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How to build an effective marketing attribution strategy to avoid dependence on Google, Facebook, or Amazon
Building an accurate attribution model is more important for digital marketers today than ever before. According to the latest Forrester research, end-to-end B2B conversion rates are 0.75% on average. A lot happens between the first and last interactions with your business that can influence conversions. That’s why it’s essential to build a comprehensive attribution model using the highest quality data that illustrates your customer journey.
Truly understanding which marketing initiatives are responsible for sales and revenue can help you make targeted changes to improve performance and drive a greater return on investment.
Today, there are a number of major platforms that address marketers’ attribution needs in terms of quality, testing, and data management. But do the benefits of working with one-stop-shop platforms outweigh the problems they create in data management?
Here’s an overview of the most popular options:
Google has always been the forerunner in providing attribution technology. Google Analytics is a free tool anyone can use to track different touchpoints in the customer journey and attribute them to sales. Google Ads also has attribution capabilities for paid advertising.
Attribution 360 was originally an enterprise-level offering, but now a simplified version is available for everyone. It integrates with Google Analytics, Google Ads, and DoubleClick Search. This allows advertisers to analyze cross-channel performance data, as well as upload offline conversion data. You can assign whatever attribution model you want to your conversion events, as well as compare different models.
Facebook Attribution is the newest major option out there, designed to help you build a clearer picture of the customer journey. You can use it to assign credit to various audience touchpoints across your Facebook, paid, or organic efforts and then estimate the incremental impact of your marketing on Facebook, Instagram, Audience Network, and Messenger.
Using Facebook Pixel on your website further makes it simple to target previous site visitors with ads on the social media platform. You can then use data-driven attribution modeling to see how your efforts pay off.
Last year, Amazon introduced its own measurement solution for brands that sell on the platform. It allows them to measure the impact of display, search, social, and video channels based on consumer behavior on Amazon. It includes valuable conversion metrics like page views, purchase rates, and sales. Ultimately, you’re able to get a comprehensive understanding of how your marketing tactics across the web impact shopping decisions on Amazon.
On the surface, it looks like there are a number of easy solutions for marketing attribution today. Marketers just have to decide which major platform is the most valuable for their audience data needs. However, simply relying on big players like Google, Facebook, and Amazon creates some inherent issues that businesses should be aware of.
These platforms provide valuable data on consumer behavior at a granular level that you just can’t get elsewhere. But once you start relying on them to track your own audience behavior, you lose control over your data entirely. These platforms operate using what is called “walled garden” data management. They have complete control over audience data, making it impossible for businesses to utilize it for their own analyses.
Walled garden scenarios with Facebook and Google have been in the news for a while:
Now Amazon recently joined their ranks.
Working with walled gardens for marketing attribution can provide a lot of value, but it also encourages businesses to relinquish control of their own audience data. Features like Google’s tracking tags and Facebook’s tracking pixel give them control of your first-party data as well as the third-party data they provide. This might seem like a worthwhile solution given data management regulations like GDPR and the California Consumer Privacy Act, but managing your own consumer data is infinitely more valuable because you can perform your own unique analyses. Platforms like Google, Facebook, and Amazon are also under no obligation to give you full access to your audience data if they don’t want to.
With all that in mind, choosing an attribution technology should be about more than just selecting the best walled garden to work with. Forward-thinking marketers are prepared to use third-party tools that give them the freedom and flexibility they need to manage their own data while building a powerful attribution strategy across a clear customer journey.
Attribution modeling is an evolving art. As the volume and depth of audience behavioral data continue to grow, businesses are learning there are many different ways to attribute value to your marketing efforts. Choosing the most accurate attribution model is important, as it can drive decisions to optimize marketing campaigns and gain more sales.
Here’s an overview of the main options for attribution modeling in 2020:
This is the standard model used traditionally in Adwords and with many other platforms. All credit is assigned to the last touchpoint before converting. This model doesn’t consider any other interactions a customer made with your business before converting.
First click attribution gives 100% of the credit for a conversion to the first interaction with your business. If, for example, someone finds your business from a PPC ad, clicks through and converts, the ad would receive all the credit for the conversion.
This model also assigns 100% of the conversion value to a single interaction. If someone types in your URL then converts on your website, this model ignores that last click and instead focuses on the interaction that came right before it. It’s a valuable option for businesses that get a lot of direct traffic to their website.
Linear attribution splits credit for a conversion across all the interactions a customer has with your business before converting. Say they find your business on Facebook, sign up for your email list, then go directly to your site URL to convert. Linear attribution would give equal value to each of these 3 interactions.
Time decay works like linear attribution in that it assigns value to several different touchpoints across the customer journey. The only difference is that it assigns more value to the touchpoints closer to the point of sale. So it might assign 15% value to the first two touchpoints, 30% value to the third touch point and 40% value to the last. It’s possible to adjust how much value you assign to each touchpoint.
The U-shaped (or position based) attribution model prioritizes both the first and last interactions before a sale. It’s based on the idea that the first time someone discovers your business and the last contact point before they convert are the most valuable for driving conversions. In this case, 40% of the credit is given to the first and last touchpoint while 20% is split between the other interactions in the middle. This results in a U-shaped graph for attribution.
A custom attribution model involves assigning whatever value you want to the various touchpoints in a sales funnel. No one understands the inherent value of different pieces of marketing material more than those who created them. If you have touchpoints in the middle of the funnel that you think are more valuable for driving conversions, you can assign a custom percentage of value to it.
Algorithmic attribution is a more advanced modeling strategy that relies on machine learning technology to assign a value to your various touchpoints. It uses historical performance data, including won and lost deals, to create a unique model with custom weights for your customer journey. Also known as data-driven attribution, this strategy is able to make more nuanced inferences and changes to your attribution model based on your unique audience. To use this attribution model, you need advanced technology designed specifically for this purpose.
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So, which attribution model is right for your business? The only way to know is by testing out different models and comparing their performance. It’s important to utilize technologies that offer the flexibility to test and compare varying modeling strategies.
That said, the data you feed an attribution model is just as important as the model itself. Marketers need access to nuanced, high-quality data regarding audience behavior and the customer journey across marketing channels in order to get a full picture of their marketing operations.
Luckily, there are a number of technologies out there that can help marketers create their own beautiful landscapes instead of relying on the walled gardens. QuanticMind, for example, helps you integrate and manage your data and help you employ data-driven attribution models. Some options are integrated marketing solutions, some are for attribution only, while others focus on tracking specific marketing channels. Assuming you plan to avoid relying on walled garden data giants, some third-party options include:
The list continues to grow. If you want to invest in technology that rivals the capabilities of Google or Facebook attribution, here are a few key features to look out for:
Unquestionably the most important element you need to build an accurate attribution strategy is data. Your marketing attribution technology should be able to manage your first-party audience data while simultaneously integrating with third-party providers. Tracking all customer interactions across numerous platforms is important for building a clear picture of the customer journey. This includes on-site, search, social media, email, and even offline conversions.
If you use certain technologies for data management as well as analysis, then they should have processes in place to accommodate privacy regulations such as GDPR.
Competitive intelligence is the ability to monitor your marketing performance compared to other major industry players. This can include news monitoring, tracking trends in news mentions, and analyzing how your PR initiatives perform compared to others. This can be based on keywords for search advertising, news topics, social signals, or other important factors. Advanced technologies can also provide recommendations to improve your marketing strategy based on historical performance and the current industry landscape.
The best technologies offer flexibility in the types of attribution models you can use to analyze marketing performance. Customization allows you to build any kind of attribution model that makes the most sense for your business. You can also analyze your data using a variety of different models (last click, linear, U-shaped, etc.) and compare results.
Data-driven attribution is widely considered the most nuanced option with the most potential to deliver accurate results. Investing in an attribution technology with machine learning capabilities will allow you to test the performance of data-driven attribution versus other models.
Effective attribution isn’t just about building the best model. It also involves having the analytical capabilities to truly understand the impact of individual touchpoints on your marketing goals. Important tracking features include:
Most importantly, your technology should be able to make connections between specific marketing initiatives, use cases, and their value for ROI. You need to be able to build a clear picture of how financial investment and marketing initiatives impact sales and revenue. Comprehensive data about the customer journey and historical performance allow the tool to accurately attribute cost and revenue data to specific bidding decisions.
Building a comprehensive, accurate attribution model is essential for advertisers to understand the impact and value of their marketing initiatives. But these insights are only valuable if marketers are prepared to make quick, targeted changes to their strategy based on performance. The competitive landscape is constantly changing. Touchpoints in your sales funnel that were once responsible for significant revenue can quickly become less valuable over time. Marketers need to stay on top of these changes if they want to maximize the value of comprehensive attribution long term.
That’s why predictive advertising is the perfect solution for search engine marketers today.
And this is where QuanticMind comes into play. Our automated bidding technology collects all important data points to assign value to clicks and identify the most profitable price to target your PPC ads.
It also offers more precision than any stand-alone attribution technology by using decimal conversion values, allowing it to attribute a conversion to multiple clicks. This illustrates how specific keywords, audience targeting, and bids impact the path to purchase.
Based on these nuanced attribution insights, QuanticMind uses automation to make new bid decisions. This ensures your paid search initiatives are always optimized.
Businesses today have a lot of options when choosing marketing attribution technology. In summary, the keys to success are:
Lastly, consider investing in technology that can help you build a nuanced attribution model as well as automate campaign optimizations based on these insights.
As competition in the paid search space intensifies, the use of automation to manage digital programs follows suit. The push and pull between full automation, partial automation, and manual bidding only further muddies the water. So what is the best approach?
There is no right or wrong answer when choosing a bidding strategy—the answers are not always black and white. To add more confusion, Google has begun adding error messages in Google Ads Editor to not-so-subtly push advertisers into using their automated bidding platform.
For advertisers that don’t work out of editor that often, below are examples of the error icon and error messages coaxing the implementation of Smart Bidding:
Another new tactic Google Ads has rolled out in beta is the Optimization Score. "What does that mean?" I hear you ask. Good question.
Here is their definition: “Your optimization score is an estimate of how well your account is set to perform. Apply the recommendations to help your campaigns perform better and raise your score.”
In short, the Optimization Score is a really smart way to talk advertisers into spending more money. If you’re competitive like me, you’re going to do what you can to get the highest score possible, which seems like it’d be a good thing, right?
In reality, a lot of the recommendations Google offers to improve your optimization score revolve around their best interests. Examples of negligent recommendations include raising audience bid modifiers by over 200% and raising daily budgets by over $400. Budget-related recommendations are often embellished in order to encourage advertisers to spend more money in Google Ads. They aren’t necessarily beneficial to advertisers, nor are some of them even realistic with budget constraints.
It’s not all bad, though. Google Ads optimization score does offer some useful tips to improve campaign performance. Some useful optimization suggestions include using new ad types, utilizing extensions, and editing ad groups missing ads or keywords, to name a few. To find your account optimization score, navigate to the left menu > click on recommendations, and the header of the recommendations tab will show your account’s optimization score and how to improve it. Screenshots below will outline what to look for:
Below is an example of a recommendation to switch to smart bidding, and what difference it would make to your optimization score.
To make viewing suggestions simpler, you can click the three dots on the right and click “dismiss all” to clear these recommendations:
Here are the steps to remove these errors in Google Ads Editor: Click the error to expand and view the message (which should look like the screenshot below)
1. Click “Show Rule” which will navigate you to the right side of the editor page and show custom rules set to flag campaigns using manual bidding.
2. Click the X next to any of the rules that include manual bidding - enhanced CPC or manual bidding
3. Hit save on those filters and that should remove these error messages in your Editor view.
4. Another simple way to remove these error alerts is to hit “ignore” on each message but this is a more time-consuming option.
Digital advertisers should always keep an open mind when viewing Google’s recommendations. The opportunity to try new strategies with ads, keywords, and extensions can be tempting if your performance is not at the desired levels, but some suggestions are not advisable to act upon, particularly when they relate to bid strategy and budgets.
Amazon’s invasion of the SEM territory has officially begun. Last year, Amazon’s search ad revenue surpassed that of Microsoft, taking the number two spot behind Google. Amazon will end this year strongly with a 12.9% search ad market share, while Microsoft will take a mere 6.5% of that same pie. According to eMarketer, this dark horse is expected to take additional market share from the top players and secure $11.7 billion of search ad revenue between now and the end of 2021.
Amazon has a compelling advantage over its eCommerce search engine counterparts thanks to its unique position at the bottom of the consumer buying funnel. Today’s consumers visit Amazon to discover new products, read reviews on and/or price check a product. But Amazon truly stands out because those who search on this site are already in the mindset to make a purchase. Unlike its competitors, Amazon does not need to persuade potential buyers down the conversion funnel.
Given the inevitably immense advertising influence of Amazon sponsored ads, and with the winter holiday season fast approaching, let’s explore some best practices around preparing for peak shopping periods on Amazon. You’ll be able to apply these methods for various shopping dates such as Prime Day, back-to-school season, Valentine’s Day, Mother’s Day, and many more.
Your first step is to understand your business goals for the upcoming peak shopping season. If you’re unsure, start by answering this question: Is my main objective to drive brand awareness or sales? Note that it’s entirely normal to have more than one goal. However, you should be able to prioritize given multiple goals.
Next, align your targets with your goals. If you’re looking to boost brand awareness, your success metric would be impressions. Therefore, make your brand and products visible to more shoppers by taking measures to increase traffic. If eligible, run both Sponsored Brands and Sponsored Products campaigns in order to maximize your opportunity to reach as many potential customers in multiple ad placements (i.e. search results top of the page and product details page). Sponsored Brands campaigns are highly effective in reaching potential customers, still lingering at the top of the conversion funnel, with new brands and product offerings. However, if your campaigns are receiving less than expected impressions, make sure:
On the other hand, if you’re determined to drive more sales, then your key success metrics would be conversions and Advertising Cost of Sales (ACoS). Once you have a significant amount (i.e. at least two weeks) of historical data, conduct a keyword-level performance analysis to identify the top-performing keywords that will help you reach your sales goals. Additional metrics you might find helpful in determining which keywords to raise your bids on during the peak shopping dates include total sales, click-through rate (CTR), and conversion rate. If your campaigns are resulting in low conversions, try adding negative targeting to prevent your ads from serving for the poor-performing keywords.
With your business goals and success metrics in mind, adapt your campaigns to account for the peak shopping period’s landscape.
Adapt your bids: With heightened traffic volume during peak shopping periods comes an increased competition on keyword targeting for Sponsored Brands and Sponsored Products, as well as product attribute targeting for Sponsored Products. Match your bids to how much you’re willing to pay for a click in exchange for peak shopping period impressions.
Adapt your budget: Consider increasing your daily budgets by at least 200% in order to account for higher traffic (i.e. impression and click) volume. The chances are that your campaigns will deplete your daily budget much faster during major shopping dates and ads will be unintentionally paused until the following day. Adapting your budget will prevent you from missing out on conversion opportunities during the remaining prime hours of the day.
Adapt your campaign schedule: The days leading up to and trailing a holiday can be just as profitable as the special day itself. Turn your campaigns on earlier and keep them running a few days past the peak shopping dates in order to capture as much of the available traffic as possible.
Adapt your bidding tactics: If your ads are eligible to serve in placements such as top-of-the-page or product details pages, consider setting bid multipliers (up to 900%) to give them a better chance of securing those high-converting opportunities.
Lastly, remember to give yourself ample time to adapt your campaigns. Amazon recommends budgeting at least two to three weeks prior to the start of any major shopping dates.
Conduct your due diligence on whether Amazon Advertising is a good fit for your business. If the answer is yes, here is Everything You Need to Know About Amazon Ads in 2020 to get you started. However, if you’re not quite ready to take on this endeavor, for now check out our blog post on A Digital Marketers Guide to the Holidays for more general tips on facing the holiday season head-on!
Our people are a large part of what makes Centro such a great place to work. We’re excited to introduce you to some of Centro’s most interesting people in our newest blog series, as they share their ‘Centro stories’ and a variety of experiences that have impacted their work and life.
Tyler Kelly was the fourth employee hired at Centro. After ascending to SVP of Client Development in just seven years, Tyler managed a team that grew partnerships with more than 300 agencies.
In his current role of President, Tyler is busy putting fourteen years’ worth of Centro experience to good use. Read on to learn how this original Centron has built our reputation for outstanding customer service from the ground up.
Clare McKinley: What’s the most exciting thing about our product, Basis?
Tyler Kelly: In essence, it’s that we’re fulfilling an industry need through automation. Not only does Basis automate low-value tasks, it automates low-value tasks from the beginning through the end of the media buying cycle. That means that the efficiencies created by automation start in media planning and run all the way through billing and reconciliation.
In an industry that’s experiencing a lot of turmoil, the end-to-end consistency Basis offers is groundbreaking.
CM: How does Centro as a company play into the larger conversations about automation that are happening in the industry right now?
TK: In short, we’re leading the charge.
Right now, the average media professional uses 15 different tools to do their job. That’s obviously not sustainable. From an automation standpoint, the question is, how do we scale the entire process? Basis is the only technology I know that can scale all digital media channels (search, social, display, and programmatic) from end to end.
We’re also invested in educating our industry on where automation is headed. For example, we partnered with the 4A’s to kick off their Future of Automation study. They reached out to businesses all over the country to put a finger on the pulse of what automation means to media professionals.
One of the most important findings is that automation is seen in two different ways. One is through programmatic, and how businesses can automate their media. The second is broader: How can we scale the entire process of running a business? How can we create processes that streamline and create more efficiencies within agencies? Those are the questions we’re trying to answer with Basis.
CM: Could you speak to the custom solutions Centro offers its clients, and how they set Centro apart as a provider?
TK: We have a spectrum of custom solutions we offer our clients. The first is full managed service. For businesses that can’t do their own buying, we can execute everything from front to end.
Then we have Centro as a programmatic vendor. There are a lot of agencies out there that have been doing direct and using third-party programmatic partners, but they want to see what’s actually happening within their programmatic channels. Our team executes the programmatic channels within Basis for these clients, and they get full transparency into their programmatic buys.
The next option, which I think is the most unique in the industry, is our media execution solution. It’s great for clients who want to start doing media planning on their own eventually, but aren’t quite there yet. With this solution, our services team operates within a client’s instance of Basis until they’re ready for self-serve. We are the only media technology with a 300-person service team executing this type of solution, and we've seen tremendous success.
Self-serve is the last option—the client implements Basis on their own.
CM: Centro is known for its customer service. How do you create a best-in-class customer experience without compromising quality?
TK: Customer success is ever-evolving, but our philosophy stems from Shawn and his adoption of Raving Fan service in the early days.
Within our customer success team, we have a dedicated person for each account, regular QBRs (Quality Business Reviews) to make sure everything is running smoothly, and a technology help line that clients can call any time of day.
It ensures that clients have access to a single point of contact—a person they can call—and grants access to all of the resources available within the customer success team.
CM: How have you turned “sales relationships” into partnerships?
TK: The most important thing is to get away from the idea of being just a vendor. In order to do that, you need to help clients accomplish their business goals.
On the client side, we’re asking, how do we help the client sell more of whatever they’re trying to sell? How do we help them achieve their goals? On the agency side, how do we help them scale their agency? How do we help them win more business? It’s about showing that they can increase their bottom line and media performance by partnering with Centro.
CM: What’s your strategy for anticipating customer needs currently, and into 2020?
TK: I would say the biggest learning we had this year was around education. The industry still needs a lot of education around digital buying and digital buying practices.
As we look at our clients, success is all about guiding, educating, and making them better. That’s the strategy we’re going to continue with, because it helps everyone in the industry—us included.
Earlier this year, the 4As set out to create a 360-degree view of programmatic and other forms of automation. In partnership with The 614 Group, a multi-part initiative was conducted via content research, qualitative interviews, and quantitative surveys. Centro joined as a Platinum Sponsor to help underwrite the study, and to increase our own understandings of how automation is impacting business.
Now that the study is complete, Centro, along with 4As and The 614 Group, is sharing research findings and conducting roundtable discussions with 4As member agencies on a multi-city roadshow throughout the US.
Holiday retail sales across crossed the $1 trillion mark in 2018, thanks in large part to the growth of eCommerce sales between Thanksgiving and Christmas. Paid search advertising offers huge opportunities to gain exposure and drive revenue during the holiday season, but competition is higher now than ever before.
Google has made some key changes to the search algorithm that will impact how your ads will be displayed when someone is searching for your target keywords, most notably with impression share bidding and query level targeting. There are numerous changes businesses have to make to their marketing campaigns to stay ahead of the competition during key holiday shopping weeks. These tactics are not yet mainstream in the PPC marketing fraternity, though, and only a few marketing managers know how to prioritize seasonal advertising tactics to maximize results.
Search engine advertisers who invest in the right collection of strategies can set themselves up to dominate the PPC landscape this holiday season. Here, we take a look at what you should do.
The holiday season represents a great opportunity to increase clicks, conversions, and sales. But you’re only going to see these benefits if you allocate enough budget to the holiday months.
How much budget you should save for November and December really depends on past performance. Look back on your campaigns from previous years and see how your impression share and clicks changed during key seasons.
Some questions to think about while creating your holiday strategy this year are:
Begin by calculating the revenue that your keywords generated in the past seasonal years. The best way to do this is by looking at your Google Ads Auction Insights report. This includes valuable metrics on how your ads performed compared to your competitors. Pay particular attention to:
Compare your performance on these metrics during November and December versus other months of the year. If your impression share, average position, and other metrics perform poorly during the holiday season, then you’re not allocating enough budget to keep up with competitor changes.
You also need to evaluate if you wasted any money on Google ads.
For eCommerce sellers, it’s easy to assume a larger portion of your annual sales will happen in the months before Christmas. Rather than creating a monthly budget to meet PPC sales goals, it’s better to consider how holiday shopping opportunities can impact annual sales overall, then budget accordingly.
Say, for example, you run a winter sports gear eCommerce business. You already know that search volume for your product keywords will be low from May through August. With this knowledge, you can decrease your monthly PPC budget for those months and reallocate it to November and December. This ensures you maximize your profit on holiday PPC campaigns while simultaneously meeting your annual sales goals overall.
If you don’t have a lot of historical data to evaluate your seasonal ad spending, then keyword search volume can help you understand targeting and bidding opportunities. Take your target keywords to Google Trends and see patterns in how search volume changes across the year. The keyword “board games” for example triples in search volume every December like clockwork:
Keywords like these offer more impression opportunities during the holidays versus other times of the year. It makes sense, then, to increase bids for these keywords to get a higher impression share and, in turn, clicks. At the same time, you might discover some product-related keyword phrases don’t show a dramatic increase in search volume or sales during the holiday season. You can redistribute ad spend by bidding less on these keywords during that time.
Even if you use automated bidding, you can still make manual bid adjustments to target more valuable keywords during the holiday shopping season. It’s vitally important, though, that you know when to gain control of your automated bidding strategy. Ultimately, it’s a machine, and your results from the machine will only be as effective as the information given to it.
Most advertisers don’t bother creating campaigns to target holiday-specific keywords every year. So this is a huge missed opportunity to reach a highly targeted audience that is ready to convert on search.
For instance, someone searching for “stocking stuffer ideas for toddlers” is definitely looking for Christmas gifts, and therefore is more likely to purchase the sponsored product suggestions:
It doesn’t require a significant time investment to create dedicated holiday PPC campaigns. Simply duplicate one of your current campaigns, replace the keyword lists, allocate more budget, and then wait for the increased conversions to roll in.
Now let’s look at another long-tail keyword - “christmas gift ideas for friends”. Consumers searching with this type of phrase know that they want to purchase something; they’re just not sure exactly what. Your ads are an opportunity to show them what you have on offer. Even if they don’t purchase the product you’re promoting, they can click through and convert on your website.
Whether you’re running shopping ads or a traditional search ad campaign, it’s important to include relevant information that relates to the very specific audience you’re targeting. For example:
People who look for holiday gift ideas online are often crunched for time. So, one of the above ads includes “Fast Holiday Shipping” in the headline to speak to this need. The second ad’s description says “Find the perfect gift for every man on your list.” This implies their business is a great place to find a gift for husbands, fathers, brothers, etc.
You should definitely base this year’s holiday PPC campaigns on last year’s performance, but don’t let that limit you from trying out new strategies altogether. The winter season is a great time to test out new channels, campaigns, and targeting strategies.
Set aside a certain portion of your PPC budget to try new initiatives. It could be a new targeting strategy or trying out a new feature in Google Ads. If you haven’t already, consider investing in automated bidding strategies. Instead of turning off your manual bidding campaigns, simply create an additional automated one. Then you can test and see which performs better.
Google’s Smart Bidding offers a variety of bidding strategies based on differing business goals. You can also use seasonality adjustments if you expect major changes in your conversion rates based on select events. Smart Bidding automatically considers predictable seasonal factors like Black Friday, Cyber Monday, etc.
Last year Google also introduced Smart Shopping campaigns for eCommerce advertisers. These combine Standard Shopping and display remarketing campaigns, helping advertisers win ad placement in prominent places across networks.
Arguably the biggest opportunity that eCommerce sellers should take advantage of this holiday season is Bing paid search. In November last year, Bing saw the highest retail growth from 5th November pre-Cyber Week. Here were their top categories for click share from 23rd - 27th November:
Bing PPC is less crowded than Google, making it easier to outbid your competition. The Bing audience is also willing to spend more on retail products than those on Google. So, consider investing in Bing this holiday season to get more reach and drive more sales.
Feed optimization is something that you should be working on all year round. But right before the holiday shopping season is an excellent time to start cleaning things up to ensure you give your conversion percentages a boost. This includes optimizing such elements as:
Regardless of whether you’ve already optimized all these things before, there’s always changes you can make that might improve click-through rates. Something as simple as changing the main product image can have a huge impact on performance. You can use Supplemental Feeds to test changes you make to different feed variations.
You should also go through and make sure all your fields are populated as missing data can cause Google to disapprove of products. Then you need to be certain that you’re not sending paid traffic to any “out of stock” product pages. You don’t want this happening during peak holiday shopping weeks.
Targeting audiences during the holiday season is a bit different than the rest of the year because people are primarily not shopping for themselves. In order to better target gift-givers, advertisers need to make changes to their marketing content and ads.
People often know what they want to buy for themselves, but are unsure about what others will like. Your marketing content should make efforts to convince readers that your products are something their loved ones would enjoy. Including social proof from other happy customers is a great way to do this. Solicit user-generated content (UGC) from your previous customers to highlight on your landing pages.
Creating top of the funnel content like gift guides can also help shoppers make decisions about the types of products they want to buy for their friends and family. This is a great way to supplement your paid search efforts with content for organic search engine results.
For your advertising copy, consider the target demographic in this case. People often do their holiday shopping online because they’re too busy to hit the physical stores or they’re looking for deals. Your ad copy should reflect this need. If you want your ads to perform well, promotions are simply a must. Use promotion extensions for search ads to highlight a sale, free shipping, free gift, etc.
Lastly, if your business offers gift cards and free shipping, make sure these options are clear on all your sales and product pages. Particularly in December, when shoppers are feeling rushed, they’re more likely to turn to gift cards rather than buying a product. You can even create special promotions highlighting your gift card offerings (e.g. buy a gift card valued $100 or more and get an additional $10 gift card free).
The type of ads you use can also have a huge impact on performance when targeting gift-givers. Showcase Shopping ads, for example, are a great option to help shoppers understand what kind of products are available related to a broad keyword search. Showcase Shopping ads allow you to group a selection of related products together to introduce audiences to your brand:
This is a great option for targeting first-time shoppers who want to learn more about a selection of products they’re interested in purchasing as a gift for someone else. This year, advertisers can also include video content as part of their Showcase Shopping ads, offering a new opportunity to stand out from competitors.
Audience targeting is another important area in which to make changes in order to better reach gift-givers with your advertising message. You may want to refocus efforts with your current audiences and/or add new audiences to improve your targeting.
Add new audiences
If you’ve created marketing content for your organic SEO efforts, you can build new audiences based on those who’ve interacted with it. For example, visitors who viewed a wishlist from your eCommerce store or people who viewed a gift guide.
Prepare remarketing lists
Remarketing lists are a great way to reach holiday shoppers later in the season. They may have visited your website in early November, but you can convince them to finally convert right before Christmas with a special offer.
Your remarketing lists can include repeat past purchasers, but what about the people who bought from you last November then never made a purchase again? These are much more likely to be gift-givers. Add them to your remarketing lists to convince them to shop with you again this holiday season.
Consider cross-channel marketing
Remarketing lists are also a great opportunity to drive conversions with cross-channel marketing. To explore the opportunities here, check out your Audience report in Google Analytics. This will show you how your audiences move through the funnel across marketing channels.
Do some experimentation here. You might find that re-targeting shoppers who clicked on your search ad with a relevant Facebook ad drives more conversions. Cross-channel marketing gives advertisers the opportunity to really drive their message home, convincing shoppers to buy.
As mentioned above, most people prefer to do holiday shopping online because they’re busy, it’s convenient, and they’re looking for deals. Shoppers have many options to make purchase decisions online. If you want them to choose your products, you need to make every effort to minimize barriers to purchase.
Offering free shipping is one of the best places to start. 9 out of 10 consumers say free shipping is their biggest incentive to shop online. Another important factor is the option for in-store pickup. Especially in a week or so before Christmas, many people are shopping online with the hopes of picking up a product in-store. These are both benefits that you can highlight on your product pages as well as in your shopping ads with merchant promotions:
There are many other changes that can make the online shopping experience easier and help reassure customers they’re making a good choice. You can guarantee shipping delivery before the holidays, for example. Or highlight your return policy, so they know they can get their money back if someone doesn’t like their gift. Streamlining your checkout process is also essential.
Businesses today have made a lot of efforts to improve mobile user experience, yet mobile cart abandonment is still 86% on average - much higher than on desktop. Lowering cart abandonment on mobile is particularly important during the holiday season, as last year the mobile share of digital commerce reached 40% on Thanksgiving.
In addition to improving mobile user experience on-site and during checkout, I would definitely suggest setting up a series of cart abandonment emails and retargeting ads to help capture these sales.
Online shopping during the holiday season will only continue to grow. Incentives like sales, same-day shipping and in-store pick up have made online the preferred shopping method for many before the holidays. So optimizing your holiday PPC campaigns to capture traffic isn’t just worthwhile, it’s mandatory for eCommerce success today. Prioritizing key months in your PPC strategy will ensure you stay ahead of the competition and maximize the value of holiday shopping to drive more sales every year.
Most Americans are already sold on the American dream—however, with the 2008 housing crash etched in most consumers' memories, marketing a global real estate company is not without challenges.
As VP of Marketing & Media Strategies at RE/MAX, James Schwartz oversees digital marketing, media, and creative services for over 6,800 offices and 100,000+ agents. He is tasked with attracting and retaining realtors by providing innovative marketing tools that work - to close deals and help clients buy and sell properties in more than 100 countries.
In this episode, James shares the primary challenges of operating within a crowded and competitive marketplace and how RE/MAX utilizes digital strategies to make it easy for realtors to get in front of prospective buyers and sellers.
The holidays are upon us! As you’re making your advertising wish list this season, don’t forget to add search and social. Think about it—your customers are already compiling wish lists of their own and now is the time to reach them wherever and whenever they are filling their carts.
These days, it seems there are more ads competing for consumers’ attention than snowflakes on the ground. Therefore, it’s critical that your message reaches the preferred audiences at the right moments. Search and social campaigns are nimble and well-suited to adapt to holiday demand!
Target, segment, and engage your audiences with the right search and social techniques, and make for a very jolly holiday season. If you’re looking for a last-minute holiday or year-end push, download our holiday infographic for strategies to boost performance quickly.
A three-pronged combination of changing consumer buying habits, the vast proliferation of data, and a constant need to stay at the forefront of digital disruption has prompted organizations to place greater importance than ever before on using statistical insights to drive strategic decision making. By embedding data analytics into their core strategy, business executives can begin to streamline their internal operational processes and then identify and react quickly to unfolding market transformations. The effectiveness of employing such a data-first approach has been proven time and again in various surveys carried out by leading think-tanks. According to one such study conducted by the McKinsey Global Institute, a data-driven organization is 23 times more likely to turn prospects into customers, six times more likely to retain them, and 19 times more likely to generate a profit as a result. Quite compelling numbers.
In order to keep pace with this newfound reliance on statistical analysis, there has naturally been a rise in marketing technology designed to extract lucrative insights found within the troves of data. Chiefmartec illustrated this in their latest supergraphic that details all the solutions at play in the marketing technology landscape today. Back in 2011, there were only 150 companies. As of this year, there are over 7,000.
This Martech boom has ultimately streamlined the marketing industry in multiple ways, empowering advertisers to become more efficient and scale their efforts seamlessly. It now rings true that tapping into the potential of artificial intelligence and machine learning to reach desired audiences more effectively is no longer a pipe dream. Many companies have already realized this, and so as technology progresses, it has become clear that marketing without some form of automation is a mistake that no business can afford; not if they want to outperform their competitors that is.
The question arising from this rapid evolution, then, is just how can it be navigated successfully. How do marketing managers decipher which tools will drive the most value, improve efficiency, strengthen risk management, and lift profits?
Our latest eBook looks to provide some of the answers.
Inside, we open up with some commentary on why investment in digital ad spending has skyrocketed before moving on to analyze the ways digital teams can exploit technology to gain more frontline monetization opportunities. We then close with what we see as a paradigm shift in the industry and discuss how the fundamental role of a performance marketing agency must change in 2020 and beyond.
To help break it down, we’ve put together this handy infographic that offers a quick snapshot of the main themes.
![The New Performance Marketing Agency Model [An Infographic]](https://centro.net/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/Infographic-New-Performance-Marketing-Agencel-Model.png)
It’s clear that statistical analytics, with its multiple use cases and wide-ranging applications, is breaking traditional business models and ecosystems. There is now simply too much complexity in the world of digital marketing to ignore the benefits of leveraging big data. The industry demands sophistication, machine learning, and automation to get everything you need quickly and to respond to what is available for a targeting perspective.
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If you’d like to talk to a best-in-class performance marketing agency about certain challenges you’re facing and how to develop strategies that cater to your audience, get in touch with our experts at QuanticMind Digital.
