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.
2 Things Every Social Advertising Strategy Needs
If you’ve been in online marketing for a while, you know the importance of having good creative for social advertising.
These days, social media advertising has become so advanced, that in order to get ahead of the competition, manual or automated bid optimization aren’t enough anymore. In fact, 55% of social media advertising optimization now comes from creative management, while the remaining 45% relies on bid and budget changes.[1]
But how can we get the most relevant creative to our audiences in the most efficient way possible?
The First Way: Dynamic Creative
As we know, online advertising is never one size fits all. Facebook gives us a powerful antidote: dynamic creative.
This feature allows you to upload a number of images, videos, and text assets and have the system automatically generate the ads for you. This ensures that the right creative combination reaches the right people, and that they’ll see what’s most relevant to them. From there, they’ll be more likely to take an action.
The Second Way: A Cross-Channel Strategy
Dynamic creative is great because it saves advertisers time and can provide efficiency. But in order to step it up a notch, a cross-channel strategy is key.
In MarinOne, we use search intent strategies to ensure that we take people’s actual intent when they’re searching for something, and customize the creative response on Facebook. For example, someone might be looking for quality underwear, and as a result, you can retarget them with an ad on Facebook that shows a high-quality image and copy that stresses the excellence of the clothes. This ensures that the creative resonates with them.
A Launch Point for Social Advertising Success
These are just two, quick-win tactics you can use to make sure your advertising campaigns benefit from the best creative, and that your audience information is powered by an automated, cross-channel approach.
Read about how Le Slip Français used these techniques to boost ROI and conversions. Then, to learn more about how Marin can help you implement a successful social advertising strategy, get in touch today.
[1] Facebook Marketing Partners Convention, Dublin, June 2018.
Is 2018 the Year of the Digital Ad Platform Rebrand?
First it was Google, then it was Amazon, then it was Oath.
Out with the old, in with the new, as they say—and in this case, 2018 seems to be the Year of the Ad Platform Rebrand. We took a look at what changed and why.
What’s in a Name?
While most of the rebranding included simple name changes, others provided advertisers with consolidated or new solutions to streamline their advertising platforms—often bringing disparate products under a single brand identity. (Click to enlarge.)
Why Rebrand?
As the major ad platforms continue to grow and develop new features and services, so does the potential learning curve for advertisers hoping to take advantage of these platforms. In Amazon’s case, the goal is to attract more brand advertisers. Across the board, however, these rebrands make the case for simplicity, and for ensuring the services are as easy and intuitive as possible for advertisers.
With one potential barrier to success lifted—multiple advertising solutions with disparate messaging and features—the hope is that brands can focus on driving more brand awareness, customer engagement, and revenue.
Your move, Bing.
Let’s Talk
Here at Marin, we think the easiest way to run your digital advertising campaigns is from a single location. Our independent platform unites advertising across search, social, and eCommerce, connecting you to customers wherever they are. We think the only way to see better results from ad spend, every day, is to run your channels in concert, such using search intent signals to power your social advertising and to integrate, align, and amplify all of your digital advertising efforts.
Whether you’re using Oath, Google, Amazon, Facebook, Twitter, or Bing, we’re here to help. To learn more, feel free to schedule a demo.
For further reading:
- Oath Unifies Ad Tech: https://www.oath.com/2018/09/10/oath-ad-platforms/
- Amazon Advertising: https://advertising.amazon.com/blog/blog/amazon-advertising-simplified?ref_=blog-list
- Introducing Google Marketing Platform: https://support.google.com/marketingplatform/answer/9031231?hl=en
What We're Reading This Week: Top 5 Industry Articles
The Marin Marketing team stays busy not only striving to deliver compelling, educational, and relevant content—we also spend time following the most interesting industry news. In this series, we list the stories that are grabbing our team’s attention.
Google and Facebook want half
The “duopoly” are marching toward making up half of the U.S. ad market, as video, TV, and politics bring in big media dollars.
Read the article
Is this the end of the Ad ID Consortium?
With AppNexus leaving the Ad ID Consortium and only one founding group remaining, what happens next?
Read the article
Snapchat links visual search to Amazon listings
Snapchat users can now scan their mobile phone over a physical item to bring up the item’s associated Amazon product listing.
Read the article
Mobile likely to dominate holiday shopping
According to a new OpenX and Harris Poll survey, most consumers think the U.S. economy is doing okay, so plan to spend the same or more on gifts this holiday season.
Read the article
Amazon’s making the duopoly a triopoly
New projections say that not only is Amazon gaining ground on Google and Facebook—it’s poised to surpass them.
Read the article
How to Build Your Brand with Instagram Stories
Although Instagram Stories is the fastest-growing Facebook product, and more and more consumers are shifting to the stories format, most businesses are still lagging behind.
If you haven’t adopted the Stories ad format on Instagram yet, now’s a perfect time. This ad format is an easy, great way to stay ahead of the competition. In this post, we offer tips for using Instagram Stories to build your brand. For the basics, check out A Brief Guide to Advertising with Instagram Stories.
How People Interact with Stories
Before building ad campaigns and adapting your existing assets to Stories, it’s important to understand how people engage with this format.
According to Facebook, video represents over 40% of Instagram Stories, with over 60% of these being sound-on.[1] And, about one-third of the most viewed Stories are from businesses, meaning that people on Instagram are open to engaging with you!
Getting Started
If you’re new to Instagram Stories, start with the basics: tell your brand story with awareness objectives, such as reach, reach and frequency, brand awareness, and video views. Keep a few pointers in mind to maximize success:
- Creative storytelling: Instagram formats allow you to be creative and craft assets that capture people’s imagination.
- Well-branded and authentic content: This will build trust (brand loyalty) and encourage feedback.
- Key moments: Incorporate opportunities for your audiences to respond. Use these moments to drive awareness and action.
Finally, be sure to consider your measurement tool. Make sure to properly implement tracking so that you gather relevant data, but also gain an understanding on how people interact with your brand. This will allow you to focus more specifically on achieving your target objectives and KPIs.
The Creative Sky’s the Limit
Be bold, understand the format, and create alluring ad campaigns with Instagram Stories. If you’d like to learn how Marin can help, contact us today.
[1] Instagram internal data, 2016-2017.
What We're Reading This Week: Top 5 Industry Articles
The Marin Marketing team stays busy not only striving to deliver compelling, educational, and relevant content—we also spend time following the most interesting industry news. In this weekly series, we list the stories that are grabbing our team’s attention.
Instagram expands shopping features
To make it easier for people to buy products they see on Instagram, the social platform unleashed two new features.
Read the article
What advertisers are spending on social video
eMarketer provides a new forecast for social video advertising, and examines what’s driving the projected growth.
Read the article
Amazon hits third best in the US
Although it still trails behind its Google and Facebook rivals, Amazon’s a contender, making up 4.1% of all US digital ad spend.
Read the article
Google plans to loosen control over AMP
Decisions about Google’s Accelerated Mobile Pages will now be made by committee, its ongoing attempt to enhance the mobile web.
Read the article
90% of consumers report being brand-loyal
Surprise! People are connected to brands. And, by a large margin, most people interact with their favorites via Facebook.
Read the article
Brands Go Wild for Amazon Advertising
It’s pretty clear that Amazon is on a monumental roll. The company’s growth is staggering, showing a 39% year over year increase in net sales, a 12x jump in earnings per share (EPS), and over 100 million Prime subscribers globally in Q2 2018. There simply isn’t another eCommerce company with the same market presence and influence over the customer journey.
A Hub for Lower Funnel Customer Demand
The reality is that many people start their purchase journey on Amazon, and brands can’t afford to ignore Amazon’s melting pot of customer demand. The Amazon platform captures a rich store of late stage buyer intent and conversion data, offering it to advertisers with a high degree of transparency into customer buying signals.
With a haul of $2.2 billion in advertising revenue in Q2 2018, Amazon is beginning to offer stiff competition to the incumbent digital advertising giants, Facebook and Google. According to Marin’s recent State of Digital Advertising 2018 report, 33% of digital advertisers see the rise of Amazon as the industry trend that will most impact their business.
It’s clear that many digital advertisers now view Amazon as a growth opportunity for their business, operating much further down the funnel than Google or Facebook. Amazon also offers a huge advantage for first movers, when you consider how competitive it’s become to reach your audience on Google and Facebook.
During a recent Marin webinar titled Ramp Up Your Amazon Ad Game: 5 Tips for Success, 62% of poll respondents were not yet advertising on Amazon. What a tremendous opportunity for advertisers to get ahead of the competition and build a brand presence on Amazon.
The Amazon Advertising Ecosystem
How can advertisers capitalize on the global reach and strong buyer intent signals on Amazon’s platform? Amazon’s ad inventory is evolving rapidly—in the past, customer reviews and price were the primary means used to help customers decide what to buy.
Lately, Amazon has been giving more prominent placement to sponsored product ads in search results, forcing brands to buy ads to win top billing. Users often see only subtle distinctions between “sponsored” content and organic results, which is less distracting than you might think when both targeting and relevance levers are working correctly.
Let’s take a closer look at the type of ads that you can run on Amazon’s platform:
Sponsored Brands (previously Headline Search Ads)
These are very prominent paid ad placements where advertisers can map campaigns to specific products (ASINs). Many advertisers are looking to defend their turf on Amazon, much as they do with paid search—companies will try to muscle in on your target audience by advertising competitive brands on your product pages.
Headline search ads are a good way to generate brand visibility and protect your brand from competitive conquest by filling available inventory with your brand. ASINs also provide a great opportunity for retailers to sell complementary products that drive incremental sales.
Sponsored Product Ads
This ad unit looks very similar to Amazon’s organic results, but sports a subtle “sponsored” flag. Sponsored product ads are keyword targeted and trigger when someone uses the Amazon search bar. Advertisers can use different match types to get the right kind of traffic, alongside negative keywords to exclude unwanted clicks. It’s a good practice to separate out brand and non-brand terms to avoid muddying performance metrics for your sponsored ad campaigns.
Product Display Ads
These ads are similar to sponsored product ads, but offer a greater variety of ad sizes and formats to showcase your wares to Amazon users. A key point is that advertisers don’t need to be an Amazon vendor to run display ads, since these ads can link out to the advertiser’s site.
Measurement on Amazon
Some advertisers question whether Amazon offers tools that allow you to measure attribution and campaign ROI correctly. While Facebook and Google have a big lead in this area, we see Amazon moving fast to close this gap.
Recently the company announced that it was introducing a pixel-based attribution solution that will track conversions across Amazon’s properties. In addition, Amazon provides advertisers with all the standard metrics on impressions, clicks, and conversions across all product SKUs.
Brands Are Already Winning with Amazon
You don’t need to look far to find examples of large brands winning on Amazon. Bryant Garvin shares an excellent example of how Purple drove growth in market share despite a tough competitive environment. How? By playing in areas where Purple’s competitors weren’t comfortable and finding “green field” advertising opportunities on Amazon.
Instead of simply doubling-down on search and chasing increasingly expensive non-brand terms, Purple’s marketing team decided to focus on video ads and experimenting with new platforms like Amazon.
Check out our webinar, Ramp Up Your Amazon Ad Game: 5 Tips for Success, to learn more about Purple’s successful ad strategy. It’s a great example of how to gain leverage and market share by thinking differently about your customer acquisition strategy than all your competitors.
Running Amazon Ad Campaigns on Marin
Marin has deep domain expertise in running paid search advertising for global brands, including those looking at Amazon as a new eCommerce channel. If you have questions about getting started with Amazon ads, feel free to get in touch. We have a broad library of customer use cases and industry examples to share with you.
What We're Reading This Week: Top 5 Industry Articles
The Marin Marketing team stays busy not only striving to deliver compelling, educational, and relevant content—we also spend time following the most interesting industry news. In this weekly series, we list the stories that are grabbing our team’s attention.
What 100 days after GDPR looks like
Over three months after rollout of the new GDPR regulations, how are digital advertisers faring? As might be expected, all’s well for the major publishers.
Read the article
Podcasters turn to measurement and attribution
When companies gathered at the fourth annual IAB Podcast Upfront, content wasn’t necessarily king. Instead, discussions centered on how to attract brand advertising dollars.
Read the article
With low CPMs, Facebook Stories draw advertisers
As people eliminate or reduce their Facebook usage, advertisers continue to experiment with the latest Facebook ad formats, with Facebook Stories poised to attract ad dollars.
Read the article
Mobile commerce to overtake eCommerce by 2019
According to 451 Research, mobile commerce is about to have its moment, as online retail growth continues to outpace in-store sales.
Read the article
Vertical video ads are coming to YouTube
To enable brands to “provide a more seamless mobile experience,” YouTube unveiled its vertical video offering at this year’s DMEXCO.
Read the article
How to Make Split Testing Integral to Your Digital Advertising Strategy
You’ve heard about the value of testing. You may even incorporate testing every now and then into your digital advertising campaigns. But, is it a routine part of your “doing business” as a digital marketer?
If you’re just now hopping onto the testing bandwagon or want to make it a regular thing but don’t know where to start—we get it. There are so many features, products, and opportunities out there, that sometimes it might be a struggle understanding how to test and the impact it can have on your ad account performance.
In this article, we hope to shed some light on the darkness of ad campaign A/B (“split”) testing, and provide a simple and effective split testing framework.
When to Test
To have the most impact, you should incorporate testing at each stage of your ad campaign. Be sure to always perform testing at the project level. Although it may feel like all of these A/B tests can gobble up time and budget, this isn’t necessarily the case—when it comes to split testing, some platforms make the process easy, and allow you to quickly see the results without eating up all of your campaign budget.
To make things even easier for you and your team, plan to complete your testing campaign in three phases:
- Targeting and delivery
- Creative
- Messaging
Let’s take at these phases, and the most common A/B test scenarios for each one.
Targeting and Delivery
Objective test (traffic versus conversions)
With targeting and delivery, a common use case is measuring traffic versus conversions. This is a good test to conduct if:
- Your main objective is striking a balance between volume and cost
- You sometimes struggle with increasing your conversion volume
- You optimize for link clicks and aren’t confident about switching to conversions, since it may negatively impact your KPIs
Test setup
To set up this type of test, create two campaigns: one with a ‘traffic’ objective and the other with a ‘conversion’ objective. Make sure you have identical creative, number of ads, and targeting.
Conduct the split test, making sure you’re allocating enough budget for each ad to deliver at least one conversion per day. Run the campaign for a set period of time (e.g., one to two weeks) or until you can clearly see which campaign performs best.
Optimization window
What if your campaigns are generating conversions, but you want to make sure you’re optimizing toward the best-quality ones? You can test the optimization window, typically one day versus seven days.
The conversion window allows you to tell Facebook’s algorithms what data to consider when deciding whom to show your ad.
Test setup
Create two campaigns or one campaign with two ad sets. Make sure that all segments that are part of the optimization window are identical, and, like the traffic versus conversions test, that you’re allocating enough budget for each ad to deliver at least one conversion per day. Run the campaign for a set period of time (e.g., one to two weeks) or until you can clearly see which campaign performs best.
Ad formats (static versus video)
Does this sound familiar? You’ve always used static images for your conversion campaigns, reserving video for brand awareness. But, you recently noticed that static images limit your scale, so you’re looking to identify a new best practice. Video it is!
With ad formats, you can A/B test single formats or a combination.
Test setup
- Single format: Create one campaign, including different formats in different ad sets, making all other segments identical. Run the split test at the ad set level.
- A combination of formats: Create one campaign that includes a combination of formats to different ad sets, for example:
Ad SetLink Type1Static link ad2Video link ad3Static link ad and video link ad
Targeted audience (interest versus lookalike)
Although you should always target combinations of audiences, you can A/B test to identify some best practices. For example, if you’re looking to identify another set of audiences that’ll bring value to your campaigns, or reduce audience overlap without including a long list of exclusions, testing can help.
Test setup
Depending on your reporting preferences, you can set up your test at the campaign or ad set level. Create one campaign with several ad sets targeting:
Ad SetAudience1Interests21% lookalike of your most valuable users3Campaign (pixel) lookalike41% website custom lookalike audience
Make sure your audience size is sufficient to deliver. All other segments must be identical.
Creative
For many advertisers, creative can be challenging, especially if you don’t have an in-house creative team. Still, there are a few things you can test to improve results, without the need for a ton of resources.
- Video length: A/B test different video lengths, for example, five seconds versus 10 seconds or longer, to determine which one drives better results.
- Opening frame: Test different opening video frames. Your ad needs to capture attention as fast as possible, so identify which opening frame does the job.
- Aspect ratio: Test different ratios, for example, landscape versus vertical video.
Messaging
Different messages can drive different results, and determining the messaging that has the most appeal to your audience can be a quick win. Try testing:
- Subject matter: Test different stories to communicate your value proposition.
- Character limit: Try testing copy length, i.e., shorter ad text versus longer.
- Emoji: Depending on the product you’re advertising, it might be interesting to include an emoji in your test ad copy, and see how it performs against an ad that doesn’t use it.
Wash, Rinse, Repeat
By making testing a basic part of your digital campaign life cycle, you’ll be able to continuously identify best practices, adapt to publisher changes, and scale your account. If you’d like to learn how to implement an A/B test strategy into your accounts, speak to your Marin team. If you’re new to Marin, contact us to learn more.
What We're Reading This Week: Top 5 Industry Articles
The Marin Marketing team stays busy not only striving to deliver compelling, educational, and relevant content—we also spend time following the most interesting industry news. In this weekly series, we list the stories that are grabbing our team’s attention.
Consumers double their retailer apps
Shoppers are on the move, smartphone in hand. To keep pace, brick-and-mortar retailers with eCommerce sites must step up their mobile app game.
Read the article
Amazon is testing an attribution pixel
“My ads are better than yours,” said the online publisher to its competitors. Now, in an effort to drive more sales than its rivals, Amazon is testing a new attribution tool. (Not only that—it’s firmly focused on the $88 billion online ad market.)
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The state of advertising on Instagram Stories
With the Stories format growing ever more popular, advertisers are moving more of their spend to Instagram.
Read the article
Some marketers are cutting back on third-party data
With all the news around data privacy and “bad actors” in the social media world, some advertisers are changing their third-party tune.
Read the article
What’s next for net neutrality?
Lastly, while California is set to pass its Consumer Privacy Act and Congressional eyes are on the major online players, the public wants to maintain net neutrality.
Read the article
Running an A/B Test with Google Drafts and Experiments
When it comes to PPC campaign management and optimization, A/B testing is key.
In my past life working for agencies and directly with brands, we tested new creatives every two weeks. By constantly running these tests, we were able to better understand which exact wording drove people to click ads (given all the competition on the SERP) and identify the best combination of ad elements when it comes to CTR and CVR.
To put our plan into action, we went through these phases of every A/B test:
- Preparation
- Execution
- Analysis
- Preparation for the next test (based on learnings)
Preparation
Measuring Success
It’s crucial to outline measurement KPIs to understand what a successful test looks like. For example, is the end goal to drive incremental conversions and/or revenue, a specific ROI that the test objects have to hit, or traffic growth (impression share, clicks, etc.)?
Having a clear picture of success will make analysis a lot easier, and help you quickly identify your test winner.
Test Elements
When you create a new test, review what you used in the past. What worked and what didn’t (for creatives)? How does performance look right now (for bidding)?
Always test one element at a time. Including several unique elements into your test may compromise the results. The goal is to identify the exact element that drives your performance to the next level.
Execution
Once you’ve solidified your methodology and elements, it’s time to set up the test.
While you have various implementation options at your disposal, one way to run a PPC test is with Google’s drafts and experiments. According to Google, using drafts and experiments “lets you propose and test changes to your Search and Display Network campaigns.”
Drafts and experiments campaigns mirror selected campaigns and create a complete duplicate (draft), where you can change test variables.
Once you’re happy with the changes and testing object within the campaign, convert the draft into an experiment and make it live.
There are a few thing to keep in mind when you’re launching an experiment campaign for A/B tests.
Gather Historical Data
Since experiment campaigns are created from scratch, you won’t have any historical data (i.e., quality score). So, to make sure you run an accurate test against the existing setup, allow at least two weeks for the experiment campaign to gather historical data.
Use the Right Parameters
Depending on the tracking solution you’re using, review the elements you track and attribute on. Experiment campaigns are created by mirroring existing (i.e., control) campaigns, and objects like keywords and creatives will have duplicate publisher IDs.
Some advertisers use the {creative}Google ValueTrack parameter for the creative ID to attribute conversion data at the creative level. In this case make, sure you ‘recreate’ your ads for the experiment campaign before launch, to generate unique publisher IDs.
Select the Right Budget Split
Google Ads allow advertisers to select a budget split between their control and experiment campaigns. While many advertisers select a 50/50 split, keep in mind that various factors may affect the actual split during your test.
For instance, impressions / clicks / cost data will never 100% match the selected budget split, since the settings allow you to only split spend and not the SERP auction. Also, campaign settings won’t cap your campaign budgets, and in some cases the traffic split may shift toward one of the tested campaigns.
By way of example: one of our clients decided to test two different bidding strategies in their accounts. While we initially selected the campaign’s budget split as 50/50, over time, traffic (impressions, clicks, and cost) shifted to the experiment campaign, since the LTV assigned to conversions in the campaign was much higher. This resulted in higher bid calculations and higher traffic volumes.
Analysis
Well done—you’re now on the finish line of your first test!
If you prepared well, this step will be nice and easy. You already know which metrics you’re aiming to improve, so simply download data for your control and experiment campaigns and review the results based on your KPIs.
The next step: prepare for your next test, analyze the results, and keep improving your accounts. ;) Ready, set, go!
Testing with Marin
Here at Marin, we’ve have built a feature that allows you to seamlessly track and accurately attribute conversions at all levels, without the need to recreate publisher IDs for any of the tested elements. Contact your Marin Customer Success team to learn more. Or, if you’re new to Marin, just get in touch.
What We're Reading This Week: Top 5 Industry Articles
The Marin Marketing team stays busy not only striving to deliver compelling, educational, and relevant content—we also spend time following the most interesting industry news. In this weekly series, we list the stories that are grabbing our team’s attention.
AT&T blasts new California privacy law
Stating that internet communications are “geography-agnostic,” AT&T raises the concern that tailored services will be more challenging across different U.S. regions.
Read the article
Mobile sales to hit $117B in 2018
A Forrester report predicts continued mobile ascendance, with mobile influence expected to impact $1.3 trillion in retail sales.
Read the article
What’s wrong with "50% by 2020" voice search
Econsultancy writer Rebecca Sentance brings nuance to the oft-repeated projection for voice search usage.
Read the article
Brand posts up, organic engagement down on Facebook
As Facebook faces increased competition, boosts content quality, and pushes paid content, organic takes a continued hit.
Read the article
Google introduces new relevance metric, 'ad strength'
The new metric lets marketers know the quality of their ad content, plus the relevance, quality, and diversity of ad copy.
Read the article
The Top 4 Barriers to Unifying Your Search and Social Ad Strategies
Omnichannel marketing causes many brands to look at their programs as a set of disparate disciplines—SEM, SEO, content marketing, social marketing, email marketing, etc. And, each discipline often has its own department, budget, and strategy, even though customers only see a single brand.
Advertisers are increasingly coming to understand that a good way to tackle the challenges inherent in omnichannel marketing is through a unified strategy, one that combines search and social into a single blueprint. Here are what our survey of digital advertisers identified as the top obstacles to overcome in reaching the goal of an integrated program.
1. Search and social silos
Separate departments for search and social mean separate staff, managers, budgets, and strategies—resulting in teams that rarely communicate, even when they might be sitting right next to each other in the office. This lack of collaboration can result in mismatched or conflicting campaign messaging, and lead to internal battles for shared resources, such as IT, engineering, budget, or creative.
2. Attribution ‘turf wars’
When search, social, and other marketing channels operate in silos, it creates organizational knowledge gaps and makes it more difficult to agree on how to attribute credit to each touchpoint on the conversion path. Social tends to benefit from a first-click attribution model because it’s typically used to create awareness at the top of the funnel.
A last-click model, on the other hand, will provide search with most of the credit for a conversion. Changing to an attribution model that applies equal or partial credit to each channel could threaten each department’s budget or organizational standing.
3. Lack of a shared budget
As the saying goes, ‘follow the money.’ Successful paid search and paid social marketers operating in different departments and with separate budgets are understandably protective of their dollars.
Search may enjoy the largest share of the digital marketing budget. However, social is increasingly carving out a larger share. As long as search and social strategies and campaigns are isolated from each other, the competition for budget dollars will continue.
4. Incompatible metrics and goals
Search and social marketers each speak their own language around key performance metrics (KPIs) and campaign goals. A social brand awareness campaign may use Facebook to increase the number of followers or the length of time followers spend on the brand’s Facebook page.
Conversely, an AdWords campaign may seek more conversions by increasing click-throughs to the website or improving the cost per click (CPC) of specific keywords. It’s difficult to measure a unified search and social campaign’s ROI when metrics don’t line up.
Learn more
To learn the emerging best practices that brands are using to solve these challenges, download Unifying Your Search & Social Ad Strategies. Or, if you’d like to learn how Marin can help, request a demo today.
Everything You Need to Know About Lift Studies
For a long time, lift studies were considered a Facebook feature only available to large advertisers with high ad campaign budgets. Just recently, Facebook released a ‘test and learn’ feature that enables all advertisers—large and small alike—to help answer the big question: How do I know if my ads are driving incremental sales or conversions?
The self-serve solution allows you to run as many studies as you need to determine Facebook’s value to your campaigns. Now, Facebook advertisers have another way to not only understand, but also act on their lift study results and continuously test for optimal performance.
Here’s a rundown of how the test works, and best practices for achieving the most statistically significant results.
Lift Study Methodology and How It Works
Unless your Facebook account manager sets up a specific test and learn study, the study runs on the whole ad account. Facebook splits the study into two random groups: One will be served Facebook ads, and the other one won’t. The size of these groups is determined by various factors such as ad account reach, ad study schedule, and budget.
Using a random number generator and linking it to each Facebook user ID allows Facebook to create random groups, and ensures that people are staying in the dedicated group regardless of which platform and device they’re using.
When you run the test and learn study, you can select from a couple of options:
- Incremental sales or conversions caused by ads run on Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, and Audience Network
- Which campaigns caused the lowest cost conversions
Once you select the objective and optimization event, the data gets passed to Facebook via the Facebook pixel. Facebook then compares the conversions in the test and control group to measure the lift.
Once Facebook analyzes the results and measures lift, you’ll see the outcomes on your Ads Manager.
Best Practices for Running Test and Learn Studies
To get the most out of your lift studies, be sure to implement these creative and optimization tactics.
On the Creative Side
- Have a clear message and main point: Make sure people don’t have to guess what you’re offering or the action they should take.
- Static images and video work better together: According to Facebook, including static images and video assets within the same campaign leads to better performance for direct response objectives, and results in more conversions than video or static images alone.
- Optimize video ads for mobile: With major publishers like Google, Facebook, and Amazon all offering and/or enhancing their mobile advertising options, mobile ad optimization has become a prerequisite to effective ad campaigns.
On the Campaign Optimization Side
- Match your optimization goal as closely as possible to your business goal.
- Limit manual optimization—most importantly, avoid making drastic changes to your ad campaigns.
- Optimize on all placements across the Facebook family of apps to maximize ad inventory and keep CPMs down.
Even if you’re confident about incremental conversions that Facebook is driving for your ads, the test and learn solution is now widely available. Jump in and try it out! Feel free to run it in the background to give you additional visibility on how your campaigns are performing.
If you’re a Marin customer, be sure to consult with your account manager to get personalized recommendations. If you’re new to Marin, get in touch to learn more.
3 Steps to Driving More Store Visits Through Digital Advertising
This is a guest post from Brendan Davitt, Account Manager at
3Q Digital.
Although there are plenty of studies to prove online shoppers cross over into the brick-and-mortar experience more than you might think, there’s no denying that online advertising’s boom has eaten into physical store visits. Fortunately, there are a few quick ways to support the four-walled business through online efforts.
1. Set Up Store Visit Tracking
Want to prove that your Google ads are driving store visits? You’re in luck—sort of. Store Visit Tracking is a proxy metric for that.
Meeting the requirements to set up this conversion type requires a few different steps that Google outlines. First, in order to be eligible, your company needs to have multiple physical store locations that Google will need to verify. You can add verified locations through Google My Business.
Once this is completed, in order attribute a visit to a campaign, Google must have sufficient store data on the backend to attribute the data back to the campaign. If you meet the qualifications above and do not have Store Visit tracking set up, reach out to your Google representative to get started!
One piece of information that’s often overlooked is how the process actually works. Store Visit data can’t be linked back to individual clicks but rather is an anonymous aggregated metric. Current and historic data is utilized from Location Services via cellphone to create a modelled total amount. Because of this, there is often a latency period for Store Visit data.
2. Drive Visits
Once tracking is set up, it’s time to start testing. In my experience, highlighting specific events through YouTube has been super-successful at driving users into stores. Specifically, we’ve seen success with TrueView for Action, which allows for a stronger call to action that could be used to both drive customers in-store and to your website.
For example, with back-to-school shopping in full swing, there are plenty of targeting methods you can use to drive low cost per visit (CPV). If the goal is to drive a ton of store visits, I would leverage previous visitor lists given customer familiarity—someone who knows your brand within a target location is more likely to visit than someone in an acquisition audience.
Lists that highlight a customer’s lifetime value are also key. Customers who’ve purchased multiple times (in our experience, 10 or more) are more likely to visit the store. In order to keep overall efficiency down, we’ve found it’s a best practice to segment campaigns by remarketing and acquisition to best control campaign performance. In-market and topic / interest targeting are great ways to drive high volume through ACQ, but they often lead to higher overall costs.
3. Fine-Tune Your Optimization
For high-leverage optimization tips, consider location targeting and appropriate messaging. One trick is to include radius targeting around your stores or even bump it out to designated market area to gather specific geographical insights. Cross-referencing in-store revenue and transaction volume with how your geographic bid mods perform will ultimately lead to a more efficient program.
To narrow it down further, start with locations with higher in-store revenue, as they often boast store visits. Lastly, and to state the obvious, the right messaging is key to driving store visits. Calling out the value of visiting a store will help influence customers. This can easily be accomplished by calling out an in-store deal or giving people an option to “buy online or in-store.”
Put these in play now and make sure to test everything—audience lists, messaging, etc. Given a few weeks of data, you’ll be equipped to capitalize on the Q4 traffic surge to get your customers right where you want them.
What We're Reading This Week: Top 5 Industry Articles
The Marin Marketing team stays busy not only striving to deliver compelling, educational, and relevant content—we also spend time following the most interesting industry news. In this weekly series, we list the stories that are grabbing our team’s attention.
Instagram Stories pioneers turn to Facebook Stories
Price spikes are driving some advertisers away from Instagram Stories and towards Facebook Stories, the cheaper option.
Read the article
Repeat buyers favor marketplaces over retailers
Online marketplaces like Amazon and Alibaba’s Tmall are giving global retailers and brands a run for their money.
Read the article
LinkedIn is relaunching Groups in its flagship app
Looking to undo its ‘ghost town’ image and get more people onto its platform, LinkedIn is rolling Groups back into its main app by the end of August.
Read the article
Neutrogena, Sonos beta test use of Amazon video ads
Several prominent brands are piloting Amazon’s video ad placements in product search results, another sign of its expanding advertising business.
Read the article
Forrester: Video ad spending will hit $103B by 2023
Lastly, Forrester's new Video Advertising Forecast predicts over 200 million online video viewers in 2018, and 258 TV audience members, among other insights.
Read the article
The California Consumer Privacy Act and What It Means for Digital Marketers
“Privacy” is a trending term in headlines and a pressing concern for the online public. With prominent news items like Cambridge Analytica’s data mining activities and third-party developers reading Google emails, people are increasingly concerned about the use and misuse of their personal information.
To address mounting fears, California passed the Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), following on the heels of the EU’s new GDPR guidelines. According to TrustArc, “the CCPA is set to be the toughest privacy law in the United States by broadly expanding the rights of consumers and requiring businesses within scope to be significantly more transparent about how they collect, use, and disclose personal information.”
How will the CCPA affect companies doing business with California residents?
The Background
The California Consumer Privacy Act of 2018 passed through the California legislature on June 28, 2018 without opposition. Set to take effect on January 1, 2020, the current version will definitely be revised before this date, with prominent tech companies like Facebook looking to weigh in and provide feedback.
How did we get here? Back in 1972, the California Constitution was amended to state that its constituents have a right to privacy. That amendment afforded every Californian a legal and enforceable right to privacy.
Almost a half a century later—in a world of over 200 billion emails, three billion online searches, and two hours per person spent on social media a day—people’s privacy needs have increased exponentially.
To address this reality, the CCPA grants consumers the right to request that a business disclose the categories and specific pieces of personal information it collects, how they collect it, and what third parties they share it with. As the bill itself states:
“Therefore, it is the intent of the Legislature to further Californians’ right to privacy by giving consumers an effective way to control their personal information, by ensuring the following rights:
(1) The right of Californians to know what personal information is being collected about them.
(2) The right of Californians to know whether their personal information is sold or disclosed and to whom.
(3) The right of Californians to say no to the sale of personal information.
(4) The right of Californians to access their personal information.
(5) The right of Californians to equal service and price, even if they exercise their privacy rights.”
That’s quite a legal mouthful, but what does it all mean specifically for digital advertisers?
The Impact
Because of the GDPR, digital advertisers have already refined their processes to ensure compliance and consumer data safety. This includes mechanisms for fielding people’s requests for data access, deletion, and retrieval.
With the CCPA (notwithstanding AdExchanger calling it “GDPR-light”), there are a few additional things companies must do to make sure they’re protecting people’s data. Arguably the most significant part of the law for digital advertisers is a consumer’s ability to request deletion of their data and opt out of its sale—but the CCPA includes a definition of “personal information” that covers browsing and search history.
As far as scope goes, any company that does business with California residents—even if that company isn’t based in the state—must comply with the law. At the very least, this means many companies doing business in California will have to update their privacy policies and work practices to align with the new law when it comes into effect.
It’s important to note that companies have both a fix and an opportunity in front of them:
- They can apply the “Spotify exemption,” which lets them offer services based on the information consumers provide them.
- They can work with California lawmakers to influence the final legislation.
The law’s specifics are indeed likely to change by the time it’s rolled out on January 1, 2020. Despite an initial tech backlash, companies like Facebook are already weighing in on the changes. As Will Castleberry, Facebook's VP of state and local public policy, stated, Facebook is “working with policymakers on an approach that protects consumers and promotes responsible innovation.”
As other states frequently look to California’s outsized influence and precedents, there’s a good chance the CCPA could become the national gold standard through state-level legislation. (With the current federal administration going in the opposite direction and loosening data privacy rules, we don’t see it adopting anything like the CCPA or GDPR in the foreseeable future.)
The Upshot
Should digital advertisers be worried? We don’t think so, for a few reasons:
- The GDPR is here and the industry is successfully adapting. There may be legal hiccups but we don’t expect them to have a lasting impact on a robust and thriving market.
- From making data policies more transparent to changing third-party data access, the industry has proven itself to be highly adaptive and innovative, quickly implementing changes that new laws dictate.
- Both the GDPR and CCPA can be seen as positive steps for protecting consumer privacy, while still allowing brands to connect with their customers and prospects with relevant messages.
As for our team at Marin Software, as we’ve mentioned before, our core working processes don’t rely on or store any personally identifiable information for the activity on our platform. So, our customers can already depend on solutions that deliver superior campaign performance while ensuring true data integrity and privacy.
Our team understands the importance of the CCPA and can analyze your particular cross-domain, sub-domain, or retargeting requirements. Our advice: continue to focus on creating meaningful, engaging, and relevant experiences for your customers and prospects. Contact us today if you’d like to discuss further.
Additional reading:
- Full text of the bill on the CA Legislative Information site
- When it comes to privacy, California is out front. Will the rest of the country follow?
- California passes bill to move toward consumer privacy protection in a GDPR world
- Tech mobilizes against California privacy law
- Google doesn’t dispute claims that third-party developers may read your Gmail messages
- Despite marketers’ optimism about new privacy laws, massive data breaches continue to rock consumers’ trust
- California Passes Sweeping Consumer Privacy Act
- Should Ad Tech Panic Over The California Privacy Protection Act Now Or Later?
How to Use Product Feeds to Boost Your Digital Advertising Campaigns
eCommerce product feeds are jam-packed with information advertisers can use to refine and enhance their campaigns. And not only that—advertisers can add information from a huge range of sources to build data-rich feeds. Despite this, many advertisers continue to underutilize the information in their eCommerce feeds.
In this article, we take a look at ways advertisers can use product feed data to optimize ad spend.
Inventory Levels
Inventory level is a required field for nearly all publishers and a standard metric in most product feeds. Once inventory levels hit zero, most publishers stop showing ads for those products. It makes perfect sense to stop paying to advertise products that are currently out of stock.
However, there are many more ways to use this data. An advertiser may want stop bidding on a product if they have less than five in stock or to increase bids when stock is readily available. For example, with Marin, advertisers can dynamically integrate inventory data into the platform and then leverage this data to automate optimization for keywords or product groups with high or low inventory.
Product Titles
Product titles are one of the most important factors that can influence the performance of your shopping ad campaigns—and a vital part of your feed. A shopper will scan through pages of results in search of the right item, and the title is one of the first things they see when they come across your ad.
It’s at this critical point that a person determines whether they’ll click through to find out more. These few words are your opportunity to stop them in their tracks and convince them not to go any further. You don’t want wasted clicks, after all! To get the shopper as qualified as possible before they click your ad, it’s important to highlight the most important information right away. Your product title provides this opportunity. This also prevents shoppers from being disappointed or frustrated when they click through.
Make sure your titles are unique enough. If they’re not, it could affect your visibility. Customize them with important, distinguishing attributes such as size, color, gender, etc., to more accurately describe and differentiate each product.
How do you know the best optimizations to make to your product titles? The answer is to run statically significant tests. Using feed optimization techniques, you can optimize your product titles using different logic (such as including different types of information or changing the order it appears in) and then run a test to see which one performs best.
Price Competitiveness
Price competitiveness is an important ranking factor for the Google Shopping algorithm and for many other publishers. This is because Shopping ads display the price and therefore impact click-through rate.
Price competitiveness also has a significant impact on the conversion rate. Competitor price tracking in Google Shopping results ensures that retail advertisers can track their competitors’ strategic price moves across their entire SKU portfolio. Once this data has been added to a product feed, you can use it to adjust strategies based on the price competitiveness of each product.
Performance Data
Adding performance data to your feed allows you to group products together based on their marketing performance. This data also allows you to optimize campaign structure. You can automatically separate individual products into their own product groups when they hit specific volume thresholds and products can be automatically split to segregate top performing SKUs.
Feed-Based Ad Formats Are on the Rise
The tips above are just four ways advertisers can use the information in their product feeds to optimize ad spend. The good news—since you can add custom data to a product feed, you have a huge range of other tactics at your disposal.
The market share of feed-based advertising formats for eCommerce advertisers is increasing on both Google and Bing. Combined with the fact that many advertisers are exploring newer publishers such as Amazon, it’s increasingly important to explore new ways to optimize shopping spend and increase efficiency.
What We're Reading This Week: Top 5 Industry Articles
The Marin Marketing team stays busy not only striving to deliver compelling, educational, and relevant content—we also spend time following the most interesting industry news. In this weekly series, we list the stories that are grabbing our team’s attention.
Facebook influencer organic reach drops 23%
Marketing Dive attributes a drop in organic reach for influencer content to Facebook’s algorithm tweaks in early 2018. With Facebook’s new tools for influencers, this dip may not be a lasting one.
Read the article
Facebook has changed—so should your digital strategy
Facebook is in constant flux, quickly making updates based on lessons learned and optimizing as fast as breaking news. Digital advertisers have to adapt to keep up with the rapid pace of change.
Read the article
Amazon is testing video ads in mobile search results
On the Amazon front, advertisers spoke and the company listened. Now, it’s trying out video ads in mobile search results, in a limited beta test.
Read the article
The evolution of Amazon as an ad platform
Amazon’s expanding ad formats are just the tip of the iceberg. The Drum takes a look at just how far Amazon has come in such a short amount of time.
Read the article
Should ad tech panic over the California Consumer Privacy Act?
Finally, with changes under the California Consumer Privacy Act set to take effect on the first day of 2020, data privacy will land in the tech capital of the world. What’s an advertiser to do?
Read the article
Ramp Up Your Amazon Ad Game: 5 Tips for Success
Amazon has emerged as the primary purchase channel of the US consumer. Nearly two-thirds of US households have Amazon Prime, and a whopping 92% of people who begin their purchase journey on Amazon buy on Amazon.
But do you know how to leverage Amazon’s growing ad opportunities? What are the best practices for running Headline Search Ads or Product Display Ads? Do you know the difference between advertising on the Amazon Ad Platform versus Amazon Marketing Services?
Join our digital advertising experts as we explore the many ad choices available on Amazon and its online properties, including IMDb and Twitch. We’ll suggest use cases, keyword tips, and targeting strategies to maximize your advertising results, including:
- Why Amazon matters to advertisers
- Exploring Amazon’s marketing solutions
- Setting up Amazon ad campaigns
- Advanced Amazon advertising strategies
- Best practices for Amazon ads
Sign up for our webinar on Thursday, August 23rd at 10am PT / 1pm ET to learn more about this next big advertising opportunity.
Speaker Bios
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 SVP of Marketing at Marin Software, and has been with the company since 2008.
Bryant Garvin has managed and led teams that have spent over $150 million in advertising over the last six years, driving hundreds of millions of dollars in sales. He’s worked with brands ranging from startups to the Fortune 500, and has worked in in-house marketing positions to develop a keen understanding of the complexity that in-house managers face every day.
What We're Reading This Week: Top 5 Industry Articles
The Marin Marketing team stays busy not only striving to deliver compelling, educational, and relevant content—we also spend time following the most interesting industry news. In this weekly series, we list the stories that are grabbing our team’s attention.
Facebook’s new and revised video metrics
Facebook is changing the way it measures news feed videos. This is good news for advertisers wanting more insights into how their video ads are performing.
Read the article
Facebook brings playable ads to the news feed
Wait, there’s more: Facebook also announced that developers can now use playable ads in the news feed to advertise games. Gamers can experiment before downloading a game from an app store.
Read the article
Amazon to merge its ad businesses into one platform
Amazon is quickly and frequently streamlining and building up its ad business. Amazon advertisers will be able to buy campaigns from the same place, whether selling directly to the site or to shoppers.
Read the article
WhatsApp moves to monetize
WhatsApp is stepping up to a new challenge: make money. This podcast dives into the strategies and tactics WhatsApp plans to launch to drive revenue.
Read the article
Google to remove blanket exclusion from mobile app ads
Lastly, Google plans to remove a feature that lets advertisers put a blanket exclusion of mobile devices on ad campaigns. How will it affect the in-app advertising market?
Read the article
Yandex Captures a Large and Fast-Growing Search Market
Marin was pleased to recently join Yandex at their Expert Summit in Berlin and their Partner Summit in London.
Here are a few highlights from the events and what we learned about the Yandex search engine.
Russia online
When it comes to digital marketing, Russia is a relatively young but fast-growing market. The current internet penetration rate is 76.1%, which gives advertisers a great opportunity to build user trust and loyalty as they begin their online journey.
Yandex SERP
Yandex, a search engine founded in Russia, currently holds 51.58% of market share, followed by Google at 44.91%.
Yandex’s algorithm highly favors ads with relevant keyword content and ad extensions. Moreover, recent changes Yandex applied to their algorithm allow advertisers to spend extra only on additional clicks advertisers gain from higher positions. For example, if the second placement provides 85 clicks and the first placement provides 100, then only a 15-click difference will weight at higher cost when calculating an average suggested bid for the keyword.
Source: Yandex.direct
Yandex will soon introduce new ad templates, which will be automatically updated for every SERP based on the user and relevancy of ad extensions that advertisers add.
In other words, make sure you prepare for the big change and select all available ad extensions, since when the time comes, the ad placements on SERP will change and depend significantly on added features.
Source: Yandex.direct
Analytics with Yandex
Yandex is continuously enhancing Yandex.Metrica—their analytics platform—where brands can build retargeting audiences and learn more about their consumer, including behavior patterns.
Heatmaps of the most visited web pages allow advertisers to gain more granular knowledge about the consumer path on their website, and to make improvements for better performance.
Back in 2017, Yandex launched a Russian intelligent personal assistant—Alice—and together with 53 different apps Yandex offers helps users with any type of request. With such a powerful store of data on user behaviors, Yandex is able to provide a better and more precise picture of the consumer, which leads to significantly enhanced retargeting capabilities, across search and display channels.
What does the future hold?
As consumers are now multi-screening and multitasking across various combinations of devices and platforms, Yandex sees this as a great opportunity to expand customer reach in new ways, like digital ads shown indoors and on billboards. Soon advertisers will be able to retarget their audiences outside on their way to work, when meeting friends, or just wandering around the city.
Learn more
If you have any questions on how to improve your Yandex campaigns, reach out to your Marin Customer Success team. We can jump on a three-way call with Yandex and review the accounts together. Or, if you’re new to Marin, feel free to get in touch.
What We're Reading This Week: Top 5 Industry Articles
The Marin Marketing team stays busy not only striving to deliver compelling, educational, and relevant content—we also spend time following the most interesting industry news. In this weekly series, we list the stories that are grabbing our team’s attention.
Facebook’s Q2 numbers leave advertisers unfazed
With Facebook focusing on ad formats like Stories Ads and expecting growth to flatline through 2018, advertisers are betting on the long game.
Read the article
Relaxing with a game? Enjoy an ad
Almost 40% of gamers consider their passion relaxing, which is good news for advertisers seeking a receptive audience.
Read the article
Amazon has big plans for its booming ad business
Amazon’s on fire, commanding an ever-growing slice of the ad spend pie. With plans to keep expanding its advertising solutions, retailers stand to gain another powerful channel to showcase their products and drive revenue.
Read the article
Amazon advertisers want more video ads
A different take (or perhaps sage advice for Amazon): as Amazon revs up its advertising engine, some advertisers are looking for enhanced video services before they’ll go deep.
Read the article
Google Search: optimization over speed
After analyzing 33,500 keywords and 1 million pages of search results, SEO PowerSuite analysts didn’t find any improved ranking news to write home about.
Read the article
Responsive Ads: A Rundown of Google’s Latest Ad Format
This is a guest post from Charlotte Haab, Account Manager at
3Q Digital.
It’s no secret that Google AdWords has been undergoing some big changes lately—most of them pushing users toward automation. Over the past few years, advertisers have noticed many other Google ad types that encourage automation, especially ones on YouTube and the GDN.
Google’s most recent addition aims to accomplish the same thing, but on the search network. Announced at this year’s Google Marketing Live, responsive ads are here for search, and they show promise as the best thing since Expanded Text Ads launched back in 2016. So what are they? How do they work?
Optimizing Your Search Ads
Responsive ads allow you to serve more targeted ads by allowing Google to 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, and they’ve extended descriptions to 90 characters!
If the extra real estate isn’t enough to convince you to try them, Google claims advertisers who implement responsive ads in non-branded ad groups on average have seen a 5-15% uptick in clicks.
The Plan for Responsive Ads
It’s definitely scary for some advertisers to surrender control to Google’s algorithms like this, but in the future Google has plans to introduce some new features specifically for responsive ads to increase their customization and flexibility, such as specific asset reporting and “pinning.”
Through asset reporting, users will be able to view which exact headlines or descriptions performed compared to others. From there, users will be able to “pin” their top-performing assets to customize their ads even further. These features haven’t been released yet and there’s no word on when they’ll be available. So keep an eye out in your accounts!
More to Come
This ad type is still pretty new, but most advertisers should now have access to them through the new AdWords UI. Marin also has beta support for responsive search ads, so be sure to check with your account rep for further info.
So far, Marin has seen increased performance among its customers who’ve tried responsive ads. And, with Google’s major pushes towards automation, it wouldn’t be surprising if these ads catch on!
What We're Reading This Week: Top 5 Industry Articles
The Marin Marketing team stays busy not only striving to deliver compelling, educational, and relevant content—we also spend time following the most interesting industry news. In this weekly series, we list the stories that are grabbing our team’s attention.
The success of retailers’ ads on Prime Day in 5 charts
Just about every online retailer got a boost from Amazon’s Prime Day this year, and Amazon itself claims it was the most successful shopping event in its history. Here are the numbers to back up the performance.
Read the article
Britain’s online shopping boom is a bust for the
High Street
With consumers in the UK making online purchases at double the rate as their US counterparts, many storefronts have shuttered. Who’s leading the shift to the digital shopping space?
Read the article
Here's one way to measure ad boycott pressures
Sleeping Giants has sent many brands and advertisers running for the safer hills and blacklisting ads for hateful sites and content. Where do ad agencies stand in the age of brand safety?
Read the article
Whither digital advertising?
With third-party data on the chopping block for major publishers, where should advertisers turn? To their roots, writes Third Door Media’s Barry Levine.
Read the article
Amazon is primed for rapid growth
Lastly, more on Amazon, as the market anticipates today’s earnings report: the company now commands half of all online retail sales in the US. Will today’s earnings announcement boost them further into the stratosphere?
Read the article
4 Hurdles to Overcome in Implementing an Attribution Strategy
You’ve finally figured out what attribution model is best for your organization. From here, you’ll most likely have to overcome some additional hurdles. Here are the most common things to consider in executing an attribution strategy.
1. Meet your users where they are
Despite recent entrants like Amazon and Pinterest shaking up the ad tech market, Facebook and Google have gobbled up almost 75% of online traffic. Be sure your model works across channels and devices and takes an independent view of attribution credit.
2. Break down team silos
Marketing teams continue to operate independently, missing out on the insights that a combined search and social strategy provides. Avoid the pitfall of channel blindness, and instead, harmonize your teams’ budgets and objectives across channels.
3. Know that Facebook and Google are full-funnel
It’s no longer the case that Facebook owns top of funnel and Google dominates the lower funnel—the reality is they both offer excellent coverage across the entire customer journey.
4. Think horizontally
Align around the customer and think about what you’re trying to accomplish rather than chasing single-channel success. For example, what products are you using to build awareness versus conversion?
Learn more
To learn more—including detailed explanations of the attribution models available on the market today—download our white paper, The Myths and Realities of Cross-Channel Attribution. Or, if you’d like to find out how Marin can help you with advanced cross-channel ad campaign measurement, request a demo today.
The Latest Trends Keeping Digital Advertisers Up at Night
In our State of Digital Advertising report, we surveyed over 500 global B2C advertising professionals across the retail, automotive, travel, and finance sectors. The companies ranged from $40 million to over $1 billion in annual sales with an average annual digital advertising spend of more than $2.4 million.
Our survey results uncovered several key themes preoccupying advertisers this year:
Social takes the lead
Nine out of 10 respondents are investing in paid social media in 2018, beating the next most popular channel (YouTube/Google Display) by over 10 percentage points. Marketers now see the need to position social as a key channel in their online customer acquisition strategy.
Search and social are the fastest growing channels
The vast majority of advertisers expect to increase spend in 2018, led by social (70%) and followed by search (65%).
Bridging search and social is the top challenge for advertisers
With the rise of Facebook, linking together search and social advertising is the most cited challenge for both search and social advertisers.
Closing the knowledge gap remains a challenge
The survey found that many advertisers don’t feel they have the expertise required to deliver successful social campaigns, particularly when it comes to attributing ROI. Nevertheless, investment in paid social remains strong as advertisers recognize the importance of evolving their social capabilities to meet changing consumer expectations and media habits.
Here comes Amazon
The majority (85%) of respondents believe Amazon and its digital advertising options will impact their business in 2018. Conversely, only 1 in 5 advertisers viewed the eCommerce giant and its digital advertising options as a competitor they’re unlikely to advertise on.
Video is increasingly important but creates a new set of challenges
Brands can no longer repurpose existing video content in a world of vertical video. Thirty-four percent of advertisers said that creating quality content is their top challenge with respect to video.
The view the full results of the survey and the main digital opportunities in 2018, download the report.
What We're Reading This Week: Top 5 Industry Articles
The Marin Marketing team stays busy not only striving to deliver compelling, educational, and relevant content—we also spend time following the most interesting industry news. In this weekly series, we list the stories that are grabbing our team’s attention.
Why marketers struggle to define artificial intelligence
A survey of over 300 North American B2B marketers found that less than one-fifth of them clearly understand the differences between AI, machine learning, and predictive modeling, despite these terms having become ubiquitous in industry press.
Read the article
Most US and EU companies will comply with GDPR by year’s end
In order to meet customer expectations and deliver a positive user experience, nearly 75% of US and European companies say they’ll be compliant by the end of 2018.
Read the article
Instagram leads as a global platform for influencer marketing
Although Instagram isn’t the only platform for influencer campaigns, it’s leading the pack as a go-to for global brands. In some regions, YouTube and Instagram are neck and neck.
Read the article
Amazon now has nearly 50% of US eCommerce market
Amazon continues to corner the eCommerce market. And, led by computer and consumer electronics, eMarketer projects that the leading retail site will jump by close to 30% this year.
Read the article
Last-minute digital video ads drive live sports viewership
comScore reports that viewers are more likely to see “last-minute” video ads during live sporting events, making these ads even more powerful for digital marketers.
Read the article
Amazon on the Rise: Our Q2 2018 Digital Advertising Benchmark Report
Our latest research finds that as search spend continues to grow from increased clicks and CPCs, another channel is quickly gaining traction: eCommerce, due to the rise in spend on Amazon. Now capturing over 20 percent of digital ad spend for our clients advertising on that platform, Amazon’s Sponsored Product Ads represent 79 percent of ad spend, with Headline Shopping Ads capturing the remaining 21 percent.
We share these insights and more in our Q2 2018 Digital Advertising Benchmark Report. Our interactive web page 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 areas of digital marketing.
Other highlights for Q2 2018 include:
- Search Driven by Clicks and CPCs. Thirteen percent year-over-year growth in search spend was driven almost equally by increase in click volume and increase in CPCs, with the average global CPC increasing from $0.80 in Q2 2017 to $0.85 in Q2 2018.
- Mobile Accounts for Nearly Half of Search Ads. Mobile share of search ads remained at 40 percent in Q2. Mobile share is highest in eurozone countries at 46.4 percent and lowest in U.S. at 38.4 percent.
- Social CPCs Up, CTRs Down. While social CPCs increased by three percent since last quarter, averaging $0.184, CPMs ($3.07) and CTRs (1.67%) dropped slightly from Q1 2018. This difference may be a result of increased awareness due to highly publicized breaches and privacy regulations, making consumers less likely to engage with ads.
Download the report for other actionable insights for your digital ad campaigns.
What We're Reading This Week: Top 5 Industry Articles
The Marin Marketing team stays busy not only striving to deliver compelling, educational, and relevant content—we also spend time following the most interesting industry news. In this weekly series, we list the stories that are grabbing our team’s attention.
Voice commerce with smart home devices is growing fast
Trade publication Voicebot.ai reports that 26% of smart speaker owners have made a purchase by voice. And, 11.5% of those people fall into the habitual voice shopper category by making monthly purchases.
Read the article
Influencer marketing fraud – how big a problem is it?
At Cannes this year, Unilever highlighted the problem of fraud in influencer marketing, leading other advertisers to reveal they've been quietly working on their own solutions. Just how big a problem is influencer marketing fraud and what can advertisers do about it?
Read the article
Telemundo viewers go mobile to enjoy the FIFA
World Cup
While the connected TV remains the most popular screen for streaming live video, between 48 and 51 percent of Telemundo’s live digital viewers consistently watch the games on their smartphones.
Read the article
Mobile commands up to 70% of retailers’ digital ad spend
The retail sector's investment in mobile ads is expected to account for nearly 70% of retailers' digital ad spending in 2018, according to a new report from eMarketer. It’s expected that retailers will spend $23.5 billion on digital ads, a jump of 18.7% from last year.
Read the article
AT&T takes on Facebook and Netflix
AT&T has unveiled a bunch of new services following its acquisition of Time Warner. The company appears to be intent on leveraging its new content assets from Time Warner to fight off competition from other streaming services and carriers.
Read the article
Amazon Prime Day: How Advertisers and Retailers Can Prevail
One of the biggest sales event of the year is on the horizon and approaching rapidly. Amazon Prime Day is the yearly promotion where Amazon reduces prices on a wide-ranging selection of items for its Prime membership customers. According to Amazon, in 2017, Amazon Prime Day sales surpassed Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales globally, with sales growing more than 60% from 2016, making it the biggest day in Amazon history at the time!
Who came out on top in 2017? Small businesses and entrepreneurs experienced significant growth in their sales from the previous year. Overall, Amazon Prime Day is a huge growth opportunity not to be missed for any retail company. Now is the time for you to reach a large number of shoppers by capitalizing on Prime Day—
July 16th-17th—and drive incremental revenue.
A Prime Day for Advertisers
Alongside the benefits for retailers, Amazon Prime Day also offers unlimited marketing capabilities for advertisers. Presently Amazon has various ad formats including Amazon Marketing Services (AMS), Sponsored Ads, and Fulfilment by Amazon (FBA), all of which provide advertisers with new revenue streams.
Selling on Amazon isn’t a choice; it’s a necessity to stay ahead of your competitors. Yes it seems daunting, but it’s not a matter of being intimidated or worrying about matters out of your control. With the Amazon Services flexible model, you control what you pay for with no subscription fees or contracts, and you pay only for order fulfilment and storage space used so it’s easy to keep a close eye on financials.
5 Reasons to Sell on Amazon
1. A trusted brand
The eCommerce giant is by far one of the most trusted and popular online retailers around the globe, with The Value Institute ranking them 2017’s most trustworthy brand. There’s no need to build brand awareness here—all you need to do is piggyback off their success by creating a Seller Account, and the potential for massive traffic for your product listings is huge! Alongside Amazon’s trustworthiness, if you approached anyone in the street and asked them to name five big online retailers almost certainly Amazon will be among them.
2. Customers' extremely high intent to buy
According to Statista, as of December 2017, 197 million users visited Amazon websites per month, in the US alone, which is an average of 81 per second! It could be argued that Amazon’s place within the customer journey is much further down the funnel than Google or Facebook, with searches being made with an extremely high intent to buy. This may be the reason why 60% of advertisers view Amazon and its digital advertising options as a growth opportunity or a “necessary evil,” while 17% view Amazon and its digital advertising options as a competitor.
Because of its rising popularity and trustworthiness, Amazon has also invested heavily in its advertising offerings, with Amazon Marketing Services (AMS) being one of its most commonly used formats. AMS offers a range of different ad types to fit your retail objectives, including Headline Search Ads, Sponsored Product Ads, and Product Display Ads.
While Amazon’s ad revenue of $2 billion in 2017 is still modest compared to Google ($40 billion) and Facebook ($21 billion), Marin’s State of Digital Advertising report found Amazon is capable of growing into as much an ad platform as it is a commerce platform, with 85% of respondents revealing the eCommerce giant would impact their business in 2018.
3. It’s easy
You can be up and running in no time. Selling on Amazon is a simple and effective way to reach millions of potential buyers. Whether you’re selling in small or large quantities, Amazon provides you with the tools to sell online prosperously. There are five simple steps to the process:
- Register your seller account
- Upload your listings
- Consumers see and buy your products
- Deliver your products to the customer
- Receive your payment
There are two ways to sell on Amazon, Basic (sell a little) and Pro (sell a lot) with each plan being designed to meet your needs. From as little as £25/$40 per month for a Pro plan this presents a cost effective opportunity to sell on Amazon.
4. Advertising solutions
Advertising on Amazon is an easy way to promote your listings on the platform and get your products noticed when consumers are shopping for similar items. Like Google Ads and Bing Ads, you only pay when someone clicks your ad. There are two advertising solutions: Sponsored Products for promoting individual listings, and Headline Search Ads for registered brand owners to promote their brand and product portfolio.
These solutions can help to give your products a visibility boost and maximize your sales by bringing those products to a new audience, all of which can be optimized fully when formed with an advertising technology partner who can help drive product sales and raise brand awareness on Amazon. This is done through amplifying the performance of your AMS advertising with flexible reporting and automated optimization.
5. Hands-off fulfilment and shipping
Opting for Fulfilment by Amazon (FBA) lets you send your goods to Amazon’s fulfilment centers, where they’ll deliver your products to the consumer, manage customer service, and handle returns on your behalf. Amazon has the infrastructure to handle everything for you. According to Forbes, Amazon shipped over 5 billion items worldwide in 2017 alone and sellers using FBA can take advantage of Amazon's free 2-day delivery to reach approximately 100 million Amazon Prime subscribers worldwide.
A Rapidly Growing Opportunity
Although Facebook and Google still control the digital advertising industry, Amazon’s ad revenue is growing faster than both companies, with eMarketer also predicting that by 2020, Amazon will have overtaken Oath and Microsoft to claim the #3 spot in the share rankings. With its rising market share and wide variety of ad options, digital advertisers and global brands are starting to flock to Amazon.
Efficient Advertising with Privacy Protection
Amidst a shaky GDPR rollout, we saw a number of industry changes (in addition to big shifts earlier this year) that impact measurement and tracking:
- Apple announced Intelligent Tracking Prevention (ITP) phase 2.
- Google will roll out Parallel Tracking this fall.
- Google deprecated the user ID field from DoubleClick Campaign Manager premium reports, complicating efforts to link a conversion to its ads. Google may even reduce the extra charge for these reports, since they will no longer have a primary key. :-)
- Facebook revoked floodlight tags from their ads.
- AppNexus, The Trade Desk, and AdForm created the Advertising ID Consortium, defined as “people-based interoperability for the advertising ecosystem.” This effort is aimed at creating a standardized ID large enough to offer marketers similar targeting capabilities that the dominant publishers like Google and Facebook provide behind their walled gardens. Bonne chance!
Wow! Using a redirect as a “party loophole” (first from third) will further fall away under Safari. Parallel Tracking will cause redirects to be treated as just another object on the page (and subject to the same first/third party rules). Unlike Facebook and Google, no RTB companies enjoy significant visitor traffic directly to their domains. (When was the last time you visited “adnxs.com”?)
What are the implications of these changes? What options do marketers have to implement an accurate, multi-touch attribution model to measure effectiveness across large publishers?
Goodnight, Floodlight!
According to Google, “Floodlight iframe and image tags are not able to observe all of your conversions.” Instead, Google will estimate Safari conversions by extrapolating results from other browsers—not exactly desirable, as iPhone users are generally more affluent and younger, and represent half of all mobile traffic.
Advertisers can opt to replace floodlights with global site tags. Big spenders can look at the new and complicated Ads Data Hub (ADH) for custom analysis and measurement. ADH data can only be queried in aggregated form, so it can’t be exported for detailed analysis.
And, since large publishers such as Facebook, Amazon, and Twitter don’t contribute, Google will deliver a Google-centric view. Impressions from Facebook, for example, won’t be present. This setup makes it impossible to achieve a transparent and complete multi-touch solution.
The Enterprise Approach
Enterprise multi-touch attribution solutions such as Visual IQ, Ipsos, or Convertro were never easy. Deployments often took a year to roll out and gain predictability. It’s not getting easier—these consumed the DCM log file and/or a pixel-based ID, both of which are increasingly problematic.
Marin’s Stack-Independent Answer to Multi-Touch Attribution Challenges
Marin Software is in the optimization business so our first priority is getting the right data, whatever the source. We integrate with all the Google tracking products, including GA, DCM, 360, and ADH, and have many customers on each. We integrate with enterprise attribution vendors such as Convertro, VIQ, and others, with multiple customers deployed. We integrate with Adobe measurement as well. A number of our larger customers have multiple integration techniques so that they can compare the numbers between different approaches.
Over the years Marin developed our own first-party tracking solution to support customers that had not deployed another system. However, it has evolved into a useful supplemental measurement technology, allowing us to compare numbers across vendors, audit order IDs, analyze converting paths, and better integrate with ad servers such as DCM, Sizmek, and AdForm (to include search and social clicks in those solutions’ reports).
Because Marin Attribution doesn’t do retargeting, it can be first-party. Marin Attribution can re-inflate DCM Data Transfer path to conversion reports back to their original glory, with a user ID present.
Data-Driven Attribution
Marin Attribution interleaves with Facebook-provided converting path data to deliver view-through and cross-device insights, a product offering called Marin TruePath. Because TruePath operates primarily on converting traffic, it’s not suitable for creating attribution models automatically.
However, advertisers can run their existing models against TruePath, or work with Marin to construct models using incrementality testing, also known as data-driven attribution. In our experience, an explicit test-based approach is transparent and more easily explained to senior leadership.
Marin TruePath is lightweight can be implemented quickly. To see our solution in action, be sure to request a demo and we’ll schedule some time for a test drive.
Google Marketing Live: New Features, New Focus
Didn’t have time to catch the keynote from Google Marketing Live? We’ve got you covered. Here are highlights from this year’s event and what they mean for digital marketers.
Safety First
Given the current hot topics of data privacy and brand safety, it wasn’t surprising for Google to focus on the value of advertising, transparency, and trustworthiness. Keynote speaker Sridar Ramaswamy pointed out that you can opt out of personalized advertising across all Google services, proactively reminding the audience that Google is committed to a safe, secure user experience.
How Can We Help You?
Ramaswamy also focused on Google’s shift from providing answers to offering assistance. This involves understanding what people need in the moment and helping them get things done. In his words, “Google is where the world turns to for assistance."
Key Goals
Across Google’s set of advertising solutions, the company is driving for better results, simpler experiences, and stronger collaboration. From more and better advertising automation to capturing more attention during shopping “moments,” online advertisers will have new opportunities to optimize ad delivery and improve results.
Rebranding
As they announced a couple of weeks ago, Google’s advertising suite is getting a slight makeover—or, at least a new name.
Google Ads now includes Search, YouTube, Google Maps, and Google Play. This is a good reminder that there are probably places and ways to reach your customers that you might not be taking full advantage of today.
As for the Google Marketing Platform, it’s still being managed by Google, and brings advertising and measurement into one place. This begs the question, however—do advertisers want Google making decisions around their budget and spending choices?
Talking Shop
The 2,500 attendees (up a whopping 2400% from the 100 who dropped in just five years ago) were treated to the highlight of the day—a rundown of Google’s new advertising products and features, including:
YouTube product formats
Maximize lift will help advertisers reach people most likely to consider their brand after seeing a video ad. Along with TrueView for Actions, this will make it easy to use YouTube at every stage of the funnel.
Responsive Search Ads
You heard it here first—Google is going to own ad creation. Responsive Search Ads will make life easier for marketers by automatically delivering relevant ads based on people’s stated wants and preferences. However, we think this will come at the expense of control. By handing the keys to Google, advertisers may find themselves locked out of the car.
As beta partners, we’ve seen increased performance with this ad format. But, it’s unclear if this simply translates to taking up more SERP real estate at the expense of organic results. Ads are getting cluttered, though, so it’s ultimately a good thing that machine learning is doing the heavy lifting.
Smart Campaigns
Smart Campaigns are now focused on SMBs, replacing AdWords Express. If you’re not familiar with AdWords Express, that’s probably okay. However, Google did mention cool tools to automatically build a website for the half of small businesses that don’t currently have one set up.
Advertising for All
When all was said and done, there was one main takeaway from Google Marketing Live—advertising should work for everyone. As Google seeks to democratize—and monetize—more automated, secure offerings, the search advertising future is looking bright, transparent, personalized, and helpful.
Unifying Your Advertising Across Google, Facebook, and Amazon
The “big three” publishers—Google, Facebook, and Amazon—operate as walled gardens by design. Sadly, they have zero incentive to share data across channels. This siloed approach is totally at odds with your goals as an advertiser—you need a single view of performance to run effective cross-channel ad campaigns.
There’s an answer—our next-generation advertising solution, MarinOne, unifies your search, social, and eCommerce advertising. Within a single platform, you can:
- Get a unified view of your true customer journey
- Amplify your search, social, and eCommerce campaigns
- Gain campaign insight with a single, customizable dashboard
We’d love for you to see it in action. Sign up for our webinar on Tuesday, July 10th at 10am PT / 1pm ET for a preview and to learn how our customers are using MarinOne to save time and increase conversions.
Speaker Bios
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 SVP of Marketing at Marin Software, and has been with the company since 2008.
Rob Emery has been part of the product team at Marin Software since 2015, where he has honed and delivered features serving Search, Social, and Optimization. He’s currently Director of Product Management and taking a lead role in the development and release of MarinOne. Prior to joining Marin, Rob worked in digital marketing for brands including Hilton Worldwide and Bonnier Corporation.
What We're Reading This Week: Top 5 Industry Articles
The Marin Marketing team stays busy not only striving to deliver compelling, educational, and relevant content—we also spend time following the most interesting industry news. In this weekly series, we list the stories that are grabbing our team’s attention.
How to Map and Make Sense of Engagement Metrics that Matter
Building an effective customer engagement plan can be daunting. eMarketer’s Lauren Fisher spoke with Jennifer Zeszut, co-founder and chief customer officer of Beckon, on how to set up an effective customer engagement framework.
Read the article
Microsoft matches Google Lens with AI-powered visual search for Bing
You can ‘Bing’ a picture now. See how Google’s main competitor is entering the world of visual search.
Read the article
Facebook starts showing all ads a Page is running
In its continuing efforts towards greater transparency, Facebook has introduced an “Info & Ads” section on Pages. It lists all ads the page has run across Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, and partner networks.
Read the article
Google streamlines ad products, winding down AdWords, DoubleClick branding
Google has rebranded its advertising products and consolidated them into Google Ads. Marketing Dive digs into the rationale behind the changes.
Read the article
We Have Reached Peak Screen. Now Revolution Is in
the Air.
“Tech has now captured pretty much all visual capacity,” writes New York Times columnist Farhad Manjoo. In this new phase of what he calls “Peak Screen,” what comes next?
Read the article
What You Need to Know About Amazon’s Inventory Performance Index
One of the core competencies that separates Amazon sellers that can scale from those who can’t is inventory management.
This is especially true for sellers utilizing Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA), a well-oiled process that both minimizes storage costs and maximizes customer satisfaction with healthy stock rates. While walking this tightrope, FBA policies and terms change frequently. These updates can affect seller fees and therefore bottom lines.
Let’s get right to the timely bit. July 1st, 2018 is a mini-Judgment Day for third-party sellers on Amazon. This will mark the end of the per-unit storage limit in favor of a weight-based system. More critically, a new policy goes in effect that utilizes Amazon’s Inventory Performance Index (IPI)—a measure that Amazon calculates for each seller—to determine product storage limits and overall inventory health.
What’s an IPI?
IPI stands for Inventory Performance Index and is comparable to a FICO credit score. Sellers are provided the general inputs that factor into the equation but not the specific formula that outputs the score given the inputs (in other words, a black box). Just as FICO protects their formula from abuse, Amazon retains the IPI calculation with proprietary status.
There are four factors used to determine the score:
- Sell-through rate (we’ve seen this be the most important factor)
- In-stock rate
- Excess inventory percentage
- Stranded inventory percentage
If any of these are unfamiliar, Amazon Seller Central breaks it down in detail and provides transparency into each factor for seller accounts in the Inventory Dashboard.
The Policy Change in a Nutshell
A final score check will be performed on the last day of each quarter starting June 30th, 2018.
Seller accounts who fulfill with Amazon with a score lower than 350 will have a storage limit imposed that will persist through the following quarter, regardless of score improvements in that quarter. Additional overage fees will be charged at a rate of $10 per cubic foot per month. Ouch!
Seller accounts with a score at or above 350 will have no limit on storage (normal FBA storage fees and long-term inventory fees still apply).
How This Affects Sellers
For obvious reasons, there are major benefits to having an IPI score above 350. Sellers can avert headaches and growth can continue uninhibited. For those seller accounts above 350, rest easy, though there are still strategies to consider that help maintain good standing and improve IPI score. For sellers who find themselves under, never fear.
For sellers on both sides of the IPI score threshold, understand that there is a lag between when actions are made and re-calculations to update the score. Sellers have reported that inventory takedowns and re-stocks usually update on the same day, while updates to sell-through rate typically only happen once a week. Especially if you’re near the IPI threshold, plan and adjust restocking and adding new products with care. Remember: the IPI score on the date of the final check is the most critical and will have implications for a full quarter with regards to storage space.
New Policy, New Playbook
For sellers who are on the wrong end of the score, let’s go through how to not just survive but thrive with storage limits.
- Determine new storage limits. Amazon assigns separate space for apparel, standard size, and oversize units. If the catalog spans multiple categories, this will relieve at least some of the squeeze.
- Be confident the storage limit will be no less than 25 cubic feet per item type, according to Amazon. Especially if there is decent selling history on the account, the platform should provide space above that minimum. Though it’s unclear how exactly limits are determined (we do know limits are based on Amazon’s available space as well as seller account performance), the limits are designed to provide an efficient amount of storage that makes sense for both Amazon and the seller. Amazon ideally wants to be able to reap sales commission with the seller being able to stay ahead of demand for customer satisfaction.
- Prioritize minimizing inventory. If seller accounts are exceeding the limit, there is still time until the end of the month to draw down before overages apply. The two options to draw down are to increase sell-through rates or remove products from FBA warehouses. Utilizing one of Amazon’s marketing services like Sponsored Ads or Lightning Deals may help boost orders and lighten inventory enough to minimize overage fees. Additionally, removal orders will help pull back excess inventory and also improve sell-through rate. Creating a removal order is a relatively painless (and cost-effective) process. Amazon allows sellers to select products to be disposed of or preferably, shipped back to sellers at nominal cost (currently, no shipping is charged on returns).
- Maintain a clean catalog. For all sellers on Amazon, this new policy is designed to shine light on products that are underperforming or inefficient and help improve the seller experience (at least in Amazon’s eyes). Sellers can leverage the new tools that support the new policy to clean up catalogs that may be overdue for attention. Beyond storage limits, the Inventory Performance Index gives sellers a current scorecard with specific components of inventory management that can use the extra focus.
Updates to Amazon’s seller policy can throw a wrench into what was once conventional practice. The Inventory Performance Index and storage limit changes for third-party sellers are no exception. The only thing to be certain of is that this won’t be the last update of its kind. Don’t let policy be the one thing that hampers progress. Happy selling!
7 Marketing Tips to Attract Wedding Gift Purchasers
This is a guest post from Charlotte Haab, Account Manager at
3Q Digital.
Summer’s finally here. For most of our weekends that means one thing—weddings.
Spring through summer is well known as wedding season in the US, and for digital advertisers, the industry can be a lucrative one. But how about for those of us who aren’t peddling save the dates or bridesmaid dresses?
The average wedding has about 100 guests, each tasked with getting a gift to celebrate the new couple. If the average person spends $116 on a wedding gift, that’s a lot of revenue to be had! The question then becomes: How do we tap into those fringe markets—like gifts—during the peak of nuptial season?
Here are seven things to keep in mind to get the most out of your marketing this wedding season.
1. Be on the right channels
If you want to capitalize on the summer wedding eCommerce runoff, being on the right channels is key. It’s no lie that weddings are all about aesthetic. As such, having a presence on visual wedding-oriented channels like Pinterest, Facebook, and Instagram is extremely important. Seventy-two percent of people getting married start on Pinterest, and 33% connect with brands through Instagram. Those numbers grow each year.
As a new wedding-goer myself I know I’ve turned to Pinterest for gift-giving etiquette. Have fun with it! Create a “gift guide” pin featuring your top giftable products, and use keyword targeting to hit people like me, perusing Pinterest for wedding gift cost guidance or trending items. Or, target users with marriage-aged friends on Instagram with romantic product shots of this season’s latest gifts—bonus if they’re shoppable!
2. Hit the right demographic
Considering who will be buying wedding gifts is important. You’ll want to apply age targeting segments wherever possible. The average newlywed couple is 25-34, which means their friends are, too, so be sure to target that segment the most aggressively.
Also target ages 45-64 to hit parents and family members of the new couple. The older the demographic the more money they tend to have—making the higher age ranges ideal targeting for bigger ticket items.
Lastly, while it may be archaic, most people actually buying wedding gifts are women. So consider gender-specific targeting to better get at this key group of buyers. Similarly, if you’re selling a bigger ticket item—like appliances or furniture—think about applying some household income targeting to exclude the users who can’t afford your products.
3. Get creative with customer segments
In SEM there are a lot of targeting options that lend themselves perfectly to gifting. You can play around with the best combinations of In-Market or Affinity audiences to expand your reach. Some are even specific to weddings, such as In Market for Gift Baskets or Personalized Gifts, or even an affinity for Luxury Shoppers or Home Decor Enthusiasts.
You could even craft your own custom affinity audience and target people interested in specific topics or domains, like theknot.com, Zola, or just straight up “wedding gifts.” They sky's the limit.
Beyond this, you could also try your hand at some customer list targeting. Create a list based off of users who purchased your gifts around the holidays, and remind them of their pleasant past purchasing experience this time around!
4. Whittle down your keyword targeting
I would also recommend implementing an RLSA keyword strategy. Keywords like “wedding gifts” or “gifts for couples” might get you where you want to be, but they’ll be incredibly competitive and likely carry some pretty high CPCs.
To get around this, create a campaign of those top of funnel keywords you wish you could afford, and slap some audience lists on top of them to narrow their reach to your existing customers! This is another place creative customer lists can come in handy. If someone who purchased with you last year is now looking for a wedding gift, they’ll likely recall your brand, and may even be willing to purchase from you again. The stronger the intent of your customer lists, the higher you should bid up.
5. Use the right creative
Like I said earlier, weddings are all about aesthetic. In order to inspire the right people you need to have proper creative. For events like weddings people respond well to notions of sentimentality. Include language around getting your loved one the “perfect gift.”
When using image creative, it’s important to stay on trend, and tell a story as much as possible. Weddings are about friends and families coming together to celebrate—if you can capture that in your imagery, you'll have a winning ad, like this great Zola example!
6. Update your site to match
If it’s within your means, update your website during wedding season to encourage new users to purchase. I would suggest an on-site “countdown” to wedding season, or even better a dedicated “gift guide” to steer users to your top selling or biggest ticket items. At the very least there should be a clear path from your homepage to the items you consider gifts.
7. Consider lesser-known wedding expenses
Lastly, if you’re not a home goods or traditional gift retailer, fret not—there is still plenty of the wedding cash cow to go around. If you’re marketing formalwear, hotels, transportation, beauty, or entertainment services, you can still capitalize on all those bells and whistles that come with a wedding.
What We're Reading This Week: Top 5 Industry Articles
The Marin Marketing team stays busy not only striving to deliver compelling, educational, and relevant content—we also spend time following the most interesting digital marketing industry news. In this weekly series, we list the stories that are grabbing our team’s attention.
Google Clears Up Confusion Around Mobile-First Indexing
A recap of Google’s tweets deciphering the most common misunderstandings around mobile-first indexing.
Read the article
Magna upgrades global ad growth forecasts, with Facebook and Google as drivers
Global ad revenue is expected to grow beyond expectations this year, to $551 billion. You guessed it—Facebook and Google are leading the way.
Read the article
US brands remain 'mediocre' when it comes to CX, Forrester finds
The field is open for a CX leader to emerge in sales in marketing, according to research by Forrester, while some industries are doing a better job than others.
Read the article
Facebook is testing paid subscription options for private groups
Although free Facebook groups aren’t going anywhere, the company’s testing a program to allow group administrators to charge for content.
Read the article
Keeping Up With Change: How Marketers Give Customers What They Want
With rapid industry change and new trends emerging even faster, customers are coming to expect constant innovation.
Read the article
Top Five Takeaways from SMX Advanced 2018
It’s a wrap for another year at SMX Advanced in Seattle, where thousands of digital advertisers huddle up to explore the latest paid search and SEO industry trends.
SMX was an exciting show for team Marin, not least because we unveiled our new platform, MarinOne, to the world on the conference opening day. The announcement garnered quite a bit of media coverage also—check out what Laurie Sullivan at MediaPost had to say about it.
Later that evening, we were thrilled to share our news with a room full of digital marketing leaders during our launch party at the Chihuly Garden and Glass Museum underneath Seattle’s iconic Space Needle.
While it wasn’t possible to attend all the sessions due to the excitement and activities around MarinOne, I did manage to siphon off my top five takeaways from SMX this year:
- Purple, a Utah-based mattress startup, used story-based video to generate incredible demand throughout their funnel. Check out these video engagement stats, for example—Purple videos get 35,000 YouTube viewing hours and 17,500 Facebook viewing hours each day. That marketing team must be getting no sleep!
- YouTube’s TrueView In-Stream is “the most valuable impression on the web,” according to video advertising expert Cory Henke. TrueView is free for the first 30 seconds and gives ample opportunities for testing and validating new video creative.
- Brad Geddes gave an interesting session titled Humans Rule the Machines, which outlined the role of “imagination workers” in marketing who will add value on top of AI in terms of creativity, strategy, storytelling, and machine auditing.
- Amazon marches on. Mary Meeker’s latest Internet Trends Report shows that 49% of all product searches start on Amazon, and 28% of all eCommerce sales are processed by Amazon. To quote Bryan Garvin from Purple, “Ignore if you don’t like sales.” Duly noted, Bryan!
- Several sessions highlighted the value of Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) for publishers and eCommerce vendors. A recent Forrester study outlines the total economic impact of AMP as $211K in cost, six-month payback period, and a $1M return over three years.
As you can tell from my notes, there were many important digital advertising topics under discussion at the conference. It’s also an excellent opportunity to mingle with brands, agencies, and digital marketing experts in the great city of Seattle. Until next year!
What We're Reading This Week: Top 5 Industry Articles
The Marin Marketing team stays busy not only striving to deliver compelling, educational, and relevant content—we also spend time following the most interesting industry news. In this weekly series, we list the stories that are grabbing our team’s attention.
Would You Pay for an Ad-Free Facebook?
Despite Facebook’s headline news and recent data privacy speed bumps, only 23% of consumers would pay for an ad-free version of the platform. Read more via eMarketer.
Read the article
Fortnite’s Explosion in Popularity Is Opening New Doors for Marketers
Gamers are serious about their passion—and marketers are clueing in to the advertising opportunities. A few great ideas from Adweek on how to capture the attention of avid gaming audiences.
Read the article
Employee advocacy outweighs influencer marketing
Move over, online celebrities—employee advocacy is more scalable, cost-efficient, and effective. A recent Sprout Social survey uncovered the numbers and trends.
Read the article
Commemorating 20 years of Google
Google turns 20 this year. Check out Search Engine Land’s retrospective and how Google became synonymous with “internet search.”
Read the article
64% of live streamers have engaged with ads, IAB finds
Lastly, happy World Cup day! Marketing Dive digs into the data around live-streamed soccer matches, online versus TV ads, device usage, and more.
Read the article
Introducing MarinOne, a Unified Digital Advertising Platform
We’re excited to share some big news today: We’ve launched our next-generation platform, MarinOne, which unites your search, social, and eCommerce advertising.
Now, you can maximize the results of your digital ad campaigns with a single view of the customer. By focusing on the customer and not the channel, MarinOne gives you a powerful new way to engage with people wherever they are, no matter which device they’re using or what channel they’re on—ultimately driving more customers and higher revenue.
Check out our video to learn more, and then request a demo today.
What We’re Reading This Week: Top 5 Industry Articles
The Marin Marketing team stays busy not only striving to deliver compelling, educational, and relevant content—we also spend time following the most interesting industry news. In this weekly series, we list the stories that are grabbing our team’s attention.
Have we reached peak smartphone, and what does that mean for marketers?
Among all of Mary Meeker’s insights and factoids, she reported a decline in the cost of smartphones. Marketing Land looks at what this means for marketers and how the industry should respond.
Read the article
71% of retailers use mobile location strategies to boost store traffic
Are you using location data to entice people into your store? If not, you’re lagging behind the ever-increasing number of retail marketers taking advantage of location strategies in their advertising campaigns. Read more from Mobile Marketer.
Read the article
Apple debuts screen limits, Siri shortcuts and privacy updates
Apple announced several new developments at its recent developer’s conference, keeping consumers excited and mobile marketers on their toes.
Read the article
The Battle for the Soul of Advertising Will Affect Everything
In today’s advertising world, says author Ken Auletta, there are “the disrupters and the disrupted”—and they both need each other to ensure a thriving consumer economy. Great read.
Read the article and the NY Times book review
82% of marketers plan to increase digital spend, but only 26% are confident in ROI
Nielsen's latest CMO report shows that the ascent of digital marketing budgets continues, but marketers still aren’t fully confident about it. They also continue to want greater transparency and real-time data insights.
Read the article
What We're Reading This Week: Top 5 Industry Articles
The Marin Marketing team stays busy not only striving to deliver compelling, educational, and relevant content—we also spend time following the most interesting industry news. In this weekly series, we list the stories that are grabbing our team’s attention.
1. Study: 82% of marketers plan to boost use of
location data
Three out of four respondents in a Cuebiq survey want to use information from how customers spend their time to power their marketing campaigns. Read more insights from Mobile Marketer.
Read the article
2. IAB says digital ad revenues up 21% to $88B in 2017. Left unsaid: The duopoly dominated that growth
Digital advertising is up and Google and Facebook are going strong. Marketing Land’s Ginny Marvin looks at the numbers.
Read the article
3. Confusion, chaos in the GDPR's first week
The GDPR hasn’t been all wine and roses, and the digital advertising community is still figuring it out. Econsultancy covers the one-week aftermath.
Read the article
4. Once Feared Obsolete, Physical Retail Stores Are Key To Omnichannel Revenue
Joe Apprendi of Revel Partners discusses the importance of melding the in-store experience with data-driven marketing online marketing techniques.
Read the article
5. Meeker: Data-driven online experiences create a 'privacy paradox'
Mary Meeker’s much-anticipated annual report took the pulse of digital advertising, looking at smartphone growth, mobile payments, voice products, and the ongoing privacy debate.
Read the article
Using First Party Data in Your Digital Marketing Strategy
This is a guest post from Ashley Aptt, Account Director at 3Q Digital.
A marketer’s data is as good as gold. Certainly, there are number of ways to collect data via internal and external sources.
The most common data sources are first party and third party—first party data is essentially your data. It’s the information you collect directly from your customers or your website. In contrast, third party data comes from other sources—it’s data aggregated from a variety of sources.
Due to changes that the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) requires, the future of third party data is uncertain. Under the GDPR, companies are required to inform consumers about the data they’re collecting, such as how they intend to use it and with whom they intend to share it. Given this change, there are concerns that this can lead to the end of third party data as we know it.
What Does This Mean for Marketers?
With all the shake-up around third party data, now’s the time to rethink your marketing strategy and utilize your first party data as much as possible. If your website is already tagged with a remarketing pixel for your various media platforms, then you’re off to a good start. Remarketing pixels are considered first party data since they capture the user’s behavior and activity while they’re on your website.
If you have a customer relationship management (CRM) system to help manage your customer information, then you likely have details about your customer’s past purchases and other interactions with your business. When used properly, you can leverage your remarketing audiences and CRM data to create targeted marketing lists to re-engage site visitors and past purchasers.
Incorporating First Party Data into Your Digital Media Strategy
Most advertisers are already familiar with the basics of remarketing and the importance of segmenting your data to re-engage users with relevant messaging across search and social platforms to increase conversion prospects. But by using your remarketing and CRM data, you can take your strategy to the next level by analyzing customer data and trends to home in on customer retention and repeat purchases, while also using that data to expand your reach to a targeted audience.
Here are some ideas to leverage your first party data and up your remarketing game across paid search and social:
- Push upsells and cross-sells: Once a visitor converts, leverage CRM data to determine complementary products they may be interested in. For example, if a customer purchases a swimsuit, follow up with ads to sell them a beach towel or swim cover-up.
- Re-engage seasonal shoppers: If you have a set of customers who only purchase during a certain time of year (such as holidays or summer), that’s okay! Create lists for these purchasers, and ramp up your marketing efforts for them during the time of year they’re most likely to convert. Also consider if there are other holidays or promotional events when it might make sense to re-engage these visitors.
- Don’t forget about video: Video advertising is becoming more and more popular and it’s a great way to reach your audience. Consider using a sequential messaging strategy to build a story and keep users interested in your brand.
- Expand your reach with lookalikes or similar audiences: Google and Facebook both have the ability to build a new audience based off your first party data. This is a great way to expand your reach and find users who are like your current customers.
Conclusion
While first party data may not offer as much opportunity to scale your marketing efforts as third party data, there’s still a lot of potential to leverage first party data to increase revenue and improve ROI. Put your customer data and insights to good use to refine your remarketing, retention, and acquisition strategies.
Keyword Decisions: When to Hold On and When to Cut
This is a guest post from Oscar Chow, Senior Paid Search Analyst at Wheelhouse DMG.
An ongoing challenge for digital marketers is managing their paid search keywords as efficiently as possible. With the oldest accounts reaching two decades old, it’s not uncommon to find campaigns with unwieldy structures expanding over time. In this post, we’ll go over techniques that can help you optimize your keyword lists for high performance.
Give It Your Best Shot
Let's step away from marketing for a moment and share some words of wisdom from a branch manager from "The Office" who advises, "You miss 100% of the shots you don't take."
In paid search, keywords are the shots that digital marketers take. If a keyword isn’t being bid on but has relevance and conversion potential, that’s a missed opportunity. Much like a star athlete who creates the best chances for their team to score, a fundamentally sound SEM campaign will bid on keywords that have compelling ad copy matched with a high-quality landing page to generate results.
In SEM, having the right keyword in auction at the right time is still a key element to success, even with new search ad formats and campaigns assisted with machine learning becoming more commonplace. Should we keep spending on this keyword that hasn't converted? How much longer can we wait? Can spend be more productive on this group of keywords?
We've heard real concerns like this from many of our clients at one point or another. Rightfully so, the keyword list is often an area where many apply a fine-toothed comb to find opportunities that could spur growth or create efficiencies.
The Process
Let’s take a look at how we can make sense of keyword performance. To aid in the analysis, we’ll address an approach that makes headway but does have a few lurking pitfalls to be wary of. Let's look at an example.
We pull a performance report that screens out keywords that have charged spend over the past 30 days but no conversions. We can title the spreadsheet ‘Inefficient Keywords’.
For starters, we can safely mark (and later remove) keywords that went by previously unnoticed with really high spend and traffic. Obviously, these are poor performers.
As for the others with traffic here and there, doesn’t it seem prudent to remove these "bad" terms and send them to keyword purgatory as well? After all, when you add it all up, it’s a non-trivial amount of spend that didn’t lead to conversion.
But let’s be careful here—by coming to that conclusion, we’re effectively creating a low-light reel. It’s guaranteed that we’ll be disappointed from cherry picking undesirable parts of the data.
Still, it might feel compelling to X-out these keywords. However, because of low sample size and statistical noise, swinging the axe could be premature without further consideration.
To gut-check this reaction, ask the following questions:
1. Has the keyword been given enough of a chance (clicks) to perform?
“Enough of a chance” is going to vary by industry CPC and account. As a rule of thumb, the lower the value per conversion, the lower the spend tolerance should be and vice versa. Stop if the answer is "yes" on this question. You have the confidence to deem the keyword unfit.
2. If there hasn't been sufficient traffic, does performance look any better over a longer period of time?
Time doesn't only heal all wounds—a conversion could be tucked away right outside your set time frame. While you shouldn’t make exceptions common, it’s probably okay to keep a keyword that’s been productive in the past, especially if the window is arbitrary.
3. Would a few conversions drastically improve the keyword's results?
There might be a few keywords on the cusp that would go from stinker to star with just two to three conversions. Keywords with low sample sizes often see high volatility over short time frames because one conversion can drastically skew their conversion rate.
Troubleshooting through these questions should inform whether keeping a keyword active or paused is the right move.
The Solution
To make this type of keyword analysis more scalable, Marin comes built-in with a proactive solution to managing low volume terms—the Dimensions tool. Dimensions allow campaigns and ad groups to be categorized based on intent. The dimensions can span multiple campaigns, allowing for more data aggregation.
Great categorization has three elements:
- Consistent definitions
- A depth of attributes for each dimension
- A breadth of dimensions that encompass the account
Marin’s offering provides all three. Adding descriptive meta-data allows you to cluster low-volume data points into a more representative group, providing a powerful way to make better decisions about keywords on a programmatic scale. In simple terms, we can still make smart decisions with less information than we’d ideally have. Here’s an example of ways you can categorize a long tail, typically low-volume keyword into dimensions to provide more clarity around its value:
Grouping keywords into meaningful clusters, these customizable, client-specific dimensions give us more data to judge. The keyword [garden pruners with 1 inch cutting capacity] may have only spent $10 and not driven any orders over the past 30 days, making it difficult to value. However, if we look at other pruner keywords with no brand name, that have intent for use at home, we can aggregate much more data and assign a relevant bid to this very specific long tail keyword.
Closing Thoughts
The strongest SEM keyword campaigns use practices that put keywords in positions to succeed. You should frequently evaluate your keywords for their ability to be productive at driving results. From time to time, making decisions at the keyword level is warranted to maintain or achieve peak performance. These decisions are best backed by data-driven practices.
What We’re Reading This Week: Top 5 Industry Articles
The Marin Marketing team stays busy not only striving to deliver compelling, educational, and relevant content—we also spend time following the most interesting industry news. In this weekly series, we list the stories that are grabbing our team’s attention.
1. Facebook’s Latest Transparency Move Is Showing You How Much Objectionable Content It Removes
Despite dramatic news headlines, Facebook is doing a good job of keeping offensive content off its platform. This Fast Company article covers Facebook’s efforts to keep its community safe.
Read the article
2. How Publishers Are Responding to GDPR
The GDPR goes into effect today. eMarketer spoke to Richard Reeves, managing director of the UK's Association of Online Publishers, to get his take on challenges that publishers face with the new privacy rules.
Read the article
3. Data Suggests Surprising Shift: Duopoly Not
All-Powerful
However slow the pace or slight the drop—what goes up must come down. eMarketer looks at companies that are growing faster than expected, and cutting in to Google’s and Facebook’s frenetic wedding dance.
Read the article
4. Shopper Marketing Undergoes A Digital Evolution
This is an exciting time for e-commerce. According to Gartner’s, marketers now spend $178 billion each year on in-store campaigns, and $55 billion of this could shift to online ads. Read more about the current retail opportunities and challenges.
Read the article
5. YouTube channels are seeing a lift in live
video viewership
And lastly, if you’re as ready to go with GDPR as we are, you might still be looking up last-minute resources to dot the i’s and cross the t’s. Here’s a handy Marketo resource. Also be sure to check out
our FAQ.
Read the article
Ensuring Cross-Channel Success: An Interview with Connie Lanter
Connie Lanter is a Senior Customer Success Director in Marin Software’s San Francisco office, with over 20 years of experience in customer success and account management. She helps digital and traditional advertisers across a diverse range of industries improve marketing results and drive revenue.
What do you do at Marin?
I work closely with some of Marin's largest enterprise customers to find ways to continually improve their digital marketing results. I think of it as long-term relationship building and turnaround, which includes understanding each customer’s goals and pain points, and then finding solutions for them. At the end of the day, it’s all about formulating the best possible solutions for our customers with the least amount of friction.
How are most paid advertising teams working today?
During our recent webinar, Unifying Your Search and Social Ad Strategies, 62% of our pool of over 400 survey respondents identified “operating in silos” as the number one way of running their paid advertising programs today. Only 21% of respondents said that that they have a unified search and social program.
So, only one in five organizations are where they need to be to compete in an increasingly multi-channel world. Plus, I’m really curious about how many of those 21% are doing search + social combined management across the board. I bet if we asked them they’d say it was partially managed together.
What are a few common barriers to running combined search and social advertising campaigns?
It’s interesting that 35% of those same respondents have separate search and social teams, and 16% don’t have a shared budget. These results aren’t surprising, since many teams aren’t thinking in holistic terms and focusing on the customer journey.
To achieve a truly integrated program, there are so many hurdles and pain points to overcome, including team silos, isolated budgets that aren’t working together to reach common goals, conflicting strategies, and a lack of communication, even sometimes when folks are sitting right next to each other. Not only is this frustrating, but it’s also slowing teams down, causing unnecessary conflicts, and ultimately preventing teams from maximizing the effectiveness of their digital marketing programs.
There’s also a knowledge gap that teams have to overcome, since the different channels are often unique beasts that require their own set of skills, knowledge, and continuous learning. With a unified approach, however, you get to become an expert on “digital,” not just a single platform.
In the long run, this not only serves teams better, but it’s a great growth and motivational opportunity for individual contributors, particularly at smaller companies. Someone’s expertise may lie in one channel, but with a unified approach, there’s always a chance to learn new things and excel in a different medium.
What are the benefits of a unified approach?
Once teams graduate to omnichannel, the benefits are pretty numerous—at the very least, being able to speak in one brand voice, and at the very best, gaining more traffic, more clicks, and more business. From our own research, we’ve seen teams double their conversions from adopting a unified strategy. Customers who don’t have a unified approach to digital advertising are simply leaving money on the table.
What do you recommend that advertisers do to unify their campaigns?
Start from the ground up. Define your goals and KPIs—starting with the overarching company goal—and then collaborate to answer a few basic questions: What’s our message? What are the nuts and bolts of how we’ll deliver it? What are we serving up on Google? On Facebook? On Twitter? On Amazon?
And, how are we looking at our full marketing program to measure which touchpoints are working and which ones need to be tweaked? It’s making sure teams have the right creative for the message they’re conveying, the right holistic strategy, and the right tools to measure success and act on the insights.
Any closing thoughts?
There are ways to get around silos and hurdles and really focus on a strategy that ultimately leads to more conversions for your organization. It all starts with a conversation and having a trusted digital advertising partner to offer an objective view of cross-channel performance.
However challenging implementing a combined strategy may be up front, it all pays off in the end with more engagement, clicks, conversions, and revenue. Baby steps can lead to great strides.
For more information on implementing a winning cross-channel advertising strategy, view our webinar, Unifying Your Search and Social Ad Strategies.
Marin Software's GDPR FAQ
As your Ally in Digital, Marin Software believes that securing and protecting sensitive and confidential customer data is central to everything we do. Over the past year, we have been working hard to refine internal processes and procedures to ensure GDPR compliance. We believe Marin is in compliance with GDPR. Below is a summary of additional questions you may have.
What is GDPR?
The General Data Protection Regulation (“GDPR”) is a new set of regulations that harmonize the data privacy laws across the European Union ("EU"). The GDPR sets forth a number of rules to protect personal data processing, personal data movement, and other individual rights and freedoms.
When does GDPR go into effect?
May 25, 2018.
Who does GDPR apply to?
GDPR applies to all individuals (or “data subjects”) residing in
the EU.
What organizations are subject to GDPR?
GDPR applies to any organization processing personal data that is: (i) established in the EU (regardless of where the personal data processing takes place); (ii) offering goods and services in the EU; or (iii) monitoring behavior of EU individuals.
What data is subject to GDPR?
GDPR applies to personal data that is processed or profiled.
What is Personal Data?
Personal data is any data that relates to an identified or identifiable individual, including elements such as: (i) location data; (ii) online identifiers; (iii) identification numbers; and (iv) profiling data (e.g., cookie data). Personal data also includes personal characteristics such as physical, physiological, genetic, mental, economic, cultural, or the social identity of an individual.
What is Profiling?
GDPR applies to those circumstances where individuals are profiled, or where personal data is used to evaluate certain personal aspects of an individual. Using Internet preferences and cookie data to create individual profiles falls into this category. Profiled personal data includes information such as economic situation, personal preferences, interests, online behavior, IP addresses, geo-location data, and movement data.
What is Data Processing?
Data Processing is defined quite broadly under GDPR and includes any action, whether automated or not, performed on personal data. Such actions may include viewing personal data on a computer screen (regardless of where the data is stored) and transforming or classifying information. Any personal data processing must be performed in compliance with GDPR.
What is a Data Controller?
A Data Controller is any organization that owns or controls the means of personal data. Customers using Marin’s solutions may be Data Controllers under GDPR.
What is a Data Processor?
A Data Processor is any third-party to whom a Data Controller provides personal data for processing. These may include consultants, agencies, tracking technology providers, ad tech analytics, marketing firms, CRM providers, marketing analytics tools, and outsourced email providers. Marin operates as a Data Processor under GDPR when providing services to our customers.
What actions has Marin taken in preparation for GDPR?
Marin always has maintained the highest standards with respect to protecting confidential information and complying with privacy rules and regulations around the globe. We have reviewed this status in the context of GDPR to ensure compliance.
Audits and Certifications
- Marin performs periodic security scans on our applications and networks.
- Marin works with an EU-based independent third-party to perform penetration tests and vulnerability assessments to ensure that we are operating at the highest standards.
- Marin’s data center is a Tier IV gold SSAE No. 16 audited facility that meets the highest standards for data center security.
- Marin Software complies with PCI-DSS standards for credit card processing.
Privacy-by-Design and Privacy-by-Default
- Marin employs Privacy-by-Design principles in our product planning and development practices.
- Marin also uses Privacy-by-Default principles to ensure our products remain compliant throughout their lifecycle.
- Data Protection Impact Assessments (DPIA): Marin supports our customers by providing assistance with DPIAs that involve Marin’s applications.
Dedicated Security and Privacy Team
- Marin’s security and privacy team are here to answer our customer’s questions and provide support in their security and privacy initiatives.
- Marin has appointed a Data Protection Officer to oversee and our compliance with data privacy requirements world-wide.
Transparency
- Marin supports our customer’s privacy and security programs by providing guidance and documentation to enable transparent data processing practices.
- Marin’s tracking technologies can be configured to support our customer’s privacy requirements.
Data Minimization
Marin only processes the minimum amount of data necessary to provide our customers with meaningful analytics and management tools.
What if I have additional questions?
Ask your Marin Customer Success representative or contact Marin's privacy office at privacy@marinsoftware.com.
Additional GDPR Resources:
- European Commission — Seven Steps for Businesses to Get Ready for the General Data Protection Regulation. https://ec.europa.eu/commission/sites/beta-political/files/data-protection-factsheet-business-7-steps_en.pdf
- Google’s Data Privacy Site. https://privacy.google.com/businesses/
- Interactive Advertising Bureau – Europe: Privacy & Data Protection Information. https://www.iabeurope.eu/category/policy/data-protection/
- Interactive Advertising Bureau – Europe: Transparency & Consent Framework. http://advertisingconsent.eu/
- Oath’s Privacy Center. https://policies.oath.com/us/en/oath/privacy/index.html
- International Association of Privacy Professionals - GDPR Checklist. https://iapp.org/resources/article/gdpr-checklist/
- Amazon Advertising: Advertising and the EU General Data Protection Regulation. https://advertising.amazon.com/ad-specs/en/policy/gdpr
- Digital Content Next “Ad Ops: the unlikely GDPR heroes. 10 Actionable Steps to Digital GDPR Compliance”. https://digitalcontentnext.org/blog/2018/02/06/ad-ops-unlikely-gdpr-heroes/
What We're Reading This Week: Top 5 Industry Articles
The Marin Marketing team stays busy not only striving to deliver compelling, educational, and relevant content—we also spend time following the most interesting industry news. In this new weekly series, we list the stories that are grabbing our team’s attention.
1. Stories are about to surpass feed sharing. Now what?
Josh Constine of TechCrunch looks at the rise of the Stories format and how it’s set to surpass feeds as the primary online sharing vehicle this year. What should advertisers keep in mind as they seek to create meaningful—and respectful—Stories ads?
> Read the article
2. The 10 biggest announcements from Google I/O 2018
CEO Sundar Pichai’s keynote at Google’s I/O included everything from advice on social responsibility to amazing demonstrations of new AI tools the company’s been working on. We were wowed and awed. If you haven’t seen it already, be sure to check it out.
> Read the article
3. Did Google Just Kill Independent Attribution?
For publishers, is isolationism the new normal? Martin Kihn, Research Vice President at Gartner, comments on the impact of Google’s decision to stop including user IDs with log files from its industry-leading ad server.
> Read the article
4. Where do marketers draw the line on data targeting as privacy concerns grow?
Marketing Dive does a “deep dive,” looking at the need for advertisers to pay more attention to first-party data in a time of mounting data privacy concerns.
> Read the article
5. YouTube channels are seeing a lift in live video viewership
The online video wars continue. This is an exciting space and we’re looking forward to the digital advertising innovations that will inevitably result.
> Read the article
Facebook F8: A Little Human Connection Goes a Long Way
At this year’s Facebook Developer Conference, Mark Zuckerberg was quick to address the (not-quite) Elephant in the News, acknowledging recent data privacy issues and outlining the steps Facebook is taking to return to its main focus as a social network: connecting people with others in their lives. He also announced a new dating app, another way the company is striving to foster meaningful connections among people on its platform.
Combined with the latest data that says people and advertisers are sticking around Facebook, this year’s F8 announcements show great promise for digital advertisers. Here, we cover just a few, and weigh in on the continued and potential Facebook advertising opportunities.
The Human Need to Connect
Although Zuckerberg admittedly wasn’t a fan of connecting with U.S. senators in front of millions of people, the company’s recalibrated focus on human connection bodes well for digital advertisers, for a few reasons:
- Facebook isn’t going anywhere. Advertisers today are investing more and more ad spend on social, as people continue to visit the platform to the tune of 1.45 billion active users a day.
- This number will likely grow. If new features such as the dating app are successful, more people will likely join the platform in search of more targeted match suggestions.
- The dating app is a future advertising opportunity. If/when the app takes off, it’ll no doubt be a great chance for marketers to scale their Facebook advertising even further. Watch this space.
Expanding the Virtual World
Artificial intelligence (AI), virtual reality (VR), and augmented reality (AR) are having a field day, and F8 confirmed that Facebook are among the pioneers leading us into a brave new cyberspace. Messenger chatbots are already being adopted as a customer service vehicle. Advertisers can refine this experience to scale their business and drive more impactful interactions.
For example, someone who purchased a t-shirt in the wrong size could contact the brand via Messenger, and then the friendly customer service bot could acknowledge the complaint and notify the purchaser once the replacement’s on the way.
If people want an even more personal interaction, Instagram already has video chat capability, and as this gets extended to Facebook it’ll be just the tip of the iceberg on delivering an innovative customer experience.
Advertising of the Future
Facebook’s long-term investments in AI, VR, and AR will mean enhanced possibilities for advertisers sooner than we think. Also, although only a third of the people on Facebook currently use Marketplace, this forum is still in its relative infancy and may eventually support paid ads. As Facebook continues to diversify and innovate, its advertising opportunities will only grow.
We’re looking forward to further demand as Facebook continues to flourish and expand. As an early adopter of Facebook advertising, we believe in the opportunity to engage with your customers at the right time, and think that Messenger is a great place to experiment.
Facebook wants to keep cultivating great relationships. We’re excited and eager to hear about how Facebook continues to develop these deeper connections.
The Key Elements of Successful Audience Optimization
Audience optimization is one great way to ensure your social ad campaigns meet your goals. However, what’s involved with optimization, and what things should you keep in mind to maximize the effectiveness of your campaigns?
In this article, we discuss the main elements of audience optimization and how to set your social campaigns up for success.
Audience Fatigue
Every audience has a life cycle. Depending on its size, budget, and campaign length, an audience will eventually grow tired of a campaign’s ads (i.e., fatigue). Naturally, a smaller audience
(< 80,000) will fatigue quicker than a larger one.
The most efficient way to avoid audience fatigue is to keep things fresh and strategize for new audiences every seven to 14 days. In other words, understand audience fatigue and be able to optimize to avoid it. Audience fatigue is when an audience is overused, resulting in a high frequency, costly CPM, and declines in performance.
Audience Overlap
Audience overlap is another issue that social marketers face on a regular basis. This is a result of ad sets from the same advertiser ending up in the same auction, bidding against each other, and inevitably damaging performance. Having overlapping audiences can lead to poor delivery of your ad sets.
Additionally, averaging a high Ad Relevance Score can often be difficult, especially if you’re constantly trying to avoid overlap and fatigue. Facebook calculates the Ad Relevance Score based on the positive and negative feedback an ad receives from its target audience. In short, if your Relevance Score is high, your audience wants to see it, and if not—well, something’s wrong.
Ad Creative for Audiences
Facebook allows you to create Engagement Custom Audiences from four ad types:
- Canvas
- Video
- Slideshow
- Lead generation
An Engagement Custom Audience (ECA) is a Custom Audience made up of people who’ve interacted with your content on Facebook. “Engagement” refers to actions like viewing your video or opening your lead form on Canvas. These four variations of ad creative are also the most customer-friendly and engaging ad types. Where it’s relevant to your campaigns, use these ad types as much as possible.
Using ECAs, you can retarget ads to people who’ve shown intent by interacting with your video, canvas, or lead gen form. You can also use Engagement Custom Audiences as a source for a lookalike audience, which will let you find people similar to those who’ve engaged with content on Facebook.
Audience Strategy
There are a vast number of audiences available to advertisers. Start building these audiences and using an audience tracker (this can be a simple Excel spreadsheet; see example below) to understand how often and when they were last used.
For example, you may have audiences compiled from:
- The Facebook pixel
- Your CRM data
- Leads from Facebook content (videos, slideshows, etc.)
- And more
[caption id="attachment_11410" align="alignnone" width="500"]
A Sample Social Strategy (click to enlarge)[/caption]
With more insight into your audiences, you can more effectively build campaigns with the right targeting and ad durations. Keep experimenting and optimizing.
Marin Wins ‘Best Search Software’ at the Drum Awards
We're excited to share Marin’s win at this year’s Drum Search Awards in London, where our search solution was recognized for its innovative features:
- First Party Data/Personalization: Marketers can personalize targeting based on real audience insights
- Marin SmartSync: Allows brands and marketers to ‘copycat’ their campaigns from Google to Bing with one click
- Search Intent: Allows marketers to understand where their prospective customers are in the sales cycle
- Marin TruePath: Links Google and Facebook, de-duping conversion, impression, and click data across devices, providing a complete view of the customer journey
Constant Innovation for Continued Success
At a black-tie event in the London Marriott Hotel Grosvenor Square, we were recognized as the best product on the market for increasing performance and revenue for search marketers, anticipating their future needs, and allowing them to run seamless cross-channel and cross-device campaigns.
We work hard to ensure that our customers gain a financial lift from using our platform, with some customers seeing an overall lift of 45%. We’ve also been able to boost cost efficiencies and time savings by over 60%.
The judging panel included industry experts across prominent brands and agencies, including Google, Facebook Atlas, and Philip Morris International.
Icing on the Cake
As our RVP of Sales, Richard May, said, “We’re really proud. Marin Search has been helping brands around the world get the most out of their ad spend and make informed budget allocation decisions. Recently we've really focused on innovating our offering, and it’s great to see this hard work paying off. Being nominated in such a competitive category is fantastic recognition of this work and winning the award is the icing on the cake.”
Watch an interview with our Marketing Director EMEA, Irisini Davis.
How Does Search Attribution and Brand Incrementality Work?
This is a guest post from Ashley Aptt, Account Director at 3Q Digital.
While attribution is simply the act of assigning conversion credit to certain keywords or ads, many advertisers are beginning to realize the importance of understanding how it works. Attribution plays a large role in how advertisers perceive their campaign performance.
Without a solid grasp of knowing how your attribution model works, you might be misinterpreting your data. Certain campaigns can easily be over or under estimated based on the attribution model being used.
Here are a few points to demystify the nuts and bolts of attribution for search campaigns.
The Standard Model: Last-Click Attribution
Google AdWords defaults to a last-click attribution model, which assigns conversion credit to the last keyword that received a click. This means that if someone clicks an ad from a non-brand keyword search then later converts after clicking a brand ad, Google assigns conversion credit to the brand campaign.
Meanwhile, Google doesn’t assign any conversion credit to the non-brand campaign. A major flaw with the last-click attribution model is that it doesn’t account for the fact that the user may have only heard about the brand because of the non-brand search they performed earlier. So brand campaigns get the conversion credit and performance looks strong, while non-brand played a large role in driving the user to the site but performance metrics looks bleak.
This is just one example, but scenarios like this play out numerous times every day, week, and month. And over time, the performance metrics add up and can lead advertisers to believe that non-brand is not driving enough value to justify the expense (often resulting in budget cuts for non-brand). On the other hand, the brand campaign could be getting more credit (and investment) than it deserves.
Brand and Non-Brand Working Together
It’s important to understand how attribution plays a role here, and how it easy it can be to jump to conclusions in terms of brand versus non-brand performance. It’s also important to understand the role that non-brand plays in the user’s conversion journey.
Non-brand can be a great acquisition strategy to bring new, qualified people to your site. Without a good acquisition strategy, growth can become stagnant—and over time, those high-performing brand campaigns could begin to see a decline in performance as brand awareness begins to decline.
In thinking about the example above, if that person never searched on the non-brand term as they were beginning their journey, would they still have purchased from your site? Maybe. Or perhaps they never would have even heard of your company.
Non-brand performance may not look strong on the surface when using a last-click attribution model, but there’s value in non-brand! And it’s important to think about the true value of brand campaigns, and if they’re worthy of all the conversion credit they’re being given.
Understanding Brand Incrementality
At this point, you may be wondering if bidding on your brand keywords is as valuable or important as you’ve thought. Would these users have clicked an organic listing and converted regardless of the presence of a paid search brand ad? It’s certainly a possibility.
Without brand ads, some people would have still navigated to your site and completed their purchase. But even though Google’s last-click attribution model is likely over-reporting the value of brand campaigns, this doesn’t mean that investing in brand terms isn’t valuable—it absolutely is!
Bidding on brand keywords is still an important strategy to ensure high visibility when users are most likely to convert. And maintaining ownership of your brand terms is especially important if you also have lots of competitors bidding on your brand terms.
However, there’s a chance that you’re over-investing in brand campaigns, and spending money on these terms when the funds could be re-allocated (where they would have a larger impact on performance or account growth). To know if this is true for your account, it’s important to test brand incrementality. Running a brand incrementality test will allow you to quantify the true value of brand search spend, conversions, and ROI.
Advantages of a Multi-Touch Attribution Platform
There are various ways you can measure brand incrementality. One approach I recommend is to use a multi-touch attribution platform, which will allow you to understand the true value of brand campaigns and non-brand campaigns (along with other marketing initiatives).
Multi-touch attribution platforms can assess marketing performance and go beyond a last-click attribution model to apply conversion credit to various touchpoints throughout the customer’s conversion journey. This gives advertisers a more insightful look at how each of their marketing initiatives perform. And ultimately it can help ensure that marketing budgets are being allocated towards the right strategies to drive optimal performance.
Conclusion
Brand campaigns may be getting more conversion credit than they deserve, but this doesn’t mean you shouldn’t bid on brand. Reconsider how you evaluate non-brand performance and consider if having a larger non-brand investment could help your brand grow. Use a multi-touch attribution platform to test brand incrementality and properly assess campaign performance in order to properly allocate marketing funds.
3 Ways to Get Started with Amazon Advertising
When buyers search for a product, they’re increasingly turning to Amazon as their first stop. There’s no doubt that Amazon advertising is on the rise, but is it enough to loosen Google and Facebook’s iron grip on the digital advertising landscape?
We think so. Amazon's ad revenue is now $2 billion, and it's the largest online marketplace in the world. While still modest compared to Google ($40 billion) and Facebook ($21 billion), Amazon is growing faster than both, according to Fast Company. With its climbing market share, digital advertisers and global brands are starting to flock to this online retail behemoth.
[caption id="attachment_11315" align="alignnone" width="500"]
Source: Synergy group, Forbes, TechCrunch[/caption]
As always, the early adopter catches the worm! Here’s more information on Amazon’s advertising solutions and how Marin can help you get in on the ground floor of this growing opportunity.
What Is Amazon Advertising?
Amazon Advertising provides several targeted, CPC advertising solutions to Amazon vendors and brands in order to grow sales. Amazon offers a range of different ad types to fit your retail goals and objectives, including Sponsored Brands, Sponsored Products, and Product Display Ads
[caption id="attachment_11316" align="alignnone" width="500"]
The Amazon Marketing Services Ecosystem[/caption]
1. Sponsored Brands (for Brands Only)
Sponsored Brands ads allow brands to feature a headline and an image above a shopper’s search results. You can link your ad to a landing page where people can get more information or make a purchase. The daily minimum budget required is $100, so this is an affordable way for brands to test the waters with Amazon advertising.
Sponsored Brands ads are a great way to showcase your logo and align your ad directly with specific keywords. This way, you can reach the people more likely to be interested in your products and drive more sales.
2. Sponsored Products
Amazon also offers the “Sponsored Products” option that displays your products at the top of a search results page. Sponsored Products work the same way as Sponsored Brands ads: you select the products you’d like to highlight based on specific keywords, and you set bids and a daily budget.
At a daily minimum of $1, this is a no-brainer for SMBs or those wanting an inexpensive way to test this placement. Sponsored Product ads can be useful for conquering competitor brand terms or improving your ranking on broader category searches, so keep both these goals in mind when mapping out your Amazon advertising strategy.
You can run either a manual or an automatic Sponsored Products campaign:
- Manual: You select the keywords you’d like to bid on. By bidding manually on individual keywords, you can optimize real-time based on performance.
- Automatic: Amazon automatically finds keywords that match your product’s category, related products, and product descriptions. Here, Amazon does the heavy lifting of collecting data on which keywords perform the best, so that you can apply them to future campaigns.
3. Product Display Ads
With Product Display Ads, you can target consumers by product or interest. Your ads will appear on relevant product detail pages across the Amazon platform. Like Sponsored Brands ads, the minimum daily budget is $100. Product Display Ads can be an effective way to reach potential customers more inclined to purchase a complementary item, allowing you to gain brand reach and find customers showing clear buying intent within related product categories.
Advertise Where Your Customers Are
Marin Software supports Amazon ad solutions—and full-funnel reporting alongside your search and social channels. If you’re a Marin customer and would like to set it up, just touch base with your Customer Success representative. Or, if you’re new to Marin, request a demo of our Amazon ad solutions today.
Europe’s in the Zone: Our Q1 2018 Digital Advertising Benchmark Report
Our Q1 2018 benchmark report shows that search ad spend increased 11% around the globe, fueled by significant eurozone growth of 30%. Also, mobile advertising accounted for 40% of total search spend, representing a growing market share. Advertisers should be aware that mobile ads still offer a 33% discount versus desktop CPCs globally, a bargain that won’t always be available.
We hope you enjoy these insights and more in our Q1 2018 Digital Advertising Benchmark Report. Now available as an interactive web page, we reveal the latest cross-channel advertising trends and allow you to slice the data by region, industry, and publisher.
In addition to global industry trends, we explore the most compelling areas of digital marketing, including the evolution of mobile, the best use of creative to gain more clicks and market share, and using the right search and social tools to attract the right customers.
The Latest on Mobile, Targeting, and Ad Formats
Other key findings for Q1 2018 include:
- EMEA Clients Enjoy Lower CPCs. CPCs for EMEA clients offer a significant discount at $0.40, when compared with CPCs in the US ($0.88) and UK ($0.85).
- More Search Clicks, Better Targeting. Click-through rates (CTRs) for search are up 25% year over year, showing how improved targeting allows publishers to deliver more relevant ads to people.
- Dynamic Ads Showing Strong Growth. Facebook Dynamic Ads, the highly personalized ad format based on user browsing behavior, were up 37% year over year.
Download the report for other actionable insights for your digital ad campaigns.
How to Use Facebook Messenger to Drive Business Results
Why advertise on Facebook Messenger?
Over the last few years messaging has become more important and popular. Believe it or not, since the beginning of 2015, there have been more people using messaging apps than social networks.
We recommend that all forward-looking advertisers consider where messaging stands in their social media strategy. Businesses might be quick to dismiss this advertising channel, thinking that only the young and tech-savvy use it. However, a few reasons say that’s not the case:
- Messaging apps now have more active users than social networks, including Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. At over 3.5 billion people, that’s a huge reach—almost half the planet use messaging apps.
- People across generations prefer to message than call or email when chatting one-to-one or with a group.
- Customers like the speed and simplicity of instant messaging. In fact, Facebook research shows that 53% of people are more likely to shop with a business they can message directly.
Facebook Messenger itself has reached over 1.3 billion people, allowing brands and businesses to reach customers at scale. Facebook built out a number of features, allowing brands to:
- Extend their reach on the Messenger placement
- Drive new users to chat with your business
- Re-engage existing customers with Sponsored Messages
Here’s a quick guide on how to use these Facebook Messenger features to drive business results.
Extend your reach using the Messenger placement
One of the easiest ways to add Messenger to your social media strategy is to extend the reach of your Facebook ads to the Messenger Home placement. You don’t need any additional preparation, as this can complement your existing Facebook activity as part of placement optimization.
Here are a few things to consider before testing this placement:
- Messenger Home placement is available as part of placement optimization and not a standalone placement. Although you can’t create Messenger Home-only ads, you’ll still be able to review how the placement performed against others through breakdown reporting.
- You can test this with Link or Carousel ads.
- It supports the Messages, Reach, Brand Awareness, Traffic, Conversions, and App Installs objectives.
Test this placement to see if you can get extended reach and improve your campaign performance. As this will be served as part of placement optimization, the algorithm will aim to serve your ads on a placement that can deliver the best price possible at the time. Make sure you allow enough time for the test and gather data before making big strategy decisions—depending on your audience, Messenger Home might be a small part of your campaign delivery.
Drive people to your Messenger chat
We outlined some of the merits of engaging with your customers via messaging apps. Messaging offers speed and convenience, and can increase customer satisfaction. However, how do you get people to discover your Messenger presence and reach out to you?
There are a number of organic ways you can get discovered—Messenger Codes, adding a button to your Facebook page, sharing an m.me link. However, you can really scale and tailor who you reach with Click-to-Messenger ads. In a nutshell, these are Link ads served in the Facebook feed that entice people to open a chat with you on Messenger.
You can use all of the regular Facebook targeting—demographics, interests, custom audiences, and more. There are a number of different strategies you can explore here:
- Prospecting: Target your audience on Facebook and drive them to find out more about your products through Messenger.
- Retargeting: Use the Facebook pixel to target those customers that viewed your products but haven’t purchased yet. Messenger could work as a great bridge from interest to conversion, allowing your customers to ask important questions and get immediate answers.
- Seasonal: Create a Messenger bot around a season or event that’s key to your business. For example, target a gifter’s audience in the lead-up to Christmas offering to help them choose the perfect gift.
Before testing this ad unit, there are a few guidelines to note:
- It’s supported under three objectives: Traffic, Conversions, and Messages.
- You can use these ad formats to increase Messenger usage: Image Link, Video Link, or Carousel.
- You can place Click-to-Messenger ads on the Facebook and Instagram news feeds.
Re-engage customers with Sponsored Messages
Finally, if you already have plenty of people engaging with you on Messenger, you should consider running Sponsored Messages. These are targeted, in-context ads allowing you to re-engage a warm audience.
The way I like to think about this ad unit is seeing people that have connected to you on Messenger as leads—people who signed up to communicate with your business. They’re already an open audience more likely to show interest in your products, respond to your marketing, and convert.
Sponsored Messages can only be targeted at people who already have an open conversation with you, meaning that your audience size is very limited. You’re able to layer additional targeting, based on Facebook data; however, I suggest keeping it simple and not reducing your audience size too much. A few strategies to consider:
- Using the Facebook Pixel, data exclude people who already converted and aren’t likely to convert again. That way, you can ensure your Sponsored Messages are still relevant to your audience.
- Make the messages personalized by segmenting your ad sets based on gender, age group, or interest.
- Remind your Messenger audience about your business by sending them an offer.
Sponsored Messages are an interesting ad unit in the Facebook ecosystem, reminding me of Sponsored InMail on LinkedIn. As such, there are a few things to note before launching them:
- The ad unit is currently supported by Messages objective only.
- It can only be served in Messenger and only to people who already have an open conversation with your business.
- You will be bidding manually on CPM—the recommended bids are much higher than you would bid on the Facebook news feed.
- It only works on accelerated delivery—due to the smaller audience sizes than you’re used to on Facebook, the goal for this unit is to deliver the messages out, fast.
- You can place 1x message per ad set and serve it at a frequency of 1. This makes sense since you don’t want to bombard your customers with the same message over and over again. If you have 2x messages you’d like to serve, you have to create 2x ad sets.
How to Use Marin Social to Overcome Targeting Issues
In its effort to protect its users’ privacy, Facebook is focusing on data security. With the introduction of changes around access of information via their API, it’s now easier for folks on Facebook to find and manage their privacy settings. As part of the strategy, Facebook also removed some targeting options dependent on third-party data providers (i.e., Partner Categories).
The Difference with Marin
While Facebook’s changes might affect advertisers’ marketing capabilities, it won’t affect Marin’s core working processes, since we don’t rely or store any personally identifiable information for the activity on our platform.
Nevertheless, we know that Partner Categories was essential for advertisers in particular verticals. For instance, those in the automotive, financial, and insurance industries rely on targeting options available in Partner Categories to refine their campaigns by targeting specific demographic sectors unavailable in other audience settings. Without the third-party possibilities, these advertisers may see a decrease in their social account performance.
To address these issues and improve ad campaign performance, advertisers can take advantage of Marin Software’s industry-leading targeting features. This is how we do it:
Optimizing based on the source of truth
Marin Software is an open platform that allows advertisers to integrate cost and conversion data coming from third-party tracking partners such as Google Analytics, Omniture, and DCM (among many others). You can manage and optimize all of your social media campaigns towards your source of truth, resulting in better results.
Search Intent Audiences
Our advanced targeting allows you to harness search audiences on social, and retarget high-value social audiences browsing on search. This creates a high-quality audience that allows you to implement more relevant and resonant bidding and creative strategies for your core customers and prospects. For example, Le Slip Français saw a 67% increase in Facebook conversion volume after running Search Intent Audiences, plus a 241% increase on Google.
Prospecting audiences from Search Intent
Marin allows you to create lookalike audiences based on core Search Intent audiences. When people show specific intent, you can use those insights to find new audiences that share similar characteristics. Learn how a leading automotive brand maximized its lead generation with Search Intent audiences on Facebook.
Enhanced lookalikes
With Marin Social, advertisers can create lookalike audiences with a similarity level of up to 20%—in contrast to Facebook’s 10% similarity level. While these high-similarity audiences may not be ideal for direct response campaigns, they’re very effective for top-of-funnel initiatives such as branding campaigns. With Facebook users sharing less personal info and the absence of Partner Categories, enhanced lookalikes are a great way to keep your interest-based targeting up, running, and successful.
Campaign lookalikes
This audience type is unique to Marin Software. It allows you to create lookalike audiences from your campaigns’ performance. With this feature, you can decide which campaigns performed the best based on your unique source of truth, whether it’s the Facebook pixel or other source. For example, Performics-Starcom used campaign lookalikes to triple its ROI.
Without a doubt, Facebook’s updates to its audience targeting solutions are game changers. Still, you can continue to drive business growth by using Marin’s valuable enhanced audiences. To learn more, request a demo today.
How to Use Facebook’s Lookalike Audiences to Scale Your Campaigns
Lookalike audiences are the Facebook feature when it comes to audience targeting. If you’re looking to scale your campaigns and more, it’s a must-consider option.
The Basics: What Is It and How Does It Work?
You can use lookalike targeting to find similar users to your core audience based on interests, click behavior, and conversion habits. The smaller the percentage of your core audience, the more similar your lookalike audience will be.
A lookalike percentage says, “Give me x% of the selected country users who are most similar to my seed audience.” For example, if you create a 1% lookalike in the US, the output will always be around 2.1 million profiles, since this is more or less 1% of the total number of Facebook users in the US.
However, depending on the seed audience, the profiles may greatly differ—for example, a 1% lookalike of your most valuable lifetime users will be different from a 1% lookalike of all website visitors. Therefore, seed quality is the most important factor for success.
You have several options from which to generate lookalike audiences:
- Your custom audience (email lists, phone numbers, etc.)
- Website Custom Audience
- Page fans
- Campaign data (API-only feature)
A Few Size Guidelines
When segmenting/choosing seed audiences, think quality over quantity. Although quality can be subjective, there are a few generic size benchmarks (guidelines) for your seed audience.
- Keep it under 50,000, since anything above this may see a drop in performance.
- Keep it above 1,000.
For example, let’s take our previous 1% US lookalike. Our audience has 2.1 million people. When we create our lookalike audience, Facebook compares the people in this audience against how similar they are to our seed audience of less than 50,000. In other words, we’re magnifying the seed 40 times. If the seed isn’t high quality, then the magnification won’t produce the best audience.
As you can see, you have a lot of choices to test different audience types and associated performance. The key challenge is to segment and structure the audiences to avoid overlaps and achieve the best delivery.
Something to note: Since frequency caps limit the daily number of times you can deliver an ad to a user, lookalike audiences won’t increase your overall reach. And, you’ll have less predictability when it comes to which ad wins each auction.
There’s a way to overcome these challenges, however. Make sure your strategy includes nested lookalikes and smart exclusions. Let’s go into more detail.
Using Nested Lookalikes and Smart Exclusions
Let’s start with an example, where we exclude the next-highest percentage audience from our targeted lookalike audience. So, if you’re targeting lookalike 3% and lookalike 5%, then exclude the 3% audience from the campaign that’s targeting the 5% one.
Nested lookalikes:
Smart exclusions:
With smart exclusions, we exclude the targeted audiences that we’re already using in other live campaigns. For example, if you’re running campaigns with 1% lookalike and 3% lookalike and want to launch a broader targeting campaign, then exclude the 3% lookalike.
Avoiding Campaign Redundancies and Fine-Tuning
When you’re planning your targeting strategy, make sure you’re segmenting your lookalike thresholds according to the value of the user, and excluding the targeted audiences from campaigns to avoid overlap. This’ll allow you to use lookalike audiences from different sources, increasing the overall reach and scalability of your campaigns.
For example, if you’re running a retargeting campaign based on a Website Custom Audience of all your site visitors, exclude this campaign from all of your acquisition initiatives, along with the associated lookalike audiences.
Here’s another scenario. Suppose you’re a travel website and the user funnel includes two conversions—registration and booking. You would segment the audiences based on your goals—perhaps based on the custom audience of the previous month's bookers, conversion pixel data, and Website Custom Audience of people who registered but didn’t book. Your segmentation would look like this:
Custom audience segmentation:
You can use all of these audiences for your acquisition campaigns, along with interest-based and other targeting options.
Here’s the final campaign planning structure for this example. This takes into account that retargeting campaigns are running based on your Website Custom Audiences.
Fine-tuned campaign planning structure:
Putting It All Together
Creating effective lookalike audiences takes a bit of cunning and patience, but it’s not rocket science. With continued practice, refinement, and measurement, you can scale your campaigns to ensure you’re targeting audiences with the most relevant ads at the most relevant time, in a way that works the best for your business. If you haven’t yet implemented this feature, we strongly recommend you get started today!
Automatically Optimize Preferred Positions on the SERP Throughout the Day
As cross-channel advertising becomes more competitive and marketers continually look for ways to gain new business, it’s more important than ever to maintain a high ranking in the search engine results page (SERP). Marin’s Position Lock tackles this challenge head on, allowing you to stay in front of your potential customers.
Position Lock is an intraday, position-based bidding solution for Google and Bing. It’s designed to allow search keywords to maintain a desired position throughout the day. You can set position targets by device (desktop or mobile) at the folder level.
When To Use Position-Based Bidding
If your keywords include highly competitive terms, you should use position-based bidding to make sure you achieve your position goals throughout the day. If a competitor enters the auction, Position Lock and its robust bidding algorithm can react and bid to the desired position.
You should also use position-based bidding if you have separate targets by device. For example, for desktop it makes sense to target positions 2-3. However, having the same target for mobile may result in fewer impressions. In this case, Position Lock allows you to specify a mobile position of 1-2.
How It Works
Position Lock grabs the current position for desktop (desktop + tablet) and mobile directly from intra-day cost reports. It takes the difference between the two latest cost reports and determines the keyword-level impression weighted position by device.
The rules-based engine then bids up or down by a percentage each hour based on the most recent data. Bids are only changed for keywords that have received impressions in the last hour.
Position Lock doesn’t require tracker implementation or URL tagging. There’s also no limit to how many keywords you can bid on.
Try It Out
If you’re a Marin customer and you’d like to maximize your SERP results throughout the day, just ask your representative to enable Position Lock. Or, if you’re new to Marin, request a demo.
The Mobile Shopping Experience on Facebook
It’s no mystery that most people connect to Facebook through the mobile app. What’s still a puzzle, however—at least for certain advertisers—is how to tailor ad messaging and strategy to suit mobile devices.
Shopping advertisers often adjust campaign structures and overall approaches according to a brand’s products and business model. Additionally, there are several things they should do to rock their paid social mobile e-commerce initiatives.
Start with tracking
Show of hands—who wants to lose track of the conversions on your mobile web page or app? Nobody? Indeed, the very first thing you should consider is the tracking system you’re going to use. If you’re going to promote content on your mobile app, you’ll need one.
If your campaigns will redirect to the mobile version of your website through a mobile browser like Google Chrome or Safari, be sure to set up your Facebook Pixel correctly. Facebook provides its own mobile SDK, which is an excellent tool for advertisers who don’t want to invest in a third-party mobile tracking system.
The Facebook SDK allows you to track many different in-app events, including Add to Cart, Add of Payment Info and, of course, Purchase. This will not only enable you to track purchase conversions on your campaigns, but will also provide great visibility of your customers’ in-app decision journey.
Pick a format—or two
When choosing the right mobile shopping ad format, there’s no right or wrong one. Ideally, you should always explore all the creative possibilities that Facebook offers—from static images to videos to carousels.
Although there’s no single answer to which creative format you should use, here are some things to consider:
- If you can’t afford to shoot a video, consider slideshow ads. These are quick and inexpensive to create. All you need is a set of images to be used as animated slides.
- Collection ads are an amazing format for e-commerce. They show your targeted audience not only the main product you want to promote, but also a whole set of items you sell on your website. This ad format looks great on mobile, and it can redirect to either a website or an app.
- As always on Facebook, you should test different formats and variations of the same ad. An A/B split test could be a great ally in your quest to find the perfect creative solution for your campaigns.
Establish a bidding strategy
One of the key features of a successful campaign is a strong bidding strategy.
Always make sure you’re bidding not only with the right value, but also with the right optimization type. On conversion campaigns—the most likely campaign type for your mobile shopping efforts—the best bidding strategy is to optimize on conversions.
But what if you get poor delivery?
Especially right after the launch of a new campaign, you might consider optimizing on a less precise conversion type, which could help improve delivery on your ads, before switching back to a conversion-focused bidding strategy.
A great way to do this, particularly on mobile, is with the “Landing Page Views” optimization.
[caption id="attachment_11250" align="alignnone" width="500"]
Facebook Ads Manager[/caption]
Why use this bidding optimization on mobile shopping campaigns, which redirects to a website? Because on mobile, link clicks can sometimes lead to a high bounce rate. This is due to a variety of reasons, such as a long page load time due to poor mobile connection. With “Landing Page Views” optimization you can gain more actual website page views, rather than generic link clicks.
What if you’re redirecting to your e-commerce app? In this case, you can send customers to a specific landing page inside the app through a deep link. Thanks to the SDK you’ve set up, you can redirect them to a specific product, or a certain section of your app, and track their actions.
How to Improve Your Campaign Performance in Facebook Auctions
You may be familiar with existing best practices for Facebook ad auctions, understand how they work, and know how to efficiently optimize your campaigns. The only constant is change, however, and maximizing success on Facebook auctions is no exception.
As Facebook improves their algorithmic solutions and the ad auction becomes more competitive, here are a few bits of advice for ensuring optimal performance.
Optimize to the highest revenue possible.
Bid on the item that’ll help you achieve this goal. Yes, it’s great to bid on the item that generates the most volume. However, if your goal is purchases and you’re optimizing for link clicks, you won’t get the most out of your campaign.
Set fewer constraints to the delivery system.
Let Facebook’s algorithms look for better results. Although you want to be as precise as possible with your targeting, applying too many constraints (such as demographic targeting on lookalikes and custom audiences) will limit the number of people you can reach for lower cost. Plus, your cost per action will grow.
Ensure a great user experience.
Optimize your landing page. Your ad creative, optimization, and targeting are very important; however, if your landing page isn’t providing the best experience—for example, it isn’t optimized for mobile—then you won’t win conversions.
Improve speed.
Minimize redirects, plugins, and shortened links; compress files to decrease rendering time; and improve server response time. Although these can have their own benefits, people won’t wait for a slow site to load.
Focus on the winning format.
Look at where the volume is. Some formats may not work for all advertisers, but you can at least test winning formats per objective—such as direct response formats like video, image, and collection ads. This may lead to great results.
Test format combinations.
Include an image and a video in one ad set. Maybe you tested video and it doesn’t perform as great as an image does. However, by including video and image in the same ad sets, Facebook algorithms have more flexibility to get you the best results, since some people may like video more than image and will decrease the overall cost per action.
Reduce duplicates and attribute well.
Look at cross-channel/cross-platform. Yes, your attribution model may be the best for you. However, make sure you're not double-counting the conversions and remember it may take multiple steps to get the final event.
Don’t try to outsmart the system.
Allow the Facebook algorithm to work for you. This is especially true during the learning phase. It may seem like you just launched the campaign and your performance is fluctuating, so you want to make changes. However, Facebook’s algorithm is still learning. It has to test and meet certain thresholds in order to properly deliver your ads. Therefore, avoid making changes for at least 24 hours and until you reach 50 optimized conversions.
Learn and adapt.
What worked last month may not work this month. You’ve likely tested and identified creative and targeting best practices. However, remember to test again and again once you see delivery decline, as the Facebook ad auction is a fast-paced environment.
Continual Improvement
It’s always possible to continue optimizing and improving performance. On top of trying out different best practices and recommendations, find what works for you, stay patient, and don’t be afraid to experiment with your campaigns.
Things to Keep in Mind About Attribution Models
This guest post first appeared on the Wheelhouse DMG blog. If you attended our webinar with Facebook on cross-channel attribution, it offers further, valuable insights on the pros and cons of using various attribution models to measure your marketing success.
Understanding the Value—and Limitations—of Marketing Attribution Systems
Digital marketing continues to expand, both in scale and opportunity. A decade ago, digital marketers were limited in the ways they could connect with customers, but now have a multitude of display opportunities: paid search (text and shopping), marketplaces with Amazon and eBay, video, and myriad social channels.
With the increase in digital investment and, more importantly, the diversity of channels where we are investing, it’s essential that we know which investments are actually generating revenue. And these insights, to a degree, can be found through attribution models.
The Value of Today’s Attribution Models
A good attribution platform can really help digital marketers solve this problem. Data siloed in multiple platforms results in duplicate credit being given to multiple marketing efforts. However, attribution solutions only give credit based on set rules—and it’s up to us to make smart assumptions as to how credit should be given (first-click, last-click, etc.).
These models were born from our need to determine which traffic sources drive value before a conversion takes place—to be able to place a fractional percentage to each individual purchase. This is what we now have, but don’t be fooled. Industry wide, marketers have a concept in their mind that attribution is telling them whether their money is well spent. And to a degree this may be true, but it’s an incomplete picture.
The Misconceptions and Limitations of Marketing Attribution Systems
A smart friend of mine, Philip Chiappini, data scientist at REI, reminded me a few years back: “Attribution only tries to measure fractionally how to give credit. It does not measure the incrementality of a marketing effort.”
I can’t stress this enough—and it’s an essential concept to confront when deciding how important an attribution platform is for your business. Attribution platforms cannot answer how much revenue you will lose if you turn off your remarketing efforts, or what lift in revenue you’ll see if you double your marketing budget. Only mixed market analysis or even more simple A/B, on/off tests can tease out those answers.
The primary purpose of an attribution tool is to avoid double counting of conversions and to algorithmically give fractional credit. Attribution models are measuring the value of each touch within a path before a conversion (or micro moment). Measuring that path’s conversion rate to a similar path, minus one touch point, gives you the fractional value of that touch point in the first path.
When compiling millions of different paths, an attribution algorithm can begin to place value on each marketing channel. Because this is how credit is valued, systems tend to overvalue channels where touch paths are more prominent.
Envisioning the Future of Attribution Systems
What marketers need are attribution systems that continue to do the heavy lifting through computer learning algorithms, but are also customizable enough that a smart person can differentiate a remarketing display ad from prospecting ads.
Until these systems can take into consideration the purpose of the ad and not just the ad type, attribution tools will fall short of delivering what we really need. A system that can not only provide fractional credit but also test for true incrementality would be a welcome, actionable addition to the digital marketer’s tool belt.
Marin’s Thoughts (and Policies) on Data Privacy
There’s been no shortage of recent Facebook headlines, with data privacy and the responsibilities of tech powerhouses leading the conversation. At Marin, we believe Facebook remains an important way for brands to connect with their customers.
With these events and the upcoming implementation of the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), we think it’s a good time to review how we’re using data at Marin and clarify a few questions for our customers.
The short answer: The recent changes are a step in the right direction for protecting consumer privacy, and still let brands connect with their customers and prospects with relevant messages.
What happened at Facebook?
Before 2014, Facebook allowed developers to access the profiles of users who’d granted permission and those people’s friends. The goal was to provide a platform for developers to harness the power of Facebook’s social graph for interesting new applications. What Facebook didn't plan is the misuse of their data and the threat to their users' privacy. Facebook disabled this ability well before the election, but the proverbial cat was out of the bag.
This is what allowed Cambridge Analytica and their partners to turn 270,000 app installs into access to 50 million profiles.
What is Facebook doing about it now?
Facebook has a multi-pronged effort to bolster data privacy, making user data security the center of their strategy. Recent changes include:
- Limiting information that can be accessed by app developers
- Making privacy settings easier to find and control
- Removing “Partner Categories” to disable ad targeting by third-party data providers
We believe these are all positive steps to help give Facebook users more control over their information.
How does this affect Marin?
These changes don’t affect Marin’s core value—helping advertisers get the most out of their digital advertising. We don’t rely on or store any personally identifiable information.
Industry-leading capabilities like our Search Intent tools help advertisers better leverage their first-party behavioral data in a clean and compliant manner. We can even help find new customers through Facebook’s lookalike capabilities. With Marin, your data’s covered:
- Anonymous tracking data: Whether we integrate data from publisher, third party tracking or Marin Tracker, the data is purely anonymous. With Marin, users and brands are safe.
- Secure audience capabilities: With its clean data flow and precise segmentation options, our audience targeting features rely solely on first party data.
- Advanced cross-channel targeting: Our advanced targeting allows advertisers to harness search audiences on social, and retarget high-value social audiences browsing on search. These features leverage advertisers' first party data only, and keep advertisers in touch with people on their multi channel, multi-device journeys.
With users and brand safety at heart, our mission is to offer cross-channel capabilities to advertisers in a clean and transparent way.
What about GDPR?
European privacy law is also on digital advertiser minds.
The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is an EU regulation on data protection and privacy for people in the European Union. Its goal is to harmonize and simplify the regulatory environment for international business by unifying privacy regulations within the EU.
Given the global nature of the internet, everyone with a digital presence should understand the required changes. If the US government starts to consider additional regulation on user data, GDPR is a likely model for future legislation.
The core elements of GDPR include the rights to:
- Transparency: Clear policies can help users understand data use.
- Notice and Choice: A clear opportunity to opt-out of data collection.
- Right to Access: Know how their data is being used and for what purposes.
- Data Erasure (“Right to be Forgotten”): Request the erasure of their personal data.
- Data Portability: Request copies of their personal data and transfer to other companies.
GDPR was adopted on May 27, 2016 and becomes enforceable on May 25, 2018. The IAB has more details and resources.
What should you do next?
Above all else, take the time to review your data privacy practices and policies and make sure you’re using data in a way you’re proud of and that your customers are comfortable with. You should do the same for any partners you’re working with. (Also see our privacy policy). Stay up to date on steps that both Facebook and the EU are taking to ensure user privacy.
In the meantime, continue to focus on creating meaningful, engaging, and relevant experiences for your customers and prospects. By taking these extra, thoughtful steps, they’ll reward you with their business and loyalty.
A Mobile Strategy Assessment in Three Steps
This is a guest post from Ashley Aptt, Account Director at 3Q Digital.
We all know it by now—mobile is important! Mobile usage continues to grow, and if you don’t have a strong mobile strategy in place, you’ll be left in dust. Aside from the fact that over half of Google’s paid search clicks come from mobile devices, Google is also moving to a mobile-first index. While this doesn’t have a direct impact on paid search, it’s a clear indicator that mobile is the new frontier and you’ve got to have a plan in place for this ever-growing trend.
Here are three keys ways to assess your mobile strategy.
1. How Does Your Site Stack Up?
There are resources readily available to test the mobile friendliness of your site, and even your site speed. I recommend using Google’s Test My Site tool, a free website tool that evaluates your mobile site speed and estimates the percentage of visitors lost due to loading time. And luckily, when you use this tool, Google will even provide a few suggestions on how you can reduce loading time for your mobile website.
It’s important to evaluate how your mobile site performs, because a strong mobile experience equates to stronger performance results for your media campaigns. Use the Google site speed tool to find out how much traffic you’re losing due to poor mobile site speed.
Then, run some basic math based on your conversion rate and average order value to get a sense of how much revenue you’re losing out on. If your site is falling short and costing you money, then make necessary changes soon!
2. Understanding the Value of Mobile
Many advertisers mistakenly take mobile performance at face value when making paid search campaign optimizations. They download a Google AdWords performance report segmented by device to compare performance among the various devices, and then apply device bid modifications to equalize performance based on the data.
The thought process here comes from a good place—if mobile CPAs are higher, it seems like a logical optimization strategy to bid down on mobile to reduce the CPA. However, since many users begin their journey on a mobile device and then convert on a desktop later, mobile is likely being under-valued in the performance report because it’s not getting credit for the conversion.
To paint a better picture of mobile performance, you should evaluate cross-device performance (user-friendly visuals are located in the “tools” section of your Google AdWords account). The screenshot below illustrates how mobile plays a part in the conversion cycle.
For this client, mobile assisted in over 1,200 desktop conversions. If you’re using Google’s last-click attribution model, those conversions are not counted toward mobile performance, thus understating the value of mobile device interaction.
Additionally, if you have retail store locations, you should talk with your Google rep about adding “Store Visits” data to your AdWords account. Many users search from a mobile device while they’re on the go, so mobile is a great source for driving in-store traffic. Once you have Store Visits data in your account, you can segment this data to evaluate the number of store visits coming from mobile devices specifically.
3. Optimizing Mobile Performance
Now that you have a better understanding of why mobile is important and steps you can take to improve your mobile site experience, let’s dive into ways that you can optimize your mobile strategy for paid search.
Applying proper device bid modifications is a great first step in optimizing your mobile strategy. As mentioned above, just remember to take into account the hidden value of mobile and consider things like cross-device conversions and in-store visits before bidding down mobile too much.
For your top-performing keywords, consider increasing mobile bids to top-of-page bid estimates to ensure full visibility on those keywords, as most visibility and clicks come from the top position on mobile devices. It’s also worth testing smart bidding instead of manual bidding. Smart bidding leverages Google’s machine learning and backend data to optimize bids for each auction, and it even takes the user’s device into account.
In terms of ad copy, strive to make your ads appealing to mobile users. Here are a few tips:
- Try using the Ad Customizers “IF” function to tailor ad copy based on the user’s device.
- Ad copy that mentions the ease of converting from a mobile device, or even featuring a mobile URL, can provide the user with a sense of confidence in your mobile site experience. This will encourage more clicks and visits.
- Leveraging call extensions and message extensions is another way you can provide potential customers with an easy way to get in touch with you.
- Consider testing some mobile-specific features such as image extensions or Google Shopping Showcase ads to determine if the more visually appealing aspects attract your users.
Conclusion
Mobile isn’t going anywhere! Start assessing your mobile site and make necessary changes to improve the mobile experience for your site visitors. Then dive into mobile performance to get a clearer understanding of the role mobile plays in the customer journey.
You may want to regularly analyze this data, as the results can change as your site improves and more users continue to search and shop online. Lastly, keep mobile top of mind as you create campaigns and ad copy. Think about the user experience from a mobile perspective to guide your strategy.
So Your Social Ad Performance Is Declining—How Do You Fix It?
Although it’s a great feeling when social ad campaigns are on auto-pilot, functioning automatically, and blasting out to all the audiences we’ve carefully selected, it could happen—we start seeing stunted reach, fewer clicks, and sluggish conversion rates. At these moments, it’s time to roll up our sleeves and investigate the most common culprits for dips in social performance, and make adjustments to address the problems.
Here are a few simple things to examine to ensure your social ad campaigns are performing at their best.
Frequency
What is it and why does it matter?
Frequency is the average number of times people see your ad. A higher frequency can leave a greater impact on the user, since they’ll be more likely to remember your brand and take action. As a starting point, we recommend planning campaigns for a frequency of 5-8, but with every campaign and creative being different, this can fluctuate depending on a few different variables:
- Campaign length
- Daily active users
- Optimization event
- Page connections
- Previous brand exposure
- The longevity of the decision-making process
What does it mean?
A greater frequency—often combined with a decrease in click-through rate (CTR)—simply means that your ads are reaching the same audience continuously. In turn, a decreased CTR indicates that users are no longer paying attention to your ads or the audience pool is left with users who aren’t interested in your brand or product offering. Either way, the audience isn’t clicking your ads anymore.
How do you improve it?
If ad frequency has reached higher than your usual average, the best solution is to explore new audiences that represent potential new revenue. Try lifetime value audiences, campaign lookalike audiences (available through Marin via API), or Marin’s search intent retargeting and prospecting audiences.
In addition, new creatives can always provide a performance uplift, as they can appeal to audiences that initially didn’t respond to your ads. Consider changing:
- Theme of the creative
- Creative format (e.g., video or carousel)
- Call to action
- Color palette
- Offers and text
CTR
What is it and why does it matter?
CTR indicates the percentage of clicks that result from the total number of impressions. The higher the CTR, the more people click your ad, and the higher the website traffic that could result in conversions.
What does it mean?
There are four potential reasons for a decrease in CTR.
- For audiences that have performed in the past or are very relevant—e.g., 1% lookalike or retargeting audiences—the creative might be the offender. Alternatively, you’d need to check the frequencies of the previously best-performing audiences to avoid audience saturation.
- If you’re experimenting with broad audiences such as keyword targeting, it could be that this particular audience is just less engaged with your brand and your investment could have a better return somewhere else.
- If your high CTR plummets, it could be that your ads are suffering from creative fatigue, meaning your audience has seen your creative for a while already and is simply tired of it. Make sure you’re following creative best practices.
- Lastly, if you’re targeting large audiences, the campaign may have not had enough time or budget spend for Facebook to identify the users who are most likely to convert.
How do you improve it?
Having identified the reason behind the decrease in CTR from the suggestions above, you could try a new approach or a combination of tactics:
- Test new creatives using one of the suggestions in the Frequency section.
- Make your audience more specific by overlaying your keyword targeting with a lookalike audience or reducing the percentage size.
- Don’t pause your campaigns too early, as Facebook’s algorithm requires at least 50 conversions per ad set to get through the learning phase. As the name suggests, during the learning phase the algorithm is learning about your audience and their behaviors and may not produce optimal results. However, having gone through the initial learning phase, Facebook has enough data to deliver your ads to the right audience and therefore produce the results you’re after.
CVR
What is it and why does it matter?
Conversion rate (CVR) indicates the conversions (purchases, sign-ups, etc.) resulting from link clicks. It’s one of the most important metrics, as it indicates the quality of the click audience and the relevance of your ad.
What does it mean?
A sudden, significant drop in CVR can indicate a tracking issue such as:
- Broken tracking links
- Missing pixels on your website
- Missing pixels in ad setup
Alternatively, it can be a sign of a technical error on your website such as broken webpages or errors with processing purchase requests.
Other reasons behind a low CVR can be a misleading call to action or irrelevant landing page. It can also indicate the state of the market and competition, which is why we always recommend keeping an eye on competitors’ activity and Facebook offers.
How do you improve it?
If you’ve seen a sudden unexpected drop in conversion rate we recommend reviewing your website, since often it’s related to this.
Double-check your tracking links and ensure that active pixels are on the website and attached to your ads. Install Facebook’s Pixel Helper plugin, and verify whether the pixel fires on each relevant page such as add to cart, register, and purchase.
Additionally, try optimizing the user experience by shortening the conversion journey and providing appealing offers.
Marketing on Facebook: Analyzing the Results of an A/B Scope of Test
In the previous article in our Marketing on Facebook series, we looked at how to build a robust A/B scope of test framework to help uncover optimal relevance and ROAS. In our third and final post, we analyze the results of our test and formulate an action plan. (Be sure to refer back to the previous article for a refresher.)
Summary of Insights
Remember, we’re working with a retail advertiser’s scope of test. The retail advertiser is using Conversion and Product Catalog sales objectives. They’ve set a goal to optimize their campaigns, with the broader challenge to drive ROAS improvements.
Let’s don the hat of a Marin Customer Engagement Manager. Reviewing performance insights, we can formulate our summary:
- Men and women display consistently different trends in purchase behaviors—men have higher conversion rates, but cost more per conversion and produce lower revenue; women produce higher revenue, but have lower conversion rates.
- Instagram posted consistently higher ROAS versus other placements.
Summary of Opportunities for Optimization
In response, we note several opportunities for optimization:
- Testing men and women targeted together versus. segmented
- Testing placement optimized ad sets including Instagram versus segmenting Instagram
- Testing optimizing to standard pixel events versus. Custom Conversion
- Testing more refined lookback windows for seed audiences
- Testing more refined lookback windows for dynamic ads
Summary of Scope of Test
Because age, gender, and in many cases the location often have a significant impact on results, the gender A/B test weighted higher in importance for Phase 1, versus testing placement optimization. Additionally, this was a priority for the advertiser at the time because they were also thinking about a more gender-tailored approach to creative design.
We’ve noted that in setting up ad studies, a clear definition of success is very important for successful learnings, so be sure to define KPIs. We elected ‘overall campaign performance’ as the measured goal for our scope of test, and also noted improvements for our KPIs of Relevance Score and ROAS.
Let’s look at some of the highlights that the example scope of test produced.
Phase 1: Testing Gender Optimized Ad Set Versus Unique Ad Sets for Men and Women
Background: A/B test campaign targeting men and women together in an ad set, versus a campaign targeting men and women in unique ad sets. Winner is plugged into Phase 2.
Theory: Optimized ad sets—whether combining placement or genders—allow the Facebook auction algorithm to find the most opportunities from the defined audience pool. When we target women uniquely, do we see higher ROAS?
Test Results
Including men and women in the same ad set can work better in some cases. This is because the auction algorithm has more options in effectively placing impression opportunities for results (placing an ad impression in front of the person most likely to take action X), for the most efficient price.
In other cases, we need segmentation to better refine the audience versus the goal—to make it more relevant.
Learnings: The campaign segmenting men and women improved Relevance Scores by two points, and improved ROAS by 18%. Creating segmentation in the audience—limiting and refining its overall scope—helped generate a more relevant targeting pool. Because more relevant ads are more cost efficient, we saw improved ROAS in correlation with higher Relevance Scores.
Highlights: Looking at the ad set targeting men only, we saw that the Relevance Score and ROAS were about equal to that of the campaign ad set that combined gender targeting. However, the ad set targeting women only posted significantly higher Relevance Scores and ROAS. While men remained an overall difficult and more expensive conversion, the more focused and relevant ad set targeting women was able to efficiently serve impressions, and generate conversions and revenue.
Conclusion: Overall, the campaign segmenting gender targeting produced better results.
Targeting in this way achieved not only a more relevant—but also a more positive—user experience. The auction produced more value for our advertising outcomes, reaching people who mattered most to specific goals. As a result, we gained improved ROI.
Additional Insights
It’s possible for a budget to be spent faster yet win less auction impressions. Why? Because of low relevance. For comparison, the two campaigns with equal overall audiences produced the following insights in Round 1:
CPM (Campaign A, Segmented Genders): $26.16
CPM (Campaign B, Combined Genders): $29.66
For the same budget of $1,500, Campaign B produced 6,776 fewer impressions, and despite a higher conversion rate (52.94% vs. 49.89%), produced 18% less revenue.
In all, the ‘less relevant campaign’ produced less impressions, less clicks, higher overall CPAs, and lower revenue.
With similar results in Round 2, we were able to prove that fostering more relevance in our targeting, ads in the auction produced more results at higher overall campaign ROAS in response.
Marin Tip: Relevance Score can be a powerful tool in your campaign management. Look for it in the Marin Social dashboard at the campaign, ad set, and ad level:
With the above results, you can also test unique creatives to men and women in the future, to see if you can further optimize with a more tailored message or image/video.
Phase 2: Test Placement Optimization Versus Segmenting Instagram
A/B test campaign utilizing Placement Optimization (including Phase 1 winner: men and women segmented), versus a campaign utilizing Placement Optimization except for Instagram, which is a unique ad set. With noted insights that Instagram produces higher ROAS, can a controlled budget via a dedicated ad set improve overall campaign ROAS?
Winner is plugged into Phase 3.
Test Results
Learnings: Segmenting Instagram into a unique placement and providing for controlled budget produced a 4% improvement in ROAS overall. We noted a slight uptick in Relevance Score, (under 1 point).
Highlights: While Instagram continued to post performance gains in a dedicated at set, we saw smaller overall gains than we hoped for. We noticed that the ad set utilizing all other placement options without Instagram performed markedly worse than when we included Instagram.
In the ‘overall’ performance gains overview, Instagram carried the campaign’s success. We planned further testing to produce a placement-optimized ad set.
While not as impactful as we’d hoped, Phase 2 created an opportunity to build a follow-up scope of test to understand the best combination of placements. Just because our results don’t post a clear winner doesn’t necessarily mean a failed ad study. We should view such results as additional opportunities to test and refine our strategy.
Phase 3 and Beyond
Additional testing found that building Lookalike Audiences from Custom Audiences that used more narrow lookback windows (10days was best) helped improve Relevance Scores. In addition, on average, it produced 11% gains in ROAS, versus campaigns that used Lookalikes based on a 180-day lookback window seed Custom Audience.
We uncovered similar patterns for dynamic retargeting ads—using more tiers, plus more narrow windows in those tiers, proved most optimal from a ROAS perspective. There was no significant impact to Relevance Scores.
Dynamic retargeting tiers we found most successful were:
- Added to Cart but not Purchased in 3 days
- Added to Cart but not Purchased in 10 days, not Added to Cart in 3 days
- Viewed Content but not Added to Cart in 7 days
- Viewed Content but not Added to Cart in 14 days, not Viewed Content in 7 days
- Viewed Content but not Added to Cart in 30 days, not Viewed Content in 14 days
We also determined that using a Custom Conversion produced worse overall results, versus using a pixel event to track conversions. When using the pixel event, for example, our Relevance Scores were on average 1.2 points higher than when we used a Custom Conversion. Also, we also improved our ROAS when we used the pixel event.
Final Thoughts
Relevancy and quality can help advertisers achieve efficiency gains in assigned budgets on Facebook. However, they’re often overlooked in favor of bid and budget adjustments.
While bid changes and budget adjustments hold value in optimizing campaigns, Relevance Score—and overall the relevance concept in the auction as described within the total bid—is one of the key drivers of performance efficiency.
Time after time we’ve noticed that campaigns with low Relevance Scores perform worse when compared with campaigns posting a higher Relevance Score. In these cases, increasing the bid value or switching to Auto Bid doesn’t typically improve acquisition costs or revenue.
In a lot of cases, campaigns with low Relevance Scores also under-deliver to allocated budgets.
Finally, to achieve efficiency gains, you need a carefully outlined approach that incorporates an understanding of the baseline, plus measured steps to test improvements to this baseline.
Refining Your Campaign Strategy
If you’d like to partner on projects similar to the one we’ve described here, contact your Customer Engagement Manager and they’ll gladly schedule a time to review your campaign strategy. They can also help model and support your progress through a scope of test. Or, if you’re new to Marin, feel free to get in touch.
Unlocking the Facebook Ads Feature to Best Optimize Your Account
This is a guest post from David Creatura, Senior Analyst at Wheelhouse DMG.
One of the most important questions you can ask about your Facebook advertising efforts is, “How am I attributing our traffic and conversions?” Attribution is a commonly covered topic purely because of the wide range of opinions and perspectives one can have on the issue.
Customer journeys are often complex, and far from a one-to-one interaction between a single advertisement and conversion. Knowing how Facebook’s attribution works is critical to understanding your social advertising in a nuanced way to grow your program, versus relying on the default view.
To Attribute or Not to Attribute: That is the Question
How do we value a conversion for an individual who clicks on a Facebook ad one day, comes back to the site organically the next, opens an organic Instagram post a week later, and eventually converts via an email two days later?
In this scenario for our example company, the time between the customer initially clicking the ad and completing a purchase was 11 days. In the company’s analytics platform, the purchase would register in the default view as coming from the email campaign, as that was the last interaction the customer had prior to converting.
However, as the customer journey shows, there were many other touchpoints that helped move the customer closer to the conversion. Should we not also give credit to the organic Instagram post for keeping the customer engaged with the brand? Does the Facebook ad deserve full credit for being the initial interaction with the brand?
There have been plenty of publications focusing on the inexact science of attribution. No one model is a perfect fit for every company. Depending on your customer base, industry, brand, products, etc, there will be a different attribution model that will make the most sense for your advertising efforts and business planning.
Facebook’s Default Attribution View
Let’s use a fake e-commerce company to help explain the process. In honor of our resident furry friend in the Wheelhouse DMG office, we’ll make it an artisanal cheese manufacturer called Reggie’s Parmigiano Reggiano. We’ll use Reggie’s business to help us understand Facebook’s default attribution.
Reggie launches a Facebook ads campaign with the goal of driving a positive return on ad spend (ROAS) of 4:1. After a month of running his advertisements across different audiences he pulls in his “Website Purchases” and “Website Purchases Conversion Value” columns to see how his ads performed. (Ideally Reggie checks his campaigns routinely during the month, but he has other standard business priorities such as walks, begging for food, and angling for belly rubs.)
After pulling in the columns he sees that he drove $11.5k in revenue from just over 200 purchases and a total spend of $2.5k. After dividing his revenue by spend, he sees that he drove to a ROAS of 4.6 and exceeded his goal! This would seemingly signal the opportunity to spend more aggressively on his Facebook campaign, as he has room to hit his ROAS goal.
In this scenario, we would encourage Reggie to look a little bit deeper into the initial data that Facebook is showing him. Companies are often unaware that Facebook’s default attribution view is a 28 day post-click and also a 1 day view-through conversion. This means that Facebook will give 100% full revenue credit to an individual who clicks an ad so long as they complete a purchase within 28 days of clicking.
Facebook will also give 100% full revenue credit to a customer who just scrolls past an advertisement on their feed and then converts within 24 hours. This has significant implications as Facebook will show revenue for someone who does not click through an advertisement and will inflate the actual performance of your ad campaign.
This can be especially misleading if your campaign contains audience targeting of previous customers, email subscribers, or past site visitors. These are individuals who are already familiar or fans of your brand and have a higher likelihood of converting than a new prospect.
They very well may scroll past your ad while looking at their friend’s news for the day, then convert from an email that was sent as part of a broader campaign strategy. When presented with this scenario the Facebook ad is getting credit for performance when the email actually drove the revenue.
Now, this is not to say that view-through conversions can be disregarded, because there is legitimacy in accounting for view-through conversions. Thinking about attribution a bit differently than the default view, however, we recommend taking a percentage of that revenue to account for the impact an ad impression has in a customer journey as opposed to 100% credit.
This percentage will vary across advertisers, but if there is no standard that they apply for, it’s recommended that view-through conversions be roughly 20% of the total view-through revenue. We’ll touch on how to calculate the unique percentage for your advertising efforts in a future post.
Changing Your Attribution Window
To better help Reggie understand his artisanal cheese business success, we would segment our purchases by conversion type to change the way we view our campaign. To segment out by conversion type, click your column’s dropdown and select “customize.”
In the lower right of the available metrics to pull in, there’s a section titled “Attribution Window.” Beneath that, you’ll find Facebook presenting its default window of 28-day post-click and 1-day post-view. In our example below, we’ve changed that to shorten the post-click window for this specific client.
Upon editing your attribution window, the columns for “Website Purchases” and “Website Purchases Conversion Values” will expand to show the number of view-through conversions and revenue, as well as click conversions and revenue.
In our example with Reggie, we see that the ad campaign drove $6.8k in revenue using 7-day post-click attribution. If looking purely at click-driven revenue, this would result in an actual ROAS of 2.7.
That ROAS represents a 41% lower figure than what Facebook presents in its default window many advertisers are using to judge performance. Instead of increasing bids like Reggie initially would using the default view, Reggie should be significantly decreasing bids.
When we account for the view-through revenue, Reggie drove just over $3k in revenue using view-through conversions. Taking 20% of that $3k in revenue would show $600 in revenue is a fair representation of a view-through conversion. When added to our $6.8k in revenue that results in a complete revenue view of $7.4k, or a ROAS of roughly 3.0. At this point, Reggie still needs to pull back his bids!
Find What Works for You
To reiterate, no single attribution window or view is a one-size-fits-all for advertisers. But knowledge and further analysis about how Facebook presents your ad performance will tremendously alter the way that you’ll bid on your Facebook campaigns. For purely performance-focused campaigns and advertising efforts, this is a critical first step in ensuring your Facebook advertising campaigns are grounded in a reporting foundation that will allow you to scale your program.
Attribution Rules at SMX West 2018
Over 1,000 digital marketers braved the torrential rain and weather delays to attend SMX West 2018 in the San Jose Convention Center from March 13-15. Despite a wide-ranging agenda that included artificial intelligence and voice search, the emphasis of this year’s show fell squarely on marketing attribution.
Scoring Points with Attribution
We all know that attribution is a complex topic that frustrates many advertisers. It’s hardly surprising that all the competing attribution models—such as first-touch, last-click non-direct, linear, time-decayed—leave some advertisers dazed and confused.
Google’s session at SMX West promised an “Inside Look at Attribution” using a clever soccer analogy for capturing all touch points along the customer journey. In soccer terms, you can consider last-click attribution as the equivalent of giving 100% credit to the striker who scores a goal—and I know a few strikers who would happily take all the glory! Last-click gives an incomplete picture of the path to success, as it’s designed to ignore the defender who won the ball, the midfielders who played it forward, and the winger who crossed it for the assist.
The Value of Assisted Conversions
Although many advertisers still use it today, last-click attribution discards much of the creativity (and credit) from the goal-scoring process. The Google team shared statistics showing that most retailers see four clicks along the customer journey prior to a purchase. Using a last-click model inherently ignores 75% of the influence by discarding the first three clicks in each consumer’s path to purchase. Put simply, you’ll never get an accurate Return on Ad Spend (ROAS) if your model ditches three-quarters of the data you should be using to measure a conversion.
Placing this into the context of a modern marketing campaign: it may be a thought leadership webinar that gets a prospect to take a discovery call, but you can’t discount the benchmark report that prospect downloaded earlier in the year, or the newsletter that contained a relevant customer success story, or the email campaign that generated a website visit. The point that Google and others made is that data-driven attribution is the only way to track all of those meaningful interactions that happen along the customer journey to conversion.
Mobile’s Place in the Customer Journey
It’s also notable that mobile activity tends to take place earlier in the customer journey when buyers are researching a purchase or doing some digital window shopping. Although mobile accounts for a growing volume of transactions, many consumers still feel more comfortable completing their purchases on a computer or in-store. As a result, mobile influence is easily discarded by last-click, and it’s important influence on the buyer’s journey is often overlooked by less sophisticated attribution models.
Dig Deeper into Attribution
If you’re interested in learning more about attribution, join Marin Software and Facebook for a live, 60-minute webinar on Wednesday, March 28th, 2018 at 10 am PST / 1pm EST. This event will explore the myths and realities of cross-channel attribution, offering a clear picture of your conversion efforts across channels and devices. You’ll learn:
- How to map the full customer journey
- The pros and cons of modern attribution models
- The real value of views, clicks, and conversions
- Exploring cross-channel attribution with Marin TruePath
We’ll answer any attribution questions you have and demystify the various models. Hope you can join us.
Press “Play” on Video Advertising: 10 Keys to Success
If their advertising revenue is any sign, Facebook and Google will be the dominant players in the digital ad space for years to come. How can marketers continue to compete? Including videos in your advertising campaigns is the new winning strategy, especially on YouTube and Facebook.
The Shape-Shifting Digital Marketer
How can advertisers do this with people constantly shuffling their attention between channels and devices? Video is a great way to stand out and get noticed in a sea of content. It’s a booming category for digital advertisers, with Cisco predicting that video will represent 80 percent of all internet traffic by 2019.
Marketers must change their game plans to adapt. And, since your video is competing with many other forms of content, simply creating a basic video ad isn’t enough. Brands must build high-quality, engaging videos (in mobile-friendly formats) that are more likely to catch the attention of their specific target audience.
Press “Play” on Video Advertising
Download our short guide, Press “Play” on Video Advertising: 10 Keys to Success, to explore 10 ways to create successful video ads. Just a few topics we cover include:
- The key to getting viewers to make your video all the rage
- How to brand our video for maximum effect
- Using video to achieve lower cost and a far more targeted audience
If you’d like to learn more about how Marin Software can help you with your video advertising campaigns, request a demo today.
Marketing on Facebook: Building and Incorporating an A/B Testing Framework
Marketers who conduct the most successful ad studies with the most quality, consistent learnings tend to do a few important things:
- Establish a foundation of refining and outlining business goals
- Review and mark out baseline performance and past results
- Methodically execute campaign flights against the A/B testing framework outlined
This is where the concept of a “scope of test” framework can help you succeed. In this second article in a three-part series, we unpack this framework so that you can better understand it. Using a real-world example, we’ll review how a scope of test used ad studies to help reveal what creates the most relevance, and in turn, how that improves ROAS.
While our focus in this post is more specific to testing for relevance and quality, we’re happy to support other forms of ad studies for advertisers.
A/B Test (Ad Studies) Background and Guidelines
Ad studies help test test the impact of different audience types, delivery optimization techniques, ad placements and creative, budgets, and more, on mutually exclusive audiences. Once they’re completed, these studies help you understand ‘what works’.[1]
Audiences are split into ‘cells’, ensuring that someone in one cell isn’t in the other. Because of this ‘split’ comparing one variable versus another—for example, News Feed Desktop placement versus News Feed Mobile placement—the data is statistically accurate. Each cell is exposed to a unique variation of the test variable, so a determination can be made as to which variable delivers performance in comparison.
When you’re creating an ad study, it’s important to follow a few test guidelines:
- Define KPIs
- Determine confidence level: tests with larger reach, longer schedules, or higher budgets tend to deliver more statistically significant results
- Select only one variable per test
- Avoid launching segmented A/B tests (e.g., one round of testing that’s then used to determine winners and losers)
Once you follow and meet these guidelines and recommendations, you can create a scope of test in support of planned ad studies. It includes KPIs, schedules, etc., and builds a process to implement the ad studies, and acts as a compass in tracking results and winners.
Scope of Test
A scope of test has several sections:
- Historical Scenario
- Understanding the Baseline and Goals
- Summary of Insights
- Summary of Opportunities for Optimization
- Summary of Scope of Test (Phases and Rounds)
A phase is the umbrella to rounds, used as a proof of concept. For example, “Phase 1” could be “Testing Placement Optimized Ad Sets.” (We’ll review this in more detail in our next article.),.
There should be at least two rounds within a phase to establish a pattern in the data—a tiebreaker to determine winners and losers.
To help define KPIs, review historical data and establish a benchmark, both from an insights perspective and an Opportunities for Optimization perspective. Be sure to include summaries of both within the Understanding the Baseline and Goals section of the scope of test.
If no historical data is available, run a few campaigns to what you believe are the most relevant audiences, using the resolving data as the benchmark.
With available benchmarks, the summary of scope of test incorporates the KPIs that will determine the success of each study.
In our real-world example below, we review a retail advertiser’s scope of test. For the purposes of this article, we’ve condensed a lot of the summaries. If you’re a Marin customer, reach out to your account manager or Customer Engagement Team for more details on a scope of test and how to implement one.
Historical Scenario
The retail advertiser is using Conversion and Product Catalog sales objectives. They’ve set a goal to optimize their campaigns, with the broader challenge to drive ROAS improvements.
The advertiser is targeting men and women without segmenting the genders into separate ad sets, using a custom conversion to track results. They’re also running Dynamic Ads using a ‘Purchase’ event for tracking conversions.
Within the prospecting conversion campaigns, the advertiser’s targeting focuses on a similarity Lookalike Audience based on past purchasers (180-days lookback), as well as interests gleaned from Page Insights. Placement optimization incorporates all available placements for Carousel ads.
For retargeting business goals, they’re running Dynamic Ads, targeting people who’ve engaged with products but haven’t added them to cart, as well as those that did add to cart but haven’t completed the purchase. Both dynamic audiences are looking back 30 days.
Understanding the Baseline and Goals
In partnering with this advertiser, a Marin Software Customer Engagement Manager first outlined the Understanding the Baseline and Goals section of the Scope of Test, which provided the benchmarks and helped set the KPIs.
Here’s some of the content included within Understanding the Baseline and Goals:
Prospecting Campaigns
- Men and women targeted in the same ad sets
- Similarity lookalike audience based on 180-days purchasers
- Targeting framed around relevant Facebook interests
- Optimized placements (Facebook Feed, Mobile Feed, Instagram, Messenger, etc.)
- Custom Conversion
- Auto Bid
Retargeting Dynamic Ads Campaigns
- Men and women targeted in the same ad sets
- 30 days viewed but not added to cart
- 30 days added to cart but not purchased
Conversion: Purchase event - Auto Bid
On average, prospecting campaigns post a Relevance Score of 3; their dynamic retargeting campaigns post a Relevance Score of 5. In our test, the team reviewed 90 days of recent campaign insights.
In our next article, we’ll review these campaign insights and how they can be analyzed and acted on for future growth.
[1] Split Testing
The Myths & Realities of Cross-Channel Attribution
The marketing landscape is awash with competing attribution models—from first-touch to time-decayed to last click—none of which truly capture the full path to conversion. So what’s an advertiser to do?
We believe you should focus on true cross-channel, multi-touch attribution. Without a clear picture of your conversion efforts across channels and devices, it’s simply impossible to follow your customer’s journey, calculate ROAS, and double down on your most successful campaigns.
Sign Up for Our Attribution Webinar
Join us for a live, 60-minute webinar on Wednesday, March 28th, 2018 at 10 am PST / 1pm EST. We’ll explore the myths and realities of cross-channel attribution. You'll learn:
- How to map the full customer journey
- The pros and cons of modern attribution models
- The real value of views, clicks, and conversions
Our Senior Product Manager for Attribution, William Hartley-Booth, will present with Emilio Tamez from Facebook. Be sure to sign up today to reserve your spot.
Speaker Bios
Emilio Tamez is a Quantitative Researcher on the Advertising Research team at Facebook, whose primary focus areas include cross-channel measurement (especially search and TV) and brand equity quantification. He joined Facebook in 2016 after holding jobs in media analytics for a political campaign and neuroscience research. He is native to the American Southwest and holds a degree in Statistics from Rice University.
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.
The Facebook Algorithm: The Basics and How to Work With It
Like all algorithms, Facebook’s collects a certain amount of data and analyzes it before stabilizing performance and delivering the best results. So, while your ad sets are in this “learning phase,” you may see fluctuations in performance, which might make it tempting to stop your ads before they’ve had a chance to work most effectively.
In this article, we cover the basics of the Facebook algorithm and things that can impact the learning phase.
More About the Learning Phase
Facebook wants to ensure a flawless user experience and that you’re reaching the people that matter the most to your business. To this end, they’ve introduced the learning phase.
During this time, Facebook’s algorithm shows ads to different types of people in your audience, and tries to feed the delivery system with more conversion data for the most stable and best results after the phase ends. The algorithm decides who gets served ads.
Facebook has different requirements depending on the optimization timeframe:
- Day: Facebook has a minimum requirement for an ad set of five optimized conversions. You should aim to get at least 10.
- Week: For a week, the number of conversions has to reach 50 for optimal optimization.
What Happens Once the Learning Phase Ends
After an ad set reaches 50 conversions, the learning phase ends. This means the Facebook algorithm has collected the necessary amount of data and you should start seeing stable performance.
If you’re using a different attribution model than the Facebook default (one-day post-view/28 days post-click) the learning phase can be longer. For example, for one-day post-click it’ll take longer to get 50 conversions.
In addition to the recommended number of conversions, be sure to not pause ads or make any drastic changes to the ad set, especially by editing creatives, updating targeting specs or the optimization timeframe, amending bids and budgets, and firing the pixel conditionally. Also, note that the oCPM algorithm needs at least 24 hours, with no changes at all, to effectively learn.
After the learning phase, you can start optimizing your ad sets to get the best performance. However, make sure that your budget/bid changes aren’t higher than 20%, as this will most likely restart the learning phase.
It’s important to gather enough of data for the algorithm to collect learnings and stabilize performance. So, be sure to allow the algorithm to reach the time thresholds before trying to optimize your campaigns.
How to Create and Optimize Shopping Campaigns at Scale
Most digital marketers with retail responsibilities are looking to run Shopping campaigns that consistently outperform their peers. In our Marin Software Retail Guide, we draw on our expertise managing global ad campaigns to unpack what you need to know to succeed with Shopping ads.
Shopping Ads Continue to Boom
Whether you’re starting out or you’re a seasoned pro, you’ll benefit from learning more about the fastest-growing ad type on the web. We cover several key ways to boost your Shopping campaign performance:
- Taking control of your product feed
- Establishing a campaign structure for seamless workflow
- Optimizing performance to deliver business results
Shopping Ads Versus Text Ads
Shopping ads are fundamentally different from text ads, because marketers must maintain dual visibility into both product feed and campaign performance. This speaks to the dependent relationship between feeds and campaigns—a change to one directly impacts the other.
With this complexity in mind, marketers must approach Shopping campaigns holistically to generate positive results. Your product feed is a great place to begin—our guide includes instructions for cleaning up your product feed and making sure it contains all the right elements for winning campaigns. From there, it details how to fine-tune your campaigns, optimization, advanced strategies like mobile and RSLA, and more.
To learn how to create successful Shopping ad campaigns download our Marin Software Retail Guide today.
Marketing on Facebook: How to Create Value and Relevance
Marketing on Facebook is as much an art as a science. Most importantly, it’s an opportunity to curate a marketing program for full-funnel success, using a variety of ad formats and optimization tools. Among the myriad tools available to advertisers, creating relevance is a key component in achieving optimal results for your budget.
In this first article in a three-part series, we’ll explore the basic concepts of the Facebook auction. In our last two posts, we’ll describe a framework advertisers can adopt to help create and execute A/B tests (ad studies) aiming to improve campaigns for relevancy—and in turn, drive better return on investment.
The Nuts and Bolts of the Facebook Auction
Basic Concepts
Facebook ads are paid messages from businesses that are written in their voice and help reach the people who matter most to them.[1] Ads (or orders) are placed into an auction within campaigns, and the auction works to create the most value for advertisers in response to objectives and goals. The auction also supports the best experience for people browsing on Facebook properties.
To start building and launching Facebook ads, you need:[2]
- Business Goal: campaign objective (Brand Awareness, App Installs, Product Catalog Sales, etc.)
- Audience Reach: core audiences (age, gender, etc.), custom audiences (first-party data)
- Budget: Lifetime and Daily budgets pace daily allocations differently
- Bid: target maximum amount advertisers are willing to pay per result
- Creatives: variations such as video ads, Instagram Stories ads, Carousel ads, etc.
Once you submit your ad, it goes to the ad auction, which helps get it to the right people. At a high level, Facebook describes the ad auction in these terms:
“We try to show your ads evenly throughout the day so that the people most valuable to you in your target audience are more likely to see them. The more relevant we predict an ad will be to a person, the less it should cost for the advertiser to show the ad to that person.” — Facebook Blueprint
Total Bid
When marketing on Facebook, every auction opportunity to serve an impression to someone is won or lost in response to the Total Bid—a combination of:
- The bid value + expected rate of action (results) (eCPM)
- Ad Relevance
The Total Bid applies across all campaign objectives using the formula:
An ad that's high quality and very relevant can beat an ad that has a higher bid, but is lower quality and has less relevance.
To put it another way, Ad Relevance determines winning ad impressions within a balance of two things:[3]
- Creating value for advertisers by helping them reach and get results from people in their target audiences
- Providing positive, relevant experiences for people using the Facebook family of apps and services
Putting It Together
We’ve covered several key concepts, which we can sum up in a few points:
- Create value for advertisers’ outcomes by helping them reach people who matter most in response to specific goals
- Positive and more relevant experiences are rewarded with higher ROI
And, the most important: an ad that's high quality and very relevant can beat an ad that has a higher bid, but is lower quality and has less relevance.
Determining the Total Value
As we’ve learned, the auction is supportive of producing the most results for advertisers, and ads that win in the auction and get shown deliver the highest total value—in other words, the highest Total Bid.
Total value isn't how much an advertiser is willing to pay us to show their ad—the bid alone doesn’t win the auction. It’s important to note that it’s a combination of three major factors:[4]
- Bid
- Estimated action rates
- Ad quality and relevance
High relevance and quality is as much an audience targeting challenge as it is an ad creative one.
For example, advertisers can cast a wide net and target nearly everyone on Facebook and Instagram. Not everyone wants what the advertiser is offering, however; as a result, Ad Relevance will likely be negatively impacted.
This negative impact can come from two possible sources:
- An algorithmic calculation, as Facebook reviews the advertisers goals vs. target audience and message, and then downgrades the ad because it’s not very relevant to targeted people
- Actions by people on Facebook signalling that they’re not interested in the ad served to them (e.g., hiding the ad or not engaging with the ad)
Creating a campaign is fairly simple, from a workflow perspective. Creating a relevant campaign, however, is what requires the most attention and care.
How to Check Your Work
To empower advertisers to success, our Customer Engagement teams encourage building and incorporating an A/B testing framework which scientifically validates audience, optimization actions, and ads—a Scope of Test.
When advertisers design and implement such a framework, the ROI results are typically positive and improved over the long term in comparison with advertisers that don’t take opportunities to A/B test and refine their strategies.
In our next article, we’ll lay out exactly how to conduct a proper Scope of Test. Stay tuned!
[1]Prepare to Advertise on Facebook
[2] Getting Started with Ads
[3]About the delivery system: Ad auctions
[4]About the delivery system: Ad auctions
Using UTM Tagging and Google Analytics Audience Lists for Cross-Channel Retargeting
Your site visitors are more likely to convert after being exposed to your brand on both Facebook and Google than those only exposed to one or the other. Ideally you’re already advertising across both channels, but what can you do to most effectively combine the targeting prowess and visual appeal of social marketing with the advantages of search intent?
In this post, we highlight how you can use Google Analytics UTM tagging in your Facebook advertising to go after specific audiences on Google.
Find potential customers through Facebook to target
on Google
Facebook advertising is great for reaching new potential customers who aren’t actively searching for your product, but when they are, you’ll want to ensure ad visibility in those search results now that they’re aware of your brand.
One way to do this is to first create a campaign specifically designed for new user acquisition and tag their URLs accordingly (remember to exclude previous visitors). Then, create a remarketing list in Google Analytics making sure the traffic source matches that label. Finally, apply this list as a Remarketing List for Search Ads (RLSA) in AdWords, using the target and bid option, for campaigns and/or ad groups comprised of broad, top-of-funnel keywords.
This tactic not only helps to ensure search ad visibility to users who’ve already been exposed to your brand through Facebook—by applying the RLSA specifically to upper-funnel keywords, it also serves your broad match keyword strategy by adding that layer of qualification criteria to improve their chances for success.
Get Facebook converters back into the funnel
through Google
A previous purchaser is usually easier to convert than a new customer. Here again, cross-channel advertisers can take advantage of this fact by employing UTM tagging to distinguish likely converters from their most successful Facebook ads, and target them more aggressively on search using RLSA.
The steps here are similar: After running ads on Facebook, identify your top converting ad set and tag its URLs with UTM tracking parameters to label them accordingly. Then, create a remarketing list in Google Analytics based on the traffic source matching that label. From there, you can use this list as an RLSA across your relevant Google campaigns to modify the bids for those users when they search for your product, to increase the likelihood of getting these highly qualified users to your site—especially now that they’re demonstrating intent.
In sum
Of course, these approaches offer just a glimpse into the capabilities that URL tagging and search retargeting provide that will hopefully inspire you in your cross-channel advertising efforts. Good luck and happy converting!
How to Determine the True Value of Your Marketing Channels
Attribution. It’s one of the most important topics of 2018; many advertisers are realizing how critical attribution is when it comes to evaluating multi-channel performance. It’s a bird’s-eye view of how online advertising—how each touch point—impacts customers and drives revenue for businesses.
Why Last-Click Won’t Cut It Anymore
The most common model used in the past was “last-click,” which gives credit to the last interaction a user had with the advertiser—for instance, the user searched an item of clothing, clicked an organic result, and then bought that item. It’s simple, and last-click data is usually free. But, you get what you pay for, which is to say an incomplete picture.
Let’s say the user took these steps:
- Searched for running shoes on Google, clicked a shopping ad to the advertiser’s site, then got distracted and abandoned cart
- Scrolled through Facebook and was served a retargeting ad but didn’t click
- Browsed a favorite blog and was served a remarketing ad but again, didn’t click
- Searched for the brand, clicked an organic search result, and finally purchased
In this situation, who gets the credit? Arguably, if steps 2 and 3 didn’t happen, the user might still have purchased running shoes, but they could’ve gone to a competitor. And there are plenty of scenarios that look a whole lot like that one—complicated and impossible to reconcile by giving one interaction 100% of the credit.
So you’re convinced you need more nuance in your attribution, right? Let’s talk about multi-touch (or multi-channel) attribution.
Your Multi-Touch Attribution Options
To set the attribution stage, here’s a quick breakdown of the most common models:
The first three are what we call single-source models; the latter four are multi-touch models. Regardless of which one you choose to go with, multi-touch models give a larger picture of each user’s path and funnel leading up to a final sale or lead.
Multi-Touch Works: A Quick Case Study
The Problem
One advertiser in the finance industry made the switch from single source to multi-touch in Q3 2017. This particular advertiser’s main KPI is ROAS, or return on ad spend, and they’d found tremendous success with what we traditionally consider higher-intent channels, like search. On search, they were consistently hitting their ROAS targets throughout 2017 and able to grow their investments to drive revenue growth for the business. However, they were struggling to hit their goals in channels like display.
The advertiser knew there was value in these channels, but the data just wasn’t there. ROAS for their display campaigns on Google was 50-70% lower than their search campaigns, and they had begun cutting budgets to reinvest in better-performing channels.
The Solution
By Q3 2017, this advertiser’s display monthly budget had dwindled from $60k to only $20k, with most of the spend going toward retargeting small segments of audiences that worked well. They tried prospecting campaigns, targeting similar audiences to their customers, but ROAS was so low that they quickly paused. Despite the small, segmented remarketing audiences performing well, ROAS wasn’t showing growth, and managing such a low spend on those campaigns wasn’t worth the investment or time. By the end of July, the advertiser decided to pause their display campaigns.
While their display campaigns were paused, the advertiser decided to roll out a multi-touch attribution model, specifically Time Decay, giving credit to all touch points within a 7-day lookback window, including view-throughs, which they used Sizmek tagging to track. This was in opposition to their first-click model, where they previously only gave credit to the first click within a 24-hour window. After being paused for a month, they re-launched their display campaigns with a test budget of $30k, evaluating performance with their new multi-touch model.
Results
Performance was strong out of the gate, with ROAS up nearly 200%, exceeding their expectations. They were able to finally see the impact of these more upper-funnel channels, open up their targeting to broader remarketing audiences, and even launch prospecting campaigns on display. By October 2017, the advertiser was able increase their monthly display budget 350% from what it had been pre-multi-touch, nearly $90k, while hitting their ROAS goals, which now matched search.
Through this experience, we learned that single-source attribution models fail to tell us how middle interactions contribute to the user journey. Even though these touch points might not be how users first find out about a brand, or even serve as the final interaction before a sale or lead, they help ensure that the brand or product is top of mind and sway the user towards completing the final step in their path. Though it can be a huge investment, it’s worth it to figure out the true value of channels like display or Facebook. Who knows: you could end up tripling your investment and revenue on a channel previously deemed ineffective.
Editor’s Note: Marin TruePath
Marin TruePath is a cross-channel measurement solution that provides you with actionable insights across the customer journey. With view-level conversion data that accounts for each device, marketers can finally make more informed budget allocation decisions with a complete picture of the customer journey.
For more information, reach out to your Marin Customer Success Manager or contact us.
6 Facebook Video Ad Plays to Improve Performance
Surprise, delight, and convert with video
Mobile applications like Snapchat, Facebook, and Instagram have transformed user behavior. Now, at any given moment, people have an always-on outlet for recording and publishing videos of life moments as they happen.
This means that video-based content has taken over online posts that were formerly text-only. To stay relevant, brands need to transition to a mobile-video-first content and paid media strategy for a few reasons:
- Video is more engaging and performs better than static images
- In comparison to TV commercials, online video ads are cheaper, highly targeted, and measurable
- Video is a proven driver of direct response, not just brand awareness
Here are six tactics to improve your Facebook ad campaign performance with video.
1. Use text with your visual assets
The use of text is a great way to hook a person into your video—they’re probably discovering your content while swiping through their mobile news feeds, along with other messages competing for attention.
Overlay compelling copy on your video using neat, easy-to-read typeface and simple text animation. Chances are high that the sound will be muted, so be sure that the first text animation appears within seconds of the ad reel. This will ensure that Facebook impressions at least some element of your message.
2. Keep it short
Brands are discovering that short and sweet videos are oftentimes just at effective, if not more so, than longer form, complicated videos. More videos are competing for more people’s attention, so your video should be no longer than 30 seconds to maintain interest. If you don’t have an in-house production team, use Facebook’s slideshow ads to easily add animation to your ad creative.
3. Get personal with video Facebook Messenger ads
Facebook Messenger ads allow you to expand the reach of your campaigns to nearly 1.3 billion users on the most widely used messaging app in the world. Early adopters of Messenger ads are seeing better click-through rates and engagement than email. That’s because Messenger ads allow you to have a more personalized, one-to-one conversation with your prospects and customers.
Video is a great way to add even more of a human touch to your Messenger ads. For example, you could create a 30-second video introduction to your brand. Once you’ve hooked your audience into the Messenger app, be sure to use Quick Replies to streamline your customers’ experience and encourage next steps, e.g., click here to learn more, find nearby store, tell me more, etc.
4. Plot your story to the customer journey
The key to success is a full-funnel strategy that combines video ads with custom audiences. In other words, your video content should vary based on where your targeted audience is in the funnel.
For example, you may want to use educational videos featuring gurus, thought leaders, or celebrities to drive awareness. Or, you may want to incorporate elements that encourage people to share your video, such as hashtags, competitions, or challenges. At the bottom stages of the funnel, a video with a compelling demo of your offering would be a great way to drive conversion.
5. Collapse the funnel with video
Historically, advertisers have considered video a top-of-funnel tactic. As more and more people watch videos on their mobile devices, many marketers are using video for direct response and brand awareness. New ad formats like Twitter Website Video Cards and Facebook Canvas Ads allow marketers to collapse the funnel, giving users a frictionless experience from discovery to conversion. Both of these new video ad formats provide an engaging way for brands to tell their story with links to landing pages to encourage a purchase.
6. Measure the influence video views have on conversion
The popularity of video means that post-view conversion data is more important than ever. Marketers need to understand the influence that views have on the path to purchase to make informed budget allocation decisions, and to move beyond last-click attribution. Most organizations are still using cookie-based analytics tracking, which doesn’t allow you to track across devices.
Additionally, publisher reporting (such as Facebook and Google) doesn’t provide insight into the influence each channel has to conversion, often leading to overcounting of conversions.
Marin Software is uniquely positioned to solve this attribution gap with TruePath, an innovative new measurement solution providing marketers with actionable cross-channel intelligence and unbiased conversion data. TruePath utilizes people-based tracking mechanisms to account for both post-click and view-level conversions as your customers interact with your brand across devices.
These insights are crucial for growth. A leading travel brand saw 158% increase in overall return on ad spend (ROAS) using TruePath. They were also able to establish a better understanding of how their campaigns on Google and Facebook can work together to optimize the path to purchase across each stage of the buyer journey.
To learn more about Marin TruePath, contact your Customer Success representative. Or, if you’re new to Marin, contact us to discuss with a member of our sales team.
The Winds of Change Are Chilling for Some in Ad Tech
Digital marketing has always been a fast-moving industry. Recent changes by the browser players are creating tectonic shifts that every advertiser and vendor should watch closely. For example, Apple announced Intelligent Tracking Prevention in the summer of 2017 and the ripples hit some ad-tech vendors hard, impacting even large vendors like Criteo.
Three key changes in the browser landscape will challenge the status quo:
- Apple Intelligent Tracking Prevention
- Google Parallel Tracking
- Chrome native ad blocking
Ironically, Apple’s tracking changes will actually help Google and Facebook, who continue to capture virtually all of the growth in digital ad spend. The harsh reality is that this growth will come at the expense of real-time bidding/programmatic display. The changes will directly challenge the core business model of many programmatic exchanges. (On a related note, I expect Amazon to grow and benefit from these trends in 2018 and beyond.)
If you’re not working with the larger publishers, trying to reach your target audience based purely on demographic and behavioral data will be more challenging than ever before. Advertisers should also be aware that accurate targeting and measurement across search, social, and programmatic display will be severely limited for redirect-based solutions (remember that redirects underpin the ad tech stack of many smaller publishers).
Read on for more details on these changes and Marin’s predictions about how they’ll impact the digital marketing landscape for the rest of 2018 and beyond.
Safari ITP
The Change:
At the WWDC last June, Apple announced that upcoming versions of all their operating systems would limit how long cookies would be stored. Dubbed “Intelligent Tracking Protection,” this change restricted all third-party access to cookies for purposes such as advertising and tracking to a one-day window. The cookie can still be referenced for login purposes for 30 days, but it’s no longer available for cross-site tracking. Safari is critical because although its desktop share is low, its presence on iPhone and iPad devices means that Safari’s U.S. mobile market share is over 50 percent—and skews younger and affluent as well.
The Impact:
Since traditional programmatic display is built on third-party cookies, ITP will make it harder for smaller publishers and many third-party ad tech providers to offer audience targeting capabilities based on prior web behavior or browsing patterns.
Does this mean the ads that follow you everywhere around the internet won’t be so persistent? Not really. This change isn’t a big deal for Facebook and Google in the long term, even on Safari; many users visit these sites directly multiple times within a 30-day window, where those publishers can set their own darn cookies! Advertisers will still be able to effectively retarget with Google and Facebook, both on owned and operated sites, and on third-party sites via the Google Display Network/Facebook Audience Network.
Marin has offered a first-party tracking solution for years which is compatible with Safari ITP already. Many of our customers use it, and it’s a fully tested and proven solution. We also work seamlessly with tracking from DoubleClick, Adobe, Sizmek, AppsFlyer, Kochava, Google, and Facebook. We also offer Marin TruePath, a cross-channel measurement solution that incorporates cross-device data while de-duping across publishers. To learn more about TruePath, contact us today.
Google Parallel Tracking (GPT)
The Change:
Today, clicking an ad results in at least two network round trips: the first to the publisher (let’s say Google or Facebook) to record the click, and the next to the landing page for the result. Redirect tracking such as doubleclick.net or xg4ken.com will incur additional round trips, slowing page loads even further. Google created a process called Google Parallel Tracking (GPT) to get visitors to landing pages more quickly once they click an ad. This may seem like a small improvement, but advertisers should be aware that a one-second delay in mobile page load can decrease conversions by up to 20 percent.
How does GPT work? It uses sendBeacon, a browser method for asynchronous payloads, to send click information to data collectors in parallel with loading the landing page. In practical terms, GPT sends users directly to your landing page after they click a search ad, rather than through a redirect. The browser processes URL tracking requests in the background, speeding up page load times and reducing mobile post-click abandonment. Check out Google’s full GPT announcement on Inside Adwords.
The Impact:
Because they are “sort-of” 1st party (the browser visits that domain) and “sort-of” 3rd party (it only visits for a few milliseconds and the user did not intentionally go to that domain), redirects have been a loophole for setting cookies as long as browsers have blocked 3rd party cookies. Like ITP, sendBeacon treats its payload once and for all based on the browser page, not the payload page. This means that cross-domain tracking and targeting is more limited for browsers that restrict third-party cookie-setting. This is a default setting with Safari but it’s also applicable to other browsers.
In combination with Apple’s ITP changes, relying on redirects for tracking has become increasingly difficult and detrimental to ad performance. Put simply, ad tech providers who rely on redirects for their tracking (such as DoubleClick Campaign Manager, for example), are using estimation rather than concrete data.
What You Can Do:
Parallel Tracking will be applied selectively at first and become standard (non-optional) over the first half of 2018. Safari owns about half of all mobile traffic in the U.S. and an even higher percentage among more affluent customers. DoubleClick is hampered by offering advertisers an “estimated” approach which says that it’ll project which Safari visitors actually converted. As an advertiser running sophisticated digital campaigns to reach customers, do you really want to guess at your conversions from iPhones, iPads, and Macs?
Here are steps you can take to mitigate the impact of GPT:
- Find a solution like Marin that offers a first-party approach.
- Ensure you can measure upstream Facebook views.
- Combine with publisher tracking to better measure multi-device journeys.
Chrome Native Ad Blocking
The Change:
Beginning on February 15th of this year, Google’s Chrome browser began blocking all ads on any website that don’t meet the standards defined by The Coalition for Better Ads. With a stated goal of making online ads better for everyone, the coalition has identified four desktop and eight mobile experiences that fall below their standards.
The Impact:
The goal is to encourage advertisers to present non-intrusive ads, thus creating a better experience for the end user and encouraging fewer ad blocker installations. These new ad standards are likely to promote a “flight to quality” where publishers will look to Google and Facebook to ensure that users have an appropriate ad experience.
What You Can Do:
As an advertiser, you can allocate more budget towards social media ad formats, like in-stream video or Instagram Stories. These ad types are designed to reach users in a meaningful way and are less likely to run afoul of the new ad standards. In addition, you can enjoy the clear benefit of driving higher user engagement for your campaigns.
The Key to a Unified Experience
All three of these changes are being made ostensibly with the goal to create a better experience for users. If successful, visitors will gain increased privacy, faster load times, and better ad experiences—all positive developments from the user’s perspective. However, these improvements will come at the expense of programmatic players in a fragmented ad tech industry.
As the industry struggles to adapt to these changes, Google and Facebook are well positioned to continue capturing additional share of digital ad spend. At the same time, these publishers offer powerful targeting capabilities that can drive performance for advertisers. That’s why it’s imperative that advertisers have a strategy and toolset that enables you to work across these channels. Your customers are moving between Google and Facebook, so make sure you have a team and marketing stack that gives you full visibility into the cross-channel customer journey.
Our team at Marin understands these changes and can talk with you about your particular cross-domain, sub-domain, or retargeting requirements. Contact us today if you’d like to talk about these tracking issues further.
How to Get Your Facebook Ads to Reach the People You Want to
If your Facebook ads aren’t quite reaching all the people you’re looking to influence, there are several things you can analyze to solve the problem. Here are a few tactics to ensure your ads are delivering the way you want them to.
Is your bid too low?
In order to run competitive campaigns in an increasingly competitive Facebook auction market, make sure you’re entering your ads in the auction with a realistic bid that reflects your CPA target. However, if the initial bid doesn’t get you delivery at some point, don’t be afraid to test higher values to get back on track. Facebook’s market is ever-changing, so be sure your bids keep pace.
Is audience overlap too high?
If ad sets in your ad account have a high overlap, Facebook will try its best to keep you from bidding against yourself in the auction. However, in order to do so one of the ad sets will miss out on impressions and subsequently suffer from under-delivery.
To combat this, try excluding the audiences from each other. If this result sin small audience sizes, try testing broader audiences (such as increased lookalike threshold) and apply the exclusions then.
Your promoted object may not have enough data
Generally, if you’re optimizing towards one of your pixel events, it’s recommended to be as specific with your promoted object as possible. By setting your promoted object, you’re telling Facebook what you want your final conversion to be so that Facebook can help you achieve it.
Some advertisers may struggle with generating enough conversions to feed Facebook’s algorithm to have the required delivery. Facebook recommends having 50 conversions per ad set per week so that the algorithm has enough data to optimize delivery.
If you’ve concluded that your promoted object doesn’t reach this target, try adjusting the promoted object to an event before the final conversion. The volumes there are likely to be considerably higher and therefore can improve delivery.
Are you using the right bidding type?
Facebook offers various bidding types to suit your objective, audience type, and audience size. While oCPM bidding can be very powerful, it’s not always the right bidding value. As a rule of thumb, we suggest using oCPM only with larger audiences whom you know relatively little about (i.e., prospecting audiences). Keep the audience size over 100k.
Consider seasonality
Sometimes seasons, holidays, and major retail days (such as Black Friday, Christmas, and Back to School) can increase the demand of ad space for particular verticals. If you’ve historically noticed increased competition during those periods, consider increasing your bidding to stay in the game.
Is your budget realistic?
Make sure your budget expectations are realistic for the audience size you’re targeting. For instance, if you’re retargeting a high-value custom audience of 500 users, you might not be able to spend the whole allocated budget. To set realistic audience targets for your team and your client, follow this simple calculation.
Audience size x 5 (frequency)
____________________________ = Anticipated budget
CPM that you’ve historically seen
for such small audiences
With this calculation, you’ll get the total number of impressions you’re able to deliver with a recommended maximum frequency of 5. By dividing it with your historical CPM for a similar audience, you’ll get the expected budget you’ll be able to spend.
Check the Relevance Score
Lastly, Facebook is always looking out for its audience as it’s aiming to provide a pleasant user experience. If your ads have received a lot of negative feedback (hint: the tiny x button in the top right corner of the ad) Facebook will scale down the delivery of the ad as it’s seeing that it’s not resonating well with the audience. So, always make sure to target the relevant audience with the best possible creative most likely to resonate with them.
Shop ‘til You Click: Creating Shopping Campaigns at Scale
“With Shopping, you can’t just bump bids up. Great Shopping results begin with feed design and optimization.” — Kevin Wetherby, Google Shopping Commercial Lead
According to Marin’s Q4 2017 benchmark report, Shopping ads saw 8% more clicks and 31% more click share from Q3 to Q4 2017. Given the strong adoption of Shopping campaigns by retailers, we believe this trend is only set to continue in 2018.
How do top advertisers run Shopping campaigns that consistently outperform their peers? With the industry constantly evolving and so many moving parts, how can retailers optimize their digital shopping campaigns to gain more clicks?
The Almighty Product Feed
Shopping success starts and ends with the product feed. The first step is verifying that all of your feed’s values are accurate and that the feed is structurally organized so you can confidently build campaigns that map to value groupings within the feed. In other words, you can only build product groups that correlate exactly with your feed—so, this is your top priority when it comes to Shopping.
There’s just no substitute for domain expertise when setting up Shopping campaigns; using a combination of quality feed setup and proven campaign structure will improve the likelihood of each product showing for related customer searches.
A Clean and Organized Shopping Campaign Structure
Once the foundation of your feed structure is set, the next step is establishing an effective campaign structure. This basic structure addresses two of the most common challenges when it comes to Shopping:
- Establishing a fluid optimization workflow for growth
- Increasing overall product visibility
The best way to ensure Shopping success is to use a multi-pronged approach. Heavy reliance on broad segments (All Products or Everything Else) leads to inefficiencies, while an overly granular structure (all item ID) can bottleneck volume and impede performance. The trick is to find the right mix through a combination of continuous testing and optimization.
Learn More in Our Shopping Webinar
There are even more great things you can do to ensure your Shopping campaigns are meeting and exceeding your revenue goals—feed optimization, scaling your campaigns, advanced strategies like mobile and RLSA, and more.
For in-depth tips on positioning your Shopping campaigns for success, join us on Thursday, February 22nd at 10 am PST (1 pm EST) for Shop ‘til You Click: Creating Shopping Campaigns at Scale. During this 60-minute webinar, we’ll offer expert advice that includes:
- Establishing a foundation for seamless workflow and campaign management
- Making the most of your product catalog and maximizing visibility
- Tips for success with Google Shopping and Facebook Dynamic Ads
Our Product Marketing Manager for Search, Patrick Hutchison, will present with Brian Roizen from Feedonomics and retail industry leader, Ginny Marvin, from Search Engine Land.
Speaker Bios
Ginny Marvin, Associate Editor, Search Engine Land
Ginny writes about paid online marketing topics including search, social, display and retargeting for Search Engine Land and Marketing Land. With more than 15 years of marketing experience, Ginny has held both in-house and agency management positions.
Brian Roizen, Co-founder and Chief Architect, Feedonomics
Brian oversees all of Feedonomics’ automation processes and loves taking the most annoying manual tasks and automating them. He has founded a series of AI-based websites reaching tens of millions of users per month and landing in the top 1,500 websites on the internet. His latest company, Feedonomics, helps automate feed-based advertising for some of the largest agencies, brands and retailers.
Patrick Hutchison, Product Marketing Manager, Marin Software
Patrick is a Product Marketing Manager at Marin Software, with a specialty in search. Previously, he held roles in Sales, and Professional and Client Services at Marin Software. He got his start in online advertising back in 2007 with Vizu (acquired by Nielsen).
3 Reasons Why Facebook Video Ads Are Better Than TV
It takes a significant investment of time and capital to plan, produce, and distribute TV commercials. On Facebook, the only real barrier to entry is testing video ads and acting on the lessons learned.
Additionally, the feedback loop and audience insights available on Facebook provide considerably more advantages over TV—marketers can take an agile approach to test and learn before scaling up.
There are a few other areas where Facebook excels over TV that marketers can benefit from: targeting, interactivity, and measurement. Because of Facebook’s social, mobile, digital framework—and massive reach of 2.1 billion people—these benefits just aren’t possible with media buys on TV. Let’s take a closer look at each one.
1. Targeting
Facebook’s wealth of psychographic, demographic, and first-party data matching options allow you to reach very precise audiences with your video content. With TV, media buyers are more limited to reaching people based on the types of shows they’re watching and time of day. Facebook Custom Audiences, in conjunction with your Video Ads, allow you to reach people who’ve interacted with your brand, online or offline, with personalized content.
2. Interactivity
To keep the conversation going with people who engaged with your video content, you can create audiences. Not so on TV. Although you can continue to buy commercials for specific channels to reach people based on the type of entertainment and channels they prefer, you can’t be 100% confident you’re reaching that exact person.
What this means—marketers on Facebook can take an interactive approach to the media planning and buying process by aligning video formats with a compelling narrative to drive conversion.
For example, using Facebook Video Ads, The Economist increased newspaper subscriptions across 24 countries, including the US and in the UK, by 66%. A key driver of success was Marin’s multi-objective media plans, allowing The Economist to implement a full-funnel strategy by re-engaging people who had interacted with their web properties, and video ads with bottom-of-funnel messaging to subscribe.
3. Measurement and Optimization
Video ads on Facebook provide marketers with instant insights, such as how long people watched your video, demographic insights of who interacted with your video, and ultimately whether or not your video impacted a conversion online or off.
In broadcast TV, Nielsen's ratings are the de facto performance measurement, capable of providing statistical conversion lift insights. However, the data insights available on Facebook are instantaneous, allowing marketers to take an agile test-and-learn approach to determine which videos are performing the best and then scale budget upwards. Gaining similar insights with TV would mean more time and higher costs.
Using video ads on Instagram, online casino LeoVegas saw a 44% decrease in cost per first time depositing player. Their key to success was implementing the carousel format with video ads to optimize to the game creative, with the highest level of engagement ultimately lowering overall costs.
Carousel ads automatically determine the most engaging video creative and then shift budget accordingly. For LeoVegas, this wouldn’t have been possible with a TV commercial. TV also couldn’t have measured how much revenue LeoVegas generated from people subscribing online.
Facebook Video: An Easy Win
With social video advertising on the rise and more people actually watching videos before making a purchase, the mandate’s clear—advertisers should incorporate video into their Facebook advertising. If you’d like to learn how Marin can help, contact us today.
Super Bowl Ads in 2018: A Sign of Things to Come?
Am I the only one who missed the Budweiser Clydesdales? It’s clear that they weren’t the only thing absent from yesterday’s TV spots—many ads were also missing meaning. Why was that?
Super Bowl spots are usually quite entertaining (hat tip to Tide)—and notoriously expensive. So, they naturally invite industry commentary and speculation. But, this year’s event struck me as uniquely peculiar compared to previous years, and perhaps a harbinger of things to come. In today’s blog post we unpack what we observed and what it means for online advertising.
TV Embraces Clickbait
Our investigation begins with a qualitative analysis of the content in the ads themselves. Overall, there was a stark pivot towards ads that were equal parts engrossing and bizarre, with the product reveal typically a holdout until the very last shot.
This speaks to a larger reordering of the media landscape, with digital channels usurping TV in the competition for high-quality attention from both viewers and advertisers.
Context
Attention Level
Strategy
Search and In-stream Ads
High
Persuasion + Information
Mobile Multi-tasking
Medium
Compete for attention—entertain on one screen, inform on another
TV
Low
Pure entertainment to capture attention
Are Internet Ads the New TV Ad?
Website builder Wix (NASDAQ: WIX) made waves in January by opting out of its Super Bowl spot altogether. This was noteworthy because they moved that budget online.
Granted, NBC executives weren’t about to take this affront lying down, and reportedly came to Wix at the last minute with a "great offer" to buy a spot in the Super Bowl (that’s code for “massive discount”).
You might wonder how Wix was able to produce a commercial that fast. The answer: they recycled a previously recorded ad featuring two YouTube stars, Rhett and Link.
This turn of events inadvertently showcased how divergent today’s internet ads and TV ads have become. If you missed it, go ahead and watch Wix’s Internet ad that aired on TV and contrast that to one of the made-for-TV Super Bowl ads—such as one of Tide’s commercials.
See the difference? The made-for-internet ad is heavy on information and persuasion, while the TV ad is just ... funny(?).
Source: HBR, “When People Pay Attention to TV Ads, and Why”
What About CPMs?
Despite this role reversal, TV CPMs still dominate. If my math is right, Super Bowl eCPMs were about $220 this year.
Let that sink in for a minute. $200+ for 1000 impressions.
In this context, Wix’s decision to yank its Super Bowl spot and invest it on the web makes more sense.
A quick look at Marin Software’s Global Advertising index reveals that video CPMs on channels like Facebook average $5-10, depending on industry and targeting.
That means Super Bowl ads cost up to 44 times more than video ads on Facebook--video ads that are being delivered in a high-attention context to a low-friction audience.
By low-friction, I mean: If my video ad suits your fancy, you can just click and buy. On the other hand, with Super Bowl ads, there isn’t a click to buy option. In fact, in today’s environment, one might argue Super Bowl ads are a lot like Tom Brady’s game-ending Hail Mary.
For TV’s sake, and the Clydesdales, we hope there’s a happier ending.
Retargeting Tips to Give You an Edge with the 2018 Holidays
The shopping season didn’t end with 2017. Take advantage of continued online purchase activity by giving your retargeting campaigns a boost, and set the stage for 2018 with our helpful tips.
Boost your budgets, serve more impressions
Because of the December 2017 web traffic boost, especially for those of you in e-commerce, additional traffic likely made you serve additional impressions and may have maxed out your budget. Hopefully, that didn’t happen and you didn’t miss out due to a limited budget.
Now, look at how your traffic historically performs over the first few months of the year, and increase the budget by that amount for each month. Note that January shoppers may have maxed out their credit cards in December, so look for ways to entice them with February and March deals.
Adjust your campaign bids
Nearly every advertiser, particularly those in business-to-consumer, increases their spend for the holiday season, so the competition is always fierce.
As the New Year settles in, this competition means it’s not uncommon to see your CPM costs go up during this time of year. To prepare, increase your CPM bids across your campaigns by 50-100% of the current average CPM cost for the campaign.
Bidding higher will give you a better chance of serving more ads by winning more auctions and therefore winning more impressions.
Stay ahead of the game by preparing at least 30 days in advance for Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, graduation season, wedding season, and summer holidays. Have your audiences built, your creative uploaded and approved, and schedule a quick call with your Customer Success Manager.
Holiday-themed content and landing pages
With every New Year comes new holidays! Valentine’s Day is right around the corner, one of the biggest first-quarter celebrations each year.
If you’ve got a big sale, free shipping, or you’re running Valentine’s Day (or even President’s Day) promotions—or whatever your very best offer is—put it front and center. Your shoppers are always hungry for deals so be sure to highlight your most enticing products, specials, sales, and content.
You may want to create an audience of only the people who visited your holiday landing pages. You can then target them with shorter lookback windows to cash in on their instinct to impulse-buy. If your creative looks like your landing pages, give yourself some extra Valentine’s Day heart candies because that’s a best practice.
Plan ahead
After the first three months in the cold, the next three bring April showers, May flowers, and June vacations. From spring cleaning to Easter to the great outdoors, start planning now for expected activity in the CPG, sporting goods, and other retail spaces.
Happy 2018 holidays!
All About Search Ad Extensions and How to Choose the Right Ones
This is a guest post from Charlotte Haab, Account Manager at
3Q Digital.
Google recently announced it would be sunsetting review extensions. While these have been around since 2013, they’re notoriously hard to get approved, and just generally clunky and unimpactful.
If you’re one of the few sad people to see them go, don’t worry! There are still a ton of other great extension options to bulk up your ads and bolster that ad rank. Like review extensions (R.I.P.) certain extension options complement certain business goals more than others. Keep reading to learn how to choose the right extensions for your goals.
Before I get into each extension type: an overview.
What are ad extensions?
Ad extensions are basically extra bits of information about your business or offering that you can tack onto your regular text ads. The general theory behind including as many ad extensions as possible is that they take up the most space on the SERP, and encourage users to click your ad over competitors. In fact, it’s proven that adding extensions can boost your CTR, which means a better ad rank and potentially even cheaper CPCs.
When do they show?
Ad extensions serve at the sole discretion of the search engine you’re running on. Search engines use a multitude of back-end factors to determine when, how, and in which combinations your ad extensions show in auction. That being said, the goal of their algorithms is to get the advertiser the best performance possible at no additional cost.
Choose the Right Extensions for Your Company Goals
Drive Converting Customers Onsite
If you’re like most online retailers you’re probably looking to get new users to your website with the end goal of driving conversions. With that in mind, you’ll want to be sure you have sitelinks, callouts, structured snippets, price extensions, and promotion extensions (when applicable).
- Sitelinks give you up to 6 of what basically equate to miniature ads made up of a 25-character linked headline, and two 35-character description lines. Use these to showcase additional value props, upsell/cross-sell related or complimentary products, or even link users to your information or contact pages.
- Callout extensions are exactly what they sound like. Use them to call out any unique or compelling factors about your product or business, such as free shipping, 24/7 customer support, sales, or virtually any value prop or descriptor you think is compelling. They’re 25 characters each and you can have as many as you want.
- Structured snippets give you a more specific way to showcase information to potential customers by using a pre-defined header and listing items. The header types to choose from include Amenities, Brands, Models, Services, Styles, and Types, among a handful of others. From there you just list what you’ve got! You can list up to 10 items per header, each with a 25-character limit.
- Price extensions are extremely important for ecommerce advertisers. While they’re unfortunately not available via feed, you can manually pick a few of your top sellers and list them with title, price and brief description—all of which are limited to 25 characters. The extensions should link straight to your product page.
- Promotion extensions are a great way to highlight a special deal or sale to encourage customers to convert. You can choose or forego a pre-defined header—they’ve got most holidays and the big online ecommerce days like Black Friday and Cyber Monday. You can fill out details about your promo including the discount or % off, and promo requirements such as qualifying order prices or codes. These should link to a relevant landing page with sale or promotion highlighted.
Drive Customers In-Store or Connect With Them Offline
If your business also includes brick-and-mortar or you want your customers to contact you offline, try adding location extensions, affiliate location extensions (if applicable), call or message extensions, and even callouts.
- A location extension is simply your company’s address. You can manually input it yourself if you have one location, or you can link up your Google My Business account to manually import multiple locations.
- Affiliate location extensions are the same thing, but instead highlight the addresses of affiliate stores that sell your product.
- Call extensions display in the form of a phone number or button that a user can click to contact your business.
- Message extensions allow customers who see your ad to directly send questions or comments via a direct text message.
- You can use callouts to drive users to a location by highlighting location-oriented ideas like proximity, in-store deals, or in-person or 24/7 support.
A Note On Automated Extensions
Since extensions can be a little manual, if you have a large, or categorically segmented account, implementation can be a bit of a bear. Fortunately Google offers a few automatic options that can save you some time by pulling relevant information right from your website.
Some commonly used automated extensions include calls/messaging, seller ratings (the small orange star ratings you see at the top of an ad), previous visits, and even dynamically generated versions of sitelinks and structured snippets. Automated extensions are compatible with manual extensions if you want to run both. If there are certain automated extensions you don't want to be running, be sure to opt out in your account level settings.
In summary, ad extensions are a unique, free option for bulking up your ads, showing off additional value props, encouraging more clicks and conversions, and ultimately improving your ad rank and overall performance. Now that you know how to determine which ad extensions are best for your unique business goals you can get to work applying them to your campaigns and driving results!
Shopping Ads, Audiences, CPMs, and More: Our Q4 2017 Digital Benchmark Report
In our Q4 2017 benchmark report, we show that advertisers are investing heavily in Google Shopping ads, which increased 31% in click share year over year (YoY). Our data reveals that audience utilization remains low at 24%, despite the clear benefits of combining audiences with keyword targeting.
Also, social CPMs increased 44% YoY, indicating that competition for consumer attention is heating up among advertisers.
To create our quarterly benchmark reports, we sample the Marin Global Online Advertising Index, composed of advertisers who invest billions of dollars in annualized ad spend on the Marin platform. We analyze data from around the world to create our report.
For Q4 2017, other key findings include:
- Get the Mobile Bargain While You Can: At 53% of spend, mobile CPCs increased 25% YoY. While mobile CPCs remain discounted relative to desktop CPCs, the gap is closing rapidly. Advertisers should seize the opportunity to court customers on their preferred medium by utilizing mobile bid adjustments, but be mindful that discounted CPCs on mobile will soon dissipate.
- Social Engagement Gets More Competitive: CPMs increased 44% YoY, indicating that competition for consumer attention is heating up on social channels. Yet, click-through rates have remained relatively flat YoY, which may indicate creative personalization isn’t keeping pace with consumer expectations.
- Too Many Ad Groups Have Too Few Creative: In Q4 2017, there was a slight shift (3%) away from creative-heavy ad groups to creative-light ad groups. Advertisers have an opportunity to benefit from Google’s machine learning technology underpinning the newly released “optimize” ad rotation setting.
- Audience Utilization Remains Low: Just 24% of advertisers have an audience KPI, despite the strong campaign performance advantage that combining audiences with keyword targeting provides.
To find out how your ad campaigns measure up to industry benchmarks across channels and devices, download our Q4 2017 Digital Benchmark Report. In addition to global trends, we explore the most compelling areas of digital marketing today, and identify tactical opportunities to help you drive better performance.
Does Facebook's New Direction Really Spell Gloom and Doom for Marketers?
This article first appeared in Marketing Dive.
Mark Zuckerberg's 2018 resolution and Facebook's subsequent News Feed change announcement are sending shockwaves through the digital advertising world.
As Zuckerberg wrote on his Facebook page on Jan. 4, "The world feels anxious and divided, and Facebook has a lot of work to do — whether it's protecting our community from abuse and hate, defending against interference by nation states or making sure that time spent on Facebook is time well spent." Stemming from this, Facebook will start to show users more posts from friends and family and fewer from publishers and brands.
Although some are already portending doom and gloom for marketers, the reality will be a little less dramatic. Here are a few things that the industry can expect now that Facebook is focusing on a more quality and secure user experience (which, subtly, will require advertisers to pay more to reach desired audiences):
1. Feeds will be less cluttered
The industry has already noticed a significant decline in organic reach for brand posts, and focusing on friends and family will only continue this trend. Advertisers will have to experiment, identify what works and refine their marketing strategy accordingly to find the perfect mix of paid and organic. Do event photos work better than press releases? What do your users want to see in their Facebook feed? Advertisers will need to maintain a clear view of what's driving people to their brand.
2. However, ads may stand out more in a cleaner feed
With more content coming from users, high-quality, professional ads may pop in a way they don't today. In this case, the increased incentives will force brands to look at their ad offerings to make them more appealing, more engaging, and better suited to a people-first platform.
Less clickbait and attention-grabbing headlines create an opportunity for a brand's messaging to rise above the noise of baby pictures and travel stories.
3. Video: red-hot in 2018
Video represents the biggest opportunity for continued Facebook ad growth, with its new and engaging paid media formats like in-stream video ads. And, expect to see the growth of Facebook Live and Facebook Watch for organically reaching audiences with paid content versus organic posts.
Video is not just red-hot due to its massive popularity. Sixty-four percent of users are more likely to buy a product online after watching a video, according to data from Animoto. With that statistic alone, it's definitely time for advertisers to ramp up their video advertising if they haven't already.
4. Facebook Messenger will keep the conversation going
After a somewhat wobbly start, Facebook Messenger now offers concrete advertising solutions. With over 1.6 billion users, it's the most popular mobile messaging app in the world, and Facebook's News Feed changes won't affect the emerging advertising opportunities that Messenger presents.
Note that a majority of Messenger users opt to have push notifications turned on. Messenger ads can additionally perform better than email since there's greater opportunity for personalization and engagement.
Beyond the opportunity to expand the reach of paid ads, now businesses can use Messenger to engage in 1:1 personalized conversations with prospects and customers. For example, someone looking for a flight could click a few automated responses, such as "Where are you going?," and interact with a brand for a top-notch customer experience.
In sum: not to fret
Facebook Messenger is just the beginning. Thinking across channels, Google provides a similar capability with click-to-message ads that prompt SMS interactions with customers. Plus, we can expect to see Facebook expand advertising into WhatsApp in the near future. Lastly, companies can add a Facebook Messenger plug-in to their website that can serve as a direct customer service and lead generation portal.
Hey, Snapchat, Amazon, and LinkedIn — your turn to make a move.
As with all changes in the industry, advertisers who stay flexible and roll with the changes will be best equipped to benefit from them. My advice? Stay aware, refine strategy as needed, test and test again, and keep exploring new and meaningful ways to attract customers.
The Top 10 Trends in Digital Advertising
Another year older and wiser, and the digital advertising industry shows few signs of slowing down. To understand the current landscape and get a sense of what lies ahead, we dug deep into industry data as well as the Marin Advertising Index—which represents billions of dollars of annual ad spend on the Marin platform.
I hope you enjoy the result—our list of 10 digital advertising trends that promise increasing opportunities and unique challenges for global advertisers.
1. Google + Facebook “Eat the World”
By the end of 2017, Google and Facebook owned 63 percent of the U.S. digital ad market and 54 percent of digital ad revenue worldwide, according to eMarketer. Nationally, Microsoft grew but remained a distant third place, claiming four percent of the total U.S. revenue share.
The numbers don’t lie—at the close of Q3 2017, Google reported ad revenues of $24B and Facebook reported $10B. All signs point to continued dominance of “the big two” in 2018.
The opportunity: Upping your cross-channel game stands to net you more customers and more revenue. Our own research indicates that brands who manage their search campaigns alongside social have almost 10% higher revenue per conversion.
2. Audience Targeting Takes the Stage
Digital marketers increasingly understand that a “one size fits all” approach doesn’t cut it anymore. They’re finding ways to go even further to meet customer expectations of greater personalization and map relevant ad campaigns to audience needs. Audience targeting fills this need.
Layering “Audiences” on top of keywords drives better results than using keywords alone. With this focus on more refined audience targeting, marketers will be able to more easily identify people interested in their products, set the right bidding rules, and create the right experience for millions of people. In fact, advertisers using Similar Audiences in conjunction with remarketing on Marin’s platform are seeing strong campaign results, including 40%+ increases in clicks and conversions.
The opportunity: Despite the advantage that combining audiences with keyword targeting provides, use of Audiences by advertisers remains low at just 21%. As a result, first movers stand to benefit the most. Add audiences to all campaigns, starting with “Bid Only” to measure without restricting your reach.
3. Press Play on Video Advertising
Cisco expects video will represent 80% of all internet traffic by 2019. Not only that—64% of users are more likely to buy a product online after watching a video, according to comScore.
YouTube has a secret weapon in the video battle: TrueView. TrueView has 93% ad viewability, plus you only pay when a viewer watches 30 seconds of your ad. As an advertiser, you can deliver big spikes in conversion with video advertising campaigns by evaluating your videos across a variety of variables, and then optimizing and adjust to meet your goals. We predict that TrueView will become a not-so-secret weapon for advertisers in 2018.
The opportunity: As video advertising continues to explode, marketers who master the game stand to drive substantial campaign performance improvements. Use YouTube and Facebook for your video ad campaigns to take advantage of 80%+ of the public’s attention in digital. In addition, be sure to use search intent to inform and drive your social ad campaigns. Then, measure, manage, and optimize to continuously improve results.
To see just a couple of examples of how businesses have crafted successful video ad campaigns, read our case studies and check out our recent webinar on video advertising tips:
- Meliá Revamps Performance on Facebook Thanks to Marin’s Cross-Channel Search Intent
- The Economist Uses Marin Social Multi-Objective Media Plans and Facebook Video Ads to Raise New Subscriptions by 66%
- Webinar: Press Play on Video Advertising
4. The (Amazon) Empire Strikes Back
Despite the dominance of Google and Facebook, Amazon is emerging as the next big player in digital advertising. But let’s be realistic here—Amazon’s current share of the digital ad market is just two percent nationally and less than one percent worldwide.
However—as The Wall Street Journal reported in December, GroupM’s parent agency, WPP, may increase its spending with Amazon by 50 percent this year from $200 million in 2017. This would help push total spending on Amazon ads by three of the world’s largest agencies to a collective $800 million a year.
As Amazon opens retail stores and ventures into the CPG space with its $13.7 billion purchase of Whole Foods, retail advertisers in particular will have to do double time to keep pace and take advantage. Additionally, Amazon’s self-service offering for retailers on Amazon Stores, with basic headline search ad capabilities, means retailers have yet another avenue for additional revenue and growth.
Consumers definitely now have a voice—and they’re using it to make purchases. Amazon’s Alexa digital assistant—inside millions of Echo virtual-assistant devices sold into U.S. homes—should give the company a powerful boost in an online advertising market driven by consumer targeting.
The opportunity: Keep an eye on Amazon. It remains to be seen whether it’s “too big to fail” or will be perceived as a competitive threat to retailers. In the meantime, advertisers would be wise to monitor Amazon’s evolution as an emerging powerhouse in the digital advertising space, and start to plan for future ad spend on that platform.
5. The “Next Big Thing” in Ad Tech
Voice search has taken the consumer market by storm and the numbers are staggering. Amazon has sold over 20 million Echo units, with Google Home gaining ground and gobbling up to 24% of market share since it hit the scene in 2015.
In addition to voice search, smart hubs and visual search will become firmly established in 2018. Innovative products like Google Lens, Pinterest Lens, and Amazon’s CamFind allow consumers to take a picture of an item and then search for that product to purchase online.
The opportunity: As voice and visual search technology matures, so will the advertising opportunities. Adapt to increased voice and visual search volumes and make sure your team is understands these technologies. A single-answer voice response is vastly different from the familiar world of typed search queries with multiple ranked results. Stay informed, knowledgeable, and ready to be an early adopter.
6. Changing Channels on Attribution
Because up to 90% of sales still happen in-store, marketers increasingly want to understand the full path to conversion and the impact of digital touch points to offline sales. To this end, the industry’s quickly moving away from the limitations of last-click attribution—rife with its inaccuracy, double-counted conversions, and poor reflection of the customer journey across devices and platforms. Advertisers are increasingly embracing a holistic view of measurement.
The opportunity: Unify attribution across channels. Assign reasonable and accurate value to all touch points along the customer journey to gain a full picture of performance and make better budgeting decisions to drive profitable return on ad spend (ROAS).
7. Offline Measurement Gets Connected
Speaking of offline sales—consumers continue to turn to mobile for all aspects of the shopping experience, whether it’s searching for products, finding the nearest retail location, or consulting their mobile device in-store. In other words, when it comes to mobile, shoppers are most often looking—and searching—to buy.
Additionally, it’s important to note that Google has access to 70% of all US debit and credit card transactions in-store through partnerships with companies that track that information. That’s a whole lotta data! To determine when digital ads contribute to an offline purchase, marketers will have to match this user data with other identifying information from merchants and credit/debit card issuers.
The opportunity: By matching ad clicks with in-store transaction data, Google has a treasure trove of information for merchants about which digital ads translate into physical store sales.
8. The Supreme Court of Privacy
Advertising is an industry in the crosshairs of consumer privacy, and the past several years have seen a substantial shift in attitudes towards protecting user identity and online activities. Many people are no longer content to share personally identifiable information (PII) without providing publishers with explicit permission and defining strict rules of engagement. Coupled with fresh legislation such as GDPR, many advertisers find themselves seeking practical advice on what marketing activities are permitted or prohibited.
The opportunity: GDPR will have a broad impact on all advertisers (not just those based in the EU), but programmatic ads will be most affected. Advertisers who adapt to GDPR will likely be forced to emphasize less ad volume and much higher quality data. Advertisers will be required to show far greater transparency around their data collection and targeting practices, but this presents an opportunity to build a much greater level of trust (and engagement) with users in the longer term.
9. Is Ad Blocking an Immovable Object?
Recent estimates from eMarketer predicted that over a quarter of US internet users would block ads in 2018, up from just under 16% in 2014. Also, research from PageFair shows that people are much more likely to leave your site if you ask them to disable ad blockers. Not only are ad blockers a reality on US desktop and mobile, but they’re also on the rise in developing countries.
This all means, of course, that ad blockers will continue to pose a significant threat to ad-funded business models due to their rising popularity with users globally.
What’s an advertiser to do? Large publishers have little incentive to intervene as their business booms, but small publishers still struggle with these ad blocker restrictions. In particular, recent Apple/Safari and Google/Chrome moves on privacy impact smaller publishers, given the potentially deadly impact of ad blockers on already limited revenue streams.
The opportunity: Despite the seeming doom and gloom surrounding ad blocker adoption, advertisers still have options to run successful campaigns. Be sure to focus on a positive user experience, so that users won’t be prompted to block your ads in the first place. Make your ads relevant and enjoyable. It’s essential that you deliver meaningful ads that don’t annoy users. Also, be sure to get fewer, higher quality ads via opt-in mechanisms, as advertisers will pay higher CPCs on these ads.
10. Messenger Ads: There’s an App for That
Messenger Ads represent one of the most exciting channels to come online as of late—although still a nascent offering, it’s being touted as “the new email” by some in the advertising industry. Despite its relatively recent arrival on the scene, Messenger itself now has 1.3 billion monthly users, up from 1 billion in July 2016. That’s the same count as Facebook’s other chat product, WhatsApp, showing massive advertising potential.
The opportunity: Advertisers are already reporting CTRs north of 50% (which is basically unheard of these days). Perhaps it'll decline with time, but Messenger Ads promise a huge opportunity for advertisers who jump on the bandwagon in 2018. Be sure to hop on.
New Year's Resolutions for the Savvy Social Marketer
It’s still January, so there’s plenty of time to keep your New Year’s resolutions. While most of us are trying to stick to an earnest regimen of daily gym visits (and actually going this year!), eating healthy, and having a well-balanced lifestyle, social marketers in particular are making an industry-friendly list of our 2018 ambitions.
Let’s take a step back and organize our strategy for getting ahead in advertising this year.
Plan More
Where do you want to take your social media strategy in 2018? The first step is looking at the current state of your campaigns. Are you meeting goals and capturing the right measures of success? Are you happy with your growth rate or can you accomplish even more? If you had all the resources you needed, what would you do to create a killer strategy?
Make a list of all the goals and objectives you want to achieve. This will be the basis of your plan and help guide you towards favorable outcomes. Be sure your goals are SMART:
- Specific
- Measurable
- Achievable
- Relevant
- Time-bound
Learn from Last Year’s Successes and Failures
As Thomas Edison famously stated, “I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work.” Learning means trial and error—we all fail at some stage or another and it's what you do with that failure that strengthens your efforts going forward.
Listen to constructive feedback and ask yourself, “Why? How did that happen?” Don’t be afraid to ask for feedback in the first place. You’ll challenge your team’s abilities and shake up the status quo, which will increase the chances of discovering even better ways of doing business.
“Move fast and break things. Unless you are breaking stuff, you are not moving fast enough.”
No, this isn’t a grade-school dare. It’s sound advice from Mark Zuckerberg, who used this mantra to build a trillion-dollar social empire. Your failure just may be the key to your success! Use your own version of “creative destruction” to rethink, revamp, and revive any deficient or lackluster parts of your social ad campaigns.
Explore ways to take advantage of new and evolving advertising technologies. Also take stock of your successes and what's working, then build on these. Set new growth targets and determine precise tactics for how you’ll achieve them.
Remember, 3M’s failed adhesive evolved into its flagship and ubiquitous product, the Post-it!
Think Mobile-First
According to Facebook, mobile is now driving over half of all campaign conversions. If you’re not including mobile as part of your existing strategies, you’re missing out on a huge potential revenue stream.
With this trend expected to expand even more this year, we highly recommend a mobile-first strategy. Build out your campaigns with mobile in mind rather than having to adapt later.
Make Time for Video
Video ads are a powerful ad unit for generating engagement. Facebook has seen phenomenal growth in video usage over the past year—it’s now serving a staggering 8 billion video views a day. Video usage has exploded astronomically, with no signs of slowing down.
If you have no idea where to start, check out our previous article detailing 7 Tips for a Killer Video Advertising Strategy. And, to see just a few examples of how businesses have crafted successful video ad campaigns, read our case studies and check out our recent webinar on video advertising tips:
- Meliá Revamps Performance on Facebook Thanks to Marin’s Cross-Channel Search Intent
- The Economist Uses Marin Social Multi-Objective Media Plans and Facebook Video Ads to Raise New Subscriptions by 66%
- Webinar: Press Play on Video Advertising
Explore Multi-Touch Attribution
It’s now becoming more important than ever to understand each of the touch points in your customer’s journey. It often takes multiple touches with a brand before a consumer takes action, so it’s key for us marketers to plot this path to conversion accurately.
Resolve to make 2018 your Year of Attribution. You’ll gain valuable insights into your social ad campaigns, achieve a full picture of performance, and enable better budgeting decisions to drive profitable return on ad spend.
Optimize Placements
Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter have a host of placements across their platforms, so don’t limit your reach. Effectively drive action from your audience by choosing to set up placement-optimized campaigns whenever possible. Test various iterations of your placement setup—if you didn’t achieve your desired outcome the first time around, explore and analyze the reasons and refine to ensure success. Read our article on the benefits of placement optimization and how to implement it into your campaigns.
Happy New Year and good luck with your resolutions!
4 Important Things to Know About AdWords Parallel Tracking
Since the inception of AdWords and paid media tracking, Google has quickly sent users to an interim landing page, then quickly redirected to the intended page. All this occurs very quickly and is transparent to many users. We’ll call this a linear redirect tracking pattern. With recent browser support and updates, there is now the ability to go directly to the intended landing page, but still track clicks on paid ads. This is called parallel tracking, since there are two events happening simultaneously.
Here are things you should know about this update.
1. Why change?
Google recently announced that parallel tracking is rolling out. Google cites delays of “hundreds of milliseconds” that result in the current linear tracking method. This delay is literally the same as the blink of an eye but Google is adamant that it can negatively impact campaign performance, especially on mobile devices.
2. What’s the impact?
Mobile pages, especially on slower networks, will see the greatest benefit from parallel tracking. This assumes that the mobile user has an updated browser version that’s compatible with parallel tracking (more technical info below, for those interested). Some desktop users (again those on very slow networks) will see a slight improvement. However, the majority of desktop users will see almost no difference.
From a third party tracking perspective, Google has warned us that “Providers will need to make changes to their platform that could take several months to complete, so it's important to get started early. We're also working closely with key providers to help make the transition as easy as possible for all advertisers.” However, keep in mind that it’s in Google’s best interest to work with third party providers, since it will encourage greater measurement and apparently improved campaign performance.
3. Ok, so how does it work?
This is one of those situations most easily demonstrated with a diagram.
Current (linear redirect) model
Google SERP > redirected page > landing page
Parallel model
4. Should I be concerned?
Not really. Parallel tracking is already rolling out as an opt-in tracking method. Additionally, not all browsers support parallel tracking, and Google has already said that it’ll default to traditional linear redirect tracking for browsers that aren’t compatible. The only concern that marketers should have is for any third party systems that may be using their own redirect methods.
Bonus: Technical info
AdWords is taking advantage of a relatively new feature in browsers called navigator.sendBeacon. Navigator is simply a metadata object that contains data like your browser version, operating system, device type, language, and more. This is how services like Google Analytics gets device, language, viewport info, etc. sendBeacon is something that allows for background sending of network responses.
The visible effect is to land directly on the intended URL, but in the background, the redirect URLs and network calls are occurring. Instead of waiting for step 1 to complete before step 2 starting, Google skips to the last step, while executing steps 2-4 in another thread. This is directly analogous to synchronous vs. asynchronous tag loading.
Since the vast majority of devices are capable of multiple threads (you can think of these as having multiple active tabs on a browser), this is a more efficient way of handling the transmission of multiple network responses. The only thing to note is that sendBeacon doesn’t allow nonsecure protocol, as per w3 standards. Only HTTPS URLs will transmit in parallel.
A Comprehensive Facebook Campaign Structure Gap Analysis
Facebook is constantly introducing new features to help advertisers scale activity. Testing new stuff is exciting, and can often distract us from our main tasks. That said, a best practice is to allocate 70% of your budget to core campaigns and 30% to testing new features.
What steps should you take to ensure your core campaigns perform efficiently, and that your campaign structure’s up to date? Don’t be afraid to shake things up and re-structure your campaigns to identify more opportunities and improve results.
Before You Jump In
Before you re-structure anything, it’s crucial to analyze your current core activity—in other words, a gap analysis. This happens in three stages:
- Assess your current campaign structure and note observations.
- Identify opportunities and action items.
- Design and implement the campaign restructure.
Current Campaign Structure and Observations
Depending on the size of your account, you can either analyze all of your campaigns or concentrate on the top performers. In either case, follow the steps below to complete an initial assessment of your campaign structure. The campaign elements we’re using are just an example—tailor the specifics for your business.
- Mirror the campaign structure to an Excel table. This will give you a full view of your setup. Include:
- Campaign name
- Ad set – Audience Inclusion
- Ad set – Audience Exclusion
- Ad set – Age
- Ad set – Gender
- Ad set – Placement
- Any other ad set splits, e.g., country, language, connections, etc.
- Number of ads inside the ad set
- Budget per ad set
- Analyze the amount of ad sets and the audience splits. You can use Facebook’s overlap feature to identify highly overlapping audiences.
- Analyze Exclusions to make sure you’re using smart exclusions, and at the same time not excluding too granularly for ad sets to have limited size (and thus bad delivery). Read more about this in our article on lookalike audiences.
- Check that your age and gender splits are consistent and broad. Facebook algorithms are more efficient with broader demographic targeting.
- Make sure you’re using consistent placements and making the most of Facebook algorithms.
- Ensure you’re not running too many ads, and that the number of creatives is consistent.
- Make sure you have enough budget allocated to the ad. This is important. There should be enough budget to deliver at least one main KPI per day.
In our example there are a couple of observations:
Our Main KPI is Purchase and goal CPA is €35.
- Yellow: The campaign has 25 ad sets with lookalike audiences that have a high overlap percentage. This means the splits are too granular and are less efficient.
- Tan: In most cases, you should use smart exclusions. However, since we’re targeting highly overlapped audiences, these exclusions aren’t sufficient to reduce overlap and excluding more audiences will result in very small audience sizes.
- Blue: Some ad sets have reduced age ranges for no particular reason. Also, since our product is suitable for both genders, there’s no reason to split them.
- Light green: Placement optimization is common and can be rolled out to all ad sets. Read more about placement optimization best practices.
- Gray: Currently, there are too many ads within each ad set and it looks like the number isn’t consistent. Facebook will push the best performing ad, so not all ads in the set will have a chance to perform. It’s better to reduce the amount of ads to two to four to avoid wasting budget.
- Dark green: Since we’re running a lot of ads, our budgets are very limited—some ad sets have enough budget enough for one conversion. This is fine, but our budget should be higher to scale activity.
Opportunities and Action Plan
As you’re noting observations, you’ll likely identify a few opportunities to improve your account structure. Let’s put our knowledge into action.
- Reduce the number of limitations by reducing the amount of targeted segments. Run main lookalike audiences with smart exclusions. Once the initial segments are exhausted, we’ll add other thresholds. This will allow for audience and campaign rotation.
- Expand reach by targeting broad consistent demographics and avoid splits. Same for placements, as this will allow Facebook’s algorithm to optimize your ads more efficiently.
- Reducing the number of ads will prevent user fatigue, and once these ads are exhausted, add other elements to keep things fresh. You’ll spend your budget more efficiently here, too, and you’ll be able to identify the best performing creative you can use as a template for the future campaigns.
Proposed Campaign Restructuring
The final and easiest step is based on our action points. Here, we create our new campaign structure.
Management and optimization should be easy, whether manual or automated. Allow more budget for your ads to deliver and push the best performing ones.
When your campaign starts to experience fatigue, pause underperforming ads and let your top performers continue delivering results. Create a campaign with new segments to ensure you have the right volume.
Your own campaign structure and goals may differ from our example. Look at your strategy from a full-funnel perspective, and implement the most efficient campaign structure for your particular needs. If you’re a Marin customer and need help, contact your account representative. They’ll be able to assist with a full gap analysis and provide the best recommendations for your campaign restructure.
Rethinking the Ad Tech Industry
Clutch Magazine sat down with Chris Lien, Marin Software CEO and Founder, to discuss how ad tech providers can rebound and regain advertiser trust.
Confidence in the ad tech industry is rocky, and its reputation with brands is at a crossroads. Over the course of 2017 industry critics concluded that there might be too much fraud and too little quality. Christopher Lien, Founder and CEO of Marin Software, spoke with Clutch about how ad tech providers can regain advertiser trust.
In Germany, it’s very much about viewability, safety, and transparency in digital marketing. Does ad tech have a trust issue? Are different countries having different discussions (such as US, UK, FR, Asia)?
Lien: Safety and transparency are top-of-mind for most digital marketers. Advertisers want to know that they’re receiving value and performance for their advertising investments. Ad tech hasn’t always done a good job in terms of its business practices, and this does create a trust issue. Also, there’s a bias to "trust the technology" that can lead to mistakes such as ads running alongside content that’s not brand-safe.
I think the various issues raised over the past year by advertisers, plus some of the high-profile mistakes, have led ad tech companies and publishers to take a good look at their business practices and how they can do better for their advertisers (and the consumer). Marin has always been an online advertising management platform that’s transparent and focused on the success of the advertiser.
Marin's customers always know where their ads are running, what they’re paying for those ads, and what they’re paying for technology to measure, manage, and optimize those advertising placements. More of the industry is now embracing transparency. But, there are many players in the ad tech industry (and publishers) who are comfortable making money off of more aggressive business practices that we at Marin view as not in the interest of advertisers and consumers.
Psychology defines elements of trust-building as openness, reliability, and integrity. These traits are also often considered relationship-building characteristics. Where does our industry have problems regarding these traits? For example, with integrity, what about the conflict of interest when publishers are offering a bidding tool or an attribution tool at the same time? Also, who owns the data?
Lien: To be fair to the ad tech industry, there are many advertisers who just want to provide a budget to a provider and don't want to take the time to understand what they’re buying from that provider. These opaque, managed services providers then often take advantage of their advertising customers, as they’re not pushed to provide transparency and performance details.
Also, when advertisers use the publishers’ own tools to purchase media on that publisher, there’s an inherent conflict of interest in monitoring where the dollars are being spent on media on that publisher.
What needs to happen, and what do the players need to do to win back trust and confidence from advertisers? What would really make a difference?
Lien: I don't see the current situation as one where all trust has been lost in the ad tech industry ad tech providers, publishers, and advertisers. I do see where we now have more of a dialogue on how the industry builds or rebuilds trust based on transparency and performance. Advertisers need to demand more from their publishers and their ad tech partners, and the publishers and ad tech partners need to do more to act in the interests of the advertisers.
I also believe calling out bad actors in the ad tech industry is a good step, too, and highlighting cases where advertisers have been taken advantage of by low-quality providers.
When it comes to trust, does it matter if the provider is based locally or globally?
Lien: I don't think it matters where the company is based as long as they’re high-quality, focused on delivering performance, and acting in the best interests of their customers, the advertisers. I do think, understandably, that there’s a bias in Germany to want to contract with other German providers. At the same time, Germany's ad tech industry is smaller than the global industry, so German advertisers should take advantage of contracting with best-in-class partners who often aren’t German companies. Non-German companies, of course, have to be compliant with all local laws and regulations.
Marin Software is a US company that’s been very active in Germany for several years. Are the Germans particularly difficult? Is it especially difficult to gain trust of German advertisers?
Lien: Germans are demanding customers, but Marin welcomes their demands. German advertisers generally want to understand the technology they’re buying, how it works, and what the performance is. Those are good signs of an educated advertiser. Additionally, there are unique rules to do business in Germany due to the EU’s regulations on data protection, privacy, and server location. Marin is compliant with all of these regulations and counts among our customers many of Germany's leading companies, including Volkswagen and companies within the Otto Group, for example.
Digital Advertising 2020—what can we expect?
Lien: Digital advertising in 2020 will be quite similar to digital advertising in 2017. This is a world where more and more consumers are spending time online and therefore advertising dollars will continue to flow into online channels, principally search and social.
Access to the internet via different devices, with mobile gaining an ever larger share, will be commonplace. Advertisers will seek to leverage data to deliver a personalized advertisement to each consumer based on various signals and knowledge of that particular person on some anonymized, privacy-compliant basis.
We also know that many goods and services are marketed over the course of a consumer journey beginning with creating awareness, providing information to spark intent, and then moving to fulfill this intent and to ultimately re-engage the customer after the purchase. Marketers will leverage technology platforms such as Marin’s to deliver the right message at the right time on the right device.
I think the biggest changes we’ll see by 2020 will be the availability of ever-faster mobile internet access speeds, in particular 5G, which will make the ability to consume video and rich media even easier. Large video files will be able to stream in real time, which will enable more immediate, immersive, and customizable advertising experiences. I also believe we'll see, by 2020, adoption of augmented and virtual reality for digital advertising opportunities enabled by advances in technology and access speeds.
Finally, we’re now seeing the early stages of voice-activated and chatbot-driven user experiences, and I believe by 2020 both of these activities will be very mainstream for digital advertisers. So, 2020 will look a lot like 2017 in many ways, but there also will be many exciting advances that I expect will be in pretty wide use to create engaging digital advertising experiences for consumers.
What’s your vision for the Marin Software platform?
Our vision for Marin is to provide the world's leading brands with the best-in-class cross-channel, independent, and open performance advertising platform. When we look at how consumers become customers on the internet, about 85% of their time is spent between the properties of Google and Facebook across a variety of devices including desktop, laptop, tablets, and smartphones.
Leading marketers need a platform that enables them to coordinate the management of these two walled gardens to acquire customers and to drive revenue. Marin's platform enables advertisers and their agencies to measure, manage, and optimize their online advertising investments to drive financial performance, time savings, and better business decisions. To do this, advertisers need an open platform, one that’s independent from any publisher, to be their digital ally as they look to make sense of the complexity, scale, and fragmentation of the digital landscape. As part of this, advertisers will look to leverage their first party data to better target their prospects and customers, as well as using second and third party data.
Marin’s open architecture and our ability to support the world’s largest brands enable us to partner with advertisers to help them achieve their marketing objectives. Digital advertising and how advertisers leverage it to drive revenue and to acquire customers is still at a very early stage. We at Marin are excited to work with our customers to help them run better digital advertising programs that deliver better business results.
Thank you for the interview, Mr. Lien.
This interview first appeared in German, in Clutch Magazine. Interview by Cara Hönkhaus.
Understanding Conversion Differences Between Google Analytics, Facebook, and AdWords
This is a guest post from Ashley Aptt, Account Director at 3Q Digital.
If you’re an advertiser and you’ve ever wondered why conversion metrics are different in AdWords and Facebook versus Google Analytics, you’re not alone. As a user goes through the purchase process, it’s likely that they’ll interact with the same brand numerous times before converting. Assuming there are no tracking issues on your site, these reporting differences can be summed up in one word: attribution.
What Is Attribution?
Attribution is the science of understanding which media campaigns are driving conversions for your business. It’s very common to see data discrepancies in Google Analytics compared to media platforms, and it all boils down to differences in attribution models.
Here’s a common path a customer may take along the purchase journey with one company. We’ll return to this scenario throughout the rest of this article.
- Day 1: The user starts their search and clicks an AdWords ad
- Day 2: The user sees a Facebook ad and clicks it
- Day 2: The user clicks another AdWords ad
- Day 3: The user later converts on a Google organic listing
In the use case above, Google Analytics would assign conversion credit to the Google organic listing, Google AdWords would take credit for the conversion, and Facebook would also take credit for the conversion. As you can see, both AdWords and Facebook take credit, but Google Analytics only considers the organic listing.
Let’s dive into the attribution differences between these platforms in greater detail.
Understanding the Google Analytics Attribution Model
Many platforms use a last-click attribution model. This means that the last ad or keyword that led to a conversion gets credit. Google AdWords, for example, uses a last-click attribution model (by default). So, when a user clicks two paid search ads, AdWords assigns conversion credit to the last ad that was clicked before the conversion event occurred.
Google Analytics also uses a last-click attribution model. But an important differentiator is that Google Analytics takes all channels into account. So, in the scenario above, even though Google AdWords is applying conversion credit to the last AdWords ad that was clicked, Google Analytics isn’t giving Google AdWords any credit for this conversion. Google Analytics attributes all conversion credit to the Google organic listing. This is a key difference in understanding why Google Analytics conversion data can differ greatly compared to media platforms.
How Does Time Impact Conversion Data Discrepancies?
Another key differentiator in how Google Analytics records conversions in comparison to many media platforms is that Google Analytics assigns conversion credit on the day of the conversion, whereas media platforms typically assign conversion credit on the day of the click.
Again, looking at the example above, Google Analytics records the conversion on Day 3 (the day of the purchase). Conversely, Facebook and AdWords retroactively assign conversion back to
Day 2 (the day each of these platforms received their last click).
Depending on your business, this difference can be meaningful, especially if your purchase cycle is longer or if you have an event that drives a lot of conversions on a given day.
More Ways Facebook Attribution Is Different from Google Analytics
In addition to the differences with last-click models and the timing of conversion reporting, a few additional elements make Facebook conversion tracking unique.
First, Facebook can track impression-based conversions. The default attribution window for Facebook is 28 days post-click and one day post-view. This means that Facebook counts a conversion even if a user never clicked a Facebook ad. This is a huge difference in reporting, because Google Analytics doesn’t have the ability to track impression-based conversions.
Another difference between Facebook and Google Analytics is that Facebook has the unique ability to track users from one device to another (if the user is signed-in on all their devices). This means that Facebook can track cross-device conversions. Google Analytics only uses cookies to track users, so it doesn’t have the ability to track cross-device conversions.
Conclusion
There are several reasons why conversion data in Google Analytics doesn’t match conversion data that media platforms provide. Neither method is right or wrong, but it’s important to understand what the attribution differences are, because these differences can cause a huge discrepancy in the data that you see reported in each platform, especially in Facebook.
If you don’t feel comfortable using Google Analytics data as the point of truth because it greatly under-values Facebook, but you also don’t like to use the Facebook data because it’s too lenient with the conversion data it records, then using a multi-touch attribution platform is likely your best option. Multi-touch attribution platforms can look at the various touchpoints in a user’s purchaser cycle and determine a better way to assign conversion credit to each platform.
Marin's TruePath
Want one place to track all your channel activity, including every touchpoint that led to a conversion? This is where Marin TruePath comes in—a lightweight, cross-device, cross-channel measurement solution. TruePath delivers user journey reports that properly attribute revenue to all touchpoints—including search, social, display, organic traffic, and more. To learn about TruePath, contact Marin today.
How Audience Targeting Helps Refine Advertising Campaigns
Audience targeting gives marketers a powerful tool to tailor their message and build highly relevant ad campaigns for different customer segments. Layering “Audiences” on top of keywords drives better results than using keywords alone.
Consider a few results:
- eharmony averaged 220% ROI after adopting an advertising strategy based on personalization and audience segments.
- Ancestry’s smart audience utilization continues to increase its ROI and drive high-performance remarketing campaigns.
- MoneySuperMarket discovered that delivering the right message at the right time was key to keeping customers happy and retaining their business.
Breaking Down Barriers to Success
Most marketers underutilize audience products today. In our conversations, we hear a number of recurring themes when we explore why this is happening.
Many advertisers say that “We don’t have a retargeting pixel installed” or “I don’t know where to start or how to test audiences.” The good news: After you set a baseline with Google Analytics, audience targeting is easy to implement and test to find the best configuration for your organization.
Start Your Audience Targeting Efforts Today
To get started with audience targeting and ensure the largest yields from your advertising budgets, download our free guide, Finding Your Ideal Audience: Advertisers Get Smart About Customer Acquisition. With its practical advice and hands-on tactics, you’ll be able to begin using audience targeting right away.
The Current State of Digital Advertising
Between Q3 2016 and Q3 2017, clicks on Google product ads grew by 62%, showing that more advertisers are taking advantage of Google’s latest shopping ad formats to capture first-mover advantage. The auto industry posted the largest CPC increase on Google, clocking a 35% YoY gain.
To create our quarterly benchmark reports, we sample the Marin Global Online Advertising Index, composed of advertisers who invest billions of dollars in annualized ad spend on the Marin platform. We analyze data from around the world. For Q3 2017, other key findings include:
- Creative goes deeper. Because its “ad rotation” capabilities have dramatically improved, Google is signaling the end of A/B testing. They’re suggesting ad groups have at least three creatives, but nearly 50% of ad groups aren’t yet meeting this target.
- Bing out your best. Bing presents 10-15% in additional volume for advertisers not invested there today. As Google’s market share levels out, include Bing in your search advertising mix for a more holistic approach.
- Showcase what you got. Industries with the biggest CPC decreases include real estate (-27% YoY) and healthcare (-11%). Newly released Showcase Shopping Ads present an opportunity to get ahead.
To find out how your ad campaigns measure up to industry benchmarks across channels and devices, download our Q3 2017 Digital Benchmark Report. In addition to global trends, we explore the most compelling areas of digital marketing today, and identify tactical opportunities to help you drive better performance.
How to Optimize Voice Search Results
This is a guest post by Stephanie Hyland, Search Content Specialist at Intertwine Interactive.
What time is it? Where is the closest movie theater? How many ounces are in a gallon? Regardless of what you may be looking for or wondering about, consumers of all ages are now turning to voice searches for information instead of physically typing their query into a search engine.
“We weren’t surprised to find that teens—always ahead of the curve when it comes to new technology—talk to their phones more than the average adult,” according to voice search survey Google conducted in 2014. “More than half of teens (13-18) use voice search daily—to them it’s as natural as checking social media or taking selfies. Adults are also getting the hang of it, with 41 percent talking to their phones every day and 56 percent admitting it makes them feel tech savvy.”
With more and more people using this hands-free type of search method to find what they’re looking for online, how do SEO experts stay on top of this growing trend? With the voice search method only gaining popularity, the SEO industry has to now look outside text-based search queries and start thinking along the lines of making everything more conversational.
Here are four tips that are important to consider if you want to continue to appeal to those who are looking for quick information in a more conversational tone.
1) Focus on Long Tail Keywords
Since many consumers don’t articulate in the same way when they use voice search as they do when they physically type a query into a search box, it’s important to focus on natural phrases. By making these long tail keywords more conversational, they’ll be found easier when a consumer’s using voice search to find a particular service, product, or location.
2) Become Familiar With Schema Markup
To make sure you’re as successful as you can possibly be in your particular industry or product promotion, be sure you’re well-versed with schema markup. Schema markup is a powerful SEO tool. This semantic vocabulary, when applied to your website, will index all of the information and will help search engines return the most useful results to the consumer.
Being familiar with this HTML add-on will help search engines make sense of the context of your content. If you have high-quality content that can be easily interpreted, you’ll not only rank better in traditional searches, but it’ll also help your content be recognized as a reliable source through a voice search.
3) Be Sure to Optimize Your Website’s Microdata
When consumers are using voice searches, they’re typically looking for a quick answer, such as directions or how close they are to a particular product or service. Be sure to optimize your website’s microdata by ensuring that information such as the address and directions to your location are accurate. If this information isn’t correct on your website, you run the risk of not showing up within search results and missing out on potential business opportunities.
4) Create Useful FAQs Pages
When consumers are using voice search to ask general questions, they’re typically framing their questions with “who,” “what,” “where,” “when,” or “how.” In order to stay competitive within the search results for such requests, create or adjust your FAQ pages to be more conversational. By framing your FAQ pages in a more conversational tone, it’ll help your content show up as a reliable source within a voice search.
With advancements being made every day with voice search technology, consumers should expect to see new and improved aspects of this search method over the next few years.
“Though it’s already helping a lot of people save time and simplify their days, there’s also potential for voice search to do a lot more in the future,” according to the Google post.
To learn more about voice search technology, see Intertwine’s blog post that compares voice search and traditional search.
A Brief Guide to Advertising with Instagram Stories
Instagram Stories has quickly become one of the more exciting products in the Facebook marketing suite. Facebook claims that 300 million people around the globe watch and create Instagram stories every day. By comparison, this tops Snapchat’s reach of 178 million daily global users.
Advertising on Instagram Stories has allowed marketers to place powerful short video or image ads to inspire users when they’re most engaged. Read more about why you should try this powerful feature and what you need to succeed.
The Audience
Instagram attracts a highly engaged global audience looking for inspiration. Unlike on Facebook, where users come to connect with family and friends and see what the newest trending cat video is, the visual nature of Instagram lends itself well to influencer content. People come to Instagram looking to be inspired and discover the things they care about. This includes content from brands and businesses—1/3 of the most viewed stories are from businesses.
While Snapchat is the most popular platform for people aged 12-24, Instagram attracts a broader demographic—more users across more life stages. 59% of Internet users aged 18-29 are on Instagram. With Instagram Stories businesses can reach engaged users at scale.
The Experience
The Stories format has taken the world by storm. Snapchat piloted it and after its initial success, we started seeing stories everywhere—WhatsApp, Messenger, Facebook, and of course Instagram.
There are a few reasons the format is so successful, all boiling down to the experience it offers. As people’s attention spans are shrinking due to content overload, stories offer more information in a visual format, faster. It’s the format of the future. Which is why brands should get on it.
Advertising on Instagram Stories allows brands to reach users when they’re engaged. Stories are designed for mobile viewing with a visual vertical image or video format. Unlike the Facebook feed, which is often silent, users view 60% of Instagram Stories with the sound on. This creates an immersive experience where brands have a chance to capture attention and showcase what they’ve got.
The Format
The formats available for Instagram Stories ads are designed for the mobile experience. To convey their message, brands can use video that’s up to 15 seconds or static images up to 10 seconds. Both video and image ads are vertical and occupy the full screen, capturing full user attention.
The Objectives
Instagram Stories were first available under the Reach objective only, and was the new shiny tool for brand advertisers. Very quickly, Facebook released other objectives—Video Views, Brand Awareness, Traffic, App Installs, and even Conversions. While Instagram Stories won’t be your go-to for DR campaigns, they can be efficient at driving higher-funnel objectives, such as traffic to your site and awareness of a product.
Tips to Make your Instagram Stories Ads Work
- Being visual is key. There is no space for post copy or link description in Instagram Stories ads. The placement is all about looks—so, it’s crucial to use best quality images and videos. An image from a stock photo library that may have worked on Facebook won’t grab user attention on Instagram Stories.
- Grab attention quickly. As the video on Stories is only up to 15 seconds long, the first couple of seconds need to do the job. Consider including branding at the beginning of the video and not the end. Use text overlays to add a call to action to the ad and influence clicks.
- Use sound. It’s become customary to recommend that advertisers design video for silent social media feeds. Instagram Stories is your opportunity to combine the visual experience with sound, as the majority of Stories are played with sound on.
- Think about the environment. Instagram Stories are great and more than 50% of Instagram business accounts use them monthly. However, they won’t suit every brand and every objective. Be critical and evaluate if your brand suits the Instagram demographic, whether your creative assets are suitable, and if you really think what you’re doing will grab attention in seconds.
The Opportunity
Instagram Stories ads are now available to all advertisers using Marin Social. You can select it as a stand-alone placement and use it for Brand Awareness, Video View, Traffic, Conversion, and App Install objectives. For more information, touch base with your account representative. Or, if you’re new to Marin, contact us today.
Advice for Advertisers in 2018: Press Play on Video
According to a recent study by Cisco, video will represent a whopping 80% of all Internet traffic by 2019. But that’s mostly people watching videos of cats falling off furniture, right?
Not entirely! In fact, 64% of users are more likely to buy a product online after watching a video, according to comScore.
Despite the numbers and trends, many advertisers still struggle to craft stellar video advertising campaigns—what video formats improve ROI? How should marketers handle creative? How do video ads impact paid search?
The Video Advertising Learning Curve
As video advertising continues to explode, marketers who master the game stand to drive substantial campaign performance improvements. Leading video advertisers must:
- Understand the best ways to incorporate video into paid campaigns
- Learn what video ad formats and creative drive the best ROAS
- Consider how video can outperform traditional text and display ads
With a holistic view of the overall advertising landscape and the right preparation, marketers can use video ads to boost brand awareness, move consumers through the sales funnel, and increase revenue.
Join Our Webinar and Press Play on Your Video Ads
Sign up for our webinar, Press Play on Video Advertising: Tips for Success in 2018, to learn everything you need to know about paid video advertising. Marin’s Wes MacLaggan and Cory Henke from Variable Media will share the latest data, tips, and tactics.
The webinar is on Thursday, December 14th, at 10 am PST
(1 pm EST).
Speaker Bios
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.
Cory Henke launched his creative and analytics advertising agency, Variable Media, in March and has been able to grow and mature both large and small clients. His background is heavily rooted in analysis stemming from many years with ad agencies such as IPG and web publishers like Yahoo!, developing substantial experience in the direct response and e-commerce front.