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‘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? Digital media in 2019. We brought in Centro’s media innovations and technology team to give us their respective prediction on what will happen in the industry this year.
Christine Kim, director of client learning:
“Conversational Search -- 2019 will be the year we see voice search hit unprecedented levels in the marketplace. This year, according to eMarketer, more than 100 million Americans (nearly 1/3 of the population) will use a voice assistant. Additionally, nearly one-third of the 3.5 billion searches performed on Google every day are voice searches. The surge of virtual assistants such as Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant, and Apple’s Siri has changed consumer behavior in their day-to-day lives. With this shift in behavior, advertisers will need to start planning for what consumers might speak -- and not just what they type -- on their devices.”
Noor Naseer, senior director of media innovations and technology:
“Advanced TV will grow aggressively. Usage of various OTT devices, TV everywhere, online subscription and streaming services have surpassed previous forecasts. Furthermore, the expectation is that adoption, usage frequency and time spent will continue to accelerate upwards. A July 2018 eMarketer survey forecasts that the U.S. population of connected TV users is expected to exceed 57% in 2019. More advertisers and marketers should expect to dedicate investments previously saved for digital display and Traditional TV campaigns into these platforms and opportunities.”
Ryan Manchee, vice president of media innovations and technology:
“Required Transparency -- from the food we eat to the clothes we wear to the media we buy, the growing desire for more transparency in sourcing, quality, and the individuals and companies involved will reach a tipping point in 2019. Accelerated by the combination of growing skepticism and the ability to quickly verify claims, buyers of all types will demand sellers to be more forthright with their supply chain. In a world of choice, transparency will become a requirement and will also become increasingly marketable. More buyers will be able to make informed decisions that align with their priorities, even if that means choosing an alternative.”
Technology has done amazing things in recent years. Nearly every industry has now adopted improved processes, thanks to innovative solutions that technology has allowed. While some of these trends are obvious to outside observers, others only make sense to the people who are driving the designs. Marketing technology resides on both sides of the fence, offering marketers and their target audiences better experiences that bolster brand awareness.
As 2018 comes to a close, we wanted to look back at some of the digital marketing technology trends that dominated this year (and will continue to do so as we embark upon the next calendar year).
Consumers' expectations are higher today than ever before. Companies that truly want to create engaging campaigns must find ways to deliver authentic experiences to each of their audience members. With today's ever-connected world of mobile devices and non-stop Internet accessibility, consumers expect to be engaged and delighted across multiple channels and platforms, posing major challenges for marketers that weren't prepared for the technological takeover.
According to Adobe, "60% of marketers struggle to personalize content in real-time, yet 77% believe real-time personalization is crucial." That's a huge gap that can only be filled when organizations understand the importance of hiring an outside firm that can automate, update, and optimize their outreach and advertising efforts.
Although desktop usage is still quite common among people with traditional working hours, mobile and tablet technologies have taken over as consumers' preferred search methodologies. What marketers really need to understand is when mobile usage will provide ideal results. Depending on a company's intended demographic, the time of day in which it chooses to display ads could make or break a campaign.
As mentioned above, real-time personalization is the key to revealing a higher ROI. When mobile marketing technology is used correctly, companies can hyper-target their messages based on users' habits, locations, and the time of day in which they're most likely to give the brand the attention it wants.
Artificial intelligence (AI) began popping up in the gaming world a few years ago, but it's only recently reared its head in the marketing industry, turning once-bland ads into must-see experiences. It goes without saying that any trend grabbing people's attention exponentially in just a couple of short years will find its way into marketing campaigns.
AI ups the advertising ante, enabling companies to give consumers that real-life, personalized engagement that's truly meant for the person who's seeing the ads. It will continue to be used to aid in content creation, proper PPC purchasing, website design, and everything else users interact with on the Internet. Machine-learning algorithms enable companies to learn about their consumers and adjust to their needs and desires unlike anything before.
Once upon a time, departments were siloed, unable (or unwilling) to know what the others were doing. Today, that's not possible. Finance, marketing, accounting, and sales are all intertwined by the power of an organization's data. Each department drives the success of another, ideally finding its way to positive customer experiences. Without the necessary technological infrastructure to capture, manage, and analyze everyday data, however, companies are missing out on major opportunities to fulfill their customers' needs.
Data's all about bringing components together and identifying trends, successes, and opportunities that will propel a business into its next stages of success.
Centro is the place where better performance meets more efficient planning, execution, and management of paid digital marketing campaigns. If you're ready to learn what a performance-driven approach can do for your marketing initiatives—learn more about our services and meet our team. Get ahead of the game and be part of the trends that bring big solutions.
As a digital advertiser, you know by now that SEM is a fast-paced, rapidly evolving industry—and that the amount of change that happens in one year can easily equal more than a decade of development in another industry. To that end, it's not surprising that 2018 saw significant changes across the entire advertising landscape, with everything from the emergence of new data and privacy legislation, to new ways to target audiences and acquire insights—and looking ahead, it's safe to assume that none of these things will experience a slow down anytime soon.
If you’re wondering what new digital advertising opportunities to watch in the New Year, here are our Top 9 PPC predictions for 2019.
Back when Bing first started developing PPC advertising capabilities, the company created a platform completely unique from that of Google’s. The strategy didn’t work, however, and most advertisers ignored Bing as an advertising option.
Now Bing has revamped its strategy yet again, making it as easy as possible for advertisers to import their campaigns to its platform directly from Google Ads, while continuing to make improvements, and launching new features like dynamic search ads, automated bidding, and in-market audience targeting.
While Google still holds the lion’s share of the search market, Bing’s user base has some unique characteristics that makes it attractive for advertisers. For instance, Bing users tend to be wealthier, and spend 32% more shopping online than average internet searchers. Since Bing minimized the hassle of importing Google Ads campaigns and maximized the potential to reach target audiences, we can expect that more advertisers will launch Bing PPC campaigns in 2019.
Advertisers have been aware of the importance of cross-channel marketing for a long time. But it’s been very difficult to deliver the same marketing message across channels and accurately measure the impact of these efforts—that is, until now. And it’s getting a lot easier. Google’s automated bidding strategies, for example, make it possible to attribute across devices and platforms. And Google’s multi-channel funnels can include paid and organic search, referral sites, affiliates, social networks and email newsletters.
Google is just now waking up to answer this long-awaited need. And there are also a variety of third-party tools that advertisers can leverage to manage cross-channel advertising initiatives. As more options make it easier to launch, track and attribute multi-channel campaigns, businesses will be more inclined to pursue a comprehensive cross-channel strategy for advertising.
Chatbots have been around for several years now, but most still see them as a futuristic marketing tool that only the most competitive digital marketers develop, deploy, and use at scale.
In 2019, more marketers will realize that this couldn’t be further from the truth. Creating a chatbot for your brand is easy and relatively inexpensive. And the opportunities to integrate them into your marketing strategy are abundant.
Chatbots can interact with members of your audience just like a real customer service representative in many ways, such as:
Consequently, chatbots represent a huge opportunity for PPC advertisers to optimize their campaign performance and drive conversions. It’s possible to include a chatbot as a widget on your landing page as an optional element. Or you can go all out and turn your entire landing page into an active chatbot. But undoubtedly, including them as part of the landing pages for your ads offers your audience a customized experience that no other content can deliver.
Automation isn’t a new trend in 2019, but it’s a PPC standard that’s here to stay. And to this end, Google Ads have rolled out a variety of new features that encourage advertisers to take advantage of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning to optimize their campaigns.
So instead of “adopting automation”—which just about every PPC advertiser has already done—automation will become more integrated as an an integral component of strategy for PPC managers. While initially many PPC managers saw automation as a tool that made their role redundant, it’s now being looked at as an opportunity to supplement human intelligence—and making PPC managers much better at their jobs in the process.
Among other things, automation can take over tedious manual campaign management tasks, freeing up managers to focus on new growth initiatives. It minimizes busy work and helps uncover new opportunities for marketing managers to pursue. Thus, instead of seeing it as an intrusive technology that threatens employee value, marketing managers will soon embrace automation as the powerful tool that it has come to be.
2018 saw a growth of new ad types as platforms like Google and Facebook continued to develop new ways for advertisers to strategically target their audiences. Here are just a few examples of the many new ad types that came out in 2018:
While it might seem like advertising platforms would likely run out of new ad types, that eventuality never actually occurs. Instead, more ad types emerge every year that make it easier for advertisers to target and capture their audiences’ attention. And 2019 will be no different. (Plus, even with traditional ad types, Google, Facebook and other platforms are constantly adding new features that change the way they work.)
Historically, keyword targeting was the one best way to reach specific audiences. Search queries reflected user intent, and can tell advertisers a lot about the person behind the keyword. Now, however, PPC targeting has become more advanced, making audience targeting a more critical part of the strategy.
Google’s in-market audiences, for example, draw on user search history and sites they’ve visited around the web to identify individuals who are researching to buy in certain niches. And targeting audiences that have already shown purchase intent is more valuable for PPC advertisers than traditional keyword targeting.
Up until now most advertisers have relied on audience targeting as a way to refine their keyword strategy. But in 2019, more advertisers will start to realize that it should be the other way around—audience targeting will be an opportunity to reach the right customers as well as make ads more relevant and personalized for users' interests. Keyword targeting is still important, but it doesn’t offer the same advertising potential as audience targeting leveraging online behavior insights.
Video is one of the most powerful types of content on the web—and businesses who invest in video marketing are positioned to reach new, broad and diverse audiences, especially on mobile devices. In fact, by Cisco’s estimates, 80% of all internet traffic will be video content by 2019 and global video traffic will increase threefold between 2016 to 2021.
It stands to reason then that advertising platforms are following these trends and continuing to develop their video capabilities as a result. Google Ads, for example, recently released the option to create vertical video ads for TrueView and Universal App campaigns on YouTube.
Looking ahead in the near future, advanced video advertisers are sure to take advantage of these nuanced campaign optimization opportunities in 2019. Meanwhile, those that were slow to enter the video advertising arena in the past few years are bound to finally start.
As a digital marketer, you know that Google Ads is consistently pushing AI and machine learning as a standard part of modern day advertising, and many marketers are already using these advanced technologies to act on data insights and optimize their campaigns.
But as more marketers adopt AI and automation, competitive advertisers will start looking for new strategies to stay ahead of the competition, giving rise to significant growth of predictive advertising in 2019.
Like most automated advertising technologies, predictive advertising tools leverage AI and machine learning to drive nuanced performance insights, as well as vast amounts of behavioral data from various web platforms. From there, advanced statistical models rely on real-time data and historical performance insights to effectively predict future ad targeting opportunities. Instead of reacting to big data insights, advertisers can subsequently make proactive campaign adjustments based on future market changes.
In the past few years, advertisers have focused so much on AI and the current opportunities it creates, that the value of predictive statistical modeling has stayed a well-kept secret. But as AI and automation become status quo, advertisers who take advantage of predictive advertising will have a huge opportunity to gain a competitive edge and carve their own space in the market.
Most marketers who use search engine PPC do so as a way to supplement their organic SEO efforts, as it’s well established that creating a comprehensive SEM strategy is the best way to maximize visibility in search engines, and drive more clicks, conversions and sales.
That said, Google is constantly coming out with new ad types and features to help advertisers expand their PPC efforts. In August 2018, Google launched Expanded Text Ads, an ad type that enables advertisers to specify three headlines and two descriptions to convey more information in their ad, ultimately giving them more real estate for their marketing message.
Meanwhile, it’s well known that Google prioritizes paid advertising over organic search results, and the latest addition of Expanded Text Ads goes to show the extent of its plan for PPC ad growth. Forward-thinking advertisers recognize that Expanded Text Ads will likely become the PPC norm before long—so expect to see many more advertisers using the feature and other new ad extensions in 2019.
The online advertising industry, like many other industries today, is awash with the terms “Artificial Intelligence” and “Machine Learning” -- two buzzwords that by now are common parlance in SEM. Yet despite this recent, exponentially growing interest, publishers and advertisers have barely scratched the surface of what these terms mean and just how they can fuel data-driven decision-making with automation in order to propel better and more consistent results.
In an era when data equals currency, the ability for automated solutions to identify and surface critical insights at deeper levels of granularity than previously possible will become a tool of paramount importance for digital marketing professionals. In the short term, they can inform new strategies and leave time for more campaign creativity. In the long term, they will undoubtedly change the very economics of the industry.
So, how does automation impact advertising? How does it work and what are the benefits? We take a look.
The term itself refers to platforms and software executing processes automatically without the need for human intervention, which affect areas that include inventory quality, ad effectiveness, and marketing intelligence. Employing automation in any marketing stack will help reduce -- or eliminate altogether -- many of the manual, redundant processes that create impediments in a complex digital media ecosystem.
In a recent panel discussion about artificial intelligence, Phil Gaughran, the U.S. chief integration officer at McGarryBowen agency, boldly predicted that by 2022, 80% of advertising processes will be automated -- a threshold he claims will never be surpassed due to experiential marketing tactics that will always require hands-on involvement. “[This means] a changing job description in terms of what it means to work in advertising, unlocking a huge well of opportunity” he said.
As the field of online advertising matures and rapidly expands, so too has the sheer quantity of data involved. Where digital marketers once used to manually manage campaigns and bids with spreadsheets, modern day-to-day practitioners -- even at the most basic level -- are dealing with clicks that contain significant amounts of information relating to key modifiers such as location, time (time of day, day of week, etc.) and device (desktop, mobile, and tablet). Expert analytics professionals at DXC Technology expect annual data generation by companies to increase by a daunting 4,300% by 2020. While all of this data is clearly priceless when it comes to forming a robust marketing game plan, it is simply impossible to parse, dissect, and interpret manually -- even with a team of data analysts. And many marketers are completely uncertain how to even get started.
This is where automation comes in.
The best aspects of automated marketing platforms are glaringly apparent to the majority of industry watchers and are becoming increasingly popular -- largely because data-driven decisions are now integral to every company’s processes and goals.
But just why is automation key? The short answer is that it saves both money and time.
An uptick in ROI
Every single keyword in an online marketing program has a unique bid level at which it drives the highest return at the lowest price possible. Automated technology backed by data science and machine learning algorithms can predict the ideal bids at a given time on a given day at the individual keyword level, ensuring that valuable budget is never wasted while simultaneously maximizing returns on what is spent. For most modern platforms, this unparalleled optimization becomes automatic over time, as the software continuously learns and improves, empowering businesses to outpace their competition and uncover opportunities that would otherwise remain undiscovered.
An optimized working day
While checking and analyzing data for an individual modifier, keyword, product, or ad group is a useful exercise, repeating this for hundreds, thousands, or even millions of keywords in a given portfolio is simply unrealistic from a time or resource standpoint. By replacing these repetitive tasks with automated campaigns and guidelines, marketers will inevitably free up time to concentrate on alternative tasks that can drive brand awareness and demand generation.
Automated online advertising ultimately makes it possible for digital marketing teams to engage with, and be discovered by, their desired target audiences while allowing them to take care of other meaningful responsibilities.
A marketer wears many different hats and consequently, such tools are extremely valuable to have in their arsenal. From predicting the most profitable bids and extracting hidden insights to creating a highly efficient, time-saving environment, automation empowers businesses and organizations of any size and structure to solve advertising problems at a far greater scale than previously thought possible.
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Our own automated digital advertising platform is instrumental in driving consistent growth for marketing teams large and small. See for yourself how powerful it can be.
At Centro, we know that keeping up with the trade pubs and latest trends can be tough and time consuming—so we made it easier for you, and compiled all the articles, reports, and other bits of awesomeness you may have missed, but should definitely read. Bundle up, and enjoy the latest list below!
GroupM Revises Ad Spend Forecast Down While Magna Anticipates Record Growth [:03]
Two industry forecasts offer a differing view of media investment for 2019, with GroupM revising its 2019 ad spend forecast downward to $563 billion, while Magna raised its forecast to $578 billion. What’s affecting this variance beyond macroeconomic factors, is digital media? Magna said digital will make up half of their global ad spend by 2020, but GroupM still forecasts digital’s share at 42% in 2019.
New IAB Report Highlights Accelerated Growth of Video Spend [:02]
According to a new report from the IAB based on data from the first half of 2018, video advertising revenue is set to hit $7 billion, a 35% growth from this time last year. The report details the volume of Americans streaming video content each month (220 million), the volume of monthly streams (47 billion) and average video CPMs ($25.63). Beyond video considerations, the report covers all areas of digital ad revenue growth holistically—including mobile, desktop, search, and display.
More Ads Appear on TV, Digital Media [:02]
Commercial pods look to be on a growth trajectory moving into 2019 as TV networks and digital platforms make changes to how ads load between breaks in content. Both Google and YouTube have announced modifications to how commercials will air, in some cases in pod structure. Traditional TV vehicles including networks are also announcing shifts, offering a moment to reflect on changes in viewing experiences and viewers’ perceptions of commercial breaks.
Digiday Research: Media Buyers Don’t Rank Amazon, Twitter or Snap As Must Buys [:02]
Facebook and Google have the presence in the marketplace and make it easy for advertisers to spend money with them. It’s easy to add them to a plan and execute. However, Amazon, Twitter and Snapchat are struggling to play catch up. In a recent study done by Digiday, media buyers rated Twitter, Snapchat, and Amazon as platforms that are “nice to have” but not “must have.”
Good Day, Sunshine: WeatherBug Ups Revenue By Moving To A Unified Auction [:02]
The waterfall approach was no longer working for WeatherBug as they had too many SDKs. Having a manually managed SDK-based waterfall meant that WeatherBug was never sure if they were receiving the best price for their inventory. While they have not gone to header bidding, WeatherBug started using a mediation platform from mobile ad network InMobi to help migrate from SDKs to a unified action.
Digital News Daily Report: Mobile Shopping, Yes. Mobile Payments? No. [:02]
As Americans wade deeper into the holiday season, new evidence from GfK shows that no matter where they go, they’re watching their smartphones, with 45% viewing their devices as essential shopping tools. However, it seems that consumers still have reservations around making mobile payments.
The Entrepreneur’s Guide To Ad Tech Business Models [:05]
Review the business models that have been successfully used over the past two decades, as well as their pros and cons. These models include taking a percentage of media to CPMs to SaaS.
The End of the Beginning [:24]
Tech is building different kinds of businesses, and will change what certain industries look like (think retail, transportation, and entertainment). As we move beyond social and search, how can new technological foundations like machine learning and crypto create whole new platforms and economies? Read more to find out!
‘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? Amazon Advertising Platform. We brought in Centro’s programmatic solutions director, Lindsey Freed, to give us the breakdown.
What is Amazon Advertising Platform?
The Amazon Advertising Platform (AAP) is self-serve software from Amazon that enables advertisers to programmatically reach Amazon’s and advertisers’ audiences via Amazon sites and apps, and across the web on sites and all devices.
How can AAP be used for campaigns?
Amazon’s ad buying customers, such as Centro for example, have access to exclusive (Amazon) first-party data to segment consumer behavior, past searches, and browsing and purchasing history. Through cross-device targeting, buyers are able to deliver relevant ads to the right consumer with targeting types including prospecting, lifestyle, in-market, contextual, look-a-like, remarketing, and demographics. Inventory is available across Amazon’s owned and operated sites, including the open exchange.
How does Centro’s technology intersect with Amazon’s ad offerings?
Centro’s team has the ability and expertise to precisely target and reach billions of online shoppers (on behalf of our customer, through AAP) as they research, consider, and purchase products at any stage of the customer journey—whether they are on Amazon digital properties or not. Campaign data on Amazon is then uploaded back to Centro’s Basis software to unite it with analytics from other parts of a brand’s campaign (that isn’t happening through Amazon). This could be anything from buying on (a) other sites directly, (b) programmatic through the DSP within Basis, as well as (c) search and social.
What are the stand-out features of AAP?
Advertisers can use Amazon search queries within AAP to retarget across the web. For Link-In campaigns, where the creative clicks through to Amazon’s site, AAP offers e-commerce ads that dynamically populate images and product ratings based on Amazon’s machine learning algorithm and a selected optimization goal (such as click-through rate, purchase rate, or detail page view rate).
What are the performance metrics that I can track with AAP?
For Link-In campaigns advertisers can see in-depth metrics like return on ad spend (ROAS), cost per purchase, add-to-cart counts, detailed page-view rate, and more. For Link-Out campaigns, the conversion-based metrics are best tracked via third party ad server, but standard measurements like CTR, CPC, and CPA can be tracked within AAP.
Ok, I’m interested – how do I work with Centro and Amazon?
Centro’s technology platform, Basis, allows users to buy ads on Amazon properties directly, or manage Centro’s internal service team to run campaigns on AAP, on the users’ behalf.
Are you interested in other Centro resources that will help you understand Amazon Advertising Platform? We’re here for you! Reach out to [email protected].
It might seem like advertising and customer experience are two diametrically opposed concepts -- and truth be told, when marketers evaluate customer experience, they rarely consider how advertising impacts their audience.
Unfortunately, that’s a big and growing problem. According to a recent study, nearly 70% of consumers say they don’t trust advertising, while another 42% say they distrust brands. And they have a point -- all too often digital ads fail to take into account the customer experience, often seen as self-serving and even aggressive, as opposed to relevant, timely, and helpful for consumers. Once audiences feel alienated, it’s no secret then that they increasingly ignore ads or make use of ad blockers to prevent them from appearing at all.
Contrary to popular belief, the advertising experience doesn’t have to result this way -- either for you or your customers. And if you're looking to expand reach, boost ROI, and increase profits -- it shouldn’t. To avoid this common mistake, businesses that want to develop a relevant, sustainable, and profitable advertising strategy need to, above all else, prioritize the customer experience.
Below are some key initiatives marketers can take to fully consider and embrace the customer experience.
First, one of the biggest mistakes an advertiser can make is targeting their ads to the wrong or irrelevant audience. To avoid this, advertisers have a plethora of available targeting tools at their fingertips, all aimed at helping them vector in on the right prospects.
Location, device, and language targeting are the core standards that Google offers. That said, even advertisers who optimize for these standards are often missing numerous targeting opportunities -- and as a result, 70% of marketers fail to leverage things like behavioral data to reach their target market.
This, of course, is clearly a big mistake, as online consumer behavior can provide unique insights that can supercharge targeting efforts. To that end, Google’s in-market audiences can help advertisers hone in on users who have shown online interest in one of any number of areas.
The ability to target ads can become even more sophisticated when leveraging third-party behavioral data from web publications that rely on data aggregation tools such as tracking cookies, IP addresses, and form fills. In addition, user intent data can also help advertisers identify new customers, while also providing insights about them at various buying cycle stages. By strategically leveraging these third-party data insights in the right way, advertisers can better personalize their marketing message, finding more ways to attract the right audiences at the right time with the right ads.
All too often, advertisers spend countless hours creating and finely tuning dynamic ads that speak directly to the needs of prospects, only to direct their clicks back to generic landing pages that fail to deliver the same targeted and relevant message. Sound familiar?
While it might seem obvious, landing page relevance is another factor that clearly affects the customer experience. Thus, relying on generic landing pages for your ads both impacts the customer experience, the effectiveness of your ads and ultimately, the number of conversions. So how do people react when they click on an ad and reach a landing page that isn’t what they expect? Ultimately, many of them will bounce and search for a competitor. In addition, a poor landing page user experience also impacts your PPC Quality Score, which in turn, affects your ability to rank for certain keywords.
So when optimizing your digital advertising efforts, make sure you consider how closely your landing page content matches your ad copy and query intent. A good practice is to use the same words and phrases in both your ads and landing pages headlines, which maintains a sense of continuity and helps reassure visitors that they’re at the right place. To that end, dynamic search ads (DSAs) can be used to ensure your search ads, search terms, and landing pages are congruent and to determine which page performs best.
To truly put their consumers first, advertisers need to understand that customer experience optimization goes well beyond their ad copy and landing pages. Consider how users respond to online ads in general -- while some respond by clicking on them, the vast majority end up at your website through alternative means. As such, advertisers need to focus on customer experience across their entire website to make it easy for users to find exactly what they’re looking for -- whether it’s a product, service or company information.
Important user experience factors include:
While improving site-wide user experience is just a good practice in general, perhaps the biggest reason to do so is that your site is the gateway to your company and brand. If potential customers encounter major challenges accessing your site and the information on it, they will probably assume they will have the same experience throughout the entire buying cycle.
Whether warranted or not, many consumers don’t see digital ads as a way to meet their own needs -- in fact, it’s just the opposite. Many see digital ads as something that only serves the needs of a business aimed at getting one more sale. And in many cases, they’d be right.
That said, advertisers who speak to the emotions of their audience are better poised to counteract any knee-jerk reaction that prevents them from being open to an advertising message -- and might even change their perception altogether -- by touching on universal emotions such as love, desire, ambition, adventure, family, community and a sense of purpose.
That said, your message shouldn’t be one-dimensional because your audience is complex. For example, weight loss ads not only speak to people’s need to look and feel attractive and desirable, but to lose weight easily and with minimal effort.
And while PPC advertisers have less real estate to work with in their ad copy, there are still plenty of opportunities to create an emotional appeal. Consider ad copy that asks the question: Why would people search for information about buying a new car online? The answer: because they want to both make an intelligent decision and get the most for their money -- a rationale that might effectively combat any feelings of buyers’ remorse that likely will occur with a major purchase. Thus a headline like “The smart way to buy a new car” speaks directly to the audience’s emotional needs.
Instead of focusing on product features and sales, marketers can and should create more emotional advertising copy by turning to their buyer personas. To really get a strong and accurate sense of your audience’s emotional needs, responsive search ads (RSAs) allow you to create adaptable ads that align with your text to show a greater range of both emotional and promotional messages, while also determining which of those best resonate with different audiences. Once it’s determined what your audience needs and wants to feel -- it’s incumbent upon you, the advertiser, to accommodate these needs throughout the entirety of your campaigns.
As with almost anything else, timing is everything. You not only need to provide a valuable message, you often need to do it exactly at the right time in order to push potential customers over the line for a conversion. While leveraging automation to target in-market audiences with Google Ads is a great starting point, it often doesn't go far enough. By the time most people start deliberately searching for a product or service, it’s likely they already have the intent to purchase and will probably buy it soon. When your ads finally reach them, they’ve already converted -- with your competitor.
That’s where predictive advertising comes in. With advanced data analysis and statistical algorithms, predictive technologies can help advertisers identify in-market audiences before they show any signs of purchase intent. By strategically leveraging historical data and statistical projections as part of a predictive platform, advertisers can draw critical correlations between demographics, interests, and online behavior to more acutely target the type of people interested in their products and services.
A powerful predictive advertising technology, for example, could analyze first and third-party intent data and discover that women who read a certain type of travel adventure memoir are more likely to buy a specific type of hiking shoe. A shoe retailer could use these insights to create targeted ads to this demographic before they show any purchase intent. Tools like artificial intelligence and machine learning can be used by advertisers to not only discover these insights, but act upon them by displaying ads exactly when people need them the most.
Ultimately, these capabilities not only elevate customer experience, they also resolve major remarketing issues that advertisers face on a daily basis. Case in point: How do you think customers feel when they’re served a display ad for flights 10 minutes after buying airline tickets? The short answer is that they think it’s irritating, or at least are uncomfortable in light of the obvious evidence that advertisers are tracking their online behavior. But by offering that ad to the right audience well before they purchase -- or even before they think about purchasing -- you’re providing unique value that will put you head and shoulders above your competitors.
It goes without saying that you put your customers first in almost every aspect of your sales cycle -- from customer service to help desk to shipping needs. So it stands to reason that you put them first with your advertising message as well with tactics like using emotional appeal, improving website navigability, and offering relevant and consistent landing pages. But even beyond that, marketers today have a real opportunity to breathe new life into campaigns to change a largely negative perception of advertising, while boosting clicks, conversions, ROI, and revenue in the process.
The tools are readily available for you to deliver even more targeted and relevant ads to the right audience at the right time, anticipating and accommodating the needs of the buyer even before they do. All you have to do is think like the customer.
Many PPC advertisers focus the bulk of their efforts on optimizing campaigns for search ads—and with good reason. It’s profitable, reliable and a known entity on which they can comfortably and (somewhat) predictably reach their core target audience. But it’s certainly not the only path for revenue.
Location-based ads—and in particular Google Maps—increasingly offer a variety of new features that advertisers can leverage to better target and convert local audiences. By adding its features to your digital advertising toolkit, you're sure to give conversions and ROI a significant lift.
The following is everything you need to know about how to advertise on Google Maps to supercharge your online advertising strategy.
When people search for businesses through the Google Maps app, they automatically have access to search ads that feature business locations. Similarly, when users search Google for nearby businesses, location-based ads appear in local at the top of search results from the Google Maps mobile app. (This also works when conducting searches using Google or Google Maps on desktop.)
Compared to regular Google PPC ads, it might seem like Google Maps ads provide little opportunity to rank, simply because the Google Maps app only displays one ad above organic results and Google Maps desktop shows two ads before organic results. And as such, your targeting strategy needs to be competitive enough to land your ads in those top one or two positions.
That said, there are numerous ways you can optimize your listings and leverage Google Maps to improve online advertising—it just requires you to execute precision with your targeting strategies and optimize your ads to attract more in-store visits.
E-commerce has grown astronomically in the past 10 years. It’s no secret that people love to shop online, using the web to buy everything from shoes, to cars, to ordering groceries for home delivery. This development has left many advertisers wondering if allocating their budgets to drive in-store visits is really worth the investment.
Yet despite the growth of ecommerce, in-store shopping is still going strong. It is propelled, in part, by the wealth of location-based shopping information available on mobile phones. Consider this:
With more than a billion users, Google Maps is the most popular mapping app for acquiring location-based information. So incorporating local search ads into your advertising strategy carries a myriad of benefits, that include:
In short, mobile phones make it quick and easy for people to find relevant local information when they’re out running errands or planning a trip to local businesses. People who use their smartphones to get local business information don’t want to endlessly search to find what they need—they want to access it quickly and easily, underscoring that location-targeted advertising is increasingly essential for any business with a physical location. And advertising with Google Maps is key to reaching these users.
Google Maps has implemented many changes recently that give businesses even more opportunities to improve advertising performance on its platform. In fact, during Google’s most recent Performance Summit, they announced four key new features:
Let's take a quick look at each.
A new and important advertising feature that helps your business get noticed in Google Maps are Promoted Pins. Promoted Pins are the array of red pins on the map highlighting businesses. But, perhaps surprisingly, not every business automatically gets a pin. By strategically leveraging Promoted Pins, it’s possible to display a special branded pin to help your business stand out to people who are nearby your business and looking at Google Maps.
These pins are purple instead of the traditional red, indicating that it’s an ad. Promoted Pins can also include your business logo right in Google Maps. For example, if someone searched for “Contact lenses near me,” it could trigger a branded Walgreens Pin. If they click on the pin they’ll see a targeted ad as well.
The ads that correspond with Promoted Pins display important business information such as location, distance, and Google Reviews rating. But they’re also an opportunity to highlight special in-store promotions to convince people to come visit your business.
Along with these ads, it’s also possible to promote coupons related to the person’s search. So if someone searches for “Contact lenses near me,” Walgreens could display a coupon for $3 off contact lens solutions to entice the person to visit.
When people click on your local search ad, they’re taken to your Google My Business page. This is a local business resource you can customize and optimize to increase in-store visits and conversions. At a fundamental level, your business page needs to include important information like your location, business hours, phone number and website.
Also, these days many customers only make location store visits only if they’re sure it stocks the items they want. To that end, you can also use your local pages to display a searchable database of that store’s local inventory. By sharing your local inventory along with your Google Maps ads, you can increase in-store visits and, thus, conversions.
To display this information on your local pages, you need to have a local product inventory feed, which requires you to submit information daily about all of your inventory. The incremental local product inventory feed allows you to make regular updates to item prices and quantities available throughout the day.
To use local inventory search, you must provide the store code, quantity and price of each item in stock. But you can also include optional inventory details like sales price and sales price effective date. Google can then use this information to recommend special promotions to members of your audience.
In-store promotions can appear alongside your promoted pins, directly on the map below the logo. It’s also possible to display coupons, specials or sales right from your business page. If you use the incremental local product inventory feed, you can offer special sales a specific times of the day. This helps your local audience find what they’re looking for while also offering relevance and opportunity to convince them to choose your store over another.
Here’s a basic, three-step run through of how to set up location-based ads to show on Google Maps:
To show ads for Google Maps, you first need a Google Ads account and a Google My Business Page. A Google My Business page is critical for all aspects of search engine marketing. This free profile lists important information (location, hours, photos, and reviews) and appears in local organic search results. It can also appear with your local search ads or on Google Maps.
You likely already have a Google My Business page and have optimized it to make your business look appealing. (Quick tips: list correct information, upload appealing business photos, and promote positive Google reviews for your business.) From there, the next step is to set up a location extension.
One important way to optimize Google Maps ads is to target people who are near your business location. Do this by setting a custom radius for how close someone needs to be for your ads to appear. Radius targets quick conversions from people who are out and can visit your local business based on proximity and convenience.
Location targeting allows you to target entire countries, areas within a country or a radius around a location. Choosing a radius around a location may result in less reach for your ads overall. But it helps target specific audiences that are likely to convert. This is particularly important for location-based businesses that deliver services within a specific radius, or a local business whose customer base is within a certain radius.
Say, for example, you run a supermarket chain with three locations in town. The targeting radius for one store should not overlap another location when people are physically closer to a different store. In the same vein, a towing company wouldn’t want to target ads to a radius outside of their service area.
It’s also possible to adjust your bids based on audience location. For example, you can increase your bid for someone who’s within a one mile radius of your business.
Radius targeting is only one way to optimize your location-based ads. If someone searches for “[niche keyword] near me” and they’re within your set radius, then they could see your ads on Google Maps.
However many potential consumers have location-based search intent even when they’re not within a specific location radius. For example, someone traveling to Minneapolis next week could search for “Minneapolis hotels” while they’re still physically in Seattle. So you’d need to target location-based keywords if you want your ads to appear for these queries.
To build a location-based keywords list, use your search queries report, Keyword Planner and other third-party keyword research tools. The biggest difference between regular keyword targeting is that location-based keywords include modifiers that imply local intent.
A Seattle hotel, for example, could target keywords like:
There are a variety of modifiers relevant to your business location, such as nearby employers, event venues or other colloquiums used to describe different parts of town. The keywords you target can also inform the promotions that display along with your Google Maps ads. A pharmacy like Walgreens wouldn’t just target keywords like “pharmacy near me,” or “pharmacy [city name]." They could target keywords like “contact lenses [city name]” then display a special discount on related products as part of their Google Maps ad.
While sometimes overlooked, Google Maps offers a host of features aimed at helping businesses attract local traffic and drive conversions. And targeting keywords with local intent and radiuses around your business location are just the beginning. Used strategically, Google Maps can help you harness relevant inventory information, limited-time promotions, and help your location stand out on the map using special promoted pins. In short, it broadens the horizons of your strategy with exponentially more possibilities for targeting specific demographics. Like a premium fuel, or a shot of vitamin B12, learning how to advertise on Google Maps will supercharge your digital advertising strategy.
Video continues to be one of the strongest methods of delivering messages to audiences everywhere, especially on social platforms, yet there is still much room for growth and improvement for many marketers.
From boomerangs to behind-the-scenes live streams, to long-form unboxing videos—consumers are posting videos and consuming brands’ video content at unprecedented rates. This webinar shares 12 insights on social video, including: