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If you’ve advertised on platforms like Google Ads or Bing Ads, you know by now that they try their hardest to make the SEM account maintenance process as easy as possible. Thanks to automation, you can easily set and forget your PPC campaigns, letting Google Ads do the heavy lifting for everything from optimization to simplifying campaigns to targeting the right prospects. But your work doesn’t stop there.
In fact, even the most experienced search engine marketers understand that their accounts often require additional maintenance—a little TLC and a personal touch—to garner the highest possible value and ROI for their advertising dollars, while ensuring their PPC campaigns remain profitable and efficient.
However, as your PPC campaign initiatives expand and evolve, so do the corresponding maintenance obligations. The more time, money and resources your marketing teams invest into SEM account maintenance, the more difficult it is to create enough efficiency and momentum to steadily increase ROI. At the same time, marketers who fail to put time and resources into campaign optimization risk falling behind competitors who do.
This post discusses the challenges around SEM account maintenance and efficiency at various points throughout your campaigns, and what PPC managers can do to strike the right balance between maintenance and momentum for their business.
It likely goes without saying that your bidding strategy is perhaps one of the biggest opportunities to improve campaign performance. Google Ads offers several main options to bid for your ads, and the one you choose is contingent upon your campaign goals and overall account strategy:
Clicks and conversions are the relevant bidding options for SEM. Focusing on clicks means you’ll use cost-per-click (CPC) bidding, enabling you to only pay for an ad when someone clicks on it. With CPC, you have the option to bid manually or use automated bidding. If you choose to bid manually, you have full control over the bids you set at group level, or for individual keywords or ad placements. If you choose automatic bidding, Google makes the bidding decisions for you.
If you focus on conversions, you’ll leverage a cost-per-acquisition (CPA) model, and you’ll need to set up conversion tracking so you can define the kind of on-site actions you want visitors to perform. While focusing on conversions can help you nurture leads and realize higher revenue from your PPC efforts, you also relinquish control of how your bids are set.
Without a doubt, Google Ads automatic bidding features make SEM account maintenance and campaign optimization a lot easier—especially for less experienced advertisers who lack the expertise or resources to make well-informed decisions based on their own insights. To garner the most relevant and strategic insights possible, Google’s automatic bidding platform leverages a machine learning algorithm in combination with behavioral and demographic data, such as location, day, time, browser and device, among other things.
Most SEM managers concerned with SEM account efficiency opt for automated bidding, in which Google adjusts CPC bids in order to maximize clicks. However, while perhaps more labor intensive out the gate, the ability to control your own bidding strategy can potentially give you the opportunity to factor in external data insights that can improve the effectiveness and efficiency of your campaigns and give you a bit of an unanticipated leg up over competitors.
The reason? You can gain key insights on consumer behavior from external data that Google Ads just can’t provide or factor in, thus giving you an edge over competitors not leveraging those same insights. And when marketers make bidding choices based on an understanding of their full unique funnel, they in turn can improve conversion rates, lower their minimum bid, and improve their Quality Score.
While it may be a well-kept secret, third-party bidding tools combine both the efficiency of automation and the accuracy and personalization of manual bidding, truly optimizing your entire campaign strategy.
Here’s why: Third-party bidding solutions automate your bidding strategy based on a broader range of factors, allowing you to create your own unique bid policy settings to increase the performance and value of your advertising efforts based on specific factors and campaign goals. For example, third-party platforms leverage data science and machine learning technology to maximize a KPIs like conversions, profit or revenue. But you can also set them to do so within a monthly spend amount and specify minimum margins in order to maximize your revenue-based KPI within a framework that fits your broader business goals.
On the other hand, in a purely automated scenario, Google Ads assumes advertisers want to bid with a single marketing goal in mind (i.e. clicks, conversions, etc.). In reality, advertisers working toward complex goals like performance and growth likely have several relevant key performance indicators (KPIs) that determine the success of their campaigns. Google’s automatic bidding technology simply doesn’t have the sophistication, options or information to make these kinds of strategic, highly personalized decisions. And savvy advertisers who use Google automatic bidding in an effort to improve efficiency can end up sacrificing optimal effectiveness as a result.
In today’s PPC advertising world, bid adjustments are just as important as your campaign structure and initial bidding strategy. Google now offers a variety of bid adjustment options, and they’re a standard strategy for advertisers wishing to better allocate their ad spend and improve campaign effectiveness.
You can adjust bids for the following factors:
Some advertisers use bid adjustments as a general targeting tool—doing a -100% desktop bid adjustment, for example, will prevent your ads from appearing on desktop. That said, the real value of bid adjustments is helping you target your bids more efficiently to improve performance.
Some common bid adjustment strategies include:
While bid adjustments can help improve SEM account maintenance and campaign performance, they also increase the complexity and maintenance needs of your campaigns. Some bid adjustments are only optimal during specific market conditions, so leaving these adjustments in place unnecessarily can negatively impact campaign efficiency. Thus, marketers should be prepared to make necessary and timely adjustments to their bids, or risk hurting their campaigns. And the best way to address this issue to to strategically leverage a technology designed to automate bid adjustments in a way that automatically calculates location and device for Google or Bing based on trends and changes relevant to your unique business.
Many advertisers focused on maintaining the efficiency and effectiveness of their SEM account maintenance and initiatives fail to realize the critical and fundamental role of account structure. In fact, how you first establish your campaigns is one of the most significant factors impacting potential optimization down the road.
When an account is well organized, it’s also easier to systematically identify key areas, then adjust and optimize to improve efficiency. It also ensures that the search queries you’re targeting are relevant to your target audience. This in turn improves your Quality Score, which ultimately makes it easier to target your ads at lower prices.
One aspect of your account structure that you can continuously change is ad grouping. As you continue to understand and refine the keywords and market information that can improve your account’s relevance, it’s worthwhile to follow keyword grouping best practices. Among other things, you can:
Create broad, top level ad groups - Select generalized keywords that relate to the products or services you want to advertise. A clothing retailer, for example, could group keywords based on product types (e.g. “women’s boots”).
Segment your groups into targeted subgroups - Next you’ll create sub groups using keyword modifiers. These will provide more detail about user intent, whether it be transactional, investigative or instructional.
Clean up and optimize your groups - Lastly you’re ready to optimize your keyword groups by adding in synonyms and variations on your base keywords, and organize duplicate keywords into your desired groups.
Once you create your ad groups and organize your keywords within them, it’s important to take the next steps to improve your structure as your PPC campaign matures. Setting and leaving your ad groups make it impossible to keep up with competitors over the long-term, as your ad performance can degrade as competitors make small adjustments that adapt to new market trends leaving your business behind the curve.
Instead, getting ahead of the curve, so to speak, will be reliant upon how often you revisit and refine your ad groups to optimize performance and efficiency, a strategy that you will constantly hone as your business grows and as markets change.
Luckily, keyword grouping is another area of SEM account maintenance that you can automate. And by leveraging predictive analysis and machine learning, it’s also possible to improve keyword grouping beyond what PPC managers and standard automated processes provide.
Some marketers incorporate negative keywords into their PPC strategy almost as an afterthought, selecting the most obvious ones and deciding that’s all they need to truly optimize their campaigns. In reality, failing to discover and use all your relevant negative keywords can result in significant wasted ad spend.
Negative keywords can come from a variety of sources that are either irrelevant to your business or irrelevant to your PPC advertising goals. For example, keywords such as “[brand keyword] login” or “[brand keyword] order number” suggest a user has already converted into a paying customer. If your main PPC advertising goal is to drive conversions, then these are important negative keywords to add to your list.
It’s worthwhile to put extra time and effort into compiling your negative search terms list initially when setting up your campaigns. But you should also put processes in place so you continuously discover new negative search terms. For example, it’s good practice to set up Google Alerts for your branded keywords and others relevant to your industry so you can track what news and content searches could trigger your ads to appear.
That said, constantly reviewing your keyword lists for negative keywords can create monumental challenges—at the very least, this requires you to sift through thousands of keywords and make important distinctions between exact words, phrase or broad match negative. But for businesses that invest heavily in PPC campaigns, its a challenge that can’t be overlooked. And if complete, updated negative keyword lists are continually maintained, it’s possible to save up to 20% or more of your PPC budget.
The key to success is to continuously assess Google Ads performance to identify new keyword opportunities, then group keywords in a way that’s easy to asses. From there, use your search terms report, negative keyword tools, competitive research, and other sources of data insights to continuously add to and refine your negative keyword lists.
Performance analytics is also arguably the most important aspect of SEM account maintenance, simply because it’s essential to optimizing every other aspect of your PPC campaigns. If you’re not able to fully attribute your PPC performance metrics to optimization efforts to, you’ll have no key insights for future improvements.
Accurate and full-funnel performance attribution can help with your SEM efficiency and efficacy efforts by:
Google Ads offers a variety of internal features that can help you gain insights to make these important optimization decisions—for example, the Keyword Planner tool can help you identify growth opportunities based on your budget allocation. But these are generalized estimates that don’t reflect the unique market and position of your business.
Meanwhile, the same predictive analysis and bidding automation tools you use to improve efficiency can also paint a better picture of campaign performance—serious marketers will often use Google’s internal reporting features along with third-party technologies that provide deeper campaign insights. But the best advertising technologies provide flexibility so that you can make key decisions to customize your bids and budgets or automate changes to focus on efficiency. It’s never one or the other.
Despite the abundance of optimization and automation features at your disposal, creating efficient campaigns that maximise your return on ad spend (ROAS) still represents a major hurdle for marketers. Compounding this challenges is that many advertisers underestimate the range of opportunities available for them to improve their campaign structure, ads and landing pages, keywords and bidding strategy.
Those who focus on all of these unique areas are in the best position to be able to reduce wasted ad spend and maximize campaign performance. But doing so requires PPC managers invest extensively in SEM account maintenance. Only the largest, best equipped PPC management teams can attempt to keep up with the task long term. And even then, new data and market insights will always complicate the data and introduce new challenges. In short, SEM account maintenance presents a daunting and formidable task for even largest and best-supported teams—that is, unless they leverage the right tools.
Google Ads’ internal automation and optimization features are a great place to start when managing the complexity of SEM account maintenance. But it’s far from the only option. External technologies can factor in optimization points specific to your unique business and market, while giving you the ability to act on data insights from a much broader understanding of consumer behavior across the web.
At the end of the day, true SEM account maintenance is learning to strike the right balance between insights, automation and hands-on optimization. It’s about finding the desired combination of efficiency and effectiveness, personalization and profits. And then finding the right technology to get the job done.
The turkey is in the oven. The football game is on TV. The house is ready for the in-laws coming over (more or less). And while you’re busy preparing for the upcoming Thanksgiving feast ahead, your desktop is shut down and you’re ready to leave the office for an extended holiday weekend. But just as your household is being prepared for the holiday, your Thanksgiving PPC campaigns are also in need of some holiday preparation.
Thinking ahead, you’ll want to ensure that you’re still maximizing ROI and giving conversions a boost, even when you’re in post-Thanksgiving food coma bliss. So, while we’re sure you have plenty of other distractions, here are a few tips for your Thanksgiving PPC campaigns to keep in mind over the holidays.
While your primary audience will stay the same, it will likely be expanded a bit to account for one-off buyers and additional holiday searchers. To take advantage of this anticipated uptick of potential customers, as well as ensure that your campaigns will be found in holiday searches, be sure to capitalize on all related holiday-themed keywords relevant to your offerings. In the same vein, you’ll want to think of the plethora of long-tail and related keyword combinations that could further hone in on likely targets.
From there, be prepared to adjust bids accordingly to make sure you’re showing up strategically throughout the weekend. Because CPC spikes on high-traffic days when customers are at home and unusually eager to part with their money, be prepared to bid higher than you normally do than at other times of the year.
We all know the holidays are a bit nuts and chances are your customers aren’t running on a normal schedule either. So if your ads are set to run for a specific span of time during the day, or day of that week, make sure they’re adjusted to accommodate abnormal holiday traffic flows. People might not be in the office, but that doesn’t always mean they’re ready or available to shop online. And be sure that all of your promotions are carefully aligned with your Thanksgiving PPC campaigns so that you’re truly maximizing the value of your campaign and achieving the highest possible ROI.
Once that campaign is underway, be sure to keep up on the holiday metrics with granular reporting -- there could likely be some aberrations or surprises due to the holiday. Pay close attention to keyword performance, click-through rates, and conversion rates, as these metrics will likely diverge from usual, non-holiday levels. And it never hurts to learn from the past by comparing last year’s data to this year’s metrics. Attempting to exceed those results will not only help your campaigns reach new levels, but it will also likely score some bonus points with your superiors.
Remember that these days, the majority of holiday searches -- including those on Black Friday and Cyber Monday -- occur from mobile devices. And the number of mobile purchases are rapidly growing. So you’ll want to ensure that you expand your strategy around your Thanksgiving PPC campaigns to capture the dearth of anticipated mobile traffic as busy shoppers buy gifts while doing a thousand other holiday errands. To make sure you’re providing an optimal mobile experience, check to make sure that consumers are going to the right mobile landing page on their devices, and that you’ve updated your mobile bid modifiers. You also might want to customize mobile tracking so you can parse and analyze conversion rates on these platforms.
‘Tis the season. This may be a no-brainer but the only way you’ll rank for holiday keywords is if you actually have holiday content to post. So work up some catchy, memorable holiday copy. And start early to get ahead of the competition -- as well as the eager consumers looking for holiday-themed ideas and goods the moment the Thanksgiving leftovers are put in the fridge. Be sure your ad copy is posted well before the holidays so they can easily find you the moment they embark on their holiday shopping.
There’s never been a greater time to write a powerful CTA than the day after Thanksgiving. The reason? Many prospects are home for the extended weekend and already feeling pressure to get started on their shopping bonanzas. And they’re already in the mood to look for that “perfect” gift, so your CTA might be just the boost that they need to put them across the finish line as an actual conversion.
That said, you have a lot of competition vying for the same eyeballs. Be sure your copy is succinct and to the point, reflecting the spirit of the season while also creating a sense of urgency -- without being aggressive. (it’s a tall order, we know.) Tailor your copy to accommodate anticipated spikes in traffic around each holiday and event -- like Thanksgiving, Black Friday or Cyber Monday. And complement your copy with eye-catching colors and graphics, which can sometimes mean the difference between a click and being passed over for something else.
Between a Thanksgiving dinner to prepare, visits from friends and family, and holiday decorations to pull out of the basement, we’re pretty sure that your plate is full. But it’s likely that the health and success of your PPC campaigns are never that far from your mind. (Plus all those metrics will be right there waiting for you when you return to the office Monday morning.) Applying a few holiday best practices ahead of time will set your Thanksgiving PPC campaigns on a solid and profitable course over the holidays and give you one less thing to worry about -- and could even bring you much-needed peace of mind amid the holiday chaos.
‘Tis the season… to be advertising!
HO HO HO! Thanksgiving is practically here, Black Friday is right around the corner, and the holidays are soon-to-follow. At this point, consumers have already started their shopping, and every brand/retailer is on the hunt for the best way to increase their share of wallet. Proper targeting, segmentation, and engagement are now more important than ever in order to stand-out.
Are you trying to determine the most effective way to deploy the remainder of your annual marketing budget? Do you know the right strategies and tactics to heighten your message’s engagement? We’ve made a list (and checked it twice) of all the latest stats and key trends, that are sure to put your holiday campaigns on the “nice” list!
Review our Holiday Advertising Trends Infographic below!
You’ve done your keyword research. You’ve compiled a monster keyword list. You’ve run plenty of campaigns on that keyword list. You’ve worked hard trying to optimize your bids. You have analyzed and tweaked and done your best to make sense of the results.
But you can’t. Your ads don’t seem to produce the profits you seek, your keyword list isn't getting play and your superiors are wondering if you actually majored in marketing.
Nevertheless, this story is a familiar one to internet advertisers of all stripes. Keywords, while their harvesting and list-building is pretty straightforward, are actually monumentally difficult to make pay … at least until you know what you’re doing.
Luckily, there are some answers. In this article, we’ll discuss a wide variety of relatively simple tricks to help you boost your ads’ effectiveness. This includes understanding the difference between keywords and search terms, discarding irrelevant keywords, removing errors and extra characters in your lists, and tightening up your words and phrases.
It also will entail making ad groups more profitable by winnowing out underperforming keywords on your keyword list and organizing them more effectively, understanding the other uses of each keyword, using negative keywords to avoid bidding on them, and using your keywords and search terms on your site.
You likely know how to search for keywords, most likely using a free tool like the one provided in Google Ads, as well as how to segment your keyword list somewhat proficiently. Given that, we’ll provide you with tips to make them perform better and more efficiently during your campaigns.
Lastly, you probably already have outlined and executed a PPC strategy, even if it’s not yet paying off in the way that you want. If you haven’t, feel free to read and file these tips, although you might want to go back to basics first. Whatever stage you’re at amid your strategic PPC journey, you can benefit from these smart, easy steps. Let’s get started.
First and foremost, it’s critical to understand the difference between keywords you add to a keyword list and search terms. This is somewhat fundamental, but don’t feel offended: Many marketers still don’t understand the function of each. Simply put:
This matters because a variety of search terms will funnel toward the same single keyword. For instance, if you sell prepackaged muffin mix, the following search queries might trigger any number of keywords. Once you run a campaign, you can look at the data to see which search queries triggered your keyword. This tells you two things:
You can immediately add the pertinent keywords to your list. We’ll talk about what to do with the keywords that don’t work in Steps 5, 8, and 9.
Understanding what your ideal customer is looking for and reflecting that in your keyword list is critical. First, that starts with researching queries rather than keywords on your keyword list. Keywords serve you, but only if you first make sure you’re serving prospects. And that comes from knowing their queries.
Again, you can perform this research in your own data. You can also use tools such as Google Trends, which will tell you what searchers are looking for. Once you have those queries, you can plug them into a keyword tool and see what you get.
The bottom line here is, what do you actually sell, and what are your ideal customers looking for? The more granular you can become with regards to defining intent, the further you go toward the long tail and low competition. It also nails the prospect’s experience when they hop online to do the research that will bring them to you.
Micro-moments are a fascinating new-ish idea stemming from Google’s research that “people are more loyal to their need in the moment, rather than any particular brand (as Tourism eSchool reports, 65% of smartphone users agree that when conducting a search on their smartphones, they look for the most relevant information regardless of the company providing the information)
What are your micro-moments? What do people come to search engines looking for in the moment, and how can you snag them when they need what you sell the most? For muffin mix companies, it might be school bake sales or holiday parties, Fourth of July picnics, or even a funeral, where no one has time to cook. It’s not your brand that will win them over, it’s your ability to take care of them in these situations.
So: What’s their time of need? How can you serve them in it? Now use the answers you come up with to run keyword searches, test them via campaigns and use the rest of these steps to keep the most valuable ones.
While older PPC platforms used to reward variations of keywords, that’s no longer the case. Nowadays, search algorithms tend to weed them out using a rough version of the following rules:
What does this tell you? That you’re not getting much out of your ad spend on words that are likely closely matched keywords, but are not in fact those words. So just cut them out entirely and stop the competition/wasted money.
Remember when we talked about irrelevant keywords from your keyword list in Step 1? Well, there’s a good chance some of them are still on your list. How do we know? Because if you search “muffin mix” in Google Ads, you will pull up keywords that contain words such as “recipe,” “homemade” and “how to.”
These all tell you that searchers are looking to do something at home, probably right now (an irrelevant micro-moment). While a small subset of them might purchase your mix if it pops up, most will quickly look elsewhere – which means you’re ultimately wasting your ad spend.
You’ll also likely pull up terms relating to products that you, the “dedicated muffin mix maker,” just don’t carry. This begs the question -- do these keywords even have a place in your keyword list? Some marketers run their campaigns on the notion that any impression is a good impression. But is it? Are those impressions worth much if they don’t convert and steal spend from keywords that do?
The short answer is no, they do not have a place on your keyword list, and may in fact only be there because your marketing department has run lots of keyword searches, thrown everything into an Excel spreadsheet, and then failed to properly vet the list.
If you’re guilty of hoarding a long keyword list while also completely disinterested in combing through hundreds or thousands of keywords, we understand. Yet if you want your ads to perform, you must get those irrelevant keywords out of there.
You can do further work to tighten up those words on your keyword list by weeding out misspellings and errors. Pure sloppiness is a waste of money, and because the system no longer rewards variations, the use of misspellings is low (if the system lets you input them at all).
Luckily, Google Ads is pretty good about returning clean keywords, as are most other research tools these days. (With the exception of some of the Amazon keyword-mining tools, which haven’t caught up.) Still, some misspellings do sneak in, as do duplicate spellings from other dialects.
In the case of a muffin mix vendor, the misspelling of “recipe” may not have been valid anyway, but the spelling of “savoury” has to go. So does anything along the lines of “mufin” or “bluberry” or any other obvious misspelling that’s just plain wrong.
Once you’ve removed errors and tightened up the words on your list, you will want to segment them appropriately to avoid keyword cannibalization. Perhaps you have ad groups dedicated to different flavors, how many ingredients they have to add, holidays, and school functions, among other things.
This step is simple, but it’s not necessarily easy. In order to know which ads are under-performing, you need better tools to help you see which terms deliver results and which don’t, and to help you distinguish which is which. Machine learning and data science are probably your best bet because they create a wealth of usable data and deliver metrics you might never arrive at on your own. Plus, platforms that utilize such cutting-edge technologies do a better job of helping you maximize your ad spend and optimize the words from your keyword list that do work, so you can turn your attention to other aspects of your marketing, such as ad creative or search query research.
Keywords can mean many things to many people. As we’ve seen, the keyword “muffin mix” can mean prepackaged or homemade.
According to the site Keyword.com, "I was looking through an Adwords account from another Adwords agency. One of the most used keywords was “Danish Swedish.” It was in the top 10 with most impressions, clicks, and cost. With that keyword people were searching for the search term “Danish-Swedish Farmdog” more than 80% of the time. It is all right if you are a dog breeder, but this client is a translation agency looking for big companies (It was not difficult to win that client after I show them this example).
Here’s where those terms from Step 1 – “homemade blueberry muffin mix” and “blueberry muffin mix recipe,” both of which may trigger your ad’s keyword “muffin mix” – come in again. To avoid these kinds of scenarios, make a chart of common search terms that might trigger your ad but aren’t related. Obviously, you’ll want to remove them from your keyword lists so you’re not bidding on them.
That said, you can use them in other ways
Once again, we turn to the lesson in Step 1, that many search terms will trigger keywords even when the searcher isn’t actually interested in your product. If you want to save as much money and see the greatest results, you need to ensure irrelevant user searches can’t trigger your keywords.
This might seem similar to discarding irrelevant words, but it’s subtly different. That step means taking out keywords that don’t match your intentions, while this means actively blocking the keywords you do use from triggering search terms that don’t match your business and brand.
Let’s return to our muffin mix search. We’ve already crossed out the misspellings, because we don’t need those. Now we’ll focus on terms that could trigger your keyword “muffin mix,” but not for the right reasons.
First and most obviously, you want to avoid “muffin top,” because you’re not a fitness site, nor do you sell empire-waist shirts to hide your beltline. Most people who are searching for ways to make a streusel or something for the top of their muffins will search more specifically, and it’s likely that they still will be looking for a recipe. This is most obvious as a keyword (leave it off the keyword list!), but there’s still value in excluding it as a search term. While not that many searches for “muffin top” may trigger “muffin mix,” any that do represent waste.
Similarly, you might want to avoid the phrase “healthy muffin mix,” because someone who comes to your site and sees high-calorie treats geared toward holidays or birthdays will most definitely not be a customer.
When you do find those terms – healthy, recipe, muffin top, homemade, etc. – you can add them to a negative keywords list. That tells the system not to trigger your ads when someone searches for those words or phrases. That way, you’re not wasting your ad spend paying for people to see ads they don’t care about.
Ranking higher in organic search has value of its own, which is why it’s important to use good SEO practices. However, using a lot of those terms on your site will also help you achieve higher ad rank and provide more legitimacy for the human eyes that land on your pages. Incorporating an intelligent SEO campaign into your marketing efforts is critical if you want to see the most from your PPC endeavors, plain and simple.
As with most things, putting in a little time up front to understand often subtle nuances in what makes keywords ideal for your campaign and what makes them irrelevant will quickly pay off both in the short and long term for your campaigns. While it might seem like common sense, taking the time for best practices such as removing errors and tightening up words and phrases, understanding exactly what your customer is looking for, researching other keyword uses, and removing under-performing keywords will make your campaigns more efficient and highly targeted -- which in turn, will lead to higher ROI and conversions. Ultimately, keywords define you, your brand, and your offerings to help you target the right customers in need of your products and services. Putting in the care to find the best keywords will give those customers a better path to find you as well.
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To learn more about how you can build more effective, higher-performing keyword lists, connect with our digital media experts today.
It’s no secret that words like artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) carry a lot of weight these days. No doubt, these technologies have changed industries for the better with the ability to process high volumes of data rapidly and accurately, providing analysis and actionable insights that can be leveraged in myriad strategic business decisions.
Perhaps not surprisingly, ML is especially relevant to digital advertising. With its ability to not only compile consumer data, but analyze and predict future consumer behavior, the technology has significantly transformed the space and will continue to open up new doors for the industry going forward. Yet few people really understanding its specific role and its vast potential for advertisers.
First, we’ll distinguish between AI and ML.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is essentially a computer system that can perform tasks that would normally require human intelligence, such as making decisions or understanding speech language. AI has applications to a wide variety of industries, including advertising.
Machine Learning (ML) is a type of AI that uses statistical techniques to learn from data. When an AI computer system is set to perform a specific task, machine learning allows it to learn from new information as it comes in. It can then make changes to improve performance at a task without being programmed to do so.
In advertising, AI and ML elevate the ability to make buying decisions that emulate human decision making. However, with the right AI technologies and data insights, it’s actually possible to significantly improve decision-making processes beyond human capabilities.
The digital footprint consumers leave is huge, and it’s only continuing to grow. On Google alone, 40,000 search queries are performed per second. To put that in perspective, that's 3.46 million searches per day.
In order to create the most relevant advertising message and deliver it at the right time to the right audience, marketers need as many data insights as they can get. But, in light of the enormous amount of consumer data generated on a daily basis, advertisers are struggling to analyze and act on the information available to them. By the time they manage to derive insights and adjust their campaign strategy accordingly, a new, more relevant data set emerges. Only the largest and most competitive global corporations could hope to build an advertising team with enough data specialists to effectively tackle this kind of undertaking.
While many advertisers don’t yet realize it, ML is the only viable solution to this growing problem. Among other things, the technology makes it possible to analyze and gain insights from vastly more data than a human ever could ever process in their lifetimes. What’s more, it also automates advertising decisions based on these insights, making ads more efficient and effective, and driving business revenue in the process.
Among other things, ML has the capacity to draw on data from a wide variety of sources, including search engines, social media, and other third-party platforms. It can then draw connections and make sense of it in a way that a normal human brain isn’t equipped to do.
Consider social media, for example, where individuals discuss their interests and pain points, follow topics that interest them, and check in at various locations. In what’s known as cognitive intelligence, ML can use this information to build complex personality profiles. In addition to better understanding customer demographic information, marketers can then leverage these comprehensive profiles for insights into users’ thinking, behavior and even their next probable move.
Thus, building better audience profiles makes it possible to create more relevant and targeted ads for potential customers -- a capability that has become increasingly critical in recent years as ads have become more irrelevant to, and thus ignored by, consumers. Having a deeper understanding of the needs, pain points, and even your audience’s train of thought makes it possible to develop truly meaningful and relevant ads aimed at addressing their toughest challenges.
The same processes that make it possible to build better audience profiles can also help advertisers discover new audiences that they never before thought to target. ML can help uncover unlikely but valuable correlations between consumer demographics, interests, and online behavior that reveal new potential target audiences.
For example, an AI system has the ability to analyze a large set of Facebook data and discover that older women who are interested in green living and like horror movies are more likely to buy a certain category of digital products. The data might not explain why this unlikely correlation exists, but advertisers can test out the opportunity by showing ads to them and accurately gauging their response.
AI also makes it possible to develop a template of target audience characteristics that you can search for, identify and cross-reference across the web. As with Google’s similar audiences or Facebook’s lookalike audiences, you can discover new leads to target across the entirety of the internet, as opposed to just one platform. Using vast amounts of third-party intent data, ML can process this consumer information and make sense of it in new ways that lend themselves to better and more strategic decisions for your business.
Historically, most advertisers have relied on spreadsheets and basic analytics software to track their data and generate insights to optimize their campaigns. All too often, this becomes a tedious, error-prone, and laborious strategy that generates only marginally valuable insights.
Artificial intelligence and ML, on the other hand, can automate this process, freeing advertisers to focus on discovery, growth, and other initiatives to improve the media-buying process. Because ML does this more rapidly and accurately than humans, it also results in more valuable insights. Depending on what kind of AI technology is being leveraged, it’s possible to improve insights even more by incorporating your own previous ad performance, as well as that of other advertisers, into your analysis.
ML is also a worthwhile investment because it vastly broadens your dataset and analysis capabilities beyond that of advertisers. What’s more, it continues to grow in value over time as it learns from the performance of its own choices and uses this information to improve future campaigns. In short, the longer you use machine learning technologies, the smarter it becomes, thus increasingly emerging an essential tool for obtaining more ambitious advertising goals and metrics.
Employees tend to get nervous when their employer starts implementing AI and ML technologies -- largely because they assume AI will supplant their jobs and minimize their value to the business.
But in reality, the best way to use AI and ML is by allowing them to support internal teams, not replace them. In fact, using ML effectively can make advertising teams more competitive and relevant in the industry, which can actually increase their overall value to the organization. Also, because ML has the ability to predict the outcomes of campaigns, media buyers can leverage the technology as a check to help them avoid mistakes before they occur. If, for example, they accidentally clicked the wrong campaign setting or forgot to adjust their budget to match seasonal bid costs, these outcomes could easily be displayed in the predicted results, enabling the business to course-correct before a bad decision is officially executed.
As previously mentioned, ML frees media buyers of tedious tasks and saves them time, providing more opportunities to focus on strategy and development. Applying ML to routine, administrative tasks means that advertising teams spend less time doing busy work, and more time working on creative, innovative projects within their department.
While some businesses might envision a future in which advertising is 100 percent automated by machines, it’s more likely that ML will become an essential tool that advertisers will regularly rely on to support their internal teams and streamline workflows.
ML can derive and help businesses act on new data insights faster than a human, or even a team of humans. At the same time, it can use advanced statistical algorithms to identify trends and predict future outcomes. That means it can help advertisers see around corners and make necessary bid adjustments to maximize their return on ad spend.
Its ability to make changes quickly also helps businesses cut costs and reduce wasted ad spend, as it can identify unnecessary spending quickly that will enable you to lower your bids accordingly. Leveraging ML for more accurate and timely insights mean better ad targeting, making it possible to reach advertising goals with a significantly lower budget.
The right advertising software will utilize an advanced decision engine to predict the best ad investments. By using important buying signals, data, and quick bidding options, these solutions can ensure you always effectively leverage your advertising budget to increase ROI.
ML is transforming the digital advertising industry on a daily basis, and as such, has the ability to dramatically improve the direction -- and ROI -- of your campaigns. Currently, AI has the ability to discover new audiences, build comprehensive user profiles, save time, reduces ad spend, and supports advertising teams in countless ways.
That said, it’s only effective as the solution in which it's being used. Advertising software can pay for itself and then some by improving the efficiency and effectiveness of your campaigns. And looking ahead, ML will become an increasingly necessary tool to add to the advertising arsenal, further accelerating the evolution of the digital advertising industry, as businesses find new and innovative ways to realize its true potential.
Few can deny that big data is the engine powering numerous industries -- and that includes digital marketing. From phones and tablets to social networks and even digital assistants, consumers have more channels than ever from which to access brands' products and services.
While for marketers that means even more ways to reach niche audiences, it also means exponentially more data at their disposal -- which they are now required to parse and analyze in order to make smarter and more strategic decisions regarding the future of their digital campaigns.
Consequently, the role of the digital marketer has evolved significantly to one that can also make sense of copious consumer data -- numbers, statistics, and trends -- to optimize their campaigns, increase ROI, and bolster conversions. While this sounds like an enormous and daunting endeavor, big data also provides a path to detailed, nuanced, and previously unattainable insights that have served to strengthen their SEM and other digital marketing efforts.
Here are five ways that big data has turned digital marketing on its head, opening up new opportunities for marketers and their customers.
Improving the customer experience should always be a top priority for brands. After all, the experience customers have buying products and services from you will often have a direct bearing on the type of review they leave, whether they return to the site or patron your competitor.
Big data gives you a reliable way to effectively measure and assess where customer engagement is strong and where it lags, what resonates with your customers, and where they lose interest. For example, different aspects of your campaign as they relate to customer satisfaction can be tracked and adjusted accordingly, providing you a means of connecting the dots between the components of your campaigns that resonate with consumers and the resulting behavior that elicits the highest returns. This information can include the time they spend on a site looking at your ad, the number of pages visited once they’re on your site, return visits, or comments and feedback, which can then be compiled in aggregate to make the customer experience -- including the conversion process -- simpler, and more efficient.
Without a doubt, big data insights garnered from analytics tools have given brands a better ability to accurately respond to customer needs and wants, as well as fluctuations in their consumer habits and behavior, lifestyles, incomes, and other variables.
If anything, the availability of these insights equips digital marketing teams with the ability to be flexible and pivot, if necessary, for the customer. The result? Better ways to engage with consumers and more effective strategies, which in turn makes for more satisfied and ultimately loyal customers.
It’s well established that much of digital marketing -- PPC advertising in particular -- is about the art of locating and targeting new and desirable audiences that have a strong potential to become customers. Big data is the fuel that drives these campaigns.
Among other things, big data can help you take full advantage of all your digital marketing channels by vectoring in on new demographics and groups of consumers that have an interest in your product, as well as distinguish which audiences are more likely to actually become buyers.
To that end, big data enables us to drill down even further to understand and analyze buyer intent -- whether consumers are casually perusing, looking for something else, or are on a mission to find a specific product or service. Once it’s understood what groups are actually looking for, marketers can tailor their content and campaigns accordingly to further reach untapped audiences and drive ROI.
Big data is critical in determining how users got to your site in the first place -- and that includes the keywords they’re consistently using to find you. Big data gives you the ability to find those keywords that provide the most value, as well as explore related keywords that might also be profitable. It also allows you to detect correlations between the keywords that have driven website traffic or led to conversions. And when potential customers do land on your website, big data can also be crucial in optimization efforts that allow them to immediately see the products they want most right away. You can further refine and optimize this kind of targeting by showcasing different groups of products at the top of your site, based on the differing needs of various groups and demographics of site visitors. This capability allows you to maximize ROI with a better understanding of what your audience is looking for and how they’re looking for it -- often resulting in a big boost to conversions.
A McKinsey report found that 30% of the thousands of pricing decisions a company makes every year fail to deliver the best price. For many organizations, this represents wasted effort and a lot of money left on the table that could otherwise have been channeled into your bottom line. Meanwhile, according to the consulting firm, a 1% price increase can result in an 8.7 % increase in operating profits, underscoring that incremental price adjustments based on nuanced insights around consumer behavior, can elicit strong returns and often lead to significant increases in ROI. These adjustments can be determined by the wealth of market and customer data you have at your fingertips, which includes everything from social media engagements and interactions to website traffic and specific PPC campaign data -- because finding the sweet spot for pricing can be vital to the success of your marketing endeavors.
As digital marketers, we are constantly perfecting our campaigns. But we often don’t know what we need to improve upon unless we have insights into the success -- and especially failures -- of previous campaigns.
Big data provides a clear and accurate picture of what went wrong and what went right during your last campaign, where you beat your metrics, and where you missed the mark. This kind of data-driven approach provides a wealth of context for analysis so marketers can make more informed and strategic decisions going forward. With insights garnered from prior customer data, marketers can see where strategies fell short or failed altogether, and can subsequently leverage that data to validate tweaking or even significantly adjusting their digital marketing strategy to ensure a better customer experience going forward. For example, retail clothing stores can leverage insights from previous campaigns to determine when to hold sales, what items to promote or how to adjust prices for the items that will likely be popular. In short, big data is often the only window that gives them the ability to confidently lay the groundwork for even stronger, and more effective campaigns in the future.
Big data can represent a monumental task for marketers, adding copious more layers to marketing goals and campaign analysis that can be complex, time-consuming, and labor-intensive.
But it can also be a digital marketers’ best friend. The insights contained in big data hold the key to greater customer engagement, discovering new and untapped audiences, creating more accurate pricing to maximize ROI and profits, refining the right keywords, and measuring against past successes and failures.
Big data has changed the game for marketers, and as such, the best marketers also have the ability to access its insights. That said, finding the nuggets of truth in a vast sea of data is something that even the best digital marketers can’t do alone. For digital marketers, leveraging dedicated platforms designed to drill down to the most valuable insights will be critical going forward -- especially as they continue to navigate through a vast and growing barrage of data to make their campaigns more targeted, relevant, and profitable than ever before.
You’ve probably seen the headlines calling ad blockers the “death of online advertising," and anyone who works in PPC advertising knows a thing or two about them.
But while ad blockers gained popularity back in 2016, three years later, advertising revenue is as strong as ever. Still, some worry that the rise of ad blockers in popularity and adoption will continue to grow, affecting long-term advertising growth potential.
It’s true, ad blockers can have an impact on your PPC growth potential, but only if you allow them to. In fact, pragmatic advertisers see ad blocking as an opportunity more than a hindrance. And once you understand the real scope and impact of ad blocking features, you’ll also gain clarity on your path of growth.
The first step to overcoming the challenge of ad blockers is understanding why people use them. After all, at least some portion of your target market is using ad blockers.
As of 2017, roughly 40% of laptops and 15% of mobile devices in the US used ad blockers. Globally, more than 600 million devices were using ad blocking software in 2016 -- and all industry predictions expect they will grow.
More than any generation, millennials are the driving force behind ad blocker use, as they’re the most disenchanted with intrusive online ads. This represents a significant and accelerating problem for advertisers, as millennials have already overtaken Baby Boomers as the largest generation. And perhaps not surprisingly, their buying power is also expected to more than double over the next four years. Perhaps ironically, the generation with the greatest potential to drive ad revenue is also the generation paying the least attention to ads.
That said, millenials (and others adopters) actually have very good reasons for why they use ad blockers. According to PageFair’s recent ad blocker report, the number one and number two motivations behind ad blocker usage represent about 60% : (1) Exposure to viruses and malware, (2) Interruption. The biggest takeaway? Nobody’s saying they hate advertising. They simply don’t want to be exposed to malicious ads or be exposed to ads that detract from their web experience.
As a PPC marketer, you know that not all ads on the web are spammy, intrusive, or irrelevant. But, unfortunately, a high percentage of them are.
While it seems ad blocker adoption is an attack on low-quality advertising, the ad blockers themselves are indiscriminate. While you might have a highly targeted, relevant PPC campaign that helps your audience convert, it won’t reach anyone who uses ad blockers.
Ad blockers may seem like bad news for advertisers, but really they’re a response to a problem. Even if your ads are unintrusive and highly relevant to your audience, would you want them to appear alongside spam ads and clickbait? Low-quality advertisements give the whole industry a bad name, discrediting honest, customer-centric PPC advertisers.
If nothing else, ad blockers are a way for consumers to fight back against spam adverts. And they’re more prevalent than you might think. According to a recent AdGuard survey: 57% of web users were attacked by scammers through online ads representing a major intrusion in the advertising market -- a fact not lost on the advertisers.
Even Google, which makes 90% of its money from advertising revenue, created an ad blocker people can use with Chrome in response to research released by the Coalition for Better Ads, detailing the types of ads that make it difficult for people to browse and use websites.
While its ad blocker doesn’t impact Google PPC or social media ads, it does block ads that create a poor browsing experience. The tech giant launched their own ad blocker iAd blockers that may help cut down on bad ads and spam ads. But there’s no getting around the fact that they can negatively impact ad visibility and returns for quality marketers in the process. So what’s the solution?
The short answer is: a change in strategy.
Instead of viewing ad blockers as a hindrance to growth, it’s better for PPC advertisers to perceive them as an opportunity.
There’s a certain group of people who are always going to ignore advertisements, ad blocker or not. So why bother serving ads to people who are only going to ignore them? You shouldn’t. Instead, it makes more sense to invest your time and advertising spend reaching people who are receptive to your marketing message -- people who are actually paying attention.
Also, the idea that one day in the future nearly every consumer will use an ad blocker (like nearly every person with a computer now using antivirus software) is unlikely. Advertising isn’t inherently malicious (like malware), and consumers understand this.
According to Hubspot research:
Consumers are open to the idea of viewing advertisements as long as they’re quality ads that don’t take away from their user experience on the web. So why not make efforts to meet this need with your advertising strategy? If you create quality, relevant, unintrusive ads, you'll show your audience there’s no need to use an ad blocker.
Of course there’s the issue that even if advertisers make these changes, the people using ad blockers are never going to know about it. But that’s not necessarily true either. Ad blocking software is predominantly used on desktops and laptops. In fact, only 22% of people who use ad blockers use them on their mobile devices.
So the same people who have tuned out advertisements on their computers can still be reached with targeted ads on their phones. There’s still an opportunity to reach them with targeted PPC ads, which can be even more relevant when you use advanced mobile targeting features such as location-based targeting.
Marketers who actually understand and appreciate the reasons people use ad blockers are much better positioned to develop an advertising strategy that doesn’t annoy them. Not only will this make them more receptive to viewing ads, but they’ll also be much more likely to convert.
That said, even if advertisers can’t recapture the attention of people who use ad blockers, there’s still everyone else. Ad blocker penetration is still extremely low. At the same time, the number of new internet users is always growing. If the advertising market can eliminate intrusive, spammy ads while providing a more relevant message, new users will be much more willing to see ads than old-time internet users. And the more advertisers can do to prevent their audience from considering using ad blockers, the better.
The truth is, the rapid growth in desktop ad blocking is nothing more than a tough lesson from which advertisers can learn. There are still plenty of opportunities to create better marketing messages for your target audience that address the problem -- particularly for PPC search advertisers. Hubspot’s survey also asked which mobile ad formats people find most valuable or useful, and search ads were the top result.
Consumers have multifaceted needs when it comes to online advertising, but there’s a clear path to success. Focus on the right key areas and it’s possible to grow your PPC revenue despite the rise of ad blockers.
Start with consumer data
If you want to deliver relevant, helpful ads to your target audience, your most important tool is data. The more you understand the interests, needs, and intentions of consumers, the better you’ll be able to target them.
There are many different sources of behavioral data advertisers can mine to gain insights:
First-Party Behavioral Data
This is information your business collects about your audience through tracking cookies and site form fills. Most marketers collect this using their website analytics tools and CRM platforms. First-party data is the most common kind of data marketers use and is often considered the most valuable. But there are other important sources that can broaden your understanding of your target audience and their needs.
Second-Party Behavioral Data
Second-party data is behavioral information collected by other businesses. Form a partnership with another business that targets a similar audience to yours, then you can share behavioral data and insights to get a deeper understanding of the interests and needs of your audience.
Third-Party Behavior Data
Third-party behavioral data comes from publishing networks and data aggregators. They collect information about people’s behavior on other sites around the web. Third-party data is a great way to learn more about consumer demographics and what kind of information they’re consuming on the web. You can use this to optimize your marketing message. Third-party intent data can also help you uncover qualified leads who haven’t yet interacted with your business directly.
You can use these sources of information to flesh out your buyer personas and inform major marketing strategy decisions. Understanding buyer intent can help you better target warm leads, increasing your conversion rates in the process.
Businesses that are customer-centric consider the needs and desires of their audience over their own agenda: getting clicks, driving revenue, etc. And when you really do prioritize your audience, it will help drive your advertising goals in the process.
Consider these top reasons people click on advertisements, according to HubSpot: Two of the top reasons are negative: (1) It was a mistake, (2) The ad tricked me into clicking. Using deceptive strategies to get people to click doesn’t prioritize the needs of the user. And while it may be a great way to improve click-through rates, it likely does little to convince these leads to become paying customers.
What’s the main reason someone would click on an ad by mistake? Likely because it’s intruding into the content they’re consuming. People don’t visit a web page to look at ads, they want to consume the content without interruption.
Advertising networks have made some efforts to make ads less intrusive. Google, for example, now penalizes sites that display interstitial ads on mobile. But unfortunately, this issue is still very common (You’ve probably seen ads that don’t fully block the page but still prevent you from reading the content.)
Serving ads that block or distract from the content experience isn’t a customer-centric marketing strategy. Making your ads less intrusive to maintain a good user experience is. And it’s the job of both advertisers and the platforms serving these ads to ensure audience needs are the main priority. Then the only reason people will click on an ad is because they want to.
Remember, most consumers are open to seeing ads that are relevant to them. To achieve this, it’s not just about targeting people with products or services that interest them. You need to also serve these ads at the right point in the consideration process.
Take for example a woman who purchases a pair of leather boots online. Then the next day she visits another webpage and sees an ad for leather boots. Since she’s already made the purchase, the ad is completely irrelevant. Even if she likes the style and color of the boots in the ad, it’s unlikely she will buy two pairs of boots in two days.
The goal here is to get your ads to appear in that small window of opportunity when someone’s suggested they have purchase intent but haven’t yet made a purchase. Your intent data can help you identify this key timeframe.
In the PPC world, the best way to tackle this challenge is to optimize your reach and frequency. It’s possible to use intent data to set frequency caps, make bid adjustments and optimize your audience targeting to ensure your ads show up when they’re most helpful to searchers.
Most advertisers don’t even attempt to do this because the sheer volume of actionable intent data out there is too large to begin to derive actionable insights. By the time they’ve made the necessary adjustments, the window of opportunity has passed.
The solution that will help you deliver timely, relevant ads to your audience is technology. Use a bid adjustment tool to derive key insights and automate changes in your PPC accounts. Without some amount of automation, it’s virtually impossible to serve the right ads at the right time to the right people.
There are also key advantages when you engage in predictive advertising. Use a technology that incorporates AI and machine learning to understand major market trends before they happen. This way, you can be proactive in your advertising strategy, making necessary changes to gain future ad visibility during these key points of relevance. Because the more relevant and timely your PPC ads, the more your audience will appreciate and respond to your advertising message.
Ad blockers aren’t just an impediment to be overcome by advertisers -- they’re indications of a greater problem with digital advertising. If people are going so far as to install software to prevent seeing ads, then you know there’s something is likely wrong with the digital advertising strategy and approach.
Customer-centric businesses want to serve ads that inform, help and ultimately convert their audience into customers. And customers often appreciate these ads. The reason? They provide relevant products and services when they need them the most, providing a crucial stepping stone in their own buying journey. The good news is that the public is ready to see these ads whenever marketers are ready to serve them.
At the end of the day, it’s about making their customers want to click. Advertisers will start succeeding in their battle against ad blockers when they get to the root of the problem, embracing it not as an obstacle, but as a new opportunity to help meet their customers’ needs.
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!
New York Times passes 3 million mark in paid digital subscribers [2-minute read]
Backed by a large marketing push and it’s new slogan, "The truth is worth it." The New York Times is up to over four million total subscribers, with one million subscribers to its print circulation. And its ad revenues are up compared to last year.
The Battles Programmatic Is Yet To Win in 2019 [4-minute read]
As programmatic continues to grow, its hold on the industry is being held back by three main things: transparency, viewability, and brand safety issues. According to experts, there is still a lot of work to be done in terms of transparency. However, there has been a noticeable shift in the industry, where advertisers are asking for more meaningful measurement and data.
What Advertisers Want to Know About Programmatic [3-minute read]
With an expected $46 billion dollars dedicated to programmatic buying, more marketers are seeking answers on top concerns regarding the space. AdWeek pulled together a list of top questions and answers to marketers’ most pressing curiosities, including how media can be measured, how supply strategy can be improved, and how programmatic ad spend will or should be split between RTB vs PMP deals.
First-Price Auctions Are Driving Up Ad Prices [2-minute read]
Many publishers have now shifted to a first-price auction model which has caused the price of the inventory to go up. In an agency-side test, CPMs were 59% higher in first-price than second-price auctions. From a buyer’s perspective, this price bump suggests that in first-price auctions, buyers are paying more than they should.
5 Things Marketers Must Know About Mobile In Programmatic To Survive in 2019 [3-minute read]
There are many ways you can use mobile in the programmatic world. In order to survive in 2019, this article lists the top 5 things you should know from evaluating ad formats to audience-specific considerations.
Six-Second Ads: It's All About The Context [2-minute read]
Short-form ads are increasingly making a presence as prime video placements for advertisers, driven by the new age of dwindling attention spans. However, the increase in popularity has also required advertisers to rethink video ad spots that they historically cut down from 30 seconds. While advertisers work to retool the length of these ads, they may also struggle with the fact that the efficacy of this shortened format can’t be compared to their traditional predecessors.
Ad-Supported OTT Viewers Incremental To TV [1-minute read]
The IAB released a report, Ad Receptivity and the Ad-Supported OTT Video Viewer, illustrating the demographics of OTT video viewers, the regularity with which viewers consume OTT content and how AS-OTT viewers are incremental to traditional TV consumers. The report notably distinguishes free, ad-supported OTT viewers from subscription-based viewers who don’t see ads.
Facebook: Coming To A TV Near You? [1-minute read]
Facebook is rumored to be working on a project that will include a connected TV (CTV) device. This will include a camera, be similar to Roku or an Amazon Fire Stick, and could potentially stream content from Facebook Watch.
Amazon’s Alexa Finds Its Business Model: In-Skill Purchases [1-minute read]
Amazon has revealed a business model for Alexa developers: in-skill purchases or what they are calling a “consumable.” Developers can now start selling these unlocked features/functionality, premium content, or even virtual games within skills—all of which can be purchased, used and then purchased again.
Domino’s in-house technology push has helped increase online orders [4-minute read]
But does it sell more pizza? The answer is yes! The company saw sales grow 8.3% in their third quarter when they made the decision to bring technology in-house—which got rid of silos and allowed their teams to work closely together by establishing cross-functional groups with their online, offline, research, and IT teams.
Netflix: Engineering to Improve Marketing Effectiveness [19-minute read]
A peek behind the crimson logo, this multi-part blog series by Netflix’s AdTech team shares their methods to effectively working across-departments to create, localize, manage, distribute, measure, and optimize their digital marketing and a growing library of creative assets. It's an impressive read about how they approach promoting their content through testing and personalization to drive new subscriptions and increased viewership. Part 2 is here.
Optimizing your ROI is a challenging, seemingly endless, process in the highly competitive world of search engine marketing (SEM). In order to stay ahead of the curve, digital marketers must continuously anticipate and execute solid strategies aimed at uncovering new opportunities for growth through testing and experimentation. That of course includes implementing best practices around keywords, as well as staying on top of any unanticipated PPC roadblocks - like keyword cannibalization.
With modern technology solutions now empowering SEM professionals to observe, collect, store, and leverage increasingly large clusters of data, there is a growing -- and pressing -- need to embrace new ways of understanding the power of big data and how to leverage it to extract actionable insights.
This inconsumable amount of information has led many of today’s marketing teams to suffer from what Debra Bass, president of Global Marketing Services at JNJ, has termed as Infobesity. The emergence and rapid rise of accessible data has not been balanced by opportunities to support and properly analyze it, making it near impossible from a time and resource perspective to successfully manage thousands (or millions) of keywords in a given portfolio. A costly, oftentimes unrecognized, consequence of this can be keyword cannibalization across entire PPC programs.
Keyword Cannibalization is called such because, in effect, digital marketers are taking a “bite” out of their own results and margins, splitting CTR percentages, links, content, and those all-important conversions between two (sometimes more) pages that should be consolidated into one, while driving up CPC numbers in the process.
In a scenario in which you have the same keywords targeting the same audiences all competing against each other, Google will automatically show the ad that it deems more relevant based upon the ad rank assigned to that specific keyword (ad rank calculated by multiplying your maximum CPC bid by your Quality Score). When a search query pairs with multiple keyword match types, and there are various ads supporting these keywords, the flow of regular traffic for the original search term will markedly diminish as your control over matched keyword behavior becomes severely hampered.
Over time, you’ll begin noticing how select keywords will direct traffic to page x one week and then page y the following week. These unrelated and unexplained fluctuations will lead to inadvertent spikes throughout your program that can prevent you from reaching your PPC campaign goals. If ignored or incorrectly managed, keyword cannibalization will entail a slew of negative outcomes, from diminishing page authority to rising CPC costs and decreasing conversions.
Just how you deal with this headache depends on where the problem has its roots. Once that is determined, there are four possible ways to resolve this issue.
Create One Authoritative Page
The most straightforward solution is simply to convert your most authoritative webpage into a one-stop landing page that links to a series of variations that all fall within the same field of your target keywords. A highly effective, high converting landing page can become the foundation for creating a successful lead generation strategy.
Employ 301s Liberally
If you’re splitting your CTR between a collection of moderately relevant pages, essentially you’ve turned them into competitors. Not ideal. To counteract the problem, digital marketers can use 301 redirects to link the pages of lesser importance to a single definitive version that is no longer fighting for views and SERP ranks.
Build New Landing Pages
Creating multiple landing pages with only slight keyword variations might, at first, appear to be thinning content. While this may be true, ultimately the more landing pages you have on your site, the more opportunities there are for visitors to turn into leads. A recent study by HubSpot revealed that upon increasing their number of LPs from 1 - 10 to 11 - 15, companies reported a massive 55% lift in leads. Go the extra mile and develop 40+ LPs, and you could be looking at a 300% uptick. Those are compelling numbers.
Get Creative With New Keywords
This is where SEO comes in. Content-rich pages should be utilizing a highly diverse set of keywords that can broaden your reach, with particular attention paid to the long-tail. Naturally, you will draw less traffic with a long-tail keyword, but the audiences you do capture will be extremely valuable: more focused, more committed, more targeted.
With companies today trying to dominate SERP real-estate in their respective fields, keyword cannibalization is more common now than ever before. In an ironic twist, it is the savvy marketers attempting to harness the potential of optimized SEO campaigns who are falling victim to its traps, unable to comprehend Google’s myriad technical languages.
Through a combination of implementing the right technological systems and exercising best practices, keyword cannibalization can be eliminated, though, and you can ensure your ads are reaching your desired audiences. Google is very smart when it comes to identifying, deciphering, and then appropriately ranking content on its pages, so if you’re not on top of your keywords, your business could be suffering - missing out on leads and wasting valuable marketing spend. While it might seem negligible, finding tricks to avoid keyword cannibalization will likely ensure that you see higher ROI, lower CPC costs and more conversions -- and continue to benefit from all of the tangible rewards of your PPC efforts.