Thought leaders, assemble! We recently hosted a roundtable discussion with the Centro Industry Advisory Group (CIAG). The CIAG is aimed at gathering valuable input from thought leaders to help shape the future of advertising technology and services.

Digital creative is up against a lot of hurdles. It can be difficult to stand out while creating a positive experience between audience and brand. On top of that, digital creative is often an afterthought. Many brands repurpose TV spots and print assets for digital vehicles that are capable of so much more.

In our latest Centro Industry Advisory Group (CIAG), we discussed how advertisers can think about digital (both media and creative) first. Planning ahead is key, but you have options even if you’re short on time. Here are our top three digital creative tips you can use no matter what your timeline looks like:

1. Maximize Your Photo and Video Shoots

Get approval to send a social strategist or digital planner to the production day. Your talent is there, so take this opportunity to capture tons of extra content! It won’t all be gold, but the team can sift through it to find the moments worth repurposing when time isn’t such an issue.

Make sure the person you send is very comfortable with social media as well as the brand’s voice and standards. Instruct them to take vertical video as well as horizontal video. Mix up the aspect ratios. Take videos, take photos, take Boomerangs, apply filters. Just capture content.

If you’re confident in the abilities of that person, give them permission to go live on various platforms or post to your stories in real time. When you’re back in the office, take some of the content and build mock ups of your raw content in a digital environment. Most platforms have WYSIWYG tools that anyone can use for free.

2. Think About the Realistic Digital Experience

The simplest example of this is online video. We all like to think of media consumption as the stock photo experience:

We idealize that our audiences look like the picture above: Comfortably sitting on a couch with their phone, sound on, viewing a full-screen video of your ad with no distractions. But when is the last time YOU fit that image?

Mobile video in particular is often consumed with many distractions (i.e. TV, kids, the zombie apocalypse), on various devices, and regularly muted. To have a chance at stopping the scroll, try adding subtitles to mobile video.

3. Maximum Allowable Duration Does Not Equal Most Effective Duration

TV is typically bought in :15 and :30s, but digital is much more flexible. In the analytics world, just because you can measure 50 metrics doesn’t mean you should measure all 50 metrics. In video creative, just because you have :30, doesn’t mean you should use :30.

Think about users’ attention span. If you can tell your story in :09, tell it in :09. YouTube now has a standard :06 format called the bumper ad. Creative folks may not think this is enough time to tell the story, but there are many world-class brands doing a great job with this format.

These very short-form videos also discourage ads that build to a big reveal at the end. These ads sometimes have low brand recall since attention has moved on and the viewer doesn’t even make it to the reveal.

At the end of the day, digital is a fast-moving and unique medium. It’s full of potential for advertisers who can harness its power. Additionally, digital is one of the only mediums that can provide rapid feedback. We’ve given you three tips here, but we encourage everyone to test, learn, iterate, and improve.

We are currently forming a junior industry advisory group comprised of future media and marketing leaders with 7-10 years of experience. Our advisory groups provide guidance on best practices and where the industry is headed in a conversational, round table format. If you are interested in joining our group, please fill out our quick form!

In SEM, past performance data alone does not tell us everything we need to know about future performance. Even the smartest machine-learning algorithms backed by years of prior data are fundamentally limited. You often need to also know something about real-time present conditions, and these are just as often unpredictable by nature.

For example, you need to know about your current competition. If you bid the same way every day and it results in exactly the same performance, then you will bid the same way tomorrow, too. But what if tomorrow your competition intensifies? Or what if it slackens? Your historical performance data won’t clue you into this. To react to this effect, savvy marketers use “Auction Landscape Data” to divine the prevailing relationship between you and your competitors.

In the roiling industry of Lead Generation, there is another present condition that must always be accounted for: Lead Capacity.

What is Lead Capacity?

At its core, every Lead Generation business is a conglomeration of contracts with local partners. I’m a small business owner in the service industry and I need to find people who need my service, but I don’t have a robust advertising network to do so efficiently. Multiply that story by a thousand or so and you have yourself a case for a Lead Gen business.

But this is where it turns sensitive. At your scale, you’re set up to supply way more leads than your partners are able to support. How do you make sure you get each partner exactly as many leads as they require in a given time frame - no more and no less - and that you pace those out at peak efficiency? In this sense, Lead Capacity can be thought of as analogous to its retail cousin, inventory. Whereas inventory is products on the shelf, Capacity is leads to-be-delivered across your partner network. Think of Capacity like inventory that must be put on the (figurative) shelf over some agreed-upon span of time. What, then, are the constraints of such a model?

1. The shelves are only so big

You’re picking up leads from your large-scale ad network and carrying them over to your local partner’s shelf. What happens if you pick up a lead and carry it over to the shelf, but the shelf is full? That’s a wasted lead.

2. Leftover shelf space is bad

While you can’t put too many leads on the shelf, you also can’t leave it sparse. You must keep your partners’ happy with well-stocked shelves.

3. How much stuff is already on the shelf matters

It costs you something to pick up each lead. If you’re running out of time before the shelf needs to be full and there’s still a lot of empty space, you’ll grope for even the most overpriced leads. Conversely, if the shelf is almost full and you still have lots of time left, you probably reached on a few overpriced leads too early.

These are the challenges that Lead Capacity Bidding is designed to solve.

Bidding to Lead Capacity - Level One: The On/Off Switch

The Shelves Are Only So Big

The Level One solution is a cost-saving measure. Let’s call it the “On/Off Switch”. Very simply, when a partner can no longer support any leads (or more accurately, per your contractual agreement, they won’t pay you for any more leads), you cease spending for that partner. The goal is to minimize wasted leads.

In practice, there are some restraints that make this slightly complicated to implement. How do we shut down for one maxed-out partner and not for his lead-starved neighbor? Since SEM is moderated by the publishers, we have to play by their rules. We can’t pre-filter for only those searches with intent to use a particular partner, nor decide after the lead matures whether or not we want to pay for the clicks that caused it. In other words, there is no “On/Off Switch” at the individual per-partner level. And we certainly can’t tell Google “I wasn’t able to monetize this lead, can I have a refund on my clicks?” So, we have to abstract within the edifice of location bid adjustments, under the assumption that more proximal leads are more likely to monetize.

That is, instead of toggling traffic for a particular partner, we have to do so by geo-target using bid adjustments (0% for On, -90% for Off). There are a couple of ways to do this, each with their own intricacies.

1. By Location (Zip Code, City, DMA, etc)

The publishers support traditional location targeting (and bid adjustments) per campaign as granular as the zip code level. If you have several partners within that zip code, then you’ll have to treat their Capacity as a combined total. With this approach, a question to ponder...

What happens when a partner is willing to accept leads from more than one Zip Code/City/DMA? How would that factor into the aggregate ‘total capacity’ of those Zip Codes/Cities/DMAs?

2. By Radius (Location Extensions)

Google offers “Location Extensions”, by which you can target a radius around a coordinate pair (i.e. the exact physical location of a partner). In concept, this more directly allows you to adjust for the capacity of each individual partner, without aggregation. What if, though, you have partners that are close to one another such that their radii overlap? And what if those partners have very different capacities from one another such that their respective radii have very different bid adjustments? And then what if I’m smack dab in the middle of them searching for a plumber? Which bid adjustment will I receive: the 0% for the guy who’s dying to plumb or the -90% for the guy who’s already plumbed plenty?

As long as you can approximate your partner network to a set of geo aggregations, the “On/Off Switch” is a quick, high upside win. Where you were previously spending money on leads that can’t monetize, now you aren’t. Less cost, same return.

Bidding to Lead Capacity - Level Two: Pacing

Leftover Shelf Space Is Bad

Now that we’ve saved all that money, we have to attend to our partners. We do this, of course, by fulfilling our contractual obligations to them, which most likely takes the form of providing them with all the high-quality leads they ask for. We don’t want to give them excess leads they won’t pay for, but - perhaps of equal or even greater importance - we don’t want to give them too few. The long-term health of our business relies largely on a happy partner network.

Doing this is super easy. Assuming the demand exists in the market, all we have to do is go and get it. And we can ensure we’ve got it by ratcheting up to +900% all bid adjustments to geos with remaining ‘total capacity’. Position 1.0, 100% Impression Share, 0 antsy plumbers.

But alas! For you have budget and efficiency goals.

How Much Stuff Is Already On The Shelf Matters

‘Lead Pacing’ is optimizing for a minimum spend to acquire a certain number of leads per geo (Capacity) over some time frame. Implicit in this definition is the priority that you do still need to get all those leads, no matter the cost. If a geo is slow, pace up. If it’s hot, pace down.

There is a fundamental paradox in this: what might be good for your business long-term may not necessarily be the best thing for it in short-term. Put another way, it’s a competition between happy partners with high lifetime value and peak SEM performance efficiency now. To illustrate this, consider the following example of two cities.

Let’s say your contracts with your partners are to provide ‘Starting Total Capacity’ of leads per ‘Fulfillment Period’. And let’s say our ‘Fulfillment Period’ is the week. Then if we’re 70% through, it’s roughly Thursday. Los Angeles has only received 20% of its Capacity for the week whereas New York already has 80%. Using Capacity as our guide, we would give Los Angeles a high bid adjustment and New York a low one - all in service of our partners getting the number of leads they asked for.

But how much will those marginal leads cost us? Counterintuitively, a lot more in the area where we’re getting more aggressive. If we were instead to apply bid adjustments based on cost per lead, they’d be in reverse: Los Angeles would get the low bid adjustment and New York the high. And because it’s increasingly more expensive to manufacture leads where demand is low, this scenario can be fairly common.

For this reason, it’s imperative that you know where these priorities balance for your business. Are your partner contracts sensitive to leads left on the table or is there some leeway? Is your SEM efficiency largely at odds with your Capacity pacing or is there some harmony? Expected Revenue must be at the forefront of every decision you make. Only then can you appropriately optimize to your particular medley of considerations.

~

For those who want to dive deeper, here are some additional questions to grapple with:

1. What happens if a partner is right on the border between Zip Codes/Cities/DMAs? More commonly, what happens if they’re anywhere but the exact center? How would that factor into the expected value of leads originating from adjacent Zip Codes/Cities/DMAs?

2. What is the relationship between ‘Remaining Capacity’ (either as an absolute or a percentage) and Conversion Rates? Based on this, at what points in the ‘Fulfillment Periods’ is it advantageous to bid higher or lower?

Mountain of debt have you feeling blue? Retirement savings not quite where you’d like them to be? Monthly expenses exceeding your monthly earnings?

You’re not alone! Financial worries are one of the main causes of stress. Luckily, there are plenty of ways to minimize financial stress, especially if your employer offers a total compensation package.

If your employer provides total compensation, make sure to explore all of their financial incentives! Otherwise, it’s easy to miss out on your full earning potential. Here are a few examples of financial incentives your company may offer, that you should definitely take advantage of:

401k

If your company provides a 401k match and you’re not participating—you could be leaving part of your compensation on the table! Reach out to a 401k plan administrator for additional information on how to earn the max for retirement.

Pre-Tax Deduction Programs

Does your company allow you to set aside pre-tax dollars to pay for transit, parking, medical, or childcare expenses? If so, don't wait to take advantage! Reach out to your benefits or payroll administrator for more information about these programs.

Student Debt Assistance

Any assistance to pay down these debts faster could save you hundreds of dollars in interest. If your company offers payments against student loans or other incentives to help pay down student debt more quickly—sign up!

Non-Cash Incentives

Whether it’s yoga, meditation, or a sweet office space with a ping pong table, it’s likely these perks are being offered to you in an effort to improve wellbeing. While this may not add dollars to your paycheck, it will pay out in dividends to mental health.

Financial Advice

Check to see if your company offers financial counseling, or has any recommendations for financial advisors. A financial advisor can help better manage your money and achieve short- and long-term financial goals, such as saving for retirement and paying off debt.

The bottom line? Reducing financial stress is possible if you take inventory of all the incentives offered by your employer. Interested in how Centro compensates its employees? Check out our Culture Page for an overview of what's included in our total compensation package.

This infographic provides a walkthrough of how to take your good results and drive towards better PPC performance using Big Data, Machine Learning, and Human Experience. The goal: extract the best possible results by using forward-thinking strategies and technology available today.

In the modern data environment of the internet, customer journeys are more intricate, making a “Conversion” in Google Ads worth less - and your own ability to track revenue so much more meaningful. Your data tells a better story, you just need to capture it, unify it, and process it. 

Given technological advances in scalability and infrastructure, the application of machine learning is the no-brainer approach to process all that data. And show you what is really “converting” lower down the funnel.

But machines, automation, and computers can’t do it all alone - not without human involvement! A relationship is necessary. Learn more about the relationship between your data, your automation options, and your role in the process in our new eBook: The Path to Great PPC: Merging Big Data, Machine Learning, and Human Experience.

To download this infographic, click here. Alternatively, if you’d like to request a demo with us and discuss all the ways we could drive improved SEM performance through big data and machine learning for you, get in touch here.

Ever get overwhelmed by all the new trends in the ad tech industry? You’re not alone! As an intern who is new to this space, I still have much to learn. Before coming to Centro, I was unfamiliar with the ad tech industry and its breadth of complexities.

The more I have learned, the more I have realized how exciting this industry truly is—and how it plays a role in my everyday life. From the shows I watch to the podcasts I listen to; the ad tech industry is all around me. While I’m still trying to comprehend all that ad tech encompasses, here are just a few trends that have caught my attention:

Artificial Intelligence

Artificial intelligence (AI) is new and exciting to the world of advertising and creating revolutionary changes within the space. AI can improve efficiency in many capacities, such as expediting menial tasks and increasing speed. With so much assistance from AI, advertisers can focus on other more creative and strategic tasks. This technology is especially effective when it comes to programmatic advertising.

Another emerging form of AI is machine learning—a type of artificial intelligence where computer systems learn from data. In the advertising space, this data can then be used to organize, predict, and plan a variety of ad campaigns. It is also becoming a prominent tool in programmatic advertising. Read our blog, Ask the Expert: What is Machine Learning? to learn more!

Audio ads

Whether I’m commuting or sitting at my desk, I am always listening to a podcast. I am not the only one who is hooked on this growing format—according to eMarketer, there are 204 million digital audio listeners in the U.S.! This is a platform that advertisers cannot ignore.

Audio advertising allows companies to reach their customers when they are unreachable by visual media. Whether they are walking to work, on the treadmill, or just sitting at their desk—advertisers can engage with consumers on a deeper level by seamlessly integrating themselves into a consumer’s favorite podcast or playlist. Are you ready to tune in? Check out our webinar on Audio Ads to learn more!

Connected TV

Nowadays, streaming is the way to watch TV. In fact, I don’t even have cable in my apartment, I only watch television through Connected TV (CTV). This platform is growing rapidly, making it an exciting place for companies to advertise. In 2019, 57% of the general population will use Connected TV at least once a month.

CTV provides opportunities for advertisers to use more traditional forms of advertising across digital networks. It also offers things that traditional television advertising can’t, such as greater tracking opportunities. It’s important for advertisers to take advantage of this platform now, as it is growing rapidly. Read our Connected TV Guide to review best practices and utilize this platform most effectively!

Ultimately, I found the ad tech industry less intimidating and confusing once I saw how it integrates regularly into daily life. As media engagement continues to evolve, so will advertising.

Centro is prepared to meet the needs of the growing ad tech industry. Connect with us to learn more and start your journey today!

At Centro, we know that keeping up with the trade pubs and latest trends can be tough and time-consuming. To make that easier, we’ve compiled all the articles, reports, and other bits of awesomeness you may have missed, but should definitely read. Enjoy our latest list below!

Brand Transparency 2.0: Moving Beyond the Buzzword [:03]

Brand transparency means owning your intent and building trustworthy connections with audiences. Today’s consumers prefer brands that play it straight, which is why transparency has become a leading currency in modern marketing. Learn from brands who are doing it right in this article.

Forbes: Three Ways Brands Can Leverage AI For Predictive Advertising [:05]

In a world where more experiences are digitized on the daily and data collection is ubiquitous with our every click and tap, consumer expectations for tailored and personalized experiences are rising. Consumers can thank Artificial Intelligence (AI) for enabling much of those enhanced and personalized experiences. Forbes lays out ways that brands and advertisers can lean on leveraging AI to predict consumer behavior, create operational efficiencies and be more creative.

Retail Wire: Location-based marketing is spreading beyond smartphones [:03]

Location data is having an impact that expands well beyond mobile – A 2019 Factual Report details how marketers are increasingly leveraging location data through additional advertising channels: connected speakers, digital out-of-home, advanced TV and automotive.

AdExchanger: The Rise Of The qCPM: Rewarding Quality In Programmatic Buying [:07]

Chasing after the lowest CPM doesn’t guarantee great campaign results or audience receptivity. Accordingly, the industry is seeing the rise of the qCPM, or quality CPM, that only counts impressions that are viewable, with on-target delivery, optimal frequency and in brand-safe environments. AdExchanger walks through some examples of how and why a few agencies and other media buying organizations have chosen to prioritize the adoption of the new metric.

The Washington Post Is Preparing For Post-Cookie Ad Targeting [:04]

The Washington Post has developed a first-party data ad targeting tool that permits contextual targeting & user-intent predictions for marketers. This will result in an experience that is not reliant on third-party cookies but will still drive results despite the state of data privacy today.

Winners & Losers In The Streaming Wars [32:46]

Listen to eMarketing analyst Ross Benes & forecasting analyst Eric Haggstrom talk through the future of the video industry as the different streaming partners raise prices, drop prices and how content is impacting each service.

The Drum: 75% of advertisers to up podcast ad spend in 2019 [:04]

Three-quarters of advertisers plan to increase ad spend in podcasts this year according to a study from global-owned digital audio advertising platform DAX. More details and stats on rising audio consumption trends and associated advertising opportunities are detailed in The Rise of Digital Audio Advertising Report. The study surveyed over 200 media and ad agency leaders to understand perceptions and intentions for audio.

Giving brands a voice [:06]

As AI-powered voice technology becomes smarter and smarter, will voice play a crucial role for brands in the near future? ComScore has predicted that 50% of all searches will be through voice by 2020. Could voice be the next big thing in marketing?

A Wikipedia for Generation Z [:07]

Want to know who the biggest TikTok star is right now, who is in Emma Chamberlain’s squad, or where Baby Ariel grew up? Only one website will give you the answers: Famous Birthdays. Despite its name, the site contains more than just birthdays—it’s more like a constantly updated, highly detailed map of who matters to the teen internet, featuring a mix of biographical information, photos, videos, rankings, and detailed statistics on every social-media star you could think of. And to teenagers, it’s a bible.

Once upon a time, TV was a predictable experience for viewers and advertisers alike. People would simply flip on their TVs, and from there Nielsen could easily tabulate reach on a widely accepted point system. TV was a well-oiled machine with unparalleled reach and a reliable method for buying.

In the past decade, however, the landscape has changed dramatically. A once reliable process for media buying and measurement has been eroded by the rise of non-cable viewing options. Netflix, Hulu, OTT apps, and the ability to stream content on non-TV screens has made TV wildly complicated for ad buyers.

In this webinar, Noor Naseer, Centro’s Senior Director of Media Innovations + Technology, evaluates the many pieces of this ever-changing landscape and prepares buyers for leveraging one of advertising’s most complicated media types.

Given the modern data environment, improving your PPC results will increasingly rely on processing quality data. Going from good to great PPC performance involves collecting and processing bigger data sets and using machine learning to find and select the best bids. But, despite what you and many other search marketers may fear, humans are an integral part of this process as well. Machines can’t do it alone.

You’re a talented search marketer, but you want to constantly improve, grow, and stay sharp on the latest techniques in digital marketing. Whether you’re the hands-on owner of a SEM program day-to-day, or you’ve stepped away to think more broadly about your digital acquisition strategy, the goal is still the same: turn your PPC channel into an efficient and predictable revenue driver. 

But, once you’ve started hitting the ceiling, it’s time to put more of your data to work.

Collecting More Data from PPC

I’m assuming you’re a pretty advanced search marketer, so you have your ducks in a row regarding your program structure. This means you probably have strong campaign build-out, highly relevant ad groups matched with ad copy and keywords that are tested, kept clean, and aligned with a good landing page experience.

You’re also probably driving some significant volume. If PPC is a truly pivotal channel–generating forty, sixty, or eighty percent of your revenue–you’re willing to spend a lot with search engines. Lots of dollars leading to lots of clicks and revenue.

When you’re spending tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars on search engine marketing, you earn a valuable byproduct: data.

This data is a gold mine! Every click results in some set of actions on your website. Some clicks get further down the path towards revenue than others. Beyond that, every click is not only attributed to the keyword, ad, ad group, and campaign, but also to all sorts of attributes and dimensions that provide details about demographics, geographies, and habits.

The intricate customer journeys of the modern era make a “Conversion” in Google Ads worth less. Your own ability to track the path to revenue is so much more meaningful. Your data tells a better story, you just need to capture it, unify it, and process it. 

Hip hop artist Drake makes the claim “I don't carry cash 'cause the money is digital”. This resonates with many of us search marketers these days, hosting most transactions (and therefore conversions) online. But an offline conversion in-store is part of the customer journey for a great many buyers. And the ensuing revenue may have come from your search ads. The customer journey isn’t as cut-and-dry as one may suspect in Google Ads 101.

Search marketers generating less volume from their PPC can probably get by adequately looking at impressions, clicks, and conversions in Google Ads for their optimization efforts. However, when you’re working towards being best-in-class for a scaled-up search program, the publisher metrics aren’t good enough. Performance marketers running huge programs require more to truly grow.

Big Data: The Perks for Performance Marketers 

Collecting the data we’re discussing here will very quickly generate “Big Data”, which is all the rage these days. #BuzzwordAlert. But big data actually enables exactly what we’re looking at discussing here: a better optimization approach.

Big Data means you get the full picture. You get statistical correlations. You get to see reality, and no longer need to ask yourself “why” something is happening. You have the information necessary to tell you what is most likely to happen under any given circumstance. Seeing the actual numbers-based correlations between objects, segments, decisions and their outcomes is the real gold mine derived from your data! More information shows more precise trends from input to output. Which ultimately enables more specific and accurate decisions for search campaigns.

Generating a usable data set, though, isn’t that easy. You’re likely collecting quite a bit of data, and with some additional tags or tools you can collect even more. But it’s the unification and integration that is key. Unifying data to attribute the customer journey, the conversions events, and the revenue values back to the campaigns, keywords, and clicks that sourced them is required before any meaningful optimization actions can be used. It’s a necessary step to accomplish our goal: maximize performance.

Human beings, despite extreme intelligence and ability to reason through situations, aren’t capable of taking advantage of this big data set on our own. We need other tools as a “middle-man,” and I’m not talking about spreadsheets. We need something that can process data every day, note trends, and learn how the relationships are situated from click to revenue. I’m talking about letting the machines take over.

Enter Machines

I’m a human, and if you’re reading this I presume you’re also a human. So you and I probably share the desire of not wanting machines to take over the world. Or take over our jobs. However, I feel very strongly that I do want machines to help make my life easier, through automation.

Machine learning is the type of artificial intelligence that should take over here. And it should automate specific parts of your program:

• data crunching
• finding correlations between segments in that big data
• the calculations that generate a CPC bid that leads keywords to revenue, based on your desired optimization metrics.

Machine Learning is the obvious choice when dealing with big data in a field like search engine marketing. However, other automation is super valuable to put those calculations to work. SEM automation crunches your online and offline data to learn. Then, it pushes bids, bid modifier adjustments for different dimensions, and a host of other efficiency tactics.

Humans are Still Important. Really important.

Don’t be fooled by all the discussion here of collecting data, processing it, and automating through machine learning. Nothing here can happen in a meaningful way without human intervention.

Human experience has been, and will be, the glue that keeps SEM programs running effectively. Machines enter to help save time, run more robust calculations, and execute better decisions from the available data. Machines take grunt work off of our plates, but not the strategic and directional elements that only humans can accomplish. 

Frankly, it’s something we have to be thankful for! We getting better results when the machine is processing data and making bid calculations from the trends. And we’re also freed up to think more creatively about the art and strategy for hitting our marketing goals.

It can feel unfamiliar to not be “in control” of every bid decision. However, relinquishing that control need not be too difficult once you reason through the cost/benefit. It’s a simple calculus: algorithmic bidding executes far better for at-scale programs with big data sets. And better results benefit your business!

Big Data + Machine Learning + Human Experience

As an experienced search marketer, you likely focus on improving performance and increasing your bottom line. PPC has tremendous room for growth given the amount of data we can now capture about every stage of the customer journey. Your integrated data, particularly data pertaining to revenue, should be working for you.

The rapid advancement and proliferation of voice assistant technology are introducing exciting opportunities for companies in consumer-facing industries. The SEM industry is no stranger to this phenomenon. The rise of voice assistants is changing how consumers interact with devices and search engines, so digital marketers need to re-strategize how they approach their SEM optimization efforts to account for this up-and-coming voice commerce. Until the very day AI completely takes over our world, you should proactively leverage current voice search trends to capture the full potential of your SEM program. Before we dive into some methods to optimize for audible search queries, it is important to understand how voice search works and why it is becoming so prevalent.

Voice Search: The Next Big Thing

In our efficiency-obsessed, FOMO (“fear of missing out”) indulging society, these voice-activated smart devices satisfy our thirst for efficiency, instant responses, and multitasking. At its core, voice search machines such as Google Assistant, Google Home, Amazon Alexa, Amazon Echo, Microsoft Cortana, and Apple Siri allow you to speak your search terms instead of typing them into your device. Then speech recognition transcribes those human words into text. Next, using natural language processing (NLP), the text is parsed out and analyzed for user intended commands. Once this determines which websites are most suitable for the voice query, it then uses text-to-speech technology to deliver search results verbally.

Given this sophisticated yet user-friendly process, it does not come as a surprise that ComScore forecasts that half of all searches will be voice searches by 2020. And thanks to trademarked algorithms developed by search engines such as Google’s PageRank, search almost always gives us the results pages we are looking for. Better yet, with improvements to machine learning and AI, search is becoming increasingly predictive.

Voice Search is coming for you, retailers!

Based on a study conducted by OC&C Strategy Consultants, last year’s $2 billion voice shopping market is expected to grow to $40 billion in 2022. At the rate at which consumers are adopting voice-activated technologies today, implications for retail businesses as well as local businesses are becoming more apparent. 

Given this massive opportunity (or disruption, depending on how you look at your glass), how do you optimize your SEM program to account for this insurgence of voice search queries?

Areas of Opportunity with Voice Commerce

Voice search queries provide more information on consumer intent

Unlike text queries, voice search queries often contain question words, such as Who, What, When, Where, Why, and How. For example, when you are searching for a pet store on your desktop or tablet, you might type in “Affordable Pet Store in Manhattan.” This text query does not reveal whether you need dog food, catnip, or a hamster wheel. However, when you use your voice to articulate using audible search, you might say, “Where can I buy cheap chew toys for dogs?” As such, voice queries tend to be more intent-driven searches that often result in a higher level of bottom-of-the-funnel conversions. Moreover, the type of question asked often reveals the degree of intent. For instance, Who, What, Why, and How can be identified as lower purchase intent question words, whereas, When and Where are indicative of higher purchase intent. Therefore, adjusting for natural language and specificity of audible searches, you may want to raise bids for more relevant, action-oriented keywords.

Focus on long-tail keywords

The above pet store example highlights another key distinction between text and voice search: length of the query. The average text search is only 1-3 words, whereas its voice counterpart typically consists of 3-7 words. Since long-tail keywords often lack data volume, try using broad match modifiers to capture more traffic on voice queries. Bear in mind that voice search is prone to user mispronunciations; therefore, it is important to add in negative keywords of common misspellings and similar-sounding words relevant to your product.

Give some love to top-of-the-funnel

Digital marketers can capitalize on the way we unconsciously modify our query behavior given an opportunity to say it out loud. Aside from the obvious impact on the lower funnel, you can influence the rest of the funnel (i.e. your best marketing leads!) with informational content to drive more traffic to your site and overall engagement with your brand. This can be achieved by optimizing for natural, conversational language query version of the content in your newsletter guide, community forum, or FAQ pages.

Website load speed matters

Often overlooked in search engine optimization is website load speed. As with traditional text search, voice search places a higher priority on websites that load faster. There are plenty of free tools online to help you measure your website’s current load time and provide suggestions to improve the speed.

Be mobile and local friendly

One-fifth of all mobile queries on Google are voice search. Ensure that your website is mobile-friendly. If your web page is not mobile optimized and/or does not load instantly (millennials can smell that delay from miles away!), you are most likely to lose out on leads and conversions. And since mobile voice search is 3 times more likely to be local compared to text search, try adding in mobile ad extensions such as Click to Call, Location, and Offer extensions. This will enable the user to take their desired action without having to conduct further searches.

Key Takeaways

You may think this change is just around the corner. However, it is here now! More and more users are adopting the new technology into their lives and voice search is becoming just another part of their daily routines. Think of this as a tremendous opportunity and put in the effort now to optimize for voice search queries, and you will find yourself ahead of the competition!