When I first started working in digital marketing, part of my training process was learning about best practices, campaign structure, and all kinds of additional tools provided by publishers and third party vendors to drive success for brands.

As discussed in my previous posts, it’s important to know your brand and your customers, and to understand what makes them tick (and click) to convert on your website.

One way is to continuously run tests on your activity and learn what works and what doesn’t. Or, you can switch on and off tools like audiences and bid adjustments, explore new campaign types and channels, etc.

This article is dedicated to bidding—automated bidding, to be more precise. However, it would be wrong to look at this topic separately from everything else that’s happening in your accounts.

Much like in your home, wi-fi wouldn’t work with no electricity. Or, how can you enter the living room without a front door?

Let’s walk through our house together from room to room to see how every component makes our environment cozy and inviting to our guests—in other words, our customers who we’re driving to convert and come back for more.

Let’s start with the hallway (a.k.a., data source)

When thinking about your account optimization and bidding (whether it’s manual or automated), it’s important to identify your trustworthy data.

Some advertisers have developed their own tracking and attribution systems in-house. These systems provide them with first party data, and all the insights they opted into their product to track user journeys and interaction paths with the brand.

Another option is to pick a third party vendor or publisher tools to execute tracking for you. Here, it’s important to review the packages vendors offer and understand which ones suit your business needs the most.

Remember, the digital world is changing every day. Online customer behaviors simply aren’t the same as they were five to 10 years ago.

For instance, social networks now have more influence on a consumer’s decision making process. When someone’s in their exploration phase, reviews and feedback are important. This assigns higher revenue share from sales to publishers like Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, etc.

The question here: as an advertiser, are you taking cross-channel user interactions into account, and is the value you assign to your social media or affiliate advertisement fair?

There are various vendors that consider these factors in their attribution model and share the conversion data between the channels fairly—whether it’s a click from Google or impression from Facebook that contributed to a conversion.

Marin Software has developed an attribution model called TruePath, which helps advertisers see the impact of other channels on their search campaigns and vice-versa. This allows you to better understand the value of campaigns that don’t necessarily convert on their own (e.g., prospecting), but play a key role in the user journey.

Sugar, spice and everything nice (a.k.a., audience
kitchen prep)

In past posts, we discussed the importance of understanding your audiences, how they affect performance, and what it takes to bring home that extra conversion.

When you’ve identified a list of audiences that convert better than others, you can add these and their similar audiences to specific or all campaigns. As these are best performers, you can add specific bid adjustments to these.

With one of my clients, we created audience rules to cover their top product categories and certain pages—like What’s New? After running these audiences for a month, we saw that after visiting the What’s New? page, people were 32% more likely to convert on the website, even if they purchased long-existing stock. The next step was obvious: increase the bids on audiences that visited the page and reap the results.

There are tools that offer automated bid adjustments for audiences tagged across campaigns. For instance, the Google eCPC model takes audience behavior into account (Google conversion pixel data only) and adjusts bids for you based on audience performance in the campaign/group.

Marin Software also measures audience performance when it comes to automated bidding. Here, however, the app can use your preferred source of truth. You can select a list of conversion types that are important when it comes to bid adjustments and performance and the app will do the rest—calculate and execute.

At Marin, we’ve also come up with the concept of search and social intent. Here, we help our clients to reach social prospects and leads in search engines and vice-versa.

For example, we ran a test on social campaigns using search data. The result: CPA for these campaigns was 65% lower in comparison to traditional social campaigns, while conversion volume spiked by 388%. The client also saw a 100% increase in their daily appointment requests.

The living room (a.k.a., device performance
and adjustments)

According to many marketing sources, every year is The Year of Mobile. :)

And yes, every year, we witness how mobile search share is growing, as mobile devices become more versatile and occupy every part of our lives. This may or may not be the case for you, but I feel lost without my phone, as it’s such a huge part of my life—all of my contact information is there, not to mention the easy ability to call for food delivery or an Uber in just a couple of swipes/taps.

And yet, when it comes to conversion rate and return on investment, desktop keeps showing higher, better results.

Why is that?

SmartInsights and many more research companies compiled research on this topic to prove that even though most of the initial searches on the product/service/ideas are coming from mobile, conversions are more likely to happen on desktop.

A key takeaway here is that it’s important to review device performance not only against each other, but also from a cross-device perspective.

Marin has created a special solution for this—you can set separate targets to devices. Then, based on the targets and their performance, our solution adjusts bids to meet the desired goal.

Home office (a.k.a., additional rules in Marin bidding)

Marin bidding equips you with a list of additional rules to augment your usual strategy. You can apply these on top of your target. These include:

• Bid cap
• Bid floor
• Minimum daily bid change
• Match type boost
• Publisher boost

Is your new promotion about to start outside of your working hours? You can set up your schedule to boost bids for a fixed time period.

Or, is your finance team keen to stay on top of the maximum bid values? Not a problem—just set up a bid cap and Marin won’t assign bids above your desired value.

The app uses these rules as advanced triggers to keep your performance in check. It also provides the calculation used for every object on bidding to show what was used in the process, and why.

When it comes to adjusting your target/strategy, the app makes everything very transparent and easy to understand.

Behind closed doors—what else can we do with our campaigns?

Device, audience, geo-targeting, time-of-day and day-of-week—these are the first adjustments that come to mind when reviewing a bidding strategy. But can we do more?

You bet! Our Marin analytics and product teams have worked hard to bring extra zest to your mix-and-match bidding approach.

For instance, do any of these scenarios sound familiar?

• Your top-selling shoes are out of stock but your campaign is live
• Impression share has dropped but you’re trying to stay ahead of competitors
• A list of objects needs an extra push because of a new product launch or seasonality

Who you gonna call? In this case, not Ghostbusters—but, feel free to pick up a phone or email account and contact your Marin team.

Marin’s Dynamic Actions is your secret weapon when it comes to bid adjustments based on your unique situation.

With Dynamic Actions, you can tag objects in Marin with certain labels, whether it’s product stock or a certain performance metric. Marin will then recognize this tag, and based on your preferences, bid down or up for selected objects. Or, you can even stop the bidding altogether if you run out of stock.

This comes in handy when you have additional metrics you want to consider for bid optimization.

Making the place comfy (a.k.a., the importance of
bidding target)

Whether it’s revenue or exposure, every organization works towards certain goals, and it’s important to hit them to grow your business.

With automated bidding, your main responsibility is to identify the desired target and to experiment with adjustments and data points. This maximizes the benefits of machine learning for an optimal bid calculation.

When you’re assigning a target to a group of objects, bear their current performance in mind. For example, is the target too aggressive? If so, perhaps it’s best to start +/-20% of the current performance and adjust the target every couple of weeks. This allows the final bid to change smoothly over the given time period, and avoids performance spikes.

If you use the bid adjustments above wisely, they’ll bring great value to your advertising programs. To test them out, start with one to measure the impact, and then add or remove as you go.

As we mentioned in our audiences article, it’s important to have statistical proof that a certain element is bringing your performance to the next level before you add it to your initial target. Also, remember the importance of your budget—sometimes, a higher bidding budget for your test can bring in incremental revenue at a low extra cost.

For instance, during a bidding test with one of our clients, Marin managed to increase lead volume by 600%, while the average CPL in their account dropped by 20%. The team also saved 25% of their day-to-day time by letting the app handle bid optimization.

If you have a little extra budget on hand for the test, it can lead to excellent results.

Last but not least—cleaning house (a.k.a., bidding can’t work on its own)

Some advertisers ask us: why is it important to continue optimizing campaigns, when automated bidding is switched on?

Even the most modern and automated house—where Alexa and Google Home answer the door and adjust the lights—needs a human touch.

Automated bidding can indeed help you save tons of time when it comes to keeping tabs on performance and updating bids. However, we have to remember the world around us is constantly changing. Therefore, digital campaigns continually need fresh ad copy and images. And, with our ever-expanding vocabulary and trend shifts, search engines see +15% new search queries every year.

So, dust the surfaces, make them shine, and be able to show off your best performance to date.

P.S. look at our beautiful garden (a.k.a., bidding
test example)

Hope you’re still with us on our home maintenance metaphors!

Like any other top performance marketing company, at Marin we continuously run bidding tests with our clients. Let’s take a look at a test we performed against Smart Bidding, where the goal was to maximize leads to a set target cost per lead/acquisition (tCPL).

Within Marin’s bidding folders, the team activated portfolio bidding functionality. This functionality allows the app to use Bayesian data blending to help the algorithm identify the best bid for the given keywords. On top of this, automated mobile bid adjustments accommodate performance differences across devices. They also ensure placement on the first page of the SERP, and a high position and impression share at competitive levels.

In Google Ads, the client set the Smart Bidding tCPA model for a set of campaigns they used in the test.

During the test, the client didn’t create any new creatives or updated keywords. This kept the data as fair as possible across the campaign buckets that were in competition.

A month after the test started, the team compared results to the time period before the test. We ran the test during a low seasonality timeframe to avoid any external factors that might interfere with the results.

The post-test results were stunning—while running pure automated bidding activity in the account, both solutions showed an increase in conversion volumes MoM +51% with Marin’ bidding solution and +44% with Google Smart Bidding. The CPL also dropped, meaning that not only did the client gain incremental conversions from the automated bidding, but they also did so at a lower cost.

CPL in Marin dropped -47% MoM and -28% in Google Smart Bidding.

When all is said and done, when it comes to bidding, it’s important to evaluate all tools an advertiser can and should use. Once you identify areas of performance, you can use them as a layer to your bidding strategy. Automated tools help with the process of calculation and execution for hundreds or even thousands of keywords—with no time or effort from your team.

So, agree on the strategy, set it up, sit back and relax, and let the machine deliver the best bids possible.

Now that you have the perfect automated bidding home—go take that much-deserved vacation!

Audience targeting is much like cooking—with the right ingredients, a few adjustments, and seasoning to taste, you can create something hearty and enticing. Like any good online recipe, we’ll start broad and dive into the details, and cover the options you have for building an excellent mixture of audience-enabled advertising campaigns.

And, while you can look at the faces of your dinner guests to assess the success—or failure—of your culinary handiwork, we recommend a more analytical approach for your ad campaigns.

Read on.

What Is Audience Targeting?

Audiences are buckets of your users or customers, grouped based on your preferences. As an advertiser, you can create these buckets across every publisher where you sell your ads (Google Ads, Bing, Yandex, Facebook, etc.).

Once you build audiences, you can utilize them in different ways:

• Reporting: This allows you to better understand consumer behaviors, e.g., which web page is driving the most traffic/revenue.
• Bidding: Based on the data you’ve gathered, you can adjust your CPCs for advanced bidding.
• Prospecting: You can create similar audiences based on your existing lists to target new users.

In this article, we focus on Google Ads audiences—however, you can use this audience approach across all search publishers. The main difference is usually the naming convention across Google Ads, Bing, Yandex, etc.

Where Do I Start?

Option one—RLSAs

If you’ve never worked with audiences before, the best way to start is to create Remarketing Lists for Search Ads (RLSAs) and add these to all or top campaigns in Observation mode. This will allow you to gather data on your audiences, while keeping reach open for everyone performing a search query on your keywords.

You can set up RLSAs for specific pages of your website and based on rules—for example, a customer added items to the shopping cart, but didn’t complete the transaction in the last seven days. Generally, it’s a good practice to retarget your cart abandoners with a slightly higher bid, to remind them about their incomplete purchase.

Another good set of audiences are ones based on your top/desired web pages, for example:

• New arrivals
• Sales
• Specific category / product line
• Blog sections like “what to wear,” ”inspiration,” or “what’s trending this season”

Look at your website structure to determine the audiences to create.

Option two—category audiences

If you don’t know which pages to target or your business is still very new, publishers have an option to use pre-created audiences based on user interests. These are called in-marketaudiences, and represent the people interested in something specific such as travelling, cars, a particular industry, etc.

There are also demographic audiences that allow you to focus on gender and/or age range.

Option three—Customer Match

If your business has been in the market for a while and you have a list of loyal customers you’d like to retarget, all you need to do is upload your CRM list to the publisher and apply these audiences to your search campaigns.

Note that for legal and confidentiality reasons, all publishers encode user data upon upload.

Okay, I Have My Data—What’s Next?

Once you’ve identified which audiences deliver the most revenue for your campaigns, you can:

1. Start using them in bidding: Based on the most successful conversion rates (CVR), you can add bid adjustments for these audiences proportionally in your campaigns/groups.
2. Create specific retargeting campaigns: You can duplicate your existing campaigns, while adding top audiences to your campaigns and setting them in Targeting mode instead of Observation. This will restrict who sees these campaigns to people who fall into your audience buckets.
3. Create similar audiences: The publishers generate these audiences—they include people whose behavior is similar to the one identified in your existing audiences (RLSAs or CRM).

Piece of Cake… Or Is There More?

There’s always more! ;)

You can create and retarget audiences based on the people who spend above your average order value (note that this requires additional analytics tools like Google Analytics or Yandex.Metrica). Or, you can retarget search users who interacted with your social campaigns. Yet another option is combining your audiences with “competitors” campaigns, to drive people back to your website when they enter a competitor’s search term.

Good luck! If you have any questions or want more information, reach out to your Marin CS team. Or, if you’re new to Marin, schedule a demo today.

From the birth of the search engine through 2016, advertisers worked hard to make their SEM ad messages concise enough to fit into the strict character limits of a standard text ad. Every ad had 25 characters in a headline and 35 characters in each of the two description lines.

Also, advertisers could get beyond these limitations and increase their ad real estate—they could proactively create ad extensions such as enhanced sitelinks, callouts, price extensions, structured snippet extensions, and the like.

In search marketing years, doesn’t 2016 seem like a long time ago? In just the last two years, the search engine results page (SERP) has seen a massive amount of change.

Walking Upright: Expanded Text Ads

In late 2016, Google (and other publishers shortly thereafter) introduced shiny new expanded text ads (ETAs).

ETAs added an extra headline and increased the headline character limit from 25 to 30. The new ad type consolidated two description lines into one and topped it with 10 additional characters. Overnight, ad text space expanded by 45 characters.

Early testing proved that ETAs brought more exposure, a higher click-through rate, and more visitors to advertisers’ websites. Consequently, over the last couple of years all advertisers have been slowly, surely moving toward ETAs.

Creative Changes

Creatives also had to evolve, as devices we use every day got bigger. Also, since people now make more precise and educated search queries, advertisers can communicate with them using more specific messaging and visuals to drive more clicks.

The Modern Search Age: More Space, Dynamic Ads

The evolution of search continues, and won’t stop any time soon.

Last year, Google launched two new ad types allowing advertisers to expand and experiment with their search advertising campaigns even further:

• Expanded text ads improved (ETAi) allow advertisers to have three headlines (30 characters each) and two description lines (90 characters each). This means creative ad text has increased by 130 characters since 2017 and by 175 since early 2016.
• Google’s responsive search ads have the same character specifications as ETAi, but advertisers can add up to 15 headlines and four description lines to one ad. Google Ads then shows all possible ad combinations to best match a user’s search query. Advertisers can preselect one specific headline and one specific description line to always appear in the first position within the creative.

New Formats, New Benefits

The search engines suggest spreading, separating, and adapting your messages to the new ETAi and RSA formats instead of simply adding additional lines of text to your existing creatives.

The new ad types allow users to see headlines—that is, the most important, relevant message—in bold blue text. This helps you grab attention and entice people to continue to your website.

Note that using all the available characters may truncate your ad on smaller screens, leaving viewers with incomplete messaging and possibly no call to action.

The great thing about RSAs is that they alleviate advertiser headaches due to constant A/B testing. A/B test no more! This is a useful solution for teams juggling several channels and looking to automate.

If you prefer greater control over the message structure and update frequency, ETAi is an excellent solution, because it allows you to use the new format and update the creative test as you see fit.

Be Part of the Next Phase

The SERP looks very different today than it did just three years ago. If you haven’t used the newer ad formats yet, it’s a good idea to start, as your competitors are likely already getting their feet wet. Know that whether you go with RSAs or ETAi, testing is your key to success.

Marin supports both new ad formats—in MarinOne, you can see all three headlines and two description lines in your creatives tab. You can also single- and bulk-create/edit your ads.

If you haven’t tried them yet, be an early adopter and gain a competitive advantage—touch base with your Marin representative or schedule a demo today to learn how to simplify, amplify, and evolve your SEM campaigns.

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.

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.