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‘Ask the Expert’ is a blog series that breaks down the complicated tools, tech, and trends you’ve been hearing about in the trade pubs and around the office. We reach out to our in-house experts to ask the tough questions and turn them into bite-sized Q&As for your reading pleasure.
This month’s topic? Machine learning. We brought in Centro’s VP of customer success, Steve Monti, to give us the breakdown.
In terms of advertising technology, what is machine learning?
Machine learning is a type of artificial intelligence (AI) where a computer system learns from data. In advertising technology, this is often used to improve the performance of ad serving systems, mostly in programmatic advertising, to show ads to individuals in order to achieve a result. The result could be a click or a variety of other types of actions that the advertiser wants. Different elements of machine learning can be present in many common systems used within the advertising tech space, such as demand-side platforms, ad exchanges, ad servers, and more.
How does it work within ad-buying systems?
Software with machine learning can optimize the performance of campaigns by gathering data to learn how key performance indicators (KPIs) were achieved in the past. The system then learns what element combinations are needed in a campaign to have the highest likelihood to generate the same result or KPI. The system will then structure a campaign to match those parameters to obtain the impressions that can lead to those same KPIs. Elements could include targeting data, device or location of a user, ad unit size, the content of the page, and more. Machine learning can build a model that will continue to hone as a campaign is running.
Is it related to algorithmic optimization?
Somewhat, of course! Machine learning uses algorithms, but not all algorithms lead to machine learning. Algorithms have the ability to make finite, black, and white decisions. Machine learning implies a logic of learning from those decisions over time.
Is machine learning strictly for optimizing to generate clicks?
Machine learning technology builds a model. In an ad-buying system, a model is made up of a mix of targeting combinations that calculate the probability of a result occurring. A click is a highly desired result, but a marketer can, theoretically, program their system to model towards other types of results as well.
Ok, I’m interested -- what does Centro offer in terms of machine learning within its platform?
Inside Centro’s platform, Basis, users can optimize campaigns with algorithmic optimization or machine learning. These features can also be turned ‘off’ or ‘on.’ When ‘on,’ the system continually learns based on more than 30 targeting parameters and will set bids based on the probability of success.
Learn more about the programmatic advertising opportunity with Centro, here.
The digital industry is constantly evolving, which can make keeping up with the latest trends and advances very challenging. Fear not! Centro is here for you. What are the emerging trends? What's still working? Where are we going next? In our latest infographic, we answer pertinent questions regarding digital platform investments, mobile, and the video landscape as they continue to move forward.
Click to read our take on the digital trends and predictions for 2019.
It might come as no surprise that today an increasing number of people are spending the majority of their waking hours staring at screens or swiping themselves into a frenzy on their tablets and smartphones. A recent study by market-research group Nielsen revealed that American adults now spend more than 11 hours per day watching, reading, or simply interacting with media online, up from nine hours and 32 minutes just four years ago. From a marketing and advertising perspective, that is a lot of face time you could be missing out on, and with it, brand awareness and revenue. Consequently, it’s more important than ever that you’re employing pay per click advertising, or PPC, to maximize value, profitability and ROI on your campaigns. So what is PPC?
We’ll break it down.
So, then, what is PPC? How does it work? And what are the benefits?
While the field has matured and grown increasingly complex in recent years, at its core, PPC is a model of internet marketing by which advertisers pay a fee each time a user clicks on one of their ads that appear online. It is, essentially, a measured method of buying visits to your website rather than deriving them through organic search with the idea that these ads will be of greater value to your advertising goals: more targeted and carrying a higher likelihood of conversion.
There are several types of PPC advertising, but the most popular remains paid search, commonly known as search engine marketing (SEM). This sophisticated, keyword-driven discipline allows industry professionals to place bids for ad placement on a search engine results page (SERP) real-estate when a consumer searches for a keyword that is related to their products or services. When implemented efficiently and funded smartly, PPC campaigns can be the most powerful weapon in a marketing armory and the return on investment (ROI) can be substantial.
Sounds easy, right?
Well, not quite. A lot of resources go into programming and maintaining the best campaigns. You need to consider first researching and selecting the most appropriate keywords, organizing those keywords into defined campaigns and ad groups, and then creating or adapting landing pages that are fully optimized for those all-important conversions. Throw into the mix that the SEM world is highly competitive, often forcing businesses to constantly alter their strategies, and you can see how it becomes difficult to anticipate and execute the best investments for your campaign strategy.
Here’s the good news, though. If you and Google are metaphorical “best friends,” it gets easier. Google became one of the largest companies on the planet because of advertising. In 2016, Google’s advertising revenue reached a massive $79.4 billion, accounting for more than 90% of its total revenue. This means that Google treats its SEM advertisers well, affording them prime space on results pages, which in turn, drives organic traffic further and further down the rankings.
If you want to start using PPC, it’s imperative that you know how to do it right or you risk wasting a significant amount of your budget. Google Ads (formerly Google Adwords) is Google’s very own advertising platform and the most popular system of its kind in the world today, allowing businesses to go to market on its search engine and its affiliate sites. This is where you set up your bids on the keywords you want to trigger an ad display.
Unfortunately, it’s not as easy as simply bidding large sums to ensure your ads show more prominently than your competitors. Instead, every time a search is initiated, Google will draw up a pool of ads that then become subject to an Ad Auction, an entirely automated process that determines who will claim the top spots on the SERPs. These “winners” are selected based upon an advertiser’s Ad Rank, a metric calculated by multiplying two key factors - the CPC bid (specifically, the highest amount an advertiser is willing to spend) and the Quality Score (a value out of 10) that summarizes the quality of your ad based on click-through rate (CTR), relevance, and landing page experience. The advertisers with a better Quality Score get access to more ads at lower costs.
So, how do you improve your Quality Score?
For one, establish an effective keyword list. This may be incredibly time-consuming but it’s the foundation of every SEM program. The most profitable advertisers on Google are the ones continuously engaged in a process of growing and refining their keyword portfolio, taking advantage not only of the most frequently searched terms close to the offerings they sell, but also the long-tail and other niche iterations that can often be hugely profitable due to their lower costs.
Secondly, ensure your landing pages are targeted. With an overabundance of information available on the internet, audiences quickly recognize whether they’re interested in a specific webpage or not. To grab their interest and keep it, creating optimized landing pages is a must, so consider everything from attention-getting headers, strong visual elements, clear calls to action (CTA) and focused copywriting.
The key to a robust, successful modern-day marketing strategy is learning to effectively utilize a diverse portfolio of channels that can help get your brand before the eyes of potential customers in different ways. Although PPC advertising looks simple on the surface, managing a successful campaign and navigating the intricacies of bidding are anything but. Savvy digital marketers are in a constant process of testing and experimenting with keywords, offers, landing page content, and a myriad of other variables, leveraging data from these campaigns to inform other strategies in their overarching marketing strategy. So think of it this way: email campaign A always promotes offer X, but testing across your PPC activities reveals that offer Y yields 50% more conversions. Ultimately, applying this scenario across all of your marketing efforts makes it clear that companies can uncover hidden opportunities for growth that would remain dormant if PPC wasn’t the secret weapon. Learning to wield it to its full potential makes this great marketing game much less intimidating, while empowering you to drive more profitable and effective results.
As a digital marketer, you know that in order to truly succeed in digital marketing, you need to understand the needs of your audience, target them at the precise moment of purchase intent, and deliver a relevant message that helps them convert -- easier said than done. Historically marketers have relied solely on traditional business intelligence to strike the right balance between this complex mix of elements in order to achieve their campaign and revenue goals -- a feat nearly impossible in today’s fast-paced digital world. But looking ahead, that's where smartphone AI will come in.
These days more than ever, consumers rely on their mobile devices as a tool to fulfill their shopping and product search needs. Thus, as technology has continued to evolve and adapt to consumers' changing needs and behaviors, smartphone AI has emerged as a viable tool for businesses, helping them drive insights to deliver the right marketing message to the right audience at the right time, while unlocking new potential targets, buyer intent and other relevant opportunities that promise a major win for ROI.
Safe to say, business Intelligence (BI) has grown exponentially in sophistication over recent years -- a development driven by increasing amounts of available consumer data. What’s more, today’s business intelligence capabilities are incredibly advanced, with the potential to drive more actionable insights than ever before.
The most common type of business intelligence marketers use today is descriptive analytics. Leveraging first party data directly from your business, descriptive analytics essentially summarizes the performance of a business in the digital market. Data sources include on-site behavior, your brand’s social media mentions, performance of your internal sales teams, advertising market share, which, when combined, can drive data insights to help make better business decisions.
The next step in business intelligence capabilities is predictive analytics. By strategically utilizing a combination of advanced statistical algorithms, first party data and external third party intent data, predictive analytics can project future performance of your marketing and business efforts.
As such, most marketers who adopt predictive analytics do so to forecast the trajectory of their campaigns and other marketing efforts based on their advertising investment and other strategic factors -- and its applications are numerous. For example, in addition to basic annual and quarterly forecasts, predictive analytics can perform sentiment analysis based on data from social media conversations and online forums. It can also make generalizations about how people feel about your brand by performing text analysis.
Yet even in light of these advanced capabilities provided by regular business intelligence, Artificial Intelligence (AI) can still, in many ways, surpass these insights. And when combined, both technologies complement each other to offer unique advantages and unprecedented lift to your PPC campaigns. And the businesses that take full advantage of it are primed to increase business growth and stay ahead of the competition.
Contrary to popular belief, AI doesn’t refer to one specific technology, but an array of potential digital capabilities that mimic cognitive human functions. Thus, any computer with the ability to adapt and learn from surrounding conditions and solve problems has artificial intelligence.
As you might already know, mobile devices today include internal AI engines that leverage a user’s personal data, as well as information from mobile device sensors, to analyze and make decisions on the device itself. Here are a few of the many applications of smartphone AI today:
Perhaps not surprisingly, smartphone AI not only offers a myriad of benefits for consumers, it’s changing the way they interact with their mobile devices. The combination of advanced natural language processing and intent prediction now makes it possible for mobile assistants to become intelligent chatbot interfaces that can both understand the relevant information that people need when they ask for it, and also infer intent through natural conversational language. In many ways, they have the potential to become as helpful as a knowledgeable friend -- with the added benefit of search engine access -- setting the stage for conversational commerce that holds the potential to be the next big game changer in app marketing.
Most importantly, AI is changing the mobile advertising market. As the majority of marketers know, mobile devices aren’t primarily used for making phone calls -- they’re the main purchasing tool for many eCommerce shoppers. And, thanks to AI, they can potentially be used by consumers for buying recommendations for an even greater, more personalized shopping experience.
Similar to keys or a wallet, mobile devices have become everyday tools for consumers, who regularly use their phones to communicate, navigate, research potential purchase decisions, and shop. As a result, mobile devices provide an extensive amount of relevant, actionable consumer data that organizations can use as part of their business intelligence efforts -- data that only increases in value as more people rely on their mobile devices to make everyday life decisions.
That said, the wealth of new available consumer data also presents a problem. Businesses simply can’t process it quickly enough for it to continually drive marketing insights and create additional value. That’s where AI comes in.
AI can help drive advertising strategies by:
It goes without saying that using AI technologies makes it possible and easier to analyze large amounts of consumer data. It can also help predict which kinds of consumers to target in order to reach your marketing goals. By making advertising campaigns more efficient and effective, AI can simultaneously reduce your necessary advertising budget while improving ad performance. It makes sense, then, that its capabilities be incorporated in the tools that consumers most use -- their mobile devices.
But while there are already a variety of tools and technologies on the market designed to help businesses improve mobile advertising with smartphone AI, adoption has only penetrated a small group of competitive marketers -- largely because the rate of AI adoption has been generally slow. Currently, most businesses are often too focused on gaining insights from their regular business intelligence capabilities -- which have significantly grown in value in the recent year -- to explore and consider more sophisticated options.
The truth is that business intelligence and smartphone AI aren’t mutually exclusive advertising growth strategies. While, AI can mimic the cognitive functions of real human decision-making, ultimately it’s your unique business and marketing priorities that drive the choices you need it to make.
Business intelligence capabilities such as descriptive and predictive analytics can tell you a lot about current and future performance potential. And businesses that combine these BI capabilities with smartphone AI can often create sophisticated, efficient and effective advertising strategies that can often outpace competitors solely relying on just one of these technologies.
In 2016, mobile internet usage surpassed desktop for the first time, and the gap only continues to become ever wider.
Since the future of internet will be mobile, businesses are starting to make it a priority. Google itself has made several major algorithm changes to prioritize mobile-first indexing, as well as launching its Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) project to improve the speed at which sites load on mobile devices.
Mobile prioritization affects all areas of search engine marketing (SEM), including SEO and PPC advertising. The landing pages you create for your PPC ads need to offer a good mobile user experience, as this affects your Quality Score and other advertising outcomes. Users are also much more likely to bounce after clicking on your advertisement if they find landing pages difficult to navigate, further underscoring that mobile will need to be a priority for a successful, long-term SEM strategy.
Most businesses today build their buyer personas based on demographic factors and what they imagine are the needs and pain points of their target audience. But with smartphone AI, it’s possible to gain an even deeper understanding of what people really want and why by conducting intent-based marketing -- nearly impossible to do properly without using advanced data insights. Among other things, smartphone AI has the potential to process phone and chat conversations, as well as draw on location-based data to specifically understand what a person has the intention of doing or buying.
And businesses that use smartphone AI insights in combination with their own business intelligence tools can optimize their mobile sites to deliver the kind of content audiences really want -- because they have the power to really know. As more and more businesses adopt this advanced targeting strategy, it will becomes increasingly challenging for the competition to keep up.
Targeting your audience with the right message during these micro-moments is essential for business success. And Smartphone AI makes it possible to better understand a user’s intent so you can deliver a targeted ad or marketing message at the time and place they can benefit from it the most. Google calls these micro-moments, intent-driven moments of decision-making and preference-shaping that occur through the entire consumer journey. Of online consumers, 69% agree that the quality, timing, or relevance of a company's message influences their perception of a brand.
In addition, the user experience will also have to be prioritized as smartphone AI becomes more prominent. Marketers will need to create concise, targeted landing page copy that easily enables users to make quick purchase decisions with the click of a button. It will also become important to prioritize mobile ease-of-use, while also reassuring users on your page copy that they’re making the right decision.
When you make marketing decisions and advertising campaign adjustments based on business intelligence insights, it’s always a process of trial and error -- in order to stay optimized you need to constantly measure results, adjust for market fluctuations and retarget your strategy consistently.
Machine learning provides a solution to help simplify this process for advertisers. Among other things, machine learning can analyze consumer behavior, see how audiences interact with your ads and marketing message, then help you make necessary decisions to improve your targeting -- all of which boost smartphone AI's capabilities that provide deep insights into customer intent. Machine learning also has the ability to analyze large amounts of consumer data and recognize complex patterns that regular data scientists wouldn’t be able to discover.
Managing reams of business intelligence data is daunting enough as it is and ostensibly, adding smartphone AI into the mix could be perceived as yet another obstacle for your marketing teams to overcome. But in reality, with the increasing reliance on mobile devices as a tool for shopping and searching, leveraging smartphone AI is an investment that not only makes sense but promises sustainable ROI over the long term.
As a digital marketer, you know that the industry doesn’t stand still for a moment. Competitors have are always finding new and creative uses for business intelligence capabilities in an effort to gain an edge in the market.
That’s your opportunity to leverage a tool that your customers are already using. Marrying smartphone AI to your existing arsenal of business intelligence capabilities will only work in your favor -- whether it's unlocking buyer intent, applying new predictive behavior technologies, or creating a better shopping experience -- that will give you the leg up you need to leave your competitors behind.
Consumers are constantly inundated with video ads from a multitude of brands both large and small. Whether they're on a PC, tablet, or laptop, they're exposed to one ad after another—which makes it easy for them to ignore what doesn't connect or stand-out. This creates a unique challenge for brands/agencies alike, and poses the question: How do companies capture the short attention span of consumers in an entirely saturated market?
Here are five proven advertising techniques to help your brand break away from the pack.
In-your-face branding is a turn-off for today's consumers. They've become desensitized over the years, making consumer advertising with heavy-handed branding largely ineffective. Instead, consider a technique called brand pulsing. This technique strategically knits branding through an advertisement in an understated way. It ensures that your brand is seen, but in an effective, understated way.
Ad placement can impact the effectiveness of messaging and affect how consumers think about the brand. Ads must be relevant not only to the audience, but also the space in which they’re located. For example, if you own a company that manufactures dog toys and your ad appears on a website dedicated to maintaining saltwater fish tanks—it’s probably going to miss the mark. Utilize a demand-side platform to help discover ad space that is most relevant to your brand and vice versa.
Establishing a personal connection is crucial to effective advertising in a saturated market. One of the most valuable advertising tips for companies in any industry is to find a way to empathize with their target audience. This is less difficult than it seems. Think about it—most companies are created because they offer a product or service that solves a problem or satisfies a need. Show that you understand their challenges and frustrations and that your product or service is the solution.
Create highly shareable video content that’s appropriate for a wide range of audiences. Avoid segregating some markets to appeal to others. For example, the use of crude humor for shock value may increase your number of views but is likely to isolate certain segments of your audience.
Today's consumers value rich, interactive experiences on and offline. Avoid talking at them—instead, provide your audience with educational and actionable content. Deliver a full experience. Do that, and they will remember your brand. Content that’s extravagant for the sake of being extravagant is easily forgotten, while content that cultivates a positive learning experience is usually the most effective.
Maximize Brand Exposure
There is a myriad of advertising techniques and tactics that can be utilized to increase brand exposure, however, many of them fail to take into account that online channels are now very saturated with ads. What worked a few years ago, may not work now. Stay on top of the latest advertising tips to maximize exposure and make your ad dollars work harder for you.
Centro offers a performance-driven, demand-side platform designed to help you streamline media campaigns across a multitude of online channels. For more information about how programmatic can transform your consumer advertising, contact us today.
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Sources
https://www.acuityads.com/blog/2017/11/06/seizing-short-attention-spans-saturated-online-channels/
https://centro.net/
https://centro.net/services
https://centro.net/products/dsp-programmatic-advertising
https://centro.net/products/reinventing-digital-media-planning
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.