Technology
Basis Platform
Advertising Operating System
Communication Portal
Intelligent Collaboration
All Channel Activation
Activate Media on Every Channel
Consulting
Resources
The promise of Artificial Intelligence (AI) includes minimizing tasks people are required to do. What if companies could communicate with customers (and prospective customers) in a way that brought value to both their organization and audience(s)?
From chatbots to digital assistants—conversational interfaces have evolved significantly over the years and will continue to do so well into the future. This webinar discusses this evolution to help you learn more about the following:
Sometimes you have to look far and wide for tools and resources that you need for your PPC campaigns to be successful and profitable. Other times, what you need to be successful can be found right at your fingertips. Such is the case when you use both your own inventory and lead capacity to optimize your SEM activities and increase ROI.
The combination of the products you have available, along with the number of leads you can successfully generate and handle are critical data points that can be leveraged to your advantage -- as important indicators regarding the success of your campaign, as well as a foundation from which to make your SEM strategies and campaigns even better.
The majority of businesses use search engine marketing (SEM) to sell products or attract leads to their business. So they use whatever information they have about these things to hone keywords and create targeted ads that drive conversions. But few realize the same information -- lead capacity and inventory -- can be used to develop their PPC ads can also be used to streamline and optimize their SEM program. This article discusses how to do this using two main information sources:
For just about every type of company, both inventory and lead capacity are important for business success. They can also help inform and strategize your SEM program to drive revenue, reduce wasted ad spend, and generate higher ROI. Here are nine creative ways to use inventory and lead capacity information to build a more efficient SEM strategy.
Local Inventory Ads (LIAs) are a special merchant ad type, and one of the easiest ways to start using inventory and lead capacity information for better SEM. They're also very important for businesses that want to drive online-to-offline (O2O) conversions, as they display your products and store information to users who are within close proximity of your stores. When users click on your ad, they aren’t taken back to your landing pages but instead are directed to a Google-hosted storefront.
LIAs use your inventory information to bring your local store online. Shoppers are also assured your store has the items they’re looking for. This helps you deliver the right ad at the right time to shoppers who are likely to convert offline. It also makes it possible to track the effect your search ads have on in-store sales.
Essentially, ad schedule bid adjustments allow you to temporarily increase or reduce bids during certain hours of the day, and are a great tool for businesses that have regular, predictable, day-to-day fluctuations in sales. Ad schedule bid adjustments are also a strategic way to attract more conversions as well as manage advertising investment when your capacity is full.
Here’s how it works -- most PPC advertisers use ad schedule bid adjustments to bid up during times when they normally see high conversion rates from their analytics data. This gives their ads more visibility when people are more likely to convert. But you can also use ad schedule bid adjustments to adapt your investment to your lead capacity needs as well.
Say a local restaurant runs PPC campaigns for their business but finds that on Fridays and Saturdays from 12-2 pm, their seating is almost always completely full. In other words, they don’t need the help of PPC ads to attract business during those hours. What’s more, they could end up paying money for clicks they didn’t need to get enough customers for their capacity limits. To fix this, they can use bid adjustments to reduce their bid (by as much as 100%) during these peak hours. At the same time, they can also increase their bid (by as much as 900%) during times when business is slow.
Anyone running PPC ads for an eCommerce store knows the challenges of keeping pace with it. You have to make sure the ads you display always match your inventory selection, no matter the changes. Google’s Dynamic Search Ads (DSAs) are one unique solution to this problem. When you enable your website to serve up DSAs, Google will scan the organic index of your website and create ads for you to display in search results. So whenever you make changes to available products on your site, your DSAs will sync up.
DSAs can help you create a more efficient SEM program by saving time. There’s no need to create separate ads, keyword targeting or bids for each product on your site. They will also automatically update your ads as you make changes to your site pages. What’s more, DSAs can help you capture additional traffic that you wouldn’t normally reach through a keyword-targeted campaign.
Google Maps ads are highly relevant for local businesses, although most don’t fully optimize for this kind of listing. These local search ads appear on Google Maps results when people search for nearby businesses. While there isn't a lot of real estate for ads on Google Maps, most businesses (even enterprise chain companies) aren’t doing everything they can to optimize for these choice spots. Google Maps ads are based on your Google My Business listing. Making changes to this is a big opportunity to improve local search performance, especially since 46% of all searches on Google are local.
The first thing you can do is make sure your storefronts have the most recent call numbers, address and location information. If you have your Merchant Center and Google My Business Accounts linked, it’s also important to keep your local inventory information up-to-date to better optimize for these ad spaces.
If you run a service-based business instead of retail, you can also optimize using time-segmented bidding strategies. For example, a coffee shop can bid higher during high traffic hours in the morning.
Just remember that your Google My Business page is relevant for paid ads as well as organic search. So keeping your inventory updated, highlighting promotions, and time segmentation are worthwhile to optimize for these local listings.
Cost-per-click (CPC) offers a unique opportunity for advertisers to drive ROI because you're not just paying for exposure like traditional advertising. Instead, you only pay when someone clicks on your ad and visits your site. That helps ensure that you’re only paying to target the most relevant leads for your business.
As a result, PPC is set up so that the most relevant keywords for your target audience are often the most expensive. But targeting the most expensive keywords isn’t always the best strategy to maximize ROI. Instead of focusing solely on CPC and subsequent revenue, it’s better to dig deeper to understand how your advertising costs relate to your overall sales cycle. If you can calculate things like cost-per-lead and cost-per-sale, you’ll have a better understanding of the impact that your ad campaigns have on overall ROI. You might find that investing in less expensive keywords will fill your sales pipeline more effectively.
You can target keywords relevant to numerous points in your lead cycle at varying CPCs. Focusing on a wide variety of keywords makes it easier to execute bid adjustments in order to ramp up your PPC strategy and adjust to lead capacity changes within your business. For example, a consulting business with a full appointment schedule for the next two months could reduce investment in bottom-of-the-funnel keywords and increase investment in top-of-the-funnel keywords to start nurturing the next round of leads into future clients.
As mentioned earlier, Local Inventory Ads (LIAs) are a great way to save time and optimize your SEM efforts. Among other things, they leverage inventory feeds to help you create ads for your available product listings.
However, this system does come with issues that can lead to a less-than-optimal advertising strategy. That’s because Google’s understanding of your inventory selection is limited by how often it pulls your data feed. So if a product is listed as “out-of-stock” in your inventory feed when it’s pulled into Merchant Center, Google will continue to assume that’s the case until new data comes in. This is a problem because Google could choose not to display ads for a product until it knows inventory is available.
This might seem like a rare problem with minimal impact, but that’s not necessarily true. Your most popular products are the ones that regularly run out of stock, right? And once you do restock them, your bestsellers are not benefitting from any ad visibility. Meanwhile, your competitors are continuing to sell and earn revenue.
The solution to this problem is to pull your data feed into Merchant Center more frequently than you might think is necessary. As a general rule, it’s a good idea to do this daily to ensure that Google always has the most up-to-date inventory information and that you maximize your advertising opportunity for popular items. Certain types of businesses with rapidly changing inventory might even want to do this more frequently.
In 2017 Google introduced new call bid adjustments in AdWords. The goal was to help advertisers get more out of their click-to-call ads. And it works. Calls convert three times better than web clicks.
Call bid adjustments allow you to control how often the call option appears with your search ads. Since calls are so valuable for sales and conversions, why not show the extension all the time? It turns out that lead capacity, call volume, and sales opportunities can all benefit from call bid adjustments.
Google provides an example: If you’re a travel advertiser, you may see higher order values from calls because it can be easier to cross-sell rental cars, group tours, and other vacation add-ons during a live conversation. Raise your call bid adjustments to show call extensions more frequently and drive more of these high-value call conversions.
But taking advantage of sales opportunities isn’t the only way to benefit from and maximize your investment in ads using call bid adjustments. Say a business runs a call center and also offers an online customer service center. They want to maximize their use of call extensions to drive high-converting call traffic within their capacity limits. For a business like this, it can be worthwhile to adjust call extension bids at times when call volume and phone wait times are high. Their ads will encourage users to visit their online help center instead of calling their overwhelmed customer service representatives. Then when call volume reduces, they can adjust to increase bids so the call option appears more frequently with search ads.
Maximizing your use of call extensions within the limits of your business’ capacity is a great way to increase revenue and decrease costs. In one real-world example, Medical Guardian, a Medical Alert Systems company, found that their phone leads convert 2 times more often than their web leads. Using call bid adjustments, they were able to generate a 20% higher call volume for their business and decreasing the cost to acquire leads by 60%.
As the other points in this post illustrate, there are a lot of ways to use inventory to optimize your SEM campaigns. But businesses that get creative with their data can also optimize their local inventory distribution based on search data insights, making a more effective SEM campaign in the process.
We saw a great case study of this in practice at SMX West 2017. An apparel merchant near a college town was dissatisfied with their poor sales in local stores. They assumed (rightly) that the college-age shoppers that dominate the town preferred to shop online. So they decided to look at their geo data, layering and mining keyword searches localized around specific stores in specific zip codes.
Their hypothesis: Brick-and-mortar outlets in areas with the highest search traffic would sell the most units. By optimizing their inventory in those locations against the bestselling items for college-age students, the store saw a significant (100%+) lift in profits.
Search data can provide a lot of important insights to help businesses with multiple locations optimize their inventory distribution, marketing campaigns, bid strategies, and more. Store location, online product sales by location, search interest, and product interest are just a few examples of the broad data types businesses can use in combination to drive actionable insights, creating a more efficient sales strategy in the process.
There are a lot of factors that can affect a business’ lead capacity, like the speed of the buying cycle, call volume, phone wait times, and appointment availability, among other things. And a highly optimized SEM strategy allows for bid adjustments based on these factors. Why spend money bidding on expensive, high-converting keywords when your sales pipeline is near maximum capacity?
Rather than manually pausing and starting your PPC campaigns based on these factors, it’s better to adjust your bids to ensure you’re consistently meeting but not exceeding your PPC lead goals. This kind of complex bid adjustment strategy is beyond the capabilities of Google Ads’ automation features, but you can use an advanced bid management tool to create unique algorithms catered to your business needs.
The ways in which you can use inventory and lead capacity information to create a better-optimized SEM program are numerous and diverse. Perhaps surprisingly, you already have a lot of the resources readily available and at your disposal. That said, being able to leverage them to truly optimize your SEM program and create the most value for your campaigns takes time, effort and more than a little strategic thinking, as well as some trial and error.
Google Ads offers a variety of features that you can use in complex ways to adapt your campaign strategies to your own business' inventory and lead capacity. However, more advanced tools can help you develop unique automated solutions tailored to your specific business needs, profit, and ROI goals as well as comprehensive marketing vision. Taking the time to figure out which tools and unique strategy works best for you is an investment that will very soon pay for itself. Because creatively leveraging inventory and lead capacity with the goal of more efficient SEM will only serve to boost ROI and make your PPC campaigns that much more profitable, and sustainable, for both your short and long-term business goals.
Imagine you’re in a graveyard at midnight (just work with us here, okay?) The chilling howl of a werewolf echoes in the distance, and a full moon only makes the shadows longer and more sinister. While it seems as though no one is around for miles, you instinctively know that you’re not alone.
You see a dark and shadowy figure emerge from behind a gravestone. Then another. Then another. The hair rises on the back of your neck.
You don’t know what these things are, or what they want, but somehow you have a feeling that they don’t have your best interests at heart. In fact, they would probably tear you apart as soon as look at you. All you know is that you have to keep moving. To survive this, you have to be quick and nimble. You have to anticipate their every move. And then somehow, you have to stay a few steps ahead of them just to live to tell the tale.
Feeling terrified yet? Well, you should be.
Instead of ghosts, ghouls and goblins, these spooky, dark figures are actually competitors, fraudsters and cyber attackers (oh my!)
In order to stay alive and kicking in a cut-throat digital advertising environment, you need to stay on your toes to prevent them from ambushing your campaigns at every turn. And if you let your guard down for a moment? Well, you will likely be vulnerable to all kinds of nefarious surprises. As you traverse this graveyard, you’ve seen what happened to those who came this way before you—and you reeeeeallly don’t want to end up the way they did.
No doubt, the internet is a graveyard full of hidden dangers—to your technology, your identity, your business and marketing efforts. So we’re here to give you a little head’s up to the threats that might pass your way, while helping to arm you for the inevitable fight ahead.
Along the way you might have to combat armies of infected bots and fake (let’s just call them "mostly dead") users. You will have to navigate a labyrinth of haunted ghost sites. You will have to survive hijacks to your ads and your clicks. And you will have to find the courage to uncover those masked URLs.
But we’ve got your back with a Halloween lookbook, “Top 10 Terrifying Ad Fraud Attacks That Will Kill Your Campaigns,” that will alert you to these threats, answer your questions and provide a few pointers that will help you steer clear of these demons and stay profitable throughout this oh-so-spooky season.
Meanwhile, we’re here to equip you with the right tools to keep your digital campaigns safe and protected. Although attackers are constantly sharpening their knives in preparation for their next victim, there are ways you can reduce the chances of falling prey to their frightening schemes.
In addition to providing superior bid-management, granular customer data insights and analysis, and customized campaign management, Basis Technologies provides a platform well-equipped with anti-fraud and security technologies, offering an additional layer of security and protection so ROI stays intact and your campaigns remain as lucrative and profitable as possible.
In short, your tool of choice is Basis. So who ya gonna call?
Wanna share or download this lookbook. Visit our resources center to share this lookbook to your social channels or post on your blog.
To even the most casual observer, it’s obvious we are living in unparalleled and unprecedented political times. And, paradoxically, it is also a time we are experiencing low voter turnout -- especially among younger generations.
In the last mid-term election (2014), only 21% of millennials voted, according to the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement. When about 80% of young voters choose not to participate in the election process, I feel there is a responsibility of CEOs and business leaders to do what is necessary to encourage full participation by our employees in exercising their right to vote.
Many of our political leaders today seem more interested in winning at all costs, sowing divisiveness among our citizens, and belittling each other at a time when we need to be working together to solve our large and exacerbating foundational problems. We have witnessed, over the last 50 years, what I consider a catastrophic failure in our political system and leaders. Their lack of leadership and inability to create bi-partisan solutions has left U.S. citizens with unsustainable levels of debt, an archaic and crumbling infrastructure, an ailing public education system, spiraling healthcare and higher education costs, as well as a planet that is getting warmer every year. Even if we worked together today to start solving these problems, it’s not going to be easy. The difficulty level of solving them increases exponentially each year (and each congressional term) that political leaders choose to not work together in creating common sense solutions to these issues.
Sadly, it is the younger generations as well as their children and their grandchildren who are going to bear the brunt and the responsibility, and incur the cost of political mismanagement of the last half century. So, 21% participation isn’t good enough. We have to do better.
At Centro, we enacted a new policy this week where we are making Election Day in the U.S. and Canada a national holiday going forward. For all national election days, our employees are getting a half-day paid time-off so they have the requisite time, space and freedom to vote. In the U.S., our employees will be taking this on November 6, 2018. In Canada, employees will do this on October 21, 2019, for its next election. Our goal is 100% participation of our employees.
Importantly, Centro is not making any references or inferences to our employees on “who” they should vote for or what issues they should vote “for” or “against.” Our company is only asking that each employee votes and that they vote their conscience. They can vote for whomever they feel best represents them and their values. And they should vote for the person they feel will make the best decisions to put our local, state and federal governments on a better, and more positive, track going forward.
Centro is not the only one that has this perspective on civic and corporate duty, and so we are asking, and encouraging, our peer companies in Chicago, in the U.S., in Canada, in media and in technology to join us in making Election Day an official national holiday. The strength of our country and our economy are critical to creating a positive business environment and we need responsible and pragmatic political leadership working together to help us continue to grow and flourish. A great way to show government the power of teamwork is for businesses to unite in giving employees time to vote on Election Day.
###
Shawn Riegsecker is founder and CEO of Centro.
Popular digital assistants like Apple’s Siri and Amazon’s Alexa have taught us that voice technology is dramatically changing the way consumers search for information online. And that holds especially true for Google Voice Search. Instead of wasting hours scrolling on Google’s search pages, voice-activated search enables us to find exactly what we are looking for simply by saying the word.
It’s a trend that is experiencing a rapid upward trajectory. The Wall Street Journal reports that 51 percent of consumers use voice search in their cars, and 39 percent use voice assistants in their homes. These statistics are increasing as consumers become familiar and comfortable with voice search technology for their day-to-day activities.
As Google Voice Search and other voice search capabilities rise in popularity, they’re also becoming important vehicles for businesses that want to improve their pay-per-click performance and reach new consumers. It's now vital for marketers and businesses to optimize their PPC ad campaigns for these types of search engine queries.
This article discusses why it’s important to consider Google Voice Search when developing your pay-per-click ad strategy. It also provides actionable tips for optimizing your PPC ads for Google Voice Search queries.
It’s no secret that digital assistants and voice search technology make our lives easier by enabling more convenient online searches. Users need to simply ask their device a question and they get an answer just a few moments later. People to interact with their devices in a way that’s more natural and less constrained. They use familiar language and a conversational tone to access the information they need.
As such, voice search has become a popular feature for Google search engine users. Google’s CEO reports that 20 percent of the queries on its mobile app and across Android devices are voice searches. Those numbers are continuing to grow, attributed largely to accessibility. People can use Google Voice Search on both their mobile and desktop devices. After the user articulates their search query, they go to the search engine results page. From there, they can click on different links to get the information they need. When considering how voice searches impact your PPC campaigns, it’s important to recognize that though voice queries often return similar results to typed queries, there are a few important differences:
All of these voice search variables can impact your search engine marketing strategy. For example, depending on your target audience, you may aim to reach more mobile users. The more mobile your audience, the more important Google Voice Search is when considering PPC ads and target keywords.
It’s important to note that while there are a range of different voice search technologies, from Amazon’s Alexa to Apple’s Siri, the focus of this particular post is on Google. The reason? If you’re using Google AdWords, then Google Voice Search has the greatest impact on your PPC ad campaigns. That said, you can also apply this information to ads on other search engines like Bing and Yahoo.
Now that you know how Google Voice Search may impact your PPC ad strategy, you’ll need to learn how to optimize your PPC ads for voice search queries. The good news is that if you are currently using SEO and PPC best practices to optimize your campaigns, you may not have too much work to do.
Here are a few tips that will help you get started optimizing your PPC ads for Google Voice Search:
1. Start by taking a look at your existing search term data
Before you begin optimizing your ad campaigns for voice search, it’s important that you look at the data you have on which search terms consumers use to find your brand online. Take a look at your search term report on AdWords to identify which long-tail queries trigger your PPC ad campaigns. Google doesn’t provide a separate report for voice search queries. However, there are ways to find out which queries might come from consumers utilizing voice search.
Once you export the report, filter the data to return search terms beginning with “OK Google.” This allows you to see some of the exact terms leveraged by search engine users when they look for brands like yours through Google Voice Search.
In addition to searching for the phrase, “OK Google,” look for long-tail keywords that are at least five or six words. Because voice search users tend to have more conversational search queries, consumers use longer keyword phrases to find your brand online via voice search. After developing a list of keywords and phrases from your existing search term data, add them to your AdWords campaigns.
2. Launch dedicated question ad campaigns on Google AdWords
As previously mentioned, Google Voice Search queries are typically more conversational than typed queries. This is most likely because consumers who type queries into the search bar recognize that they are interacting with a machine and deliberately use shorter, logical phrasing.
Voice search users, however, tend to use more filler words and conversational questions, as they would when talking to a person. Also, due to the conversational nature of voice search queries, these consumers are more likely to ask a question. For your business, that means you need to develop dedicated question ad campaigns and bid on question-based keywords to drive intent.
Meanwhile, the type of question a search engine user asks can reveal a lot about their degree of intent. For instance, “what,” “who,” and “why” based questions indicate interest, but not necessarily a desire to take action. Questions that begin with “when” and “where” tend to indicate that a user may be more ready to buy.
Going forward, you can consider these nuances when developing a list of target question-based keywords for your campaigns. If you’re trying to reach consumers who are ready to buy, you use different types of question-based keywords than if you are trying to attract consumers who are in the awareness or consideration phases of the buyer’s journey. Target the question-based keywords that make the most sense based on your unique conversion goals.
3. Consider including the top three question keywords in your PPC campaigns
While most voice search users are utilizing long-tail keywords in their queries, it’s important to remember that long-tail search queries often have low traffic volume. Your business should include the top three question keywords or keyword phrases in your sets to capture more voice queries in your ad campaigns.
Use Google AdWords keyword planner to investigate the volume and competition levels for the your target keyword phrases. In addition to lower volume, less competitive keywords, you may want to use question-based keywords that have a higher search volume. This will help ensure that you are expanding your reach on the search engines for voice search users.
Although you want to reach as many voice search users as possible, remember not to let the low traffic volume keep you from using less popular, question-based keywords that are relevant to your PPC ad campaigns. Long-tail question-based keywords are more specific, which helps you increase relevancy in your campaigns. While you might not reach many users, the users that you reach are likely the right fit for your brand.
4. Add negative terms that don’t apply to your product/service
As with typical PPC ad campaigns for typed queries, you need to generate a negative keyword list for Google Voice Search queries. In your search term report, you’ll probably notice queries that are relevant, but not ideal, for your brand. These queries are often terms that don’t apply to your products or services. Therefore, these are terms you don’t want your PPC ads appearing next to in the search engine results. By including these negative keywords, you’ll be able to avoid attracting unqualified traffic.
In addition, you may also want to include keywords that suggest the wrong intent. For instance, to target consumers in the decision phase, use negative keywords to avoid attracting consumers that are starting the buyer’s journey. Because many of these search queries are questions, you also need to include negative question terms in your negative keyword list to avoid attracting consumers who are not the right fit.
In addition to generating a new negative keyword list, you should also revisit existing ones for your legacy PPC ad campaigns. To optimize these lists for voice search, consider removing negative keywords like “near me,” “where do I,” and “how to”. This will help you capture more voice search traffic from users who are phrasing their query as a question.
5. Enable AdWords location extensions
Google AdWords location extensions, which allow your business to display address, phone number, and directions to your physical location next to your PPC ads, is an effective way to make sure that your ads display for mobile searchers who are on the go and ready to buy.
Ultimately, this feature allows your business to show up more often in the “near me” searches. “Near me” searches are critical for reaching local shoppers who are near your location and ready to make a purchase. Given that many mobile searchers are using Google Voice Search, especially when in the car, using this extension can also help you attract more users. Using Google location extensions is especially important for businesses that have multiple locations; it allows users to see where the locations are on the map and choose the store that is most convenient.
6. Customize ad copy to answer search query questions
No matter what type of target audience you address with your PPC ad campaigns, it’s vital to create customized ad copy that is relevant to the search query. Your ad content should provide some context based on the targeted search terms. It should also entice users to click on your link and take the next step toward conversion.
When it comes to Google Voice Search and PPC, consider answering the question-based query in your ad content. For instance, let's say you are targeting the question-based phrase “where can I buy camera equipment near me?”. You should ensure that the ad content clearly answers this question while inviting the user to click to learn more. Naturally, the more relevant and engaging your ad copy, the more likely search engine users will click on your ad.
7. Create relevant and contextual landing pages
If you are serious about your PPC campaigns, you should already be creating relevant and contextual landing pages for ad traffic. Many beginners make the mistake of driving PPC ad traffic back to their home page. However, this doesn’t create an effective gateway to the next step in conversion, as it frequently offers too many options for the consumer. That, in turn, can cause them to navigate away from the page before taking any desired action.
Instead, create PPC landing pages that are optimized for conversion. That is, specific and contextual landing pages guide users to the next step in the buyer’s journey. Among other things, ensure that your landing pages are optimized in the same way your ad copy is. If your ad addresses a question-based keyword, you should discuss the answer to this question in your landing page copy. Similarly, ensure that the offer you are delivering through the landing page relates to the PPC ad content.
Also, because many Google Voice Search users are using mobile devices, ensure that your landing pages are optimized for mobile. That means keeping graphics to a minimum and keeping any copy on the page clear and concise.
8. Claim and update your Google My Business Listing
Since many voice search users are looking for local businesses, it is important that you claim your Google My Business listing and update the information. This helps increase your chances of showing up in Google Voice Search results pertaining to your location and business category.
Claiming and keeping your listing up-to-date helps your PPC ad campaigns and benefits your organic search results. The search engine scans your Google My Business listing to better understand your business category, location, and hours. This information allows Google to deliver more relevant content for local search engine users.
Google Voice Search is a powerful trend that will continue to impact your PPC advertising strategy. As you begin to optimize your PPC campaigns for this tool, keep the following in mind:
When it comes to Google Voice Search and PPC ads, don’t be afraid to experiment. Once you find a strategy that reaches more voice search users, you can adjust your PPC ad strategy based on your results. It might take some trial and error. However, accommodating a fast-growing technology gives you access to new, diverse groups of consumers that will only open new doors -- and revenue opportunities -- for your campaigns.
It’s no secret that PPC advertising is a highly crowded and competitive space. Many businesses in the same industries borrow tried-and-true strategies to get their ads to appear in search results—and one such strategy is revenue management. For online advertisers and marketers, that means honing and refining pricing around anticipated and sometimes dramatic spikes in demand and dips in supply that yield the strongest results and highest ROI for your PPC campaigns. While it takes constant adjustment, flexibility and more than a little patience, when implemented with the right technologies and approach, it can take your PPC strategy to the next level, giving a boost to performance and adding to your bottom line in the process.
If you’ve worked in the travel or hospitality marketing industries, you’ve likely heard of terms such as lead capacity, revenue capacity or revenue management. Or put another way, you might have heard it like this: “Sell the right product to the right customer at the right time for the right price.”
Essentially, the principle is based on the idea that people are willing to pay more money for the same product or service when they really need it, or when there’s inventory scarcity. Businesses can take advantage of this, adjusting their prices to maximize potential revenue based on these factors.
For example, you try to book a hotel in Munich during Oktoberfest and discovers it’s double the price it was last month. Or when your friend booked her plane ticket to Seattle last week and today you’re paying 30% more to book the same flight. This is called price discrimination, and businesses use it all the time, especially when selling online, to maximize revenue and profits.
Revenue management requires anticipating consumer needs and influencing their behaviors to purchase the same products/services at a higher price than they normally might. Normally this strategy is limited to businesses that offer fixed, time-limited resources, like hotels, concert venues and airlines.
While there are a variety of market variables that can affect price fluctuations in revenue management, the potential benefits are too good to pass up.
PPC management is a little different from the regular revenue management strategies you see these industries utilize, but it’s based on the same concept. It’s possible to make quick, regular adjustments in price based on market variables. The only difference is that you’re trying to attract the most consumers to your website who will efficiently convert or make a purchase. Your goal is to get the cheapest cost per click with the highest potential revenue from your PPC ads.
It’s possible to optimize for this because of the way PPC bidding works. Google Ads prioritizes which ads to rank first in search results based on ad relevance and how much you bid at an auction. Advertisers that bid more money have a better chance of their ad getting placement.
But not all search engine users have the same value and revenue potential for PPC advertisers. Bid high for every relevant keyword you come across, and you’ll end up spending more money to reach both higher- and lower- quality leads. Adjust your bidding strategy based on a user’s revenue-driving potential to optimize PPC strategy.
It’s possible to understand the potential revenue value of a user based on the keyword searches they’re using. Keywords help illustrate the intention of the user, so you can bid knowing if they’re more or less likely to click through and convert. Once users do click on your ad and you pay for it, that indicates an additional level of interest as well.
Because it’s keyword-specific, every keyword is going to have historical performance data combined with bid landscape data from publishers, which when totaled, present a keyword-level relationship between the projected click volume at a given bid level. Essentially, it’s the keyword you’re targeting and the associated content you present with your ad that illustrate the level of user interest.
You can use this information to optimize your PPC strategy. Beyond that, you’ll need to optimize your landing pages and subsequent lead nurturing strategy to close the deal and realize revenue.
Relying on revenue management principles is a valuable way to optimize your PPC campaigns to peak performance. But there’s a reason not many people in the field use this strategy: it isn’t easy to execute. You must be prepared to make small changes in your bidding strategy based on ongoing insights that come in weekly or even daily.
You could argue that the strategy is more trouble than it’s worth — too much monitoring and manpower is needed to operationalize it. But in reality, most marketing managers that use any sophisticated bid optimization strategy do so with automation, not extra people.
Using an automation technology doesn’t only make it possible to use a revenue management strategy at scale, it also helps ensure your changes are more accurate and optimized. The people that manage a normal PPC program are more likely to miss opportunities and unnecessarily waste ad spend than a machine optimized for the job.
Even a well-equipped paid search program won’t have the resources necessary to keep up with and fully take advantage of revenue management as a strategy.
Say a business has two team members of their paid search program charged with making bids and bid adjustments. In order to do this, they’d need to react to a variety of market variables to make the right bids at the right price to maximize clicks from high quality PPC leads. And these market variables are constantly changing, making last week’s evaluation irrelevant in today’s market.
They could tackle the problem by focusing their efforts on higher volume keywords. But then they must completely overlook the long tail keywords that also have optimization potential. The average SEM program actually spends with 18 percent inefficiency on keywords with few clicks or conversions.
And by focusing on reviewing higher-volume keywords, they likely wouldn’t have time to also evaluate the impact of their efforts on revenue overall. With a program having around 50,000 keywords and a goal of making 100 bid adjustments a week, they’d still end up falling behind on their PPC goals in the long run.
An automated tool, on the other hand, has the ability and capacity to calculate an optimal bid for all 50,000 keywords. It could even do this daily, regularly analyzing the latest incoming market information and using it to make accurate adjustments, regardless of how much data is coming in or how many keywords they needed to track.
Machines are already better than people at computing, so it makes sense that an automation tool would be able to better recognize patterns to take advantage of. Some opportunities are subtle, take place over large timeframes, or can contribute to other segments of that program as well. Instead of evaluating each keyword individually, an automated tool can take a portfolio approach, maximizing the marginal utility of each keyword.
Of course, using automated technology to manage PPC requires a financial investment, but it’s worthwhile if you take full advantage of the tool. Automation can help you reduce wasted ad spend and better target likely-to-convert PPC leads with your ads. Once you have an automation technology saving you money and driving revenue, it pays for itself and then some.
While revenue management isn’t a unique approach, most advertising managers aren’t taking advantage of its principles to improve their PPC program. That’s because they either don’t have the skills to try it, or know they don’t have the manpower to make the most of it.
And they’re right, of course. Revenue management is a sound economic principle that takes a lot of investment and refining to operationalize. Market factors such as time, date, location and device are constantly changing. How can they really keep up with the insights to get maximum yield?
They can’t, unless they enlist help. Adding more team members to your PPC program might help you stay on top of the task a little longer, but eventually everyone falls behind. Those serious about adding value to their PPC strategy and increasing ROI are best off investing in an automation technology to handle the changes faster, better, and with more precision.
While these fundamental economic principles might seem simple, striking the right balance for your keyword bids to generate the highest value for your organization takes time, effort and a lot of educated calculations. Achieving just the right combination will entail studying market trends and strategically leveraging a variety of factors, such as time, date, location and device, to your greatest advantage. As with almost anything else, you can’t expect to go it alone with a man-powered staff, regardless of their experience or expertise.
Those serious about mastering this strategy need to invest in an automated tool designed to fill critical knowledge gaps in your PPC program—a move that could turn around missed opportunity and wasted spend into accelerated performance and increased ROI, while opening the door to more and even better opportunities down the road.
Regardless of the industry, we all strive for higher and higher return on investment -- ROI -- in our campaigns and other endeavors that drive marketing revenue. Logic would dictate that we spend the minimal amount while attempting to achieve the highest possible return. Yet striking just the right balance for optimal returns takes some strategic planning, a few educated calculations, and maybe even a little luck.
On its face, it stands to reason that the more insight and visibility you have into your customers, your marketing revenue, and their data, the more efficient and streamlined your processes and the more value you can generate for your organization. But what exactly does that trajectory look like or entail? What kind of visibility should you have? And how can you leverage your insights to not only ensure but increase your marketing ROI?
There is no magic formula. Because every organization's business needs, objectives, and challenges are unique, so too is their pathway to generating value and higher returns. That said, for many organizations, that recipe for success often shares common elements that include visibility, insight, action, and attribution. In order to give ROI a healthy boost, organizations will have to find a way to strike just the right balance that works best for them.
There are a wide variety of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that marketers can use to assess the value of their marketing initiatives. But at the end of the day, soft metrics (like brand awareness) do little to illustrate ROI from your efforts.
Metrics that focus on marketing revenue are musts in today’s digital landscape. According to a recent study:
CMOs and other managers want to know what drives marketing revenue and ROI?
Most like to take a simplistic view, citing financial buy-in, a better understanding of the customer journey, and analytical insights, among other things. But marketing ROI is as multifaceted as the digital space it exists in. There is a combination of correlated factors that affect and help illustrate ROI. Miss one of them, and you’re missing the whole picture.
Achieving maximum visibility is one of the biggest challenges marketers face in the digital age. At the same time, it’s one of the most important factors for success. The more visibility you have into your audience touchpoints and how they’re interacting with your ads and brand, the easier it is to understand which elements of your campaigns are working and which aren’t.
Whether it be content type, target keywords, platforms, channels, or bidding strategies, more visibility means more useful KPIs. Nearly every kind of business has a multi-touch sales cycle where simple campaign attribution strategies come up short.
That’s why the most serious marketers agree there’s a need to invest in tools and technologies to gain visibility beyond what advertising platforms themselves have to offer. And the greater your lead volume, the more opportunities there are to optimize your strategy and improve ROI when you have more visibility.
Luckily, there are a variety of tools out there that help you gain broader visibility, allowing you to customize and prioritize the data most important to you. The best tools will summarize holistic cost and performance data across channels. They’ll also include dashboards with instant reporting and built-in trending that you can personalize within the interface.
Of course, visibility is only the first piece of the ROI puzzle. However, oftentimes using the software and integrations that provide the most data about your audience also serve up the most noise. More visibility is always better, but only if you can gain actionable insights from it. And while visibility is essential, it’s only the first step.
So how are you supposed to turn this bank of data into actionable insights that drive ROI? Also, how are you supposed to attribute certain data points to the revenue changes you’re seeing?
Data ≠ insights. Once you have broad visibility, your next challenge is make sense of the data it provides. Indeed, while many businesses understand the value of and invest heavily in business analytics, the vast majority of companies are unable to leverage big data to their advantage:
So when assessing the value of analytics technologies for your business, don’t focus on data volume alone. You’ll only be able to maximize ROI from the insights you glean, not from data.
Instead, you need to be able to answer important questions like:
Ultimately, your ROI will come from the changes you make to your marketing strategy based on the insights your business analytics provides. If you’re unable to draw actionable insights from your data, then there’s no real link between visibility, insights, and ROI for your business.
It’s also important to note how the quality of insights you derive affects ROI. Even the most basic analytics reports from AdWords or the like can offer some insights for long-term strategy improvement. Most often, these limited reports do little more than point out gaping holes in your strategy, or big mistakes that waste your ad spend. Make these changes, and you’re left wondering what other minute adjustments you can make that will have a huge impact on ROI overall.
Serious CMOs need analytics technology that captures the whole customer journey and provides actionable insights to drive ROI.
In order to capture revenue-driving insights from your analytics, you first must track every possible interaction in your customer journey. Once you have this visibility, use it to understand important points about your audience. You can:
It’s important to gain these insights and track performance in both the long and short term. Making adjustments to improve your customer journey is relevant annually, monthly, weekly, and even daily. And the age of your insights is an important factor for potential ROI impact.
Meanwhile, the average SEM program actually spends with 18% inefficiency on keywords with few clicks or conversions -- representing a lot of wasted opportunity and room for improvement. While data-savvy managers can capture some revenue-driving insights from analytics reports, new data is coming in all the time. It’s humanly impossible to keep up with and act on the minute changes in data insights in the short term. However, these seemingly small gradations in data are actually the biggest opportunities to improve conversions and reduce wasted ad spend, driving more ROI in the process.
How so?
Again, it’s in your technology. Use business analytics software that automates data analysis and can derive important insights for you. AdWords has made major steps in the past few years to fill this need, introducing artificial intelligence (AI) technology to suggest campaign changes to your team. But it still lacks the visibility most businesses require, deriving less valuable insights as a result.
In truth, the best quality insights come from analyzing a full database of information in real-time, using a technology that learns from and predicts future performance. The most advanced options use machine learning to map out for you where your performance is headed given the most recent data points.
If step 1 is achieving broad visibility, and step 2 is deriving insights from your data, then step 3 is making informed adjustments to better optimize your marketing strategy. These are all tactics that can help you maximize your marketing revenue return and realize more ROI. And again, the speed and scale at which you can make changes from your insights will impact their value immensely.
Contrary to popular belief, top industry marketers aren’t relying on teams of data scientists and advertising managers to make minute campaign adjustments around the clock. They use automation. In the advertising realm, you can use business analytics automation to:
In order to truly maximize your ROI, you need to have processes or technologies in place that broaden your visibility, help you derive key insights, and assist you in quickly acting on these insights for greater effect. You should automate what you can, but also use a technology that has the features and flexibility for you to develop your own optimization strategy based on your own data analysis.
In the end, the process of obtaining more ROI from your business analytics circles back around to visibility. You need to be able to fully and accurately attribute your ROI back to the optimizations you’ve made based on your data insights. Otherwise, you’re simply making adjustments that you believe should increase ROI without actually knowing if they actually do.
Digital sales funnels are complex, and there are a lot of factors that can cause leads to convert or fall out. It’s best not to assume your optimizations are the most effective strategies available to you. There very well could be other, even more, relevant changes you can make to maximize ROI. Accurately attributing your efforts allows you to channel in on this.
But most marketers still struggle with this, either by lack of understanding or lack of necessary technologies. According to The Lenskold Group, nearly two-thirds of companies don’t use tracking or simple single attribution models.
It’s your job to ensure your conversions and lead nurturing efforts are attributed to the right campaigns. There’s no best way to do this because each business has a unique sales funnel with disparate touchpoints and value for its bottom line. That’s why the best approach enabling the most visibility and understanding is to customize your campaign attribution strategy.
Don’t rely on first touch, last touch or other pre-defined attribution strategies. Create an attribution approach that works best for you. Leverage a technology that allows you to use any attribution method -- even from third-party software -- to gain better insights.
Complete visibility means gaining insights that are both broad and granular. Beyond the individual campaign level, you also need to measure the impact of your efforts on your ROI long-term (quarterly, yearly, etc.). That’s because adjustments with a short-term impact could also lead to significant gains later on. Full visibility means also having a clear understanding of the combined and weighted impact of your campaign performance long-term.
Even ignoring the benefits of proper attribution for maximizing ROI potential, most marketing managers understand the importance for buy-in. So often businesses invest in advanced analytics technologies but are unable to (A) make sense of their data, or (B) prove that their data insights are directly responsible for increasing revenue. Marketing managers understand that both these things are essential if they want to garner long-term buy-in from higher-ups in the business.
There are a lot of technologies out there that give you the tools you need to broaden visibility, insights, and even ROI. Very few assist you in gaining the understanding and attribution reporting you need to illustrate that it’s worth the investment. The best business analytics software is equipped to illustrate their value for you, making your job a whole lot easier in the process.
Of course, gaining a deeper understanding of your audience’s demographic makeup, needs and behaviors has deeper implications for your business -- and not just about gaining insights to improve your marketing efforts. Deeper, more accurate insights can impact many different aspects of your business, from communications and customer service to product development.
Understanding what channels, platforms and content are most effective with your audience makes it easier to cater to their needs. At the same time, understanding the marketing climate, developing a strong positioning strategy, and launching effective ad campaign strategies are all key factors for new product success.
Visibility and insights don’t just make better marketers, they make better businesses. Because the better you understand your audience, the more opportunities you’ll have to be customer-centric. The implications for ROI are significant when you focus on your customers in all areas of business, marketing or otherwise.
Maximizing marketing ROI isn’t a linear process, it’s a circular one. You need a combination of distinct elements working harmoniously to achieve it. Altogether, you need:
When it comes to maximizing marketing ROI, you can’t have one of these elements without all the others -- they all fit together to create a sound ROI strategy that is bigger than the sum of its parts. Instead of starting with visibility and working your way through each step, start with the big picture. Invest in an analytics software that has the ability to assess a holistic picture of your unique marketing environment, while providing all the features you need to gain visibility, find insights, take action and attribute your efforts. By figuring out how all these pieces fit into the entirety of your marketing strategy, as well as how expanded visibility and insights lead to elevated ROI, you’ll ultimately be creating processes and strategies that can be repeated and built upon, setting you up for even more successful campaigns down the road.
How do you activate and improve media performance? Well, by the thoughtful integration of digital buying, of course! Is converging your direct and programmatic buying into a unified platform really that simple? The short answer is—not always. That’s why we’re here to clear the air and share a practical guide of tested methods to get you there!
According to Forrester Research*, 75% of agencies are headed towards convergence, while only 17% have fully achieved this state. More importantly, most agencies know that failing to evolve media buying practices means potentially jeopardizing their future. However, there is a bright side—and a solution! The convergence of direct and programmatic buying, along with a holistic system for internal collaboration, allow agencies to focus on the innovation and advancement of their media buying solutions. Can technology help achieve this?
What agencies prioritize in tech buying to create a more holistic system for internal collaboration:
We believe that the thoughtful integration of media buying can be achieved if and when it’s powered by a unified media platform. Read more about how to get there with our guide, Converge Direct + Programmatic. TheBlueprint -- and get started on your convergence today!
*Methodology: In this study, Forrester conducted an online survey of 104 advertising and/or marketing agency professionals at the manager level or above with responsibility for or influence over media buying strategy to evaluate digital media buying.
*Source: A study conducted by Forrester Consulting on behalf of Centro, June 2018
*Base: 104 media buying strategy decision makers at US advertising and/or marketing agencies
Keeping up with the trade pubs and latest trends in the ad tech world can be tough and time-consuming. We took it upon ourselves to de-clutter the space, and compiled a list of articles, reports, and other bits of awesomeness you may have missed, but should definitely read. Enjoy the latest list for October 2018 below!
The CMO Survey - 2018 [20-minute read]
A recent survey of marketers and a subsequent report by Duke University, the American Marketing Association (AMA) and Deloitte, proves to be chockful of interesting nuggets. One particular note is these marketer’s utilization of 3rd party data when compared to their 1st party data over the coming years – an expected decline of 11.4% of 3PD, and an expected increase of 70.0% of 1PD (page 60 of the PDF).
How Much Is Your Private Data Worth – And Who Should Own It? [4-minute read]
With data breaches from Equifax, Facebook, and Target, who should really own your data? In short, people, not companies, should have rights to their data, and people, not companies, should be able to sell it as they see fit, as argued by Stanford’s Business school publication.
Programmatic Is Fastest-Growing Part Of Digital Display [1-minute read]
Many news and industry outlets have long been reporting the expansive growth of programmatic advertising. It seems inevitable that an eventual plateau would surface but contrary to any such thought, the popularity of programmatic continues to grow quickly. A new report from the eMarketer illustrates the YOY growth (26.3%) accelerated by the largest ad platforms in the digital media game.
How Cheap Are Fraudulent Ad Impressions? [2-minute read]
Fraudulent ad impressions cost a fraction of the real thing, however, simply raising your price floors isn’t enough. In order to truly combat fraud, stop treating scale as the only metric that matters. Fraudsters know that buyers want cheap impressions so they create them for nothing.
Hearst Releases New Marketplace For Connected TV Advertising [1-minute read]
Hearst Television Inc. is launching an over-the-top (OTT) advertising marketplace. The marketplace includes programming owned by the company and in partnership with companies already affiliated with Hearst, such as Roku.
The anti-Netflix: Free, ad-supported video streaming services are growing [4-minute read]
Good news for advertisers who like video ads - you’re in luck! Despite the popularity of subscription services in the OTT market, ad-supported platforms are gaining popularity. New free video streaming services that viewers are flocking towards, are enabling more advertisers to take advantage of an influx of digital video consumption.
Snapchat, Amazon Team Up To Form Mobile-Commerce Power Duo [1-minute read]
Snapchat and Amazon are teaming up to bring you the ultimate shopping experience. Snapchat can now link shoppers directly to Amazon, taking on Instagram and Pinterest. Hopefully the experience will improve, because unlike Pinterest and Amazon’s own experiences, I could never get my app to successfully search.
How visual recognition is set to change advertising [2-minute read]
Visual recognition, or computer vision, software is helping develop a deeper understanding of the images and videos shared by consumers through textual and sentiment analysis. How will this advancing technology be applied to advertising?
Digital Tech Lights A Fire Under Out-Of-Home Advertising [7-minute read]
Out-of-home advertising is going through a bit of a renaissance. In a world that was once ruled by offline/analog experiences, advertisers now find the majority of OOH ad purchases are digital. An increasing number of ad tech players are creating opportunities to buy ad space on signs, billboards and screens to push fresh types of creative and execute other creative feats with greater measurement options. The increased appeal comes from the ability to now impact lower-funnel metrics and tie information back to campaign sales data, driven by big-budget advertisers like Netflix, Spotify, and McDonald's, who have been creatively leveraging digital OOH to more effectively target consumers in local markets.