exceed - business objectives year over year.
Advertising has been around since the beginning of time. While it’s evolved as technology has come into the forefront of our lives, its intent has always been the same: to convince people they need something so badly, they can't live without it. As time has passed, though, consumers have caught on to marketing tricks.
Due to increased consumer knowledge, companies have been forced to adjust the ways they approach their audiences. After all, if brands don't listen to buyers' needs, rest-assured - their competitors will.
When the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) came into play in May 2018, it was a game-changer as far as advertising was concerned. This was the first time a unified set of strict rules was put in place to govern how people's data was used. The regulation also offered ways for consumers to easily opt out of communications if they disagreed with marketers' intentions.
Ad blockers simply weren't enough for online audiences anymore. They called for greater security with less effort and demanded control of the way their personal data was being used. Only a month before GDPR went live, the famous Cambridge Analytica scandal occurred. It was discovered that some 50 million Facebook users' personal information had been facilitating marketers' tactics for years, unbeknownst to the social site's users.
This was a turning point for consumers and advertisers alike. Consumers stopped allowing their personal data to be used as marketers began implementing more secure measures of protecting their privacy. Businesses worldwide were forced to respond by formulating new marketing strategies, driven by transparency. Reputable companies own the responsibility of keeping users' data safe and secure.
Advertising is built on emotional responses to certain images, phrases, or actions. It's not inherently bad, but some manipulative tactics are so subliminal, people don't even realize their decisions are being swayed.
When you were little, the candy at the checkout counter elicited an emotional response and made you feel like you needed that sugar right then and there. The same is true for trinkets strategically placed at the register, that are meant to incite impulse buys. This is similar to what happens with digital advertising, but online marketing takes a layer deeper.
Manipulative advertising is intended to take rationale out of the picture. Instead, it relies solely on emotions to justify buying behavior. When you're not prepared to think, decorative words can go a long way in convincing you to do something.
People need to think logically rather than emotionally. Once people recognize the tricks used to elicit feelings instead of thoughtful buying processes, they can break the cycle of bad advertising behaviors.
Consumer expectations in today's world demand more. People want increased personalization in their advertisements, but they mandate better privacy in their interactions with companies with which they consider doing business. As a marketer, your job is to instill confidence in your audience while finding ways to use online data the right way.
Quality vs. quantity. Nowhere are the tradeoffs more important than in the world of search engine marketing. Specifically, with the data that we use to measure performance, set goals, and drive the decision-making for our paid search programs. As a fellow SEM professional, you know that data is everything. It measures our value. It allows us to define strategies and boost our performance. It is the driving force behind the work that we do. But data on its own is not -- in and of itself -- an automatic key to higher value, better performance, and data-driven PPC. The operative piece is actually quality data.
Consider this: an athlete is dependent on quality food to help create and maintain energy, increase endurance and build strength. If that athlete indulges too long or too much in foods that are high in sugar, contain simple carbohydrates and other additives, their performance will inevitably suffer. Chances are they’re going to be slower and weaker -- and even micro-seconds of lost time will inevitably benefit their competition.
The same applies to how key decisions are made for running a large-scale SEM program, of which no decision is more important than defining and executing on a bidding strategy. Quality data is the key requirement to enabling advanced optimization strategies, fueling accurate forecasts, and activating key insights -- insights that allow you to have visibility into your sales funnel and the entirety of the customer journey. In turn, this not only enables you to provide a more relevant and valuable customer experience, but allows you to drive the optimization techniques that can boost conversions, gain an edge over competitors, and ultimately increase revenue and ROI.
Perhaps not surprisingly, missed performance goals often boil down to incomplete or low-fidelity data that drive misguided decisions. Simply put, if you don’t have quality data, it doesn’t matter how sophisticated the algorithms or optimization techniques you try to apply to your program, your performance will fall short of its peak potential. To put this in perspective, the lack of a complete and unified quality data set represents a significant challenge for most SEM programs.
However, solutions that can capture and leverage the right quality data can have a very meaningful impact on the success of an SEM program. Here are a few ways:
Now more than ever, data has the ability to directly drive increased business performance. By measuring, tracking, and analyzing data on past performance, smarter and more effective decisions can be made to deliver improved results moving forward.
In fact, certain core categories of data that most businesses already have can be directly applied to increase SEM ROI and drive higher revenue. By tying analytics data from web and mobile tracking solutions, offline data from call centers or CRM platforms, inventory and/or capacity systems that track real-time supply constraints, and contextual data like micro-weather signals that influence conversion rates back to SEM data, search teams can empower smarter and more profitable bidding decisions. Few, if any, large scale SEM programs can achieve peak performance without leveraging data from these types of sources.
In addition, a unified data set will not only offer insights into how deep your prospects are in the funnel, but also illustrate the various milestones of the customer journey to which value can be attributed. If you don’t typically have conversions for at least 30 days after an initial click, for example, a unified data set can provide insight into other stages along the path that can serve to predict not just whether a click is likely to return value, but how much.
Conversely, if your SEM program isn’t achieving peak performance, this likely means you should evaluate your SEM data mechanics. At the highest level, you should ask if your current bidding solution is capturing and leveraging all the critical data that measures and influences your funnel, regardless of where that data resides. For example, if your solution is having trouble integrating data from third-party sources, offline locations, and/or deeper funnel metrics -- or simply can’t do this -- you may be forced to use a sub-optimal strategy of optimizing bids to metrics that don’t actually measure business performance.
Here are some other questions worth asking to evaluate your data mechanics:
Achieving peak performance is hard. But more than anything, the foundation to achieve it requires investing in a platform that collects the right quality data and then allows you to unlock its potential by applying sophisticated algorithms to automate bidding optimization at scale. Being data-driven in paid search demands it.
And what if you’ve just deployed a new bidding platform? If you want to minimize the all-too-common and expensive “bidding learning period,” the quality of data you feed into the new platform is of paramount importance. At a more tactical level, if you don’t integrate historical data, you and your team may struggle to see patterns, garner key insights and make the most profitable strategic decisions until you build a new history. Here you would have a much more manual process of finding out, for example, whether May was a stronger month than June, and for what reasons. So when it comes time to set budgets and give forecasts for next Q2, they will be more difficult to prepare and less informed.
Why else might historical data matter? In the world of SEM, almost every business experiences some sort of seasonality, whether it’s based on promotional events, holiday periods, or a combination of both. Ideally, your future promotions and seasonal strategy will be driven by lessons from past successes and failures. Likewise, your bidding strategy should also be able to leverage data from past promotions and seasonal periods to intelligently guide future bid calculations and adjustments. With the right platform, strong historical data can provide the context and insight necessary to make proactive decisions to maximize business value.
Thus, it’s not only important to access and leverage your historical data, but also to be confident in the fact that the data set feeding your platform will be put to full use. That is being data-driven in your PPC. If your platform only uses 30-60 days of historical data for bidding, for example, how can it account for a once-a-year event like Black Friday? What ends up happening all too often is that paid search professionals are forced to completely override their bidding platform and control the bids themselves in order to be confident the decisions being made will best align with business objectives during such volatile periods.
While it might be a lofty goal to achieve “full automation,” today’s paid search marketers need a solution that provides robust data integrations and the capacity to fully leverage that data in a proactive way to win in a competitive ecosystem and achieve peak performance. Among other capabilities, this should include the ability to integrate and report on promotional and seasonal data from the past, along with ongoing revenue and performance metrics all in one pane of glass.
Remember how we talked about the quality of the food that athletes consume, and how it directly impacts both their potential and performance? Quality data operates the same way in terms of powering advanced techniques and capabilities in your bidding solution. These are the features that ultimately enable you to differentiate yourself in a competitive market and can take you to the level of achieving peak performance.
Take forecasting and scenario modeling -- while the concept of predicting the future isn’t new to the industry (and is something Accounting and Finance teams never stop asking for), it’s a far more accurate science to do when fueled by reliable and comprehensive data sets. The output of algorithms that make such calculations within a bidding platform will be empowered -- or limited -- by the depth of data that the platform ingests from the sales funnel and customer journey. But make no mistake, capturing all available data points will provide a richer understanding of a click at any given point in the process and better enable modeling as to how that click’s future will transpire, even when accounting for a delay of days or weeks to mature into a deeper funnel sale.
Similarly, automating audience bid adjustments is another example of advanced bidding techniques that enable you to outperform your competition. Status quo would mean relying on humans to define segments, collate and analyze the data, and then attempt to determine the appropriate audience bid adjustments to make and when. On the other hand, by automatically tracking all the audience attributes of each click and understanding how those attributes impact conversion rate and monetization, a bidding platform can be empowered with the raw fuel to be able to drive an automated approach. And rest assured that with proper data science methodologies used to model this data, it is possible to unlock higher performance and garner the greatest value from customer audience data. That’s a key requirement to achieving peak performance.
Humans vs. machines. It’s an age-old question. Historically, SEM teams have been responsible for not just the performance of their advertising spend, but also coming up with the tactics, processes, and tools to achieve it. Today, technology now offers the ability to go well beyond what humans can accomplish on their own or even with the assistance of first-generation bidding platforms. This means the best of all worlds: humans plus machines. Being data-driven in paid search isn't possible without this machine side.
What’s the alternative? Regardless of the size of your organization, at scale, there aren’t enough humans to review all the relevant data and execute all of the necessary decisions to manage a program with hundreds of thousands or even millions of keywords or products -- you simply can’t scale your team to accommodate all of that data. And if you try, you certainly won’t achieve peak performance. Enter technology, which can do both the blocking and tackling of keyword-level bidding, as well as more advanced strategies like device, location, ad schedule, or audience bid adjustments. But as we’ve discussed, that automation can only begin with strong, reliable quality data.
High-powered SEM platforms have the ability to provide a critical link to understanding where your business derives its value while also forging a path to increased ROI and higher revenue. They also provide historical context that enables you and your team to identify patterns and make strategic and informed decisions quarter to quarter, week to week, hour to hour, and even minute to minute. It enables you to have truly data-driven PPC programs. But, like the fuel that drives a sports car or the food that fuels a professional athlete, performance doesn’t come without the right inputs. In SEM, that means peak performance can’t be achieved without reliable and accurate quality data.
Is your brand important to you? We certainly hope so. After all, you've spent countless hours and innumerable amounts of energy developing a brand that tells the story of your business and conveys everything you want the public to know about your company.
It would be a shame if all the efforts you've put into extending your outreach fell into the wrong hands, compromising the integrity of everything you built.
Programmatic advertising is vital to building your audience and creating an extensive outreach that leads to better customer engagement. Yet, how do you balance awesome exposure without incurring the potential problems that could transpire if someone put your brand alongside content that doesn’t fit company values? Fear not, there is a way!
First, decide what level of risk is tolerable for your company. If you're running brand campaigns that are built to generate awareness, you'll need a higher risk tolerance than if you were just running direct-response campaigns.
Once you've settled on the amount of risk that's acceptable, utilize pre-bid screening tools that will enable you to understand how the safety parameters you've put into place measure in the real world. Centro's partner Comscore offers a tool, for example, that allows you to understand the risk and reward tradeoffs for important metrics such as:
Centro also partners with Peer39—another company built around providing brand safety in digital environments. Of course, the more your campaigns are screened, the more likely your efforts won't reach optimal scale. It’s important to set reasonable expectations of permissible risk first.
Block list sites are specifically prevented from serving your ads. To retain brand safety, you'll want to put websites to your block list if they:
Allowed list sites are the opposite—where your ads would only be served to specific sites that you’ve identified as aligning with your values or deem ‘safe.’ Know that using an allowed list, however, may limit your reach and scale. Generally (and not specifically related to block lists or allowed lists), you can find a list of trustworthy ad inventory sources on Pixalate’s Seller Trust Index, which evaluates multiple criteria in how ad marketplaces source ad supply.
Have you ever wondered if YouTube is safe for your brand? It's a valid concern, but there are precautions you can take to make sure your message stays as intended:
Programmatic media buys are extremely beneficial to any business, but brand safety must be at the top of the list before letting the algorithms go to work. By blocking content that doesn't fit your company's values and utilizing the tools that automate the security process, you'll be able to achieve scale in your campaigns, without putting your brand in a publicly compromising position.
Centro has everything you need to ensure brand safety on every digital media buy. We're here to help you realize positive ROI without sacrificing the integrity of your business.
Learn more about Programmatic Advertising with Centro.
Have your cake and eat it too: adopting a brand safety approach that doesn’t cost you scale.
https://centro.net/blog/centro-ensures-brand-safe-ads
Employing Google Shopping has become a dominant advertising strategy for retail businesses in recent years. Early adoption was slow, but now Google Shopping ads make up 76.4% of retail search ad spend and receive 85.3% of clicks from Adwords or Google Shopping campaigns. There are many opportunities for retail businesses to gain visibility and drive sales of their products using Shopping feed optimization techniques. But it isn’t challenge-free.
Google Shopping has become so popular that the market is already saturated. Every retail marketer has a number of strong competitors they’re fighting against for rank and visibility in search results, and this competition is only set to become harder as more retailers enter the market.
In the past, the most expensive and competitive keywords were bottom of the funnel, suggesting shoppers had immediate purchase intent. Today, though, many advertisers target high-funnel search queries, driving up competition across the sales funnel. It’s no longer possible to save your advertising budget by targeting different points of the buyer journey. Everyone’s fighting for ad space, and it’s not going to get any easier.
Google has done an excellent job in recent years of catching up with Amazon in the retail search-advertising space, and they continue to roll out new features that make it possible to surpass them. A good example of this is Shopping Actions. Retailers who opt into this program can have their ads appear on Google Express, Google Search, and Google Assistant.
As more search advertisers start taking advantage of features like this, the landscape is going to become more competitive. Simply jumping on each new feature bandwagon Google introduces won’t be enough. The one thing that can relieve this issue is developing a feed optimization strategy that outperforms the rest.
The good news is that there is a long list of ways to optimize your Google Shopping Feed, and very few retail search advertisers are taking advantage of them all. The best way to stand out in a crowded marketplace and outperform the rest is prioritizing Shopping feed optimization. Here, we outline some essential techniques you need to be executing.
Your product images are one of the most important Shopping feed optimization techniques to focus on. They appear prominently in search results and can have a huge impact on click-through rate, or CTR. Including quality, relevant images alongside your products is just good e-commerce practice, whether it be on your website or in your Google Shopping Ads.
Here are some quick tips for your images:
You can also try out different kinds of images and test which ones perform better. For example, you can compare the performance of basic white-backdrop product images versus lifestyle shots.
Your product titles are another valuable element to consider. It’s important to include keywords as part of your product title, as this impacts what search queries your product will appear for. Your product title is also the most prominent aspect of Google Shopping results besides your image. Including relevant keywords in the title also helps search engine users feel like they’ve found what they’re looking for.
One thing you’ll want to do is ensure your product title includes a target keyword towards the beginning. But, there are other strategies you can use to optimize your product titles further. For example, you can include your brand name in titles to appear more relevant for branded keyword searches. Or you could include other details people might search for, such as size, color, material, etc.
You need to choose a single strategy here or risk creating long and unruly titles. Use insights from keyword research to determine what information is most important to include in your product titles.
A lot of advertisers don’t see the value in organizing their product types because they don’t have a direct impact on how Google categorizes and ranks products. But they are a powerful tool you can use to understand the performance of the different kinds of products you offer and make changes to your strategy accordingly.
First off, if you use your e-commerce tool (e.g. Shopify or Woocommerce) to generate product types for you, there are going to be some errors. Some products will be miscategorized, or you could end up with duplicate product types. Take the time to go through and fix these errors: it will be worth it for the insights they provide.
Divide your product types into clean, logical categories, then start using this as a factor when monitoring campaign performance. Error-free product categories can offer unique insights into performance improving opportunities that you may not discover otherwise.
Most ecommerce retailers today don’t take the time to create unique descriptions for their products. They stick with manufacturer default descriptions or use the same generalized description for a wide range of product variants.
Just like your product title, the description is another way Google can understand what your product is relevant for. They’ll also highlight keywords in your product description that match user search queries. Ensure that you include specific information here so you can outperform competitors that take the trouble. You should:
Using product categories as a data feed attribute is entirely optional, so most advertisers don’t use it or only select the most general category descriptions for groups of products. For example, a sporting goods retailer selling sports uniforms could categorize their products as:
Or as:
Most search marketers don’t go this granular because it’s a tedious task. But it’s worthwhile if you want to help Google fully understand what kind of queries your products are relevant for.
The good news is if you already did the hard work optimizing your product types, then it will make choosing your product categories much easier. You can download your feed to a spreadsheet, sort by product type, and then start adding in product categories in a new column.
GTIN is the acronym for Global Trade Identification Number. This identifying number shows Google that a product is unique. In some cases, Google requires a GTIN before approving a product for Merchant Center, but not in all cases. If you haven’t been using GTINs for your products up until this point, you might want to reconsider.
Using GTINs opens your products up to new opportunities to gain visibility in search results. If a number of retailers sell the same product, Google can categorize them together in the same auction based on the GTINs. This opens up the possibility for your ad to appear as the sole result for a Product Listing Ad for high funnel search queries. Google also often displays a banner of Google Shopping results for queries like “best of X” or “top X.” Your ads will only qualify for these results if you include GTINs.
One of the most essential aspects of Shopping feed optimization today is automation. Every Google Shopping campaign draws information from your merchant feed, made up of structured data about what products you offer. Managing this information in a spreadsheet only works for the smallest businesses. It quickly becomes unruly when you have more than 20 products, let alone hundreds or thousands.
Google Ads developed automated feeds as a solution to this problem. Automated feeds essentially scrape your web pages to see what products you currently have on offer, then automatically generate relevant feed information based on this data. Automated feeds are extremely important for campaign optimization. For example, you can avoid wasting ad spend promoting a product that’s not currently in stock. Automated feeds can interpret stock information from your website and automatically update your campaigns to reflect this.
Automated feeds are the most beneficial when everything on your website is accurate. Otherwise data feeds can include broken links, improper product titles, and other issues. You can also end up including poorly performing products in your advertising campaign inadvertently.
At this point, you’re well aware that Shopping feed optimization techniques can be operationalized in different ways. There are different ways to optimize your product title, description, product categories, and more. If you really want to create the most optimized feed for Adwords, you should take the time to test different strategies.
Even if your Google Shopping feed is created automatically, it’s easy enough to create additional feeds to compare performance. “Supplemental Feeds” are a unique type of feed you can create to have standalone data on performance. You can’t add or remove products from them, but you can duplicate a primary feed then make changes to that existing data to test feed variations.
Supplemental Feeds are a powerful tool with which to experiment on performance data and understand what elements of your feed are most effective. You can also take advantage of custom labels within your Supplemental Feeds to drive even more insights. For example, you can use custom labels to group products in ways that are significant to your business, such as new versus old products, price categories, sale versus full price, etc. The performance insights you gain from Supplemental Feeds can inform mass changes you make to your primary feeds to improve campaign performance overall.
Put simply, automated bidding is essential for keeping up with the competition. Automated bidding allows you to bid more effectively and take advantage of micro-changes in the market. This simultaneously reduces neccessary ad spend and improves campaign performance.
Google offers automated bidding options for Shopping campaigns that you can set based on your campaign’s historical performance and future goals. Or you can rely on Smart Bidding to target overall performance for you.
Choose an automated bidding strategy that helps you beat out the competition in the areas that matter most for your business. And if Google’s preset automated bid strategies don’t match your current goals, third-party tools can.
Merchant Promotions is one of the Shopping feed optimization techniques with the most obvious performance benefits. Merchant Promotions is a feature that allows you to add special discounts, free shipping, or free gifts to your Shopping ads.
Once you submit a product feed to Google Merchant Center, you can start creating promotions. Create and optimize your Merchant Promotions so you can drive conversions, boost CTR, and attract more traffic.
There are always ways to improve your Google Shopping feed. Every time you add a new product to your ecommerce store, there’s a new opportunity for optimization. There’s no getting around the fact that ongoing feed management is essential if you want to stay competitive as a retail search advertiser.
Advertisers have two options when approaching their Google Shopping feeds: either take on the necessary leg work to create the most accurate and optimized data feed, or use automation technology to stay ahead of the game. Google Ads provides some internal solutions for automated Shopping feed management. But there are also a variety of third-party feed management tools that can provide advanced insights and optimizations. Invest in automation technology and use it to its full potential. This ensures the payoff outweighs the cost and drives business growth through retail search advertising.
‘Ask the Expert’ is a blog series that breaks down the complicated tools, tech, and trends you’ve been hearing about in the trade pubs and around the office. We reach out to our in-house experts to ask the tough questions and turn them into bite-sized Q&As for your reading pleasure.
This month’s topic? Audience Extension. We brought in Centro’s VP of publisher solutions, John Hyland, to give us the breakdown.
Audience extension has long been associated with local media companies who sell off-site inventory based on demand from their local advertisers. The rep at a local media company is uniquely positioned to help their best customers with all of their digital needs – SEM, Social, and all forms of display (mobile, video, desktop, and native). Audience extension is rapidly being adopted by national websites too. National publications are adding incremental dollars to their media plans by helping advertisers buy impressions across the rest of the web to reach their audiences on any site and digital device.
Local publishers want to capture a larger share of the advertiser’s digital advertising budget. Today, nearly all local media companies have scalable operations to service the digital needs of local clients, therefore, no one else is more equipped to understand the needs of local advertisers. On the national side, it is about maximizing yield from their core, proprietary audience. Advertisers buy ads on national websites because of reach, association with media brands, and audience loyalty. If the advertiser has a larger budget than a single site can accommodate with its own inventory, the site needs to extend its audience off-site during the rest of its users’ online journey.
Media companies already place many ads on the page—user-experience is still very important. Many companies use audience extension to stay in front of audiences with frequency, or cross-platform. If a reader goes to a website twice a day for 30-minutes, there is a large amount of digital screen time that the advertiser’s message isn’t in front of the customer.
On the local side, it is the most efficient way to blanket a specific marketplace. Programmatic gives the ability to reach customers within a 30-minute drive of your storefront in real-time. The programmatic landscape empowers local publishers to bid on inventory cross-platform, regardless of device. From a national perspective, it is all about first-party data. National media companies need programmatic advertising to find them across thousands of sites, in order to scale audiences efficiently.
Local media companies have grown incremental revenue for the last 10+ years. You would be hard pressed to find a local newspaper, radio, or TV station that isn’t doing some form of audience extension from SMB rep management, to full-blown agency-style trading desks offering SEM, Social and Programmatic Display. National media companies started adopting this practice in the last three-to-four years. The ones who have adopted it have advertisers that demand more of their audience, and more ways to reach their audience.
The biggest differentiators are service, transparency, strategy, and education. Everyone has access to the same data and the same inventory (impressions). Advertisers want partners that can optimize quickly, in real-time, and who are transparent about what they are buying. For the national side, advertisers are buying the site because they love its brand safe atmosphere and audience. It’s better to work with the site, who will just add a line-item to advertisers’ current plans, and the whole strategy is executed through one point of contact, bill, and holistic strategy.
Centro offers a self-service and a managed service solution. In the self-service option, we train your buyers and sellers to sell and execute campaigns using our platform, Basis. Self-service is a differentiator—it allows for speed, control, and increased margins. For others, it isn’t efficient to build out an internal team. Therefore, they leverage Centro for the strategy and execution of the digital media buys. We power programmatic buying in the open marketplace, private marketplaces and more. Basis also ingests SEM, social and direct buying data to provide a robust agency-style trading desk and a holistic view of their campaigns via one platform.
It’s well established that landing page design impacts many facets of an SEM program's success. While we've previously discussed how to optimize overall design to secure more leads, ensuring your landing page is aesthetically pleasing and clearly articulates your message is only one piece of the puzzle. Before a user even clicks on your ad, various aspects of your landing page are factored into whether your ad is served, the amount of the required bid, ad placement, and, in some cases, ad quality. After clicking an ad, the user flow and prominence of conversion actions impact not only your bottom line but also the bidding insights and optimizations.
Let's dive into each of these.
First, before we dive into landing page relevance, we need to first discuss how Google ranks your ads. Each time one of your ads is eligible to compete in the auction, Google computes an ad rank for your ad and all others competing. The rank your ad receives determines whether it will be displayed, what position it will be displayed in, and the cost per click (CPC). While the exact formula is a closely guarded secret, the key inputs include your max CPC, the ad's Quality Score, search context (e.g. location, device, time, etc.), ad rank threshold (i.e. the minimum bid required for an ad to appear in X position), and the expected impact of ad formats and extensions.
While some of the other inputs are more straightforward, Quality Score is significantly affected by the quality of your landing page. Reported on a scale of 1-10 (with 10 being the most desirable), landing page relevance and experience are two of the components taken into consideration, along with ad and keyword relevance and quality. Thus, as Quality Score is factored in along with your bid and the other inputs to determine ad rank and CPC, you’ll also want to obtain a higher Quality Score for your ads to both improve their position and reduce CPC, all of which will lead to overall efficiency gains.
Now we can focus on landing page relevance. Imagine you are looking to buy a new collar for your dog. You then search for "skulls and crossbones dog collar" and click an ad. How likely would you be to stay on the site and buy something if you were taken to each of the following pages?
Most people would be more inclined to continue through the conversion funnel in experience A and maybe, B versus C or D. This difference in relevancy would then be reflected in the ad's Quality Score.
Outside of relevancy, page loading speed is also another major factor to consider. What if you ended up on landing page A but it took 15-20 seconds to load? Loading times of more than a few seconds are likely to see marked user drop off, even if all other best practices are followed, resulting in a much lower Quality Score.
While difficult to objectively measure, it is also worth considering how very general landing pages with multiple, branching funnels and calls to action can make insights and optimization more difficult. Take, for example, a company that sells enterprise software. They have determined through analyzing past sales performance that filling out a "Contact Us" form is most likely to lead to a follow-up conversation with a sales rep and ultimately a purchase. However, rather than investing in a streamlined landing page experience that has this call to action prominently displayed, all ads redirect users to the website's home page.
Given the clear benefit to the company for prospective customers to fill out the "Contact Us" form, it would make sense to optimize bidding toward that conversion action. However, all too often, the numerous potential paths for potential customers to get to “Contact Us,” and the competing calls to action on the homepage make that difficult, regardless of the bidding solution used. For example, a user located in Los Angeles searched for "keyword A" and upon arriving at the homepage, clicked through a few product pages and then left. Does that mean that users located in Los Angeles are less likely to convert and negative geo modifiers (i.e. decrease bids by 20% for searched from the Los Angeles metro area) should be added? Or is "keyword A" too broad of a term to lead to many conversions and should be bid down? Or are both actually good targets but the lack of a clear call to action (or too many calls to action) led the user down too many or a less-than-ideal path? By introducing the confounding variable of poor design, none of these questions can be answered with certainty, which in turn, can lead to suboptimal bidding decisions and lost potential efficiency gains.
Conversely, imagine if the landing page for the software company mentioned earlier offered a more tailored experience with some basic product info that related to the ad clicked while clearly displaying the “Contact Us” form above the fold. Any insights related to the keywords, locations, or audiences that have a higher propensity to convert would be more reliable and more likely to lead to an overall increase in performance.
While landing page relevance and quality impacts overall PPC efficiency, there are some areas of PPC that have additional idiosyncrasies -- Dynamic Search Ads (DSAs) are a good example.
DSAs, ads which are automatically generated based on landing page content, are a great way to discover additional keyword opportunities and scale creation of highly-targeted ad copy. Rather than requiring you to create a preset keyword list, DSAs instead leverage Google's crawling technology to mine your website for relevant keywords and automatically use them for ad targeting and ad copy. However, as Google typically crawls sites every 2-3 days, frequently changing landing pages can lead to irrelevant traffic and inefficient spend for DSAs.
A common example of this problem, often cited by Google, are daily deals sites. For example, a particular URL that is crawled on Monday may offer a deal on a trip to Europe. However, when a user clicks on a DSA generated from this page on Tuesday, it has been replaced with a trip to Las Vegas. Given that the landing page experience is now unrelated to the ad the user clicked on, conversion is much less likely and often spend becomes inefficient.
While many components go into building a successful SEM program, landing page design is one area that is often overlooked. But as a critical pathway to your site and business, neglecting efficient landing page design will likely cost you leads, conversions and ultimately revenue. Rather than directing users to general areas of your website (like the homepage!), invest time in creating a more relevant, well-designed user experiences. For sites with a large inventory, newer tools like dynamic keyword insertion can be leveraged to make this process less time-consuming.
By making this investment upfront, you can improve your ad's Quality Score, obtain more reliable insights, make better optimization decisions, and understand if particular PPC functionality is appropriate for your use case. And you will also be giving your targets a clear path to entry -- all benefits that will help you to increase efficiency and have the most successful PPC program possible.
At Centro, we know that keeping up with the trade pubs and latest trends can be tough and time-consuming. To make that easier, we’ve compiled all the articles, reports, and other bits of awesomeness you may have missed, but should definitely read. Enjoy our latest list below!
To protect its business, Kroger is building an Amazon-style flywheel [:08]
Kroger is in a race for reinvention, one made more complicated by Amazon—with traditional retail being squeezed and customers slowly shifting online, they’re on a mission to reformat stores and provide pick-up and delivery options. This will allow them to drive more online business, bring in more online advertising revenue, and invest more in online-offline capabilities.
How Can We Move To A Programmatic-First Future? [:04]
What will it take for the advertising industry to take a ‘programmatic-first’ approach to all media buying? This article sheds light on the benefits for agencies, advertisers, publishers—and what the industry must do to make it happen.
LiveRamp Adds Connected TV Identity Solution [:04]
LiveRamp announced that they will be expanding the capabilities of IdentityLink to include Connected TV. Consumers will benefit from a consistent brand experience across TV, over-the-top and digital, while marketers will be able to offer more measurable, people-based CTV campaigns.
A Funnel Thing Happened On The Way To A Converged Video Marketplace [:02]
Advertiser Perceptions is reporting that TV is being valued at the bottom of the marketing funnel due to increases in digital backchannels and data. This report found that marketers and agency executives are utilizing advanced TV platforms for lower-funnel functions such as sales, conversions, leads and other actions.
Advertisers Now Pay More for Facebook Users' Attention [:03]
If time is money, then Facebook is pushing the limits of relativity when it comes to time spent and the revenue they’re earning per user. For each hour that a U.S. adult spent on Facebook on mobile last year, advertising revenue was $0.73—about 35% more than the prior year.
Voice marketing is a looming opportunity, but not without its pitfalls [:06]
Hitting the sale of $1 billion in devices just last year, there has yet to be a smart voice assistant with voice ads on their platform. This article details a variety of key concerns that marketers should be aware of, including customer profile disparity and overreliance on vendors to propel an offering into the market.
Programmatic Audio Exchange DAX Inks Deal To Offer Voice-Enabled Ads [:03]
European radio giant, Global’s digital ad exchange has signed a deal with voice-activated ads company Instreamatic.ai. This partnership will allow Global’s DAX to place ads with verbal prompts in streaming mobile audio apps like TuneIn, Bauer Media’s KissFM and AccuRadio.
Oracle Didn’t See the Data Reckoning Coming [:05]
Over the last five years, Oracle has led acquisitions totaling over $3 billion quickly becoming a massive name in advertising. However, its Data Cloud division has faced challenges delivering on that investment bringing in around 1.25% of the company’s total revenue.
Data Finds Link Between Local Search, DOOH [:02]
Marketers are starting to see connections between digital out-of-home interactive screens and search engine advertising. They are seeing a direct correlation between proximity to a DOOH campaign and an increase in Google My Business interactions, with the use of data.
Machine Learning Is A Key Component In Managing Mobile Advertising [:06]
Mobile advertising highlights its own short list of challenges unique in the digital space relative to desktop. Read about what machine learning can do to address issues related to app-based advertising, updates in location-based advertising, and more advanced ad fraud detection.