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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:
As a PPC advertiser, you may know by now that in September, Google announced that it planned to further expand the broadening of exact match keywords to make them, well, not so exact.
As its name once suggested, Google exact match keywords triggered ads that matched the exact keyword search. The function essentially hindered or prevented an ad from being served altogether if it didn’t perfectly match the keywords in the specified order of your choosing. While stringent, and perhaps even limiting, it also gave advertisers complete control over the terms for which their ads appeared.
Google’s recent announcement upends those previous parameters. Powered by machine learning, Google's update may also trigger ads for searches with close variations -- ones that match the keyword intent or that otherwise have the same meaning as the specific keyword, including the same keywords in any order.
"This means your exact match keywords can show ads on searches that include implied words, paraphrases, and other terms with the same meaning," Google said in its help docs.
Granted, “exact match’ might now be a bit of a misnomer. But think of it this way: If you’re marketing for a hospitality industry business and using the exact match keywords “San Diego luxury beach hotels,” your ads might show on terms such as “luxury beach hotels in San Diego” or “San Diego luxury hotels near beaches.” The list goes on, but you get the idea. Even if it isn’t an exact match, the new Google update now takes into consideration a multitude of new words that fall under the umbrella of “implied words, paraphrases, and other terms with the same meaning.” Subsequently, your ads would appear because all of the search terms contain the same basic intent as the original keyword. What wouldn’t necessarily trigger ads are terms like “best San Diego hotel” or “four-star San Diego hotels,” simply because the intent is slightly different.
Google says that the impetus for its latest development is largely attributed to the constantly changing ways that people search, noting that new searches comprised “roughly 15%” of the total they see every day. And that’s a lot.
Google’s latest keyword expansion follows a 2014 update to its platform that included plurals and misspellings as ‘close variants’ to phrase and exact match keywords. But the biggest difference between the two is that plurals and misspellings are generally easy to determine and course correct. Intent, on the other hand, can incorporate broad definitions that are often open to interpretation, indicating that advertisers should closely monitor how this will impact their campaigns, both in the short and long term.
Of course, the same “intent” might not translate to the same value for your campaigns. What’s more, even slight variations between keywords can result in significant disparities in conversions, which in turn could have a dramatic impact on your PPC strategy over time.
That said, thus far there doesn’t appear to be major performance fluctuations at a macro level, but the industry is seeing changes at the keyword level, as those with more history, higher click volume, and quality score are receiving more impressions. For example, one ad group is now seeing the exact match of “flu treatment” triggering ads more often than the exact match of “treatment for the flu.” While the overall performance from cases like these hasn't changed much, CPCs have increased slightly in some.
Also, one potential drawback as a result of the change is that some advertisers are splitting one campaign into three or four different campaigns in order to target specific match types. That, in turn, causes complications for bid automation if those campaigns don’t generate enough conversions to use automated bidding.
It also might mean some extra legwork on your part to beef up negative keyword lists. While there are an exponentially greater number of relevant keyword combination possibilities, there are perhaps just as many, if not more, keywords and keyword combinations that wouldn’t be a fit or that wouldn’t target the right audiences. For advertisers, that will inevitably require valuable time, resources, and personnel that could otherwise be spent elsewhere. On the other hand, it might eliminate the need for you to separate exact and phrase match keywords (allowing you to recoup some of the time you lost adding to the negative keywords list).
But for digital advertisers, results from the expanded Google exact match keyword update are thus far positive. For one, it provides a wider array of close variants to what would have been pure exact match terms, of which 99 percent have been relevant. That means that you have more keyword possibilities, along with a slew of new opportunities available to you that you otherwise would have missed because a phrase wasn’t ‘just so.’ Also, with the exponential number of new queries and search terms that are continuously emerging and being used, it’s likely that consumers are looking for your products with terms you haven’t even considered.
Ultimately, time will determine whether Google’s latest experiment will have a significant impact on digital advertisers. But opening new keyword possibilities has a strong potential to open new doors that lead to new audiences, higher ROI, and yet untapped revenue that will ensure that your campaigns remain on an upward, and profitable, trajectory.
The advertising industry has made huge strides in attempting to understand the mind of the consumer and potential buyer. But it hasn't been able to predict the future - that is, until now. With the emergence and proliferation of predictive advertising technologies that predict consumer behavior before it actually occurs, that future may well be here.
It's well established that predictive analytics has dramatically changed the digital marketing landscape in recent years, and it’s only continuing to grow and evolve. According to a recent report, the global predictive analytics market is set to reach $10.95 billion by 2022. Predictive analytics has a variety of applications in marketing. But for digital marketers, the most valuable application will be predictive advertising.
As a subset of predictive analytics, predictive advertising is leveraged by businesses to analyze data from consumer behavior, which then uses these insights to predict future trends and optimize marketing and sales strategies.
Perhaps most importantly, predictive advertising can help you identify members of your audience that are likely to convert while automatically prioritizing leads, made possible by leveraging advanced statistical modeling and machine learning. Specifically, machine learning looks at historical data patterns and derives insights from these patterns in order to make informed changes to advertising strategies. And there are a number of benefits to using machine learning, including:
What’s more, machine learning makes it possible to achieve these goals with more speed and accuracy than an entire team of data scientists.
Artificial intelligence is a powerful technology that makes predictive advertising possible. But another key element is the wealth of consumer data available today. The growth of Internet of Things (IoT) devices is presenting a myriad of opportunities for data collection and analysis. And it’s no secret that the average consumer today leaves a massive digital footprint, which is only continuing to grow. Thus, predictive advertising strategically leverages this data to drive a plethora of consumer insights, including:
Without a doubt, the wealth of data available today enables marketers to better understand the intentions, preferences, and buying patterns of individual members of their audiences, while also making it possible to better track the nuances of the market they’re advertising in. That said, this data is only valuable if advertisers find ways to successfully unlock it. Conversely, the abundance of data can easily overwhelm marketing teams with too many relevant touchpoints to analyze, creating significant gaps and a host of missed opportunities.
Now enter predictive advertising, which can use your internal audience data as well as third-party behavioral data to identify new potential customers to target and enable you to broaden your audience base further than you would if you simply relied on regular targeting tactics.
Predictive advertising can draw correlations between demographic and behavioral factors that regular marketing analytics simply wouldn’t be able to make. Leveraged in tools like Google’s Lookalike Audience and Facebook Similar Audiences these technologies provide the ability to draw correlations between different demographic and behavioral data to identify new relevant audiences to target. For example, say predictive analysis helps you discover that members of your current customer base are likely to read a certain online publication. From there, you could then start targeting other people who also read that publication.
Most marketers today who use data to drive targeting insights rely on their own first-party behavioral data: metrics like site pages visited, lead magnets downloaded, and abandoned carts. But first-party data only tells you so much about your audience’s needs and intent to purchase. When you add in behavioral touchpoints from other sites, you get a much richer picture of a lead’s intent, which in turn makes it possible to reach leads with relevant marketing messages deep in the sales funnel, as well as improve retargeting capabilities for display ad campaigns.
The better businesses understand their audiences, the easier it is for them to create relevant, targeted ad copy that converts. Combining first and third-party audience data allows you to build more robust buyer personas to inform your marketing collateral. But can these creative changes be automated and implemented at scale? The answer is yes, but with the help of machine learning. Machine learning can drive predictive insights and in turn help you make smart choices to improve advertising copy and ad design. While machines aren’t replacing real creatives, they can help optimize marketing collateral to become more effective and relevant to target audiences.
Predictive advertising already allows you to automate ad personalization based on a variety of behavioral, demographic, and situational factors such as device ID, domain, location, purchase history, or interests, and trigger that data to reach relevant audience members. Predictive advertising insights can also inform the right kind of copy to include in dynamic PPC ads. And we’re only just beginning to realize the possibilities for its potential to unlock new, unique and valuable customer demographic insights.
According to data from Nielsen Digital Ad Ratings service, billions of online marketing dollars are being wasted in advertising -- largely because ads are reaching the wrong audiences, reaching the right audiences at the wrong time, or businesses are simply spending more than necessary to achieve their marketing goals.
On the other hand, businesses that focus on minimizing wasted ad spend get the double benefit of being able to channel their saved budget into other marketing initiatives. Predictive advertising can help with this by executing nuanced targeting and bid adjustments in real-time to drive more ROI. A good example is Google’s automated bidding platform, which allows advertisers to choose a goal (site visits, visibility, conversions, etc.) and then leverages audience data from its advertising network as well as competitor performance data to automatically adjust bids in real time.
But targeting capabilities become even more nuanced and effective when using third-party predictive advertising technologies. Because now you’re free to use any kind of relevant third-party data you want, so you can rely on site visits, social media engagements, your PPC campaign data and other variables to drive even deeper insights. And instead of relying on the one-dimensional goal options of Google’s automated bidding, you can customize the key performance indicators (KPIs) you want to target.
Thanks to smartphones and on-demand information, it’s become increasingly difficult for advertisers to target audiences at some of the most critical and relevant times. For many purchase decisions, it’s possible for people to show intent and convert into a buyer mere minutes later. By the time they see advertisements for the product they’re looking for, it’s already too late.
Google calls these micro-moments: An intent-rich moment when a person turns to a device to act on a need — to know, go, do, or buy. There are four key micro-moments that advertisers can target to help their audiences convert:
Not surprisingly, targeting ads to consumer micro-moments is incredibly valuable for businesses because consumers are determined to find what they’re looking for, and will be interested in brands that help them achieve that goal.
But successfully targeting ads to micro-moments is essentially impossible without using some kind of automation. While PPC advertisers can use Google’s in-market audiences to determine who is searching for certain categories of products and automatically target them with relevant advertising, predictive advertising can take this goal to the next level by helping you anticipate customer needs before they start showing strong signs of purchase intent. Using historical data of consumer online behavior and demographic information, predictive advertising can anticipate what kind of people could be interested in your products and services before they start the buying journey. In essence, it’s possible to start targeting these micro-moments before they even occur.
Of course, there are some kinds of micro-moments advertisers can’t anticipate in advance. Someone’s car breaks down on the side of the road and now they’re looking for auto repair services. Or someone’s relative passed away and now they need funeral home services. How can advertisers target these new “interests” when they come up so suddenly?
Predictive advertising technologies can handle the challenge because they analyze massive amounts of data in real time. Machine learning can infer intent from search queries, location, and other factors, then automatically serve relevant ads. What’s more, this is all done in the background, giving marketing managers the freedom to pursue other media-buying opportunities.
Predictive advertising is a relatively new application of predictive analytics. For most marketers, it might sound like a luxury only the most competitive enterprise businesses can afford to fully utilize. And that likely won’t change as long as adoption of the technology remains low. In the future, however, it will likely be essential for a wide range of businesses. Consider:
The competition
Over time more businesses will adopt automation and predictive advertising to optimize their campaigns. Taking advantage of the same technologies to improve campaign performance will become the only way to keep up with the competition, let alone stay ahead.
The savings
Arguing that predictive advertising is “too expensive” to fit budgets will be difficult as the technology continues to demonstrate value for businesses. Predictive advertising can identify minute bidding inefficiencies that can add up to a significant reduction in unnecessary ad spend. Not taking advantage of the technology can end up costing you money instead of saving it.
Budget reallocation opportunities
Predictive advertising helps advertisers ensure they only spend the minimum amount necessary to reach their marketing goals. That means more of your advertising budget can be redistributed to other initiatives that maximize ROAS. This is particularly important considering that for every $1 spent on Google Ads, businesses can earn $2 of revenue. Predictive advertising helps make sure each dollar of your budget is well spent.
Efficiency
Predictive advertising can automate a wide range of campaign optimization tasks that would otherwise need to be done by advertising managers and their teams. Rather than replacing their jobs, AI and machine learning can help free team members to focus on other marketing initiatives, such as discovering new media buying opportunities to drive growth.
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Google Ads and other major advertising options are already making big changes to incorporate AI and machine learning into their platforms. And a wide variety of external tools, with more advanced targeting, data analysis, and optimization features, are also available. Given the enormous benefits, value and competitive edge predictive advertising brings, it’s simply a matter of time before all advertising becomes predictive. And tools like machine learning paired with advanced statistical analytics can help businesses of every size improve the relevancy, efficiency and ROI of their advertising campaigns.
The future is being able to predict the future. And with predictive advertising, we’re one step closer to that reality.
As a marketer, you have access to a popular search platform with desirable and high quality target demographics, accelerating growth rate and profitable long-tail search opportunities. No, we’re not talking about Google — we’re talking about Bing. It may be surprising, but Bing is a hugely overlooked opportunity for search engine marketers today. While Google has always held the lion’s share of the search market, Bing PPC opportunities continue to grow every year. The Bing platform processes more than 15 billion searches monthly, and boasted 142 million unique searchers in 2017.
So for advertisers who only focus on Google, failing to create a Bing PPC strategy represents a lot of missed opportunities.
Meanwhile, the demographic makeup of Bing users is also unique, providing a slew of compelling reasons for advertisers to place their PPC ad money there. Consider:
In short, Bing is a great platform to target bottom-of-the-funnel online shoppers who are willing to spend more than the average searcher.
Another major benefit of using Bing for SEM is lower competition. Fewer advertisers have Bing PPC strategies, making it easier to gain access to higher ad positions at a more affordable rate than with Google Ads.
So, if you’re ready to start incorporating Bing PPC into your search engine marketing mix, here are seven important secrets for success.
Back when Bing was in its infancy, Microsoft wanted to build a search and advertising experience that was vastly different than Google’s. Over time they came to the conclusion that making the platform dramatically different from Google's wasn’t the right way to compete with the search giant, so they changed their strategy. Now Bing and Google advertising are so similar, it’s possible to easily transfer your Google ad accounts to Bing using account syncing.
While importing is quite simple, there are a few key differences between Bing and Google advertising to keep in mind. Once you transfer accounts, you may want to make some changes to your campaigns to optimize on Bing’s platform.
Some of the key differences include:
Bing treats negative keywords differently
Both Bing and Google Ads allow you to include negative keywords at both the ad group and campaign levels. However, unlike Google Ads, Bing will not negate any keywords that are included as one of your target keywords. With Bing, you can still show ads for negative keywords that appear in a target keyword phrase. Google Ads, on the other hand, automatically blocks searches related to that negative keyword even if they’re relevant to your campaign. What’s more, if you have broad match negatives in your Google Ads account, Bing considers them phrase match when you transfer over.
Automated rules do not transfer
If your Google Ads campaigns include automated rules, you’ll need to recreate them after transferring your accounts to Bing as they won’t automatically transfer.
Create a Bing Merchant Center store for shopping campaigns
If you have Shopping campaigns, you’ll need to create a Bing Merchant Center store before importing from Google Ads to Bing Ads. The system will prompt you to link the campaign to your store before you can import it.
Bing’s language and location targeting differ
If you’re targeting more than one language with your Google Ads campaigns, it’s important to know that Bing doesn’t support as many languages as Google. If you import an account targeting languages that Bing doesn’t support, it will default to the parent language.
With Google Ads, it’s also possible to target more than one language within a campaign; Bing only allows you to target one language. So when you import multi-language-targeted accounts, Bing will select the highest ranked supported language and you’ll need to create new campaigns to target secondary languages. It’s also important to know that you cannot change your language or location targeting once you save a campaign.
Just because Bing makes it easy to sync with Google on its platform doesn’t mean they should always mirror each other. Optimizations you make to improve your Google Ads campaigns might not be relevant to your Bing audience. Or there might be a better way to optimize those campaigns. Bing has a unique audience — in fact, 27% of Bing clicks come from searches that are exclusive to the Bing Network.
So use account syncing initially to copy over your Google Ads campaigns. Then utilize Bing’s internal tools, analytics, and insights to drive unique optimization decisions. Using Bing’s analytics features or even its third-party bid management tools can help you discover optimization opportunities unique to the Bing PPC network and its audience.
Doing another set of analyses for a second search network is time-consuming, which makes it difficult to scale. But there are plenty of available automation technologies that can help you optimize both your Google and Bing PPC strategies by using unique datasets that require no extra time or effort for advertisers.
In mid November, Bing Ads fully rolled out the Competition Tab — a new analytics feature offering important insights and recommendations — that includes two sections: Audience Insights and Recommendations. Audience Insights allows you to see how your impression share is performing against the competition, incorporating important metrics like overlap rate, average position, position above rate, top of page rate, and outranking share.
Search advertisers can use these insights to understand what changes they can make to improve their ad performance against competitors. The Recommendations section can also help do this for you, using machine learning to suggest changes to improve performance, such as optimizing campaign device targets, location targets, and expanded keyword targeting among others.
About a year ago, Bing launched its own dynamic search ads similar to Google’s. In case you aren’t familiar with the technology, dynamic search ads automatically target relevant search queries based on your web content. Instead of creating your own ads one-by-one, Bing creates targeted and relevant ads for you by scanning your site content. Dynamic search ads are a great opportunity for businesses whose site content changes frequently due to the fact that there’s no need to create new and customized ad titles every time you have a new sale or special offer.
Bing’s dynamic search ads also save time, as you don’t need to maintain keyword lists or manage your own bids. And by streamlining your processes, dynamic search ads can also help you discover opportunities you might have overlooked to drive conversions.
Bing's search ads have some unique offerings that allow you to make better-targeted ads. Google Ads enables you to target a specific keyword, while Bing Ads sets extra parameters for reaching audiences by providing more specific information related to their search query.
Like Google Ads, Bing recently developed automated bidding strategies. By utilizing search patterns analysis, clicks, and conversions, Bing can automatically optimize your bids while simultaneously respecting your budget limit.
There are four main ways Bing can manage your bids for you:
1. Enhanced CPC
Enhanced CPC (cost per click) is the default bid strategy for all campaigns. It adjusts bids in real-time, increasing them on searches that are more likely to convert and decreasing them on searches that are less likely to convert. Enhanced CPC can increase your total number of conversions while reducing cost and staying within your budget limitations.
2. Maximize Clicks
Maximize clicks is available for search ad and Dynamic Search Ad campaigns. The goal of this strategy is to get as many clicks as possible within your budget. If you want to have greater control of your budgets, you can also set a maximum CPC to ensure Bing never pays more than a certain amount per click.
3. Maximize Conversions
Maximize Conversions is available for search ad campaigns and sets your bids in real-time to get as many conversions as possible. With this strategy, you don’t need to set your own ad group or keyword bids. Like with Maximize Clicks, you can also set a maximum CPC for more control of budget spend. In order to use Maximize Conversions, you need to set up conversion tracking and have at least 15 conversions in the last 30 days.
4. Target CPA
Target CPA (cost per acquisition) is available for search ad campaigns and you don’t need to set ad groups or keyword bids. Instead, you set your 30-day average CPA goal as well as your budget, and Bing PPC features will automatically align your bids to this average. How much you spend on individual conversions varies, but Bing PPC offerings ensure it’s in line with your average cost per conversion. For this strategy, you'll also need conversion tracking and have at least 15 conversions in the last 30 days.
Automated bidding is a great strategy for marketers who are new to PPC advertising and might not have the skills or resources to conduct optimizations on their own. More advanced marketers can use third-party bid management tools to scale their strategy and drive insights from a wider dataset of audience behavior, which provide additional features that more accurately reflect the unique, multifaceted SEM goals of individual organizations.
In addition, Bing’s advertiser training resources offer a useful chart to help you determine if you need conversion tracking and if it’s possible to use a third-party bid management tool based on your bid strategy.
Another unique new feature of Bing ads is LinkedIn Profile Targeting. Released as a beta feature in October 2018, it offers a powerful new targeting feature, especially for B2B marketers.
LinkedIn Profile Targeting, which is available for text ads, shopping campaigns, and dynamic search ads, allows you to target more than 575 million global LinkedIn members spanning 145 industries, 80,000 companies, and 26 job functions when you use its data for search campaigns.
Advertisers can apply LinkedIn Profile Targeting at the campaign or ad group level. You can set bid modifiers to better reach certain profile targets. For example, a 15% increase for profiles in the graphic design industry or information technology job function.
Bing’s in-market audiences are an advanced targeting feature that allow you to target people who have shown purchase intent in a relevant category, such as searches, clicks on Bing, and page views on Microsoft services. If someone searches for vintage car accessories on Bing, for example, they could end up in the “Auto Parts & Accessories” audience category.
Currently, there are 208 in-market audiences, including apparel, entertainment, business services, computers, and children’s products, among others.
In-market audiences are simple to set up and can drive conversions by reaching likely to convert audiences. You can associate in-market audience lists to ad groups and target and modify bids for these audiences. Advertisers can also set bid modifications for specific audiences, such as setting a 20 percent bid boost for in-market audiences.
When Bing piloted in-market audiences last year, they found it can improve conversion rates by 48% and click-through rates by 28%. This makes it a great way to target audiences that are ready to convert and even easier to target people at the bottom of the sales funnel.
Bing also makes it easy to monitor the impact of in-market audience targeting on overall campaign performance. Bing enables you to view reports using audience segmentation from the Accounts Summary page or the Campaigns, Ad Groups, Ads, Keywords, and Ad Extensions tabs.
They say never put all your eggs in one basket. That especially applies to your long-term PPC advertising strategy. Google may be the king of search and search engine marketing, but diversifying is always a smart option for advertisers. What’s more, by exploring options outside of Google, you have access to Bing’s unique audience, a wide array of advertising options, and targeting features — all of which have the potential to complement your Google strategy and drive even more conversions.
While Bing might still be an unknown, its growth, quality demographics, and PPC opportunities are all on a trajectory going up and to the right. But like anything else, you won’t truly realize its full potential for your PPC strategy until you start opening its doors and exploring your options.
Read even more Bing ad secrets here: 13 More Bing Ads Secrets to Broaden Your SEM Coverage
You might often hear marketers tell you to take the time to carefully execute PPC campaign management for optimal performance, then you can simply "set it and forget it." While it may be a popular philosophy, it’s also a common misconception among amateur advertisers.
Without a doubt, setting up well-targeted campaigns lays a strong foundation that gets you off to a great start. But experienced marketing managers know that PPC campaign management and optimization aren’t static disciplines. Both competitors and the market rapidly change, and thus, so do the needs of your audience and their search queries. And if you don’t keep up and make necessary changes, your competition will soon outperform you by doing so first.
As with a well-tended garden, in order to get your campaigns to grow and thrive, you need to continuously keep them managed and maintained. Reviewing how your audience reacts to and interacts with your PPC ads can also provide you with new insights that make your campaigns even more effective.
Smart advertisers conduct routine PPC campaign management tasks regularly -- sometimes even daily -- to implement important changes like:
If you choose, you can let your PPC campaigns run themselves in the background. But if you want to maximize ROI from your ad spend, ongoing PPC campaign management and maintenance is a must. Here are eight strategies you can leverage to maximize ROI from your PPC campaign management efforts.
PPC advertising can help drive numerous marketing and business goals. But targeted, successful campaigns don’t attempt to achieve everything at once. Subsequently, an important part of PPC campaign management is defining a clear goal and appropriate metrics that can be measured against key performance indicators (KPIs).
Before starting a campaign, you should be able to answer questions such as:
Define your goals before you start because it will ultimately impact what bidding strategy you choose, what keywords you target, and what kind of ads you serve.
Carefully structuring your account from the beginning is an important part of PPC campaign management, making your campaigns easier to manage, and reducing the chances of making big targeting mistakes, such as:
When you’re starting out with just one or two campaigns, account setup might seem easy. But if you plan to expand in the long term, it’s important to consider multiple factors when initially laying a foundation for your account structure.
Setting up your account the smart way means:
When setting up your campaigns and ad groups, consider what kind of PPC campaign management tasks you’ll be performing down the road, and make choices that will simplify this for you. For example, don’t put too many ads in an ad group, and use detailed names to describe your campaigns and ad groups. Don’t create multiple campaigns for the same product category, or target multiple products/services with a single ad group.
When you first create your keyword lists, you’re often taking a guess at what keywords are relevant to your audience without any hard data. But as your campaigns get underway and evolve, you can then start to gain some perspective regarding which queries perform better than others.
A great strategy advertisers can apply when setting up new campaigns is to start using modified broad match keywords, which provide a list of search queries that trigger one of your ads. You can then duplicate your campaign and add these same keywords as phrase match keywords. Search terms that actually generate clicks on your ads can then be added as exact match keywords. Known as segmenting keywords by relevance, this strategy enables you to bid more on high converting queries. Also focusing on more relevant keywords will improve your Quality Score, making ad relevance an important factor.
It’s equally essential to remove keywords that are causing problems with your campaigns. Take the time to review the information under the “Search terms” tab and remove keywords that:
Removing problem keywords from your campaigns will help free up your budget so you can focus on high-quality keywords, and thus, channel your efforts around achieving the highest ROI.
Even if you do a great job establishing your negative keyword lists in the beginning, you can’t possibly know every potential irrelevant keyword associated with your ads -- this can only be determined by monitoring campaign performance.
Some experts will actually tell you that maintaining your negative keyword lists is even more important than managing your normal keyword lists, simply because there’s a significant negative impact every time your ad shows for one of these irrelevant keywords. As previously mentioned, relevance is an important factor in determining your Quality Score for a search query. Low relevance means low Quality Scores, worse ad position, and poor performance.
Making regular changes to negative keyword lists is especially important for advertisers in niches related to news or pop culture topics. Beyond mining your search terms report, you can also set up Google Alerts for important brand keywords, which will allow you to discover new and trending news topics that could cause irrelevant search queries to trigger your ads.
Some advertisers put so much energy into keyword targeting and bid strategies that they forget about their advertising collateral altogether. But the actual advertisements you display and their associated landing pages are of equal importance for PPC campaign management.
Delivering ads for the most relevant search queries doesn’t matter if your ad copy and call-to-action aren’t optimized and attract prospective targets. By the same token, you won’t also be able to drive on-site conversions from your efforts if your landing pages offer poor user experience.
So if you’re experiencing unexpectedly low Quality Scores within your campaigns, your advertising collateral could be the culprit. Consequently, you’ll need to monitor performance and take the necessary steps to continually improve it.
Test your ad copy
Often, even the smallest changes to your ad copy can significantly impact PPC performance. A more relevant headline or call-to-action, for example, can mean the difference between a person ignoring your ad or clicking through and converting. Similarly, including relevant ad extensions can also have a big impact -- an auto repair business, for example, could significantly improve ad performance by including call extensions with their ads.
In short, smart advertisers simply don’t guess at the ad copy that is most relevant to their audience -- they set up different ad versions and test performance. One way to do this is by leveraging advanced settings in Google Ads to rotate different versions of your ads indefinitely. You can also rotate and automatically optimize to display the best performing ad over a set amount of time.
Improve landing page user experience
Equally important to monitoring how audiences interact with your ads is how they interact with your website content once they click through. A slow loading page will naturally result in a higher bounce rate. Meanwhile, other landing page elements could lead to user experience issues that frustrate visitors.
It’s important to also ensure the content on your landing page matches the content of the associated ad. A specific, targeted ad that leads users back to a generalized landing page will most definitely cause confusion or make visitors wonder if they accidentally clicked on the wrong ad. Consequently, you’ll need to be sure to use language that helps reassure visitors that they’ve landed in the right place.
Google wants to help its advertisers succeed in their PPC efforts. And PPC campaign management is a huge part of this, so they have a big incentive to help with that as well. One of the ways Google does this is by sending email alerts with important information to help you improve your accounts and campaigns.
Google can send you email notifications for:
Smart advertisers can and should take full advantage of these notification services so they can react quickly to the problems and opportunities Google identifies. That said, you’re not automatically signed up to receive all of these alerts -- some require an opt-in. To ensure you’re receiving the most important alerts you need for campaign maintenance, check your email notification settings under “Setup” then “Preferences” from your Google Ads account.
Set up Google’s email alerts the way you want them. With Reports, for example, you can choose to receive all available reports as an email alert, or select the most critical reports that you customize yourself. This way Google can bring your attention back to your PPC accounts whenever they need critical maintenance.
Automated rules are another important tool Google offers to help you manage your PPC campaigns, allowing Google to make changes to your account for you based on rules you create. And by taking full advantage of these automated rules, you’ll save time and improve the performance of your campaigns without needing to make laborious manual changes.
Here are some of the many ways you can leverage automated rules for PPC campaign management:
To leverage these tools to their full potential, consider the kind of regular campaign management tasks you perform manually and see if they can be automated via Google. From there, you can then start creating your own custom rules to help you save time and improve campaign performance.
It’s no secret that in recent years, Google Ads has rolled out a variety of important campaign management features. For example, by using machine learning technology, the platform provides recommendations that can help you improve campaign performance and the strength of your accounts.
When you’re first starting out, it’s highly valuable to take advantage of these features because effective campaign management isn’t something you can do all on your own. The market, competition, and your audience are constantly changing. As a result, comprehensive PPC campaign management is a full-time job for even small business marketers. For larger businesses or those with aggressive growth strategies, keeping up with campaign maintenance manually is practically impossible.
And while Google’s internal automation features are a great place to start, they offer limited use of powerful technology. Machine learning and artificial intelligence can not only help you discover new insights and opportunities, it can act on them for you.
However, while the data that Google leverages comes solely from your PPC ad performance and that of your competitors, no business solely exists within the bubble of Google PPC advertising. There’s a wealth of data beyond Google that can drive even more relevant insights such as audience data from your CRM platform and third-party intent data from other sites around the web -- none of which Google’s AI platform even considers.
So if you want to get the most relevant help to improve PPC campaign performance, you’ll need to use a technology that draws on all these data sources to gain a full picture of your audience and market. By using the same powerful machine learning and AI technologies as Google, you can make significant changes to your bid strategy, keyword targeting, and other campaign factors aimed to dramatically boost conversion rates, lift ROI and improve the overall performance for even your most underperforming campaigns.
Creating and executing successful PPC campaign management is a critical building block for an effective SEM strategy and imperative for maximizing your return on ad spend (ROAS). That said, it’s no secret that the myriad of maintenance tasks associated with a high bar of success are an expense that can quickly add up to take you over budget. In short, you have to spend a lot of time, personnel and resources to consistently and continuously maintain your accounts while making the necessary changes needed in order to keep them optimized. And while necessary for PPC growth, it’s a precarious balance to maintain.
That’s where artificial intelligence and automation come in, which, among other things, make it possible to better optimize your campaigns while simultaneously reducing the amount of hands-on work needed from marketing managers.
Any marketer worth his or her salt knows that there is no recipe for instant campaign success. A successful PPC campaign needs to be well-tended, carefully monitored, and constantly updated to accommodate the ever-changing market tides. Like anything worthwhile, it requires patience, care, and a little TLC. But maintenance and management can also be time-consuming, laborious, and eat into profits when it becomes too big for your organization to handle or exceeds your resources. Finding the right tools that leverage automation to establish accounts, refine keywords, define and uphold campaign goals and enforce automated rules can go a long way to ensure that crucial functions are done swiftly and accurately. And by keeping the busy work off of your plate, you’ll be able to focus on what matters most -- designing even better, stronger, and more creative campaigns that take ROI -- and resulting profits -- to new levels.
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Interested in how Centro's automated technology can help you unlock improved PPC performance? Connect with our digital experts today.