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The path to bringing programmatic software in-house isn’t always linear. When it comes to programmatic buying, there are typically four different options:
How do you know which path is the best for you, your company, and your team? The path forward may seem daunting at first, but don’t worry—we broke it down for you. Read our 10-step checklist below, and get ready...set...grow!
Establish business goals.
Set campaign KPIs to track and determine success.
Assess the skills, digital acumen, and expertise of your existing teams.
Seek out the right talent. Culture is key.
Gain buy-in from primary stakeholders in all levels of your organization.
Get to work! Create a vision and start planning.
Sift through your toolbox. What tools and processes do you have or need to establish the right infrastructure?
Determine a budget.
The future is...here. Prepare your organization for ‘what-ifs’.
Find the right programmatic technology partner.
Now that you’re prepped and ready to go, dive into our Programmatic Readiness Guide as you continue to assess the ideal solution for your digital buying needs. Learn more about the different programmatic buying options; use our 10 Questions to gauge your readiness and spark action!
It’s all about the journey.
Facebook has been popping up a lot in the news lately with regard to its data collection and distribution methods. The recent Cambridge Analytica data scandal has called into question the way Facebook uses its customers’ personal data to help advertisers with precision marketing on the platform. Not to mention, new data privacy regulations like GDPR are changing the way that companies worldwide approach gathering and sharing private consumer data.
In light of these recent events, Facebook is making some adjustments to the way it collects and uses customer data. If you advertise on Facebook, you may be wondering how changes to the social media platform will impact your reach and ad results. Below, we’ll explain which Facebook ads targeting options are changing and what these changes mean for your social media and paid advertising strategies.
Unless you’ve been taking a hiatus from the news recently, there’s a good chance that you’ve heard about Facebook and the Cambridge Analytica scandal. Without going into too much detail, this data scandal involved a political data firm that accessed and used Facebook user data to map out personality traits. Then, the organization used that information to target specific audiences with digital ads that were political in nature.
After this information recently came to light, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg appeared before regulators to explain Facebook’s user privacy practices. The social media platform found itself under fire from both government organizations and the public, who, understandably, were concerned about how Facebook user data was being collected, shared, and used.
Though the data scandal has certainly impacted the public’s opinion of Facebook, this isn’t the only recent event changing the climate for the Facebook advertising platform today. The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which started on May 25, also has an impact on Facebook ads targeting. GDPR is a European Union regulation that aims to give citizens control over their own personal data through stricter privacy regulations for consumer data.
Under GDPR, Facebook will no longer be able to collect or use data for behavioral ad targeting. To become GDPR compliant, Facebook will need to find a form of ad targeting that doesn’t use personal data unless it has explicit consent from its users. This change in Facebook's data privacy rules may cause some alarm for businesses that rely on Facebook’s sophisticated targeting features to reach the right consumers for their products and services.
Before you can understand how changes to Facebook ads targeting will impact your social media ad strategy, it’s important to know how Facebook collects data from its users for advertisers to use. There are typically four different places from which Facebook collects data – advertisers, the voluntary information users put on their profiles like their birthday or location, interactions on posts, and data supplied from third-party data brokers.
Facebook is eliminating the data it collects from third-party brokers, or advertising partners as the company refers to them. The data that comes from partner categories allows advertisers to target Facebook users based on their offline behavior. This offline behavioral data can include consumer characteristics such as owning a home, being loyal to a specific brand, being in the market for a new vehicle, or belonging to a particular income bracket.
Essentially, the data that comes from these advertising partners is any information that isn’t provided by users in their profiles or gathered through their engagement habits on the platform. This third-party data comes from a variety of sources, including public records, surveys, and loyalty card programs. It has become beneficial for advertisers on Facebook, especially for smaller businesses that may not have access to large quantities of their own customer data.
With Facebook facing a lot of scrutiny over its mishandling of third-party data along with a need to comply with GDPR regulations, the company has started making changes to its privacy policies. After evaluating its data collection and privacy practices, Facebook has decided to eliminate third-party data from its ad targeting platform. This change means that advertisers will no longer have access to offline behavioral data that came from third-party data brokers.
Though these changes to the Facebook ads platform may sound significant, the truth is that businesses will still be able to leverage rich data through Facebook ads targeting. Even after getting rid of offline behavioral and demographic information that was provided by third-party advertising partners, Facebook still has a wealth of data on its users. And all of this information is more than enough to help your business better understand and reach your target audience.
As of the first quarter of 2018, Facebook reported over 2 billion monthly active users. Every time one of these users does something such as like a friend’s photo, watch a video, or share a post, Facebook has this data. Any time a user messages a friend or makes a purchase or donation through the platform, Facebook has this data too.
Facebook has collected all of this information from users interacting on the platform to build a complex data profile. This data profile has a section that focuses specifically on advertising interests. (If you’re interested in learning more, you can download your own personal user data profile to see just how extensive this profile can be.)
Even though you won’t have access to data from third-party advertisers, your business is still able to leverage all of the data that Facebook pulls from its users’ interactions and engagements on the social media platform. This information alone is enough to help you build a significant customer profile by bringing together interest, locations, and specific keywords.
It’s also worth mentioning that Facebook often makes updates and improvements to its advertising platform to keep its advertisers satisfied. Advertising accounts for a significant portion of the company’s revenue, and they can’t afford to lose advertisers. In fact, advertising currently makes up 88% of Facebook’s total revenue. That’s why the social media giant continually works to improve their advertising platform over time.
What this means for your business is that even with the removal of third-party data from the ad platform, there will most likely be updates in the near future that help account for the lost targeting options. With technologies like artificial intelligence and machine learning advancing at a rapid pace, more algorithms and data capabilities will continue to pop up, some of which will no doubt become valuable for improving ad targeting. These advances in technology bring some exciting new possibilities for advertisers.
Even if after all this, you may still feel that you just can’t live without the data you were getting from Facebook’s advertising partners. Just because Facebook has eliminated partner categories from its targeting options does not mean that you can’t contact the data firm directly to get the in-depth analysis you want on your target consumers. If you feel that your business is unable to launch a successful social media ad campaign without this data, then you can work directly with these third-party data brokers to access it.
If you relied on third-party data through partner categories for your Facebook ad targeting, you will need to start making changes to your Facebook ads strategy to account for this shift in data usage. Here are a few things to keep in mind while adjusting your Facebook ad strategy:
1. Use the information that you have at your disposal
When it comes to updating your Facebook ads strategy to account for the lack of third-party data, you’ll need to consider what types of information you still have access to that you can work with for targeting. Then, you can create a targeting strategy around this information.
For one, you will still be able to target user interests. Consider what your target buyers like and what interests they may have indicated on the social media platform. Though a home services company may not be able to target homeowners directly, the business can still dive deep into their own information about consumer interests to deliver targeted ad content.
For instance, the home services company might target Facebook users that like certain magazines or television networks like Better Homes and Gardens and HGTV. This type of media indicates an interest in home improvement. The company could also target users that like specific pages about home improvement such as brands like Home Depot or influencers like Bob Vila.
To find connections like these that are relevant and helpful for Facebook ads targeting, you’ll need to make sure that you have done your target audience research. Buyer personas come in handy here because they may give you new insight into your customers that you might not have considered before.
2. Get creative with your ad targeting options
With third-party data eliminated from Facebook’s advertising platform, you may have to get a little more creative with your ad targeting. Let’s use the example above of the home services company that used to target homeowners on Facebook. What else might this business be able to do to reach their target audience besides interest targeting?
Well, you could target consumers who have shown an interest in your competitors. When a consumer likes a competitor’s page, this is a good indication that they are interested in the same types of products or services that your business offers. By targeting Facebook users who like competitor pages, you can expand your reach in the target market and give consumers another option.
Another Facebook ads targeting option is retargeting or reaching back out to customers who have visited your site. Retargeting is one of the most successful ways to reach and convert qualified leads on Facebook. After you have placed the Facebook pixel on your company’s site, you’ll be able to reach back out to customers who leave your site without making a purchase and deliver targeted ad content that encourages them to convert.
Yet another option is to use Facebook Lookalike Audiences to target relevant consumers on the social media platform. Lookalike audiences are groups of people on Facebook who are very similar to your current customers. Using Facebook Lookalike Audiences can help you take advantage of connections that you may not have even thought of by reaching customers that share similar interests and traits as your best customers.
3. Collect more of your own customer data
With these changes in the Facebook ads targeting options, it becomes all the more critical for businesses to collect their own data from customers. Though you can work directly with third-party data brokers to recover some of the data lost in the Facebook ad platform changes, this just isn’t an option for most small to medium-sized businesses with limited budgets.
The best way to make up for this lost customer data is to gather it yourself. Though this can be a time-intensive process, it is worthwhile in the end because it helps your business learn more about the people you serve. The more you learn about your customers, the better you will be able to provide them with the information and insight they need to make more informed purchasing decisions.
The first step in this process is to work on building long-lasting relationships with your customers. By providing a valuable customer experience, you can build trust with consumers in your target audience. This trust will go a long way in helping you build stronger relationships with consumers and encourage them to engage with your brand and opt-in to provide you with more information.
Once you have a group of happy customers that your brand has worked to establish a strong relationship with, it will be easier for your business to get insights and information from these consumers. Whether you are getting their contact information in exchange for valuable content like gated e-books or simply sending out a survey that asks questions about their interests and buying behaviors, your business will be on its way to building complex data profiles in no time.
4. Consider shifting some of your advertising budget to other ad platforms
Remember, Facebook is not your only option for reaching new leads online. Though social media advertising plays a vital role in your overall digital marketing strategy, it is only one piece of the puzzle. If your business relied heavily on Facebook partner categories for your social media ad targeting, it might be time to consider shifting some of your ad budget to other channels.
Businesses today have a wide variety of effective avenues available to them for online advertising. If you find that despite your best efforts, your Facebook ads are just not as successful as they used to be, then it may be time to use some of that ad budget on a channel that offers a more significant return on investment.
With these changes in Facebook ads targeting, it has become more critical than ever for businesses to take an integrated approach to online marketing. In the end, the goal is to reach as many of your target buyers online as possible while making efficient use of your advertising budget. The most effective way to do this is to leverage data from both the Facebook ad platform and your search engine marketing (SEM) campaigns to improve your targeting, relevancy, and reach.
Aligning Facebook advertising and SEM efforts helps advertisers deliver more personalized and relevant content to consumers while maximizing their budget. By looking at both search engine marketing and social media ad campaigns, your business can better understand useful targeting options for your audience like geo-targeting and targeting by device. You can use the data and insights you gain from your social media and SEM campaigns to enrich the other.
Though the Facebook ads targeting options are changing, there is no reason for businesses to panic. Even if you rely on Facebook ads to reach your audience online, you will still have access to a wealth of data that will help you understand and connect with your target buyers. Not to mention, you can leverage data across your social media and SEM ad platforms to get more out of your advertising budget.
To date, 2018 has been a year of massive change in the digital space. 2019 seems set to bring just as many challenges to online retailers, brands, and internet marketers alike. The intense volatility of this time makes it difficult to predict what will happen next and how to leverage each event for maximum profit. Any business leader that hopes to succeed in coming years must take note of these trends and develop a future-proof growth strategy accordingly.
What kinds of challenges are we talking about, exactly?
Think tectonic shifts in global markets, which make it difficult for brands to set marketing goals that will remain meaningful amid the shifts. Future performance on marketing spend is tough to predict given some of the changes happening right now. New online regulations that, while creating necessary protections for citizens, also create challenging hurdles that we must overcome to succeed online.
Smart digital leaders, the ones who will ride out the coming years in style – or perhaps even benefit from these changes – are working hard to spot such challenges and develop growth strategy that can handle current and future online shifts.
Let’s take a look at a few of the coming challenges, as well as some examples of online leaders doing it right.
Uncertainty is the new norm in marketing, giving rise to both creativity and constraints.
Leaders in the digital marketing economy are planning a future in which major technology players hold a share of political clout that has thus far been unimaginable. This future comes with risk, uncertainty, lack of predictability … and opportunity. Author, entrepreneur, and product strategist Azeem Azhar elaborates on this idea in a recent article for the MIT Technology Review:
“The massive global platforms – Facebook, Google, Amazon, and the like – are defining a new political economy. Their corporate sovereignty will chafe with states’ own sovereignty. Those same nations will curry favor with the platforms to win the putative economic benefits provided by them.”
Meanwhile, he explains that the AI software stack will continue to diverge from traditional software. He points to recent trends around novel interface methods—including voice inputs and outputs, images as large-scale inputs to machine-learning software, and specialist hardware and frameworks such as Google’s TPU and TensorFlow.
What gives technology such power is its ability for platforms to keep up with the pace at which people, goods, and commerce move – and will continue to move, given that goods are moving more rapidly through supply chains. Digital leaders understand that this power serves as a form of currency that cannot be bought out or controlled, at least not entirely, by states and nations. Therefore, the most intelligent are linking their advertising strategies to Google, social and other media that promise big returns in future.
Prevailing changes in how people shop and from whom they’re buying also poses uncertainty to brands.
For instance, the passage of General Data Privacy Regulation (GDPR) in Europe imposes new regulations for express consent of what data a company can collect – and how marketers within an organization can subsequently use it. Simultaneously, the imposition of new trade regulations and restrictions in the United States creates a lack of predictability for some industries as to what shoppers will buy. A state of increasing retail fragmentation means that established brands no longer have the same foothold that they once did.
Intelligent digital leaders resist the despair that may temporarily accompany declining sales, and instead see this as an opportunity to test. There’s always a market somewhere; now is the time to create a far-reaching growth strategy that plays with audience, product, ad creative, bids and more.
Meanwhile, advertising economies are maturing across the Asia Pacific (APAC) region, which means that the timing is right to launch campaigns that help you expand into new markets.
Also on the radar of intelligent digital leaders: Cryptocurrencies. These offer the opportunity to help digitize cash-based economies, whose citizens are only recently gaining access to smartphones, but they also bring with them serious security risks and the dangers inherent in any method of payment unregulated by a central banking system.
Understanding you need change is one thing; knowing how to implement a future-proof growth strategy is something else entirely. Here’s how two industry innovators are preparing.
Domino's Pizza
Domino’s is the second-largest pizza chain in the United States, with sales in fiscal year 2015 hitting more than $4.7 billion. Today, this global franchise leader is focusing on speed as its competitive advantage, according to Innovation Leader. Accordingly, the company is implementing technology that makes “order now” possible at every advertising touchpoint, giving customers much-desired control over their buying choices.
“When you place an order online, you have ultimate control,” explains Domino’s CDO Dennis Maloney. “You get to see the entire menu, you get to browse, you get to add products to your cart. It’s just a much more controlled experience if you’re shopping online than if you place a phone call to the store.”
It’s a simple vision that employees ranging from the CEO to retail store associates can align towards—use digital touchpoints to make ordering straightforward. This capability is future-optimized and platform agnostic, i.e. no matter which digital platform ends up succeeding in future, this growth strategy will continue to perform.
Sierra Club
Innovation Leader shared another story from grassroots environmental nonprofit Sierra Club, which has grown to a base of 2.5 million supporters across 52 volunteer-run local chapters. The company has maintained an active community base, despite significant market competition. Among its two most important foci: preserve community relationships over the long-term and expand its influence.
Better data is important for both objectives, because retention campaigns are built on understanding audience behavior. Luckily, lookalike audiences on Facebook and Google (among other platforms) pave the way to an excellent growth strategy. In collecting their own data through various platforms, they can aggregate it to create a picture of their members, then use that picture to advertise out to future members with the same attributes and interests.
“The ability to capture member activity, such as participation in trash clean-up at a local park, means that the Sierra Club could publish how many pounds of trash were collected that week and how many people participated,” explains the Sierra Club’s chief innovation officer, Chris Thomas. “The Sierra Club can also use this information to track its most active members, and recruit them for participation in events or as local chapter leaders.”
This is another powerful example of a growth strategy whose creators have girded it against future market changes. No matter which platforms end up most popular, no matter what other changes occur in the market, there will remain the ability to gather data from one’s own audiences and craft marketing campaigns targeted toward similar people.
The future of marketing is ever-changing, which makes the process of building a marketing stack a challenge. By selecting tactics that are bound to be with us in several years – e.g. lookalike audiences and customized online shopping experiences – you’re bound to set your company up for success.
Now it’s time to leverage market changes by choosing technologies that align well with your growth strategy. In this ever-changing world, machine learning is the most powerful way to keep up with market changes, analyze new opportunities and take advantage of niches that pop up faster than your competitors.
Ask a Centro Expert is a blog series from Centro where we break 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, palatable Q&As for your reading pleasure. This month’s topic: blockchain. We talked to Ben Bring, Centro’s VP of client services, for the break down.
What is blockchain?
A blockchain is a digital, undisputable ledger that chronologically records transactions in near real time.
Large amounts of information that can be recorded securely. Not one entity can destroy it or artificially manipulate it.
How could it be used for digital media?
Blockchain has the potential to impact how media professionals do business and deliver results. The biggest fundamental point is that it has the ability to provide transparency and accuracy to a chaotic digital framework. It could solve for decades-old processes involved with matching contracts with delivery. And it could be applied to issues such as ad verification, fraud mitigation and data quality.
How could a blockchain affect media contracts?
In a typical contract between an ad buyer and an ad seller, the buyer only pays for what it contracted. Having an indisputable record could remove our industry’s reliance on having multiple parties reporting and then working through discrepancies to come to an amendable billable unit or value. The industry would work off Smart Contracts where all parties have the ability to see what actual digital events took place and then cross reference the contract. There would be no doubt as to what was requested for purchase (audiences, impression counts, clicks, etc.) and what was delivered. Media buyers would be protected from waste and potential fraudulent activity by their partners. No single party has the ability to tamper with these digital records, contractual or otherwise. The math is there for everyone to see. No conversation is necessary.
When squaring away contracts, do we pay by bitcoin or any other cryptocurrencies?
All of the reconciliation opportunities in blockchain require some level of tokenization similar to Bitcoin or Etherium. There needs to be an agreed upon value of media and new currency with which to buy it. The challenge is that digital media is bought in a very fragmented way.
I’m not bought in yet. What else can blockchain do for me?
Another major challenge that the blockchain may be able to help solve is payments. It takes between 90 and 120 days for publishers to receive payment for their inventory. A blockchain and tokens could act as an escrow of sorts for pre-payment so that when the media is run, the token are immediately transferred and converted to cash. This also relates to transparency because blockchains could show what entities receive a portion of the payments.
What if I’m an advertiser and I don’t care about payments to publishers?
Advertisers could also benefit from higher quality data. Data continuity and quality are two issues that plague our industry. Both facets are affected by numerous obstacles such as 3rd party mediation, lack of direct connections and data loss. Blockchain has the potential to help solve for all of these moving pieces. Because the ledger is distributed, connections can be more direct, not only removing mediation ad fees but also decreasing data loss.
Ok, I’m interested. Can my campaigns be recorded in blockchain now?
Not just yet. As with every new applications to technology, implementing a blockchain for campaigns is cost-prohibitive currently. And its capacity for processing data may not be enough in a programmatic buying environment, where DSPs are transacting in the millions every minute of the day. The possibilities are worth noting because it takes planning, vision and collective thinking to bring to market commercially viable solutions. Even if I believe the media industry is not ready for mass adoption of blockchains, I am cautiously optimistic about how our professionals could utilize it. It’s important to keep an open mind and continue following the advances made and how they can impact your business.
The key will be adoption. Ad tech players are going to have an impactful role in creating applications for the technology that every company could use.
Are you interested in other Centro resources that will help you understand blockchain? Reach out to [email protected].
Financial services businesses have many opportunities to build brand awareness and attract new clients through search engine marketing (SEM). But search engines are constantly changing, making it difficult to keep up with the best optimization tactics without enlisting professional help.
According to Brandpoint’s State of Content Marketing for Financial Services report, the biggest challenges for financial services marketers are:
These challenges can all be addressed when you develop a targeted, comprehensive SEM strategy.
There are two main approaches financial services businesses can take to search engine marketing: search engine optimization (SEO) and Pay-Per-Click advertising (PPC). With SEO, you create and keyword-optimize your website content to rank well in organic search results. With PPC, you pay to have ads appear in search results using the Google Ads (AdWords) advertising platform.
Besides optimizing for the right keywords, there are many factors impacting your ability to rank well in organic search results. Google prioritizes older domains with more authority on the web. So while it’s technically free to optimize for SEO, it is a long-term strategy that won’t deliver fast results in the beginning.
PPC can deliver immediate results if you have a big enough advertising budget. Budget-conscious financial services businesses have to balance keyword targeting and ad relevance to attract profitable traffic for the right amount of ad spend.
Read through this entire guide, and you’ll walk away with a clear idea of how to use SEO and PPC to build a comprehensive SEM strategy for your financial services business.
Optimizing your blog and site content for search engines is a great way to grow a steady stream of organic traffic over time. Here are a few important SEO factors that financial services businesses should pay attention to:
It doesn’t matter what keywords you target or how great your content is, you can’t succeed at SEO unless you first take care of the technical aspects. This is mostly about making sure your website is easy for users to navigate and easy for search engines to crawl and understand.
At a minimum, you should:
The first thing you should do is audit your site for technical problems that could affect user experience. You’ll want to identify and fix broken links, remove/fix 404 pages, and fix any other technical errors. You should also find and minimize the redirects on your site, as they can affect site speed.
There are plenty of diagnostics tools out there that you can use to perform a site audit. Screaming Frog and SEO Crawler are two examples.
Taking steps to improve your site speed is essential, as it’s a very important rank factor in search engines. As little as a 1 second delay in page speed can equal an 11% loss of page views.
Google has a Page Speed tool that evaluates your site speed for mobile and desktop. It also offers actionable advice on steps you can take to improve performance:
Once you’ve made changes to improve your site performance, create and submit a sitemap to Search Console. A sitemap is a XML file that makes it easier for Google bots to crawl and index your pages.
You can make a sitemap for free using a tool like XML Sitemaps. Then log into Search Console and submit it there.
There are tons of relevant keywords that financial services businesses can target for SEO. However, since 75% of users never click past the first page of search results, the real challenge is finding keywords that your pages can realistically rank well for.
The key here is to identify relevant keywords to target that don’t have very high competition. For example, say you’re an accountant. Many businesses and magazines target keywords like “accounting services.” It’s better to identify equally relevant but less searched-for keywords like “What to look for in a business accountant.”
Keywords like these are called long-tail keywords. Long-tail keywords often answer common questions your audience asks search engines.
There are plenty of tools out there that can help you brainstorm long-tail keywords. Answer the Public is one free option. Just type in a root keyword (e.g. “accountant”) and it will return a list of questions related to that keyword (e.g. “are accountant fees tax deductible?”):
Start a blog on your financial services site. Your posts can target keywords that are easier to rank for, like these long-tail keywords.
Once you have a list of keywords you want to target, you’re ready to start creating and optimizing your content. You can, and should, keyword optimize the landing pages for your services. However, most of your SEO traffic potential will come from the long-tail keywords that you target on your blog.
So make sure you take every opportunity to create relevant, quality content around these keywords. The average length of content on the first page of search results is 1,890 words. So invest in your content and create something comprehensive with supporting images.
Here are the main areas where you should incorporate your target keyword:
The last thing to consider when creating and optimizing content for SEO is your disclaimers. Make sure your content is only providing financial advice on topics that you’re legally qualified to speak to. Otherwise you need to have a clear disclaimer that your content constitutes your opinion, and is not to be taken as financial advice.
Financial advice is what Google considers your money or your life (YMYL) content. Search quality guidelines offer more scrutiny for YMYL content. So don’t offer advice you’re not qualified to offer, as it has legal implications and could affect SEO.
Creating and optimizing your site content for specific keywords is only the first step in getting search engines to rank it. Google’s algorithms rely on a wide variety of other factors to help determine page rank. One of the most important factors are links.
First work on building internal links between the various pages and blog posts on your site. Google looks at internal links to help understand what your site content is about. So make sure the anchor text you use for your links helps describe the content it’s linking to.
For example, say you have a blog post covering tax deductions for the self employed. A relevant anchor text for an internal link to this content could be “self employment tax breaks” or “small business tax deductions.” Just make sure you don’t use your exact target keyword too much in anchor text, as it can actually negatively affect your page rank.
Next, you should work on building external links from other high authority domains back to your site pages. The more high authority links there are pointed at your pages, the more potential for page rank.
If your business is location-based, try to get links from other local domains, like your city’s chamber of commerce, local news outlets, and local .gov addresses. The best way to build links naturally from these domains is by distributing press releases and sponsoring local events to get mentioned in the news.
Using Google PPC ads is a great way to attract immediate traffic and drive conversions on your financial services website. Here are a few important PPC factors that financial services businesses should pay attention to:
Your keyword targeting strategy for PPC can and should be different than your SEO strategy. With PPC ads, you have the opportunity to get your ads to appear for higher-competition keywords that you couldn’t reasonably target for SEO. That said, targeting financial keywords can be quite expensive, so it’s important to do your research and discover keywords with the most potential value for your investment.
AdWords has a keyword research tool called Keyword Planner that can help with this. All you have to do is type in a relevant keyword such as “wealth management” and click Get Started.
Keyword Planner will return a list of related keywords along with relevant information like search volume, competition, and bid range. For the keyword “wealth management,” the bid range for top of the page results is $15-$50.
If your target keyword is too expensive, you can browse the other related keywords to find ones with a lower bid range. Or you can go back and search for a new query to get an idea of cost.
Since you’re paying for clicks, it makes sense to target bottom-of-the-funnel search queries that suggest the user is looking to convert. “Financial advisor Kennewick” is an example of a bottom-of-the-funnel query. A query like “What is a financial advisor?” would be top-of-the-funnel, as the user is likely just doing initial research.
Keywords aren’t the only way you can target your audience with AdWords PPC ads. It’s best practice to use demographic targeting as well to ensure your ads reach the most relevant audience.
Demographic audience targeting allows you to target ads based on user location, age, gender, and device type. If you offer localized services in a specific city, it’s very important to define the geographic location range for your ads to appear. This is also important for location-based credit unions or banks.
It might also be worthwhile to target using other demographic factors to reach your target audience. For example, if you’re a financial advisor specializing in retirement planning, you can narrow down who sees your ads to people in the retirement age range.
When creating your ad groups, it’s important to use negative keywords as well to help make sure your ads reach the right audience. Say your ads are targeting a broad match keyword like “business accountant”. You’d want to narrow down the queries your ad can potentially appear for by using negative keywords. If someone searched for “business accountant salary” for example, they’re not looking to hire an accountant, they’re probably hoping to become one. So “salary” would be a good negative keyword to include.
It doesn’t matter how well you target your ads and keywords, your ads won’t get clicks unless the copy is compelling and effective. Even minor changes you make to your headline or ad text can have a huge impact on click-through rates.
The key is to identify a unique value proposition for your financial services business and illustrate that in your ad copy. Take a look at these health insurance ads, for example:
Affordable plans, free quotes, and $89 health insurance are all examples of value propositions the advertisers use to drive clicks.
When creating your ads, you should explore all the optimization options available to make your ads more relevant and valuable for users. You can use ad extensions to include more relevant information with your ad, such as location or call extensions.
These extensions make it easy for people who are searching from their mobile devices to call or find your business location in their maps application.
Encouraging clicks on your ads is one thing. The next important thing to consider is what users do after they click through to your site. You’re paying for the click, whether visitors convert or not. So if you want to ensure you have a high return on ad spend (ROAS), optimize your landing pages to drive conversions.
Start by creating your landing pages with your overall SEM goals in mind. If your main goal is to generate leads from your PPC ads, then use your landing pages to illustrate the value of your financial services and include prominent calls-to-action to get more information.
The biggest mistake to avoid is using just a few generic landing pages for every ad type. It takes time and effort, but it’s worthwhile to develop unique targeted landing pages for every kind of ad you display.
Think about the value proposition that you use in your ad copy. If you highlight offering a free insurance quote, the call-to-action on the associated landing page should mention this as well. Ensure your ad and landing page copy line up, otherwise site visitors may get confused and navigate away.
While many financial services businesses take the time to carefully set up a targeted PPC campaign, it’s a common mistake to set it and forget it. But creating and targeting your ads is really only the first step. Once you start gaining insights into how people react to your ads and ad placement, you have new opportunities to optimize your strategy.
Over time you’ll realize that certain ad copy and extensions are more effective than others at getting clicks. AdWords makes it easy to test this by rotating ad variations and discovering the most effective ones for you.
Over time you’ll also want to evaluate the Quality Score of the keywords you run ads for. You can find your Quality Score in the Keywords tab from the side menu of AdWords. Hover over the status of an individual keyword to see the Quality Score:
A low quality score can suggest that your ad copy or landing pages aren’t relevant enough, or that you’re targeting the wrong keywords for your content. Make changes to address these issues and then monitor changes in your Quality Score to measure results.
Lastly, there is bid optimization to think about. You don’t want to spend more money than necessary to get the ad placement you need to drive your marketing goals. While you can make manual adjustments to your bidding as opportunities arise, the most effective strategy is to use a bid management tool to automatically make changes based on ongoing insights from consumer data.
Financial service businesses have so many opportunities to attract leads and grow when they develop a comprehensive SEM strategy. Just remember to target the right keywords when focusing on SEO and PPC. Then use these strategies together to maximize your presence in search engines. As long as your content is relevant and valuable to search queries, you should be able to grow a healthy stream of web traffic from SEM for financial services.
If there's one thing that's true about advertising, it's that everything changes. From subtle suggestions to in-your-face demands and info-speak to peer pressure, the shifts in advertising over the years have been many. But what about the changes in advertising as virtually every industry goes through digitization?
The evolutions we are seeing today will continue to spiral into a bold new future as we learn to embrace the Fourth Industrial Revolution—a dynamic, all-encompassing transformation of our society. It will change how we work, how we play and how we connect with one another.
Is your advertising plan up to the challenges this brave new world will present? Here's a look at how these aspects will change us and how to keep on top of those changes so your business can remain competitive.
The current digitization of business assets is being referred to as the Fourth Industrial Revolution. If you're not familiar with some of the other revolutions, you are not alone. The first Industrial Revolution is the one most people think of when they hear the term, when steam and machinery came into play to boost productivity significantly. This started the shift to urbanization and factory work for much of the world's agricultural and craftsman backbone.
At the turn of the last century, electricity drove production to even higher levels while making everyday life even easier with the Second Industrial Revolution. Factories grew as concepts such as the assembly line came into use, while housewives everywhere cheered at the invention of more tools to break the drudgery of everyday life.
Following WWII, the computer moved from military use to helping businesses around the world, culminating in the Third Industrial Revolution, which put a computer in almost every home (and pocket) in America.
Today, the Fourth Industrial Revolution is upon us: digitization. It's different than the Third because the rate of change we're seeing now is significantly higher in terms of speed, scope and impact on our production systems and society. Much as the addition of electricity expanded factories and computers automated these electrically-driven factories, digitization is creating a massive change in our society.
So, what exactly is digitization capable of doing for our businesses? It's incorporating machine learning into a wide range of areas, allowing analytics to change how we work by making us deal with exception handling instead of day-to-day drudgery. It's automating workflows as systems that can more easily integrate with each other, reducing the time spent moving information from one system to another. It's adding 3-D printing to eliminate shipping time, using the Internet of Things to predict machine failures, biotechnology to improve disease treatment, and so much more. It's also changing how the general population perceives their role in the purchasing process, which is why we've seen such a strong drive to improve the consumer experience. And it's considering new business models and services that help keep our businesses competitive against disruptions in the market. This means we're also changing how we do business as a whole, and that includes how we advertise our goods and services.
What changes can we expect in the future that we can use to adapt our digital advertising plans? We may see additional changes in the middle class, as society divides into high-skill/high-pay or low-skill/low-pay sectors, or possibly as we all come together closer to the middle. Will this lead us to that promising tomorrow in Star Trek where Federation citizens are virtually without need and allowed to instead pursue their greatest passions instead of work that pays the bills? We don't know yet. The push towards efficiency, sustainability and minimalism suggest that we could be headed in that direction as a people. Hopefully, instead of working harder, we'll learn to work smarter. Mankind's ever-present drive to innovate, invent and create will grow, including how we'll develop advertising to reach this new society.
One area of change is focusing on specializing while outsourcing other tasks, including advertising. Our social lives are becoming increasingly digital, and appealing to people through snappy customer response, a truly memorable ad or programs that reward customers for sharing advertisements with their friends are all potential directions to consider.
The Fourth Industrial Revolution is also changing how we perceive ourselves. Privacy, ownership, work, security, consumption, personal development: all these concepts are going through massive changes as people discover new and better ways of living their lives. Advertising must speak to these issues, whether it's how your newest purse blocks RFID signals to protect chipped credit cards or how your university is offering new options to MOOCS courses that combine at-your-own-pace learning with degree programs. Products or services that provide customization to make consumers’ lives easier or gives them more personal time will drive industry change. Focusing on benefits and solutions provided by these new developments will drive advertising well into the future as consumers find the best options for their lives and needs. These changes are being driven by the catalyst of the new ethical, moral and social changes of the Fourth Revolution.
Another way that advertising is changing is using storytelling to personalize a brand. An exceptional example is Carhartt's video featuring Jason Momoa, tying Hollywood giants to their Midwestern farming roots, Pacific Northwest loggers, mechanics and families around the world. Through his personal story and images of his family at play with their products featured in all states of repair, Carhartt shows the personal side of their products and how they haven't changed from their original dedication to durability in tough situations. It wonderfully connects the products to a wide range of environmental circumstances.
Digitization is also driving how we interface with technology. We're heading to 5G, allowing people around the globe access to markets that would have been virtually impossible in the past, letting them compete on a more level playing field. Video is hot, making us even more connected than ever before. VR is no longer the thing of dreams, but takes school children on field trips, consumers into a 360-degree view of products or construction workers into the building they're creating.
An excellent example of how this is changing our society was a popular meme from a few years ago, that went, "Explaining a smartphone to someone who has time-traveled from the 1950s. I have in my pocket a device that allows me to access the entirety of human knowledge. I use it to get into arguments with people I don't know and watch funny animal videos." Just as the massive change of the Third revolution took us from sock hops to AOL, the Fourth will connect us together in ways we can't even imagine.
Products and services that perfectly personalize to the consumer require these stories to show that the advertising isn't just speaking to the crowd, they're genuine and adaptable to that specific person's needs and desires. Yesterday's practice of dropping change into a jar to provide water filters for children in Africa has adapted to the point that we can buy products that provide equal number of those filters or even connect with people in Africa to determine the best way to solve the problem for their village and their needs. As our world's population heads towards 8 billion, humanity's primal need to connect and be recognized one individual at a time is being driven further on through these changes.
Because we have this level of connectivity and information, we can no longer simply sell our products on the concept that our brand is simply better than the others. Giants like Apple and Samsung have grown through their dedication to innovation while recognizing that disruptors such as LG are nipping at their heels should that innovation fall. Telling brand stories, providing VR options and having hot, memorable videos will only work as long as we remain dedicated to what has made our companies great in the first place. If the Fourth Industrial Revolution has done nothing else, it has solidly returned us to that dedication to quality, customer service, and communication that we must retain to survive the predations of industry or market disruption.
There can be no doubt that our world is changing, and as with past industrial revolutions, those who do not embrace that change will be left behind. The Fourth Industrial Revolution will bring our entire world together as a people even as we embrace our own individuality.
No matter how much data you have about your clients or customers, you can always use more. How do they like to receive information? When do they peruse the web? When do they make decisions? What subject lines appeal to them? Are they more emotional or analytical in nature? Do they respond better to humor or statistics? There's just so much you want to know, and this is especially true with responsive search ads.
On a more general level, of course, you probably already know much of this about your audience. But to what extent? If you’re like most companies, you could stand to get significantly more granular. For instance, if you send out an email with two different subject lines with a one-word difference, can you predict which one they’ll choose? Probably not. Yet it could be the difference between getting a click and not, making a sale and not, gaining a client for life...and not.
In a nutshell, A/B testing lets you find the optimal approach in any situation so you can replicate those results next time and refine them for ever-greater conversion. When you do this over and over again, for every campaign—while simultaneously optimizing bidding and analyzing your results—the outcomes are pretty amazing.
Yet sadly, according to a survey of 800 digital marketers, less than 40 percent of companies use A/B testing in their campaigns.
Well, we should clarify: it’s sad for them. Really, it’s a positive for you. It means your competition is seeking "good enough" results, making it easier for you to seek the absolute best ones and rise to the top of your field.
But running A/B tests is hard, not to mention time-consuming. When you include writing new ad copy, loading those ads, optimizing them and analyzing them, there’s a lot more to do. Even writing copy can take its toll. Once you write several headline and body copy versions, then you have to mix and match them to create multiple combinations, load them in, etc.
If you’re getting a headache right about now, take a deep breath. Now, what if we told you that this approach won’t be necessary for much longer?
Enter Google’s new responsive search ads, an answer to the prayers of any dedicated online advertiser. Responsive search ads are Google Ads newest ad type, launched alongside their latest overhaul of the interface. Meant to help further automate A/B testing and PPC ad optimization, responsive search ads are adaptive, delivering a more relevant message to searchers based on their queries.
With this ad type, you provide multiple headlines and descriptions when you create the ad. Then Google Ads does the heavy lifting, adjusting your ad’s content to match search queries, testing different combinations of text and discovering which is the most relevant for your audience.
Let’s talk about what these ads are and what they can do for your business. We’ll also take a look at how you can use them to automate ad copy creation and A/B testing, as well as several best-practices tips for integrating these into your marketing routine.
So if you’re ready to save time, learn more about your audience, outstrip the competition and increase your conversions, get ready to take notes. Responsive search ads are about to be yours.
In the past, Google suggested advertisers create multiple expanded text ads for each ad group to help advertisers test and identify the most effective ad copy for your marketing goals. It was time consuming, but worthwhile if you wanted to get more reach for your ads and understand how your audience reacts to different messages. Now, responsive dynamic ads are positioned to make this “best practice” obsolete by allowing you to test ad copy variations all in one place.
While they’re similar to expanded text ads, responsive ads have some key features that set them apart:
By providing a series of headlines and description options to Google Ads, users save time A/B testing different ad element combinations. This also has a secondary effect of giving you more opportunities to compete in auctions as your multiple headlines and descriptions can be relevant to more search queries. Over time, as Google Ads shows your different ad text combinations, it will identify and automatically prioritize the best performing variants for you.
If those benefits aren’t enough to convince you to try responsive search ads, just remember they’re allowed more real estate in SERPs than any other ad-type. What’s not to love?
Like with every ad type, there are of course some limitations when using responsive search ads. Advertisers who are already less inclined to give over full optimization to the Google Ads machine won’t be chomping at the bit to try out this ad type. It appears that responsive search ads also don’t fully support ad customizers, a feature many advertisers love to use to manually tailor their ad message to user search queries. But this might change in the long run.
With all that in mind, it’s still clear that responsive search ads can almost certainly help increase your ad group performance overall...if you take full advantage of the benefits.
Ready to start realizing the many benefits of responsive search ads for yourself? Here are seven tips you should follow to ensure your responsive search ads meet qualifications, help you automate your ad text optimization, and more.
When creating your first responsive search ad, you’ll need to provide a minimum of three headlines and two descriptions to rotate. But Google Ads recommends you provide at least five different headlines for your responsive search ads to increase the chances that your ad shows. The more options you provide, the more opportunities there are to appear for search queries and optimize your ads for the most relevant message. Using as many as eight or 10 headlines would be ideal to get the most benefit out of this ad type.
No matter how many headlines you include, make sure the variants are sufficiently different from each other. If you use too many of the same or similar phrases in your headlines, the system will have more trouble generating ad combinations.
Here’s an example of a poorly optimized responsive search ad because of redundancy issues:
Similar headlines like “Fashionable Women’s Shoes” and “Trendsetting Women’s shoes” make it hard to generate ad combinations and ultimately limit the benefits of this ad type to reach a larger audience with your diverse ad descriptions.
Try varying lengths of the headlines you create and add at least two distinct descriptions. It is possible for responsive search ads to show up to two descriptions at a time, making it even more important to avoid redundancy.
It’s possible for your headlines and descriptions to appear in any order, so you need to make sure all combinations make sense when viewed together. Google Ads recommends writing your first three headlines assuming they would appear together in your ad. Does the message make sense/avoid redundancy?
Here’s an example of a responsive search ad that’s well optimized:
All headlines and descriptions are unique and make sense no matter how you pair them up.
Your responsive ads shouldn’t be about using different words/phrasing to deliver the same message for your headlines and ad description. Instead, focus on illustrating different features and benefits of your product/service to see which are the most effective at driving clicks.
For example, let's say you’re advertising international health insurance. “Free quote,” “global coverage” and “Plans start at $199/month” are all examples of benefits you can test as part of your description variations.
Google Ads recommends you include a target keyword in two of your headlines, but also that you have at least three more that don’t include any keywords. This has to do with (you guessed it) redundancy issues. Including keyword insertion in too many headlines can lead to redundant text in the ad.
Here’s an example of a poorly optimized responsive search ad because of this problem:
There may be some important information that you want to appear in every ad text combination. In order to include this text while avoiding redundancy, you’ll want to pin it to the ad. You can pin text at Headline position 1 or 2, or Description position 1. Make sure the text you pin is less than 80 characters long.
For example, if you need to include a disclaimer in all your ads, just write it in one of your descriptions then pin it to Description position 1. This will ensure that every ad includes the disclaimer in that part of the description.
That said, you should only pin information that you really need to appear on every ad—otherwise, it limits the number of headlines or descriptions that can appear for a search query. For that reason, Google Ads doesn’t recommend pinning for most advertisers.
Google Ads may use automation to help advertisers create, show, and optimize their ads, but that’s no reason to not monitor performance metrics yourself. On the Ads & Extensions page, you can see performance metrics for each of your responsive search ads, including all the standard stats you receive for other ad types.
These statistics are performance totals of all the combinations of headlines and descriptions for that particular responsive search ad. Unfortunately, there’s currently no way for advertisers to see how individual ad text variants perform against each other within the ad. They’ll have to trust that Google Ads is doing a good job of optimizing them.
One thing you may want to look at is how your responsive ads compare to your regular text ads. Assuming you’re fully utilizing the features of responsive search ads, Google Ads should help you create a more visible and effective ad based on query relevance and audience behavior.
Google Ads has changed a lot in recent years, and continues to roll out new features and ad types that rely heavily on machine learning and automation for optimization. Responsive search ads are just the latest addition that require users to relinquish more control in order to benefit from insights and optimization capabilities.
There will always be traditional advertisers among us who love nothing more than to analyze performance and manually tweak ads themselves to perfection. There’s no denying the power of the human touch to create a highly targeted ad that speaks to audiences on a granular level.
But the truth is most businesses today don’t have the time or resources to manually target and optimize their ads at scale. And as more big data insights are available to help improve ad targeting in real-time, it would be unwise to overlook this resource and risk falling behind the competition as an advertiser.
There are already a number of bid management tools and predictive advertising technologies that make it simple to synthesize and automatically derive insights from consumer data to optimize your bids and minimize wasted ad spend. Advertisers who embrace the power of machine learning and automation are already benefiting from these technologies to outbid and outperform their competitors.
Google Ads’ machine learning and automation features are no different, and they are coming at the perfect time for most busy advertisers. Responsive search ads are just an example of the direction things are heading for ad creation, optimization, and bid targeting. Advertisers who choose to embrace and fully utilize these technologies are the ones who will best illustrate their benefits early on. In the long run, automation and machine learning are the way of the future in advertising.
At Centro, we know that keeping up with the trade pubs and latest trends can be tough and time consuming. To make that easier, we’ve compiled all the articles, reports, and other bits of awesomeness you may have missed, but should definitely read. Enjoy our latest list below!
While mobile advertising sustains momentum as a critical means of targeting consumers, shady players continue to exploit the channel through various forms of ad fraud. MarTech Advisor highlights the top categories of mobile ad fraud that advertisers must continue keeping an eye out for. And if you didn’t know, now you know.
Snapchat has rolled out the ability for advertisers to book ads in specific shows via their self-serve ad tool. Publisher partners include Vice, BuzzFeed and ESPN, amongst others. Until recently, advertisers needed to use the very manual and traditional IO system in order to work with premium content partners. The social platform is looking to bank on the fact that the Discover section is a gated community that is only is available to professional publishers, an angle that can bring a sense of security to clients who have concerns about the less rigorous parameters set around other social environments like Facebook and YouTube.
The mass exodus of Americans leaving traditional TV services is expected to accelerate through the rest of 2018. According to eMarketer, the number of cord-cutters in the US is expected to reach 33 million adults, a 32.8% YOY increase in those cutting out traditional services from the year prior. Conversely, Americans continue to flock to more affordable OTT services like Netflix, Hulu, HBO Now, amongst others, where consumers see more value. Advertisers can expect the trends to signal improved opportunities for improved targeting in the connected TV world.
In Q1 2018, The Guardian worked with Google and MightyHive to determine how much of the inventory on ad exchanges purporting to belonging to the Guardian was legit. They found that when ads.txt filters were applied to their ad buys, there were no discrepancies between what they bought and what ended up coming back to the Guardian. However, when ads.txt filters were not applied, 1% of digital ad spend and 72% of video ad spend went to unauthorized programmatic platforms.
A new trade organization has been developed with a mission of helping advertisers, agencies and publishers get smart about managing brand safety issues. This organization plans to create a certification program that will tackle issues such as brand safety, ad quality, how to vet partners, ad placement and content analysis and understanding ad fraud and malware.
More than 3 out of 4 US consumers said they see too many retargeting ads from the same retailer. And 78% of senior marketing executives worldwide said it is “inexcusable” for consumers to keep receiving ads for products they already bought. One big reason for this displeasing déjà vu is that advertisers utilizing multiple retargeting and programmatic buying vendors, which have their own ways of identifying and retargeting consumers.
With 90% of marketers of retailers saying personalization is a top priority for their marketing, it’s surprising that only 15% of those companies believe they are doing a good job at it. Especially, when research shows that personalization at scale can drive between 5-15% revenue growth for companies not just in retail, but also travel, entertainment, telecom, and financial-services sectors. This McKinsey article provides recommendations for marketing leaders on how to transform their organization so consumers are no longer stalked by irrelevant ads or bombarded with outdated offers.
In the next 18 months, it’s expected that there will be 1.6 billion digital assistants in use and that half of all searches will be voice-based. With strong growth in voice-activated usage and more marketers interested in assessing voice opportunities, brands and advertisers need to start planning how to take advantage of the space. AdAge outlines 4 key principles on how to do so based on how the platform is most commonly utilized.
August's DIAL is also available as a PDF.
Every company has unique digital marking projects. Budgeting and planning for online advertising costs will depend on your industry, company size, and overarching business goals. While company goals may differ, Centro can offer you a tested framework to create the optimum marketing budget for your business. Develop your plan, and consider your priorities, marketing channels—and even the average advertising cost of your competitors.
A typical mid-sized business puts about 35 percent of their overall marketing budget towards online advertising costs—some industries allocate quite a bit more. Below are some estimates for the average budgeting percentages allocated to digital marketing in industries that tend to rely on online ads the most:
Spending also varies by advertising type. Email, display ads, search and social media advertising costs have increased exponentially over the last few years. These figures show that costs vary by project, company, and industry.
You don't necessarily need to utilize every available marketing channel to enjoy success. In fact, marketers with smaller budgets should focus on developing a good plan with one or very few marketing channels, to ensure optimization and allow them to receive maximum value. Avoid stretching your dollars or attention too thin.
With that in mind, take these steps to right-size your company's online advertising cost:
Of course, your digital marketing goals should support your overarching marketing goals. For instance, a B2B company may hope to improve sales and brand awareness. After you know what results you desire, you can set measures that will demonstrate how well you're doing.
For example:
Your past performance can indicate how you should act in the future. Notice where your dollars have translated into sales in the past, and of course, which marketing investments did not help your company grow at all. At this point, you may want to allocate money based on past performance or determine why certain channels did not produce any positive returns.
Research anticipated costs for various types of online ads before you calculate how much money you will need to support your goals. Use tools and observation to explore marketing channels your competitors use to estimate the amount they spend. In addition, keyword research should uncover the search terms you plan to target and the average costs for ranking well on these terms.
If your initial plan requires an unrealistic budget for your company, you may need to develop another plan. Try reducing the number of channels or find cheaper related or long-tail keywords with which to start. If your initial efforts help support your goals, you may be able to utilize a larger budget later to expand your efforts. Average B2B companies spend about 5 percent of their overall revenues to promote products—however, B2C companies tend to spend about twice that amount.
Finally, use the previously set measures, or metrics, to assess how well each piece of your marketing plan is performing. If certain channels or campaigns within those channels don't produce, revisit them to figure out if they need tweaking or even discarding.
Take the best course by developing a plan with metrics to track your progress and avoid the pitfalls of trying to market in the dark.
