How to Build a Social Media Marketing Funnel
Setting up a funnel for your social media channels is a vital step for sustainable, long-term growth. For marketers, it's valuable to understand the path that your customers move through at each point of the user journey, from the moment they become aware of your brand, to their first purchase, to their evolution into a repeat and loyal customer. In this article, we will cover why you should build a funnel, what to consider while setting it up, and how to monitor the funnel’s success. The objectives referred to will be Facebook-specific, but this model can and should be implemented on any social channel that can incorporate retargeting.
Why You Need a Funnel
It’s convenient to build a set of campaigns to help achieve your ultimate goal of conversions or purchases. The strategy makes reporting easy to navigate and gives you a clear view of which campaigns are performing well, and which ones need to be fixed. But when performance begins to lag behind, there isn’t enough data available to make an informed decision, or your prized retargeting audience starts to outpace your organic traffic, a funnel can help change your trajectory.
The primary goal of a funnel is to feed your favorite retargeting audiences, while weeding out those unlikely to convert. Wasting money on clicks from those that don’t know who you are, who don’t trust your website, or have no intent to use your product or service, does not lend itself to growth. And while increasing social media spend exclusively for lower-funnel conversion campaigns is the obvious thing to do, you also need to think more strategically and guide prospects through a series of steps to get them to take the actions you want. A good marketing funnel will nurture its prospects with relevant messaging at every stage, resulting in incremental performance, more brand loyalty, and less wasted ad spend.
The Four Stages of a Funnel
In its early days, social media was primarily known as a brand awareness tool. However, more recently, and especially in light of COVID-19, its power to influence individuals and build their relationships with brands has become more apparent. After all, someone may become a brand advocate of your company through various touchpoints and interactions.
With today’s customer journey being more multi-dimensional, the marketing funnel is as applicable today as it has ever been. Social media’s ability to influence every single part of the funnel makes it a powerful tool for today’s businesses, particularly those in the consumer market.
Creating a Funnel for Your Facebook Campaigns
Facebook advertising presents a perfect example of how social media can be used throughout the customer journey. Facebook’s ad objectives are already categorized by the different stages we’ve highlighted above, and its ad types are specifically used for engaging users at the various stages.
Your social media funnel will likely start off as a simple structure with only 2-3 steps in the user journey. Things to consider when structuring your funnel are the difficulty and likelihood for the potential customer to complete an action. For example, watching a video on Facebook is easy and frequent, but taking out your credit card to buy a product on a website off of Facebook is difficult and rare (comparatively).
For this example, we will also include a step in the middle: Landing Page Views, which are less common than video views, but more common than website purchases.
So, we have our customer journey:
However, we don’t quite have that funnel shape. If we target the same audience for all three of our campaigns, the cost will be similar to if we never set up a funnel, and we may actually drive up costs by bidding against ourselves. To prevent this issue, we need to use Custom Audiences. The top of the funnel should be as broad as it can be, while still being relevant to your goal. The middle should be targeted to audiences that have shown some interest, like watching 25% of the video, while the bottom of the funnel should be reserved for those that have made it to your website and taken action.
Building these audiences take time and, in many cases, requires advertisers to start from scratch. You will also want to ensure that the potential reach of your audiences is sizable (Ads Manager provides audience summary information about the Audience Reach) and that you’ve set the right ad budget by evaluating product margins and monthly revenue goals.
Ongoing Success with a Social Media Marketing Funnel
Having diversified campaigns and audiences will now provide stability to performance and open a greater opportunity for testing. In addition to having a social media funnel setup, your reporting will likely change too. If your initial goal before was to increase revenue, that still remains the same, but remember to factor each step of the customer’s journey into your success metrics. The key to ongoing success is making sure your retargeting audience is always being updated and that you are always reevaluating your tactics to make sure they align with the objective of each stage.
Marin Software has an in-house Managed Services team that can help you create your social media marketing funnel, optimize your audiences, build a set of recurring reports to ensure your goals are met, and much more. Learn more about our Managed Services offering and schedule a demo today!
How Ad Tech Can Enhance The Home Delivery Experience During COVID-19 and Beyond
For many of us, our shopping habits have been forced online. The stay-at-home orders, radical shifts in demand, undersupplied distribution channels, and difficulties with supply chains have disrupted our usual behaviors and required us to shop in new ways, and away from brick-and-mortar locations. .
Even before the dramatic changes from COVID-19, online shopping was overtaking a major part of retail. With the introduction of a global pandemic, home delivery has become a serious competitive advantage, and brands all over the world are searching for ways to enhance this game-changing strategy that will most likely continue – perhaps even flourish – long after this crisis is resolved.
While many marketers may see home delivery as purely operational, primarily for a company’s logistics and supply-chain teams, there are ways that advertising technology can help and contribute to a more ideal user experience for the end-customer.
Inventory Data & Integrating Business Intelligence
The most powerful weapon performance marketers have is their own data. For eCommerce advertisers, specifically tied to delivery and operation logistics, inventory is a pivotal data point that should be ingested into all aspects of digital programs. The inclusion of inventory data allows for the changes of creatives and bid adjustments to align with the availability of certain products.
This can support the quest for seamless home delivery through the ability to sunset campaigns for certain products that are running low in inventory and will sell organically. As consumers, we all know there is nothing more frustrating than clicking an ad only to realize the product is out of stock, or that delivery will take an additional few weeks to complete.
Marin Software is an open stack platform so we can take full advantage of all your available data sources —including your inventory, CRM, data warehouse, publisher data, and additional third-party signals. Marin’s SmartFeed product automatically activates or pauses your campaigns based on inventory levels. Furthermore, it also automatically compares your optimized feed with actual converted search terms, so that you can see missing words from the title and split test to improve performance.
Ad Creatives
Estimated delivery time is set to become a unique selling point and competitive advantage, particularly as smaller, independent retailers try to compete with Amazon Prime. A simple way to convey your delivery times is within your ad creatives. By structuring your programs with geography in mind, you can control the information within the ad creatives to indicate an estimated delivery time to the user.
Additionally, creatives should include delivery cost and/or any import duties a consumer may need to pay, in order to keep it entirely transparent with potential customers (this also helps with brand loyalty in the long run). If you can, include inventory too!
With Marin’s Dynamic Campaigns, you can automatically build keywords and creatives from a product feed and campaign template, so that all the pertinent information we just covered is seamlessly populated.
Optimization
As many advertisers shift their attention from acquisition to retention, securing any revenues they have, the user experience is becoming an increasingly important element for purchase consideration. For many businesses, it’s possible that certain products or geographies can’t render as competitive a delivery service. It’s important to use this logic in your optimization and budget allocation strategies across your digital activity.
In the areas you are more competitive, be aggressive with your bids and budget allocation--you’re a champion in this sphere. This can be done easily through applying modifier logic within your AdTech tool, or leveraging a partner like Marin Software, whose platform has built-in forecasting and budget allocation tools to do the work for you.
Communication
Once an order has been made, the fulfillment experience begins. As customers, we all like to know when our purchase will arrive, thus communicating fulfillment progress is pivotal. The integration of order fulfillment and email marketing technology is an important component in this process.
Offering services such as free tracking and text updates is a great way to keep customers up-to-date. As we focus on retention and customer experience, these regular updates demonstrate that your operation is a business that cares about more than a simple transaction.
One, perhaps extreme, example comes from the mainstream pizza delivery brands like Dominos, which have an order tracking app to keep customers informed of each stage of their pizza’s journey to delivery. Updating regularly through order-received, including the preparation, cooking quality control and out for delivery, the platform makes sure customers stay up-to-date on exactly when their meal will arrive. This, of course, is a level of detail that not all brands will need, or have the resources for, however it shows what can be achieved.
Conclusion
To summarize, ad tech can support your quest to champion online delivery by automating the ad creatives to dynamically update per the user’s specific criteria. Within your creatives, your customer should clearly be able to understand the delivery time, cost and terms straight off the bat. Furthermore, you should leverage first-party inventory and shipping data, combined with audience data, to give you the biggest advantage over your competitors.
Should you want to have a conversation on how Marin Software can help you champion your online delivery strategy, please don’t hesitate to contact a member of our account management team by scheduling a demo today!
Am I Using the Right Marketing Tech Stack?
Digital technology is available in its many forms to help you work faster. For marketing in particular, technology can improve the quality of your marketing output and ultimately help you generate more revenue and leads.
With that said, today’s unprecedented shift is creating the urgent need for brands and their partners to think outside the box and pivot quickly. Furthermore, it also surfaces a time to evaluate different tech stacks and see which tools can help increase their performance and efficiency.
Evaluating the right advertising technology for the job will come down to many factors, and reaching the best decision for your organization will take considerable time and effort that will likely involve you engaging in substantial research in order to get it right.
It’s important to ask yourself the right questions so you can narrow down your search. Think about questions such as:
- What level of visibility or reporting does the product provide for forecasting versus actual results? Is it able to integrate with any of the advanced data visualization tools that I use on a day-to-day?
- Does the vendor support multiple channels? Does the platform integrate with all major search engines and ad exchanges?
- What support does the vendor provide for audience activation, and for which channels?
- What level of integration does the solution have with our organization’s current technologies? How does it integrate with different data feeds or analytics solutions?
- Does the platform enable dynamic delivery of personalized ads for the end-customer?
- What level of support would they provide for any account escalations or questions?
Once you’ve answered these questions, and the answers are suitable to your company’s needs, it’s time to trial your options. Going back to the dawn of humankind, when it comes to problem solving, trial and error has always been one of the fundamental methods. Cavemen would test which weapon would kill Benny the mammoth most efficiently, while our old friend Julius Caesar would stage many different kinds of gladiator fights in order to see what the Roman people enjoyed most.
Full-service tools can get expensive quickly (even if you’re just trial-and-erroring), and most digital marketers are limited on budgets. Luckily, there are many instances in which you can get a free taste of what a product can offer (also known as the freemium model). There may be limited usage of the product, but you’ll likely get a solid understanding of its core value and if it addresses the needs of your business.
At Marin Software, we offer Marin Go, which helps you experience the power of MarinOne (our flagship product), without committing to a platform fee. You can then upgrade to MarinOne at any time.
With Marin Go you can:
- Aggregate data from multiple channels into a single comprehensive dashboard. Marin Go can link up to accounts from 10+ publishers, including Google, Bing, Facebook, Apple Search Ads, LinkedIn, & Amazon. You can schedule reports to be collected, curated, and sent straight to your inbox in CSV format (or linking back to the platform).
- Track budget pacing for the month and preview capabilities from our premium tool, MarinOne, including automated budget allocation and machine-learning bid optimization.
- Ask questions of your performance using powerful, interactive reporting with change columns, flexible date ranges, saved views, and more.
- Automate the preparation of polished executive-level and client-ready PDF reports.
- Improve campaign performance with actionable suggestions and insights from our Account Performance Audits.
- Automatically A/B test creatives.
If you are interested in trialing an enterprise-class reporting tool for free, and evaluating a tech stack that can incorporate data from all your different marketing channels, sign up now with Marin Go! We believe every advertiser should have the tools to break down publisher silos. Simply link in your accounts to start enjoying the benefits today.
When Smart Bidding Is Not the Smart Choice
Consumer behavior has been forced to immediately change as a result of COVID-19, and change on a massive scale. The transformation in consumer consumption is fluid, and we can expect it to continuously evolve over the coming weeks and months. For us marketing professionals, it poses the opportunity to shift and re-align to meet the needs of our ever-changing customers.
A seasoned advertiser is familiar with how to roll out a new digital strategy in “normal” times. That said, very few do so at the scale and the speed suddenly required by the new world we live in today.
As restrictions are lifted, and we begin to settle back to the hustle and bustle of our familiar routines, we will continue to see consumer behavior evolve. The fluidity in the unchartered waters we’re all sailing in will require flexibility, control, reactivity and transparency across all aspects of our digital programs, optimization and budget allocation in particular.
And while many advertisers will look to Smart Bidding to execute on their campaign optimization and budget allocation, it’s important to consider the restrictions that Google’s automated bidding solution presents--including the prerequisites that we’ve laid out above--flexibility and control, reactivity and transparency. Not to mention, budget pacing and scenario forecasting is unavailable with Smart Bidding, so advertisers are unable to evaluate new optimization opportunities before testing them out in the real world. See below on what we mean.
Flexibility & Control
One of the most widely-known and influential thinkers on management, Peter Drucker, once said, “Trying to predict the future is like trying to drive down a country road at night with no lights while looking out the back window.” This statement, now more than ever, is very true. Consumer behavior is changing by the day, and the search auction is a highly dynamic environment. Advertisers can benefit from flexibility.
Marin Software’s technology solves for this challenge through Device Adjustments, Exclusion of Date Ranges in Bidding Calculations, and Malleable & Bespoke Optimization Bidding Targets. And rather than only catering to Google, Marin Bidding can also be applied to an advertiser’s Bing, Amazon, Apple Search Ads, and LinkedIn campaigns. Our solution optimizes for you, the advertiser, and not the publisher, and works across many different channels.
Reactivity
As markets and industries shift, advertisers will need to react to sudden adjustments in the marketplace. For an e-commerce advertiser, this could be a sudden increase in a product category that you had not anticipated. For marketers in insurance, it could be reacting to the sudden change in profitability across a vertical. Such shifts require prompt and agile adjustments, and Smart Bidding is not equipped to handle this.
The MarinOne platform was designed with just this in mind. Within MarinOne, advertisers have the ability to layer custom modifiers in bulk, at scale to tailor any adjustment grand or slight. Couple this with the fact that Marin is open-stack and easily able to ingest any first-party or third-party business intelligence data to automate and streamline such adjustments to ensure you never miss a trick!
Transparency & Publisher Independence
For many years to come, we will be reflecting on the spring of 2020 as the time of perplexing changes in our lifestyle. The effects for many businesses will be great, and the financial leaders of these organizations will be mindful of every investment made as they return to growth. With this in mind, we expect a wider call for transparency and publisher-agnostic partnerships. A true evaluation of marketing investments will carry an even greater weight in understanding publisher performance.
The Marin Software ethos is to deliver the best performance for our advertisers, regardless of publisher. In doing this, our technology offers absolute transparency into all areas of optimization and budget allocation - an area we increase to invest in with exciting things to come this year. Without access to the complete bid history of any keyword or any individual auction, like that of Smart Bidding, there’s no way for an advertiser to unpack the selection criteria, optimization signals or decisioning systems for their campaigns.
What to do...
According to a recent McKinsey publication on how to navigate Digital Transformation in a Crisis, now is the time to act. Playing it safe now, understandable as it might feel to do so, is often the worst option.
As we emerge, and consumer behavior continues to evolve, agility will be forced upon us. As marketers, we’ll need to use everything in our power to control shifts, react and be flexible to our surroundings. Marin is here as a partner to equip advertisers with technology, insights and support to guide them through the journey ahead.
If you’re interested in learning more about the differences between Marin Bidding and Smart Bidding, check out our dedicated page.
Marin's Dimensions vs. Google's Labels
Most search marketers are familiar with Google’s “Labels.” They’re a great visual reminder for keeping track of all sorts of things, such as your account’s keywords, ads, ad groups, and campaigns, so that you can quickly and easily filter and report on the data that is most important to you. Account organization is an extremely important element to a successful PPC campaign.
Marin Software’s version of Labels is called “Dimensions.” Similarly, advertisers can tag different objects for easy filtering, and then use those filters to monitor performance. They keep you organized by allowing you to easily aggregate data across an ad group, campaigns, keywords, or the entire account—faster and easier than exporting to Excel and running a pivot table.
However, there are a couple of unique ways in which Marin’s Dimensions can help make the life of a search marketer much easier, giving them a more enhanced functionality than Google’s Labels.
Dynamic Actions
There are a lot of unique factors that impact your performance as a business that are outside the auction–such as ratings, social media buzz, and new product launches. The machine-learning that is calculating your bids knows about these things so it can accurately predict changes in conversion rate and conversion value. In Marin’s world, these external factors are known as Dynamic Actions and can easily be leveraged with Dimensions to enhance your bid optimization via Marin Bidding.
It’s really up to your imagination, but here are some of the things our clients frequently do using Dimensions:
- Load product stock information on a dimension, and use this as an additional lever for Marin Bidding by increasing bids for products where stock is high and lowering bids where stock is getting low.
- Push/pull a particular vertical by specifying a boost on keywords that have a certain value on a dimension.
Smart Bidding (Google’s automated bidding solution) is unable to incorporate external data into its calculated bid, limiting the use of Labels.
Omnichannel Reporting
This is the most common use case of Dimensions--allowing detailed performance analysis across multiple channels for a search marketer to take action on and optimize. This can be done in the platform by filtering for different dimension values at various levels, but also in the Dimensions grid where you can see the aggregated performance for all objects with a particular value on a dimension. This use case of Dimensions is particularly powerful as it allows:
- Cross-publisher reporting: Dimension values can be applied to all publisher accounts in Marin, so you can measure the effectiveness of each marketing channel.
- Cross-channel reporting: Dimension values can be applied to all your search, social, and e-commerce campaigns, resulting in a unified performance view of all your digital marketing campaigns, side-by-side.
Google’s Labels are limited to the Google ecosystem, making it difficult to get a holistic view of your digital marketing investments.
Augmenting Your Cross-Channel Strategy
At Marin Software, we encourage our clients to leverage Dimensions to enhance their cross-channels marketing efforts through Automated Search Intent. This allows advertisers to create high-value user segments and reach people on another channel as they are making a purchase decision, ensuring the highest audience quality. How advertisers segment their campaigns/groups/keywords into intent buckets is only limited by the imagination, but many of our clients use (a mix of):
- Brand vs. Non-Brand
- Product Categories
- Customer Lifetime Value
These dimension values are then passed on to Marin Social, where Facebook remarketing audiences are automatically created based on intent demonstrated through search engine activity. While users can manually create search intent audiences in Facebook, it works in silo from Google Ads, and there’s no way to automatically generate that list from a single workflow or platform (like that of Marin Software’s).
Auto-populating Dimensions
Convinced of the benefits, but you don’t like maintaining Dimensions? At Marin Software, we love automation! Based on your rules, we can set up automated dimensions and automatically make sure objects have the right dimension value set--a real time-saver! You can set rules on keyword text, campaign structure, or any performance metric, giving you flexible and powerful control over your reporting. And that way, you don’t have to worry about keywords, ad groups, or campaigns that you may have accidentally missed. They will automatically be populated.
This sort of automation is currently unavailable with Google’s Labels, and any keywords, ad groups, or campaigns missing a Label would need to be added to manually.
Actions by Dimensions
Actions by Dimensions are all about scale. It’s about doing what a search marketer often ends up doing, but in a much quicker way! Once you have tagged items in your account with Dimension values, you can use the Actions by Dimension feature to carry out a number of time-saving bulk operations. Imagine that a retailer has created a dimension named ‘Shoes’ that they have used to tag thousands of Groups. They can use the Actions by Dimensions feature to automatically:
- Update the prices of all their ‘Jogging’ and ‘Running’ ads.
- Pause/temporarily stop bidding on any Groups tagged 'Walking.'
- Remove any prices previously set on keywords within Groups tagged 'Walking.'
While this feature is in parity with setting up automated rules for Google’s Labels, with Marin, you can Action on campaigns across multiple channels. So that when you have, say, a promotion that spans across your entire digital marketing portfolio, you can Action on all ads with the promo/offer corresponding to the sale, even on Facebook and Amazon.
Conclusion
To sum it up, Dimensions can greatly augment your search marketing campaigns, either by more granular reporting, simplifying workflows, or introducing advanced optimization possibilities, and this is accessible across all your marketing channels. With Marin being able to automatically set up dimensions for you, there’s never been a better moment to get started! Schedule a demo with one of our account representatives to learn more!
NEW: Google Debuts Organic Shopping Listings
Last week, Google announced on its blog that moving forward “search results on the Google Shopping tab will consist primarily of free listings, helping merchants better connect with consumers, regardless of whether they advertise on Google.” This change is a major shift for Google as the company looks to expand its marketplace play as an alternative (dare we say, “competitor”) to Amazon’s dominance.
What do we expect to happen next:
More shoppers - COVID-19 and a surge in online shopping likely forced Google to make this move sooner than it was planning. As Amazon found itself struggling to keep up with order fulfillment, shoppers really took to exercising their shopping options across the internet, comparing to see who had what and how soon they were able to get it. As a marketer, now is the time to evaluate messaging, put your best foot forward, and meet new customers at the marketplace.
Impression share will be a key metric to focus on - Take a snapshot of where you were prior to the advent of free listings and keep this in mind as a benchmark or target to work toward. With a huge influx of new listings (and impression volume), impression shares for existing Shopping advertisers are most likely going to drop. Using impression share as an optimization goal is a wise option once you know what the adjusted range is.
Product feed optimization will become more meaningful - Now that Google Shopping is not “pay-to-play” only, there is a more important emphasis on having really high quality product content. With a growing field of competition, relevance is paramount. Listed below are a few of the more important must-do’s to get the most out of your feed:
- Building out strong, relevant product titles
- Ensuring your products are indexed into the most accurate categories
- Including high quality, clearly formatted product images
- Presenting current prices for products and promoting discounts
Learn More
It’s a unique time to be in online retail, and any business that advertises products on Google should evaluate its own response to this change. If you are confident that your business can satisfy fulfillment with an expansion to Google Shopping, see Google’s help center for more details on how to get started. Google’s Shopping Insights page can also be a useful resource to understand trends and benchmarking numbers. Maybe it makes sense to expand step-by-step by listing select products or categories and adding more over time. It really depends on your goals and priorities.
As a reminder, you can always subscribe to our blog to get more tips on how to stay ahead of the game with your advertising efforts.
Upcoming Webinar: “Marketplace Advertising Through and Post COVID-19”
Due to COVID-19, many businesses have been forced to suspend operations or drastically shift their models to endure. With government officials now talking about re-opening the economy, marketers are starting to think about what that “new normal” might look like and how it’s going to evolve in the weeks ahead.
What marketers should be doing now differs from what they should be doing when economic activity restarts. In this webinar, we’ll explore both sides - during and post-pandemic - to equip you with short-term practical tips to address your current challenges as well as best practices to consider when your business returns to growth.
Five Successful Strategies
In our webinar, we’ll cover on the how-to’s and benefits of each of the following advertising tactics:
- Dynamic product data updates and safeguards
- New to Brand optimization
- Inventory based bid adjustments
- Amazon Attribution
- Automated bidding and Dayparting
We’re excited to share with you the means and methods being used by some of the world’s largest brands to drive success in digital commerce.
Learn More
Sign up today to join us on Wednesday, May 20th, at 10am BST.
Making the Most Out of Marin's Automated Alerts
From spend monitoring to ad ranking, keeping tabs on your campaign performance across your different marketing channels can be a lot of work. And because optimization is the key to a successful campaign, it’s good to stay in the know. However, most of us are not on our computers all the time, so we need an easy and efficient way to stay on top of it all, and be notified of any major changes immediately.
With Marin’s Automated Alerts, you can stay in the know with automatic monitoring and notifications for all your marketing campaigns. These alerts bring changes directly to your inbox, so that you can be notified as soon as they happen. This means timelier analysis and action, so that your campaigns can continue running smoothly even while you're away.
Check out these 5 alerts that you can set up in Marin to stay productive, optimize strategy, and make the most out of each advertising dollar.
- Monitor CPA
This may feel pretty standard. But as a reminder, the cost of an acquisition or conversion is important to ensure not only that our ads are converting, but that they are doing so at a profitable rate. It is important to modify an alert like this one with an impressions count to be sure that an ad or campaign has reached enough users to properly determine an ideal CPA.
Example: Alert me if impressions are greater than 1000 and CPA is greater than X.
- Getting Close to Spend Cap
This can help you monitor your budget pacing, and view the rate at which your campaigns spend. Take action before your cap is hit so that you make adjustments to achieve your performance goals.
Example: Alert me if total spend > $950 (where spend cap = $1000).
- Impression Share is Dropping
If your strategy includes top or absolute top impression share, this alert is for you. By receiving a notification when an ad’s impression share drops below your target, you can take the appropriate action (improve ad ranking, evaluate keywords, expand budget) before falling too far behind.
Example: Alert me if the impression share drops by more than 10%
- Check Keywords
If you’re testing out some new keywords for your campaigns, use this alert to monitor their performance and iterate when necessary. This alert is great for keyword strategy
Example: Alert me if CTR is less than 3% for selected keywords.
- Ads Not Converting
Your ads may not be converting because of audience targeting, ad copy, or user-experience on your landing page, you want to be notified about ads that don’t lead consumers to the end goal of a purchase or sign-up. This helps you save money and optimize your campaign for success.
Example: Alert me if I’ve spent more than $1000 and conversion rate is less than 10%.
Once you’ve created these alerts, you can breathe a bit easier knowing that if something dramatically shifts in a campaign, you’ll be notified and can take action immediately. Automated alerts in Marin are customizable and can be set up in just a few minutes. Schedule time with an account representative today to learn more!
Navigating the Covid-19 Crisis: Tips on How The Travel Industry Should Respond
The travel and tourism sector is one of the world’s largest industries. The direct economic impact of the industry, including accommodation, transportation, entertainment and attractions, is approximated to be in the trillions of dollars.
Now more than ever, with the onslaught of COVID-19, marketers face a challenge like none before. As I put pen to paper in my new office - a small space in my downstairs hallway - I ask you to reflect on the potential opportunity the current landscape brings.
The Power of Data
The most powerful weapon a performance marketer has is their own data. Business Intelligence is the vaccine that can neutralize competitors, whilst achieving performance efficiencies and guiding accurate budget allocation across all marketing channels.
Airline advertisers should be looking inwards, to their data teams and analysts, leveraging route codes, profitability metrics, and flight details to automate the creation and optimization of search and social campaigns. Similarly, those marketing the supply of accommodation, should be leveraging internal catalogues, occupancy data, and room value to balance the supply / demand of bookings. Of course, this data offers little value in our current world, however, as we begin to see countries emerging from restrictions, and life returning to normal, using this data to power your performance channels will be pivotal.
The travel ecosystem is dictated by supply / demand. Marketers, all the more, need to integrate the supply/demand equilibrium to their performance programme to ensure efficiency and competitiveness.
Incorporate Customer Lifetime Value
As performance marketers, often our theoretical focus is on the acquisition of new customers. However, in reality, very few actually optimise and report on User Acquisition or LifeTime Value. Businesses understand that the value of a new customer extends far beyond the first transaction – and this is especially the case in the travel industry. Undoubtedly the most valuable customer is a loyal customer, and in most instances, the cost of acquiring a new customer will barely cover the initial investment associated with the purchase.
Travel brands are already well-aware that there are different types of buyer personas: business travelers, big spenders, bargain-hunters on a budget, global explorers, and casual family vacationers. To predict and optimize customer lifetime value, you’ll need a clear understanding of these personalities and how they interact with your site. From there, you can tweak your keywords, content, and value proposition--through relevant messaging and loyalty programs.
As marketers look to acquire more customers through the digital battlefield that is Google, Facebook, Apple Search etc. , we need to re-focus our attention not only to external references, but to the internal data we have available to us. This synergy—plus the insight and efficiency AdTech brings to advertising—wins more customers, revenue, and ROI.
Now Is The Time to Act
As travel advertisers facing the uncertainty of when tides will shift, I believe that now, more so than ever before, is the time to lean into all things data and technology. Advertisers and agency partners should be using these usual times, which in reality are a down-time for our teams, to double-down on technological and data powered integrations to ensure post-covid, travel advertisers are bouncing back better than before.
I implore those in travel to remain positive. As a collective, let’s reshape our perspective. just as a woodworker might carefully shave a piece of wood to reveal its inner grain, use this time to work on data-driven solutions that we often do not have the time to deploy.
It may be that you are solving for the above, ingesting profitability and supply demand into the optimisation and creation of campaigns, however I ask you to go deeper. Have you come up with a solution to track your conversions amidst Apple’s latest ITP update? Are you leveraging your Audience data to the best of your ability, and does it incorporate a consistent brand experience across all channels? Are you using first-party searches on your site to dictate expansion?
Marin as an AdTech partner is positioned to solve for all of this. If you would like to have a conversation around how you could better leverage your internal data, I and my wider team are available to speak with you. Please schedule a demo with one of our account representatives today.
Stay safe.
Upcoming Webinar: “COVID-19 Checklist - 10 Questions Digital Marketers Should be Asking Right Now”
These are unprecedented times. Whether you have cut your advertising costs and are making tough budgeting decisions, or are gearing yourself for an unexpected increase in traffic and conversions, the marketing programs you need today are different from what you were running last month.
According to eMarketer, 38% of US Agency and Marketing Professional’s advertising efforts have been paused until later in the year.
The answer to the question “What should I be doing now?” is going to be different for every company. We want to help you make the right decisions by asking the right questions about your business, your marketing programs, and your customers.
We’ll be joined for this conversation by Jake Renter, Chief Operating Officer for Intertwine Interactive. Jake has seen a broad range of impact across the companies he helps manage and he’ll be sharing what he’s hearing from his customers.
Together we will help you answer the ten questions that will make sure you’re continuing to get the most out of your marketing investment, including topics like:
Is my messaging correct?
It’s a sensitive time for creatives, you might need to review and refresh your existing copy and revise anything that may be misconstrued as insensitive given the current climate.
Should I change my bidding strategy?
Paid search is very measurable, the first thing you need to look at is if your conversion rate has changed? We’ll elaborate on that during the webinar but as a start, one way to save yourself a lot of time and worry as long as circumstances continue to change day by day is leveraging tech for alerts. Demand and volume shifts for products can be dramatic, swinging up or down.
Should I be reducing my budgets and how should I be spending?
First, you may want to shift budgets into those products or services that have more relevance during this national emergency. Now might be a good time to do some incrementality testing and see the impact, especially at the top of the funnel.
Are there strategic projects I can be working on that will set me up for success?
If your mandate is to essentially “keep the lights on” now may present a good time to do the deep cleaning.
Sign up today to join us on Wednesday, April 15th, 2020 at 9am PST | 5pm BST
A Search Marketer's Survival Kit
These are challenging times. Fortunately, as a group of experienced performance marketers, we have a set of tools that we can rely on when supply and demand greatly change. Whether it is Black Friday, National Pizza Day, or the CEO emailing you a screenshot of Google search results with your ad nowhere in sight, we can help you make quick adjustments.
COVID is certainly a unique event, with no clear timeline--so how do you adapt? The answer uses the same techniques as any other promotion or event. The following list of strategies and tasks will help update your account for the current climate. Get the fundamentals right and your search campaign should stay healthy.
Campaigns
- Automated Alerts - Performance changes daily. Receive an email from Marin showing Campaigns/Groups/Keywords that have realized a significant change in spend and conversions across all of your channels Google, Bing, Amazon, Facebook.
- Negative Keywords - New events can trigger new searches. Ensure to keep a close eye on Search Query Reports. Marin provides your Google and Bing search query results in the same view and allows you to add negatives to both publishers at the same time. Go to the Keyword Expansion tab in Marin to view and manage.
- Day Parting - People’s schedules have changed, which may also impact online behavior. Review recent data and implement a day-parting strategy or revisit any pre-existing bid multipliers. Marin will make a recommendation with a click of a button.
- Scheduled Actions - New announcements are made daily, often days before they go into effect. Stay tuned into events affecting the geo locations your campaigns are opted into. Schedule the Activation or Pausing of Campaigns/Groups/Creatives.
- Sitelinks - The most efficient way to adjust your messaging or highlight a new offering is to add a new sitelink. These can quickly be added across campaigns.
- Budgets - Because search patterns have been changing, you might be running into budget limits on parts of your accounts. Please keep an eye on campaigns maxing out their daily budgets and make adjustments where necessary.
Bidding
Marin bidding will consider the most recent data and calculate bids for each keyword based on the recent performance performance accordingly, allowing for quick responsiveness during this volatile climate. The following detail bid strategies and features we can leverage if anticipating significant changes in performance:
- Targets - Marin bidding will automatically adjust for changing conversion rates, but if a conversion today is not worth the same as it was yesterday, you should also consider adjusting your targets to match the current environment.
- Boost - Set a bid multiplier across the folders. This will allow you to quickly bid down or bid up KWs in the folder while keeping your original bid in place. When the event is over, simply remove the boost and bids will return to normal. Calculate the boost by calculating the difference between the historical conversion rate by the anticipated conversion rate ((Historical CVR - Anticipated CVR)/Historical CVR).
- Folder Forecasting - You may have been asked to reduce spend for the month or next. Marin will recommend and implement performance targets based on budget. If reducing spend, use Marin's What-If feature to input your budget and Marin will make recommendations on how to change the target and hit your target spend. You can then select "Apply Recommendations" to quickly apply those targets. This can be found in the Optimization>Select "Forecasting" slider button area.
- Dynamic Actions - Similar to boost, a unique bid multiplier can be applied to a Campaign/Group/KW by assigning values to a Dimension and applying a bidding rule. This can be useful for making targeted adjustments on specific parts of your account without having the change your folder structure.
- Bid Override - If there are certain keywords to be managed manually, a keyword can be placed on bid override from the key tab while the remaining keywords in the campaign or group remain on automated bidding.
In addition to all of these strategies, Marin is happy to announce our “Expert Assist” offering, providing our customers with account audits that will provide 50+ insights and health checks. Whether your marketing program has cut budgets, adjusted your headcount, is in the middle of re-evaluating your strategy, or in some cases, is seeing new trends with your sales, please consider us an extension of your team. Our decades of digital marketing experience can help you navigate through this unprecedented time. Please don’t hesitate to reach out to us if you need further help!
Live vs. On-Demand Webinar - Which One Wins?
We’ve recently decided to do an experiment to see whether an On-Demand webinar would attract more viewers than the typical approach of picking a date and broadcasting the webinar live.
Marin regularly hosts “live webinars” and we typically get thousands of participants, but only about half the viewers attend the live session, the rest view the webinar when we send out the recording. In a Netflix world, our hypothesis was that people would prefer to have the content right away and by offering immediate access to the webinar, we would get better results. So we decided to do a test.
During this tough time for everyone, we wanted to share our results as they might be helpful for you to engage with your audience by hosting webinars while most of us are working remotely and self-isolating. Now is probably the best time to create more digital content to reach out to your customers.
Evaluating Engagement Metrics
First and foremost with a test, you want to define how you measure success. We have two goals for webinars: 1) Generate new leads who might be interested in our digital marketing platform 2) Build our position as thought leaders in the market by presenting amazing content that delivers actionable suggestions for digital marketings.
With these two goals, the key metrics are registrants and attendees. Moving forwards, two more important metrics are “Audience Retention” and “Audience Engagement”. In order to really measure the success of our webinar, we firstly view how many people started watching our content and how many dropped off during the session. Finally, did the audience engage with us during the Q&A session?
The Test
The test methodology was straight forward, we split our audience randomly into two groups, half received a series of emails inviting the users to a live webinar approximately three weeks from the first email. The second group received the same emails, but the call to action was to view the webinar on demand at their convenience.
Which One Wins?
We pulled out the results and here is what we’ve got:
So more registrations, more attendees and deeper engagement with the content for the live approach. We were shocked, clearly our hypothesis was wrong and people are more attracted to a live event. While the test was done in a pre COVID-19 world, we would expect the results to hold up as people are looking for opportunities for social interaction to break up their solitary days at home.
Ready to learn more?
Whilst we are all at home in isolation, now is the perfect time to get free training on Digital Advertising content. Marin has a list of webinars with the best practices in Digital Advertising, starting from Outsmart Smart Bidding to Amazon Advertising to Developing a Successful Marketing Strategy with Instagram Stories. Get Started Now!
Adapting to the Stay at Home Economy
We are in uncharted waters. The changes from Covid-19 are already widespread and they will be long-lasting. Like many other companies, we at Marin have been dealing with working from home, canceled travel plans and figuring out distance learning. I just got off a conference call with 30 kindergarteners and I have to admit it was pretty amusing.
Most countries are significantly restricting social contact to avoid medical system overload. After the initial shock of these restrictions, things will adjust to the new normal, a dramatically accelerated version of the “Stay at Home Economy” trend.
The first priority needs to be the health and safety of our families, the elderly, and our communities at large. As people adjust to the new routines they've been forced into, they will look to fulfill even more of their needs online. And digital marketing will be on the front lines.
I think there are two questions that, as marketers, we should all be asking of our companies:
- What can I do to help? Are there things that we can be doing that will make staying at home easier or better? Can I reduce friction for my customers in these challenging times?
- How should I adjust my marketing programs? The impact of this is widespread but not even. Some industries will be hit hard, while others will benefit (see Zoom). As a digital marketer, what adjustments should I be making to my marketing programs?
What can I do to help?
- Be Generous. Many companies with tools to help people work remotely are offering their services free during this time. Newspapers are lowering paywalls to make sure that people can stay informed. Zoom is offering its service free to public schools. Yogaworks is offering its online workout classes free until further notice (promo: ONLINE) to enable people to workout remotely.
- Be Flexible. We are all going to be changing plans, canceling trips, adjusting schedules. Let’s make it easy for our customers to do the right thing and help to reduce the severity of this by reducing the friction of making these adjustments. Airlines are waiving most change and cancellation fees. Airbnb has followed suit, and so have Disneyland and Disney World Resorts. Vail Resorts is offering full refunds to international reservation-holders, and free rebooking to domestic reservation-holders. How can your company help?
- Be Patient. Hourly workers are going to be especially hard hit as schools start to get canceled. Parents will need to stay home, meaning they can’t work (in many cases they can’t work anyway because their workplaces will be closed). Companies (and the US government) are starting to relax deadlines and late payment penalties to help people. Is this something that your company could do?
How will my industry be impacted?
You’re probably already seeing the impact in your volumes and conversion rates. You know your business better than we do but obviously travel/hospitality is already heavily impacted. Anything related to events will be similar. Companies offering products that make it easier to stay at home could benefit, including eCommerce, meal delivery, and streaming media. People are less likely to be making purchases that require longer consideration cycles at the moment, so we expect lower volumes and conversion rates in automotive and education. Sectors like financial services are less clear. With interest rates coming down and a recently-volatile stock market, expect a lot of activity in this sector.
How should I adjust my marketing programs?
- Bidding: It’s key to remember that you should think about changes in volume and changes in conversion rate separately. If volumes are going down but your conversion rates aren’t changing, you might not need to adjust your bids. But if conversion rates are changing you’ll want to change your bids. If you are using an automated bidding system (Marin or Smart Bidding), your bids will automatically adjust; however, you might want to temporarily add a boost to account for a step-change in performance. On Marin, you can use excluded dates to focus the sampling period.
- Budgets: For those advertisers seeing an increase in demand, make sure you aren’t hitting your budget caps and limiting the potential of your campaigns.
- Messaging: Review your messaging and make sure it’s relevant in the current environment, especially if you have changed your services or policies. This impacts your website first and foremost, but your ads should match. Sitelinks can be a great way to communicate such changes.
- Channel Impact: If you are a multichannel retailer, you may expect to see a shift from offline to online for conversions as consumers try to buy more online. If you sell through Amazon, your Prime support will be critical to “own the buy box” as more households will sign up for Prime. You can now send consumers directly to third-party retailers from ad sitelinks or headlines, which is important to test for effectiveness (Marin is working on an attribution tool with Amazon to connect Amazon purchases to ads on other publishers-- contact us for more info).
Be Thoughtful
Focus on how you can help and protect your community of co-employees and customers, not just shareholders. Review your plans and messaging within and outside your team to ensure that you are being responsible to the business, but not look like you are “taking advantage” of the situation. How would you feel reading about your marketing tactics on the front page?
Need more help?
At Marin, we want to help as much as we can. Our team of experts can support you during this time of uncertainty. As with many companies, we are encouraging employees to work from home to reduce the spread of the virus. We won’t be traveling or meeting in person, but our teams are fully equipped to support you remotely. If you need anything, please reach out to your account manager or click here and let us know what we can do.
Let’s all remember to stay safe and healthy, and to be kinder than necessary as we all try and figure how to adjust to and help in this new world.
Helping our customers during the COVID-19 pandemic
To our valued customers and partners,
While everyone across the world continues to navigate the uncertainty of COVID-19, Marin Software is committed to supporting your business throughout the course of this pandemic and to providing continuity of service at all times. Our hearts go out to all those who have been impacted by the virus. To those who are sick, we wish you a full recovery. To those who work in emergency services and patient care, thank you for your service and we are thinking of you.
While marketing may not seem “top of mind” right now, our mission is to enable you to continue, or adjust, your marketing operations, help you respond to the unique demands that your business may be facing, and keep your initiatives moving forward as appropriate. For 14 years, Marin has helped marketers measure, manage, and optimize their online direct marketing to deliver on their business requirements -- to acquire new customers, get their message out to a key audience, or build awareness. At this time of great change for all businesses, you can count on Marin to support you.
Marin’s leadership team is meeting frequently to assess and adjust to the situation as it evolves. We take guidance from government and public health authorities in each location in which we operate. Our first priority is the welfare of our, and our customers’, employees.
- Like many of you, Marin has temporarily moved to 100% web-based meetings, for both internal and customer meetings. We will continue to be available for regularly scheduled meetings, however we understand if you need to reschedule anything.
- Marin has maintained and enhanced for years a business continuity plan which directs our technical and training investments. We expect the pandemic not to cause changes to our availability or uptime.
- Marin has a globally distributed team, which is 100% enabled to work from home. This provides us operational resilience across time zones. You should expect a similar level of service from Marin as you have always received.
We are working tirelessly to help everyone stay safe while at the same time continuing to serve you. Please reach out to your local Marin team or support@marinsoftware.com with any questions, concerns, or if you need any additional help.
Sincerely,
Chris Lien, CEO
4 Tactics for Growing Online-to-Offline Conversions
While we may live in a digital world, offline sales still drive the bulk of the consumer economy. To be successful in today’s hyper-saturated world of search, marketers must optimize not only for what happens online, but also for those highly valuable online to offline conversions.
Here are some tips on how to drive more high-quality calls and in-store visits that result in sales
- Create an ideal online-to-offline customer experience
You can use your customers’ behaviors and preferences to personalize their purchase journeys. Many retailers are starting to combine online and offline experiences, in that you can order a product and check if it’s available at a store near you for pickup. Similarly, online retailers are also toying with the idea of opening up physical stores at select locations for their customers who prefer to pick up the products themselves.
2. Incorporate social media
Social media is a great way to generate awareness about your company’s products or services. expand your marketing efforts across other channels, and attract new buyers. Sharing images, posts, promotions, and other giveaways are great ways to garner more interest. By responding to your customers’ concerns and asking for their opinions, you can enhance satisfaction while getting more traffic for your site, which further promotes in-store traffic for your brick-and-mortar business.
3. Localize your branded content
Location data gives advertisers the ability to tailor ads to respond to people’s unique experiences and behaviors—where they are and what’s happening in their world. Highly targeted audiences result in better ROI and more personalized ad experiences that make people feel like a business is speaking directly to them.
Location data isn’t just about delivering highly targeted ad experiences. It can also help retailers figure out how to better attribute revenue to the right marketing channel. After pushing an ad to a mobile device, advertisers can track whether a person actually visits a store by using location data that their mobile app provides.
Some tips on how to localize your branded content include:
- Mention specific locations in metadata, headlines, and body content.
- Write unique, targeted content that provides information relevant to each location.
- Use images specific to locations.
4. Remember that mobile’s influence on offline sales continues to grow
In many cases, we find that while most consumers make purchases on desktop, most of the in-store visits come from people who first engaged from a mobile device. Search engines are making it easier for mobile users to quickly access the kind of information they’re typically looking for, from store locations and coupons to comparing prices and looking up product information. Because of this, it’s important to make both your website and content mobile-friendly.
Learn More
Marketers have many opportunities to drive more, higher quality offline leads from their search marketing campaigns. For more extensive guidance on Online-to-Offline conversions, along with real-world examples, download our guide, The Online-to-Offline Search Marketing Playbook.
Our aim is to help companies with both large and brick-and-mortar footprints understand:
- How Search Marketing Influences Offline Sales
- Tactics for Growing Online-to-Offline Conversions
- Store Visit Tracking
- The Benefits of Tracking Calls for Marketing Campaigns
- Leveraging Phone Conversations to Gain Insight for Smarter Marketing
- Effective Inbound Call Strategies
As a reminder, you can always subscribe to our blog to get tips on how to stay ahead of the game with your advertising efforts.
Smart Bidding vs. Marin Bidding - What’s the Difference?
In the world of search marketing, we are all very familiar with Google’s Smart Bidding. It combines machine learning and contextual signals to optimize bids at the auction level, and incorporates billions of data signals to calculate the likelihood of a conversion, based on the performance targets that have been set.
There are also a number of reasons why Smart Bidding works well for a business--it analyzes search queries rather than keywords, it leverages auction-time signals that are available exclusively via Google (browser, language settings, operation system, app, actual query, ad creative), and it incorporates a user’s historical behavior, like click and conversion rates, to determine bids.
This often prompts the question…”Well then why should we use Marin (or frankly any other bidding algorithm) when Google already has such a mature bidding solution in place?”
Well, here are a few limitations you should consider before putting all your eggs in the Smart Bidding basket:
- Google Only. Are you only advertising on Google? Didn’t think so. Don’t you want a bidding solution that works across multiple publishers and channels?
- Doesn’t leverage External Signals. There are a lot of unique factors that impact your performance as a business that are outside the auction--think ratings, social media buzz, and new product launches. Shouldn’t the machine learning that is calculating your bids know about these things?
- Struggles with advanced metrics and longer sales cycles. Are you optimizing to all downstream events or merely focused on “leads”?
- Lacks budget pacing or “what-if” forecasting. Creating accurate forecasts empowers you to evaluate new optimization opportunities before testing them out in the real world, reducing wasted ad spend.
- Limited control and transparency. Without access to the complete bid history of any keyword or any individual auction, there’s no way for an advertiser to unpack the selection criteria, optimization signals or decisioning systems for their campaigns.
See in detail how Marin differentiates from Smart Bidding below:
Marin’s proprietary bidding algorithms stay agile and reactive to market changes, and are more flexible to meet the needs of your business. We ensure optimal allocation of your advertising dollars, and are entirely transparent in how we calculate our bids. Not to mention our solution optimizes for the advertiser, not the publisher, and works across many different channels.
Want to learn more about our premium bid management solutions? Schedule a demo with one of our dedicated account representatives today!
Recent Amazon Advertising Upgrades
Are you looking for better performance out of your Amazon Advertising campaigns? We recently added a few new features designed to deliver results. We’ve teamed up some of the world’s largest brands to solve their retail challenges -- if you’re interested in learning how we can help you out click here.
Automated Dayparting for Sponsored Products
Does your performance vary over the course of the week? Are you running out of budget too early in the day? Dayparting empowers our customers to apply bid modifiers by hour of day and day of week to automatically allocate budgets for Sponsored Product campaigns to the highest performing windows.
Some example uses include setting different bid schedules for weekdays compared to weekends, increasing bids in the afternoon when competitor budgets run out or bidding down lower-performing overnight hours. This unique Marin feature is a must-try for any Amazon Advertiser. .
Full Campaign Management for Sponsored Display
The Sponsored Display ad sets itself apart from Sponsored Brand and Sponsored Product Ads because its ads can be displayed both off and on Amazon.com. Advertisers can increase their product awareness and demand across the web by reaching the right audiences for their business.
Marin offers full reporting capabilities for Amazon Sponsored Display ads and also provides campaign management. We also support scheduled actions to pause or activate campaigns on specified dates/times.
Amazon Attribution
Do you know how many of the customers you are reaching with Google and Facebook ads are converting on Amazon? With Amazon Attribution you can. Amazon Attribution is a powerful solution for tracking on-Amazon sales driven by off-Amazon sources (search or social ads)).
Marin connects the Amazon revenue with the publisher cost to present the full picture together. For example, where previously a Google sitelink pointed to Amazon would only show cost and no sales, Marin will link the revenue from Amazon Attribution and tie it back to the object, allowing for powerful reporting and optimization automation -- eliminating the guesswork and enabling optimization through revenue-targeted bidding.
Want to learn more? Drop us a line!
Chrome Picks up the Privacy Torch
Overview
Over a year ago Apple’s Safari browser stopped advertisers from following you from site to site with their Intelligent Tracking Prevention feature. Last week Google’s Chrome update announced their intention to do the same thing ...within the next two years!
Why is Chrome following Apple’s lead getting so much attention? Chrome is the dominant browser in US and Europe, and also owned by Google, the dominant force in serving and measuring online ads, which means this behavior will now affect nearly all of the ads on the internet. Advertisers were previously in denial regarding the Safari change because it is perceived as having a low market share, but now understanding the impact is essential for digital advertisers.
What is the impact from this update?
Measurement & Attribution - High
Google’s announcement will mean that 3rd Party Cookies will eventually be rendered obsolete, meaning 3rd Party view-through measurement will be obsolete. View-through measurement refers to granting revenue credit to ads that were merely seen and not clicked on. For example, Google Display & Video 360 won’t be able to track when people are seeing ads they serve outside their own web properties (i.e. outside google.com). This change benefits the search business, which won’t have to give up much credit to display ads. Click-based measurement can continue as normal for search ads. Marin uses first-party cookies today and will be unaffected by the Chrome change.
For view-through conversion measurement, as well as incrementality measurements (the value of running ads in the first place), Marin has been advocating for a while the return to ongoing, automated split testing for adjusting attributed metrics. These tests will tell advertisers the true value of their media investments -- and they don’t depend on cookies at all.
Retargeting / Remarketing - High
This announcement probably portends the end of retargeting ads based on tracking your behaviour across the web (At least on a 1:1 basis). For Criteo, AdRoll, DMPs and even Google and Facebook, the removal of support for third-party cookies means their retargeting / remarketing systems based on sites you’ve visited will no longer work.
Whilst surprising, It seems that even the big ad publishers have now deemed these lucrative ads not worth the privacy headache; Facebook have followed this Chrome announcement by just announcing a tool that will allow users to remove all this 3rd party data from Facebook retargeting today.
Redirects - Medium
Despite the Safari changes, URL redirection, where a user’s click takes them first to a tracking server before reaching their intended page, is still commonly used for ad measurement (Google Display & Video 360, Sizmek, Kenshoo etc.). However, with these changes this will no longer track on chrome. We should see redirects disappear completely (Marin has moved away from redirects over the last few years). The end of redirects serves another objective of Google’s which is faster page loads.
How realistic is their timeline? What do we know so far?
We don’t know much about how they will make 3P cookies obsolete right now, and two years in the browser world is a long time.
The only significant updates we have so far are:
- Chrome has recently introduced a new setting which if enabled by a user after Chrome 80 (Releases early February) would stop these cookies from working instantly - the first time this sort of control has been possible on Chrome. But don’t fret as its current default setting is disabled (for now) meaning no change.
- Up until now Advertisers have also been able to get a “fingerprint” of your device on Chrome to target you based on characteristics like your browser configuration, and fonts and plug-ins you’ve installed. Chrome has also just announced a feature to stop this, by only sharing a simplified browser profile with the websites you visit making it even more difficult for data companies to identify you (I.e. not impacted a 3P cookie, but along the same lines).
The Future and How To Prepare
- Make sure the ad measurement data you are using is using 1st Party (and implemented in a way that won’t be impacted by Safari Intelligent Traction prevention which can limit 1st Party data too). Multi-touch click-based attribution is still alive and incredibly useful at indicating where to spend your ad dollars.
- Lift tests continue to increase in importance, especially to understand how your display and social advertising is driving sales in a world where you can’t measure view engagement.
- From Google Ads Management, we expect to see tracking templates deprecated in the next 2 years (As they are for redirects / tracking beacons which will no longer work). Also expect to see remarketing tags shuttered, and a full push for audience tailored ads based on 1st party data connections (I.e. customer match, and Google audience data).
- Chrome’s timeline creates a window for its Privacy Sandbox – the privacy-safe API first unveiled in August - to re-enable some of the key marketing use cases delivered by 3rd party cookies today. Google suggests “Privacy Sandbox can sustain a healthy, ad-supported web in a way that will render third-party cookies obsolete.” If you’d like to get more involved in the industry standards process, you can take a look at the proposals that the web standards community is producing now. Given the impact to google’s bottom line is big, Google released a study last year showing that removing third-party cookies reduced publisher ad revenue by 52%, its likely some of the impacts we’ve talked about in this article will be mitigated by this initiative.
If you have any questions on this or want to engage Marin to see how to get ahead of these changes please get in touch. Marin has Marin Audience Hub for streamlined 1st party audience connections to Facebook, and Google, or Marin Tracker, A 1st Party, Safari ITP Proof tracking and attribution system to continue to track your users!
eCommerce Advertising in the 2019 Holiday Season
Introduction and Methodology
The 2020 holiday season is still a ways off, but an understanding of what happened last season will give you a solid foundation for making this year’s plans. This article highlights some of the key trends we noticed in eCommerce advertising including a shift in ad spend between Black Friday and Cyber Monday, higher ROAS through mid-December, and highlight lower costs-per-click for advertisers through the 2019 season.
While reading, keep in mind the 2019 holiday shopping season was about a week shorter than 2018 due to a late Thanksgiving. In 2019, the window between Black Friday and Christmas day was 26 days compared to 32 days in the previous year.
eCommerce advertising data, led by Amazon Advertising, was indexed across Marin’s customer base for 2019 and 2018. Our methodology takes the October average for each metric and uses that as a baseline (100) for the rest of the data that year. Data in the graphs show whether any day was higher (100+) or lower (100-) versus the baseline of its respective year.
Black Friday Outspends Cyber Monday
In 2019, our customer base spent slightly more (+2%) on Black Friday compared to Cyber Monday. This marks a shift from 2018 where Cyber Monday outspent Black Friday by nearly 40%.
So why the change? Potentially with the increased confidence in mobile shopping, Black Friday can be seen as another “online holiday” as shoppers find similar deals shopping on their own as opposed to lining up at the stores.
Strong ROAS Gains Through December
Cyber Monday and Black Friday are by far the best days in the holiday season when it comes to overall sales, but increase competition drives CPCs higher and pushes down ROAS. The good news is that ROAS rebounds through the rest of December, peaking at the shipping cut-off dates. One theory could be that many of those December sales were influenced by strong Black Friday / Cyber Monday advertising which “primed the pump” and led to a later-date purchase.
This ROAS growth illustrates where advertisers find their wins throughout the entire holiday season, not just its biggest volume days.
Better eComm CPCs for Advertisers
eCommerce CPCs saw less upward pressure in 2019 compared to 2018 making it a more stable environment for advertisers. The trends follow a similar pattern in each year, ramping up and peaking during the “Cyber Five Day” then leveling out through December, but the indexed CPC numbers were closer to the October baseline for all of December 2019 as opposed to being closer to 1.5x the baseline in 2018.
This could be the result of gained experience in the space, better planning, and better bidding decisions throughout the 2019 holiday season.
Wrap Up
Now is the time to revisit your results from last year while it is fresh. First off, make sure you have a means to store your Q4 2019 data for reference when 2020 holiday season rolls around. To solve for that, Marin now provides a free reporting solution to store and access your performance data for eCommerce, Search, and Social. Also, start thinking about how aggressive ad spend on one day might influence increased sales weeks later, and the general “flywheel effect” with eCommerce. Last, consider new ad types, run tests, and implement workflows that will save time and put you in a better place through 2020.
With 2019 in the rearview we’re excited to partner with brands to help them hit their 2020 targets and will share findings and opportunities as we analyze Marin customer data through the year.
5 Things Retail Advertisers Should Focus on in 2020
Now that we’ve hit 2020, there will no doubt be many metaphor-infused mentions of vision, sight, and awareness.
In the world of advertising, foresight is just as important as hindsight. Being able to predict future innovations and consumer behaviors means keeping on top of not only late-breaking industry news and cutting-edge innovations, but also knowing what lies further ahead in the digital advertising space.
We’ve taken the pulse of the industry and identified five things that every retail advertiser should know this year.
Eye exam not required.
1. Gray Markets
A gray market is the legal sale of a product outside of the manufacturer’s preferred distribution channel—as just one example, a retailer selling to other retailers. This is in contrast to a black market, where a product’s very creation is outright illegal.
While the sale of gray market products isn’t prohibited, as a retailer, you’d probably like to ensure that your competition’s playing fair and according to industry customs and standards.
Furthermore, gray markets are simply bad for retailers, for a few main reasons:
- Lost revenue
- Lack of full oversight and control over who sells your products
- They can drive prices down in different regions (i.e., no pricing control)
- They can affect your brand image—if there’s a product issue you’re not aware of, you can’t fix it, which can lead to loss of consumer trust
Although completely eliminating global gray markets is an ongoing battle, you can take certain steps—outside of costly and timely litigation—to minimize the impact of gray market sellers.
Follow the rules
Determine the rules for your region. Also make sure you know the local, international laws so that you’re not breaching them.
Implement smart tracking practices
Assign different model numbers to the same item in different countries, even though the functions of the item are identical. This way, you can more easily pinpoint when something’s being sold on the gray market.
As an additional tracking measure, use supplier codes. (Note that in the U.S., you must use supplier codes; not using them is illegal.)
Understand publisher options
Google, eBay, and other platforms allow you to submit a request to remove ads for a gray market product that violate copyright or trademark laws. Act quickly to ensure the gray product is on the market for as short a time as possible.
Other things you can do to minimize gray versions of your products:
- Have a single cost policy for your product catalog.
- Increase distribution channels to make gray markets less attractive.
- Inform your sales teams and retail partners of gray market practices.
For more information, check out the work of The Alliance for Gray Market and Counterfeit Abatement (AGMA), a California-based non-profit group of IT companies on a mission to raise organizational and governmental awareness of gray markets.
2. Reviews and Ratings
Most businesses know that online reviews are important. What’s a bit more challenging is how to maximize the number of positive reviews and ratings, and to keep them once you have them.
How to increase positive reviews
Soliciting feedback isn’t just a way to boost your business—it’s an opportunity to create a human connection with someone who could eventually be a big fan of your brand. To encourage positive reviews, be sure to:
- Know where the reviews are. The big players include Yelp, eBay, Facebook, and Amazon, but burgeoning sites like G2 Crowd (for B2B companies) offer an important niche for greater visibility. Make sure you have a presence on all of the sites that are relevant to your business and monitor them regularly. Also be sure your profiles are continually up to date.
- Ask your existing customers. There’s a reason they bought what you’re selling. Be direct and create a campaign designed to generate positive feedback. Include a tracked link to the review page to make it easy for them to find you and so you know where the clicks are coming from.
- Incentivize it. Offer a gift card, a cup of coffee, or company swag. Use season-appropriate messaging to sway them with the possibility of extra funds for their holiday gift-giving.
- Share positive reviews to social media. Social proof is business cachet. Positive feedback is a great way of boosting brand awareness and presenting your company in a good light. If possible, tag the reviewer and encourage them to share, too.
- Quickly respond to negative reviews. You may be inclined to ignore the haters. But, getting back to them with a positive message shows them (and anyone looking at your response) that you take customer satisfaction seriously. Answering with understanding and compassion can often calm an irate customer, and they may even delete their negative post. According to Google, responding to reviews—whether positive or negative—also improves your local SEO.
- Test to see what works. As with all things in digital marketing, test, improve, and repeat. Whether you’re requesting reviews via email or social ads, A/B test subject lines, email copy, images, and any other variable that could lead to increased open rates, clicks, and responses.
How to maintain high review numbers
To ensure your reviews are timely, relevant, positive, and plentiful, be sure to maintain regular contact with your customers and continually provide top-notch service. This may seem like a no-brainer—but how often can you boast of nailing all of the below?
- You provide your customers with same-day assistance.
- You approach everything you do with a “customer first” attitude.
- You regularly reach out to your customers to ask for a review.
- You measure, test, and continually improve to maintain customers and attract new ones (and you have the data to prove it).
Given today’s many product choices and much more discerning consumers, your brand is a reflection of how focused you are on the customer.
3. Your Cross-Channel Strategy
Once you have a solid plan of attack against gray markets and your positive reviews are flowing in, it’s time to implement or rethink your cross-channel advertising strategy.
There are three basic components to stellar cross-channel ad campaigns:
- The when: Determine the best time to launch a product. You’ll definitely want to create ad campaigns around a product that’s new to market, but also be sure to consider seasonality, your competition, and any news about a similar product that may have been negative. Should you hold off or be more aggressive against your competitors?
- The what: Make sure your product listing is a good, strong one. Be explicit and concise about your product’s specifications and pricing, and include a clear set of images with a few different angles. Write a great product description, including attributes such as color, gender (or unisex), and how many are in left in stock. In short: Be clear, concise, complete, and captivating!
- The how: Create a strategy that has your ads appearing on all platforms where your existing and potential customers are searching and shopping—Google, Facebook, Amazon, and eCommerce websites. The easiest way to do this is with a solution like MarinOne, which automatically allocates budget to your best-performing ads and allows you to measure your performance holistically.
By setting up your ad campaigns to work in tandem and across channels, you’ll see a “multiplier effect” that will bring you significantly more consumers who are not only more likely to convert, but also likely to spend more.
4. Your Delivery Practices
When Veruca Salt said, “I want it now,” she was onto something.
With Amazon and Walmart under pressure to deliver products in one day, and the sharing economy expected to grow by an astronomical 2292% by 2025, “fast” for consumers is no longer an expectation but a given.
With 88% of consumers willing to pay for it, is your business set up to provide next-day or same-day shipping? Are you on board with BOPIS (buy online, pick up in store)?
To complement your delivery practices, be aware and constantly attuned to price wars. Do you know “how low can you go”? To ensure the price is right, consider freebies and VIP incentives such as loyalty programs, special promotions, and cost adjustments for new or “veteran” customers. Highlight your premier products, or add features to a lagging product to make it more enticing.
5. The Latest Innovations
As we start the New Year, retailers continue to question whether voice commerce will be the “next big thing.” Our take is that “next” is “now.” As eMarketer reports, the vast majority of voice assistant users are already speaking up and researching products. If you haven’t already, now’s the time to take this technology seriously.
We’re also having an “all wrists on deck” moment. Wearables are making some noise, and if Facebook’s recent acquisition of CTRL-Labs is any indication, this space will only get louder.
Retail—and especially eCommerce—is also rapidly growing, with more and more consumers flocking to sites like Amazon, Walmart, and others. Each Amazon Prime subscriber alone places 60 orders a year.
Automated solutions for dayparting, reporting, and other tools can improve your eCommerce advertising performance, and allow you to more easily adapt to the latest eCommerce innovations.
Stay aware of the latest technologies and breakthroughs, assess what works for your business, and flex accordingly.
The Upshot
If there’s a maxim retailers can live by, it’s, “With great innovation comes great responsibility.” Every year—or, every month—brings a new way of doing business or a novel way a competitor has to gain an edge. As a result, retailers and eCommerce advertisers must stay several steps ahead.
Use these tips to spruce up your product feed, crank up the volume on your products’ time to market, and bravely venture forth to discover and try out potentially lucrative opportunities.
May your vision be 2020 this year.
Don’t Lose Your eCommerce Ad Data in 2020
As you may know, the leading eCommerce publisher only retains performance data for the most previous 60 days on a rolling basis. This means that you will not be able to see 2019 Black Friday data after January 27th 2020. But how am I going to make year over year comparisons of peak seasonal periods, you ask. We’ve got the answer.
Introducing Marin Go
Marin Go is our free enterprise-class reporting tool that will automatically preserve your eCommerce, Search and Social data.
Marin Go is perfectly suited for eCommerce advertisers who need a robust, cross-channel solution to pick up where publisher reporting tools fall short. Marin Go allows advertisers to report on performance down to the keyword and creative level with flexible reporting, charting, and dashboard capabilities—at absolutely no cost.
Seize the Data
Although time’s running out for you to save your 2019 Black Friday/Cyber Monday data, you still have a chance to successfully forecast your 2020 initiatives and perform year-over-year comparisons. Simply act now to secure your data and head into the rest of the year with confidence..
Remember the date: January 27th. And, be sure to use Marin Go to make the process easier. In addition to data retention, Marin Go provides a variety of benefits for eCommerce advertisers at any time of the year:
- Flexible Reporting.
Go beyond publisher-specific metrics like ACOS, and easily create custom reporting columns that match your business needs across all publishers. These columns can include your own prescribed calculations making it easy to connect all ad spend and attribute revenue uniformly.
- Cross-channel dimension reporting.
Slice and dice your reporting any way you want. Easily roll up category performance to see valuable trends and insights outside of your normal campaign structure. Dimensions are completely flexible and can be configured to reflect how you need to see you data aggregated for optimal reporting and analysis.
- Budget forecasting.
Our budget tool takes into account known temporal effects such as day of week, day of month, month of year and day of year seasonality. This comes in handy when you’re looking to estimate your 2020 holiday spend.
- Advanced option for qualified candidates (Amazon attribution).
For advertisers using Google Search to drive traffic to your Amazon listing, Marin can integrate the Google Spend data with Amazon Sales data to provide a streamlined view of performance. If you’re interested in using this feature, please reach out and we can evaluate the request. Note that this feature is normally only available to full Marin customers.
Next Steps
To make sure you hit the January 27th deadline to retain your data and make your ad campaign reporting easier:
- Sign up for Marin Go
- Link your Amazon account before January 27th
- Link your Google and Bing Accounts for cross-channel visibility
- Enjoy full access to automated reporting, dashboards, and alerting for free
Good luck and happy/easy reporting!
What Is Dayparting for Amazon?
We all have our own online shopping styles. Some of us like to shop on our morning commute, some on the soccer sideline on Saturday mornings, others in the evening, glass of wine and credit card ready.
Where are many of these shoppers turning their online attention to these days?
The short answer: Amazon.
Giving Amazon the Time of Day
Amazon now has over 90 million U.S.-based Prime subscribers. What do these subscribers do? They order from Amazon. A lot. On average, Prime users places 60 orders a year.
Today, advertisers know their peak selling times and can act on that information. It's safe to say that most advertisers are happy to pay more for customers who are more likely to purchase. This is where digital advertisers can greatly benefit from having a dayparting strategy in place.
What Is Dayparting?
For those not already in the know: dayparting is a term that broadcast programmers created. It essentially refers to scheduling broadcasts during optimal times of the day.
In pay-per-click advertising, the term refers to scheduled increases or decreases on search keyword bids. This way, advertisers can increase their bids/visibility during peak converting hours or promotions.
Dayparting with Amazon Advertising
Since Amazon Advertising is so new, it doesn’t yet have dayparting functionality. However, Amazon advertisers experience changes in sales based on time of day and day of week, and should consider layering a keyword bid multiplier. The bid multiplier reflects the expected change in keyword performance for a given time of day or day of week.
This is where Marin’s dayparting tool for Amazon automates bid change strategies, based on conversion data, to ensure an advertiser has the right bid at the right time.
Advertisers who manage their Amazon accounts via Marin’s platform can view, create, edit, and delete bid schedules of a single Amazon campaign or across multiple campaigns. You can make bid schedules different for each hour or set them up in blocks. You can also set them up separately for each day, or make them different for weekdays compared to weekends or the same on all days.
In Marin, setting up dayparting for bidding is user-friendly and easy to decipher:
Learn More
If you’d like to learn more about this feature and Marin’s bidding support for Amazon, please reach out to your account rep. Or, if you’re new to Marin and would like to start getting the most out of your Amazon Advertising, schedule a demo today.
CCPA and the Pivot to First-Party Data
This is a guest post from Shane Danaher, Senior Data Technology Analyst at 3Q Digital.
When the California Consumer Privacy Act (or CCPA) comes into effect on January 1, 2020, companies’ use of consumer data will change dramatically.
With a broad definition of personal data and an extensive legal reach, CCPA will touch most digital businesses — especially those in the marketing space. Because CCPA foists broad restrictions on the sale and transfer of personal data, it will make third-party data both less reliable and harder to procure. In light of these changes, businesses will have to rely more heavily on first-party data, as well as tools designed for procuring the same.
Having a strategy in place to migrate away from reliance on third-party data will allow your business to maintain its engagement with customers, and avoid running afoul of the law.
Note: This article is not meant to be taken as legal advice; rather, it provides info that can serve as a starting point for your journey toward CCPA compliance.
First of all, what is the CCPA?
The California Consumer Privacy Act is a piece of legislation designed to give citizens of California better control over how their data is shared on the internet. Although many consumer-facing businesses fall within its purview, CCPA takes an especially aggressive tack toward dealers in third-party data.
The legislation targets businesses that meet any one of the following three criteria:
- Produce annual gross revenues greater than $25 million
- Annually buy, sell, or share consumer information of more than 50,000 Californian consumers, households, or devices
- Earn at least 50% of its revenue from the sale of California consumers’ personal information
Even if none of the above apply to your business, chances are they do apply to your third-party data provider, creating potential problems for how you target new customers.
First vs. Third-Party Data
Simply put, first-party data is information you gather yourself; third-party data is information procured from somewhere else.
Examples of first-party data would be information gathered through customer purchases or surveys; an example of third-party data would be an audience purchased through a data exchange.
Typically, businesses use third-party data for new customer acquisition, whereas they use first-party data to gain insights into their existing customer base.
Third-Party Data and CCPA
CCPA is designed to aggressively target third-party data providers. Not only does the legislation threaten significant penalties for companies that deal in third-party data without consumers’ consent, but it also obligates companies to decorate their websites with a “clear and conspicuous” link titled Do Not Sell My Personal Information, which gives users the right to restrict how their personal data is used.
Assuming that many users will avail themselves of this opportunity to restrict the sale of their data, we can infer that third-party data sources, never renowned for their quality, will likely diminish in usefulness.
CCPA also ensures that anyone selling data into a data exchange exposes themselves to great risks. The law obligates companies to delete user data at the user’s request, not only from the company’s internal records, but also from any downstream locations to which the data has been sold. This effectively puts whoever gathered the data at legal risk for the behavior of any party the data's sold to.
With third-party data likely to become more difficult to acquire, less trustworthy to use, and more risky to create, companies should pivot away from relying on it, and instead focus on building a robust, first-party data collection system.
The First-Party Alternative
Not only does using first-party data limit your legal risk under CCPA, it also ensures that you’re using quality information to inform crucial business decisions.
By using tools like Google Analytics, Google Tag Manager, and Segment, you can gather a host of insights about your users, personally monitoring the data collection to ensure accuracy and compliance with user wishes.
Analyzing your first-party data can provide you with good information about who is using your service, and partnering with services such as Google’s Similar Audiences tool will allow you to find new users based on the data you’ve collected concerning your current audience.
With other states likely to soon adopt legislation similar to CCPA, now is the perfect time to start weaning your company off of third-party data, and relying completely on info you’ve gathered yourself.
Key Differences Between This and Last Year's "Cyber Five"
We all know by now that Black Friday and Cyber Monday (BFCM) smashed records once again as digital commerce continues to grow domestically and across the globe. What we found by looking at Marin customer data echoes this growth, but also highlights some key differences from this year compared to last during the five days between Thanksgiving and Cyber Monday—now known in the industry as the "Cyber Five."
For one, Cyber Monday was in December this year, which may have influenced BFCM advertising budgets—spanning two months as opposed to a typical BFCM that has both dates in November.
eCommerce data, led by Amazon Advertising, was indexed across Marin’s customer base for 2019 and 2018. Our methodology takes the mean of the first week of November and uses that as the baseline (100). Data for each day shows whether that day was higher (100+) or lower (100-) versus the baseline.
Findings
ROAS trended down
On Black Friday, conversion rate and revenues per click were up, but not by as much as the costs per click. As a result, Return on Ad Spend (ROAS) was down. This implies high competition around peak seasonality. It stresses the need to place bets wisely and plan ahead so that you’re well-positioned to withstand the bid wars.
2019 ad spend increase lags into late November
The ad spend climb this year was more modest and sustained compared to last year, which saw sharp increases. Again, this was likely due to the higher number of days leading up to Black Friday this year, with the day falling on the 29th.
It’s noteworthy that in 2018, the four days in the lead-up to Black Friday had 2x the mean spend, whereas in 2019 only one day, the immediate day prior to Black Friday (Thanksgiving) saw a 2x increase before Black Friday.
Spike in pre-Black Friday CPCs
As the graph below shows, advertising CPCs rose sharply in the three days leading up to Black Friday. Black Friday CPCs were slightly higher than on Cyber Monday. Though the increase (1.5x the baseline) is consistent with 2018, this year it took advertisers only a couple of days to get there, versus last year’s steady, two-week ramp-up.
A boon for Google Shopping
Google Shopping CPCs were up 17% YoY through the “Cyber Five” period, perhaps due to new additional placements on YouTube that may have driven CPCs higher.
More trends ahead
We’ll continue to monitor the year’s ad trends through the holidays—it looks like with growth across Amazon, Google, and others during the 2019 season as a whole will set records.
5 Ways to Outsmart Smart Bidding
As digital marketers, we know that Google has implemented a lot of machine learning features into its bidding platform in recent years. We’re at a point where you can create campaigns in Google Ads and the search giant will pretty much optimize everything for you.
Smart Bidding, in particular, optimizes your bids to maximize conversions, tapping into Google’s vast tank of signals—including user search query, browser, and language settings; location; and a user’s historical behavior to predict the likelihood of a conversion. From there, Smart Bidding increases your bids when a conversion appears more likely.
But which tools can you leverage to gain an even bigger advantage with Smart Bidding?
Get the basics right
When thinking of ways to be more strategic with Smart Bidding, the first thing to consider is your data integration. Marketing needs to be data-driven to be effective. There’s a lot of data you can generate in today’s world, and the data you’re pulling will be the core of a successful marketing strategy.
If you know your target user’s behavior, goals, pain points, and challenges, you can develop marketing campaigns that cater to their specific needs. Some of the data you could be collecting includes:
- Web analytics
- Social media data
- Email marketing
- Blog and content creation
- Lead generation
- In-store sales
Marketing analytics and data are playing a larger and larger role in strategizing your business forward. The more insight you have, the better, more strategic decisions you can make. Which begs the question: are you incorporating all the data you have available?
Once you have the right data integrated, it’s important to assess your KPIs, or choose what to measure. You should always measure quantifiable metrics that align with your organization’s goals.
We often see brands optimizing to a CPA. However, this approach is far from ideal if you have different margins for groups or categories of products, and doesn’t follow the logic that “not all orders are created equal.” It’s always good to occasionally review KPIs—you can often realize huge gains by adjusting to a more granular KPI.
In addition to the above, “not all customers are created equal,” either. At Marin, we believe that customer lifetime value (CLV) remains one of the best metrics to understand the overall impact of your performance advertising campaigns. Your customers aren’t just worth the amount of money they spend on your business today. They have future value if you’re able to retain them as customers.
Smart Bidding can only reach the next level of maturity when it works on conversion data that differentiates between the first transaction of a new customer and repeat purchases. Typically, only a CRM system can tell which of the two happened. And while connecting conversion tracking to CRMs presents a challenge to digital marketers, it’s possible with the right development resources.
Now that we’ve covered the basics, let’s talk about how you can improve performance with signals that matter to your business.
Align to your business needs with custom modifiers
Using Smart Bidding means relinquishing control across different market segments to what Google interprets as the most likely to convert. That’s fine in a vacuum, but an advertiser will commonly know more about their business than what’s reflected in historical online conversion metrics.
Still, there are many unique factors and trends that impact you as an individual advertiser that publishers aren’t aware of, such as seasonality, ratings, new product launches, coverage in the media, or social media buzz. Incorporating extraneous or contextual data into bid optimization can help you gain a competitive advantage and understand consumer intent—meaning more sales and revenue.
Weather and television-based contextual marketing are some of the more prominent examples of contextual marketing, but there’s no shortage of additional opportunities.
To give you an idea of how online KPIs can sometimes not match the real world, imagine a car rental company. If a particular location has very little inventory left, it might be worth considering bidding down, since a high percentage of traffic wouldn’t be able to rent.
Similarly, if a location has excess inventory, consider bidding up!
Modifiers can also be very useful to help handle promotional adjustments. Many brands have a calendar of sales or promotions, and while some of these happen at the same time every year, it’s likely that many are ad hoc, occur for different product lines, and happen for varying lengths of time each year.
Since all bidding engines leverage historical data, there will always be a delay from when a promotion begins to when bids are adjusted. Therefore, it’s important to modify your bid on the day the sale begins to capitalize, and likewise when a sale is over and conversions get back to ‘business as usual’—applying a negative modifier helps prevent overspending on bids while the bidding engine adjusts.
This is far more difficult to achieve with Smart Bidding, but easier by leveraging Google Ads scripts or a tech partner like Marin.
Full-funnel optimization
Once you’ve covered the basics and started to apply adjustments for your specific business data, another challenge that many brands face is optimizing to multiple stages of a conversion funnel.
There are many options for how to look to optimize in the most efficient manner. You could look to optimize to the point highest up the funnel—or the ‘lead.’ Or you can optimize to final sale.
However, if you have a long latency period from initial lead to final purchase, this limits how reactive bidding can be to current conditions, especially if you change targets. While it’s best practice to remove the days of latency from bidding decisions to make sure you’re using accurate data, it’s important to remember that it’s not current data.
So...what is the best bid strategy to optimize to downstream revenue in the bid calculation?
In the above example, we have a number of users who see an ad for a performance marketer. Some of the users will click the ad and decide it’s not a good fit for them, others will register, fewer others will continue to pay for a trial after being contacted, and finally even fewer will decide to buy the full product/service.
At Marin, we recommend trying to find the ‘best of both worlds’ to account for every step of the funnel, which requires making multiple bid runs. First, run bid calculations to the highest point of the funnel, or the ‘lead’, and then additional bid runs to calculate for the other points in the funnel or final revenue.
In this example, one keyword creates lots of leads, and therefore an accurate bid optimizing to leads equates to $5.
The second keyword creates far less leads, so a bid calculation for this keyword equates to $1.50.
However, the first keyword results in far less revenue from all those leads than the other keyword, and therefore a second bid run would need to calculate the adjustment required.
The first keyword is adjusted -50% to create a final bid of $2.50. The second keyword, which creates more revenue overall and far more revenue per lead, is adjusted by +500% to give a final bid of $7.50.
Marketers can leverage Marin’s full-funnel bid strategy to stay reactive and make sure the top of funnel is optimized.
Budget allocation
These days, a data-driven marketer has to answer many budget allocation questions. Where should I invest my next dollar? Am I going to hit my revenue goals? Will I spend my entire budget? Plus, today’s online customer journey isn’t as simple as it used to be.
Consumers switch between channels (and devices) as they move down the purchase funnel, from inspiration and product discovery to more focused product research and comparison, and finally to conversion.
The million dollar question is always how and where to spend your budget. While we’re not going to touch so much on attribution, it’s important to note that leveraging predictive models to correctly allocate budgets across different campaigns and channels can help drive overall uplift.
With tools like Marin’s Budget Optimizer, marketers can forecast, monitor, and automatically reallocate budgets across their most efficient campaigns and marketing channels with ease.
Take this WorldFirst customer example.
Using historical performance, Marin’s algorithm paced the budget across search and social to achieve the best results per the customer’s business objectives. As a result, WorldFirst has seen conversions increase by 107%, and has a much better understanding of which campaigns drove more sales and where budgets were best allocated.
This kind of financial modeling can be applied on top of your bid strategies to have a continuous view of investment opportunities and high-potential returns.
Leverage technology for better automation
Finally, let’s finish with thoughts of technology.
To recap the above: while Smart Bidding does offer a quick answer to some common PPC challenges, Google’s broad data doesn’t necessarily reflect your target audiences, which are unique from the average user.
More importantly, Smart Bidding gives you no visibility or control over the data being used, which means an advertiser has no access to the complete bid history of any keyword or any individual auction. For advertisers looking to analyze granular performance, the possibilities with Google are limited.
To truly maximize your campaign performance, you need to take control of your own bids and the data being used to optimize them, and do so in an automated fashion.
Leveraging a third-party advertising technology tool like Marin can help you coordinate with Smart Bidding. Marin works as a performance layer for those who want a powerful bidding solution to automatically scale their accounts while maintaining a certain degree of control.
eCPC is a smart bidding strategy that allows you to continue to place the base bid outside of Google, while still allowing Google to make the ‘Auction Side Adjustments’ based on the data they hold. This is almost the “best of both worlds” and allows you to capitalize on some of the strategies we’ve discussed, without giving up Smart Bidding as your automated bidding solution.
By using this hybrid approach, Marin continues to help brands outsmart Smart Bidding, or more accurately, work hand in hand with Google to get an edge over their competitors.
Conclusion
We’ve talked about several areas you can focus on to drive uplift:
- Getting the basics right with accurate data, correct KPIs, and data driven targets
- Aligning your online KPIs to real business needs by leveraging Custom Modifiers
- Considering a full-funnel bid strategy if you have a multi-conversion funnel to optimize to what matters most, while still remaining reactive to auction or real-world conditions
- Knowing the true value of all your digital marketing activity across different campaigns and channels to maximize your return and drive incremental lift, with better budget allocation
- And finally, leveraging technology that can help you easily implement and automate these strategies
Want to learn more? Join our webinar, How to Outsmart Smart Bidding, on Wednesday, December 11th at 10am PT / 1pm ET.
Top 10 Trends in Digital Advertising in 2020
As we approach the “visionary” year of 2020, we took a look at what the New Year has in store for the digital advertising industry. Here are key things to watch out for as you plan ahead and finalize your marketing budgets.
1. Amazon Hits Its Stride
2019 was a phenomenal year for Amazon, supported by a record-breaking Prime Day and a highly successful back-to-school season. Brands have begun to understand the power of advertising on Amazon and the unique opportunity it offers to capture people at the beginning of their purchasing journey.
The Opportunity: Brands have flocked to Amazon for its revenue-generating ad capabilities. We expect this trend to continue in 2020 as Amazon refines its offering and advertiser use becomes more sophisticated. Experiment with sending more of your paid search traffic directly to Amazon as the offerings improve, like Amazon Attribution. Amazon is simply too good of an opportunity to miss.
2. Search Remains Strong and Flexes Its Gen Z Muscle
Paid search remains the dominant digital ad channel and as we look into next year we see no indication of this changing. Google retains the upper hand through constant innovation and releasing a number of sophisticated tools that help marketers target their customers more effectively.
The Opportunity: As we move into 2020, a key challenge for search advertisers is how to reach the Gen Z audience. It’s no surprise that mobile, specifically smartphones, will be a core part of this strategy.
Smartphone search usage continues to increase—more local search queries are now done on smartphones. Marin research shows that university students are truly the smartphone generation; with this in mind, advertisers that adopt a mobile-first approach to search can expect to reap rewards next year.
3. Despite Social Controversy, Instagram Remains Facebook’s Secret Weapon
In spite of an ongoing public image crisis, Facebook has continually published positive results throughout 2019, demonstrating that media backlash doesn’t necessarily equate to poor business performance. This growth is likely to continue into 2020 due to the roll-out of a number of new features such as Facebook Watch and Automatic Placements.
However, the real story is still the rise of Facebook’s secret weapon, Instagram. With more than 500 million people using Instagram Stories every day, there’s plenty of opportunity for advertisers to experiment with engaging creative.
The Opportunity: Instagram Explore Feed is expected to launch in the New Year. It’s a fairly new concept for advertisers, bringing more interest-based targeting to the platform. Explore Feed represents a great chance for advertisers to be part of what’s culturally relevant and trending while reaching new audiences looking to discover something new. Exciting times ahead!
4. The Meteoric Rise in eCommerce Advertising
One of the biggest stories of the year is the rapid growth in eCommerce advertising. According to Statista, it’s expected there’ll be more than 300 million U.S. online shoppers by 2023. Brands should identify ways of finding and engaging with the right shoppers—for example, understanding ad formats on different channels and the role they play in the customer journey.
The Opportunity: There are so many formats emerging—from Stories to shoppable posts—and each one is designed to reach audiences at specific points in the journey. Google Shopping Ads, for example, are designed to move buyers from the consideration phase to conversion.
Understanding these nuances, as well as how these various ad formats can work together in a cross-platform approach, can help marketers avoid a siloed strategy in 2020 and will propel the business in a competitive market.
5. Will 2020 See Visual/Voice Search Take Off?
Google, Facebook, and Amazon are the key players in the voice search game. According to Google, 20% of all searches are voice and 55% of households are expected to own smart speaker devices by 2022. We’ve seen a big push this year with voice technology developing at a rapid rate.
Visual search is also starting to take shape. On the one-year anniversary of Lens, Pinterest revealed that Pinterest users were carrying out more than 600 million visual searches every month with Lens, a 140% increase year-over-year. Google’s own visual search tool, Google Lens, has seen similar growth with images now returned for 19% of search queries on Google.
The Opportunity: As speech-recognition accuracy goes from 95% to 99%, we expect voice search especially to continue to see rapid growth in 2020. As Google’s SERP continues to evolve for a mobile world, 2020 will likely see more ad formats that incorporate a more robust visual offering than years past.
This visual component has already seen an impact in Shopping campaigns since Google expanded to Showcase Ads this year. And, with 62% of millennials wanting visual search over any other new technology, it seems natural that using an image to start a search will become the norm in the next 12 months. Take note!
6. Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, and
Digital Advertising
The rise of ML/AI in advertising has had a profound impact on the industry over the last 12 months, opening up new doors and allowing marketers to deliver relevant and engaging ads to their customers. To optimize campaigns and truly drive performance, brands have a huge opportunity to leverage automated, AI-driven technologies that allow for more testing and ultimately smarter strategies.
The Opportunity: Data is what fuels AI/ML if you want to stay ahead of the competition it’s important for brands to realize the value of their own data—whether it’s from a CRM, product sales, or inventory. Marketers can be much more effective with their ad campaigns when they leverage both first- and third-party data. Using both categories of data allows them to be aggressive when they expect good returns, and to pull back when performance is dipping.
With the rise of responsive search ads, Google has empowered advertisers to test the capabilities of machine learning in their campaigns, reducing the need for traditional A/B testing. In order to deliver relevant and engaging ads to their customers, marketers will need to focus their time implementing machine learning and AI continue to transform advertising options.
But marketers should also be wary of this new technology and ensure that implementing it into campaigns is in the best interest of your audience. Many of these emerging technologies do not take into account your unique audience and the proprietary data you have in-house. Marketers can become frustrated with one-size-fits-all solutions, when their business would benefit from customized solutions, tailored to their specific needs. For instance, Smart Bidding offers limited visibility and control over the data being used, leading to a missed opportunity to maximize performance.
We expect AI and ML to continue to drive innovation forward in 2020, transforming search and social advertising by letting you tailor ads to individuals, with the goal of fully personalized ads just around the corner.
7. Digital Video Will Hit Fast Motion in 2020
Digital video ad spend continues to climb, according to the IAB's 2019 Video Advertising Spend Report. Marketers report digital budgets have increased 25% year over year, with a whopping 75% in the Media and Entertainment category.
The Opportunity: Consumer viewing habits explain this spike in ad spend, and it’s clear that advertisers should go where their customers are. AI developments for content will allow for more personalization in digital video, meaning brands will be able to tailor video ads. Brands have more incentive than ever to reach users with immersive, personalized content.
8. CPC/CTR Keeps Evolving
According to Marin research, overall search click volume has grown 14% YoY with a big jump in ad clicks for healthcare (85%). The technology industry came in second, with a 25% increase. The most notable decrease in CPCs was for healthcare, which dropped 47% YoY and now sit at $0.61 for Q3 2019. Consumers are heading to the internet for their healthcare education, and marketers in the industry see this as an opportunity to further engage with patients.
The Opportunity: The update from Google AdWords to Google Ads brings many new features, including more automated and smart options, like Smart Campaigns, with new and updated tools integrated directly into the Google Marketing platform. These updates have great potential with the new features opening up possibilities for search advertisers.
9. CMOs Tackle Ad Fraud and “Fake Views”
According to a recent report, global ad fraud is predicted to cost an unprecedented $23bn this year. In May 2019, the ANA released a study reporting that advertisers are starting to break down the pervasive fraud that riddles the digital ad world. However, with losses still projected to total $5.8B due to bot fraud this year (only an 11% decline from 2017), advertisers have a long way to go before they’ll win this battle. This growth shows no sign of slowing down as we move into 2020—the amount of fraud will only increase.
The Opportunity: Unfortunately it’s not easy to win the battle against ad fraud. CMOs must keep abreast of the latest developments. Being up to date means you can be quick to react so they can choose the right strategies for tackling each issue. For instance, just as AI powered tools like contextual image recognition and text analysis are used to combat brand safety threats, using techniques like supply path optimization and relying less on open exchanges need to become a force of habit when tackling ad fraud.
10. Mobile Keeps the Digital Advertising Trophy
People are spending less time watching broadcast TV on an actual set and reading print newspapers, and digital media consumption is picking up the slack. Mobile is the main driver of this growth. Within mobile itself, daily time spent with media on smartphones will be the only category in our forecast to see persistent growth.
The Opportunity: Google recently introduced the launch of several new ad types that will be showing up on mobile devices. Google searches on mobile devices will include gallery ads that allow advertisers to display multiple images for users to swipe through.
Users will also begin to see ads in Google’s discover feed—the feed of news stories that are built into many Android home screens, inside the Google app, and on Google’s mobile homepage—though they’ll only appear in select locations for now. Brands that maximize these mobile tools will be the ones that succeed in 2020.
Amazon Advertising This Cyber Monday: Too Good an Opportunity to Miss
According to Amazon, last year’s Cyber Monday was the biggest shopping day event in history. It was part of a record-breaking holiday season that included Thanksgiving, Black Friday, and the weekend, i.e., the "Cyber Five."
Marin’s ad management platform showed that during last year’s Black Friday weekend, clicks and ad spend were up in the US by 53% and 81%, respectively. Cyber Monday also posted 40% growth in clicks and 105% growth in ad spend for the US.
Although both events originated in the US, Marin’s data shows that advertisers in the UK and Europe are rallying around Black Friday and Cyber Monday, too—while the US leads in overall ad spend for Black Friday (81%) and Cyber Monday (105%), the UK runs a close second, followed by Europe.
It’s clear that for brands Black Friday weekend is simply to good an opportunity to miss. So, to help you maneuver through the upcoming spending sprees and plan for a successful holiday season, we’ve put together some advice.
Advertising on Amazon is a Must-Do
Are you selling products online either via your website or a third party? If the answer is yes, then Amazon Advertising is a must!
Advertising on Amazon can be an easy way to promote your listings and get your products noticed when people are shopping for similar items. There are three advertising solutions:
- Sponsored Products for promoting individual listings
- Sponsored Brands for registered brand owners to promote their brand and product portfolio
- Sponsored Display, a newer ad type bringing over the legacy Product Display Ads from the Amazon DSP
These solutions can give your products a visibility boost and maximize sales by highlighting your products to a new audience.
Sponsored Products
Amazon Sponsored Products ads are a type of paid advertising where you’re only charged when a consumer clicks your ad (pay-per-click). Keywords trigger the ads, and they also drive the consumer to a product detail page within Amazon. The ads can be displayed on top of, alongside, or within search results and on product pages, and can appear on both desktop and mobile.
Sponsored Products ads can help you grow sales on Amazon by reaching consumers searching for products like yours and driving them to your product page. This ad type can increase eligibility and placement status for your top Buy Box offers, and help grow your new and low-exposure Amazon Standard Identification Numbers.
Sponsored Brands
As with Sponsored Products, Sponsored Brands are a type of paid advertising where you’re only charged when a consumer clicks your ad. Note that this ad type is only available for professional sellers enrolled in the Amazon Brand Registry, vendors, booksellers, and agencies. You can display your ads at the top of, alongside, or within search results, on both desktop and mobile.
Sponsored Brands ads can help drive discovery of your brand. They’re great for generating awareness of a new product, promoting seasonal items, or creating more demand for a bestseller. They also allow you to drive consumers to your Store page, custom URL, or a bestselling product page.
Three Tactics to Fine-tune Your Amazon Keyword Strategy
The most fundamental difference with Amazon is that the majority of searches there are specific to a product (“sunscreen”) or brand (“Covergirl sunscreen”), and not informational (“should I be using sunscreen”), navigational (“drugstore”), or laden with superlatives or modifiers (“best sunscreens 2019”).
So, while “targeting relevant keywords” is a broad umbrella concept, breaking it down more granularly—and coupling this concept with the underlying mindset of Amazon searchers—will help brands achieve maximum return on their Amazon Advertising goals.
At Marin, we have a deep bench of Amazon tips to drive your success, but for starters you can try these three tactics to fine-tune your keyword strategy.
Conquest Competitively
What this means: Target keywords of brands and products that are similar to yours.
Play offense with your keywords, and target complementary brands and products to capture users similar to your buyers. Be strategic about how you bid on these terms versus your own. A product that’s in parallel with yours is worth a higher bid, as opposed to an entire brand that has a number of out-of-category, dissimilar products.
Protect Your Brand
What this means: Target your brand name and product name or some variation of it.
Safeguard your brand from competitors and retain loyalists. There’s a school of thought that says you can win brand terms for free through organic listings. However, dominating Amazon’s search results with your brand not only plays defense against your competitors who are likely bidding on your brand terms, but also strengthens your brand with a ubiquitous presence.
Test and Harvest
What this means: See what works and run with it. Use the rest of your keywords to prospect and build your upper funnel. Target complementary product keywords and out-of-category keywords to grab users who are active in other, related purchase cycles.
Once you can start intelligently “targeting relevant keywords,” be vigilant about analyzing your data. Scale up your best performers while throttling back your low performers, but be mindful of external factors that could change your keyword performance over time—such as seasonality, the release of competing products, sales or promotions on other channels, or positive or negative PR.
Good luck with your Amazon Advertising and this year’s Cyber Five!
Search, Find, Advertise: Google's New YouTube Ad Options
Google launched Shopping ads on YouTube a few years ago. However, earlier this month, they announced they’ll be expanding these ads to the YouTube home feed and YouTube search results.
This product-based ad type not only matches to users’ keywords in searches, but can also match to user’s “expressed interests.” These interests are likely indicated by the user’s viewer video history and video content itself.
Shopping ads in general remain a powerful option and source of growth for retail advertisers. According to our latest benchmark report, retailers spent 40 percent of their budgets on Shopping ads in Q3 2019. And, the number of clicks on Shopping ads increased 14 percent quarter-over-quarter, all pointing to continued opportunities for marketers.
Video Drives Sales
Why is YouTube, in particular, so important for retail advertisers? Well, according to Google, “Nearly two-thirds of shoppers say online video has given them ideas and inspiration for their purchase,” and of those people, “90% say that they’ve discovered new products and brands via YouTube.”
Now, by expanding its YouTube ad offerings, Google is providing retailers a new way to reach consumers when and where they’re most likely to “shop around.”
Who Can Run YouTube Shopping Ads
Advertisers who are already using standard Shopping campaigns today and are opted in to YouTube on Display Network will be automatically eligible to run YouTube Shopping ads. Advertisers who are not opted into the campaign-level setting to include Display Network will need to opt-in in order to surface their Shopping ads on YouTube.
A Few Tips for Optimizing YouTube Shopping Ads
To stand out and get noticed in YouTube’s home feed and search results, be sure to:
- Correctly categorize your products within your product feed—this way, they’ll show up in the right context.
- Draw attention by including captivating, high-quality product images.
- Test performance to see what kind of new results you’re generating by opting into YouTube versus Display network.
- Stay on-brand and consistent, and think about similarities between this ad type and, for example, product ads on Instagram.
If you’re a Marin customer and need help with these ad placements, get in touch with your account representative. If you’re new to Marin and would like to learn more, schedule a demo today.
4 Last-Minute Tips to Boost Your Holiday Ad Campaigns
As many holiday shoppers tie the last few ribbons on their gifts this year, the last-minute stragglers (no shame here) are planning to catch eleventh-hour sales and deals.
Here are a few advertising tips that provide a quick digital nudge to the season's procrastinators.
1. Amazon: Show Up at the Holiday Party
More consumers than ever before are heading to Amazon to perform product searches. If you’re not already advertising on this retail behemoth, it’s not too late to start! Having an Amazon presence will make it easier for shoppers to find your products by highlighting the ones they’re most interested in buying. Bone up on Amazon’s ad formats to identify the ones that are right for your business.
For advertisers already using Amazon’s Sponsored Brands Ads, make sure you’ve tested your campaigns to ensure they’re delivering top-notch performance. Even one, small improvement can make a difference in clicks and conversions with last-minute holiday shoppers.
For more tips on advertising on Amazon, read our info-packed blog articles:
- 3 Keyword Tactics for Advertising on Amazon
- Testing Effectively with Amazon Sponsored Brands Campaigns
- Amazon’s Sponsored Products Ads: Building the Right Structure
- Amazon’s Sponsored Products Ads: Your Targeting Options
- Amazon’s Sponsored Products Ads: Bid Optimization with Marin
2. Online and In-store: Spike the Eggnog
Who likes plain old eggnog, anyway?
Shoppers love convenience, especially as the Christmas “deadline” draws near. This is the time when it either may be too late for timely shipping, or when people might prefer not to pay extra for expedited delivery. Have you made store pickup available in the days leading up to Christmas? Is this reflected in your shopping ads?
Also, to entice them once they’re in your store—does your mobile strategy allow for an impulse buy? Do your ads let shoppers know how late your stores will be open?
Sweeten the holiday deal by making it easy for people to find and purchase the products they want, when they want them.
3. Deck the Halls with Festive Photos
Bring on the upbeat visuals—reindeer, decorated trees, boughs of holly, you name it. Work in a non-denominational message to attract shoppers across religions and belief systems.
For the best results, limit text on images and have the picture do most of the talking. That said, be sure to clearly present eye-catching, wallet-friendly deals in your ad copy.
4. Go Cross-Channel or Go Home (for the Holidays)
According to Harvard Business Review, customers using multiple channels spend 4% more in-store and 10% more online than those on a single channel. Someone on their laptop in the morning may be checking their smartphone in the afternoon, and then swinging by a store in the evening after work. (We, too, have been in the shoes of the frazzled, pre-vacation shopper!)
Increase your ad spend across channels and make sure you have a strong strategy in place for the days leading up to Christmas. You should be using search intent to fuel your Facebook and retargeting campaigns, and leaving as little as possible to chance. That perfect gift someone’s looking for will hopefully be yours.
Happy Holidays
As always, test, test, and test some more, and then optimize based on what’s working best. To learn more about holiday ad strategies and tools that’ll help you go the extra mile all year long, schedule a demo with us today. From Marin’s family to yours, have a very merry holiday and a revenue-boosting New Year!
3 Awesome Automations You Can Do With Marin
Automation should be a key part of any marketer's toolkit, reducing time spent on repetitive tasks and avoiding missed opportunities. Marin’s automation features will help free up your marketing team’s time from performing mundane work, and give them the capacity to brainstorm new ideas and boost productivity in other areas. These tools do a lot more than just making sure you don’t forget things—they make the existing workflows in Marin even more powerful.
For over a decade, we’ve been making it easier to manage the complexity that goes into digital marketing. Here, we highlight three ways our advertisers automate their efforts to simplify their work.
Keyword Resuscitation
Over time, any automated (or manual) bidding solution will bid down underperforming keywords. Generally this is a feature, not a bug—if they’re not converting profitably, you want to minimize wasted ad spend, even when those keywords have generated a decent number of clicks.
However, some of those keywords may be relevant to your organization and perform as your business evolves or competitive conditions change. If you shut off these “low-performance” keywords altogether, you may miss out on some conversion-ready traffic. This is especially true for keywords with low impression share.
With keyword resuscitation, Marin automatically increases your bids temporarily to ensure you’re not missing any click opportunities. If the keywords keep underperforming, Marin bids them back down.
Auto-populating Dimensions
If you find yourself working on Google Ads accounts with hundreds of active campaigns, keeping track of what’s happening where can be a pretty daunting task.
Marin’s Dimensions help keep advertisers organized, by allowing them to easily aggregate their data across an ad group, campaigns, keywords, or the entire account—faster and easier than exporting to Excel and running a pivot table. You can also use Dimensions for tagging your different objects for easy filtering, and then using those filters to monitor performance.
How are your brand campaigns performing against your non-brand campaigns? How are your experimental keywords performing? Do you have promotional ad copy you’re closely monitoring? Do you have different bidding rules you want to manage across your keywords? Dimensions help you tag and streamline all these views.
What about the keywords, ad groups, or campaigns you’ve missed? Manually having to set dimensions for a lot of ads or keywords requires a lot of time and resources.
Now you can auto-populate dimensions based on rules you specify. You can set rules on keyword text, campaign structure, or any performance metric, giving you flexible and powerful control over your reporting.
Automatically Pause Your Losing Ads
Always be testing. Your creatives shouldn’t have to have a long shelf life, and you should continually look to improve performance with new messaging ideas.
If you run multiple versions of a creative in a group, Marin can automatically pause the underperformers when there’s statistical significance so you can add a new challenger creative. Even better, with rules-based adjustments, you can replace the loser creatives with new ads, further automating your ad testing experience.
Get Creative
This was just a taste of three automations we frequently see with our customers. We don’t want to limit you just here, however. Marin’s platform is flexible, and it’s easy to get creative to meet your specific business needs.
Whether it’s using performance criteria to automate the movement of your ad groups into different bid strategies, auto-populating objects with missing data, or scheduling ads for special promotions or events, the custom parameters are entirely up to you. Just talk to your account representative and we can get the ball rolling.
Or, if you’re new to Marin and would like to start powering your ad campaigns with easy, time-saving automations, get in touch today.
Facebook’s Automatic Placements: Take the Guesswork Out of Finding Your Audience
Earlier this year, Facebook rolled out Automatic Placements, a setting that ensures that your ads will serve on Facebook, Audience Network or Instagram, to achieve your most desired result based on the bidding objective you choose.
Similar to Google, Facebook wants advertisers to entrust its machine learning to place ads in the most effective way possible, with the intention of creating the best user experience and serving the right ad at the right time. Facebook uses advanced algorithms to determine which placement type performs the best and is the most effective for your brand. The algorithms then attempt to serve more ads in those winning bids.
This setting is designed to get your ad the lowest average cost for the event you optimize your campaign for (e.g., link clicks, landing page views, video views). This takes the guesswork out of where your audience is. The Automatic Placements feature also reduces the time it takes to manually optimize placements, since Facebook does it for you, and extends your ads’ reach by enabling placement on more platforms and multiple placements within these platforms.
By choosing Automatic Placement, you tell Facebook to find the most relevant people across all of the eligible placements at the cheapest overall average cost available.
What are the Different Types of Facebook Placements?
There are 14 placements to run ads within the Facebook Network. We anticipate that number will grow as Facebook expands to more of their network of apps. (We expect to see WhatsApp appear as a placement soon, as well as the Instagram Explore Feed.)
Facebook News Feed
When it comes to serving social media ads, the Facebook News Feed placement is the one that sparked the movement. It’s important to remember that people don’t like being disturbed from their online activities, including Facebook browsing. Placing your ad on the desktop News Feed reduces the intrusiveness of your ads since they appear with the posts of your audience’s Facebook friends and pages they like.
Instagram Feed
Not only do over one billion people use Instagram every month, but engagement numbers for the app are higher than both Facebook and Twitter. For advertisers with highly visual products or services, Instagram ads are a must. As you might have guessed, you only have the capability to target mobile users on Instagram.
Facebook Marketplace Feed
Marketplace is Facebook’s equivalent to eBay and Craigslist. The major advantage it has over the competition is the existing Facebook user base.
Facebook Suggested Video and Facebook Watch Feed
When clicking a video in your mobile News Feed, a “Suggested Video” feed that takes up the entire phone screen can come up. Scroll down on the pop-up and you’ll see additional video suggestions. These are chosen by an algorithm and related by topic or publisher.
Facebook Right Column Sponsored
Right column ads will appear on the right rail or right-hand column of the Facebook screen. This placement is only available to show to consumers on laptop or desktop computers. Right column ads typically have less expensive clicks and conversions, and they also appear smaller and look more like a traditional ad.
Messenger Inbox Feed
This is ideal for companies who want to explain their offer, directly communicate with their audiences, convince them to try another product, or remind them to revisit your store.
Stories Feed Placement for Facebook, Instagram, and Messenger
The Stories platform provides a great space for brands to maximize reach, build brand loyalty, and generate new customers. Since Stories disappear after 24 hours, there’s a lot of opportunity to be experimental, spontaneous, and transparent.
Facebook In-Stream Videos
This ad placement allows advertisers to deliver 5-15 second, non-skippable, mid-roll video ads to people who are already watching Facebook videos on a mobile device. Since these ads don’t appear until at least 60 seconds into the main video content, people are actively engaged in “lean-back” watching mode, and the ad is just like a commercial break for the actual video.
Messenger Sponsored Messages
These are ads directed to target users you’ve already had a past conversation with. They’re messages sent to followers that include relevant promotions. They’re an effective way to re-engage the people who currently have an open chat with your Facebook Page and to nurture those relationships by providing relevant content, promotions, and updates.
Facebook Instant Articles
Unlike the audience network, ads on instant articles are displayed on articles that can be easily loaded on Facebook. Ads are usually sandwiched between paragraphs of the article. This is ideal if you’re targeting audiences who frequently read longer content not available on the News Feed.
Facebook Audience Network
The audience network is a group of Facebook’s affiliate apps and websites that can be accessed through mobile. Placing ads on the network extends the reach of advertisers to 16% more people (1 billion) than advertising on Facebook alone. The network includes some of the biggest publishers like Washington Post, Univision, and the Daily Mirror. You can you can exclude specific categories of apps and websites from the targeting, reducing the amount of wasted ad spend.
Right Placement, Right Time
Facebook has established automatic placements in an effort to help advertisers get the best results across all default placements. This allows Facebook to choose results from the broadest range possible, which implies that automatic placements are typically the most efficient use of an advertiser’s budget because they help control costs.
Marin is a certified Facebook Marketing Partner and fully supports Automatic Placements in the MarinOne platform. Schedule a demo today to learn more!
5 Tips for Successful Advertising on Amazon
As more advertisers flock to Amazon for its revenue-generating ad capabilities, the competition continues to heat up.
Subscribe to our blog to get tips on how to stay ahead of the game with your Amazon advertising efforts. In the meantime, in our latest post, we offer five quick pointers for fine-tuning your campaigns.
Protect Your Turf
As in the paid search world, brands need to make sure they’re bidding on their own brand terms. If they don’t, competitors may see it as a conquest opportunity and muscle in on your territory.
Review Search Queries
Use the information in Amazon’s search term report to create new manual campaigns using keywords that aren’t covered in their automatic campaigns. You can add irrelevant queries as negative keywords, or even add negatives to specific ad groups if queries are showing up in the wrong ad group.
Build a Store
Brands must have a strong landing page for customers and potential customers being directed from external sites or from a Sponsored Brand ad. Like a corporate website, this may not be the responsibility of the person running paid media, but it’s important to make sure the advertising investment performs well by making sure customers have a solid brand experience on Amazon.
Rev Up Your Product Details Page
This is an important part of the conversion funnel, with plenty of space for brands to put quality content in front of shoppers—but there’s also room for Amazon to place things like a table comparing similar items. Brands are now investing in their own comparison charts, which show up a little higher on the page.
If a shopper is looking for a printer but the one they initially clicked isn’t right, the vendor can show its other printers in a chart comparing price and specifications—before the shopper gets to Amazon’s chart—which may lead them to a competitor’s product.
This also may not be the domain of the digital marketer, but brands should ensure a quality landing page experience to get the best ROI on their Amazon ad spend.
Test, Test, Test
Does it make more sense to show the brand logo or an image of the product? What should the wording in the headline be? Which products should be shown and how do the products line up with the keywords? As in all areas of digital marketing, testing is key.
Learn More
For more extensive guidance on setting up and optimizing your Amazon ad campaigns, along with real-world examples, download our guide, Ramp Up Your Amazon Ad Game: 5 Tips for Success. It covers:
- An overview of Amazon’s advertising solutions
- Setting up Amazon ad campaigns
- All about automatic campaigns
And more.
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Feeling overwhelmed by your advertising campaigns? Donate 15 minutes of your time and we’ll show you how MarinOne allows you to easily manage, measure, and optimize all of your ad campaigns from a single location. Request a demo today.
Amazon Advertising Drives a 115% Boost in eCommerce Spend
Findings in our latest digital advertising benchmark report show that marketers increased their eCommerce spend 115 percent year over year, driven by more Amazon advertising. Mobile search also continues to dominate, with nearly half (47%) of total search spend dedicated to mobile ads.
Our key takeaways:
- eCommerce Continues to See Significant Growth: The 115 percent year-over-year increase in eCommerce spend is largely attributed to Amazon Advertising growth and seasonality around Prime Day. The cost per eCommerce click was up 10.5 percent compared to Q2 2019. In total, retailers spent 40 percent of their budgets on Shopping ads, and the number of clicks on Shopping ads increased 14 percent quarter-over-quarter, all pointing to big opportunities for marketers.
- Mobile Search Drives Search Spend: Nearly half (47 percent) of total search spend was dedicated to mobile advertisements. Local search queries from customers are more frequently occurring on smartphones, driving advertisers to examine how to best capitalize on the trend.
- Overall Search Click Volume Up: Search click volume has grown 14 percent YoY, with a big jump in ad clicks for healthcare (85 percent). Today’s digital advertising landscape has more of a “real-time” approach in that it can connect doctors and patients more immediately. Healthcare brands are able to reach potential customers with discretion, often when they’re actively searching for information about their health problems.
To learn more and see how your ad campaigns compare, view our Q3 2019 Digital Advertising Benchmark Report. You can analyze current cross-channel advertising trends by region, industry, and publisher.
Each quarter, we aggregate advertising performance across our customer base, and share our results with digital marketing professionals to compare against their own initiatives. In addition to global industry trends, we explore the most compelling findings in key areas of digital marketing.
Access the report for actionable insights you can apply to your digital ad campaigns.
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Feeling overwhelmed by your advertising campaigns? Donate 15 minutes of your time and we’ll show you how MarinOne allows you to easily manage, measure, and optimize all of your ad campaigns from a single location. Request a demo today.
Happy Birthday to You, Digital Advertising
On October 27th, digital advertising celebrated its 25th birthday! They say your 20s is the most important decade of your life. Let's look back at what happened in the past 25 years of digital advertising’s formative history.
Always the journey, often the destination
Over the years, due largely in part to advancements in ad technology, advertisers have become more focused on the customer and more aware of the journey between awareness and conversion.
It’s not necessarily surprising, but always exciting to watch as marketers continue to get smarter about what ad formats and channels to leverage for each part of this journey—or what combination of cross-channel efforts led to the ultimate conversion.
Their strategies are constantly evolving as technology advances and new formats are introduced. With emerging technology like visual/voice search, chatbots, machine learning, and AR, we have a lot to look forward to in the next 25 years.
Also interesting is that Amazon was born in 1994, the same year as digital advertising, but only just became an advertising powerhouse in the last couple of years. While Facebook and Google have long been considered the duopoly of digital advertising, Amazon’s digital advertising offerings are now quickly gaining on the two tech giants, and advertisers are increasingly seeking ways to capitalize on the emerging platform. According to a recent survey, 60% of advertisers plan to increase their Amazon ad spend this year.
Digital ads have massively impacted businesses
The measurement capabilities of digital ads have led the industry to become more performance driven. Marketers are constantly being tasked to prove ROI. With advancements in digital ad technology, more than ever before, they now have the capability to link performance results back to particular campaigns or channels.
Improved insight into performance keeps advertisers accountable and encourages them to experiment with channels, formats, and new technologies to drive results.
Today, the ability to track and prove performance is even more valuable, and even more challenging, as advertisers increasingly leverage many different channels—like search, social, and eCommerce—simultaneously.
As these channels become more siloed, marketers can no longer rely on publisher tools for attribution and conversation metrics—it's like allowing Facebook and Google to grade their own paper. Instead, the smartest marketers turn to third-party providers to understand and optimize performance and get a holistic, cross-channel view.
What’s cooking in the next five years?
The rise of Amazon as an ad platform has blurred the lines between search, social, and eCommerce, which will undoubtedly continue to shake up the ad industry. A huge chunk of product searches now begin on Amazon, for example, while Facebook and Google have invested heavily in eCommerce formats like Shopping ads and shoppable posts. These lines will only continue to blur as Amazon rivals—like Walmart and Target—look to emulate the eCommerce giant’s digital advertising strategy in the months and years to come.
These blurred lines are having, and will continue to have, a major impact on digital advertising strategy. Marketers will be forced to connect the dots across channels and view the customer journey holistically on their own, or risk falling behind the competition. With no incentive for publishers—i.e., Google, Facebook, Amazon—to share data across platforms, it falls on the marketer to obtain this comprehensive view from a third-party platform.
Despite the rise of eCommerce, search will continue to play a big role in the coming years. Last quarter, search volume grew 13% year-over-year and CTRs continue to increase, while CPCs decreased. The opportunity to engage more effectively with consumers at a lower cost—in combination with the introduction AI-driven technologies like responsive search ads and automated bidding—advertisers will continue to flex search across their global campaigns. It’ll be interesting to watch how this evolves, especially as more privacy regulations emerge over the next five years.
An online shopping explosion
There will be more than 300 million U.S. online shoppers in 2023. How do brands need to change what they're doing to compete so that they find and engage with the right shoppers? One of the most important things to understand is the function of a particular ad format on a particular channel and its role in the customer journey.
There are so many formats emerging—from Stories to shoppable posts—and each one is designed to reach audiences at specific points in the journey. Google Shopping Ads, for example, are designed to move buyers from the consideration phase to conversion. Understanding these nuances, as well how these various ad formats can work together in a cross-platform approach, can help marketers avoid a siloed strategy and will propel the business in a competitive market.
The 30s: reaching new heights (and audiences)
Over the last 25 years, customers expectations have risen. Going into the next 10 years and beyond, marketers need to be more cognizant of how they’re targeting specific audiences, while still effectively allocating budget and calculating bids across channels. To optimize campaigns and truly drive performance, brands have a huge opportunity to leverage automated, AI-driven technologies that allow for more testing and ultimately smarter strategies.
It’s also important for brands to realize the value of their own data—whether it’s from a CRM, product sales, or inventory. Marketers can be much more effective with their ad campaigns when they leverage both first- and third-party data. Using both categories of data allows them to be aggressive when they expect good returns, and to pull back when performance is dipping. This type of strategy also provides an opportunity to scale campaigns more efficiently—a key component to remaining competitive.
How to Align Your Social Ad Strategy With Your Unique Business Goals
This article first appeared in TotalRetail.
In an attempt to capitalize on the lucrative and competitive digital ad market, social platforms are positioning themselves as the answer for every marketer’s needs.
In the early days of social media, advertisers flocked to Facebook and Twitter because of their huge numbers of daily active users and amount of time they spent on each platform. Such metrics are no longer sufficient now that advertisers focus more on the bottom line, i.e., the return on investment that these platforms are able to yield.
For a platform to thrive in the mature, highly competitive market, it's faced with a challenge of not only getting ads in front of the intended audience, but also delivering tangible financial growth for advertisers. The attempt is to be a one-stop shop for everyone.
Drawing Advertiser Attention
There are a few approaches that platforms employ to broaden their appeal to advertisers. The classic is introducing new ad formats that solicit meaningful actions from the target audience. This move is designed to attract more direct response advertisers.
With Amazon.com posing a formidable threat as the third-largest advertising platform in the U.S., Google-owned YouTube tested shopping ads that allow users to shop directly in Google Express. It provides a seamless experience similar to how Amazon users never have to leave Amazon's app between clicking an ad and purchasing a product.
YouTube also recently tested augmented reality (AR) ads with selected brands in the beauty industry, where consumers generally have an affinity for selfies and AR lenses. Earlier this year, Reddit launched cost-per-click ads, its first performance-based ad format.
Continuous Innovation
Some platforms explore new territories and figure out ways to make them fit into their existing infrastructure. Facebook, which has become the staple of social advertising thanks to various ad offerings across campaign objectives and verticals, is heavily pushing one of its newest ad placements, Instagram Stories.
By presenting usage statistics—"inspire the 500 million that use Stories every day"—as well as educating advertisers and partners on how Stories ads yield great results, Facebook attempts to dispel the notion that Stories will drive up cost per acquisition as many skeptics believe.
Spotify, which has aggressively invested in podcasts, overhauled its app to feature podcasts more prominently. Its Spotify for Brands article highlights the direct response pull of podcast advertising: “A staggering 81 percent of listeners have taken action after hearing audio ads during a podcast.”
The Bottom Line Is the Bottom Line
For advertisers, seeing the social platforms’ shiny new objects is definitely exciting and helps reinforce the notion that these companies are committed to investing in innovations. It's important, however, to remember that the best interests of all platforms with an ad-supported business model eventually lie on maximizing their own revenue through ad sales and hitting the targets for which they're held accountable by their investors.
Every advertiser, not unlike a platform itself, has unique business goals and achieving them should always be the highest priority. Leveraging advertising channels and platforms that are already proven to be effective and constantly testing new techniques to optimize for better performance is a great place to start.
If there's room in the budget for testing new platforms or features, researching thoroughly about them while focusing on the compatibility with your brand is a necessary step to help cut through the noise and land on the candidates that can potentially generate incremental lift at scale. When it comes to shopping for advertising partnerships, there's no such thing as one size fits all.
Turn up Q4 Revenue with Customer Match and Similar Audiences
This is a guest post from Carolanne Hornung, Senior Account Manager at 3Q Digital.
Q4 is here. Advertisers are wondering, “How can I beat last year’s holiday sales?” In this article, we focus on how you can gain the upper hand using Google Ads, Customer Match, and Similar Audiences to meet your holiday goals.
What They Are and How They Work
Customer Match is a Google Ads tool that utilizes your customer email file. By uploading a file with your customer emails, you can target these users when they’re signed into their Google account.
After you upload your customer email file, Google will create Similar Audiences if your list meets the required criteria. Similar Audiences allow you to reach people who share characteristics with the users in your Customer Match file.
Customer Match is currently available for Search, Shopping, YouTube, Google Display Network, and Gmail campaigns. Similar Audiences for Customer Match is available for YouTube, Google Display Network, and Gmail only.
There are several strategies and use cases for Customer Match and Similar Audiences to boost brand awareness and increase revenue. Here are just a few things you can do to get started.
Create Customer Segments
To maximize the benefits of Customer Match, create customer segments based on user behaviors. Depending on how much information you collect from people when they provide their email address, the segmenting possibilities are endless. A few strongly recommended list segmentation examples include:
- Prospects vs. customers
- Customer purchase frequency
- Product or category affinities
Increase Bids for Past Purchasers
An effective way to target your past purchasers is through remarketing lists for search ads (RLSA). With these users being higher quality than those populating other remarketing lists, you can test utilizing higher bids when they search non-brand or competitor keywords. Since these users already trusted your brand and purchased, you can stay top of mind and drive more sales.
Target Broad/General Keywords
Explore targeting very broad or general non-brand keywords with your Customer Match list. This can be done by updating your targeting settings.
For example, a department store could test targeting general keywords such as “shoes.” This may be a risky move under normal situations, but using the “Target and bid” feature limits the reach to people already familiar with your brand. This lets you get in front of your customers again (when they may not be thinking of your brand) and potentially drive more revenue.
Develop New Ad Copy
Use Customer Match to implement unique ad copy that makes use of what you know about the people on your email list by updating your targeting settings, Gmail Sponsored Promotions, or YouTube. Test different ad copy for frequent purchasers versus customers who haven’t made a purchase in over a year. A steeper promotional discount could entice past customers to come back and make another purchase.
Cross-Sell and Upsell
You can use Customer Match to cross-sell or upsell to existing customers to drive incremental revenue. For example, if a department store has a customer file segmented with a list of people who frequently buy children’s clothing, you can target that list of users with ad copy relevant to holiday gifts specifically for children. This may encourage customers to make another purchase: children’s shoes, backpacks, toys, etc.
Expand Acquisition Efforts
Similar Audiences is a great tool to expand your acquisition efforts with Gmail Sponsored Promotions or YouTube. When you’re looking to acquire new customers, Similar Audiences is a great place to start, as it allows you to target users who share similar characteristics and traits with your most loyal customers. Google has a lot of back-end knowledge about users, and leveraging this feature can help advertisers get in front of a new audience and drive more sales.
In Summary
Customer Match and Similar Audiences present advertisers with many great targeting strategies. Get started on building and segmenting your customer lists (and creative/ad copy to test) now. Then, build your strategy and get ready to drive more revenue this holiday season!
Retail by the Numbers: The State of Digital Advertising 2019
Earlier this year, we released The State of Digital Advertising Report 2019—the result of our annual survey of over 450 digital marketing professionals in the U.S. and U.K. across several key industries. While these marketers face many common challenges regardless of industry, we noticed that responses often varied slightly from vertical to vertical.
Retail is one vertical experiencing unique setbacks and opportunities in an evolving digital ad landscape. According to eMarketer, the U.S. retail industry will increase its digital ad spending by 19.1% to $28.33 billion in 2019. As the holiday shopping season approaches, what are some of the top priorities for retail marketers this year and beyond?
Let’s take a look at retail by the numbers, according to The State of Digital Advertising Report 2019.
Search Leads for Retail
Search is by far the most popular channel for retail marketers. eMarketer recently named search as retail’s fastest-growing ad format, so it’s not surprising that 90% of retail marketer survey respondents said they allocate digital ad budget to paid search. And, 86% said they expect budget to increase in this category this year.
So what are retail marketers paying most attention to when it comes to search? 77% said they expect to increase their use of audience targeting this year, and 91% said they’re using or plan to use responsive search ads—the AI-driven format first introduced by Google last year and now being tested by Microsoft.
31% of retail marketers also perceive voice search or smart hubs (i.e., Amazon Echo, Google Home) as a trend or challenge they’re keeping their eye on.
eCommerce Ad Spend on the Rise
44% of retail marketer respondents allocate digital ad budget to eCommerce, driven mostly by Amazon spend. Of those respondents that spend on eCommerce, 82% said they started using Amazon in the last year and 71% except budget to increase this year. However, all the talk about Amazon taking budget from Facebook and Google may not be true, at least for retail marketers—100% of respondents in this vertical expect that increase to come from incremental budget.
31% of respondents who started using Amazon in the last year said the main reason was to capture people starting their purchase journey. After all, several studies have shown that more and more product searches now start on Amazon. The most popular format on the channel for retailers is Sponsored Brands, which can help drive more clicks and better post-click customer interactions.
Social Advertising – Untapped Opportunity?
Just 41% of retail marketer respondents allocate budget to paid social, but 81% plan to increase budget in the category this year. While 44% of respondents say video is the most effective social ad format, the rise of eCommerce-related formats across Instagram, Facebook, and others are adding to this increase in spend.
In fact, 81% of respondents also anticipate an increase in use of Shoppable images or Shopping ads/images on social. 63% say paid social spend on Instagram will increase this year, with 80% expecting that money to come from incremental budget.
Despite Facebook’s privacy challenges in the past year, just 13% of respondents said they reduced spend on the platform as a result.
Performance Matters
Whether they’re allocating budget to search, eCommerce, social, or all of the above, one priority remains consistent for retail marketers: the ability to prove performance. 36% of respondents said the top priority for their business marketing function this year will be establishing effective metrics, the starting point for measuring results and ROI.
This is the first blog post of a series that will explore key priorities, challenges, and opportunities faced by marketers this year across verticals like retail, travel, healthcare, and more. To see the complete report and compare against your organization’s goals, view The State of Digital Advertising Report 2019.
Optimizing Your Feed-Based Ad Campaigns
With the rise of Shopping ads campaigns and other dynamic ad formats, feed automation is now a crucial aspect of maximizing performance on search marketing programs.
Once you've prepped your product feed and inserted all the right keywords, there's an important next step: making sure your feed is optimized for peak performance.
Here, we discuss a few common optimization issues and how you can tackle them.
Common Optimization Issues
Before you start digging deeper into your product feed concerns, it’s important to identify problems and answer a few common questions from the get-go:
- Is there rogue HTML in your title or description fields?
- Are there titles that don’t contain important keywords like brand, color, or size?
- Do you have duplicate product titles?
- Do you have duplicate IDs?
By resolving these types of issues, you can make sure your product data—especially your titles—are as optimized as possible to run clean feed-based ad campaigns.
Optimization Tips and Tricks
Next, let’s dive into taking your high-quality product feed and building it into conversion-friendly ad campaigns.
First, a general rule of thumb is to apply the 80/20 rule:
- 20 percent: Break out item ID product groups for your highest-performing products.
- 60 percent: Use broader groupings like brand, category, and custom labels.
- 20 percent: Build an “All products” or “Auto campaign” to use as a catch-all or for exploratory purposes
Once you've set up this system, it'll be much easier to manage your product feed. The workflow becomes simple to extract or segment from the 60 percent into the top 20 percent, as you’re constantly finding high-performing products and breaking them out individually.
Also, your 20 percent catch-all allows you to maintain a good level of coverage for every product that’s shown in your catalog. (This is similar to keyword-based campaigns that have keyword and match-type combinations like broad, phrase, and exact.)
This structure is simple to use and supports smooth, clean product management for your feed-based ad campaigns.
This is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to automating and optimizing your product feed. For other great tips, tricks, and information—including establishing the right bidding model, addressing data issues, handling cross-channel product feed challenges, and more—download our guide, Product Feeds Unleashed: Automating Your Ad Campaigns.
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Feeling overwhelmed by your advertising campaigns? Donate 15 minutes of your time and we’ll show you how MarinOne allows you to easily manage, measure, and optimize all of your ad campaigns from a single location. Request a demo today.
Top 3 Social Advertising Tips for the 2019 Holiday Season
This is a guest post from Zenia Johnson, Account Lead at
3Q Digital.
Although we’ve barely finished the leftover barbecue from Labor Day weekend, every seasoned marketer knows what’s right around the corner: the inevitable start of the 2019 holiday season. With the start of that comes meetings and conversations where we chew over the most impactful strategies for our clients—how can we ensure a winning strategy to deliver the best results in this high-demand time?
1. Upon Immediate Removal of Halloween Costumes, Customers are on the Hunt for Holiday Deals
In Facebook’s 2019 Holiday Marketing Guide, it’s reported that in 2018 about 45% of shoppers “started shopping for the holidays in November or earlier.” For advertisers, this means you need a strategy that makes sense for your customers, and have it in place and ready to activate as soon as they’re ready to start their holiday shopping.
But how to develop this amazing strategy? Well, there are myriad tools in place, from your own first-party customer data (take a look at when your sales volume started to pick up in past holiday seasons and plan your budget allocation accordingly), to Facebook’s newly launched Data Insights tool, which, according to Facebook:
“...has nearly 30 searchable insights from the 2017 and 2018 holiday seasons across 25 markets, and is available in 17 languages. Explore this robust resource to ensure your 2019 holiday season is filled with insights and magic. Leveraging your data and available tools to view your customer trends can be incredibly impactful, and can greatly enhance (and ease) your ability to strategically plan your holiday campaigns."
2. Embracing Automation = More Time for Turkey & Better ROI
2019’s optimization-acronym game has been strong. With Facebook alone, we now have CBO (campaign budget optimization) and DCO (dynamic creative optimization), in addition to non-acronymized optimization options like placement optimization and dynamic ads for broad audiences. These optimizations are apart of Facebook’s “Power 5,” a set of optimization features that the platform recommends advertisers implement to scale growth.
Specifically, Facebook says:
“The days of manually hacking your way to ad success are no more. Top direct-response advertisers are now leveraging a specific set of automated ad tactics to unlock new phases for growth. We call these tactics the ‘Power 5’ and when used together, they have the ability to transform ad performance and scale across the Facebook Family of Apps.”
“Transform ad performance” may sound like an exaggeration, but at 3Q we’ve found that adoption of the Power 5 does indeed deliver some pretty stellar results. While testing into CBO and placement optimization for a client during the 2018 holiday season, we were ultimately able to perform with a 5x increase in sales, a 2x increase in conversion rate, and a 2x decrease in cost per acquisition.
And those results have proven to not be an anomaly—we’re continuing to see great results with clients who adopt it across the agency, which means more time spent carving and eating turkey, and less time optimizing campaigns on Thanksgiving Day.
While we’re on the subject of the Power 5....
3. The Most Nimble and Responsive Advertisers are Using a Simplified Account Structure
I know I’m cheating a bit here by referencing the Power 5 twice, but this one is truly worthy of its own section. We’ve all worked in social ad accounts that were created back when we had to have multiple lookalike audiences, re-engagement audiences, plus a few versions of a customer list live all at the same time to see great performance, but those days are long past!
The best-performing accounts now are those with a more streamlined structure. This means instead of maintaining an account that looks like this:
You’d shift your structure to more resemble this:
Outside of the gains you’d get in management efficiency, a more simplified structure makes sense because we’re finding that the broader your audience, the better your performance. Again, I’m aware that this is incredibly different from the campaign structures we saw some years past, but with the improvement in Facebook’s algorithm it’s no longer necessary to rely on lookalikes to find pockets of performance efficiency.
The shift to a more simplified structure actually extends past just social media—in most cases, simplification delivers better results in Google as well. The key thing to remember is this: in the case of any platform with strong algorithmic bidding, the signals used to optimize your campaigns are at the campaign level.
A more consolidated campaign structure equals more data density for your campaigns, which equals more data points for the algorithm to use, which will ultimately deliver an incredibly optimized campaign.
Implementing the above tips may seem daunting, but we’ve found that they truly deliver fantastic performance results. As long as you start early and have an account structure in place to maximize results, you’ll be ready to cruise right through the holiday season!
How Marin’s Managed Services Team Helped Nautilus Pump Up Its ROI
Nautilus was working with an agency that used its own ad accounts to run Nautilus campaigns on Facebook. The agency “owned” the data and was reluctant to share any kind of historical performance.
Without any kind of first-party data to build valuable insights from and optimize towards, Nautilus was eager to partner with a team that could help them build an audience-aligned social marketing strategy. The goals:
- Increase ROAS
- Further validate the value of social
- Gain full transparency into campaign metrics and performance
Marin’s Managed Services team introduced a three-part approach for better results:
- Performance visibility: a reporting cadence and structure to regularly track campaign progress for more actionable insights
- Less manual work, more strategy: a Mass Editor and DPA wizard that reduced time spent on manual campaign activities and combined manual elements of DPA creation into a single step
- Hyper-targeted optimization: a full-funnel optimization strategy that reached the right customers at the right time, and created more personalized messaging and experiences
The results?
- Exceeded the Nautilus ROAS KPI by 132% (US)
- Exceeded the Nautilus ROAS KPI by 30% (Canada)
- 388% increase from the initial ROAS goal
Learn more in our case study.
All About Amazon’s Sponsored Products Ads: Bid Optimization with Marin
Amazon’s Sponsored Products ads are one of the fastest growing ad types in the industry. Marketers who’ve eagerly joined the party may wonder: how do I maximize results and continue to scale?
As Amazon adds to its native optimization features and evolves its offering, marketers can leverage Marin’s patented automated bidding algorithm on Amazon Sponsored Products and Sponsored Brands. Here are just a few ways how.
Marin’s Foldering Structure
Marin’s foldering structure is independent of the Amazon campaign hierarchy. Marketers can implement the structure to combine ad groups with similar business targets or characteristics.
What does this mean? Well, if you’re new to advertising on Amazon, you can borrow data from your history-rich Google and Bing keywords to inform your Amazon bids and ramp up quickly without a learning or “burn-in” period. Alternatively, you can group Amazon keywords into their own folders as a divider for business targets or performance.
Both of these options are available for all business needs with Marin’s flexible foldering structure.
Flexible Bid Modifiers and Rules
You can apply flexible bid modifiers and rules on top of Marin’s automated bidding algorithm to accommodate your business needs—whether those needs are seasonal or unexpected. For example, you may need to exclude an outlier like a big Amazon sale date when conversions are extraordinarily high. Or, you can apply a bid boost to help ramp up spend if you’re under-pacing against your allocated Amazon budget.
You can and should combine rules to react to market changes—such as a competitor’s sale or unexpected, negative press—or to help spend ramp up or down.
Combine these Marin “time of calculation” modifiers with Amazon’s “time of auction” modifiers for a strategy that combines the best of both worlds. And, be sure to implement bid caps, floors, and/or maximum bid changes by percentage to ensure you have safety nets in place.
Contextual Signals
You can bid towards various goals and layer in ACoS with contextual signals. You can also optimize towards Cost Per Lead, layer in profit margin goals, or bid towards a portfolio target. You can even optimize towards custom blends of goals with what’s important to your business and assign percentage or flat value weights to certain conversions or Share of Voice.
Forecasting
Marin’s Amazon optimization tools allow you to forecast predicted spend and various budgeting scenarios on performance. Use Marin’s forecasting tool to predict future trends of Amazon clicks, conversions, revenue, cost, and profit. Make better-informed decisions by anticipating spend levels at daily, monthly, or quarterly levels, visualizing the effects in real-time of reducing or increasing Amazon budget to forecast incremental gross profit returns.
The Sky’s the Limit with Amazon Advertising
As marketers on Amazon continue to ramp up sales velocity and make use of rich customer data, the next step is diving deeper into your ad campaigns and automatically making adjustments based on real-time performance. To learn more about Marin's optimization tools for Amazon, get in touch with your account representative. Or, if you're new to Marin, contact us for a brief demo.
Impression Share Is Coming—What Now?
Starting in October, Google will no longer be offering average position as a metric. Read on to learn more about transitioning to the new impression share and impression rate metrics and what Marin can do to help.
So...What Are Impression Share and Impression Rate?
By definition, impression share is the percentage of impressions that your ads receive compared to the total number that your ads are eligible to get in the top five ad positions on the search engine results page (SERP). Impression share is a great way to find out how much more you can be doing—it shows you any missed opportunities by indicating how often a particular ad showed up in the top search results.
Average position didn’t accurately measure if ads were showing up above the organic results or not, only the order versus other ads. This left advertisers guessing.
Impression % (or rate) shows you how often your ads are showing at the top of the SERP. In other words, for each of the top five ad positions, you can see the percentage of appearances that your ad is making. This addresses another shortcoming of average position, as even an ad in position 2 might be at the bottom of the page.
Impression share metrics
The three versions of impression share all measure your impressions divided by the total eligible impressions for your ads, based on different locations on the SERP:
- Search absolute top IS: The impressions you’ve received in the absolute top location (the very first ad above the organic search results) divided by the estimated number of impressions you were eligible to receive in the top location. This is a new metric.
- Search top IS: The impressions you’ve received in the top location (anywhere above the organic search results) compared to the estimated number of impressions you were eligible to receive in the top location (also a new metric).
- Search impression share: This is an existing metric that measures impressions anywhere on the page.
Impression rate metrics
These two metrics are only based on your impressions, not the total number of eligible impressions.
- Impr. (absolute top) %: The percent of your ad impressions that are shown as the very first ad above the organic search results.
- Impr. (top) %: The percent of your ad impressions that are shown anywhere above the organic search results.
A quick way to remember the difference between impression share and impression rate: impression share is the percentage of total possible impressions in the top five SERP slots; impression rate is the percentage of impressions for each of these five slots.
How Do I Optimize for Awareness?
Advertisers who are more focused on driving awareness than ROI can focus on impression share or impression % (rate).
We recommend advertisers be careful with Google’s new impression share options in Smart Bidding. The impression share data isn’t available the same day, so it’s hard to monitor performance—setting a high target may significantly increase your spend by making you eligible for additional, unwanted auctions.
What Metric Should I Target?
The easiest way to set your targets is to use your recent performance for campaigns across the impression % (rate) metrics and use this as a starting point. This will ensure the smoothest transition from targeting a position to targeting impression share.
The table below shows our default mapping from a position target to impression %. This should only be used for advertisers with limited historical data.
How do you make the switch from average position to impression share?
Marin’s Awareness Targeting
Marin now offers a bid strategy known as Awareness Targeting, which targets impression rate instead of target position for Google campaigns. Think of this as automatically setting bids to achieve your awareness goals.
For existing Marin advertisers, impression rate targets for Google are automatically set based on recent performance. All current customers can login to MarinOne to view their new awareness targets.
The benefits of Awareness Targeting include:
- Goals-by-device: Marin optimizes devices independently because user behavior varies a lot between desktop and mobile.
- A responsive intraday bidding engine: By running every four hours using the latest prominence signals, Awareness Targeting ensures that advertisers are hitting their targets and maximizing reach, especially on high volume, highly competitive terms. This is a great way to stay ahead of competitors.
- A holistic account strategy: You can apply bid strategies across multiple Google accounts within the same workflow, instead of individually.
- A single bid strategy: One that’s compatible with position-based bidding for non-Google publishers and impression share metrics for Google.
- Immediate setup and launch: Advertisers can dive right in and begin targeting to impression share. No historical data needed!
Maximize Your Search Reach
Google has been making changes to depreciate the value of ad position metrics for quite some time, and has been encouraging advertisers to focus on targeting impression share. Now that Awareness Targeting is readily available in Marin, it’s easy for our advertisers to drive campaign goals that maximize the reach on the search results page.
Want to learn more? Schedule a demo, or if you’re a current customer, reach out to your dedicated account representative today!
Built to Last: What Automated Bidding Can Do for You
When I first started working in digital marketing, part of my training process was learning about best practices, campaign structure, and all kinds of additional tools provided by publishers and third party vendors to drive success for brands.
As discussed in my previous posts, it’s important to know your brand and your customers, and to understand what makes them tick (and click) to convert on your website.
One way is to continuously run tests on your activity and learn what works and what doesn’t. Or, you can switch on and off tools like audiences and bid adjustments, explore new campaign types and channels, etc.
This article is dedicated to bidding—automated bidding, to be more precise. However, it would be wrong to look at this topic separately from everything else that’s happening in your accounts.
Much like in your home, wi-fi wouldn’t work with no electricity. Or, how can you enter the living room without a front door?
Let’s walk through our house together from room to room to see how every component makes our environment cozy and inviting to our guests—in other words, our customers who we’re driving to convert and come back for more.
Let’s start with the hallway (a.k.a., data source)
When thinking about your account optimization and bidding (whether it’s manual or automated), it’s important to identify your trustworthy data.
Some advertisers have developed their own tracking and attribution systems in-house. These systems provide them with first party data, and all the insights they opted into their product to track user journeys and interaction paths with the brand.
Another option is to pick a third party vendor or publisher tools to execute tracking for you. Here, it’s important to review the packages vendors offer and understand which ones suit your business needs the most.
Remember, the digital world is changing every day. Online customer behaviors simply aren’t the same as they were five to 10 years ago.
For instance, social networks now have more influence on a consumer’s decision making process. When someone’s in their exploration phase, reviews and feedback are important. This assigns higher revenue share from sales to publishers like Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, etc.
The question here: as an advertiser, are you taking cross-channel user interactions into account, and is the value you assign to your social media or affiliate advertisement fair?
There are various vendors that consider these factors in their attribution model and share the conversion data between the channels fairly—whether it’s a click from Google or impression from Facebook that contributed to a conversion.
Marin Software has developed an attribution model called TruePath, which helps advertisers see the impact of other channels on their search campaigns and vice-versa. This allows you to better understand the value of campaigns that don’t necessarily convert on their own (e.g., prospecting), but play a key role in the user journey.
Sugar, spice and everything nice (a.k.a., audience
kitchen prep)
In past posts, we discussed the importance of understanding your audiences, how they affect performance, and what it takes to bring home that extra conversion.
When you’ve identified a list of audiences that convert better than others, you can add these and their similar audiences to specific or all campaigns. As these are best performers, you can add specific bid adjustments to these.
With one of my clients, we created audience rules to cover their top product categories and certain pages—like What’s New? After running these audiences for a month, we saw that after visiting the What’s New? page, people were 32% more likely to convert on the website, even if they purchased long-existing stock. The next step was obvious: increase the bids on audiences that visited the page and reap the results.
There are tools that offer automated bid adjustments for audiences tagged across campaigns. For instance, the Google eCPC model takes audience behavior into account (Google conversion pixel data only) and adjusts bids for you based on audience performance in the campaign/group.
Marin Software also measures audience performance when it comes to automated bidding. Here, however, the app can use your preferred source of truth. You can select a list of conversion types that are important when it comes to bid adjustments and performance and the app will do the rest—calculate and execute.
At Marin, we’ve also come up with the concept of search and social intent. Here, we help our clients to reach social prospects and leads in search engines and vice-versa.
For example, we ran a test on social campaigns using search data. The result: CPA for these campaigns was 65% lower in comparison to traditional social campaigns, while conversion volume spiked by 388%. The client also saw a 100% increase in their daily appointment requests.
The living room (a.k.a., device performance
and adjustments)
According to many marketing sources, every year is The Year of Mobile. :)
And yes, every year, we witness how mobile search share is growing, as mobile devices become more versatile and occupy every part of our lives. This may or may not be the case for you, but I feel lost without my phone, as it’s such a huge part of my life—all of my contact information is there, not to mention the easy ability to call for food delivery or an Uber in just a couple of swipes/taps.
And yet, when it comes to conversion rate and return on investment, desktop keeps showing higher, better results.
Why is that?
SmartInsights and many more research companies compiled research on this topic to prove that even though most of the initial searches on the product/service/ideas are coming from mobile, conversions are more likely to happen on desktop.
A key takeaway here is that it’s important to review device performance not only against each other, but also from a cross-device perspective.
Marin has created a special solution for this—you can set separate targets to devices. Then, based on the targets and their performance, our solution adjusts bids to meet the desired goal.
Home office (a.k.a., additional rules in Marin bidding)
Marin bidding equips you with a list of additional rules to augment your usual strategy. You can apply these on top of your target. These include:
- Bid cap
- Bid floor
- Minimum daily bid change
- Match type boost
- Publisher boost
Is your new promotion about to start outside of your working hours? You can set up your schedule to boost bids for a fixed time period.
Or, is your finance team keen to stay on top of the maximum bid values? Not a problem—just set up a bid cap and Marin won’t assign bids above your desired value.
The app uses these rules as advanced triggers to keep your performance in check. It also provides the calculation used for every object on bidding to show what was used in the process, and why.
When it comes to adjusting your target/strategy, the app makes everything very transparent and easy to understand.
Behind closed doors—what else can we do with our campaigns?
Device, audience, geo-targeting, time-of-day and day-of-week—these are the first adjustments that come to mind when reviewing a bidding strategy. But can we do more?
You bet! Our Marin analytics and product teams have worked hard to bring extra zest to your mix-and-match bidding approach.
For instance, do any of these scenarios sound familiar?
- Your top-selling shoes are out of stock but your campaign is live
- Impression share has dropped but you’re trying to stay ahead of competitors
- A list of objects needs an extra push because of a new product launch or seasonality
Who you gonna call? In this case, not Ghostbusters—but, feel free to pick up a phone or email account and contact your Marin team.
Marin’s Dynamic Actions is your secret weapon when it comes to bid adjustments based on your unique situation.
With Dynamic Actions, you can tag objects in Marin with certain labels, whether it’s product stock or a certain performance metric. Marin will then recognize this tag, and based on your preferences, bid down or up for selected objects. Or, you can even stop the bidding altogether if you run out of stock.
This comes in handy when you have additional metrics you want to consider for bid optimization.
Making the place comfy (a.k.a., the importance of
bidding target)
Whether it’s revenue or exposure, every organization works towards certain goals, and it’s important to hit them to grow your business.
With automated bidding, your main responsibility is to identify the desired target and to experiment with adjustments and data points. This maximizes the benefits of machine learning for an optimal bid calculation.
When you’re assigning a target to a group of objects, bear their current performance in mind. For example, is the target too aggressive? If so, perhaps it’s best to start +/-20% of the current performance and adjust the target every couple of weeks. This allows the final bid to change smoothly over the given time period, and avoids performance spikes.
If you use the bid adjustments above wisely, they’ll bring great value to your advertising programs. To test them out, start with one to measure the impact, and then add or remove as you go.
As we mentioned in our audiences article, it’s important to have statistical proof that a certain element is bringing your performance to the next level before you add it to your initial target. Also, remember the importance of your budget—sometimes, a higher bidding budget for your test can bring in incremental revenue at a low extra cost.
For instance, during a bidding test with one of our clients, Marin managed to increase lead volume by 600%, while the average CPL in their account dropped by 20%. The team also saved 25% of their day-to-day time by letting the app handle bid optimization.
If you have a little extra budget on hand for the test, it can lead to excellent results.
Last but not least—cleaning house (a.k.a., bidding can’t work on its own)
Some advertisers ask us: why is it important to continue optimizing campaigns, when automated bidding is switched on?
Even the most modern and automated house—where Alexa and Google Home answer the door and adjust the lights—needs a human touch.
Automated bidding can indeed help you save tons of time when it comes to keeping tabs on performance and updating bids. However, we have to remember the world around us is constantly changing. Therefore, digital campaigns continually need fresh ad copy and images. And, with our ever-expanding vocabulary and trend shifts, search engines see +15% new search queries every year.
So, dust the surfaces, make them shine, and be able to show off your best performance to date.
P.S. look at our beautiful garden (a.k.a., bidding
test example)
Hope you’re still with us on our home maintenance metaphors!
Like any other top performance marketing company, at Marin we continuously run bidding tests with our clients. Let’s take a look at a test we performed against Smart Bidding, where the goal was to maximize leads to a set target cost per lead/acquisition (tCPL).
Within Marin’s bidding folders, the team activated portfolio bidding functionality. This functionality allows the app to use Bayesian data blending to help the algorithm identify the best bid for the given keywords. On top of this, automated mobile bid adjustments accommodate performance differences across devices. They also ensure placement on the first page of the SERP, and a high position and impression share at competitive levels.
In Google Ads, the client set the Smart Bidding tCPA model for a set of campaigns they used in the test.
During the test, the client didn’t create any new creatives or updated keywords. This kept the data as fair as possible across the campaign buckets that were in competition.
A month after the test started, the team compared results to the time period before the test. We ran the test during a low seasonality timeframe to avoid any external factors that might interfere with the results.
The post-test results were stunning—while running pure automated bidding activity in the account, both solutions showed an increase in conversion volumes MoM +51% with Marin’ bidding solution and +44% with Google Smart Bidding. The CPL also dropped, meaning that not only did the client gain incremental conversions from the automated bidding, but they also did so at a lower cost.
CPL in Marin dropped -47% MoM and -28% in Google Smart Bidding.
When all is said and done, when it comes to bidding, it’s important to evaluate all tools an advertiser can and should use. Once you identify areas of performance, you can use them as a layer to your bidding strategy. Automated tools help with the process of calculation and execution for hundreds or even thousands of keywords—with no time or effort from your team.
So, agree on the strategy, set it up, sit back and relax, and let the machine deliver the best bids possible.
Now that you have the perfect automated bidding home—go take that much-deserved vacation!
Marin Software Is Now on the Amazon Advertising find-a-partner directory
We’re excited to announce that Marin Software has been included in the Amazon Advertising find-a-partner directory.
MarinOne eCommerce provides retailers and brand advertisers the campaign management and automation tools they need to drive sales and grow profitably.
The stunning growth of Amazon Advertising is noteworthy for any advertiser—in July Amazon announced in its Q2 earnings report that sales were up 20% compared to last year. At Marin, we’ve seen 40% YoY growth in eCommerce activity on our platform in Q2 2019, so advertisers are clearly turning to Amazon Advertising as an important driver of sales.
Most recently, our enhanced support for Amazon Sponsored Brands is enabling brands to scale with ease, leveraging bid automation and performance alerts. Sponsored Brands ads showed 13% QoQ growth in sales and impressions, with a 17% rise in CPCs. These keyword-targeted ads appear in Amazon search results, driving customers directly to a product detail page or Store on Amazon.
Here are some of the other success stories we’ve been proud to publish on behalf of our customers:
- Intertwine Interactive Increases Amazon Advertising Attributed Sales by 191% for Specialty Retailer with Marin Bidding (link)
- Path Interactive Grows Revenue 60% & Lowers ACOS by 14% Using Marin to Bid on Amazon Sponsored Products (link)
- Buyagift Increases Exposure 79% Optimizing Amazon Advertising Bids with Marin Software (link)
Let’s find the right solution for you and your valued customers. Contact us for a personal demo and to learn more about our performance guarantee with MarinOne eCommerce.
Six Strategies to Turn Your B2B Social Accounts into Success Stories
I’ve encountered many in B2B who say they’re struggling to find success with social channels and, portfolio-wide, to convert qualified leads to opportunities. Some struggle to just find qualified leads.
Not surprisingly, these same advertisers all fall short in adopting the six strategies I’ve found to be integral to building and maintaining healthy social ROI. So, before throwing in the towel and letting competitors sweep in on your misfortunes (typically, misunderstandings), adopt these key strategies to find success on social with your B2B account.
1. Warm up your leads before bringing them down the pipeline, then nurture those audiences
When was the last time you came across a brand’s ad for the first time on Facebook or LinkedIn, went directly to the landing page, bought in at a high price-point contract, and started using the software all in the same window session/sitting?
If you’re like all other good business leaders, this has most likely never happened, as your goal is to vet out your options and truly understand each solution’s offering and capabilities at each price point. So, why do you expect your prospective customers to first hear about your brand or offering and follow through to conversion in one go?
The answer is to warm up these targets by giving them ways to learn about your brand or solution, and how others are finding success with it. Too many times I’ve taken on accounts that are sending users to a landing page to start a trial or demo, and they can’t figure out why they have a poor trial or demo-to-contract-signed CVR. Marketers must understand that on social, especially when prospecting, this is interruptive marketing—you should hold your potential customer’s hand through the pipeline with strong content and nurture strategies.
2. Solve for pain points with content (and keep testing!)
Your sales team is sitting on a mountain of valuable qualitative information. They’re contacting users at different stages of the funnel, fielding their questions, and hoping to solve their pain points. Yet, most marketing teams are either oblivious to the fact that this information is out there, or are too busy to use it. Interestingly, teams like this also often have issues moving users down pipeline!
Just by holding recurring meetings with select sales staff or mining for this qualitative data out of Salesforce, marketers can understand prospects’ pain points and match or create new content to help solve for them. Once the content is ready, you can upload these audiences into social channels and serve the appropriate content piece tailored for that audience segment. Then, you can continue to build on this approach by testing content pieces against one another at each stage to find the optimal performance and user experience.
3. Test your attribution models and understand incremental impact
The vast majority of social traffic is on mobile, yet conversion paths and actions are still typically designed for desktop. This leads to attribution models typically showing social yielding poor acquisition costs, with even greater drop-offs when comparing to backend data. Given that social is mostly an upper-funnel channel to help find new audiences, it’s important to ensure that your attribution model can account for this drop in data.
There a few ways to do this, chief being multi-touch attribution (MTA) models (Facebook even has its own built-in and available for all advertisers) and incrementality testing. I recommend a mix of both, because even MTA isn’t perfect at truly understanding performance at all of the user touch points along the journey of a long sales cycle.
Advertisers who fail to adopt these practices into their models will also fail to understand a channel’s true performance, which will then lead them to misguided budget allocations. Ultimately, this drives advertisers to pull funding from social, and opens the door for their competitors to fill their pipeline with these new leads.
4. Adopt in-platform AI product features and
work smarter
Similar to B2C, B2B marketers can and should be adopting most AI product features available in these social platforms in order to work smarter and leaner. Facebook specifically has grown its AI product sets, including solutions that find the best budget distribution across audiences, placements, and even the best creative messaging mix.
With only a few additional optimizations, B2B advertisers can use these tools to find success. Advertisers who work with AI will find themselves running more efficient accounts with better opportunities to scale.
5. Feed AI with as much data as you can
While AI can be a powerful tool, it must be fed ample amounts of data to find the best solution for each advertiser. The more touch points you can identify as a conversion event and fed back into each platform, the stronger AI will work for you.
With each standard event identified on the site, the AI platform will match that standard event in its black box of data of all advertisers’ standard events to find similar users in a similar market / vertical. This allows you to use your own data warehouse, plus each platform’s data warehouse, to match audiences and drive performance on the channel.
For B2B advertisers, it’s important to match these standard events to valuable event triggers on the website—for example, defining a blog subscriber as a shallower event than someone who submits a form for a demo video. (But, to each their own—understand your funnel and website user journey).
6. Find success on LinkedIn for improved pipeline performance
LinkedIn is a valuable channel that’s getting left in the dust due to high costs shallow in the funnel or even at the delivery stage. I’ve found LinkedIn to drive more quality audiences down funnel at more efficient costs deeper in the buyer journey, despite having over 400% higher CPM or CPLs. To help get you started, follow this proven step-by-step guide to unlocking success on LinkedIn.
I’ve tested these strategies with B2B clients again and again and have always found that they help strengthen the account’s performance. Before Q4 is officially upon us, take the time to reassess your brand’s standing on social platforms. If you find that there’s room for improvement (hot tip, there’s always room for improvement), dedicate some time to exploring these avenues - your bottom line will thank you.
3 Keyword Tactics for Advertising on Amazon
For years now, digital marketing experts have touted the unshakeable duopoly of Google and Facebook. Now, Amazon has gatecrashed the party with its digital advertising platform’s display and sponsored ads.
With Amazon’s $900B+ market capitalization, it’s hard to name what Amazon isn’t doing these days—content and streaming video, grocery delivery, smart home hardware, and home services are simply bullet points in its all-encompassing “eCommerce” label.
How Big is the Amazon Opportunity?
The breadth of its offering indicates that Amazon is a key focal point for consumers and marketers alike, having had a projected 50% lift in advertising spend in 2018 alone. Studies are also showing anywhere from 50-60% of product searches beginning on Amazon. And, when search queries begin on any eCommerce site, those are high-intent and generally high-converting searches.
Consider these other aspects of the Amazon ecosystem:
- Saved credit card and shipping information reduces lower-funnel, path-to-purchase friction.
- Amazon is considered a brand-safe environment, with its primary focus on eCommerce and not user-generated content.
- Amazon customers, and in particular Amazon Prime members, are loyal, repeat customers, maintaining that highly valuable user pool.
It’s no wonder, then, that many retail brands are eagerly optimizing their media mix to include Amazon. Just like when Facebook started boasting its 50 million daily active users in 2007, this is an important time in eCommerce and a huge opportunity for brands to get in front of this high-intent audience.
Tips for Sponsored Products and Sponsored Brands Ads
What makes Amazon’s Sponsored Products and Sponsored Brands ads so great for seasoned biddable search media practitioners is that they both use keywords to target users. Because of this, you can bring over keyword learnings and your own skill set from other search platforms to get in front of a fresh and valuable new audience on Amazon.
However, since consumer behavior on Amazon and traditional engines differ, the way to drive maximum success is to stay aware of these differences when honing your keyword strategy—even if you don’t have years of pay-per-click experience under your belt.
The most fundamental difference with Amazon is that the majority of searches there are specific to a product (“sunscreen”) or brand (“Covergirl sunscreen”), and not informational (“should I be using sunscreen”), navigational (“drugstore”), or laden with superlatives or modifiers (“best sunscreens 2019”).
So, while “targeting relevant keywords” is a broad umbrella concept, breaking it down more granularly—and coupling this concept with the underlying mindset of Amazon searchers—will help brands achieve maximum return on their Amazon Advertising goals.
At Marin, we have a deep bench of Amazon tips to drive your success, but for starters you can try these three tactics to fine-tune your keyword strategy.
Conquest Competitively
What this means: Target keywords of your competitor brands and products.
Play offense with your keywords, and target your competitor brands and products to capture users searching for the competition. Be strategic about how you bid on your competitors’ brand versus products. A product that’s in direct competition to yours is worth a higher bid, as opposed to an entire brand that has a number of out-of-category, non-competitive products.
Protect Your Brand
What this means: Target your brand name and product name or some variation of it.
Safeguard your brand from competitors and retain loyalists. There’s a school of thought that says you can win brand terms for free through organic listings. However, dominating Amazon’s search results with your brand not only plays defense against your competitors who are likely bidding on your brand terms, but strengthens your brand with a ubiquitous presence.
Test and Harvest
What this means: See what works and run with it.
Use the remainder of your keywords to prospect and build your upper funnel. Target complementary product keywords and out-of-category keywords to grab users who are active in other, related purchase cycles.
Once you can start intelligently “targeting relevant keywords,” be vigilant about analyzing your data. Scale up your best performers while throttling back your low performers, but be mindful of external factors that could change your keyword performance over time—such as seasonality, the release of competing products, sales or promotions on other channels, or positive or negative PR.
This is just a taste of the Amazon advertising expertise that Marin can bring to your performance marketing efforts. Check out our many case studies to learn how we’ve helped clients like you succeed on Amazon (and other channels). If you’d like to see our Amazon Advertising solution in action, simply contact us and we’ll set up a short demo.
Benchmark Report: eCommerce Is Having a Big Moment
In our latest digital advertising benchmark report, we found a 40 percent ad spend increase in eCommerce as Amazon maintains its healthy lead. Shopping ads represented 37 percent of total search spend share, as Google Shopping continues to be a key source of traffic and online orders for many retailers.
A few other key takeaways:
- Engaging Stories Format Pays Off: 45 percent of all Instagram spend occurred on Stories as advertisers and consumers embrace the ad format. Features like Instagram Story Links and Highlights are keeping social audiences engaged as Instagram becomes more of a direct selling tool.
- Search Click Volume Rises: With 13 percent YoY growth, paid search click volume has shown solid growth globally. Specific industries have seen more dramatic YoY click growth, led by Healthcare rising 30 percent, Technology up 25 percent, and Retail growing 24 percent.
- Search CPCs Dropping Across All Industries: Retail at $0.38 and travel at $0.44 recorded the lowest CPCs this quarter. Notably, healthcare saw a sharp drop, with the lowest CPCs in five quarters at $1.08. As the healthcare industry becomes more customer-centric, marketers can find good value for clicks by boosting their paid search budgets accordingly.
To learn more and see how your ad campaigns compare, view our Q2 2019 Digital Advertising Benchmark Report. You can analyze current cross-channel advertising trends by region, industry, and publisher.
Each quarter, we aggregate advertising performance across our customer base, and share our results with digital marketing professionals to compare against their own initiatives. In addition to global industry trends, we explore the most compelling findings in key areas of digital marketing.
Access the report for actionable insights you can apply to your digital ad campaigns.
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Feeling overwhelmed by your advertising campaigns? Donate 15 minutes of your time and we’ll show you how MarinOne allows you to easily manage, measure, and optimize all of your ad campaigns from a single location. Request a demo today.
What Do People Want from Your Brand?
According to Red Crow, people are exposed to 4,000 to 10,000 ads a day. That's not counting TV, radio, print, and billboards—or the constant demands of work, family, and/or school. The people you’re trying to reach as an advertiser are overloaded, overstimulated, and overwhelmed.
Despite this reality—or perhaps because of it— there are things your brand can and should do to make sure you’re delivering resonant messages instead of simply adding to the noise.
(Great) Experience Required
Whether someone’s shopping online or in a store, there are certain deal breakers that could lose you business from the get-go. For example, rude employees make for an unpleasant in-store experience. In the digital realm, one thing that turns off shoppers more than anything else is a shoddy delivery timeframe or, worse, an undelivered shipment. Today’s consumers simply won’t tolerate such lapses in the modern, on-demand economy.
The best way to provide a great experience is to know what people want—now, tomorrow, and next month, whether it’s sustainable products, the right communication method, or other motivation encouraging a purchase—and to flawlessly execute on the delivery logistics.
What People Want
What do people want? Well, we’re all human. Of course, you should “always be testing” to find out what makes your particular audience tick. However, there are certain things that just about all of your potential customers prefer:
To be left aloneif it’s not relevant
Think obnoxious barfly versus subtle flirt. Again, people are dealing with more interruptions and distractions than ever before, so make sure potential touchpoints are meaningful, and be there when they're looking for a distraction. Using custom and lookalike audiences to target campaigns is one of the areas where a third party like Marin can really help increase the relevancy (and performance) of your campaigns.
To be understood
Do you have a good understanding of your audience and what they want, in particular, how their wants and needs change over time or by season, age, gender, etc.? Do you have a mechanism in place to alert you when trends change or new ones arise?
The right content
Are you sending a bunch of influencer videos when your buyer is looking for a discount? Make sure you’re posting the right things that meet people where they are on their customer journey. Tracking engagement and conversion rates—in particular monitoring your campaigns for spikes or drops—is a great way to ensure that your content is resonating.
Discounts and sales
On a related note, a recent study showed that 72% of consumers consider “Discounts or sales” as their top shopping priority. Contrast this with the 18% of marketers who provided this answer, and you’ll find a quick disconnect between marketing teams and the general public. Make this your mantra: Give the people what they want.
Privacy and trustworthiness
Data privacy is a top-of-mind issue, with Marin research placing it as the #1 challenge among global digital advertisers. As each week (and sometimes day) brings a new data breach or company handling personally identifiable information (PII) in a clumsy way, more and more people are concerned about how their data is being used and otherwise protected.
How are you addressing this growing consumer—and advertiser—apprehension around “Big Data”? Check out your ad management vendor’s privacy policy to ensure they’re on the right side of this argument at all times.
Connection
Are you relentlessly focused on the customer? Is there a human touch in your messaging? It’s in our nature to eventually circle back to “me,” so find ways to regularly assess your programs and make sure you’re connecting in a meaningful way with customers and prospects to maximize value.
Safety
Fraud, protecting kids online, and screening inappropriate content that displays alongside your ads are all important for advertisers. But, despite all these legitimate concerns, people will share their data if you make it worth their while. Advertising is essentially transactional—consumers will only share their data with you if you’re providing enough value and relevance to justify their trust. And, they expect you to uphold that trust as a top priority.
The Upshot
More than ever, consumers expect personalized, relevant experiences; trustworthy brands; and a secure shopping encounter. Every time you deliver on these requirements, you boost your brand credentials and increase the likelihood of gaining more customers.
To recap, make sure you’ve done your homework:
- Identify your target audience
- Learn what makes them tick
- Develop a data-driven advertising strategy—one that incorporates lessons learned and clearly establishes and messages according to your brand values
Once you’ve nailed these basics, it's time to execute on your strategy. And, although this (almost) goes without saying, always be sure to do periodic check-ins to make sure your programs are on the right track and delivering results. At the end of the day, ensuring a two-way relationship with your customers will lead to more credibility, more trust, and more sales.
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Feeling overwhelmed by your advertising campaigns? Donate 15 minutes of your time and we’ll show you how MarinOne allows you to easily manage, measure, and optimize all of your ad campaigns from a single location. Request a demo today.
Kiwi.com Arrives at 28% More Conversions with MarinOne Bidding
In the highly competitive travel booking space, Kiwi wasn’t hitting their goals. The Kiwi teams were also spending countless hours analyzing campaign data to determine the appropriate bid strategy based on campaign targets.
Marin’s performance marketing experts provided extensive guidance and consultation to ensure MarinOne Bidding—with its “always-on” responsive algorithm—delivered what Kiwi wanted.
The results?
- 28% increase in conversion volume
- 50% decrease in cost per conversion
- 21% increase in conversion rate
Learn more in our case study.
3 Things Brands Should Be Doing with Instagram Stories
More than 500 million people use Instagram Stories every day. And, a third of the most-viewed Stories come from a business account. With stats like these, it’s clear the Stories platform provides a great space for brands to maximize reach, build brand loyalty, and generate new customers.
Advertising with Instagram Stories is also a great way to give your brand a voice and help humanize it by discussing relatable topics or current trends. Since Stories disappear after 24 hours, there’s a lot of opportunity to be experimental, spontaneous, and transparent.
As you plan your creative content, here are a few things to incorporate into your Instagram Stories marketing strategy.
1. Interactivity
Stories have many interactive features specific to the format that aren’t available for Feed Posts, and experimenting with these can really help differentiate you from the competition. These interactive elements bring people closer together by allowing them to directly participate in your shared expression or announcement—and they help encourage conversation both on and off the platform.
Remember, these sort of add-ons really entice users to watch longer. By gaining and keeping their attention, you become a brand that goes beyond focusing on just sales or conversions—instead, you can build an audience connection and create a community with an ongoing relationship.
Examples of interactive features include:
- Polls: Polls are great for engagement, and an awesome way to conduct market research and build your content strategy. A good example of this is showcasing your product catalog and boosting visibility of a product line. What do your users like? Which products are their favorites? From here, you can incorporate their answers into your paid media strategy and showcase similar products that your customers really want to see!
- Instagram Stories Stickers: Instagram Stories Stickers are an excellent way to draw viewers into fun conversations, and can help with making your content look less static or boring. Examples of these are location-based hashtag stickers, questions, or GIFs. Adding a location-based hashtag sticker to your brand’s Story helps your business get seen by people searching within your local area. Furthermore, it makes your brand’s story more visible to people in your area. Your Story may show up in the suggested Stories content of other local Instagrammers!
- Instagram Story Links: If you have a verified account or you’re running a business profile and have more than 10,000 followers, you can add a ‘swipe-up’ link to your Story. This gives you the opportunity to maximize reach to your website by driving traffic to the product page, and leverage Instagram Stories as a direct selling tool. When you link within your Story, it creates a much smoother customer experience by bringing people directly to the referenced site, rather than having to navigate to the bio before visiting the URL.
2. Instagram Story Highlights
Unlike regular Instagram Stories that vanish after 24 hours, Instagram Stories Highlights can live permanently on your profile (you can always delete or edit by tapping and holding your Story Highlight). Your highlights live front and center on your Instagram profile—meaning they’re essentially prime real estate, and perfect for helping new visitors who are discovering your brand to learn what your company is all about.
This can be a great opportunity to display your evergreen content, such as customer testimonials or reviews, as well as how-to tutorials and product displays. Displaying any event experiences or brand collaborations will also bring more transparency to your business and will make people feel like they were part of those milestones.
With that said, it’s also the perfect place to direct your community of followers to your most valuable and interesting content!
3. User-Generated Content
This is when you encourage your fans to post pictures or videos with your content and re-post them as part of your brand’s story. With user-generated content, you give your fans the opportunity to tell your narrative. As we’ve seen, this helps in making fans feel happy and honored to be part of your brand’s messaging. When people see content from actual customers, it increases your brand’s credibility, and anyone discovering your brand will view your content as more genuine and trustworthy. User-generated content helps your most loyal customers become your biggest brand advocates, effectively building communities around your products and services.
Instagram’s Biggest Benefit
We hope you’ll take full advantage of the features above to help improve your brand’s engagement and relationship with both followers and prospects! Instagram’s ability to bring people together is its biggest value-add, and something all brands should be leveraging.
Want to learn more about developing a successful marketing strategy with Instagram Stories? Watch our joint webinar with Facebook today.
The State of Digital Advertising 2019
For our latest State of Digital Advertising report, we surveyed over 400 high-level digital marketers across 12 industries to find out their current goals, strategies, and concerns.
What are some of their top priorities for this year and beyond?
Combine the Strategic and the Tactical
Advertisers are working hard on key strategic goals like increasing brand awareness and reducing friction for their clients. They’re also eager to win new business by adopting more tactical plays like running omnichannel campaigns and optimizing performance. Brands who deliver on both strategic and tactical goals will outpace the competition.
Maintain the Old (and Reliable), Embrace the New
Although paid search still dominates digital advertising, other channels are taking their share. Despite ongoing controversies and people leaving for greener (Instagram) pastures, advertisers still have a massive Facebook audience—and can also take advantage of surging video and eCommerce advertising opportunities.
Win and Maintain Consumer Trust
With regulations like the GDPR and the upcoming CCPA requiring advertisers to implement entirely new strategies for ensuring data privacy, publishers have continued work to do to win and keep public—and advertiser—confidence.
To see the complete report and compare against your organization’s goals, view our State of Digital Advertising Report 2019.
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Feeling overwhelmed by your advertising campaigns? Donate 15 minutes of your time and we’ll show you how MarinOne allows you to easily manage, measure, and optimize all of your ad campaigns from a single location. Request a demo today.
How to Complement Your In-Person Events with Facebook Ads
If you’re from the midwestern United States, as I am, you’ve noticed that the seasons have finally shifted. Winter feels like a memory, you’re hearing outdoor music more often, and grills are alight.
With the change of seasons, our calendars fill with outdoor events, parties, and concerts. If your brand is joining the fray and hosting some festivities of its own, you’ll want to ensure that your events stand out from the crowd and get folks in the door. Aside from organic social media sharing (which you should definitely be doing!), it’s important to use Facebook and complementary advertising to attract people to your events this season.
Use Facebook Events
So this one is fairly obvious. Hopefully, this is the first thing you do! There are a ton of features and benefits to using Facebook event pages and the more you invest in them, the more you get out of them. Setting up a Facebook event is easy, but using them to their fullest extent isn’t as straightforward.
The first thing you should do to extend the reach of your Facebook event page is to promote the event using Facebook Ads Manager. When you set up your event, it’ll automatically post to the page that’s hosting the event, but you’ll want to start using ads to influence a wider audience. For your ads, you should use the Event Responses campaign objective. In order for your ads to succeed, you’ll need to ensure that your audience targeting is on point.
Target the Right People
When you use Facebook Events as your main registration page (instead of hosting a separate landing page on your site), it becomes very easy to advertise within the platform. I strongly recommend targeting these three segments with your event’s ads:
Top of Funnel:Drive Awareness
For events, focus on lookalikes of your ideal attendees. Interest targeting can work really well for top-of-funnel advertising. Make sure you group similar interests into their own ad sets so you can see performance on the theme (e.g., Tech vs. Advertising). For these ad sets, create messaging to move those users who showed interest—but didn’t register—across the finish line.
From a messaging standpoint, it's important to use language that complements your creative. For instance, your creative may show the speakers at your event, but the copy would cover the current sale in ticket prices or the urgency to order. It’s ok to use longer copy in your upper-funnel advertising since these potential customers will ideally not have heard of your event yet.
Middle of Funnel:Getting Users to Register
Here you have lots of options. First, build an audience of people who’ve engaged with your brand’s content in the last 90 or 180 days. You can do this in the Audience Dashboard. Secondly, build a separate audience of people who’ve attended past events by creating a custom audience and selecting “Event” from the options. This allows you to create a ton of different audiences based on how people interacted with your previous events.
Keep your mid-funnel messaging short and punchy. Use short copy to quickly stress the importance and impact of the event. You could say “You won’t want to miss this [event]” and use the creative to highlight what they can expect to see or receive if they attend. Because people will know your brand and may have even heard of your event, no need to waste time trying to build brand affinity.
Bottom of Funnel:Convert Highly Interested Users
Finally, you should retarget people who’ve been to your brand’s website, started the checkout process, or filled out a contact form. You can often bid higher here and pick up a few extra conversions for fairly cheap, since these audiences have expressed a lot of interest in your company. This would also be where you add your attendees from last year if you have a list.
Your copy in the bottom-funnel ads should be similar to mid-funnel—short and punchy. However, you do have the opportunity to call out where your customers are in their journey. If the tickets were in their cart, for example, you could say “Finish purchasing your tickets! The prices goes up on [date].” Be sure the copy is hyper-relevant to the actions they’ve taken to keep it as effective as possible.
Use Instagram, Facebook, and Messenger Stories
The easiest thing to do with your event ads is to turn on Auto Placements and let them run, but you’d be remiss if you didn’t account for non-typical dimensions and platform differences in your placements.
To ensure that each ad that runs is correctly sized, you should create vertical and square videos or images to add as supplemental creative options on your ads. If you’ve selected all placements you can simply click “Select a Placement to customize” at the ad level and choose one of the story formats.
This is incredibly powerful because what works in Instagram Feed and Facebook News Feed is very different from the way people interact with stories formats on the platforms. For instance, showing a video in your brand’s Instagram stories of someone inviting people to the event and ending with “Swipe up for more information” will be a lot more impactful than a picture of the venue, which you might use in one of the feed formats.
Use the placements to your advantage! Pay attention to the format, creative, and messaging for each ad version and map out where they’ll be most effective.
Afterward: Build Your Audience
After all your planning is done and your event is over, you should be left with a lot of data. Whether or not you have plans for another event, it would be a great idea to get ahead of it and organize your data into lists for future use. It's important to note that this info is not just useful for future events but should be nurtured in your funnel of potential customers.
In your event’s registration data, you should have a list of attendees’ names and emails. Assuming you had an advertiser disclosure in the Privacy Policy and Agreement, you can upload the list to Facebook as a custom audience.
Aside from actual registrants and attendees, you also have visibility to more data on your event’s page with the group of individuals who marked “Interested” but didn’t attend. You can use the tools in the Audience section of Facebook Ads Manager to build an audience of this group of people, and use it as a solid start for invites to the next shindig or for nurturing in your brand’s sales funnel.
If you had a separate online registration page hosted on your site, you should build a website custom audience of the individuals who viewed that page. Similar to the last audience, these people at least expressed some interest and will likely help you find folks who will convert easily next time.
Conclusion
Events have a lot of moving parts, and promotion is only a small portion of the things that need to be done to pull off a successful event. It is, however, a very important ingredient in that event’s success and should never be ignored.
Hopefully, these tips help demystify what it takes to organize Facebook ads to bolster your event’s visibility. Most of the tips here can be summed up to “build and use your list well,” so make this your credo! If you think strategically about how to use your owned and built lists, you’ll be in great shape.
How Premier Farnell Grew Revenue Incrementally with MarinOne Bidding
Premier Farnell faced the constant challenge of operating its paid search and shopping campaigns at scale. With over 40 markets selling over 900,000 electronic components, it needed to ensure the best possible performance from their digital marketing campaigns.
Thanks to MarinOne's bidding technology, Premier Farnell identified opportunities for increasing account performance, with immediate improvements in two markets, Germany and the Netherlands.
The results?
Read all about it in our case study.
Amazon Prime Day—Retailers, Are You Prepared?
One of the biggest online retail events of the year is looming on the horizon and fast approaching. Amazon Prime Day 2019 will be the fifth annual event, taking place July 15th and 16th.
Amazon introduced Prime Day back in 2015 to celebrate the 20th anniversary of its founding. It was a one-off sales event offering more deals than Black Friday, exclusively for Prime members.
Prime Day 2018 may have only lasted a day (and a half), but it was Amazon’s biggest shopping event in its history—sales surpassed Cyber Monday, Black Friday, and Prime Day 2017 over a 36-hour period. Retailers offered over a million deals worldwide and sold over 100 million products. For any retail company, that’s a staggering growth opportunity.
Prime Day 2019 holds the potential for you to reach a colossal number of shoppers and drive incremental revenue.
Here’s what you need to know to advertise on Amazon.
Advertising Solutions
Advertising on Amazon can be an easy way to promote your listings and get your products noticed when people are shopping for similar items. There are two advertising solutions: Sponsored Products for promoting individual listings, and Sponsored Brands for registered brand owners to promote their brand and product portfolio. These solutions can give your products a visibility boost and maximize sales by bringing those products to a new audience.
Sponsored Products
Amazon Sponsored Products ads are a type of paid advertising where you’re only charged when a consumer clicks your ad (pay-per-click). Keywords trigger the ads, and they also drive the consumer to a product detail page within Amazon. The ads can be displayed on top of, alongside, or within search results and on product pages, and can appear on both desktop and mobile.
Sponsored Products ads can help you grow sales on Amazon by reaching consumers searching for products like yours and driving them to your product page. This ad type can increase eligibility and placement status for your top Buy Box offers, and help grow your new and low-exposure ASINs.
Sponsored Brands
As with Sponsored Products, Sponsored Brands are a type of paid advertising where you’re only charged when a consumer clicks your ad. Note that this ad type is only available for professional sellers enrolled in the Amazon Brand Registry, vendors, booksellers, and agencies. You can display your ads at the top of, alongside, or within search results, on both desktop and mobile.
Sponsored Brands ads can help drive discovery of your brand. They're great for generating awareness of a new product, promoting seasonal items, or creating more demand for a bestseller. They also allow you to drive consumers to your Store page, custom URL, or a bestselling product page.
Should I Advertise on Amazon?
Are you selling products online either via your own website or a third party? If the answer is yes, then Amazon Advertising is a must!
If you’re reluctant, start small. Only sell your top selling product(s) online, and then once you see the value, begin to increase your Amazon inventory. If you need additional help, then a third-party ad management platform like Marin is the solution for you.
We may be biased, but Marin was able to increase exposure by 79% for Buyagift (a leading provider of gift experiences in the UK) by optimizing bids with our leading ad management platform. We were also able to increase click volume by 36%, with a 7.4% lower cost-per-click than before. This grew awareness and engagement, and ultimately helped Buyagift boost revenue on Amazon by 17%. See the Amazon case study for more information.
Take a leap of faith and reap the rewards this Amazon Prime Day!
Testing Effectively with Amazon Sponsored Brands Campaigns
Just as they do with Sponsored Products, Amazon advertisers also have access to impactful placements with Sponsored Brands, which can help drive more clicks and better post-click customer interactions.
The prominence of these ads at the top of the page highlights the importance of testing. With so many variables (products, copy, images, etc.), advertisers have lots of testing options—and lots of ways to optimize for better performance.
Marin Tip: MarinOne supports reporting, automated bid management, and intuitive ad creation via Amazon’s API (beta) for Sponsored Brands campaigns.
Let’s craft some testing hypotheses particular to Sponsored Brands. Note that you can choose to run campaigns concurrently (one test and one control), or iteratively (week one control, week two test).
If you go with iterative, be aware of an apples to oranges scenario that may happen if volume is different for reasons beyond your control—for example, a sitewide sale that runs during the test week but not the control week. For reasons like this, this approach can be more difficult to qualify.
ASIN Selection
For a Sponsored Brands ad, you can select up to three products to showcase. Be aware of your keyword selection when deciding which products to advertise together. If you’re including broad, generic terms this might be a good campaign to include proven-winner products or bestsellers. If the keywords selected are brand-driven, consider including products that are new to market.
You should be able to easily measure performance by ASIN to see which should be featured in the Sponsored Brands ad and which shouldn’t. Promote products that have good reviews and images. Keep the other variables consistent and test to see which products get to stay.
Image and Ad Copy
The ad creative components for a Sponsored Brands ad require a custom message and a 400×400 pixel image. These elements open up lots of opportunities to test! Make sure the messaging copy lines up with your keyword selection and find out what messaging, in 50 characters or less, resonates with searchers.
Similarly, what image encourages shoppers to click the ad? There are the three images of your product selection, but how do you make the best use of the header image? You could use a logo or potentially a fourth product. Be mindful of Amazon’s creative acceptance policy, too, and the approval process these changes (and the aforementioned) all need to go through.
Store or Product Detail Page
When you create a Sponsored Brands you have the option to drive clicks to your Store or to an aggregate page. A Store is a way for vendors and sellers to provide customers with curated content and a tailored experience on Amazon. Building a Store allows for a multitude of uses—including driving traffic via Sponsored Brands.
If sales is the primary goal, set a test to see where returns are strongest. A Store may provide a fuller, more immersive experience with your brand—to the point that no other brands or products will be featured. It’s all you. With headline copy, image, ASIN selection, and keywords all left static, which landing page experience produces the best outcome?
With this in mind, you should be ready to test. Remember to set the right parameters and frame your test before launching anything. You can get very precise and technical but the aim is more or less to change one variable, keep everything else consistent, and evaluate the impact that a single change has on performance. Now get out the lab coats and beakers!
All About Amazon’s Sponsored Products Ads: Your Targeting Options
This is the second article of a three-part series on Amazon’s Sponsored Products ads. Be sure to check out our previous post on building the right structure.
What’s in a Search?
Amazon ads use keyword targeting that surfaces results based on words and phrases that customers search with. In order to make sure your ads reach the right customers at the right time, it’s important that you understand and properly leverage the targeting methods Amazon offers.
Amazon Targeting: Manual and Automatic
There are two targeting options you can use when you create an Amazon Sponsored Products campaign: manual and automatic. Manual targeting lets you apply your own keywords to the campaign. Conversely, automatic targeting doesn’t require you to input any keywords—Amazon automatically collects and targets relevant keywords for the products you want to advertise, based on the information in your product detail pages.
When to Use Manual Targeting
Manual targeting is ideal for advertisers who prefer full campaign control. It allows you to set bids at the keyword level, letting you bid more competitively on keywords that perform well. If you already know what keywords your customers search with and can supply a list, this targeting option is for you. Additionally, you can use Amazon’s suggested keywords to help inform your keyword strategies.
Note: Manual targeting is available for both Sponsored Products and Sponsored Brands ad types.
When to Use Automatic Targeting
Automatic targeting can be great for expanding reach beyond your existing customer base. For example, it may be perfect for an advertiser who plans to launch a product in a new category. Since you don’t have to enter keywords by yourself, it helps save time when you create a new campaign. If you’re new to the digital advertising world, this targeting option will be a great starting point for you. It also allows you to discover new keywords that generate clicks and sales.
Note: Automatic targeting is available for the Sponsored Products ad type only.
Your Customers Are “Always On”
You should leverage an always-on approach of running your campaigns with both manual and automatic targeting. Be sure to select the appropriate targeting methods for your campaign goals and products. For example, run a manual targeting campaign using high-performing keywords with best-selling products, and run an automatic campaign to launch new products.
You can use both targeting methods in concert by running an automatic targeting campaign to gain insight on what keywords generate higher clicks and sales than others, and then applying those keywords to a manual campaign and setting more competitive keyword-level bids. Diversify your targeting methods and keep optimizing your campaigns based on what you learn from the performance, so that you reach as many customers as possible, as effectively as possible.
All About Amazon’s Sponsored Products Ads: Building the Right Structure
Amazon is on a mission to help advertisers increase awareness and drive sales on its platform. To this end, they’ve made a suite of ad types available that more and more advertisers are embracing, including the focus of this three-part series—Sponsored Products.
With the Amazon Sponsored Products ad campaign type, you can create innumerable combinations of keywords, products, and other targets to advertise your product catalog. As Prime Day approaches and to get you up to speed with this robust ad type, let’s take a look, in our first article in the series, at some structural examples of Sponsored Products ads and the benefits of each one.
In The Spotlight
Amazon Sponsored Products allow for a really interesting interplay between keyword and product selection. This concept is especially important when considering what products you want to pair with your high-value brand keywords. In most cases, you want to use these keywords to do one of a few different things. Add brand keywords and then select products that are:
- Proven best sellers, representative of your brand
- On sale or otherwise showcased in some way in the short term
- Up-and-coming products that you want to introduce to the market
Use these keywords to your advantage and keep in mind the strategies don’t have to be mutually exclusive. With Sponsored Products, finding the right product selection can be just as important as including the right keywords.
All for One … and One for All?
How are you using the Purchased Product report? This report provides details on the actual ASINs purchased after a customer clicked your ad, whether the product was advertised or not.
[caption id="attachment_12928" align="alignnone" width="500"]
Purchased Product report[/caption]
For a Sponsored Products campaign you’re required to selectively add products to advertise. Only those products selected will show in your Sponsored Products ad. However, that doesn’t prevent someone from purchasing a product that’s not the same as the one advertised. This is where the Purchased Product report is useful.
One strategy is to use your best-selling product or variant as a lead-in Sponsored Product. This is a more conservative approach than selecting a wider group of products and leaving it to Amazon to determine which to advertise.
With the “one for all” approach, you’re able to review the Purchased Product report and understand if more products or variants should be added to the campaign, or possibly if there are undiscovered products that are being purchased more often than the one being advertised!
Totally Automatic
A Sponsored Products campaign set to Automatic can be extremely valuable in an exploratory sense. With this setting, there is no keyword selection—you get to leave all that to Amazon. This lets you focus on product selection and removes the guesswork.
After some time, review your Search Query reports to see what terms are working well, and break these out into a new campaign with a Manual setting. Using this process enables you to make data-driven decisions—picking keywords that have already proven to work, and assigning bids based on accrued historical data.
Conclusion
These are just a handful of the strategies to consider when using Amazon Sponsored Products. Here, we’ve only looked at keyword targeting, but things start to get even more interesting and sophisticated with the newly introduced Product Attribute Targets (PATs). More on those in a future article. For now, stay tuned for the next post in this Sponsored Products series, where we’ll go deeper into the targeting methods that Amazon uses for this ad type.
Responsive Search Ads: The Latest Data Insights
This is a guest post from Will Cozart, Labs Analyst at
3Q Digital.
Advertisers were somewhat skeptical of the new Responsive Search Ads (RSAs) when they were first announced at Google Marketing Live 2018, as the format represented one more step into an automated search marketing world. So, what are RSAs (see this article with the full 411), how do they work, and what kind of performance have we seen now that the ad type is fairly mature?
Responsive Search Ads: a Quick Refresher
Google’s RSAs simplify the ad copy creation process by allowing machine learning to manipulate a single ad, containing multiple headlines and description assets, to serve the best possible combination for each user in each individual auction. More details on implementation and specs in the link above.
What We’ve Seen
In early testing comparing RSA performance to existing expanded text ads (ETAs), 3Q account teams didn’t see very encouraging results. While our holistic agency testing confirmed these results, evidenced by one of the test accounts below (an 18% lower CTR for RSAs? Yikes!), we realized that it didn’t paint the full picture of the ad type’s impact on an account’s performance. So, we changed up the testing methodology.
We decided to look not only at the performance of the different ads next to each other, but the overall metrics of campaigns with both RSAs and ETAs in every ad group, to those with ETAs only, all else being equal. We tested with RSAs containing only existing ETA assets to negate any impact from the copy itself, and used Google’s Drafts and Experiments tool to split auctions between the control and experiment campaigns.
The findings were now much more promising, and in line with Google’s claim of “up to 10% more clicks and conversions when using with Expanded Text Ads.” This test included 15 accounts in different verticals, and included nearly 40 different campaigns. It’s also important to note that all accounts were tested using the “optimize” ad rotation setting.
You’ll notice RSAs tended to provide the most benefit on the Non-Brand side. As the ad type is able to adapt to individual auction dynamics, advertisers are eligible for additional impressions they might not have had by using ETAs exclusively. Perhaps a combination of assets available only through the RSA format gives your ad just enough additional relevance to win an impression not possible with the existing ETAs.
On the Brand side, advertisers tend to capture a much higher share of available impressions already, so our accounts didn’t see much of a performance improvement from RSAs when looking at volume deltas for the median campaign. Some of the accounts saw extraordinary results with RSAs on the Brand side, skewing the average numbers.
Overall, our campaigns saw traffic lifts from RSAs that came in close to Google’s claims, and even improved efficiency slightly. By allowing Google to manipulate our RSA assets and choose the “best” ad to serve to each user, in each auction, in conjunction with the “optimize” ad rotation setting, our search accounts are bringing in more traffic to our clients’ sites. RSAs take very little time to get up and running, so why turn down these gains?
How to Test and Optimize
Curious about RSAs and want to try them for yourself? Have you tested them in the past, but analyzed performance at the ad level and decided ETAs still reign supreme? Have no fear! It’s never too late to get started and go after those incremental performance gains for your account.
Start by adding RSAs using your existing ad copy into each ad group of a campaign (or multiple, or all of them), and look at the performance of the campaign in question in sum. This can be done a couple of ways:
- Use the Drafts and Experiments tool (preferred) to evenly split the auctions. You’ll also get the nifty performance comparisons and statistical significance calculations right there in the UI.
- Look at ad group performance before/after adding RSAs (if you don’t expect any major outside shifts in performance, like promotions, competition, or budget changes).
While we’ve established that adding in an RSA per ad group, alongside ETAs, is a best practice for search campaigns, your work doesn’t stop there. Check out your RSAs’ asset performance to see which ones are serving most, and least, often. Consider replacing low-serving assets with new, meaningfully different ones.
I’m not talking about swapping out a single word, but the entire line of copy. Don’t be afraid to go in a new direction—you might be surprised! RSAs are powered by machine learning, so they might need a bit of time to ramp up, but we typically saw performance normalize around one week after launching. Good luck testing!
YouTube Marketing: Who's Doing it Right and How You Can Too
This is a guest post from Maddie Davis, co-founder of
Enlightened Digital.
Technology has disrupted a variety of traditional business methods, including marketing. As social media continues to be a fact of life for billions of people, more businesses are looking to social platforms to reach their target audiences.
With more than 30 million visitors per day, YouTube is the marketing tool savvy businesses are using to broaden their reach and improve customer engagement. Here are some tips businesses can use to successfully leverage the platform.
Viral Isn’t Always Better
The first thing brands must recognize about YouTube marketing is that going viral isn’t always the optimal result. Of course, it would be great to produce a single video and rack up a million new followers, but that won't necessarily hold the same amount of value as a well-established channel.
Rather than obsessing over how many hits your videos can get, focus on what’s important to your company and to your customers. Work toward a goal of producing valuable and engaging content. Your videos will resonate with your audience and contribute to sustainable, steady growth.
Find Your Voice
Successful brand marketing begins with establishing a brand voice. To determine the tone and style best suited for your channel, it’s important to identify your YouTube marketing goals and target audience.
Once you’ve established the theme of your channel, maintaining consistency is key. Your audience is more likely to develop a loyal viewership if they know what to expect. Additionally, maintaining a consistent tone and content schedule improves your channel’s professionalism. Sporadically posting content that doesn’t follow a general theme can turn viewers off and give the impression that you’re not dependable.
Cater to Your Audience
Attempting to broaden your reach across too many interests can have a detrimental effect on the success of your YouTube marketing efforts. If you do have a wide range of customers that are interested in different types of content, don’t be afraid of creating multiple channels to best suit the needs of your varying audiences.
Oracle is a great example of this multi-channel strategy in action. Aside from their main Oracle channel, the tech company offers a selection of additional channels dedicated to various disciplines such as customer experience, brand partnerships, industry developers, and even thought leadership from CEO Mark Hurd. This sort of strategy is highly effective for larger organizations with a wide selection of offerings.
Although it does require a greater amount of maintenance, presenting multiple channels allows for more focused content and a larger potential audience.
Offer Some Variety
Regardless if you’re managing one or multiple branded YouTube channels, it’s important to offer some variety in your content. A well-organized channel that includes different video formats, topics, and objectives will contribute to a more engaged and responsive following. Here are a few content examples other brands have found success with:
- How-to videos: Demonstrate to customers how to use your product or services. IKEA offers entertaining and helpful decorating how-to videos featuring their stylists, as well as interactive product assembly guides.
- Staff and office highlights: Company leadership and employee interviews offer viewers special insight into the inner workings of your company and the people who work there. Pinterest shared their team’s mission and company culture through an employee testimonial video.
- Sneak peeks: Preview videos of upcoming product launches are a great way to engage customers and create a sense of exclusivity for your subscribers. Apple introduced the new Apple Card with a video highlighting the card’s features and when it would be available to consumers.
- Branded series: Ongoing company and consumer events can make for great series-style content your fans can follow over time. Red Bull hosts a Red Bull Cliff Diving World Series event each year and houses the footage on the company channel.
[caption id="attachment_12850" align="alignnone" width="500"]
Source: IKEA[/caption]
Optimize for SEO
To ensure all of your hard work doesn’t go to waste and your video content is search friendly and attracting as much traffic as possible, SEO optimization is essential.
YouTube video optimization begins with keyword and content idea research to ensure there’s a substantial search demand. Once you’ve decided on a topic idea and keywords and phrases, you should include your keywords in three main categories:
- Video titles: These should be descriptive in nature and contain approximately five words.
- Video descriptions: Use your keywords within your video descriptions and try to stay close to 250 words.
- Video tags: Use keywords as tags for your videos to increase the chances of them appearing as suggestions for relevant searches.
Another tactic to incorporate into your overall strategy is to fill out the About Us page. The first 48 characters in your About Us page show up in the YouTube search results. Make the space count by filling out this section with useful information on what your channel offers to subscribers.
Video watch time is arguably the most important ranking factor. Videos around 10 minutes long will generally earn the best audience-retention rates, as opposed to shorter videos, which often attempt to cram in too much information. The average length of a first-position YouTube ranking video is 14 minutes and 50 seconds.
Thanks to technology's accessibility, succeeding with video marketing doesn’t require massive budgets or fancy production equipment. Whether you’re just starting out or looking to add visibility to your already established brand, YouTube marketing can make a positive impact on your business.
Apple Turns the Screw on User Tracking with Fresh ITP Changes
Apple continues to increase restrictions on user tracking in Safari, including on mobile, where it captures 58% of overall traffic and 66% on iOS devices. These restrictions mean that your current online conversion tracking setup is probably going to be missing a significant chunk of conversions, especially if you have a longer purchase cycle (Travel, Auto, Financial Services, etc). But there are ways to ensure you aren’t losing this valuable data while respecting user privacy. Read on for the full story and how we can help.
What is the context for ITP?
Imagine if every time you saw an ad on a bus, on a billboard, on TV, or in a magazine, you placed a Post-itⓇ note with the ad info on your wall. After a few days it would look something like this:
Photo by Wanda Lotus
Now imagine every website you visit could take a look at that wall, and even some of their partners could see what you’ve been up to. They can use this information to track your purchases and target you with new ads. This is basically the online reality that Google, Facebook, and other ad-driven businesses operate within today.
Apple, perhaps seeing an opportunity for differentiation compared to Google’s Android, has started to portray itself as a safer choice for privacy-conscious users:
Safari ITP: Getting tough with cookies
Safari, Apple’s built-in browser, has a market share approaching 50% on mobile devices. In 2017, Safari released the first version of Intelligent Tracking Prevention (ITP), which limited certain third-party cookie usage to 24 hours, reducing ad retargeting ability and some user tracking methods (i.e., tracking via URL redirection). (Check out our blog post The Winds of Change Are Chilling for Some in AdTech for a look-back on the impact of the original ITP release.)
Perhaps an unintended consequence, these initial limitations on third-party cookies actually reinforced the advantage held by large, established publishers such as Google and Facebook. Because consumers regularly visit those sites directly, they continually receive new cookies in a first-party context, which can be read later on a visit to an advertiser’s website and used to retarget or track the user. (Note: This workflow assumes a Google or Facebook tag is installed on the advertiser’s website, which is commonplace.)
By comparison, virtually nobody visits criteo.com or doubleclick.net directly, so those sites are forever stuck in third-party limbo, and subsequently their cookies are removed by Safari ITP. The ITP crew went on to flag the practice of reading first-party cookies in third-party context as a loophole, and that loophole was closed with ITP 2.0 in September 2018.
Apple didn’t stop there. In March 2019, the ITP team turned their attention to genuine first-party cookies being set or accessed by on-site tracking tags (i.e., set using JavaScript). So we can see that the Safari ITP 2.1 (announced in March) and ITP 2.2 (announced in May) releases are forcing the expiration of these first-party cookies first to 7 days, and then to 1 day respectively.
What are the implications of ITP in Safari 2.1
and Safari 2.2?
- Measurement. Going forward, Safari will look at how the cookie is being set (via redirect, JavaScript or from the web server). Measurement systems which rely on discouraged approaches will increasingly show purchases as “direct to site” or attribute the entire purchase to the last ad click. You can evaluate the relative conversion rates by browser (i.e., Chrome vs. Safari) to monitor impact. For example, users researching a big ticket purchase like a car or vacation may browse over weeks, but Safari will no longer track these users over subsequent weeks. As you can see below, Marin is providing our customers with actual impact analysis to help marketers understand the issue.
- Redirects. Measurement systems that use redirects, or third-party cookies, have seen a decline in Safari visitors since last fall with ITP 2.0. Marin has been very active over the past two years in moving our customers over to first-party tracking to ensure that campaign measurement remains intact.
- Retargeting. Expect retargeting spend on Safari to continue to decline slowly (as the targeting information provided by cookies disappears). These additional ITP releases extend the retargeting prevention to the big publishers like Google and Facebook (previous releases impact focused on third parties).
Sizing the impact
Marin has an ITP Impact Analysis Tool that calculates conversion losses on Safari. These reports show your attributed conversions by time of click, broken out by key browsers and Safari ITP versions, and will showcase a trendline for the conversion lag associated with Safari ITP 2.1.
So what should I be doing?
There are several options to address the reporting gaps exposed by Safari ITP, but we believe the best option is to upgrade your measurement solution.
- Move away from tracking via redirects. Redirects have been considered third-party by Safari for years, but now they’ve moved to close all the tracking/redirecting loopholes. Do not use redirects for new programs and be sure to move to a more modern approach for existing programs.
- Estimate Safari conversions based on Chrome users. This is an easy and low-touch option but raises some accuracy questions. This approach is used by Google, but it often performs differently for mobile users because Safari reaches a younger, more mobile, and more affluent demographic than Chrome.
- Upgrade your measurement source. With the latest iteration of Safari ITP, it’s clear that measurement solutions purely relying on client-side logic (i.e., standard website tracking tags) will no longer work. Marin is able to offer its customers a range of solutions, which require very little implementation from the advertiser. With one of these solutions deployed, you’re guaranteed no impact from the changes in ITP 2.1. (and we can prove it with our monitoring suite).
- Hybrid server/client cookies. First-party cookies are set on the server side but sent from the client side. This is a lower-effort approach for advertisers that addresses ITP requirements by moving cookie setting to the advertiser HTTP requests rather than Marin JavaScript. Advertisers without the resources or time to set up the server-side cookies on their own can request that Marin set these via administration (CNAME) and SSL certificate.
- Full server-to-server. This option requires the most effort but is free of all Javascript. Under server-to-server, the advertiser’s web server captures browser data and sends it to a Marin API behind the scenes. Marin processes this data to build and apply the correct attribution model. Marin will provide the logic to be coded.
Marin Tracker measures ad effectiveness for each advertiser by looking only at that advertiser’s results. We don’t look at the behavior of a visitor across domains. Given Marin's same-site, first-party design, we couldn't even if we wanted to. We operate within both the spirit (and the rules) of what the ITP team is trying to encourage.
Let’s find the right solution for you and your valued customers. Contact us or ask your Marin account manager how Marin can ensure accurate measurement with the growth of Apple ITP.
Get Your App In Front of the Right People
It’s been a few years since Apple introduced Search Ads, giving marketers the opportunity to promote their app at the top of relevant search results in the App Store—and it’s no surprise that they’ve proven to be effective in driving highly relevant app installs. If your business publishes iOS apps, it’s definitely worth taking a closer look at Apple Search Ads to reach more potential customers.
But first...some clarity
Before digging into the “how,” I should mention that there are two different systems you can opt into: Apple Search Ads Basic and Apple Search Ads Advanced. Search Ads Basic is exactly how it sounds—it offers limited reporting, has no keyword or audience refinements, and has a monthly budget of $5,000. A big key differentiator is that businesses pay for installs versus taps.
In contrast, Search Ads Advanced operates more like a standard PPC channel. You pay for taps, and have both flexibility and granularity with the keywords and audiences you can choose, including demographics, device, types, and locations. Marketers are able to fine-tune their campaigns to the exact people they want to target. On top of that, the reporting dashboards are more sophisticated, and make it easy to track improvements over time. A/B testing with different demographics becomes a whole lot easier.
Because it's designed for, well, more "advanced" advertisers running enterprise marketing campaigns who are continually looking to scale and allocate spend more efficiently, Marin offers full support for Search Ads Advanced.
So how does Search Ads Advanced work?
Like most popular search engines, such as Google or Bing, a user searches for keywords and if there are advertisements that align with the query, they’ll appear at the top of the search results. Ads are apparent to the user by their blue background and a small blue “Ad” notification next to the app name.
Ads are automatically created from the app’s metadata and imagery that businesses create for their App Store product page. Apple’s algorithm takes into account both the bid and app relevancy when determining if your ad displays. This is why optimizing your listing for keyword relevancy is a very important first step.
You can add keywords individually, or bulk upload them using a spreadsheet. There’s also a “Search Match” tool within the Apple Search Ads campaign builder to help you identify keywords most relevant to your app.
In terms of ad scheduling, you can set up your ads to start and stop on specific dates, or show only on specific days of the week or times of the day.
Why should I be using it?
According to Apple, Apple Search Ads have a conversion rate of 50%, with about 65% of app downloads coming from App Store searches. This makes this ad format an effective marketing channel for acquiring new and engaged users, and an essential part of improving an app’s visibility on the App Store.
Where does Marin fit in?
MarinOne helps deliver growth from your Apple Search Ads programs, giving you the opportunity to promote your app at the top of relevant App Store search results. With Marin’s support of a number of premium publishers, our all-in-one solution gives advertisers the opportunity to manage all of their mobile app ad campaigns in one place and at scale, reaching the users that matter.
Apple Search Ads’ tools to efficiently drive app downloads, paired with Marin’s proprietary marketing technology, delivers the next level of performance for mobile app marketers.
Some of the benefits of running Apple Search Ads through MarinOne include:
- MarinOne Bidding: Our machine-learning algorithm goes beyond the historical performance data of a keyword or creative. We look at over 75 signals, including audiences, promotional schedules, and inventory levels, to calculate better bids and increase ROI.
- Customized Reports: Create customized reports to see data the exact way you want it. Choose report dimensions, metrics, and granularity, and easily schedule reports to run once, daily, weekly, or monthly.
- Advanced targeting options: Parameters include location, gender, keywords, and the ability to target people who’ve previously installed your app. You can also use creative sets to segment variations by ad group themes or audiences, and expand your reach into top-performing audiences.
- No wasted ad spend: Our biggest value-add is our support of premium publishers and ability to leverage a full-funnel view with our cross-channel attribution tool. To make it easy for our users to allocate spend to the most efficient marketing channels, we built an integration with Search Ads Advanced to give our advertisers the best opportunity to make smarter, data-driven decisions.
Interested in integrating your Apple Search Ads into your MarinOne application? Contact your account representative for more information, or request a demo today!
Giving Voice to the Future of Search
The world of search and product discovery is changing rapidly, particularly among younger users. Last year, PWC published an in-depth study that found that 71% of consumers would prefer to use their voice assistant to search than actually type a query. It’s clear that marketers need to adapt their search strategies to reflect emerging user behaviors and preferences.
At the 2019 Youth Marketing Strategy conference in London, Marin Software hosted a two-hour digital marketing stream (to a packed house!) that included a panel of digital marketing experts discussing the future of search. Moderated by Marin’s marketing director, Brian Finnerty, our panel lineup included:
How will people search in the future?
Before the discussion, Marin screened a short video that shows how the younger generation (kids from ages 8 - 12) interact with devices and find products online, highlighting a definitive shift from traditional typed search terms to long tail voice and rich visual search. Not only were the kids very funny and enthusiastic about emerging technology, but also they proved to be incredibly savvy at finding what they needed online. Take a look...
Picking up on the kids’ reluctance to type anything (even on their phones), our panelists discussed how brands should plan for voice and visual outreach to build and maintain customer relationships in the future. Although voice search is still in its infancy, Richard May from Marin suggested that those advertisers who are willing to experiment now, while the technology is still new and fresh, would be ahead of the curve.
Visual search is taking over retail
The panelists then addressed the huge potential that visual search brings to retail advertisers, with new ad formats like Checkout on Instagram and shoppable ads on Google Images coming to market earlier this year.
Lara Suleiman from Google explained that visual search provides consumers with the most seamless purchase journey possible. As witnessed in the video on how kids search, it’s much easier for shoppers to one-click purchase items from a rich image than clicking a text ad to arrive on a vendor’s website, for example.
James Murray from Bing picked up this thread about facilitating a quick and painless customer journey. For example, he pointed out how people feel aggrieved if they have to enter a PIN number for smaller purchases today—with the proliferation of smart payment terminals now, the expectation is that it’s one-touch approval for those less substantial recurring purchases.
What does this all mean for your PPC strategy?
As shown in Marin’s future of search video, the next generation wants to see both high-quality images and price comparisons in their search results, often skipping directly to the shopping tab in Google or Bing. This is a telling development for PPC advertisers, who’ve traditionally optimized their campaigns around purchasing text ads in prominent positions on search engine results pages.
Consumers now expect search engines to do all the background work for them, filtering down to relevant and desired options with glossy product images and clear price comparisons. The panel agreed that brands who can re-engineer their PPC strategy around the user’s need for visual product information and dynamic pricing options will be most successful in terms of ROI and lower-funnel conversions in the future.
What did we learn?
Our Future of Search panel offered some great insight into where they think voice and visual search are heading. If one thing’s certain, it’s only a matter of time before voice and visual search are essential parts of the modern purchase journey in retail and beyond.
A Recipe for Making the Best Use of Audiences In Your Ad Campaigns
Audience targeting is much like cooking—with the right ingredients, a few adjustments, and seasoning to taste, you can create something hearty and enticing. Like any good online recipe, we’ll start broad and dive into the details, and cover the options you have for building an excellent mixture of audience-enabled advertising campaigns.
And, while you can look at the faces of your dinner guests to assess the success—or failure—of your culinary handiwork, we recommend a more analytical approach for your ad campaigns.
Read on.
What Is Audience Targeting?
Audiences are buckets of your users or customers, grouped based on your preferences. As an advertiser, you can create these buckets across every publisher where you sell your ads (Google Ads, Bing, Yandex, Facebook, etc.).
Once you build audiences, you can utilize them in different ways:
- Reporting: This allows you to better understand consumer behaviors, e.g., which web page is driving the most traffic/revenue.
- Bidding: Based on the data you’ve gathered, you can adjust your CPCs for advanced bidding.
- Prospecting: You can create similar audiences based on your existing lists to target new users.
In this article, we focus on Google Ads audiences—however, you can use this audience approach across all search publishers. The main difference is usually the naming convention across Google Ads, Bing, Yandex, etc.
Where Do I Start?
Option one—RLSAs
If you’ve never worked with audiences before, the best way to start is to create Remarketing Lists for Search Ads (RLSAs) and add these to all or top campaigns in Observation mode. This will allow you to gather data on your audiences, while keeping reach open for everyone performing a search query on your keywords.
You can set up RLSAs for specific pages of your website and based on rules—for example, a customer added items to the shopping cart, but didn’t complete the transaction in the last seven days. Generally, it’s a good practice to retarget your cart abandoners with a slightly higher bid, to remind them about their incomplete purchase.
Another good set of audiences are ones based on your top/desired web pages, for example:
- New arrivals
- Sales
- Specific category / product line
- Blog sections like “what to wear,” ”inspiration,” or “what’s trending this season”
Look at your website structure to determine the audiences to create.
Option two—category audiences
If you don’t know which pages to target or your business is still very new, publishers have an option to use pre-created audiences based on user interests. These are called in-marketaudiences, and represent the people interested in something specific such as travelling, cars, a particular industry, etc.
There are also demographic audiences that allow you to focus on gender and/or age range.
Option three—Customer Match
If your business has been in the market for a while and you have a list of loyal customers you’d like to retarget, all you need to do is upload your CRM list to the publisher and apply these audiences to your search campaigns.
Note that for legal and confidentiality reasons, all publishers encode user data upon upload.
Okay, I Have My Data—What’s Next?
Once you’ve identified which audiences deliver the most revenue for your campaigns, you can:
- Start using them in bidding: Based on the most successful conversion rates (CVR), you can add bid adjustments for these audiences proportionally in your campaigns/groups.
- Create specific retargeting campaigns: You can duplicate your existing campaigns, while adding top audiences to your campaigns and setting them in Targeting mode instead of Observation. This will restrict who sees these campaigns to people who fall into your audience buckets.
- Create similar audiences: The publishers generate these audiences—they include people whose behavior is similar to the one identified in your existing audiences (RLSAs or CRM).
Piece of Cake… Or Is There More?
There’s always more! ;)
You can create and retarget audiences based on the people who spend above your average order value (note that this requires additional analytics tools like Google Analytics or Yandex.Metrica). Or, you can retarget search users who interacted with your social campaigns. Yet another option is combining your audiences with “competitors” campaigns, to drive people back to your website when they enter a competitor’s search term.
Good luck! If you have any questions or want more information, reach out to your Marin CS team. Or, if you’re new to Marin, schedule a demo today.
YMS 2019: Learning About FOMO, JOMO, and FOBO in London
Youth Marketing Strategy is a marketing conference in London focused on 16 to 24 year olds, otherwise categorized as Gen Z. Marin has been a sponsor of this conference for several years now, and it’s designed as a touchpoint for advertisers and brands looking to connect with a younger audience.
So what generalizations can I spring on you after spending two days attending sessions and speaking at YMS? Quite a few....
Boning Up on Acronyms
For starters, I can now explain that FOMO, JOMO, and FOBO are considered real “things” for Gen Z inhabitants:
Definitions:
- FOMO - fear of missing out
- JOMO - joy of missing out
- FOBO - fear of being offline
I took extra care with my notes to make sure I didn’t screw those definitions up, and I’m rock solid on the first two—but I did start to question whether FOBO was a fear of being online or offline. But I’m guessing that both work equally well.
The Evidence-Based Angle on Gen Z
Like any event that’s geared up to categorize a whole group of people based on their age, many of those present (vendors and speakers) will inevitably turn to survey data to find insight and make points that are worthy of a pithy slide or memorable visual. Turning to surveys is really the only way you can get away with sweeping generalizations about an entire group of people based on their age.
Skepticism aside, I did scribble down some interesting facts that were appended to Gen Z for the benefit of advertisers and companies selling products to people in that group. I’ve cherry-picked some compelling points to share from a UK study of Gen Z respondents, which was presented by Mark Walker, CRO at Attest:
- Gen Z consumers don’t buy from brands who reflect their stance on social issues as much as Millennials (at least yet—they’re under 24 so there’s plenty of time for convictions to deepen and causes to take root).
- Some advertisers can take solace from the finding that Gen Z finds personalization and ad targeting helpful rather than creepy, at least in comparison to older generations of consumers.
- On the other hand, advertisers shouldn’t celebrate just yet. Gen Z is more likely to pay for an ad-free experience rather than suffer ads in return for a free service.
- You won’t be surprised to hear that gaming consoles and streaming TV services are heavily over-indexed for Gen Z consumers in the UK.
- If you’re in the product review business (and who isn’t these days), rejoice! Gen Z is particularly sensitive to (and presumably swayed by) negative online reviews. This also applies to PR firms, since bad news or negative coverage about a particular brand can be very detrimental to sales among Gen Z buyers.
Advertising Overdrive/Overload
In addition to the nuggets of Gen Z consumer data, I did find an old marketing quote that still rings true in a clever Opinary presentation:
“Most people ignore advertising because advertising ignores most people” – Bob Levenson
Ed Harvey, Head of UK Brand Partnerships at Opinary, also made the point that we’ve reached near saturation point for advertising, and the average digital native from Gen Z see 4,000 to 10,000 ads per day. Not surprisingly, engagement rates are very low as a result of all that noise, just 0.09% on Facebook and 0.05% on Twitter.
Big Strides in Retail
I also listened to a lively discussion about innovation in retail where Shakeel Sanghera from Nike made some excellent points about how people will always want the social, connected experience of high-street shopping. It’s something you just can’t recreate in an online setting, but it is possible to merge online and offline in meaningful ways for consumers.
For example, why not pre-order your next pair of Air Jordans online and arrange an in-store visit to try them on (to make sure they’re in stock in your chosen size and color)?
It was also noted that people are less impetuous when online shopping—which means they spend less per visit than in-store. Online customers tend to know exactly what they want and go right to the Shopping tab in a search engine or on Amazon to find it. There’s less browsing behavior online, and people aren’t inspired to try on random items and keep their partner waiting in the changing room for hours.
The summary of this discussion ended on a sensible note—for retail and beyond, technology should remove barriers and friction for consumers and ultimately be helpful. It won’t replace the warmth and social aspect of shopping with family or friends, but it can save you from waiting hours in a store for the perfect shoes, only to be told that your size is out of stock.
The Incredible, Shrinking Patience
One final anecdote before leaving the world of Gen Z—Michelle Capp, Client Partner of Retail at Facebook, made the excellent point that technology has made us all very impatient, with Gen Z’s digital natives perhaps the most influenced.
Take hailing an Uber for example. If we see that a ride is going to take more than five minutes to arrive, our instinct is to cancel it and look for quicker alternatives. Remember that just a few short years ago, people would happily call a taxi the night before for a ride to the airport. How times have changed with technology advances, for Gen Z and all of us.
Our Latest Benchmark Report: Q1 2019’s Most Popular Ad Formats
In our latest digital advertising benchmark report findings, we discovered that Instagram continues to grow its share of Facebook spend, while newer ad formats like responsive search ads (RSAs) dominate as advertisers seek growth across channels and devices.
Here are a few key takeaways:
- Responsive Search Ads Rise in Popularity: 24% of advertisers are running RSAs, a dynamic, automated search ad format Google introduced less than a year ago that puts machine learning capabilities into the hands of every advertiser.
- Search CPCs Softening: There was a 6% decrease in CPCs YoY across all verticals worldwide, as inventory became less expensive outside of peak holiday season and lower-cost mobile formats consume a larger piece of the pie.
- Facebook Spend Evolving: Messenger had the highest CPC of all Facebook-owned inventory—including Facebook, Audience Network, and Instagram. Meanwhile, an overall year-over-year CPM decrease of 14% across all Facebook properties signifies Instagram Stories diversifying the number of Facebook placements and Instagram’s growing popularity among advertisers. Instagram Ads now command 20% of total Facebook spend share with 34% of those ads being Stories.
- Shopping Ads Continue to Dominate: 22% of advertisers are running Google Shopping Ads, with the format capturing 39% of search budgets.
- Mobile Remains King: Mobile made up 43% of spend share across all verticals, highlighting the growing importance of mobile search. This data further supports the fact that search engines like Google favor mobile-friendly websites in search results.
Want to learn more and see how your ad campaigns compare? View our interactive Q1 2019 Digital Advertising Benchmark Report. You can analyze current cross-channel advertising trends by region, industry, and publisher.
Each quarter, we aggregate advertising performance across our customer base and share our results with digital marketing professionals to compare against their own initiatives. In addition to global industry trends, we explore the most compelling findings in key areas of digital marketing.
Access the report for actionable insights you can apply to your digital ad campaigns.
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Feeling overwhelmed by your advertising campaigns? Donate 15 minutes of your time and we’ll show you how MarinOne allows you to easily manage, measure, and optimize all of your ad campaigns from a single location. Request a demo today.
Facebook’s New Metrics and Changes to Potential Reach
Starting April, 30, 2019, Facebook’s relevance score will be replaced with three new “granular” metrics, plus they’ll swap out six other metrics to provide more actionable insights. As of the changeover date, the old metrics will no longer be available in Facebook’s product interfaces or in the release of Ads Insights
API v3.3.
Another change: Facebook is updating how it estimates potential reach. Now, reach will reflect the number of users who were shown an ad within the last 30 days, versus the number of users who were active on a Facebook service in the last 30 days.
Read on for more details.
Goodbye, Relevance Score
Three new metrics will take the place of relevance score:
- Quality Ranking: Measures an ad’s perceived quality compared to ads competing for the same target audience
- Engagement Rate Ranking: Measures an ad’s expected engagement rate compared to ads competing for the same audience
- Conversion Rate Ranking: Measures an ad’s expected conversion rate when compared to ads with the same optimization goals and audience
Like relevance score, these metrics aren’t factored into an ad’s performance in the auction—instead, they provide insights into how changes to creative assets, audience targeting, or the post-click experience may impact ad performance. Ad relevance diagnostics will be introduced gradually over the coming months.
No More ‘Offers Saved’ and ‘Cost Per Offers Saved’
Rather than only measuring the number of ads that were being saved for the “Offers” ad format, Facebook is extending this metric to be inclusive of all ads that are being saved, across all ad formats. This will be reflected as “Post Saves.”
Messaging Replies and Cost per Messaging Reply
These are going away, too. Previously, Facebook was measuring the number of replies within new and existing conversations attributed to your ad. “New Messaging Connections” only measures new conversations, excluding those with people who’ve sent a message to your business in the past. “Messaging Conversations Started” measures the number of times people started messaging your business after at least seven days of inactivity.
Mobile App Purchase ROAS and Web Purchase ROAS
Previously, ROAS metrics were channel specific (i.e., Mobile, Web, On-Facebook, Instagram). Since the customer's path to purchase is increasingly omnichannel, there will be one, holistic “Purchase ROAS” metric that will look at ROAS across all channels.
Updates to Potential Reach
Now, businesses will be able to gauge the number of people they can reach given specific targeting and placement criteria.
The new estimation methodology is based on people who were shown an ad within the last 30 days. Previously, the estimate was based on people who were active on a Facebook service in the last 30 days. This results in:
- More clarity: This update provides a better estimate of the potential audience that could see the ad given specific targeting and placement criteria.
- More stable audience sizes: It also reduces volatility in daily audience size estimates.
Why Facebook’s Making These Changes
As part of its efforts to improve its reporting offerings, Facebook wants to replace metrics that marketers have told them are infrequently used with more actionable ones. These metrics are intended to provide an additional level of insight and granularity, giving advertisers the opportunity to make smarter decisions regarding ad creatives, placement, and targeting.
What to Do If You’re a Marin Customer
Because Marin’s API integration is currently built out to API v3.1 and these changes will come into effect with Ads Insights API v3.3, no immediate changes will be reflected in the Marin application. This also means that all pre-existing metrics will be readily available in the Marin application until we choose to upgrade to API v3.3. Currently, API v3.1 won’t be sunsetted until October 2020.
As we get closer to upgrading to API v3.3, we’ll notify you with the foreseen timeline. At that point, you’ll need to update any reports or alerts to incorporate the appropriate actionable metrics. You won't need to take any further action for the potential reach changes.
As always, if you have questions, touch base with your Marin rep.
Checkout on Instagram: A New Opportunity for Retail Advertisers
Instagram recently announced the launch of its new checkout feature, allowing you to buy products directly in the app, and making it easier and more convenient to buy from some of your favorite brands.
Checkout on Instagram is currently a closed beta and only available to a handful of U.S. brands, including H&M, Nike, Prada, Burberry, and Zara.
Given the brands currently part of the beta, it’s clear this feature will be heavily focused on the beauty and fashion industries. And, we expect Instagram to open it up to more retailers sooner than later.
How exactly does it work?
The How-To
Tap on a product from a brand’s shopping post. Then as you’d normally do, choose from various options such as color and size. From here, Instagram takes you directly to checkout without having to leave the app.
The best thing about this is you only have to enter your billing and shipping details once—they’re securely saved for the next time you shop. You’ll receive shipping notifications directly in-app so you can keep track of your purchases.
The Benefits
According to Tech Crunch, Instagram “will introduce a selling fee to help fund programs and products that help make checkout possible, as well as offset transaction-related expenses.” This opens up a whole new revenue stream for the Facebook-owned app.
As for how it’ll affect advertisers, ads aren’t currently eligible for promotion with the checkout button—however, we think this will certainly change very soon, as Instagram starts to invest heavily in shopping related items. Checkout also comes at a time when Google just launched shoppable ads in Google images. Competition will heat up quickly!
Watch This Space
We’re looking forward to seeing some of the early results of Checkout for Instagram and what conversion rates will look like versus traditional website checkout. It all bodes well for retail advertisers looking to expand into another popular online channel to maximize performance and revenue.
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Feeling overwhelmed by your advertising campaigns? Donate 15 minutes of your time and we’ll show you how MarinOne allows you to easily manage, measure, and optimize all of your ad campaigns from a single location. Request a demo today.
Marketers, Let's Face the Amazon Skills Gap
This article originally appeared in MediaPost.
Amazon is quickly becoming the third advertising pillar that will effectively disrupt the established dynamic of the Google and Facebook duopoly. This is hardly a surprise, given that Amazon’s platform serves as a homepage for internet users.
But marketers are not necessarily prepared for the intricacies involved with advertising on Amazon — in fact, a recent Digital Marketing Institute study highlighted a growing level of concern among marketing professionals. Nearly three out of four professionals surveyed said they were concerned about a digital skills shortage in the industry, and 71% are experiencing that skills gap within eCommerce marketplace selling (e.g., Amazon).
So what makes Amazon advertising so different from the methods employed with Google and Facebook ads, and how can marketers ensure they have the specific skills set to build these campaigns?
What gives Amazon an edge at capturing ad dollars is the fact that the conversion — the sale of product — occurs right there on the Amazon platform after the user clicks on the ad, while Google and Facebook only direct traffic to the advertiser’s website where the conversion later takes place. (Sidebar: Google has tried to course-correct with Shopping Actions recently.) This shortcut makes advertising on Amazon extremely attractive to many direct-response advertisers, especially those in the retail vertical.
With growing interest in Amazon advertising, marketers who are equipped to efficiently manage every aspect of ad campaigns on Amazon are in high demand. Finding the right people to hire, however, proves to be a challenging task.
Amazon advertising is still new to the market — the official learning console was launched as recently as Q4 2018. Much like Google Academy for Ads and Facebook Blueprint, the learning console offers courses of study materials about Amazon advertising and an accreditation program where marketers can take a test and earn a certification. As a result, the recruitment pool for candidates with Amazon advertising experience is very small.
To combat this industrywide skills gap, brands and agencies should groom existing digital marketing personnel to fill the role.
Amazon advertising shares a number of similarities with tried-and true digital advertising disciplines. Marketers with display advertising experience are likely to ramp up with little trouble on Amazon’s programmatic ad-buying solution, Amazon DSP, while search marketers should be able to quickly learn Amazon Sponsored Products and Sponsored Brands.
For these two Amazon ad types, products need to be assigned to campaigns in addition to keywords, so those who are experienced in product feed management and in Google Shopping or Facebook Dynamic Product Ads have already acquired relevant knowledge that can be used as a base for success.
Still, there are some added layers unique to Amazon Advertising, such as Retail Readiness, in which marketers have to make sure that inventory, customer ratings and reviews are high enough for the products to get listed. This requires marketers to be trained from the ground up.
While every organization has limited time and resources to train their employees — regardless of whether they’re new hires or existing ones — making Amazon advertising a priority can pay off big time.
4 Best Practices for Responsive Search Ads
Google’s responsive search ads (RSAs) have been up and running since mid-2018, and several best practices are emerging that focus on a few key areas:
- Strategies for getting started
- Creative variety
- Pinning
- Optimization
Here, we detail each of these ways search advertisers can create effective and high-performing RSAs.
1. Just Get Started
The first step is to stop procrastinating—add a few RSAs to existing search campaigns alongside text ads. In the search ads app, there’s a recommendation link on the upper left side of the page that brings up the RSA ads that Google suggests adding to ad groups. If you opt to not use these recommendations, focus on a few high-volume ad groups, with a minimum of 100 weekly impressions.
It’s important to provide Google’s machine learning with enough impressions to test and understand which ads work best with which users. Choose headlines both with and without keywords, either by using dynamic keyword insertion or static headlines that use a variety of terms. When creating headlines and descriptions, think across the funnel—users search differently when they’re top of funnel versus about to make a purchase.
2. Variety Is the Spice of Search
Be sure to max out the assets for RSAs and provide 8-10 headlines and 3-4 descriptions. Include a variety of creative that focuses on products, services, problems solved, benefits, types of users, and calls to action.
Remember that users respond differently to different approaches—one person may be looking for discounts, while another may be focused on luxury brands. The more varied the assets, the more Google’s machine learning can predict which messages will appeal to which users.
3. Pin... sparingly
RSAs are designed to use machine learning to fully customize ads to meet user need based on what Google knows about them. Although pinning may be necessary for legal compliance within the organization, it also constrains the machine-learning algorithms to do what they’re meant to do. When using pins, maintain a variety in each spot. For example, pin two or three variations of a headline or description to each position to let the machine learning work.
4. Optimize for High Performance
RSAs may need fine-tuning or pruning of any low performers. Look for ‘0’ impression assets and see if they’re too similar to other assets (i.e., not enough variety in the headlines and descriptions). Remember to use dynamic and static keyword insertion to leverage great keywords.
And, don’t forget to make sure RSAs are compatible with campaign extensions. RSAs show up just like any other search ad—users don’t see a difference. To measure RSA impact, set campaigns to ‘auto rotate’ for an apples-to-apples comparison with text ads. As data accumulates, tweak and fine-tune RSA assets to continue to improve performance.
RSAs: Part of the Modern Marketer’s Journey
Many machine-learning innovations like RSAs are providing marketers with a valuable advantage: the opportunity to focus on being creative rather than being spreadsheet jockeys. The goal of all marketing is to connect with customers in a meaningful, personalized way. RSAs are one more touchpoint on that journey.
For more information on using RSAs to gain a tactical and competitive advantage, download our guide, Getting Started with Responsive Search Ads.
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Feeling overwhelmed by your advertising campaigns? Donate 15 minutes of your time and we’ll show you how MarinOne allows you to easily manage, measure, and optimize all of your ad campaigns from a single location. Request a demo today.
Offline Connect: Tie Your In-Store Transactions to Your Online Advertising Efforts
Advertisers continue to look for the best ways to measure the impact of their advertising campaigns on sales. Without an accurate picture of the full customer journey and every touchpoint to conversion, they fall short of achieving the most streamlined campaigns, the most appropriately allocated budgets, and the highest possible revenue.
Marin’s Offline Connect gives advertisers the opportunity to upload transaction data into their Marin application, and then tie those users back to an online event that took place on the advertiser’s website. By connecting offline behavior such as in-store purchases, to online behavior like booking an appointment, advertisers can better understand the resulting uplift from ad exposure.
Why Is Connecting the Data Dots a Big Deal?
Brand marketers need effective tools that tie digital ad spending to in-store foot traffic and purchases. The reality is that a big percentage of purchases are still made offline, and both the digital and non-digital are important for today’s consumer.
By having a holistic view into high-ROI marketing activities, advertisers have the opportunity to more effectively allocate marketing budget to the appropriate channels—a big piece of the puzzle when it comes to effective cross-channel marketing and engaging with consumers in a targeted, more personalized way.
Also, with the use of third-party data becoming increasingly regulated and unreliable, it’s more important than ever to tap into your goldmine of first-party data. Offline Connect ensures that the data you’re mining—your own—becomes a powerful tool in crafting a solid, “always-on” ad strategy.
How It Works
All businesses have unique event IDs that they assign to individuals once they perform an action on their website, such as booking an appointment or scheduling a demo. As those people complete a transaction in-store, businesses are able to upload their transaction data into Offline Connect.
This triggers a match between that person and the unique event ID that houses his or her information, tying the offline conversion data to the ad clicks that drove the “connecting” online event. The result: a merging of offline behavior to online actions, giving you a more holistic view of attribution.
Key Features
Offline Connect includes:
- An extended lookback window of two years—great for businesses with longer sales cycles.
- Tracker attribution support (for a variety of attribution models such as first-click, even click, etc.) to more accurately credit all marketing channels in a conversion path.
- “Intraday support,” meaning that transaction data can be uploaded at any time and reflected in a user’s dashboard within the hour. This includes orders that have been cancelled or refunded.
As an open and independent platform, Marin’s goal is to seamlessly connect an advertiser’s business to their marketing efforts. This means closing the loop by tracking what happens after the ad impression or click, including in-store purchases.
Let’s Chat
Want to learn more? Contact your account representative today, or sign up for a demo if you’re not currently a Marin customer.
Message Booster: Automatically Amplify Your Best Organic Posts
Our social marketing clients use Marin’s Message Booster to automatically promote organic posts with high engagement metrics as paid advertisements.
The reality is that organic content on social media is still very important, with its unique ability to help brands create a community of loyal followers and customers. Despite their reach shrinking on social, organic posts still play an important role in communicating a brand’s lifestyle and values to consumers and potential consumers, giving that brand a “voice” for users to research and relate to.
Organic posts trigger conversation and the content brands create evokes a response from readers. Good content creation focuses on posts, videos, tweets, and pictures that a brand’s ideal audiences want to engage with.
Enter Marin’s Message Booster.
Your Content Takes Center Stage
Message Booster is a dedicated social media management tool aimed at streamlining Community Management (CM) processes and paid media content promotion. Where engagement rates on organic content are high, the Message Booster functionality allows you to promote it as a paid page post, with a simple click of a button.
Now, the same content that’s resonating with your audiences at an increasingly high rate can break through Facebook’s algorithms and into feeds as paid media, for incremental reach and exposure. Think of it as a vetting process—you know which brand messaging is working, and now you want to allocate more budget to it!
Flexibility and Control
Like all paid advertisements on Facebook, you can set additional controls such as ad set budget, audiences, delivery method (standard/accelerated), and ad scheduling. However, you can also set rules to automate these controls.
Once created, these rules are “always-on” and ensure that every trending opportunity is capitalized, without the need for manual activation. You can use metrics such as engagement on post, engagement rate, negative feedback, reach, and specific post elements (caption, description, title, etc.) as conditions to trigger the creation of the post, as shown here:
Key benefits of Marin’s Message Booster include:
- Fast and simple interface
- Time savings and workflow efficiencies
- Automated content promotion rules (also known as “auto-boost”)
- A holistic view into community engagement data and insights
- Management of several Facebook Pages on a single interface
Want to learn more about Message Booster? Contact your account representative today, or sign up for a demo if you’re not currently a customer!
The BreadCrumb Technique: The What, Why, and How
This is a guest post from Johnathan Dane, Founder and CEO of KlientBoost.
Wondering why you’re being plagued with low conversion rates and high first-page bounce rates?
As marketers—we’ve all been there.
If you stop to reflect on your audience’s user experience once they land on your page, you might notice that it’s not so inviting after all.
The reality is, that first-page form field might be dissuading your visitors without you even knowing it.
The Breadcrumb Technique helps address the issue of aggressive single-page form fields and gives you the tools to create a much more effective landing page user experience.
What is the Breadcrumb Technique?
The Breadcrumb Technique refers to the use of multi-step landing page forms in order to get visitors to micro-convert all the way to the desired conversion action. Just like Hansel and Gretel who left themselves breadcrumbs in order to find their way back home, the technique uses the same principle in guiding a potential converter with low-threat questions until the very end.
There is a common misconception that having fewer forms means a greater chance that a visitor will convert. It’s understandable. After all, “less is more,” right?
While there are certainly cases where this is true, quite the opposite has also been proven to happen. If you know how to leverage them, adding more low-threat questions in progression can actually reduce conversion anxiety, thus leading to higher conversion rates.
Why Reduce Conversion Anxiety?
Unbounce describes conversion anxiety as:
“What your prospect feels when confronted with friction on your landing page or website. Anxiety occurs when your page poorly communicates your value proposition or creates doubt in the user’s mind.”
Stirring up conversion anxiety can bring issues like fear, uncertainty, and doubt (FUD) into play. And when you’re a marketer trying to get a visitor to leave his/her name, email, and phone number, FUD is the last thing you want.
So what is it about single-page form fields that causes user anxiety?
What Causes User Anxiety?
If we try to channel some user empathy, we can get a good idea of why visitors might be feeling anxious when converting.
Let’s say you’re thinking about replacing the carpet in your house:
- You enter “carpet installers” in Google Search.
- You click an ad that tells you that they have the lowest prices of all the other companies.
- Once you land on the first page, you’re hit with a long form that requests all your personal contact information.
At this point, the form has already come on too strong. While you wanted to start looking for the best prices on carpet installers, you probably weren’t ready to share your information and be contacted by a salesperson.
They’ll most likely give you an aggressive sales pitch that you just aren't ready for.
- Fear...of being contacted when you aren’t ready.
- Uncertainty...about whether or not it’s the right company to hire.
- Doubt….of whether to leave your information in the first place.
These are all things the Breadcrumb Technique solves.
How Does the BreadCrumb Technique Work?
To answer this question, first understand two forms of user psychology. We’ll focus on the “yes” ladder and compliance psychology.
The “Yes” Ladder
This is a type of persuasion method focused on getting your visitors to say “yes” to small, less aggressive questions in order to gain their trust. From there, you slowly start asking slightly more aggressive questions until the “ultimate ask” or goal is reached.
Here’s an example of a three-step form - image source
You can see that the first step asks very low-threat questions, staying away from personal information. The second step’s questions are a tad more aggressive, qualifying questions. And the last page asks for the actually valuable, desired, contact information.
Take note that these questions don’t have to be pointless. Figure out what qualifying questions would constitute a high-quality lead for your business and implement them on separate pages.
Now, you may be asking, “Why would they continue answering if they started seeing multiple pages anyway? They might not even give me their info once they reach the end.”
All valid questions. That’s where compliance psychology comes in.
Compliance Psychology
This is the idea that a marketer can put their “foot-in-the-door” with a potential converter using small, low-threat questions, thus leading to a better chance that they’ll answer the next question in the sequence.
In simplest terms, they’ve already committed to the first set of questions, so they might as well answer the next ones until they’ve finished what they started.
Here’s an example of a two-step form - image source
Whether you should be using a two-step, three-step, or even five-step form is all based on testing. Try A/B testing each length until you find the number of pages that show you an increase in conversions. If you notice conversion rates decreasing as a result of too many form field pages, you'll know you’ve gone too far.
It’s also a good idea to test the qualifying questions that you use in the intermediary steps of your forms. They could just as well lead to improved conversion rates if people identify effortlessly.
Conclusion
That was a lot of emotions to take in for a landing page optimization topic! But it’s added a lot of understanding on how your visitors feel about their user experience.
Remember: the main goal of conversion rate optimization is always to increase conversion rates. So although this method is about user psychology, the technique still follows any business's main objective—to increase revenue.
What Advertisers Can Do to Prepare for More Visual and Voice Searches
This is a guest post from Charlotte Haab, Account Lead at
3Q Digital.
Voice and visual search methods are quickly becoming more mainstream. There’s our Amazon ambassador Alexa, of course, our old pal Siri, the lesser-known Cortana—we even have voice assistance available in our refrigerators these days. Search marketers are starting to notice an influx in queries starting with “hey google”—but how do we address these in our strategy?
Then there’s visual search, a lesser explored but potentially very powerful eCommerce tool. Major advertisers like Pinterest and retail giants like Target are increasingly starting to embrace visual capabilities.
Here’s what you can do right now to start preparing for increased voice and visual searches.
Write Conversational Content
When people are conducting voice searches, it’s often in the form of longer tail detailed questions. These types of queries are important because they represent a very strong and very specific intent. While there’s no way to optimize ads to this yet, you can better your chances of serving an organic result by optimizing your SEO.
Make sure you have plenty of conversational content on your site. For example, if you’re a retailer, your pages should include phrases like, “where you can buy xyz…” or “to buy xyz near you.” This will make you more likely to get picked organically as the answer or first result to one of these questions, bolstering your brand and likely increasing traffic.
Update Your Paid Search Structure Accordingly
No voice ads are currently being served. However, advertisers are starting to notice voice commands in their normal search queries.
Note that many of these are long tail. Voice queries on average are at least 5-6 keywords. Voice queries are also typically very local—usually asking for nearby locations or directions.
To get ahead of this trend, advertisers can mine their search queries for voice commands and build out campaigns specifically around them. Depending on how they perform and what your goals are, you may want to bid higher or lower on these types of queries—or even exclusively target more local areas.
Another option is to exclude them completely using negatives. Simply negate “hey google” to stop showing here.
Update Your Structured Data Specs
Recently, Google made a new schema.org specification available, that if set up correctly on your backend will indicate to various voice assistants if a section of your website is particularly “speakable.”
Having this configured properly in your backend will allow easy text to speech conversion when voice assistants start reading results—making your brand more likely to be chosen as the answer. Again, while this isn’t monetized in any way, it’s valuable for brand recognition and traffic to your site!
Advertise on Applicable Platforms
Lastly—and this largely applies to the lesser sought after visual search—it’s important for brands to stay ahead of the technology and for advertisers to be where that technology exists. For instance, visual search isn't a bigger deal at the moment because brands need to adopt technology to use it well.
Some brands are ahead of the curve here, like Target or Pinterest. On Pinterest you can simply snap a picture in the search bar and the results will return hundreds of Pins that match your photo. I tested this out with a random tube of lip balm on my desk, and it sent me right to a shoppable Pin!
If you want to show up in visual searches, you’ve got to be where they exist, which right now is largely just Pinterest. Visual search is sure to gain more traction as more companies adopt the advanced technology, but for now, it’s somewhat few and far between.
Stay Current on the State of the Market
While the technology for visual search hasn’t been widely adopted yet, and there’s currently no clear way of monetizing voice search, there is speculation on how advertisers like Google and Amazon might achieve this in the future.
The conversational language in voice searches often makes intent super clear—so while the perfect ad may exist, it’s a pretty awful user experience to sit through an audio ad before getting an answer to your question. Experts believe users would likely revolt against such a concept.
As a workaround, it’s been speculated that ads may serve after organic results from voice searches, offering people an option to hear the sponsored content. If they say yes, they’ll read an ad and potentially have the link sent straight to their smartphone to encourage conversion.
The other major roadblock is that people are very unlikely to buy in an eCommerce setting without some sort of visual. The latest products, like Echo Show, and Home Hub—available with screens—have the potential to upend that, by combining voice and visual browsing capabilities to make a sale.
Ultimately, these are all very new technologies that have yet to fully catch on in a major way. While we’re not quite there yet, there’s no doubt in my mind that advertising giants will find a way to monetize voice and visual search.
The First Steps to Creating a True Cross-Channel Advertising Strategy
Before you begin to investigate tactics for implementing an effective cross-channel advertising strategy, it's important to take a broad view of your goals, data, and business. In this article, we look at the necessary elements you should have in place before getting tactical with your cross-channel ad campaigns.
Understand Your Goals
What are your digital advertising goals? Is the aim to drive awareness and exposure for an emerging brand or product? Are you selling commodity products, and aiming to get them in front of buyers before your competitors? Is it a longer sales cycle, with a high purchase value consideration that requires many touchpoints and a patient approach? Before you spend your first advertising dollar, get to know your business and clearly lay out your objectives.
Build the Foundation
Now that you know what you want to do, look at what you have. Does your site function well? Do you have quality landing pages that load quickly on desktop and mobile? Create strong content and write descriptions that resonate. Take the steps needed to get your program in the best place possible before spending money on cross-channel digital advertising campaigns to promote growth. At the end of the day, driving traffic to an unsatisfactory experience can damage your brand and derail ROI.
Capture the Data
Not every tactic is going to work well across every channel. As a digital advertiser, it’s important to be flexible, but more importantly, to be informed. As your program expands in breadth and volume, take advantage of all the insights you glean from your paid efforts across channels.
Unified reporting and analysis surfaces the opportunity areas both in terms of driving more sales or pulling back spend to increase efficiency. Take a product-first approach, for example: widget launches on the first of the month, and we’re tasked with promoting the widget with campaign assets across Google, Facebook, and eCommerce marketplaces.
Which channel did customers use to research their purchase? Where was the best return in terms of conversions? Where was our competition more assertive? At Marin Software, we believe companies need to think “big picture” by taking the holistic view across channels, segmenting audiences, and revisiting performance regularly.
Refine and Optimize
Too often, advertisers start strong and move along, failing to actively measure, manage, and optimize cross-channel campaigns. Sadly, digital advertising isn't as easy as putting up a billboard on the highway and waiting for responses as traffic snarls by.
Your audience is a moving target, and the battle for their attention is complicated and dynamic. Compound that with things like rotating inventory and promotional periods and it can be pretty overwhelming. However, sticking to the basics and doing things like search query analysis and product segmentation are core to program growth and improvement. Take the time to reallocate budgets and seize opportunities, and do so often.
Get Tactical
Once you have these pieces in place, you're ready for specific actions to coordinate your Facebook, Google, and eCommerce campaigns and deliver growth. We're here to help. Download our Search, Social, and eCommerce Guidebook to learn everything you need to know to create revenue-boosting digital ad campaigns.
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Feeling overwhelmed by your advertising campaigns? Donate 15 minutes of your time and we’ll show you how MarinOne allows you to easily manage, measure, and optimize all of your ad campaigns from a single location. Request a demo today.
3 Things You Need to Know About Google’s New Prominence Metrics
Google announced that they’ll eliminate the “average position” metric in the third quarter of this year. New metrics to give advertisers more control over their “race to the top” of the SERP will take its place. In this article, we review what these metrics are, how they work, and how marketers can prepare.
1. What's Changing?
Google will be sunsetting its “average position” metric in September. Instead, advertisers looking for information about search ad positions now have four “prominence metrics” that were launched in November:
- Impr. (Absolute Top) %: The percent of your ad impressions that are shown as the very first ad above the organic search results.
- Impr. (Top) %: The percent of your ad impressions that are shown anywhere above the organic search results.
- Search (Absolute Top) IS: The impressions you’ve received in the absolute top location (the very first ad above the organic search results) divided by the estimated number of impressions you were eligible to receive in the top location.
- Search (Top) IS: The impressions you’ve received in the top location (anywhere above the organic search results) compared to the estimated number of impressions you were eligible to receive in the top location.
The first two metrics show the percent of your impressions that are above the organic results. The IS metrics show what percentage of the total available metrics your impressions represent.
2. Why Is Google Making This Change?
Average position let advertisers know where their ads stood in ad auctions compared to other ads—not necessarily on the SERP. In this old system, a position of 1 didn’t necessarily mean you were maximizing opportunity. Since this doesn’t really give you the best read on how your ads are truly performing—and, with an increasing share of searches coming from mobile and new ad formats—position isn’t as easy to define as it once was.
The new metrics aim to provide a better measurement of the reach of your ads across eligible impressions, and a more accurate view of your position in the ad auction.
3. What’s Next for Advertisers?
Advertisers will no doubt need to give themselves time to get used to the new metrics. We see it as a natural evolution that’ll give you more control over your true performance on the SERP.
If you’re a Marin customer, we’re here to help you with the transition. The new metrics will be available in Marin in Q2, pending final API changes from Google.
The existing average position metric will continue to be reported as it is today—the additional metrics provide further detail. We’ll continue to maintain the average position metric in Marin Bidding until we fully migrate to the new system by Q3—at that time, we’ll shift to Impression Share. As we get closer to the transition date, we’ll provide instructions for migrating to the new solutions.
Looking Back at the Big Bang
We called time on The Big Bang 2019 recently in London’s Science Museum, but plenty of good memories abound from the conference. The agenda included several big themes swirling around the digital advertising world, including artificial intelligence, feed management, big data, and the future of search.
Our opening session was a lively slam down debate about the impact of artificial intelligence on both marketing and our world at large. Charles Radclyffe claimed that AI is just “fancy maths plus data plus computational power,” whereas Sera Miller asked if AI can “help you unlock a strategy or help you get the creative solution to where it needs to be? If you don't ask those questions, AI will be like the emperor’s new clothes.”
https://youtu.be/eeN7KcHnVgc
Anita Caras from Verizon took the stage to talk about the strength of native advertising to drive more engaging user experiences. She described how difficult it is for a digital brand to survive, when some research shows that 75% of brands could disappear tomorrow and people wouldn't notice! That’s a long way from the brand love that advertisers crave.
https://youtu.be/eAdnqsC3lhA
Our shopping panel was a big hit (despite being interrupted by a museum fire alarm—thanks, kid!) with guest speakers from Facebook, Google, Bing, Marin, and Feedonomics. Panelists agreed that AI, feed management, and online/offline closed loop advertising are all important advances in advertising. But Michael Wicks, a shopping specialist at Google, seemed to capture the panel’s mood with his comment, “Retailers have got to remind themselves that the customer comes first and must be at the heart of everything we do.”
https://youtu.be/k2QYm2j59yQ
Ian Carrington, Google’s Managing Director of Performance Advertising Solutions, treated our audience to a fascinating keynote on the future of search advertising, which pivoted on a single fundamental concept—technology’s role in being helpful to users. “Understanding the customer journey and being aware of it is the first step in giving that customer what they want. All companies are finding their way through this. No one knows the answer yet. It's an exciting time.”
https://youtu.be/j7R847zNQfc
Wes MacLaggan, Marin’s SVP of Marketing, followed with an in-depth look at how data can provide advertisers with a huge competitive advantage, particularly when it’s used to leverage performance across multiple channels. Wes took the example of Google’s translation efforts, moving from rules-based to semantic, AI-driven translation techniques to get ever closer to the holy grail of natural language processing.
The conference ended with a truly inspiring talk by Doctor Sue Black, Professor of Computer Science at Durham University. Sue shared her riveting life story—starting as a single mother in her 20s with three young children to becoming a successful academic and public speaker. “Coming from very difficult circumstances, I never ever would have believed I’d become who I am. Education and technology have changed my life. It’s changed my family’s life. I love technology. If I can do it, so can you.”
Sue’s uplifting talk led us into a cocktail party in the Science Museum’s flight gallery (think champagne reception with large aircraft dangling overhead) followed by science-themed fun in the amazing Wonderlab space. We ended the day with tesla coil demonstrations, a gin lab, and controlled explosions—going out with a big bang indeed! Until next year...
Finance, eCommerce, and Dynamic Product Ads Rock It: Our Q4 2018 Digital Benchmark Report
In Q4 2018, paid search continued its upward trend, growing 10% YoY. As inventory gets more expensive, however, more spend doesn’t necessarily mean more clicks—there was a modest 10% increase year-over-year in Retail, less than the search spend for the vertical.
Instagram Stories and Dynamic Product Ads ruled, however—Instagram received 18% of total Facebook spend, with 34% of that spend allocated to Instagram Stories, a 36% increase from the previous quarter. Dynamic Product Ads accounted for 35% of total Facebook spend in Q4.
See more insights in our Q4 2018 Digital Advertising Benchmark Report. Our interactive format reveals the latest cross-channel advertising trends by region, industry, and publisher.
Each quarter, we aggregate advertising performance across our customer base, and share our results with digital marketing professionals to compare against their own initiatives. In addition to global industry trends, we explore the most compelling findings in key areas of digital marketing.
Other highlights for Q4 2018 include:
- eCommerce on the Rise: Google Shopping Ads captured 36% of search spend for all verticals. Shopping Ads remained retail advertisers’ bread and butter, as eCommerce search engines increasingly join the quest to deliver relevant, targeted experiences. According to Marin Software data, monthly spending on eCommerce channel ads increased 5x since January 2018.
- Paid Search Up, CTRs Down: Paid search spend grew 10% globally year-over-year. Q4 remained the strongest quarter, with Financial Services (+25%) and Retail (+12%) leading the charge. As inventory gets more expensive, however, more spend doesn’t necessarily mean more clicks—there was a modest 10% increase year-over-year in Retail, less than the search spend for the vertical.
- Search CPCs Vary by Vertical: Travel clocked the lowest global CPC in Q4 at $0.45, followed by Retail at $0.48. Education and and Technology represented the highest CPCs in Q4, at $2.92 and $1.51, respectively.
- Mobile Search Holds Steady: Mobile accounted for 36% of search spend share in Retail and 41% of spend share across all verticals in Q4. Mobile continued to be a crucial touchpoint for product purchasing decisions, especially during the fast-paced and competitive holiday season.
View the report for actionable insights for your digital ad efforts.
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Feeling overwhelmed by your advertising campaigns? Donate 15 minutes of your time and we’ll show you how MarinOne allows you to easily manage, measure, and optimize all of your ad campaigns from a single location. Request a demo today.
Countdown to The Big Bang in London
Who doesn’t love visiting the science museum? On a Thursday! In February!
Marin Software and The Drum are bringing hundreds of digital advertisers together in London’s spectacular Science Museum on February 7th for The Big Bang event.
We’re aiming for breakthrough thought leadership, deep learning, and an opportunity to mingle with top brand marketers. It’s the hottest ticket in town (if we do say so ourselves) and the agenda will cover big themes from the impact of AI to the role of advertising in our lives.
This is most definitely not your grandma’s conference! We’ve invited the world’s largest search, social, and eCommerce publishers, as well as digital advertising entrepreneurs and innovators, to provide you with a glimpse of the future. Attendees will hear from performance marketing experts at all the major publishers.
We’ve put a ton of thought and effort into securing the right presenters and panelists with strong opinions and plenty to say about the future of digital advertising—check out a sampling of our speaker lineup below. It’s safe to say the agenda is packed and the marketing insights will be flowing.
The Big Bang event is sold-out, but we have a waitlist should any registrants be unable to attend on the day. Roll on, February 7th!
5 eCommerce Landing Page Examples That Grew Qualified Leads
This is a guest post from Johnathan Dane, Founder and CEO of KlientBoost.
Landing pages, especially eCommerce landing pages, have just one job — to get visitors to buy something.
But if eCommerce "best practices suck and are worthless," as GetUplift founder and conversion optimization expert Talia Wolf says, how do you make improvements that actually move the needle?
Well, as most marketers would agree, the strongest tactics and best “best practices” are always based on hard-earned data. So we’ve collected five eCommerce landing page tips and tactics that have created significant, measurable growth for eCommerce vendors.
In fact, the first example shows the importance of collecting measurable results in the first place…
Example 1: Testing & Optimization
Creating an eCommerce landing page without testing in place is like shooting a basketball with a blindfold on. You might get lucky and score once or twice, but you won’t improve if you can’t see what you’re doing.
Let’s take one common landing page bugaboo, page length, for example. Some conversion experts cite short landing pages as their favorite examples. Others will tell you to go long.
For example, SEO software provider Moz created a landing page variant that replaced their basic model with an entire buyer’s journey:
They say size doesn’t matter, but… - image source
In the end, the test results showed a 30% higher conversion rate for the longer page. So longer pages are better, right?
Well, in the second test, below, the shorter landing page variant increased conversions by 70.1%:
Wait, size really doesn’t matter? So confusing. - image source
There’s no one-size-fits-all solution for the length of your landing page—but there is a way to find out what your visitors want.
How, you ask? Test it.
Testing variations on your landing page is the only surefire way to find out what your particular audience needs to convert. The right page length — just like the right headline, the right call to action, and the right form fields — is easier to find when you can back up blue-sky ideas with real information.
Why It Works
In both instances above, the data provided measurable results (not educated guesses) that the designers could work from and improve upon.
Testing elements of your landing page and making changes based on those results will help you close gaps in your conversion funnel and bring in more qualified leads.
Here’s another example: one of our recent clients, a Southern California-based credit union, increased their landing page conversion rate by 174% and reduced cost per conversion by 81% — after just one round of testing.
The three different examples prove the same tactics’ value through-and-through: strategies are one thing, testing and providing actionable data is another. The strongest changes and strategies aren’t based on hunches, they are built on cold, hard, numbers.
Example 2: Breadcrumb Technique
The Breadcrumb Technique is a fancy term for multi-stage landing page forms.
With this tactic, you don’t ask for your visitor’s name, phone number, and email up front. Instead, you start with some qualifying questions to demonstrate that you and your visitor are a good fit for each other. This filter also helps reduce leads that weren’t going to convert anyway.
In this example, the Advanced Grass’s landing page form wasn’t converting well, despite the incentives and benefits listed throughout the page:
Advanced Grass’s original four-question form. - image source
Instead of reducing the number of form fields or changing the offer entirely, this landing page added an initial stage of questions before the contact information request:
Stage one of Advanced Grass’s new two-stage landing page form. - image source
Adding questions with preset responses before the contact form actually boosted Advanced Grass’s conversion rate by 214%.
Why It Works
Adding more questions might seem counterintuitive if you’re trying to reduce user friction, but the Breadcrumb Technique is effective for three simple reasons.
First, inciting engagement is much easier if your lead off with low-impact, non-threatening questions like those in the second image above. Compliance Psychology states that the smaller the initial ask, the more likely you are to receive a yes as your request grows in size and significance.
Once you have your “foot in the door,” high-impact questions like contact information becomes less threatening.
Second, user psychology. Getting visitors to answer your innocuous first-stage questions, especially questions that don’t require personal information, creates a commitment that they’ll naturally want to follow through to the end.
Third, if you have your tracking set up correctly, you can start to identify where in your conversion form users are giving up. Maybe your initial questions are perfect and users are starting to convert, but your offer is still too strong and users are “bouncing” between the penultimate and final stages of your form. This type of actionable data makes it easier to tweak your offer.
Either way, the Breadcrumb Technique primes your conversion forms for more engagement and more quality leads.
Example 3: Dynamic Keyword Insertion
Dynamic keyword insertion (DKI) allows you to customize your ad text without creating an overwhelming number of ad groups.
DKI is a useful tool for eCommerce systems with large inventories or products with different names but the same description. By inserting specific terms that match searches, your users will be more likely to convert.
In this example, AskNicely is promoting software that records and reports customer feedback through Net Promoter Scores (NPS), which can appear under a variety of searches. The primary term, “software,” appears in the original headline, but if a user looks specifically for “NPS software,” that phrase appears in place of the original word:
The keyword or phrase you searched for would determine which headline you’d see in the ad above. - image source
DKI can also help with reaching a local audience. If you’re trying to reach a specific geographic area with your marketing, the same feature that inserts the location name into your ad can add it to your landing page, like in the section below:
Will Northern Ontario have to keep shopping for carpet the hard way? - image source
Why It Works
Dynamic Keyword Insertion adds specificity to your eCommerce efforts that make your landing pages seem more personal, local, and attuned to your user’s needs.
An AYTM Market Research study found that, even online, American buyers largely prefer the personalized service and local benefits of purchasing from small businesses over large companies.
By adapting your copy to match the local and/or specialized keywords your audience is looking for, you’re more likely to engage and convert these visitors into qualified leads.
Example 4: Micro-Conversion Tracking
Micro-conversions are the steps a visitor must take to convert on your landing page.
While they don’t count as actual conversions, some trackable landing page micro-conversions include time on site, video views, partial form completion, cart abandonment and more.
When clothing subscription service Le Tote wanted to increase the scale of their online advertising, they realized they wouldn’t get far without tracking and improving upon the steps that led to a conversion.
It’s like Rent-a-Swag, but not ridiculous. - image source
By combining updated landing pages with micro-conversion tracking, Le Tote was able to increase conversions by more than 250% and reduce cost per conversion by more than 60%.
Why It Works
Think of each successful micro-conversion as a forward step on your “conversion bridge,” which users need to cross to complete your desired action.
Tracking micro-conversions can illuminate where users are getting hung up on your landing page, which will help you address those obstacles and make your landing page more effective.
Example 5: Live Chat
Adding a live chat box to your eCommerce landing page can also improve your qualified leads, conversion rates, and sales. By actively engaging your visitors, you can guide them through the sales funnel and respond to their concerns in real time.
Financial software provider Intuit added a live chat box on their product comparison page and saw sales increase by 211%:
Having a specialist on hand to answer questions is especially useful for large or complex online transactions. – image source
Intuit also tested a “Chat Now” prompt on their shopping cart page to offer assistance during the later stages of the buying cycle and reduce cart abandonment:
Note the message match: Because QuickBooks is in the shopping cart, it’s mentioned in the chat prompt. – image source
The live chat on this page led to a 43% increase in average order value and a 20% boost in conversion rate.
Why It Works
An eDigitalResearch customer service survey found that consumers preferred live chat for customer service over email, phone, and social media. Furthermore, 67% of the respondents that were already using live chat found it easy to use, and 73% said they were highly satisfied with their system.
Live chat boxes can help you reduce any friction your visitors may be experiencing while allowing them to chat anonymously, which is less pressure than phone, email or video chat. It also helps build confidence in your brand and puts your users at ease; they know that you’re an expert who is ready and waiting to help them in any way they may need.
Conclusion
Implementing these five tips and tactics into your own eCommerce landing pages can help you increase your conversion rate, leading to more qualified leads, sales, and improved customer value.
But keep in mind, just as the first tactic stressed, eCommerce campaigns are peculiar little beasts. Each will bring its own problems, pain points, and solutions. So make sure you take the time to customize your campaigns and testing to your audience to get the best results possible.
A Clean, Well-Optimized Product Feed
Everyone knows what it means when you say, “You are what you eat.” Well, a product feed is (quite literally) what your ad campaigns are eating. This is the diet that’s fed into your campaign structure and eventually constitutes various ad types across the primary platforms (Google, Amazon, Facebook), as well as hundreds of others. World-class athletes don’t sustain themselves on the daily corn dog, Fritos, and frozen pizza diet—nor do top brands promote their inventory with error-ridden product catalogs.
Here are a couple concepts to keep in mind for ensuring the long-term health and vitality of your advertising efforts.
Your Feed is Your Friend
Managing product feeds was historically one of those Wizard of Oz “man behind the curtain” jobs that rarely took priority over campaign management tasks like bidding and keyword expansion. The error here is viewing these as mutually independent of each other.
In fact, the product feed and campaign relationship is a left hand / right hand one, in which synergy yields the most efficient and results-driven performance. If you don’t know who’s managing your product feed—reach out, make a friend (and vice versa, feed folks).
Work Together
As you implement best practices and consistently deliver clean, high-quality product data, the next step is understanding the performance effects and connecting more closely with your campaigns. Be sure to:
- Run a test. See which image (for example, landscape or portrait) generates the best click-through rate for a given product.
- Build analysis. For example, track a product’s price point over a period of time against that same product’s conversion rate.
- Integrate your feed with your campaigns. Declining inventory can immediately (and automatically) bring about a more conservative paid effort for a non-competitive product.
These strategies require investment in effort up front but yield good dividends for the brands that take the care to do it.
Learn More
At the end of the month, Marin and Feedonomics will partner together on a webinar to discuss product feeds and ad campaigns, and give some real-world scenarios with the help of Hero Digital. Sign up today to join us on Thursday, January 31st, 10 am PT.
Speaker Bios
Brian Roizen is the Cofounder and Chief Architect of Feedonomics where he oversees all of Feedonomics’ Automation Processes. He loves taking the most annoying manual tasks and automating them. Brian has previously created several artificial intelligence websites and mobile apps that reached tens of millions of users per month. Brian received both a Bachelor’s and Master’s degree in Mechanical Engineering from UCLA, where he graduated summa cum laude.
Andrew Todd is a Senior Product Marketing Manager at Marin Software where he is tasked with building innovative digital advertising functionality that helps brands grow online. His voice at the company is largely that of the customer – helping ensure that Marin delivers what the market wants. Prior to his time at Marin, Andrew worked at independent agencies in New York and Austin, focused on eCommerce and lead generation. Andrew received a Bachelor’s degree in Communications from the University of Tennessee and enjoys traveling, listening to music, and spending time with family and friends.
Emma Welcher has 6+ years of experience driving paid media strategy and performance for clients across a variety of industries and channels. From strategic planning to optimizations, Emma helps drive continued growth for lead generation and e-commerce clients. She is excited by how fast everything can change in digital marketing and the opportunity to leverage platform updates to stay ahead of the competition.
Everything You Need to Include for a Successful Mobile App Install Campaign
Mobile app install campaigns allow developers to promote iOS and Android apps across Facebook, Instagram, and Facebook Audience Network. These platforms advertise your app within a specific campaign and budget, and let you target specific devices and even device versions.
This campaign type is only available for advertisers with an app, as people will be sent directly to iTunes or the Play Store to download.
Here are some essential elements to include to ensure a successful mobile app install campaign.
1) Set up the Facebook SDK or the third-party tracker
To track the performance of your mobile app event, you’ll need to install the Facebook SDK on your app. It’s a kind of Facebook Pixel that’s specific to apps. Through the Facebook SDK, you’ll be able to measure app installs and app events as subscriptions.
Marin Tip: Some may suggest using a third-party tracker. Not to worry—Marin Social integrates with select third-party trackers. You can set this up within the Media Plan Parameters.
2) Set up the campaign
To create the campaign, select the App Installs Objective.
The app selection is at the ad set level. Instead of writing a landing page URL, you’ll be able to select your app URL. If you’re unable to choose an application, double-check that you’ve registered your app on Facebook.
You can choose only one app per ad set. Once you’ve selected iTunes, for instance, you’ll only be able to create ads driving customers to the iTunes store. We recommend creating two different campaigns corresponding to each app to avoid any confusion. For example:
- App Install Campaign - Jan.19 - Android
- App Install Campaign - Jan.19 - iOS
3) Specify your audiences
Audiences settings—demographics, locations, interests, custom audiences, etc.—are the same ones as other Facebook ad campaigns. We recommend choosing the right OS for each campaign.
Suppose you’re creating an iOS campaign, “ads driving to the iTunes store.” Be sure to select iOS. This way, your iOS ad will only target iOS users. You’ll also be able to choose an OS version.
In the ad set settings, you can also choose the app install state. It will allow you, for example, to target people who haven’t yet installed your app.
4) Select the ad format
For app install campaigns, the available formats are Images, Carousels, Videos, and Slideshows. For calls to action, we recommend using “Install Now,” “Download,” “Sign Up,” or “Use App,” which are more tailored to app install campaigns.
You can also use a deep link when you’re creating your ad. A deep link is a URL that drives the user to a specific location in your app once they’ve downloaded it. This could be useful if you’re promoting a specific product within your app.
5) Optimization and reporting
With the app install campaign type, you can optimize towards link clicks, but also for app installs and app events. By selecting app installs, the Facebook algorithm displays your ad to people likely to download your app. An app event could be a subscription—by optimizing for the app event, it'll optimize for subscriptions inside your app.
To be able to report on the results you’re looking for, be sure to select the right default KPI corresponding to the mobile app installs in your Media Plan parameters.
Marin Tip: To help you to optimize your campaigns, use Marin Budget Allocation, which automatically allocates the budget on your best-performing ad sets. You can also use the Managed Rules feature, which automatically controls bidding at the ad level according to metrics that matter to your business.
Cash, Check, or Click: The Continuing Evolution of eCommerce
As we kick off 2019, it seems like eons since the first eCommerce transaction back in 1979, when entrepreneur Michael Aldrich invented online shopping. Since then, the space has exploded—with tens of thousands of eCommerce sites in existence today. In her 2018 internet trends report, Mary Meeker estimated that eCommerce accounted for 13% of total U.S. retail sales last year.
We’re now at a point where clear leaders and laggards have emerged in the eCommerce marathon. In this article, we take a look at the state of the industry, the developing competitive landscape, and things to watch out for in 2019 and beyond.
The Ascendancy of Amazon
At the moment, when advertisers think eCommerce, they likely think, “Here comes Amazon.” As of 2018, Amazon has risen dramatically to third place in the ad industry, experiencing “faster than expected growth” and giving Google and Facebook a run for their money. In fact, according to eMarketer, Amazon is poised to keep growing at a rapid clip—with revenue on track to double this year alone, growing to $5.83 billion. Wall Street Journal expects Amazon’s ad sales to soar to $28.4 billion over the next five years.
With Amazon now being so huge—representing almost half of the U.S. eCommerce market—what does it mean for eCommerce as a whole? And, what does it mean for the ‘little guy’ trying to infiltrate the triopoly’s ad turf?
eCommerce Is Booming in General
All in all, eCommerce is experiencing a Golden Age, as consumers flock to online deals and convenience, and retailers adopt more sophisticated digital ad offerings. As Mary Meeker reported, U.S. eCommerce sales grew 16 percent between 2017 and 2018, an even larger rate of growth than 2016’s 14 percent. This success is expected to continue indefinitely, as more companies expand into eCommerce and existing ones continually innovate to stay ahead of the competition.
For example, in 2018, Google expanded into eCommerce with Google Home Ordering. Amazon Stores offers brands a place to showcase and sell products on Amazon. Facebook Shop allows advertisers to create a product catalog on the platform to promote and sell their products there. Facebook also has plans to add a shopping function to livestreams. As Tech Times Reports,
“In this trial, the company is letting merchants demo and describe their items for viewers. Customers can then screenshot something they want to purchase and reach out to the merchant via Messenger, who can then start a payment transaction directly within the app.”
Still boasting 1.74 billion mobile active users—despite recent scandals and government run-ins—Facebook has the continued potential and incentive to further expand its offerings. Include ad formats like Facebook Stories, Instagram Stories, and WhatsApp advertising—and it appears the company opens several doors for every one blocked by another distressing news headline.
Outside of Amazon, Google, and Facebook, what other players are contributing to the eCommerce field day?
The “Little Guy” May Not Be So Little
Big box giants like Walmart are on the move and making steady progress despite a late arrival to the eCommerce party. Walmart’s Q2 2018 earnings reported a 4.5 percent YoY increase in U.S. sales and 2.2 percent more traffic. Notably, its eCommerce business declared a whopping 40% increase in sales. Walmart’s momentum matches solid in-store visits with robust online demand, buoyed by expanded and enhanced clothing and grocery options. It certainly doesn’t hurt that people are embracing online grocery selection with offline pickup.
There’s also strong competition from other players like eBay, Macy’s, and Costco. For instance, you may be surprised to hear that shoppers tend to spend more time on eBay than Amazon. eBay and Costco also have lower website bounce rates. When it comes to attracting tech-savvy shoppers, Best Buy corners the market. It remains to be seen whether Amazon will innovate to become even more competitive on these fronts or if the other players will try to beat Amazon at its own game.
Just When You Least Expect It….
In addition, some unexpected competition could bite into the major players’ piece of the eCommerce pie. With modest wage growth relative to inflation and the stock market, more lower-income and rural shoppers are converging on dollar stores.
As it stands, these communities have much less access to online shopping opportunities or a culture of technology that could compel residents to become eCommerce site visitors. Development initiatives such as Congressman Ro Khanna’s could transform these communities and open up new opportunities not only for jobs and higher wages, but also new revenue streams for retailers, both online and off.
Perhaps not as unexpectedly, mobile commerce is also having its moment, with mCommerce transactions around the world projected to surpass eCommerce this year. The future looks bright if often unpredictable.
What Could Possibly Go Wrong?
Well, many things could always go wrong. But, looking at 2019, the market could experience ongoing turbulence. Some economists even predict a recession if inflation continues to rise and inflicts serious damage on the U.S. economy.
The continued pace of wage growth (or lack thereof) could affect consumer confidence and spending, although it’s slowly improving. Throw in the unknowns of the full rollout of the new U.S. tax cut and uncertainty around tariffs, and, as the Magic 8-Ball might say, “Cannot predict now.”
The Next Frontiers
One thing we can predict is that retail innovation will continue. In the arena of emerging opportunities, there’s a huge potential market for up-and-coming eCommerce innovations. One such example is voice assistants, where 70% of consumers aren’t yet using one to perform a product search. To tap into this market, technology companies, advertisers, and brands will have to strategize ways to overcome consumer apprehension and mistrust.
Although at the moment Amazon and Google are the pioneers of voice-controlled devices (with Google currently in the lead), companies like Apple, Samsung, IBM, and Microsoft are all in the mix and hoping to gain ground.
In addition, as CES often proves, the sky’s the limit when it comes to the entrepreneurial and inventive spirit. With this year’s brilliant thinkers and engineers inventing roll-up TVs, a bot that folds laundry, and connected cars (and the associated $212 billion in commuter spending), it’s anyone’s guess what toys, gadgets, and breakthroughs will come next.
On the social side, eCommerce looks very likely to play a larger role in 2019, as advertisers get their feet wet selling on social platforms. They’ll have to decide if social’s an eCommerce fit or if its big strength will be awareness for the foreseeable future.
To be sure, technological change has come come a long way since Smell-O-Vision! Although it may be challenging to keep up, the good news for retailers is that opportunities to target and woo customers will only continue to evolve.
The Upshot: eCommerce Is Here to Stay and Grow
Where do retailers go from here? Given current challenges and increased competition, eCommerce businesses must give customers what they want and beat competitors to the “experience” punch. This involves a holistic approach that delivers overall eCommerce interactions based on ease of use, convenience, personalization, and choice (not to mention easy checkout, fewer clicks, and so on).
Looking at your digital campaigns as part of a unified digital marketing strategy across search, social, and eCommerce will be a key differentiator for advertisers in 2019 and the coming years as competition grows even fiercer. The ultimate goal for advertisers is to meet shoppers where they are, regardless of which platform or device they happen to be using. Choosing the right ad tech vendor with an independent, cross-channel view of the world is the key to success.
As the retail landscape transforms and companies strive to develop a workforce equipped with skills to work in in the 21st century, eCommerce will continue to find itself leaps, bounds, and many clicks ahead of its humble 1970s beginnings.
Thank you, Michael Aldrich.
SERP, SEM, ETA, RSA: The Acronym-Filled Journey of Search Advertising
From the birth of the search engine through 2016, advertisers worked hard to make their SEM ad messages concise enough to fit into the strict character limits of a standard text ad. Every ad had 25 characters in a headline and 35 characters in each of the two description lines.
Also, advertisers could get beyond these limitations and increase their ad real estate—they could proactively create ad extensions such as enhanced sitelinks, callouts, price extensions, structured snippet extensions, and the like.
In search marketing years, doesn’t 2016 seem like a long time ago? In just the last two years, the search engine results page (SERP) has seen a massive amount of change.
Walking Upright: Expanded Text Ads
In late 2016, Google (and other publishers shortly thereafter) introduced shiny new expanded text ads (ETAs).
ETAs added an extra headline and increased the headline character limit from 25 to 30. The new ad type consolidated two description lines into one and topped it with 10 additional characters. Overnight, ad text space expanded by 45 characters.
Early testing proved that ETAs brought more exposure, a higher click-through rate, and more visitors to advertisers’ websites. Consequently, over the last couple of years all advertisers have been slowly, surely moving toward ETAs.
Creative Changes
Creatives also had to evolve, as devices we use every day got bigger. Also, since people now make more precise and educated search queries, advertisers can communicate with them using more specific messaging and visuals to drive more clicks.
The Modern Search Age: More Space, Dynamic Ads
The evolution of search continues, and won’t stop any time soon.
Last year, Google launched two new ad types allowing advertisers to expand and experiment with their search advertising campaigns even further:
- Expanded text ads improved (ETAi) allow advertisers to have three headlines (30 characters each) and two description lines (90 characters each). This means creative ad text has increased by 130 characters since 2017 and by 175 since early 2016.
- Google’s responsive search ads have the same character specifications as ETAi, but advertisers can add up to 15 headlines and four description lines to one ad. Google Ads then shows all possible ad combinations to best match a user’s search query. Advertisers can preselect one specific headline and one specific description line to always appear in the first position within the creative.
New Formats, New Benefits
The search engines suggest spreading, separating, and adapting your messages to the new ETAi and RSA formats instead of simply adding additional lines of text to your existing creatives.
The new ad types allow users to see headlines—that is, the most important, relevant message—in bold blue text. This helps you grab attention and entice people to continue to your website.
Note that using all the available characters may truncate your ad on smaller screens, leaving viewers with incomplete messaging and possibly no call to action.
The great thing about RSAs is that they alleviate advertiser headaches due to constant A/B testing. A/B test no more! This is a useful solution for teams juggling several channels and looking to automate.
If you prefer greater control over the message structure and update frequency, ETAi is an excellent solution, because it allows you to use the new format and update the creative test as you see fit.
Be Part of the Next Phase
The SERP looks very different today than it did just three years ago. If you haven’t used the newer ad formats yet, it’s a good idea to start, as your competitors are likely already getting their feet wet. Know that whether you go with RSAs or ETAi, testing is your key to success.
Marin supports both new ad formats—in MarinOne, you can see all three headlines and two description lines in your creatives tab. You can also single- and bulk-create/edit your ads.
If you haven’t tried them yet, be an early adopter and gain a competitive advantage—touch base with your Marin representative or schedule a demo today to learn how to simplify, amplify, and evolve your SEM campaigns.
Top 10 Trends in Digital Advertising in 2019
As we jump headlong into 2019, the digital advertising industry continues its exciting journey through new ad formats, breaking news, and shifting ad budgets. To dive deep into the state of the industry and anticipate what the New Year will bring, we dove into industry data and the Marin Advertising Index—which represents billions of dollars of annual ad spend on the Marin platform. These 10 trends in digital advertising indicate new possibilities, persistent challenges, and ongoing turf wars among major industry players.
1. Blurred Lines: Google, Facebook, and Amazon
As the triopoly rises to the top and competes fiercely with each other for digital ad dollars, the worlds of search, social, and eCommerce will continue to blend together. Amazon is essentially a massive search engine now, Google has seen great success with Shopping Ads, and now Facebook, through Instagram, is becoming a major player in eCommerce. How can marketers optimize spend?
The Opportunity: Marketers will need to work hard to connect the dots across all these different channels and seek out an independent view of the entire customer journey, especially as lines are blurring across publishers and devices.
2. The Rise of Instagram and Facebook Stories
During its Q3 2018 earnings call, Facebook reported that more than one billion Stories are shared daily across Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp. And where consumers go, marketers follow. Marin Software’s Q3 Digital Advertising Benchmark Report found Stories represented 25% of their total Instagram ad spend, up from just 8% a year earlier—that’s a 212% increase YoY and rising.
The Opportunity: Because Stories are such a rich, immersive ad format, there’s plenty of opportunity to experiment with engaging creative. But brands are at the mercy of users’ thumbs clicking through the story quickly, since Facebook hasn’t yet implemented unskippable ads like Snapchat. So, it’s more important than ever to get the creative right, especially since Facebook is still working out the kinks of the format.
3. The Chatbot and Messenger Brand Advantage
The number of mobile messaging app users in the U.S. will reach 171.3 million by 2022, according to eMarketer estimates. Advertisers are only just beginning to realize the true potential of the channel.
The Opportunity: Messenger apps present an opportunity for brands to move conversations forward in a way unlike any other format. Brands can have asynchronous conversations—where they can pop in and out of the app—at various points along the customer journey (when a user abandons the shopping cart, for example).
4. Brace for Impact: CCPA Is Just the Beginning
Brands should be prepared for more states, and possibly the federal government, to follow in California’s footsteps with GDPR-like regulations. As industry leaders and government officials continue to take strides toward privacy requirements, marketers need to understand their data infrastructure and make preparations now, anticipating that new regulations will go into effect and shake up ad strategies.
The Opportunity: While these changes may seem daunting now, it’s important to remember that it’s still possible to reach consumers in a courteous way, respecting those who choose to not have their data shared and honoring those who do share their data but still want it protected. This mutual understanding and promise of transparency will keep companies in a good light, and shouldn’t deter them from continuing to create meaningful, engaging, and relevant advertising and marketing experiences for customers and prospects.
5. Data, Data, Everywhere
Google’s search query report tells you exactly what people have searched for. That’s a fire hose for any company to see what their customers are really seeking. Users often search for something much broader than a specific product, and beyond shaping marketing strategy, such marketing-centric data will increasingly be utilized across the organization.
The Opportunity: The smartest marketers will keep mining search and other types of data to stay competitive, whether it’s to improve the customer experience or inform product, services, and merchandising decisions. For example, marketers can use search intent to uncover valuable insights across channels, and take advantage of specific terms and user behaviors to fuel ongoing brand strategies and tactics.
6. The Digital Is Political: New Rules for 2020
The 2018 midterm elections changed the rules for political ads. Between shrinking TV ad influence, growing digital ad spend, and general public distrust in social media, candidates had to get creative and fork out some major cash in order to come out on top.
Much of this spend was directed towards social ads, with some estimates showing “60 percent of every digital ad dollar goes toward social networks, including Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Snapchat and Instagram.” This was only a glimpse into the political ad frenzy that we’ll begin to experience in 2019 as the next presidential election approaches.
The Opportunity: Political advertisers are entering a new landscape—one that’s harder to break through with all the digital noise and distrust. Candidates must be diligent about utilizing data and understanding which channels are generating the most impact, and maximizing spend accordingly.
7. eCommerce Joins the Advertising Party
2018 was the year of Amazon, as it turned the duopoly into a triopoly and officially became the third largest digital advertising platform in the U.S. behind Facebook and Google. But Amazon isn’t the only retailer seeing major success in eCommerce—other major players are bound to follow suit by monetizing their websites.
The Opportunity: As eCommerce rises as an advertising channel, expect to see other giants like eBay and Walmart mimicking Amazon’s success to turn their own websites into advertising channels. After all, Amazon leads U.S. companies in nearly half of total retail eCommerce sales, but eBay and Walmart are not far behind at no. 2 and no. 3.
Looking beyond the U.S., it’s interesting to note that Alibaba, Baidu, and Tencent all take a significant share of the Chinese ad market, according to eMarketer’s Global Ad Spend Update.
8. Next-Gen Search: Visual and Voice
Google, Facebook, and Amazon are all players in the voice search game. According to Chatmeter, more than 50% of consumers own a smart speaker and use it daily. Amazon reports fielding an average of 130 million questions a day via “Alexa.” The opportunity for this next-generation version of search is huge—and visual search is on the horizon, taking search to an entirely new level.
For example, Snapchat recently announced a partnership with Amazon to offer users a new image-based shopping feature—users snap a photo of a product and Amazon will ring up a menu of store purchase options.
The Opportunity: Both voice and visual search are poised to be game-changers for marketers, and the opportunities for brands are still in the early days. One thing is for certain: voice and visual cannot be approached in the same way as traditional search. In fact, if Google and Amazon focus on capturing value from the transaction, Alexa and Google Home could be surprisingly free of traditional “ads.” The value is in the query and brands will need to figure out how to rise to the top.
9. AI’s All Over Search, but Creative’s Not Dead
A/B testing is dead, thanks to the introduction of technology like responsive search ads that put Google’s machine learning capabilities into the hands of advertisers. But with less time testing and more time to come up with smart and innovative campaigns, it’s certainly a time for marketers to ramp up the creative ingenuity.
The Opportunity: The rise of ML/AI in advertising will open up new doors for marketers to focus on their customer, deliver relevant and engaging ads, and spend more time thinking about what goals really matter. Spending less time in the trenches testing multiple creative will allow advertisers to focus on the real deliverables of any marketing initiatives.
10. Influencers Go Cross-Channel
A study conducted earlier this year found that 62 percent of marketers were planning to grow their influencer marketing budgets in 2018. Meanwhile, 61 percent of influencers said they had more sponsored partnership opportunities in 2017 than they had in 2016, and that number will surely rise in years to come as Instagram and other platforms gain popularity.
The Opportunity: Expect to see influencer marketing being incorporated into broader cross-channel campaigns and strategies. As influencers become an increasingly important part of the customer journey and continue to “influence” purchase decisions, the industry must work toward better attribution models for this fairly new form of engagement.
Skills Every Social Marketer Should Have Going into 2019
Digital marketing—especially social media marketing—is a fast-paced industry, with change often happening faster than you can say “professional development.” As social marketing gets more popular with the passing of each year, publisher ad offerings keep expanding accordingly.
Obviously, there are essential skills every social marketer should have: an analytical mind (or even better, a background in analytics), strategic thinking, excellent customer service, and being organized and efficient. However, if you really want to call yourself a paid social expert in 2019, here are a few things to work on.
Adaptability
Because social media is constantly changing and Facebook seems to release new features every week, some of the best practices you’ve been gathering for years may be outdated and no longer effective. Or, a client may have a new team with an entirely different communication style.
Keep an open mind and practice adapting to new and different solutions and situations. Consider working with your team to document a change management process. Then, continuously do the work of finding and understanding new best practices, new ways of working, and how to work with new teams and people.
A Passion to Learn New Things
The end of the year was most likely hectic, and you’re already thinking of how busy January is going to be—not to mention the rest of 2019. Don’t push back on what may turn out to be interesting new projects. Try to look at all challenges as opportunities that have the potential to bring insights and verve to your day-to day efforts.
Make a habit of learning or practicing one to two new things every day. It might be a new feature, a new way of optimizing, or a soft skill like public speaking.
Understanding Cultural Differences
Perhaps you already have outstanding communication skills and know your market very well. In 2019, as Facebook continues to grow its international strategies and advertising market, you may start working more with global customers.
Our culture influences our views and values—consequently, understanding cultural differences will help you tailor your ways of working and achieving the best results (and broaden your world in general!).
Cross-Channel Knowledge
It’s no secret that cross-channel advertising will be an even bigger opportunity in 2019. More and more advertisers want to make smarter decisions by allocating their time and investment to their best-performing channels.
Understanding what lies ahead in cross-channel advertising will help you create a more robust social strategy and contribute to your team’s success. Be sure to learn more about other channels and how they can interact with social, especially differences in tracking and attribution.
Knowing the Value of Organic Content
Social advertising is easily accessible—you’d be hard-pressed to find an advertiser that’s not on Facebook.
As a social marketer, you’re focused on performance and leveraging optimization features to get the best results. It’s important to remember that content is not only king, but also crucial to your social advertising success as competition increases. Leverage your successful organic content in your paid programs to get the most out of your overall social presence.
One mantra of the social marketer, like so many other professions, can be summed up as “always be learning.” Stay hungry for new knowledge and experiences. Explore, discover, and stay open to change, and you’ll have a great 2019 and beyond.
New Year’s Resolutions for Social Advertisers
Okay, social advertisers—have you laid out your goals for 2019? To help you with strategic planning, we put together a New Year’s resolutions list especially for you.
I will fine-tune my attribution to better understand my biddable performance.
Most advertisers still rely on last-click attribution when evaluating their biddable channel performance. This attribution model has a number of flaws:
- It doesn’t account for social impressions, especially the impact of social video ads.
- It doesn’t consider the complex user journey to purchase, which often includes multiple touchpoints.
- It has a tendency to devalue your paid social activity, and paint an inaccurate picture of which channels are driving conversions and incrementality.
Instead of last-click, we suggest considering more accurate measuring solutions. For example, using Marin’s TruePath, cross-channel advertisers are able to view the full user journey and understand the value of Facebook post-impression conversions alongside search results.
I will include video in my paid social strategy.
Digital video consumption has been growing each year, with Cisco estimating that 80% of internet traffic will be video by 2019. It’s a great way for marketers to tell their stories and get users to connect with the brand.
Over the course of 2018, here at Marin we’ve seen video ads improving in their ability to drive conversions and revenue. Now, we suggest that each advertising campaign aimed at driving conversions include both image and video assets, optimized towards the best performance.
I will open my heart to placement optimization.
Social media algorithms are constantly improving and have gotten really good at matching our ads to consumers. According to a study by Promo, 71% of consumers find Facebook video ads relevant.
With this in mind, we should concentrate on reaching the right people, no matter what device or placement they’re on. Using placement optimization allows you to serve your ads on Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, and a selection of partner mobile sites, all optimized towards the objective you select.
I will keep testing and learning new things.
The social media landscape is constantly evolving—consumer habits are changing and we should evolve our paid social advertising strategy to match. If a campaign is working well today, this might not be the case in 2019 if we don’t adapt to the changes.
To keep pace, it’s important to be open to new developments and carefully test whether they work for your organization. I’d encourage you to test new placements to see if they can deliver better reach and cost per conversion. Try new ad formats, especially as they tend to be cheaper once they’re first rolled out. Finally, use the split testing feature, which allows you to carefully determine whether the new campaign additions are working well for you.
Here are a few ideas to test in 2019:
- Placements: Instagram Stories, Facebook Stories, Messenger Stories, Marketplace
- Ad formats: Stories, Click-to-Messenger ads
- Optimization: Creative optimization for different placements, placement optimization
And there you have it—your social advertising resolutions for 2019. As you get ready for an exciting New Year, we’re here to answer your questions about any of the products or strategies mentioned above. Just get in touch with your Marin Social representative. Or, if you’re new to Marin, schedule a demo and we’ll show you how you can optimize your social ad campaigns.
Maximizing Sales Volume Beyond the Holidays
This is a guest post from Charlotte Haab, Account Lead at
3Q Digital.
As we get into the meat of Q4, there’s only one thing on advertiser’s minds—sales and how to maximize them. Black Friday and Cyber Monday may be the biggest sales days of the year, but it’s possible to extend that momentum and maximize your sales well into the New Year.
If you’re looking to keep sales strong even after the holidays, check out the tips below.
Use your first-party data from the holiday season
Just how huge were Black Friday and Cyber Monday this year? Black Friday raked in $6.2 billion in sales, while Cyber Monday set yet another record with $7.8 billion. It’s estimated that more than a third of the country—174 million people—hit the internet between Thanksgiving and Cyber Monday, presumably to shop for gifts.
So once all those people buy, what happens to them? This is where first-party data strategies come into play. All that online spending really fattens up customer lists! Tap your or your client’s CRM software to get lists of shoppers sent to the various search engines.
You can get as granular as your backend setup allows. Popular segments include people who:
- Purchased on Black Friday or Cyber Monday
- Purchased on Thanksgiving
- Spent a certain dollar amount
- Abandoned their carts
- Purchased certain products
The list could go on. You can use these segments to remarket down the line, or even create similar audiences or lookalikes on certain platforms going into the New Year.
For instance, if you’re able to create an audience of people who purchased Kitchen Aid Stand Mixers during a Cyber Monday sale, you can retarget them in the New Year with various attachments—maybe a veggie spiralizer to help them with their New Year’s resolution to eat healthier! Or, if you have a wider array of products for sale, you can create a list of users who had a higher than average order value, and retarget them more aggressively on your most expensive or luxury items.
Think about New Year’s resolutions
The New Year is a fresh start for many—why not capitalize on that mentality? In almost every industry there is a New Year’s resolution or related seasonality that applies to your vertical.
For example, for wedding purveyors, New Year’s Eve is a night of proposals—you can count on a spike in sales the next day. Most people resolve to get fit or healthier in the new year, and for retailers this means higher demand for activewear, kitchen, or food-prep supplies. Gyms see a sharp bump in memberships, and even banking institutions see increases in search volume as the population resolves to finally get their finances in order.
Think about which resolutions apply to your business, and be prepared with keyword expansions, increased inventory, or exclusive deals.
Make your job easier: embrace dynamic search and AI
Despite being “the most wonderful time of the year,” the holidays and surrounding dates can be among the most stressful for anyone who works in marketing. Make your life a lot easier by embracing dynamic capabilities and automation features that seem to be constantly rolling out.
Ensure total coverage and keyword mine with DSA campaigns.
Being prepared for the New Year may sometimes means a keyword expansion. For example, a retail client who typically sells beach gear wants to expand into activewear in anticipation of increased sales in the New Year.
While you can research and craft your own keyword lists, another great way to ensure coverage is to set up a Dynamic Search Ads (DSA) campaign in Google. Through these campaign types you can target broader categories based on your site structure or product categorization.
Once you set up the campaign you can really sit back and let Google do the keyword harvesting for you. Review queries on your DSA campaigns to find super high quality, longer tail, or unexpected new keywords to bid more aggressively on as the year progresses.
Use dynamic and responsive ad capabilities to target the most relevant customer with the most relevant language.
You can take even more work off your plate by embracing dynamic and responsive ad types in Google. You can use dynamic keyword insertion to make sure your headlines are totally tailored to each and every query that comes through. You can even take some of those first-party data lists and write specialized ad copy just for those people to be dynamically applied in-auction.
For instance, those stand mixer customers might respond well to, “Enjoying your new stand mixer? Check out this new attachment.” Or on Facebook, use the automated audience segments to target newly engaged couples with specific pointed language like, “Just engaged? Check out our wedding planning checklist!”
If you’re willing to surrender even more to Google’s algorithms you can stick some responsive search or responsive display ads into the mix. You can theoretically set and forget these ad types—Google will format them in each auction to serve in the most enticing way possible with the goal of driving clicks or conversions.
Use automated bid strategies tailored to your goals.
Make sure your account is set to “Optimize” for ad rotation to give Google full control over who gets served your ads in auction. Their robust algorithms serve your ads to the most qualified searchers in every auction, maximizing performance and eliminating the need to orchestrate clunky, antiquated A/B tests.
You can also test the waters with various bid strategies to achieve your specific performance goals, whether that’s a target ROAS, target CPA, certain impression share, or certain competitor you want to outrank.
Google is also constantly refining these bid strategies, so if you’ve tried them in the past to no avail, don’t be afraid to test them again! I would also encourage advertisers to stay up to date on new betas across all platforms.
For instance, this time of year can be difficult or slow for B2B companies—but implementing Google’s new pay-per-conversion beta allowed for one B2B client to finally find success through GDN acquisition and only pay for efficient conversions. The best part? The targeting is 100% in Google’s hands—barely any work for a very strong yield. Be sure to ask your account reps across all channels for updates on the latest and greatest performance tools/opportunities.
Don’t discount brick and mortar too quickly
This year has marked a shift in how Americans shop. For the first time, more than 50% of Americans say they prefer to shop online. It’s also no big secret that the industry in general is consistently moving in the direction of eCommerce over in-store shopping. Each year on Black Friday foot traffic falls by a few percentage points while online sales soar.
It’s important to note that brick and mortar stores are evolving into a valuable supplement to the ever-growing digital landscape. No matter how easy it is to shop online, humans love instant gratification. That’s why e-tailers and retailers alike are developing symbiotic relationships.
For example, this year Amazon partnered with Kohl’s to serve as a center for processing returns. Numerous big box and department stores are adapting a similar strategy by offering in-store or next-day pickup. This has the benefit of encouraging the online sale while also luring foot traffic to physical stores. In fact, this year in-store pickup on Black Friday increased nearly 75% from just one day before, that Thursday.
You can keep up with these trends digitally and still help your store business by taking advantage of some of the in-store-geared tools cropping up across online advertising platforms. For starters in Google, if your company meets certain requirements, you can set up tracking to measure store visits attributed to your digital efforts. This can help you best inform where/how to spend digitally to best support your in-store business. You can do something similar through Facebook by using their offline conversion API integration.
In addition to all of this, you can set up Google My Business and link to Google Merchant Center to prominently display in-store pickup where it’s available in your Google Shopping listings.
A note about in-store returns
Offering in-store returns after the holiday season is a great way to lure in customers. While it may be easier to buy online, returns are a pain, and customers are more likely to return in-store if it’s a possibility. Once they’re in your physical store, they’re more likely to buy something else or make an exchange rather than a full return.
Furthermore, when completing a transaction of any sort in the store, ask for an email address. Take email addresses captured from your POS system to retarget (or exclude) on digital platforms. Capitalize on the post-Christmas rush and get people through your doors!
In sum: Brick and mortar isn’t dying—it’s just evolving.
Get creative
In short, the best way to extend your holiday momentum into the New Year is by taking the tips above, and thinking outside of the box to effectively use the massive influx of data from the cyber holidays to your advantage. Fuel your customer lists and get creative with seasonal targeting segmentation. Hit your customers with pointed ad copy and achieve success on a more granular level by embracing the new dynamic and automated tools available to us.
Lastly—while trending down—don’t discount your brick and mortar stores just yet! Take what they still have to offer and use them to your advantage. Work these tips into your strategy to keep your sales as strong as possible as 2019 approaches.
Getting Social: How to Improve Holiday Ad Performance
The holidays are here—meaning a busy time for brands. To help you usher in the next round of shopping sprees, we’ve made a list (and checked it twice) of recommendations to boost campaign performance of your social holiday ads.
Be Careful Not to Limit Ad Delivery
‘Tis the season for free shipping—and refining your ad delivery. Be sure not to establish too many delivery constraints, which will limit your campaigns. With just the right restrictions, however, your social ad delivery system will explore the best opportunities and locate the best possible value in alignment with your strategies and goals.
There are several tips and tools that can help you refine your ad delivery and increase clicks:
- Combine ad sets so that you can reach the minimum conversion optimization requirement per ad set. You'll see better performance by merging some ad sets and having only a few in your campaign.
- Include MarketPlace, Messenger, and Stories in your ad placements. This will help Facebook find the best fit and encourage ad delivery based on where people are. For instance, some people may be looking at Facebook Stories but not using Messenger.
- Marin Tip: Marin Social’s Budget Allocation feature automatically adjusts your ad set budgets based on performance. This feature helps increase your delivery while reducing your cost per action.
Broaden Your Audience
Facebook results tend to be more effective when the audience is broader. Conversely, limiting the audience restrains the number of reachable people to the lowest price, which will increase your cost per action. We recommend using an audience size of at least two million. This allows you to create and vary your audience.
Marin Tip: Marin Social offers features such as Campaign Lookalike Audiences, and Interest and Location Clusters, that allow you to create audiences based on characteristics you specify. This is great for broadening your audience while you refine your targeting.
Bid Higher During the Holidays
Competition is fierce during the holiday season, leading to increased conversion rates and CPMs. To win auctions, you’ll need to bid higher. You’ll be rewarded with higher conversion rates and better performance.
Marin Tip: Marin Social’s automated rules feature allows you to set rules that make sense for you and your business. For example, you can limit and control your costs and spend automatically during days when you’re out of the office.
Optimize According to Your Objective
It’s important to bid on the right optimization goal that helps you achieve your business objective. When you do this, the Facebook system delivers the best performance and generates more volume.
For example, the link clicks optimization helps with the website traffic objective but not an app install objective. Furthermore, the delivery system needs a certain amount of data—at least 50 conversions—to reliably predict the conversion rate and maximize value.
Vary Your Content
Make sure your content is relevant to your audience, message, and objective. Include different formats in the same ad set to allow the Facebook algorithm to have more flexibility to give you the best results possible. Also, to avoid audience fatigue, refresh your ads every 10 days.
Marin Tip: Marin Social has various features—such as Mass Editor, Bulk Creator, and the Find & Replace tool—to help you create and refresh your ads.
How Have Responsive Search Ads Been Performing?
This is a guest post from Charlotte Haab, Account Lead at
3Q Digital.
A few months back I gave you the scoop on Google’s latest ad type: responsive search ads. How have these ads been performing since their release?
Refresher: The Lowdown on RSAs
Responsive ads essentially mix and match from a variety of pre-written ad assets. In other words, you can write up to 15 headline variations and four description variations, and Google will determine which combinations are most relevant to each individual auction. It’s also worth noting that each ad can show up to three headlines in the SERP, with extended 90-character descriptions.
Early Positive Results
At this early stage, the consensus is mixed. Google’s research shows that advertisers can get up to 15% more clicks or conversions by adding a responsive search ad to their ad groups.
Our own research shows that some clients saw nice improvements to click-through rate (CTR) and conversion rate (CVR) using RSAs, while others didn’t.
Why was this the case?
For one eCommerce client, the challenge was expanding branded keyword efforts when we were already at 100% impression share. With responsive search ads, we were able to grab about 10% more impressions that we weren’t getting previously.
One thing to keep in mind, in this instance, is that RSAs had just been released. A few weeks after their release, Google announced updates to standard ads that included three headlines, and two 90-character descriptions. This inherently puts less tailored RSAs at a disadvantage when comparing.
For this same retailer it’s also worth noting we saw a nearly 15% increase in CTR and a 12% increase in CVR. That’s because RSAs give Google the freedom to use their algorithms to decide which combination of copy is most likely to drive a conversion for each individual auction. The more conversion volume your account has, the better Google can learn what works for who. As a trade off, there’s a limitation to how query-specific your ads can be.
If your account has ample conversion volume and uses largely generic or branded copy—you can probably expect some improvements to performance and impression share from implementing RSAs.
In Contrast….
In a contrary example, another similarly sized eCommerce retail client implemented RSAs and saw the opposite happen. CTR dropped by about 15%. While this account had similar levels of traffic, they sold a more specialized product and had a longer time to conversion, thus smaller amounts of volume—in which case the query-specific headline structure in standard ETAs were able to outperform Google’s RSAs.
Another client who couldn’t find success with RSAs cited overall low volume. The new ad type just didn’t get enough traction and barely served—making any learnings or results negligible. In the same way the new SERP inventory was beneficial for our first example, it ended up being detrimental for our last example.
If you have very limited volume, and your copy hinges on very stringent customization, or brand restrictions, RSAs might not be for you.
While adopting RSAs early gave some advertisers access to additional inventory volume, now that standard ads have been updated to match, all text ads are now serving in the same auction—so increased impression share is no longer a benefit you should expect.
Conclusion: Give It a Try
In sum: RSAs are still pretty new. Google continues to encourage automation/machine learning strategies, and will likely continue to do so. In the meantime, it’s always good to try something new to see if it works for you! So if you haven’t implemented RSAs yet, I suggest you do— but monitor them closely until you know how they perform for your accounts.
Three Elements of an Effective Google Shopping Campaign
The right campaign structure is the foundation of a successful Shopping campaign. The trick is to get a strategy in place—once you have a process it often builds on itself, leading to even greater successes.
There are three elements to effective Shopping Campaigns: strategy, optimization, and the tools or platforms to automate and analyze your campaigns.
Strategy: Consider the 20/60/20 Rule
Retailers can use a version of the 20/60/20 rule when planning their Shopping strategy. The top 20% are high priority stock keeping units (SKUs)—individual top-performing products that drive a disproportionate volume of the top line of revenue. These products should each be placed in single-product product groups leveraging the item id criteria. This allows bids to be set based on each product’s performance.
The middle 60% accounts for the heart of the SKU count. These should be placed into product groups organized by category and/or brand in a structure that aligns with your company’s brand strategy. The objective is to have enough granular control without getting overwhelmed with too many product groups. Advertisers should regularly graduate top-volume products to single-product ad groups when appropriate.
Consider your business and how it approaches selling products. If you regularly run sales by product line (for example, All Running Shoes 30% Off), then having a corresponding product group using Category or Product Type criteria is going to be helpful to manage with. If you work with vendors and incremental budgets, having campaigns with Brand product groups will allow for easy management of those fluctuating ad dollars (and allow you to easily set campaign budget constraints).
The bottom 20% is the catch-all for new or low volume/exploratory products. A broadly targeted product group ensures coverage for everything else in your catalog. As data accumulates for these products, retailers can move them up into the middle section, and eventually promote the all-stars that stand out into the top section.
Pro tip: Exclude your “Everything Else” items across the other campaigns and concentrate them in a single Catch-All. This makes it easy to monitor performance and if too much volume spikes here, dig through it and break it out into prescribed campaigns.
Return on ad spend (ROAS) is a typical way for retailers to analyze performance. To figure out which SKUs are the top performers, product groups can be split into those that produce a high ROAS and those that have a low ROAS. Users can achieve this split manually in Google Ads, which is both time- consuming and error-prone, or they can automate it using Marin Software.
Optimization: Use Marketplace and First-party Signals
Retailers can optimize their Shopping campaigns by leveraging both first- and third-party data to enhance their decision making. Bringing in additional data helps retailers to be more aggressive when they expect the best returns, and to decide when to pull back on products that aren’t selling well.
For example, analyzing inventory quality could influence how a retailer is bidding. If certain products are in stock, but only in very large sizes such as XXL and XXXL, that can be considered low-quality inventory. The retailer may want to decrease the bids or back out of the auction until supplies are replenished.
Inventory quality goes beyond just whether or not a product is in stock, which is what many retailers focus on. Failing to assess the quality of inventory can drive conversion rates down if consumers are clicking product ads only to find the product isn’t available in their size.
Rather than getting hung up on the false- positive of whether products are in or out of stock, retailers should try and get a deeper understanding of high- and low-quality stock to make smarter decisions around which products to bid on.
Automation Can Lead to Better Bidding
Retailers can also use feed and competitor data to make better bidding decisions. Working with an independent platform like Marin, users can track up to 10 competitors in every auction they’re bidding on, to understand if their products are overpriced or underpriced relative to the market. If they discover they’re overpriced compared with their competitors, retailers might not want to bid as heavily on those auctions, because a lot of today’s consumers are driven by price points.
Conversely, retailers may want to double down in auctions where their price is better than competitors’. Retailers are often surprised to find out their prices are less competitive than they thought. This insight can strengthen their decision making and allow retailers to make smart pricing adjustments.
Automated bidding is critical for large retailers managing millions of SKUs, as it enables them to separate the top performers from the rest. Doing this at scale and bringing in data outside of what’s natively available in Google will set them apart from their competition.
Learn More
To discover other key tips to apply to your Google Shopping campaigns to increase clicks and revenue, download our guide, Shop ‘Til You Click: Creating Shopping Campaigns at Scale. Also be sure to set up a demo to see how Marin’s bidding engine leverages first- and third-party data to automatically adjust bids and keep users ahead of the curve.
How Advertisers Can Get Started with Responsive Search Ads
By now, most search advertisers have heard about Google’s responsive search ads. Still, SEM aficionados are still getting their heads around this latest ad type. How does it work? Will it bring more clicks? How does it compare to text ads?
Responsive ads choose the best-performing combinations from a search advertiser’s ad copy and assets. Advertisers can write up to 15 headlines and four descriptions, and Google’s algorithm automatically serves the best combinations in auctions based on which ones are most relevant to users, ultimately driving conversions.
With responsive search ads, advertisers can boost relevance and streamline performance across Google Ads campaigns. Now, you can create ads that automatically adjust to show the most effective ad copy to your audience.
Learn More
At Marin, we’re getting a lot of questions from our advertisers about this new ad format. We decided to partner with Google to shed some light on this important topic for search advertisers. Sign up for our webinar on Thursday, December 6th at 10 am PT / 1 pm ET and hear answers to such questions as:
- How do RSAs work?
- Why do RSAs matter to advertisers?
- What are best practices and tips for optimizing campaigns?
Sign up today to secure your spot.
Speaker Bios
Sylvanus Bent embraces a growth mindset, and looks forward to continuing to learn everything he can about successfully taking products to market. He works closely with design and engineering colleagues to ensure that Google is building the right products for its customers.
Wes MacLaggan has over a decade’s experience developing and delivering analytical enterprise SaaS applications, including four years with Applied Predictive Technologies working on the company’s platform to help retailers maximize the return on their promotional spending. He is currently Head of Marketing at Marin Software, and has been with the company since 2008.
Ad Spend Increases on Black Friday and Cyber Monday—and It’s a Global Phenomenon
The holiday season is upon us and it’s always fun to analyze the aggregate performance of our advertisers on Black Friday and Cyber Monday. Each year when we “read the tea leaves”, some existing trends are reinforced while a new pattern jumps out at us. 2018 is no exception.
More Clicks, Higher Spend
As expected, we see a marked jump in clicks and spend on paid search in the U.S. this holiday season. Clicks and ad spend were up 53% and 81% respectively on Black Friday this year when indexed off the monthly pre-holiday average. Cyber Monday also posted 40% growth in clicks and 105% growth in ad spend for the U.S. market.
CPCs Rise Up
We also observed a large gulf between click (40%) and spend (105%) growth on Cyber Monday this year, which means CPCs have increased. A combination of greater click volume with increased competition means higher CPCs for advertisers. If conversion rates increase accordingly, then advertisers can justify this higher spend and this is where an ad management platform like Marin can excel by delivering sterling return on ad spend (ROAS) to match your increased investment.
Black Friday & Cyber Monday Go Global
Although both events originated in the US, data from Marin’s ad management platform shows that advertisers in the United Kingdom and Europe are rallying around Black Friday and Cyber Monday too. While the US leads in overall ad spend for Black Friday (81%) and Cyber Monday (105%), the UK runs a close second, followed by Europe.
What better indication that the shopping season is now global than robust ad spend growth across all three regions in 2018. Stay tuned for more in-depth analysis of this holiday period from Marin as we roll into December.
For more in-depth analysis of trends across search, social, and eCommerce channels this year, check out Marin’s Q3 2018 Digital Advertising Benchmark Report.
Perfect Audience and Shopify: One-Click Integration, $250 Free Credit
Perfect Audience is excited to announce our new integration with Shopify. Users of this leading eCommerce platform can now set up remarketing campaigns in a flash. With our one-click integration, we’ll import your Shopify product feed and automatically create a set of dynamic ads featuring your store’s products.
Advertise to your site visitors and cart bouncers so they return and buy after browsing your shop.
A Key Part of Your Digital Ad Strategy
Remarketing is a key component of just about every eCommerce retailer’s digital strategy. No matter how amazing your products are, a lot of your traffic will leave without converting. If they’re interested, give them a reason to return by showing them ads on tens of thousands of websites.
You’re in control of your creative, budget, campaign duration, and more.
Easy Setup
It’s free to sign up for Perfect Audience, a Shopify user can set up campaigns in minutes, and the only charge is the amount you spend on campaigns—an amount you set.
We’ll even give you a special one-time $250 credit to get started. Email success@perfectaudience.com by November 15, 2018 to take advantage of the special free trial credit. For more information:
- Learn more about the offer.
- New to Perfect Audience? Create a free account.
- Questions? Write to support@perfectaudience.com.
Happy retargeting!
The post Perfect Audience and Shopify: One-Click Integration, $250 Free Credit appeared first on Perfect Audience Retargeting Blog.
Why Facebook Stories Are All the Rage
Instagram Stories are a huge success for Facebook. The format rolled out in August 2016 to the general Instagram public, and then to advertisers in March 2017.
Now, Instagram can boast of 400 million people using Stories every day. This is more than double the 191 million Snapchat users, the platform where stories were first born.
With user habits shifting so rapidly, Stories are poised to be the future of social media. According to research conducted by Block Party, Stories creation and consumption is up 842% since 2016. Facebook also estimates that Stories will surpass sharing to news feeds in 2019.
In light of all this, Facebook recently announced that Facebook Stories Ads are now available to all advertisers globally.
Why are Stories so wildly popular?
A Story’s Worth a Thousand Words
Stories make it easier to share experiences, are easier to consume than text, and are highly immersive, occupying the full screen and often playing with sound on.
Should you drop what you’re doing and start making Facebook Stories Ads right now? Well, maybe not drop everything, but you should add Stories to your social advertising toolkit.
What More Can Facebook Stories Offer Advertisers?
Before you fully dive in, consider these additional stats:
- Facebook Stories have about 150 million daily active users. The reach is a few times smaller than reach on Instagram Stories, but still significant.
- The format’s available to be bought along with Facebook Feed or Instagram Stories ads as a placement optimization. It’s not yet available as a standalone.
- It’s versatile and supports direct response and brand objectives: Reach, Brand Awareness, Video Views, App Installs, Conversion, Traffic, and Lead Generation.
- It includes the entire suite of Facebook targeting options.
- Facebook Stories support image and video ad formats (up to 15 seconds). By comparison, Instagram now supports up to 60-second video in Stories and the Carousel format.
Our Take on Facebook Stories Ads
Facebook Stories ads are available to all advertisers through Marin Social. After initial testing, we have a few recommendations.
- If you’re already using Instagram Stories, extend your reach to Facebook Stories. It’s a no-brainer. As long as you’re using single image or short video ads, selecting the extra placement is an easy way to get additional reach and improve your performance. In this case, you won’t need to develop new assets and can test Facebook Stories in a couple of clicks.
- Don’t expect massive additional reach just yet. Facebook Stories have less reach than Instagram Stories. Also, because you can’t choose Facebook Stories as a standalone placement, the almighty algorithm will control your ads, and they prioritize placements that deliver the best value. You won’t be able to predict how much delivery you’ll get, at first, on Facebook Stories.
- Leave a little space at the top and bottom of the asset, free from text and logos—about 14%. Your profile icon and call to action (CTA) will fill this space. (Note that Facebook requires a profile icon but a CTA is optional. See our example Facebook Story ad).
- Use text overlay and emojis to narrate the story. Text overlays are commonly used in organic stories and can help you add a little humor or context to the story. This is especially useful as Stories are consumed very quickly. Make sure your key message stands out fast.
Learn More
We’re excited about this ad format and can’t wait for more advertisers to try it out. If you’re a Marin customer and want to learn more, get in touch with your account rep. Or, if you’re new to Marin, see it in action by requesting a demo.
Retargeting Essentials for the 2018 Holiday Season
This year’s holiday season will beat 2017 in every major online retail category—the duration of the season, the amount spent, and the number of shoppers who engage. We’ve put together a list of tips to boost your retargeting click-through rate and conversions during this critical quarter and holiday season. We’ll also highlight a bunch of new Perfect Audience features we’ve pushed out this year that can help you achieve your goals.
Timeline
Get an early start. Cyber Monday (November 26, 2018) is not the day to launch your holiday campaigns for the first time—there’s a lot of down time over the Thanksgiving holiday weekend and people spend some of it online. Have your Perfect Audience Site Tracking Tag installed, your audience segments defined, and your creatives ready to go at least 30 days in advance.
It’s a good idea to run some campaigns in October, too. There’s less competition for ad space than in November and December—you may attract early bird shoppers while planting seeds for future conversions.
Ad Sizes
There’s inventory to be won using some less popular but still useful ad sizes (970×250 headers for desktop, 300×250 and 320×100 for mobile web). This is in addition to the sizes we recommend for all web campaigns.
Mobile
Cross-device retargeting means Perfect Audience will follow your shoppers from desktop to mobile device. Are they browsing your store at work, then using their phone on the train home? That’s where we’ll get them. Desktop is still king in terms of revenue, but mobile’s share rises every year and can’t be ignored. Make sure you run mobile campaigns in addition to everything else you’re doing.
Budget Bump
In Q4, you’ll probably see a lift in site traffic. This means your audiences will grow and you can serve more impressions. Our team recommends a 25-50% weekly budget increase for the months of November to December. If your traffic usually goes up by a certain amount, increase the budget by that percentage.
To change your weekly campaign budget in Perfect Audience, go to Manage -> Campaigns and Edit your campaign. In Step 3, change your budget amount. When you’re done, click Save at the bottom of the page.
Increase Your Bids
Just about every eCommerce store bumps up its advertising budget for Q4, making ad impressions harder to win.
With so many advertisers fighting for ad space, it’s not uncommon to see your CPM costs rise during this time of year. Prepare for the surge by increasing your CPM bids across your campaigns. Bidding higher will make your campaigns more competitive and will give you a better chance of serving more ads. We suggest increasing your CPM bid by 50-100% of the current average CPM cost for the campaign.
Go to Manage -> Campaigns and edit a campaign. In step 3, find Bid Type and change the setting to Manual Bidding. Then enter your CPM bid.
You’ve also got CPC bidding options for Facebook campaigns in Perfect Audience.
Save when you’re finished editing your bidding.
Facebook Marketplace and Messenger
Perfect Audience supports ad placements in Facebook Marketplace and Messenger. These are two of Facebook’s newest placements, representing new avenues to reach Facebook users. It’s turned on by default if you run Facebook campaigns in Perfect Audience. Learn more and check it out.
Take Advantage of Instagram
Mobile shopping continues to rise, as does engagement with Instagram. Instagram is approaching the one billion user milestone, and 80% of those users follow at least one business. If it looks good on the ‘Gram, your customers are thinking about how it’ll look in their homes.
Take advantage of Perfect Audience’s Instagram placements within your Facebook campaigns.
Shopify Users: Enjoy One-click Integration
Perfect Audience now has an integration with Shopify that automatically imports your product feed and builds dynamic (that is, product-specific) ads for your catalog. Set your own budgets and keep total control over your campaigns. Detailed reporting ensures you have a clear picture of your return on ad spend. If you’re already a Perfect Audience and Shopify user, setup is quick and easy.
Dynamic Ads: Stuff Your Ads Like Stockings
It’s better to have more gifts under the tree, more cookies on your plate, and more products visible in one ad. If you’re an eCommerce retailer and you have a Google Merchant Center product feed, try our multi-product dynamic ads. If you’ve got a feed imported, it takes just a few seconds to build your ads. It’s like four impressions for the price of one.
Create Holiday-themed Ads and Landing Pages
Holiday ads and landing pages get attention, create urgency, and show you’re not running the exact same campaigns as the rest of the year. Send a happy holiday message, mention the buy deadline to ensure holiday delivery, and give them a reason to click your ads.
It takes just two quick steps:
- Create landing pages and content on your site for these holiday events, then create audiences that capture visitors of these pages. (Read up on audiences.)
- Run campaigns to serve your holiday ads to your holiday page visitors. If they’re coming to your site looking for holiday deals, they’re more likely to respond to holiday-themed ads.
Instapage put together an excellent summary of best practices for post-click optimization.
New Year’s Resolution
The season extends beyond December 31st—returns and gift cards mean another wave of shoppers arrives in January. You can lower your bids and budgets a little, but don’t turn all your ads off—there are still plenty of sales to be made.
Have a great holiday!
Search Spend Grows as Instagram Thrives: Our Q3 2018 Digital Benchmark Report
In Q3 2018, paid search saw healthy 13% year-over-year growth—driven almost equally by increased click volume and rising CPCs—while Shopping ad budget share reached an all-time high of 36%. Also, Instagram ads gained ground, grabbing 15% of total Facebook spend, with Facebook’s news feed accounting for over 80%.
We share these insights and more in our Q3 2018 Digital Advertising Benchmark Report. Our interactive format reveals the latest cross-channel advertising trends by region, industry, and publisher.
Other highlights for Q3 2018 include:
- Instagram Gaining Momentum: Instagram Stories was the most popular ad format, accounting for 25% of all ads on the photo and video-sharing platform. Due to its rich ad format, deeper level of user engagement, and less crowded feed environment, advertisers are willing to pay a substantial premium for Instagram ad placements over Facebook. This includes a $0.82 CPC on Instagram, four times higher than the $0.19 CPC on Facebook.
- Global Search Spend Barrels Ahead: In addition to 13% YoY growth in search spend, the average global CPC increased from $0.80 in Q3 2017 to $0.83 in Q3 2018.
- European Paid Search Slows Down: Anomalous to increased global search spend, eurozone growth was relatively meager at 5.7% YoY in Q3 2018. Europe also saw lower CPCs than the global average, with a $0.44 CPC in Q3 2018 compared to the global average of $0.83. With the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) wrapping up its first full quarter, lingering privacy concerns may be taking a toll on the European search advertising market.
- Shopping Ads Gain Share: Shopping ads captured 37% of the average retailer’s search spend, eclipsing the 36% observed in Q3 2017. The expectation is that dynamic ads will continue to take share from traditional text ads in Shopping and other verticals.
Download the report for other actionable insights for your digital ad campaigns.
What Candidates Are Doing Right—and Wrong—with Midterm Election Advertising
This is a guest post from Charlotte Haab, Account Manager at
3Q Digital.
Whether it’s ominous video spots, sneaky “fake news,” or your favorite great aunt’s not-quite-sensitive Facebook comments,
TV and online airwaves, channels, and networks are full of political messaging.
Advertisers are in the thick of it. They can shape public opinion, but most people don’t understand how—the psychology, emotions, and branding that contribute to trying to sway public opinion. To this end, the political space sees a lot of money and content that goes into advertising. What are things looking like just a couple of weeks before the big day?
Who’s advertising?
The answer to this one is pretty simple: everyone— Republicans, Democrats, and Progressives alike. However, advertising trends between parties are pretty different and some even surprising!
This year, pro-Democratic candidates and PACs have outspent Republicans by a cool $30 million on TV ads. They’re spending $260 million in total, and according to eMarketer, competition’s only going to get more heated.
Whether Democrats outspending the GOP gives you hope for the future or leaves a bad taste in your mouth, Democratic Senate candidates are making a mistake spending the bulk (60-70%) of their marketing budgets on TV and direct mail. Where they need to be is digital. Democrats typically spend 10-15% of their marketing budget on digital, while our friends in the GOP spend a whopping 30% to 50%.
In the final weeks of this election cycle, however, House Democrats are finally getting with the times. Younger, more progressive faces of the party like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez are making a big midterm push in digital ads. After all, robust digital strategies were integral to helping candidates like her and Ayanna Pressley win the primaries. Priorities USA and Senate Majority PAC—two prominent Democratic organizations—are dropping an additional $21 million in battleground states ahead of November 6th, exclusively in digital channels.
[caption id="attachment_12153" align="alignnone" width="385"]
Example on the left: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez[/caption]
Since people today spend an average of six hours a day looking at the internet and traditional TV as we know it is fading into the past, Senate Democrats would do well to heed the data and move more spend online. Also, TV and radio represent some of the most loosely targeted advertising options available. Which leads to the next question….
Where should politicians be advertising?
Digital. Republicans clearly know this. Since May of this year the Trump campaign has spent nearly a quarter million on Google platforms alone.
The main reason that digital content/channels are so important and so compelling for political organizations really comes down to targeting. Being able to deliver an emotional message doesn’t hurt, either. (To view some examples, Google now houses all political ads in its political ad library, which shows the breadth and depth of messaging in the current landscape.)
[caption id="attachment_12154" align="alignnone" width="500"]
Example on the right: Bryan Steil[/caption]
Digital channels all offer the ability to target by demographic, language, interests, and probably most importantly, location. Hyper local targeting—sometimes down to the coordinate level—layered in with demographic and language targeting gives political advertisers the ability to tailor their ads to every single one of their constituents, with virtually no impression waste if done correctly.
On Facebook you can target people based on their level of college education, gender, ethnicity, generation, and the charities they donate to—all super-important indicators of who and what they might vote for.
With Google and YouTube, you can use topic and affinity targeting to literally pick which social and advocacy issues people are interested in. HIllary Clinton could target her ads toward people who care about reproductive rights, while Trump could target his ads at people with specific stances on immigration policy and border issues.
Meanwhile, Connected TV (CTV) is offering all the visual content of a traditional TV spot, but paired with the detailed targeting available in modern digital channels. I don’t think it’s worth Trump’s money to pay for CTV spot during an episode of The Handmaid's Tale, for example.
So….
What should you watch out for?
To loosely quote Peter Parker’s uncle: with great (digital) power, comes great responsibility. This responsibility isn’t always respected. Political and 3rd party organizations have been getting around some of the rules by allowing bots, foreign powers, or other malfeasance to pump massive amounts of money into incendiary or even false political advertisements. It then becomes the responsibility of the marketing platforms to make sure the public isn’t being misled.
In May, Facebook announced a new slew of regulations for political ads including a mandatory “Paid for by” label, and stricter requirements for advertisers to verify identity and location. These regulations extend not just to electoral ads, but also to any ad containing content related to a highly debated political issue. Facebook is also hard at work in its newly revealed war room, aiming to eliminate election manipulation on its platform.
While these publishers are definitely taking the correct steps, it’s not a problem they can solve overnight. So whether you’re an advertiser yourself or just a fervent user of the internet, remember to try and go deeper than political ads in taking sides this November.
Now get out there and vote!
Everything You Need to Know About Google’s Parallel Tracking
The October 30th deadline for parallel tracking is fast approaching. If you’re running paid advertising campaigns on Google Ads, consider these stats:
- 53% of mobile users leave a site that takes longer than three seconds to load.
- Parallel tracking will speed up landing page load times—by up to five seconds—for users coming from your Google Ads.
The math is clear: When Google’s parallel tracking rolls out on October 30th, many advertisers will gain more visitors and see a bump in campaign performance as a result.
But how does it work, exactly?
Learn More
Sign up for our webinar on Wednesday, October 24th at 10 am PT / 1 pm ET to learn about the implications of parallel tracking. We’ll discuss how parallel tracking:
- Helps load your landing pages more quickly
- Reduces lost visits due to slow page load times
- Improves ad performance and conversions
Sign up today to secure your spot.
Speaker Bios
Prashant Nair is a Product Manager at Google. He has extensive experience across all areas of digital advertising including demand side, supply side, ad network, data platform, and analytics. At Google, he’s led product operations for AdX and YouTube Ads, and helps develop the vision that fuels innovation for AdWords, AMP, speed, scoring, reporting, and more.
William Hartley-Booth is a Marin Senior Product Manager who oversees Marin’s conversion tracking products, among other responsibilities. He joined Marin in 2010 after holding positions at other advertising technology companies specializing in optimizing digital advertising across search, social, and display.