Last week, on the occasion of Women’s Day, we premiered a special PPC Town Hall episode where we spoke to three influential women who built great careers and personal brands in digital marketing.
They shared their success stories, how they overcame challenges, and tips & advice to building great careers.
Here’s the full episode with the transcript.
Full episode:
Transcript:
Fred’s introduction to the episode.
Fred: Hello and welcome to another episode of PPC Town Hall. My name is Fred Vallaeys. I’m co-founder and CEO at Optmyzr.
I’m also going to be your host for today’s episode. So this episode is airing or premiering during Women’s week. So we decided we wanted to bring together some of the most influential women in PPC and digital marketing.
Some of the folks you’re going to see here today are usually on the top 25 list of PPCers. One of them is not on that list because they don’t just do PPC. They do a whole lot more than that. So they have broader skills.
But we thought it’d be interesting to have a conversation and see how these women have built their own brains and built their careers in PPC.
Now, I’m going to be honest, I’m a white privileged male, so leading this conversation can be a little bit awkward for me. What do I know about the issues we’re going to discuss today?
So my role here today is really to facilitate the discussion, but let it flow where it needs to. And all three of our panelists are just as much the host of today’s episode as I am. But I can’t wait to hear how they did it, how they got to where they are today, and some of the hurdles and challenges that they may have faced along the way.
Now, that said, I hope that this episode is also broadly interesting to everyone, just from a PPC career perspective. There are differences whether you’re a man, a woman, a person of color, all of these things change it.
But there are also many things we have in common as humans. Right? So let’s not forget about that element as well. So with that, welcome to this episode of PPC Town Hall.
Akvile, Anu, and Navah introduce themselves.
Fred: All right, so here are my guests for today. Welcome, everyone. Get everyone to introduce themselves a little bit. Akvile Defazio, let’s start with you.
Akvile: Thank you for having me. My name is Akvile DeFazio. I’m the President of AKvertise, and we are a social media advertising agency.
Fred: And hence, you don’t make it on the top 25 PPC list because you do social. But it’s still digital marketing, and all of these things are very interconnected.
So I’m very happy to have an excuse to actually bring you onto the show for the first time.
Akvile: Thank you so much.
Fred: All right, next on the screen, we have Navah Hopkins.
Navah: Thank you very much for having me. Hi, I’m Navah Hopkins, President of Navah Hopkins, LLC. We help brands unlock the profit and solve business problems, whether it’s SaaS, whether it’s managing Ad accounts.
I am very grateful to be on the top 25 list with Fred. But more importantly, I’m very excited to have those conversations about how people can take meaningful steps in their career, whether it’s PPC or otherwise, regardless of gender.
So thank you very much for having me.
Fred: Yeah. And you’ve certainly made many steps over your illustrious career. So I can’t wait to hear a little bit about how you made those decisions and what happened.
All right. And then we have Anu Adegbola. Welcome to the show. You’re coming back for the second time. I believe it’s great to see you again. You have made some career changes since we last spoke. So tell us what you’re up to these days.
Anu: Of course, I’m very happy to be here and sharing the stage with two ladies. And I absolutely very much respect over the years.
I’m working recently, very much recently this year, I joined Marin Software as an account director to really be the paid search expert, the page search lead to help our clients do paid search very well.
And I remember speaking about that to one of the clients I was talking to recently when they were like, oh, is Marin good for us? And I was like, look, I will tell you that it is.
I am someone who’s very much part of the #PPCchat Twitter community, especially, and even on LinkedIn, trying to really talk about all the changes that’s always going on that’s coming out from Google, Microsoft, Facebook, and the likes.
And my key thing is just to make sure that they are doing paid search really well. And that’s really a passion of mine. And I love talking about it and discussing all the different updates and how to use it and test it.
Fred: Yeah. And we somehow seem to keep bringing on competitors. Marin, this week. They give you permission to be on the show?
Anu: Yes, I got the permission just today. It came in like half an hour before I was like, yeah, we’re good to go. And they’re like, as long as you mentioned Marin, how Marin is amazing.
And it’s a great third party tool. You’re good to go.
Akvile, Anu, and Navah talk about how they got into marketing.
Fred: I obviously have no qualms about bringing on competitors because at the end of the day, this is such a big space and it’s about education. So that’s why we’re here today.
But let’s just kind of go around the table again and talk a little bit more about the careers that you’ve had, the many places you’ve been.
Akvile. Let’s go back to you. Tell us a little bit about how you came to be where you are today.
Akvile: Sure. So I have an unconventional path, I guess you could say. But I feel like most of us come from many different backgrounds in our industry. But I went to school for physical therapy, and I realized after graduating that it’s not what I wanted to be doing.
And any time there are marketing tasks at the clinics I worked at, I jumped all over them. And I didn’t know what I was doing, but I was very interested to learn more. So I took the leap and got an internship that I fought for way back when I lived in Seattle.
It’s a place called Evo in there and outdoor snow ski apparel company. And out of all 30 some applicants, I think I was the only one they said that didn’t have a communications, marketing or business degree.
And they went with me as a wild card. And I’m so grateful to them because that’s where my career really started. And I was there for several years. And then unfortunately, the recession hit in 2008, so my school loans had kicked in at that point and we had to scale back on hours.
So I needed to find something else and some really good friends and people that work there to this day. But I went and moved to a pet insurance company and helped them from the ground up and I was their first PPC person.
So I did come from a paid search background way back when, but I’ve migrated over to Paid Social. So after that I went to Third Door Media, which was a publication. So over there doing Organic Social, Paid Social, Paid Search I learned a lot in that.
Fred: That’s like sort of being at the powerhouse that tells them SEO and PPC and now having to do it for them.
Akvile: It was so great. I’ve met so many wonderful people, all of you and many more. And I made lifelong friends and I just loved working. There was such a fun time. But also marketing to marketers was quite the challenge.
So I took it on as a welcome challenge and a lot of fruitful things have come from it.
Fred: Quick question. Who of us here actually clicks on ads on Google or are we all like “No!” You click on ads? I’m like 50-50.
Navah: There’s two reasons why I’ll click on an ad. One, I genuinely just need it and it’s actually better than where the organic listing would be, but the other.
And then I make up prior to the marketing gods to apologize for clicking on an ad that I have no intention of actually engaging with, but to actually see what is the ad creative to the landing page so I can build content of what is good and what is bad.
Fred: I suppose you put it in a presentation. So now a lot of people see this brand and they still get the exposure for the $5 click that you just cost them. Anyway, let’s jump into the gender thing here. Right.
But you feel bad about having clicked on that ad. Do you think that’s like, women feel more bad about doing these things than men?
Navah: I don’t know. So I’m a fairly apologetic person. It was a real shift just to stop saying I’m sorry for everything and shifting to thank you for XYZ. I forget who sent it to me first.
I’ve heard several people put this shift out there where rather than you saying I am sorry for this. I am sorry for that. You say thank you for XYZ things.
So I guess what I should be saying is thank you, Brand, for providing the opportunity for us to have an even greater education so that even more people can benefit rather than I’m sorry for costing you money, but I will say I don’t think it’s a women versus men thing.
I think it’s an empathy thing. And how many people are in touch with the empathy of what their actions are, but just the confidence that comes from saying thank you incentive, I’m sorry, I think is more of the growth opportunity there.
Fred: Yeah, I really like that. I’ll try starting. I’ve also been shying away from saying I’m sorry because if you believe what you do, you should never have to apologize for it.
But just how you position it then as being thankful. I really like that. Anyway, I interrupted you Akvile.
Akvile: No worries. Those were good questions. I do the same thing. I’m like, I don’t want to click this out or don’t want to look for the organic results right below it. But the last part of it is about seven and a half years ago, I’ve always kind of had an inkling of I want to work for myself.
But some things have transpired at that point to where I just really needed to take that leap. So I finally had the courage and I asked another industry friend of ours, her name is Pamela Lund, if I could just shadow her for a day because I knew nothing about running my own agency.
I had never worked for an agency before, which I kind of wish I did in the past, since I was always in-house. But she’s like, I’ll do you one better and I’ll teach you everything I know.
And I’ll give you half my clients because I’ve taken on too much work myself and I want to start a completely different business. So she’s like, you give me half my time back and I’ll teach you everything and let you run from there.
So I’m still thankful to this day for her because I took that leap. And here we are, seven and a half years later, and we’re working with some really cool brands, and I’ve been working for myself.
Fred: That’s so generous of Pamela. Question on that. You don’t have to answer if you don’t want to write. But did she literally just give you half the business or did she kind of…
Akvile: She still has her agency consultancy, but she did give me half of her clients. And then I did a lot of paid search back then. But then I realized that I wanted to do paid social.
So we’re both separate entities. We’re doing our own things. But I helped her out, and then she kind of just we split it up to where she would do paid search. I would do paid social.
So to this day, we still have like a couple of clients that we team up on for who wants to do collaboration.
Fred: And if you get the PPC client, the search clients, you kind of pass it on to her.
Akvile: Yes.
Fred: Got it. Interesting. All right, so Anu, why don’t we go to you next, tell us a little bit about how you got to where you are today.
Anu: Of course, it’s been a long, winding road of a journey, to be honest. If anyone told me like, yeah, ten years ago I’d be working tech sites. I’d be like, I don’t know, it’s really weird.
I thought I’d be the person always in the weeds of paid search reports. I love Excel. That’s really what really got me into it. Seriously. Like, in my first interview was, do you like data analysis? Do you like being Excel?
I was like, oh my God, I was that geeky kid. So weird when I used to play with my dad’s laptop and pulling up VLOOKUPs and doing tables.
Fred: So strange on you.
Anu: Yeah, he’s a bit of a nerd, but I am.
Fred: I can call you.
Anu: It’s fine. I started off working in digital agencies, which was really great for looking at seeing the breadth of the different kind of brands you could work on, the different kind of account types and B2B, B2C, small, large, all that kind of stuff.
But one thing I really didn’t like and unfortunately I hear still going on today is like just all the silos. There’s only like there’s a paid search team that never talked to SEO or never talked to like email marketing or never talked to CRO and never talked to anybody else.
And it was just paid search targeting and all that kind of stuff. And I was always interested in business goals. How does paid search actually work within the whole ecosystem of the digital marketing efforts that have been made for a brand?
So I moved to in-house side and worked with these guys called Prime Inferno for now, which is how I became first in contact with Marin because their third party tool was Marin.
That’s when it really started. I started really liking the idea of automation and even also I started talking at conferences and came in touch with the lads from Brain Labs. So Dan Gilbert and Dan Botiglary as well and they were really into the script.
We give a loose script up for free. Unfortunately, Fred, you, me and you, we didn’t come in contact quite a bit later because I know you’re very much into the script world as well with Optmyzr, but I really got into your automation way back then.
We’re talking about like eight, nine years ago because I’ve always also seen myself as a bit of an efficiently lazy person. If something can take you an hour to do instead of the three, 4 hours that some long reports could do, let’s get done in an hour and get on to the next thing.
I was huge to be a fan of automation straight away and I’d always like to push all different kinds of automations on my clients. And I love the fact that what paid search also allowed me to do is come across a lot of third party tools, the likes of Kenshoo, IgnitionOne, DC Storm, way back when, SA360, of course, and the like.
So it really gave me the breath and the amazing journey to then become going in-house on with a tech tool. And I’m really seeing not just the experience of my agency side and in-house, but also the experience of being part of the community.
I feel being part of the #PPCchat community is my secondary job. It’s like literally just being there, showing up, giving my advice, hearing what’s going on, and great to be able to bring that back into the community to help us do things better. For paid search advertisers.
Fred: Yes. And for the people who don’t know #PPCchat. So that happens, I believe, Wednesdays on Twitter at 09:00.
Anu: Tuesdays. Well, on Wednesday, I’m sure that’s what you were thinking of.
Fred: Exactly. And then you also recently became the President of the PSA. So like, you’re not very busy, are you?
Anu: No, not busy at all. Yes. From the beginning of my career, I have been one of those people. I come from an amazing family of philanthropists, doctors and PhD holders who do amazing things for people.
And I’ve always been trying to find that that is in my DNA. I find what do I do? What has been part of my job is helping people. And I think the truth is a lot of advertising is really about making more money for somebody else.
So for me, for many years I used to think I was not really comfortable with that. And every once in a while I think maybe I’ll leave marketing at some point because I don’t really see how I’m helping people.
So when I started really doing the podcast and when started being part of the community and being a mentor and seeing others, especially women, other black females, other people who are like me, who thought the entry to this industry was so hard, a light bulb moment went in my head.
It was like, okay, maybe I should stick around for this. I should definitely stick around for this because this is where my desire, my love to actually help people and get people doing paid search better, being able to get into the industry a lot, getting into the industry easier and making them not how to deal with imposter syndrome.
Everyone has it. That whole I’m not doing things right. I should be learning this a lot quicker. Oh my God. How come that other person knows how to do this and I don’t?
These questions that I have, should I be asking them it might make me look stupid to be able to debunk all those like, yeah, it’s not okay to ask those questions. Like, no, it’s really okay how to just help people get along in that way.
So that’s become a really good big passion of mine.
Fred: Yeah. Even Google changes things basically every week. So, we’re all imposters. We’ve never done this before. Julie Bacchini was on the show not that long ago and she’s been doing PPC for over 20 years.
And she basically said, Listen, this is like the fourth time that I’m relearning how Google Ads works, because every couple of years it’s just different. And then I looked this up for a speech that I gave.
The human body replaces itself every seven years. After seven years, every cell in your body has basically been replaced by a new one. Just like Google Ads. Right.
Except Google Ads replaces itself faster than every seven years.
Anu: Every few months replaces itself.
Fred: Exactly. Navah, do you ever feel like an imposter and tell us how you got to where you are?
Navah: All the time. All the time. I feel like an imposter. I don’t think I’ve ever had a close colleague that has ever not had to walk me off a ledge and remind me that I’m actually competent.
And I think it’s because when one is clever, one is able to know what one doesn’t know. So in a bridged history of me, I actually wanted to be a high school English teacher, but I pivoted from that because I saw that I would be both poor and ineffective in the current education system and I couldn’t do it.
And I had this really impactful conversation with a relative who basically said, what are you doing? You are denying your nature. You are denying what you are good at. Go into marketing, like, you are good at this. Go do it.
So I ended up transferring, and while I was in College, I got my certifications. I started doing some kind of like, freelance side work. Got my first gig actually in SEO. That was probably both the best and worst experience because it taught me that in order to really convey and to be heard, you have to have an authority voice and a professional voice and your friend voice.
And if you allow too many to see only the friend voice, you can sometimes not be taken as seriously. But if you own your authority voice, that’s when you can really enact change and you can empower people to do well.
So after sometimes sent in the SEO space, I actually took the money I earned to start up trying to go back to education called AngelEd, which was meant to help education be as debt free and employable as possible, connecting students to scholarships and mentors.
It ended up failing, but it was a great educational experience and it built a lot of really good connections for me, actually. Now in the University space to help disseminate digital marketing knowledge to help the next generation of digital marketers, analysts, so on and so forth.
All the while I was working on that startup, I was doing freelance work on the PPC side, ended up in Fred’s tradition of inviting competitors on WordStream. I spent five years at WordStream and I fell in love with the idea of SaaS or software as a service.
And the reason why I fell in love with it is much like has been discussed, there is a genuine love of helping people. I truly, truly love seeing the benefit that a brand can get. But unfortunately it’s not scalable.
To have one-to-one assistance, you’re not going to be able to enact as much good one to one as you could through software. And so what was nice about WordStream is not only was I able to help people and work on individual accounts, spread interesting knowledge, but also work on software that could scale really clever strategies.
And so that piece of product really stuck with me. I ended up, after WordStream going to build the paid arm for Hennessy Digital. We ended up managing a book of business of about 1.5 million ad spend per month.
So built a kind of entity there. An agency ended up then at Justuno, which is the CRO software, then went to AdZooma which is the PPC management software. And I realized after those two software jumps that, you know what, I need to take a break belonging to a brand.
AdZooma was based in the UK, I had to set up a Corporation for myself to be paid because they were going to have to pay me as a contractor. So the decision that I had been weighing and I wish I could give you a hug through this call.
I feel a lot of really good advice and a lot of really good encouragement. Like, you know what? Just make that leap. You are meant to do this. You have the brain and the workflow to do it this way.
And so after I realized, you know what? I need to take a break, I made the call. We’re going to just focus on my consulting business. And what’s nice is that because of the width and breadth of my experience working with the thousands of brands from the WordStream side, the thought leadership piece, speaking, writing Ask A PPC for Search Engine Journal.
I’m about to also write for Search Engine Land’s Public Speaking Circuit. I had enough inbound interest that I could just say I’m going to go off on my own. And it was a fairly easy decision.
I could not have done that at the beginning of my career, even though I tried. So it’s really nice kind of coming full circle and being in a place where I can help the people I really want to help, I can solve the problems I really want to solve.
Taking again every moment of sadness based on a moment of happiness. And I firmly, firmly believe that all the things I get to work on are direct result of that.
How did Akvile, Navah, and Anu build their personal brands?
Fred: Nice. So I love the whole personal branding thing and how that’s enabled you to get to where you are today, having more control over the decisions that you make. So let’s jump into that a little bit.
So all three of you have amazing personal brands in the industry. Was that a conscious decision to start building that for you?
Navah: Yes! Oh, 100%! I’m sorry, I’m jumping right now. Oh, no, thank you for letting me jump back in. I got to catch myself. So this is actually really important and this is something that everyone should have a brand outside of the brand that they work for.
Because no matter how good you are, you are replaceable. Nothing outside of you that will retain like you could always be pushed aside. So after a series of interesting working experiences where I would work really, really bloody hard and maybe things would work out.
Maybe things wouldn’t. From a pragmatist standpoint, I knew I had to start to come up with my own brand so that I could have leverage to push forward. Things I knew had to happen because it wasn’t just some quiet little kid banging on the door with an opinion.
This was Navah Hopkins or before I got married, Navah Fuchs saying, this needs to happen there’s outside clout there that if we don’t listen, what are the repercussions of that?
I was very aware that as I started to build my own external clout, I not only was able to knock those things, I was able to add more value to the company, so I was able to command a greater salary.
Of course, the main motivation was helping people and spreading useful information. But there is a certain degree of selfishness that I think is important that everyone owns and pragmatism that everyone owns.
When thinking about your brand and how you leverage your brand in internal discussions.
Fred: Exactly. I think having a personal brand has huge benefits, but it’s also a fair amount of additional work and it’s not easy to get there right. So it is a trade off.
And I guess that’s why that selfish component is necessary. Otherwise, I think people just wouldn’t want to put in the extra work for it. Akvile, talk about your personal branding and how you use it to get new clients.
Akvile: Similarly to what Navah said. My mom said this to me when I was younger. She’s like, no one’s going to come knocking on your door unless you put yourself out there.
So I try to take that in many different aspects of my life, especially professionally. But when Twitter came out, I loved it. It took me a little while to figure it out, but once we connected with marketers, it was just like I was genuinely excited to just share things, but the helpfulness aspect of it is what really I thrive on sharing, helping that generally makes me happy.
That’s the tradeoff for me. Like, I share something and I get personal fulfillment from it because people have shared with me. My career wouldn’t be where it is if there were other people in our industry that were so helpful selfless and sharing different information.
There’s plenty of work to go out there. So I love that we’re competitive, but we’re still all very intertwined and very willing to help people reaching out just without anything. You don’t expect anything in return necessarily, but for me, I just think Twitter really helps things take off, and you do have to be a little bit healthy, selfish, as Navah put it.
You do have to say, I’m good at this. I can do this if I’m accepting clients. Put it out there. I was so hesitant the first time. It was year two of my business. I lost two of our biggest clients in one week.
One got acquired by a larger company that came back to us six months later. Another one, their CEO, resigned, and I was not prepared for something like that. And I was trying to learn how to do business development.
And that’s where I really decided to lean further into my social network and offline, online. I very reluctantly just tweeted, hey, we’re accepting clients. I felt like it’s such a failure at that moment. And everyone’s like, oh, you just incorporated, you’re growing. Congratulations.
And I was like, oh, that is not how I felt. But now I’m not afraid to put that out in there anymore because other people can have different perspectives, and your closest group of confidants will know what’s going on behind the scenes.
But there’s no shame in telling people what you’re good at, what you can do to help others. And I think just being a helpful person that’s excited about the industry that we’re in, maybe updates.
I work more on the paid social side of things, and Facebook has a lot of challenges that come along with it, and there’s a lot of people complaining about it. So I’m guilty.
I’ve done it once in a while. But I think as long as you’re genuine, you’re helpful, and you’re focused on not just putting out content that’s going to be interesting and helpful to someone else, but also getting things back from the community.
So I think there’s a really good kind of equal trade going on. And using your personal brand so people know who you are and what you do and how you can help them is very important for the success of you, whether you’re working in-house at a brand, an agency, or for yourself.
Fred: Thank you for sharing, because that’s very actionable. I think. How do you start building this personal brand while it can be as easy as going on Twitter and engaging in #PPCchat and chiming in.
So #PPCchat is basically there’s five to six questions that get asked and everyone gets to weigh in and you can weigh in. But hey, here’s what I think about Performance Max campaigns.
And so you start building up that reputation, that credibility, and then that can lead into like you’re saying, a chance to tell people, hey, I’m taking new clients. Please reach out to me.
Anu, you’re obviously engaged with #PPCchat, is that a channel that you use to build your personal brand or how did you go about it?
Anu: Absolutely. #PPCchat definitely really helped to make it almost like an easy Tuesday, Wednesday strategy of like, this is how I’ll interact, this is how I’ll show what I know about our industry.
I think it is one of the little positives that came out of the pandemic years. Like, I was in my house, I was in front of a screen more times than ever now. And so honestly, the #PPCchat community dubbed me out of some of my lowest moments of just going there.
And it wouldn’t necessarily always be a tweet about paid search. It will be about something that makes people laugh, the wages, just talking about the frustration, all the frustrations everybody is going through.
There’s definitely amazing feeling of you are not alone in the feelings you’re having about your frustrations about the situation, the industry, the clients you could be working on, frustrating clients, wanted to move on things that you have to do because you need to keep a client and there was just so much joy to just get involved with that.
And especially during the pandemic, I also picked up on trying to be more regular, even on LinkedIn. For me, that was just an opportunity to not need to job hunt anymore, not need to be the one searching for what the next great opportunity needs to be.
I saw a direct correlation with more people head hunting me, more people looking out for me to participate, to partner with something. Once I started leaning into posting more on LinkedIn, even it was just about sharing some of my difficult moments, the winds and the tough times and moving around.
And you’d always find that there’ll be some things that you think to yourself, I don’t want to share, this will be annoying or nobody wants to hear about this.
And it will be those posts that get the most interaction, the most engagement, the most. Oh my God, I can’t believe that you’re doing this because sometimes and I have moved around a lot because I’ve always had a strong sense of I’m not going to stay with somewhere. I’m not happy.
Even if it’s only been there for three years. I’ve only been there for three months. And then you have this weird feeling of like, oh God, I’m not going to post them in a new job. I just have to three months. What would people say?
What would people think? And you get so much amazing support from the get so much amazing support from the community. And I’m like, oh, Jesus, all of these things is just in my head, all this weird in my head.
And so actually now that almost even motivated me to even do more of it and to encourage other people as well who are also having that whole, Lord, I want to leave, but I don’t know whether I should.
And there are just some things that a lot of it is just in your head, and you just need to push it out to realize that.
Managing personal and professional voices on social media
Fred: Sorry to interject here. I said sorry, let me take the opportunity. Thank you for letting me interject. But I find this really interesting because I think you’re going into the personal voice and the professional voice that Navah brought up earlier in the show.
And that’s actually something that I personally struggle with. I think I have way more of a professional voice. For some reason, all digital marketers are on Twitter. That’s the place. Like nobody else in the world seems to enjoy Twitter anymore.
And then people come up and they’re like, well, why aren’t you doing more Instagram? Why aren’t you making TikTok videos about PPC? Is that something that you have all looked at and talk more about?
That how you draw the line between the personal and the brand voice? Because it sounds like you kind of mix both together. You do that across platforms as well?
Anu: Yeah, I do that together, probably on this one. All the different paid social channels have different ways of working. Instagram is not going to work the same way Facebook will work.
It’s not the same with Twitter. So you cannot just say, oh, paid social voice. And I’ll do the same thing across all the different channels. That will fail. So I think it’s definitely very important to realize what works for you.
How many voices can you materialize? And that might sound a bit like for personality disorder, but no, I think with LinkedIn, I know that I can handle just posting like, let’s say once a day, Monday to Friday, because that is a professional network.
That’s how I see it. I see some people doing it in different ways. And it worked very well for them. And for me, I see it in a way that they probably put in a lot more work, a lot more time into it than I have.
And I don’t. And the pace at which I’m going, the growth that I’m seeing works for me. I’m happy with it. With Twitter, it’s a lot more conversational. It’s a lot more like nuance. You can have a little bit of fun and play with it.
So I’ll do more long posts on LinkedIn, but I can throw in like a random thought that has just come in my head at 1:00 P.m. Might be about coffee, might be about Google, either one.
I might post it, it might work. It might not work. And I think one thing also has to remember people that have to remember is that because one post doesn’t work, doesn’t mean the next won’t.
So because you’ve failed one or two posts or didn’t get rid of the engagement.
Fred: Now you get back in your head and you’re like, oh my God, people don’t like what I’m talking about working today.
Anu: No, just keep going with some of their channels. You just need to keep going with it.
Fred: And, Akvile. I realize we should definitely bring this one back to you because you’re the social expert. So what do you think about that?
Akvile: I feel like I’ve been struggling the last two years. I have a toddler now, so juggling that with COVID and a baby. I haven’t done as much as I want to year into, but the creativity that tries to resurface is not something that’s been really great the last two years.
But before that, I try to figure out who the audience is, what I want to convey with Twitter, I use it mostly for marketing. I’ll throw in a few things that are personally just to add that human component because I also do want to share certain things with that community and other people that might be my followers with LinkedIn, the professional as well.
But something like Instagram. I do enjoy sharing some work related things, but I know that it’s much more a lot of marketing friends on there from the industry, but also just people that don’t work in this space.
So I try to be a little respective of like what would they be interested in as well from my profile.
Fred: And you use your personal profile but you share marketing stuff through it.
Akvile: Yes, because there’s too much to handle too. I try to do just one for AKvertise, but I’m like, I work remotely. I’ve been working remotely for ten years and there’s only so much you can do.
And I know I can get creative there, but I’m just limited on bandwidth. So for instance on Instagram, since it is my personal account and people know what I do, I will share things like when we used to go more to in-person events like, hey, I’m here, this is what we’re doing just to make it exciting for people that are also not in this space.
So for instance, I just moved last weekend and finally set up my office again little by little. So I shared the thing like, oh, you know, my office is set up and about to do this really great conversation with some people I respect and have learned or come from.
So that type of stuff is still career related, but it kind of intertwines with personal. So I think it’s best to understand how do you want to be conveyed to the people that follow you, whether you’re public or private on different channels, or if you’re younger, maybe greener to the industry, what your goal is, what do you want to be known for?
How do you want to evolve your account, your persona per se, but just try to mix in a little bit personal so people know that there is a more human warmth component to you if they can approach you about something else.
Because while we do work most of our week, most of our lives, I think it’s also important to show that life is not just work. We should work to live, to work whatever you want to do.
But at some point, it’s not 100% right. We’re multifaceted beings. So I think it’s okay to put out some personal stuff in between career oriented posts as well.
Navah, Akvile, and Anu share how to get buy-in for your ideas
Fred: Thanks for sharing that. All right, let’s shift topics here a little bit. And Navah maybe we’ll go back to you. Okay, so now you run a consultancy. You’re having to go out there. I’m sure people are knocking down your door to work with you, but at the end, you still have to sell. Right?
So how do you get buy-in sales situations and throughout your career, when you were perhaps presenting to a room full of men, how do you get buy-in how do you get them to trust you?
I know the personal brand that you built was something that helped you before. Those people listening today who haven’t quite gotten to that personal brand level, what advice would you give to be like that trusted expert in getting buy-in more easily.
Navah: So I’m going to give advice of what you should do and then give advice of what you shouldn’t do. We’re going to start with what you should do. Be genuine and authentic in what you can reasonably provide.
Do not allow anyone to pressure you into hard metrics, hard goals that you will deliver on. Instead, lean into what you can specifically provide. So, for example, one client I’ve taken on, we’re now going into a monthly retainer.
They started off on just projects. They wanted hard metrics of what the fixes that I was proposing would be able to deliver them. And I flat out refused. I will not promise you something that I cannot guarantee will happen.
These are the things I’m expecting to happen. This is why I’m expecting to happen and give data behind why. And it all worked out. And now they kept asking me, hey, what do you think about this?
What do you think about this? Like, you know what, if you would like to be on a monthly retainer, let’s be on a monthly retainer. Otherwise, we’re going to need to make these projects.
And they found the advice, they found the value I was able to provide useful that they ended up going with that retainer.
Fred: What I’m hearing is you’re kind of doing the pushback earlier on rather than sort of like going with the flow.
Navah: Correct. And this goes to what you shouldn’t do. Don’t devalue yourself by giving away your brilliant mind for free. A lot of times when I was younger, I was so insecure in my intelligence that I felt the need to prove it, and I would give away everything of value right up front.
And so by the time it came to actually selling and the time it came to actually securing the clients, they didn’t need me because I had already given them everything away for free.
Fred: You built a software to make it easy to run it?
Navah: Yeah, exactly. And I think that’s actually one of the reasons why I lean so heavily on software is because you’re able to build out solutions. And even if you solve one thing with a lot of wit for free at the beginning, just to kind of what the appetite, you still can then build those really interesting Iterative solutions.
So I find it easiest to work in that space. But for those that are just getting started, it is okay to give a tidbit of advice. You do not need to give everything away for free. The other thing that’s very important to own is what kind of tone do you need to bring to the conversation.
There are certain people when I’m speaking to them. I am a very clean cut. I lean very much into the fact that I am a well-educated college grad. I’ve been in the industry 15 years. I will lean into every single award I’ve won.
There are other people where I’m far more casual, far more accessible. I have sold more high value deals on my Star Wars geekery than my actual PPC knowledge. Because when you like who you do business with, it’s so much easier to have that conversation, so much easier to grow that relationship.
If everything feels like it’s nickel and diming or a fight that it’s not a healthy relationship. And it doesn’t matter if you get one really big month of MRR or one really big month of spend, if the relationship will be poor, if there will be a lack of trust, if there will always be this question of value, you will hate that work and you will ultimately do bad work.
And then that will feed your impostor syndrome. And then it’ll just be bad. So find folks that you enjoy working with own your value. Do not give everything away for free, and test the limit of how much people are willing to charge.
Like I started off when I was first doing my pricing at $100 an hour. I now get $250 an hour for just consultative work. And people don’t bat an eye at it because they know that they are going to get much more value out of that spend.
So don’t be afraid to test your prices and look for those friend relationships within your authority voice.
Fred: And then I guess we all go about pricing a little bit the same way, right? When I ran an agency, maybe I can shortly, briefly in between doing Google and Optmyzr, but I was like, okay, let me charge this much.
That’s my comfort limit of what I can ask for. And then people would consistently say yes. And I was like, oh, maybe I can increase it a little. So that’s how you get there. But also ask around in the industry, because if everyone’s saying yes because you’re under pricing yourself by half, then that’s no good, right?
Hey, Akvile, let’s go to you about getting buy-in from clients, existing clients, new clients. How have you handled it?
Akvile: It’s easier now. I feel like since I have a lot of experience throughout the years, but when I was younger, it was certainly more challenging being green, and I feel like I wasn’t very confident in my voice.
I was nervous about public speaking, so I feel like people can pick up the tone in your voice. And if you’re not sounding very confident, it’s much more difficult to get a buy-in. So few years back, I knew this was an issue for myself and I needed to overcome it, especially if I wanted to be successful in business and I wanted to start speaking at conferences.
So I went to Toastmasters. And if this is an issue for you, it’s wonderful, wonderful global organization. I didn’t miss a single weekly meeting for a year, and my first speaking engagement was a keynote at the Adobe campus in Salt Lake City, which I never thought I could get to that point.
But going to Toastmasters helped me so much in being able to be present when I’m speaking to use a more confident tone, even if I’m not feeling confident, if I’m having a bad day and I have to do a presentation or do a sales call with a prospective client.
I’ve noticed that same thing. Like, I’ll test different prices, and I was so worried about doing that. I’m like to say it with confidence, even if I’m not feeling confident, maybe practice before I hop on the call.
And I have not had anybody push back. So that gave me more confidence to the next call, the next call. And I feel like even if you’re feeling like an imposter, you’re not feeling at your best, just practicing it out loud.
And don’t hesitate to try not to stumble. Of course, we all stumble from time to time, but as long as you convey it that way, then that prospective client will be confident in your scales and be like, okay, she can say that voice or that price, then she’s worth that most likely.
And as Navah pointed out, definitely sense out how that relationship is going to be and set the boundaries. Set the expectations early on because there are so many red flags that you can pick up over the years as you do this longer of what a good relationship is and sense it out.
Trust your gut, because one has anyone ever said I shouldn’t have trusted my gut? Right. Especially if you’re more intuitive and working with people. But I feel like that’s very important to do, especially if you are looking to be more forward facing, work up at a company to more executive position or a VP of some sort or just working for yourself, because that will help set the tone for your business and your success.
Fred: It’s amazing advice and I have to make light of this, sadly. But I should have not trusted my gut when my good friend told me five, six years ago that I should have bought Bitcoin, I was like, no, in the world that this can be right.
Akvile: You’re not alone.
Fred: So, yeah, we all have regrets. But in the end, you’re right. I mean, trust your gut, because I think there’s regrets of opportunities missed are very different from regrets of having taken on a bad client who’s made your life so stressful that you hate your job, you don’t get time with your kids.
I think those are two very different things. So that’s great advice. Anu, what about you?
Anu: What about me about?
Fred: Pushing back, right so a room full of men you got to present to them first time, they don’t believe you. Maybe before you had your personal brain, before you were who you are today, you’re younger. How would you have dealt with that room?
Anu: I think I definitely have to give credit for that for me to again, it’s something that I’ve mentioned, like my family, I come from a very overachieving, confident family, and I’ve always been like, I have that running through my veins.
Like, if I’m in a room, I deserve to be in a room. If I’m on a stage, I deserve to be on that stage. Especially my first speaking gig, I had a bit of stage fright and I just mentioned it and I was like, yeah, let’s just throw it out there.
Look very nervous my first one, and then I just got into my talk and it had such great feedback, and I was like, well, that’s not too hard. In fact, the way I started thinking about it is that if you’re the person brave enough to be the one standing up there and talking, you’ve got something of value to say.
You’ve done the brave thing. You’ve done the good thing to start off with. So your audience have every right to listen to you. And so I’ve always just made sure that I always come well prepared, always come with my confidence, and never feel bad about not being able to answer certain questions because you don’t necessarily need to have all the answers, all the questions on the spot.
It’s okay to say, Sorry, that bit that you’ve just asked me, I don’t know, but this is what I know. And that bit that I don’t know, I’ll research it and come back to you because everyone’s learning, everyone’s going, and you won’t always have the answers all the time.
So at the end of the day, it’s just about making sure that you do your preparation, but you don’t get flustered if there’s something that has been up about that you do not know and just keeping at it.
It’s also very much a relentless game. I think how I’ve really stuck in is that even in the good days and bad days, just realizing I just need to get back in there people, things will fail. Things will not always go right.
But there’s a 50 50% chance that you could get something if you present yourself. There’s 100% chance you won’t get it if you don’t show up at all.
So the biggest thing is to just continue to showing up and try to be better than the last time. All right.
Fred: Wayne Gretzky said you missed 100% of the shots you don’t take.
Anu: Absolutely.
Fred: I love the whole preparation thing and being true to your voice. Right. So when presentations go badly, whether that’s a presentation on stage or a presentation in front of a bunch of clients, it’s when you’re presenting somebody else’s work and you don’t know the detail. Right.
And it’s okay to not have all the answers like you said, but you should be the expert. You should really know what you’re talking about because people will call you the bullshit. All right.
So this has been amazing. I want to have a lightning round here one piece of advice you would give your younger you.
Akvile, Anu, and Navah share one piece of advice they give their younger selves
Akvile: All right, I’ll go first. Kind of piggybacking off the last question. I wish I had a stronger voice when I was younger. I think a lot and I internalized a lot, but it doesn’t. And I feel like I just had this wall up where I wouldn’t externalize it, which I didn’t learn until much later.
And I finally started speaking up and telling people my opinion. I used to be afraid of not being liked, and I’m getting to the point where not everyone’s going to like you, and that’s okay.
So I would just tell myself to not be afraid to speak up and to have gone to Toastmasters when I was younger. It’s great advice.
Fred: Who wants to go next?
Anu: My advice. The first thing that came to my mind is your imposter syndrome voice is wrong. That’s really the biggest advice. There will be situations, especially there are situations that you feel that maybe I shouldn’t have done that or that went wrong.
I shouldn’t speak my mind up here. That voice is wrong. Almost like similar to speak up, it’s better to speak up and maybe to be corrected than to just not speak up at all.
It’s better to still speak up because your imposter syndrome voice is wrong.
Fred: About the imposter syndrome. There’s this whole notion that experts it’s like this self-fulfilling prophecy. Once you’re an expert, you can say almost anything you want and people will believe it because you are the expert.
And so I think if you’re that younger person sitting in the room with someone with much more experience, I mean, do realize that often they may not be quite as hands-on with these very rapidly shifting tool sets and systems.
And so their perception on it may not be as accurate as yours. Right. And so there may be a disconnect between what you think and what you hear from the experts, but that doesn’t necessarily mean the expert is right.
And that’s where I think it’s really important. What you’re saying is don’t necessarily challenge them, because challenging someone doesn’t necessarily lead to productive outcome, but help them see the other side, ask about the other side.
Maybe they haven’t thought about it and start having that conversation because everybody gets smarter that way.
Anu: Absolutely. It’s important that we can discuss and that’s what’s so amazing about the #PPCchat community. It’s important that we can discuss what’s working for one person and might not be working for another person.
And how Google brings a lot of striving with all the updates. And some people like, oh, it’s working for me. And other people are like, no, it’s not. It’s the worst thing ever. And it’s really great to be part of that community that lets you see that, well, it’s not about it’s good or it’s bad.
It’s all about testing it to see if it works. And you can test loads of different things. And a test will work for one client. It will not work for another client. And there’ll be different loads of different caveats you need to put into place to say things work.
Because, yeah, you have all these thought leaders on Twitter who was like, bring this big sentence, bring this big statement. And I think it’s important that they be like, the caveat, though, is that always missed out.
That’s why sometimes I add to the conversation, someone put this big sentence, I was like, well, “It depends”. “It depends” is one of our favorite phrases in this industry.
Fred: That’s what makes Twitter so difficult for PPC, because it’s like, well, here’s the answer. And then here’s the ten caveats to that.
Akvile: Hot take.
Anu: Yeah, right. Navah, sorry. You go ahead. You give us your amazing tidbit.
Navah: I back up all that’s been said, I guess simply just own your power. You have power in your questions. You have power in your wit. You have power in your work ethic. You have power in every single choice that you make.
And even if something is not quite right, and even if you get set back a little bit, there is power in overcoming it and having that data point that you have overcome that adversity and you own your voice and your power.
There have been several instances in my career where people have tried to shake that. And I think one of the reasons why I appreciate so much this industry is that there are so many opportunities for true teeth in technical expertise and then also witness strategy to kind of protect those that are actually good and put to the side those that might try to shake confidence of the worthy.
So own your power, own your worth. Do not allow anyone to make you question that.
Wrapping it up
Fred: Great advice from everyone. Well, thank you so much. Viewers, thanks for watching. If you’ve enjoyed this episode you want to get more of PPC Town Hall, use the subscribe button.
You can also subscribe to the email list on our website. That way you’ll find out when we have new episodes. They roughly happen about twice a month. So thank you to our panelists - Akvile, Navah, and Anu. You’ve been fantastic.
Thank you for sharing all these wonderful insights and for remaining thought leaders, experts and educators. Most of all, let’s get rid of that box. We’re covering Anu’s face. Let’s go to this view.
No, that doesn’t work. Okay, how about this view? This is better. We can see everyone. So thanks for joining us. That little thing that was up at the bottom of the screen. My producer is trying to tell you that I just wrote a book “Unlevel the playing field”.
Go ahead and check that out on Amazon but again, thank you so much for being here. Thanks for sharing. Hope to have you again on another episode and have a wonderful day, everyone.
With RSAs going to be the only standard text format starting from July 1, 2022, there’s going to be a pretty big shift in how PPC marketers approach text ads.
In this episode of PPC Town Hall, we spoke to Julie Bacchini and Ed Leake — two well-known PPC experts with great RSA experience under their belt — to talk about how to deal with this transition.
Here’s the full episode with the transcript.
Full episode:
Transcript:
Fred’s introduction to the episode.
Fred: Hello, and welcome to another episode of PPC Town Hall. My name is Fred Vallaeys. I’m your host and I’m also the co-founder and CEO of Optmyzr.
So hot topics in PPC…Well, let’s see. Automation, Performance Max, RSAs.
So let’s talk about one of these. This week we’re going to talk about RSAs. Responsive Search Ads, as you all know, is the ad format that’s going to become the standard ad text format in Google Ads. It’s replacing the long-loved Expanded Text Ad.
And before that, regular text ad. But basically what’s happening is Google is saying, you no longer have to write a fully qualified ad text with a bunch of headlines and a bunch of descriptions.
Instead, just give Google the components. Give them a bunch of headlines, a bunch of descriptions, a bunch of calls to action. And Google’s automation will put it together based on what it thinks is going to be the best ad to serve for that specific auction, that specific search.
So there’s a pretty big shift that’s happening. And we’ve got some great experts with us today to talk about what you would do as the shift happens to RSAs. And we really have to start thinking differently about how we manage messaging and attics on Google.
I’m really excited about this episode. Let’s get rolling with PPC Town Hall.
The panelists introduce themselves.
Fred: All right. Our two guests this week are Ed and Julie. Welcome to the show.
Ed: Thanks for having me.
Julie: Thanks for having me. Yeah.
Fred: Thanks for coming back, Julie. We’ll start with you. So let’s do a quick introduction to who you are, what you do, and what you know about RSAs.
Julie: Okay. I’m Julie Friedman Bacchini, and I have sort of dual roles in the world of PPC. I have my own consultancy, Neptune Moon. I’ve been in paid search since literally the beginning, so I’ve seen it all.
This is yet another change that is happening. And I also manage PPC chat on Twitter. So I am managing all of the weekly chats and trying to be a source of the latest information gathered.
It’s hard to keep up with everything. So I do my best every week to try to gather information and make sure people can easily find what they need to keep up with what’s going on in the ever-changing world of PPC. Yeah.
Fred: And thank you for doing PPC chat. We’re big fans here. It’s just a different format to get your news, basically, and then have a great discussion around it. So I’m a fan of Search Engine Land. I’m a fan of PPC Town Hall if you prefer video.
But PPC chat is awesome because it’s just on Twitter. And even if you don’t have time when it’s live. And Julie, it’s usually what, Wednesdays at 09:00 AM Pacific?
Julie: We have two chats per week now. One is the traditional Twitter-based chat, and that’s at 12:00 Eastern on Tuesdays and then at 12:00 Eastern on Thursdays. We have been doing an audio version in Twitter spaces of typically the same topic that we talked about on Tuesday of that week.
Fred: Nice. So, yeah, check those out. And Ed, first time on the show. It’s great to have you on. So tell us a little bit about who you are, what you’re doing, what you know about RSA.
Ed: Yeah. Hi, I’m Ed. Thanks for having me on. So I’ve been an agency owner for twelve years and my side project is Ad Evolver, which is a Google Ads optimization tool.
Not sure if I’m allowed to mention this, Fred.
Fred: Yeah (laughs).
Ed: You can edit this bit out (laughs).
Fred: There are many great tools out there. Right. So let’s use them for what they’re best at. Not a problem at all.
Ed: And then to keep myself busy, I also started God Tier Ads about a year or so ago, which is a Google Ads training framework and product, that sort of thing.
Fred: So you’re basically saying you don’t do so much.
Ed: I don’t sleep. I don’t have kids, though. So I’ve got an excuse to work, unfortunately. That does help.
Google’s latest update on RSAs.
Fred: So, yeah, let’s talk a little bit about RSAs then. I think maybe we’ll start with what is happening. So I talked about how this is becoming the new ad format.
The latest news we have from Google is that the end of Q2 is the last day that you can still put in traditional text ads. These are called ETAs.
ETAs are expanded text ads because before that they were not expanded. So ETA is just like a regular ad, but basically end of Q2 and then starting in Q3, I think you can still pause and enable ETAs, or you can no longer make edits.
You can no longer make a new one. So that’s kind of the timeline we’re working with now. How aggressive have both of you and or your customers been with kind of this transition?
How are Julie and Ed dealing with Google’s transition to RSAs?
Ed: Julie? Ladies first.
Julie: Oh, thank you. I have been working with RSAs for quite a while because it feels so different when you’re creating. It’s so different from how we’ve done ads up until this point, even the regular text ads and then the expanded text ads where you had more characters to work with and the extra headlines and that kind of thing.
RSAs are just a totally different animal. And so when you’re used to writing and I’ve been doing this for a long time. So when you’re used to writing the more traditional ads, you’re used to coming up with your ideas for testing like, oh, what if we test this offer against this or we move this in this position and whatnot.
It’s really different when you start to create the RSA because you’re putting in so many elements into a single ad. So you’re like, my God, I have to come up with ten headlines. I have to come up with four different descriptions.
It’s a very different way of thinking and a different process that you have to go through. So I’ve been working with them for a while now and knowing that this date was coming when you wouldn’t even have the option to create new ones.
I’ve been working harder on them, and I know we’re going to get into this later, but once you start using our sales in your ad groups, your ETAs don’t tend to serve a whole lot.
So there’s that whole dynamic that you start to deal with as well.
Ed: Yeah, I mean, pretty much the same as me. We essentially adopted them as soon as they were available because Fred shared at the start of this call, actually, sorry to do the thing of sharing information that we haven’t recorded, but what was it? 17% of people haven’t tried an RSA yet.
So the argument is that they’re behind. We always test new features as soon as they come out, to be honest with you. And it’s normally an easy sell to clients anyway, because new things normally mean you get a little bit of an edge.
But yeah, with what Julie said, RSA is a different mindset because it’s less about the A/B. You’ve got one version versus the other. It’s more about making the struggle of writing 15 headlines that make sense, which is why you shouldn’t write 15 headlines, probably.
So our approach to the RSA situation overtime was essentially treated like two ETAs. So you have to do twice the work but compress your two ETAs down to a single RSA. That’s the way I sold it to the team anyway, to make it sound like it’s no more work to do an RSA.
Fred: Exactly. I think when Google launches new stuff, we don’t always jump in feet first because there are plenty of things that they launch and they just go to advertisers and they say, hey, can you please try this?
Because they’re honestly just trying to see if this is any good. In the case of RSA, I guess it was pretty clear relatively early on that, it was going to be a winner for Google and that they were going to push it through.
Right. But always be a little bit cautious. I suppose you don’t want to be the guinea pig in the Alpha necessarily, but once it comes to a beta stage, I tend to agree to jump in, because being early on may give you some benefits.
Even if you don’t get benefits, there’s this whole benefit, right. When Google introduces something new like you’re the only ad on the page doing that new thing. And even if you do it horribly, it looks different and you’re still going to get more clicks because people are like, oh, what’s that like?
There are four lines of something or there’s a little image next to it, so they just gravitate towards it.
Right. But then even the early learnings that you have in those extra couple of months that you’ve sort of figured out what’s the strategy. What’s the best process here that can be really beneficial?
So the RSA study that we did at Optmyzr, so we’ve done two of them.
We did it once for SMX Next in 2020, and then we did it again in SMX next 2021. But we ran through a bunch of ads, millions and millions of ads that we run through the Optmyzr system.
And we looked at how many advertisers had not yet tried RSAs at all. Last year, that was at about 25%. This year, that’s down to about 17%. But that’s still kind of a shocking number like you said. Right.
So 17% of people, given that this is going to go away in about four months, have still not experimented with the new ad format. What’s also fascinating is that for those who have tried it, only a very tiny portion of 0.2% tried RSAs and then stopped all RSAs.
So what that kind of tells me, and you’re welcome to take a different angle on this, but it kind of tells me that when you turn on RSAs, they seem to do something good enough that people want to stick with it.
Do you think that’s an okay read, or do you think it’s just that people are like, well, this is the thing I’m going to have to deal with, so I might as well fight the bullet and go with it?
Ed: I think it’s all the above, isn’t it? It’s easier as well. To a certain degree, you can be RSA is going to create a few lazy account managers. Dare I say it? And I know a lot watching this stream, but that’s an opportunity for other people that aren’t so lazy. No offense.
Fred: I’m kind of curious as far as the lazy account manager. So what were both of your strategies in the beginning? So say that a new client comes to you and they haven’t done RSAs? Like, would you go and write entirely new ad units, or would you just do the conversion and take their existing ETAs and turn them into like chunk them out into headline pieces and description pieces and put them in the right place in the RSA?
Ed: Right now? So one of that 17.5% turned up, knocked on the door, and said, we don’t have any RSAs, take the best ETAs. Hopefully, they’ve got a good year’s data and more than two ETAs and take the best components and create an RSA.
I don’t want to jump ahead because now we’re going to talk about optimization and stuff, but there are some sweet spots as well for the amount of headlines and that sort of thing.
But yeah, easy street. And also, I just want to say that when I said lazy, by the way, I don’t want to offend anyone if they’re really good at ad copy and really smart. Then be lazy because you could create an awesome RSA and get away with it for some time, probably.
Julie: Well, I mean, RSAs are definitely testing of ads as we have historically known. It isn’t just not going to exist anymore in the world of RSA. Right.
Historically, up until this point, when you wanted to kind of test different things and figure out maybe what would be more successful in your ads, you would do A/B test between expanded text ads, and then you would know the variable that you were testing, hopefully.
You had a testing plan of like what you were doing. You weren’t just kind of like randomly doing things. But if you had any method to what you were doing as far as what you were testing, it was pretty clear where you were going.
And then you could record those results and then try to build off of that. The way that RSAs function is completely different. Like that traditional mindset and that traditional method of I’m going to test headline A against headline B. Right. Like everything else in the ad is going to be the same.
But I want to see what happens if we have a different headline. You can’t do that, really. Theoretically, I guess you could do that with pinning of things. That’s the whole piece I’m sure we’re going to get into.
But just the whole way that you think about RSAs and how you use them and what kind of information you can glean from them, it’s totally new territory.
Fred: I have this fascinating example that I always give, which is you have an ad group and then the ad group has ten keywords. Okay. And now you have an A/B test, but you actually decide to make the B version the same as the A version, but you just make it as a new ad and you see what happens.
And then traditional A/B testing, where you’re usually looking for what is the best headline, you will often actually find that the A/A test has a winner and a loser. It doesn’t make sense. It’s the same ad. Right. But the thing that people then forget is while you had ten keywords and this ad group is running for all those ten keywords.
And by the way, these keywords might be broad matches. So the thing that the person actually typed in wasn’t that keyword.
It was some fairly out their variation, because broad match, as we know, is not that restrictive. And then it’s a different audience, it’s a different time of day. Like it’s different geography that is coming in from they Typed in a different query and they saw an A/A test and one of the ads starts winning. Right?
So then the question is, was it really the ad that was driving that change, or was it the fact that other circumstances with the keyword and clearly the second. But that’s a mistake people make.
And so that’s where I think you have to be careful. And RSAs are a bit better because if they do their job, as Google promises it, they should figure out what are those circumstances around each search inquiry and then put together the right ad for that person so that even if you’re not doing the AB testing, they kind of do it for you.
Ed: Yeah, but I agree with that. But the example of A/B testing with ten broads is that’s a setup issue as well. Don’t get me wrong, a lot of people do it wrong and don’t have a controlled test.
But yeah, I agree, and people misread them. And as a result of that, you got 10,000 queries driving two ads off the back of a dozen keywords, and then within seven days pick a winning ad. It wasn’t really the winner.
And as Julie said, it’s not that straightforward anymore, RSAs, is it? But also to touch on what Julie said, we’re going to lose that compounding benefit of doing proper AB tests. The trial and error of A/B tests over a period of time does give incremental value to an account. We’re going to lose that.
So I’m interested to see for the people that are quite strict with AB testing, how that will that compounding performance will go away, potentially, unless the machine learning is that good, that this is all mute, then we just stick a light about it and walk away.
Fred: So given that there’s this compounded benefit of continuous AB testing, obviously with RSA you can still do pinning, right? So you could technically make the equivalent of an ETA by pinning everything to a certain position.
Google says, well, you lose the benefit of the machine learning doing its thing. But as you would argue, you get the benefit back of the A/B testing, I guess.
How good and dedicated are you? And then you can do better than the machine? Or is there a happy medium?
Ed: I think analytical people really struggle with ad copy and add writing. I’ve looked at God knows, hundreds, maybe thousands of accounts. I don’t know, I’ve lost count. And I think it’s the single weakness of most PPC managers is the ad copy.
So can they beat the machine? Probably not over the long run. So I’m defending Google now and the machine. So hold on, I’ve offended PPC managers, and now, oh God! Do know evil.
I think, in fact, that is one of the angles that a PPC manager, particularly freelancers and small agencies, can take is to team up with really good copywriters and admit that it’s not their strength.
And if you’re going to fill stuff, if you’re going to fill an RSA, make it worthwhile. But I’m going off on a tangent.
Fred: Well, yeah, let’s hear from you, Julie. How do you feel about that? So you work with a number of accounts. How many people do you work with right now?
Julie: Neptune Moon is just me. It’s been various sizes over the years, but currently, in the pandemic world, it’s just me.
Fred: How important is the ad testing and what do you think of Ed’s point?
Because I do agree we tend to be so analytical, and the reason that I got into PPC was more my technical side and my analytical side more so than being a marketer or a great messenger. How do you feel about that?
Julie: So I come from more of a creative background. I was a marketing person, but I also did design, I did PR and marketing, and design. I have more of that writing background.
So for me, I like writing the ads. That’s not a challenging piece for me. That’s well within my particular wheelhouse.
But I think one of the challenges is this is what happens a lot with stuff with Google. They have a particular type of advertiser in mind when they move forward in different directions, and then everyone else kind of has to figure out how to work within the parameters of what ends up happening.
So I think I’m hopeful that because RSAs, in the grand scheme of things, is relatively new, as it becomes the only option, some things will evolve. So we talked a little bit about this on #PPCchat.
Within the last week, we were talking about how there are quite a few instances in industries where you have to pin stuff like, from a compliance standpoint, not every Advertiser in every industry is on even footing as far as how flexible you can be in what happens in your ad copy.
And I think RSAs are not equipped to deal with that properly right now. I hope that that’s something that is being thought about inside of Google because right now the big push is to go broad match plus RSA plus smart bidding. Right?
That’s the golden triangle that they talked about, in their Welcome to 2022 presentation from last week. And that’s all well and good, but there are quite a few industries, and then there are other businesses who feel strongly like, I want to make sure that my business name, for example, is in that first headline.
So I don’t feel like RSAs right now do a great job with that. They clearly want you to not have anything pinned. Like, the preference is definitely I’m running an experiment right now in a couple of my accounts where I’m running the exact same ad where I have pinned some of the assets, and I have everything else unpinned, and it’s really preferring the unpinned ad.
So I think there are definitely some things that I’m keeping my eye on as far as things that you might want to adopt. Right. Because it’s like, okay, well, Google is telling you this is where it’s going, and we all know that you can’t swim upstream against Google forever.
Right? It’s futile. So you have to figure out how to work within the parameters and with the system that Google is going to provide for you. But I still have some questions, and I hope that these are things that are kind of like on the board over at Google where they’re figuring out, like, hey, we might want to think about this, or this is something that is going to affect a certain percentage of advertisers.
So that kind of remains to be seen. So those are some holes that I’m seeing right now.
What’s the impact of pinning assets in RSAs?
Fred: Yeah. And let’s get into the tactics a little bit. And I know you wanted to get into those two and the strategies, but before we do, like on the pinning topic that Julie brought up.
So part of our study looked at the impact of pinning. So you can see the chart on the screen. And for those of you listening, not watching, basically, if you pin, your conversion rate goes up slightly, but your cost also goes up.
So your cost per click is higher, your cost per conversion is higher, CPR is lower. Right. And that’s kind of the whole premise that Google believes that if you let them figure out how to make the ad, it’s going to be more relevant.
Hence have a higher click-through rate. But then it might be the wrong message. So maybe that’s why the conversion rate gets slightly worse.
And then I think the cost per click is heavily associated with the CTR that’s the ad rank, the quality score component. If you have a lower CTR, you just have to pay more to maintain that same position.
So that’s why the cost goes up. From that perspective, pinning helps you with your metrics to some degree, but it’s very counterintuitive to what Google wants you to do. Of course, if you’re in an industry where you have to do it, then you have no choice.
Ed: Okay, sorry, Fred. To interrupt. Did you do multi-pinning versus single-pinning?
Fred: We did. Where is that one? We did multi versus single pinning as well.
Ed: Because I think that would be interesting because I definitely see that pinning impacts the impression share, particularly top of page rate as well, which, again, that’s Google being.
I’m not allowed to swear, am I?
Julie: Googley. They’re being Googley.
Ed: Yeah, it’s…But it screws over. Found the word that didn’t have an FC or B in it. Screws over the people that can’t… They have very strict brand guidelines that Julie was just talking about because we found a single pin is quite damaging to impression share, not necessary to performance metrics.
I’m just trying to look at the screen. If you took a few outliers there, really conversion rates, I mean, cost per click, look at that bumps. But the conversion metrics look similarish for a pin, but they hurt click-through rate and they bump CPC.
So essentially you’re losing the auction. If you pin so Google’s forcing your hand, it’s like another layer to qualify for.
Fred: So one interesting thing about pinning and this is a tactic people should definitely try. In the beginning of RSAs, you could pin a single thing to a single position. So you could be like, this needs to be my headline one, and maybe that was your brand, whatever.
Right? But then over time, I don’t think they really announced it kind of like snuck in. But now you can pin multiple variations to the same position. So one technique that seems to make sense to me is I want my headline to be something about my brand.
How do I portray my brand? I don’t know. Is it my domain name? Is it my company name? I don’t know. But I’m going to have three variations as headlines that are something to do with my brand.
I’m going to pin all of those to position one, and that’s what this chart on the screen shows is if you do no pinning, then Google prefers your ad because they have the most liberty to do whatever.
If you pin a single thing to a single position, Google doesn’t like it because you’re basically going back to kind of an ETA, very highly defined. If you do the thing where you pin multiple things to one position, then the results do improve.
Now it’s kind of like that happy medium. Google’s happier because they have flexibility. You’re happier because you got some control. So that seems to be kind of the way to go. If you feel like you want more control, does that make sense?
All right, since we’re talking about tactics, Julie, you were talking to about once you start RSA, your ETAs get very little love from Google, their impressions go way down. Do you want to talk about that a little bit more about what you saw?
How have RSAs impacted ETA impression share so far?
Julie: Yeah, I’ve certainly seen it in my own accounts that once you put an RSA into your ad group, it gets the lion’s share of the impressions almost right away.
I feel like even as a predecessor to this, before RSAs got the amount of preference that they get. Now, even Google had been picking the “winning ETA” almost from Go for probably the last two years.
It’s been really fascinating how they’ve been kind of like in the background, moving us towards this idea of we’re going to pick like, you’re going to tell us some stuff, but we’re going to pick what the best ad is.
So even if you had all your settings and you were just using ETA, where theoretically you wanted to have your ETAs, be able to kind of battle it out a little bit. Google has been choosing a winner, like fast, and you will find that one of your ETAs even was getting the lion’s share of impressions.
So it’s been difficult to even have impressions spread out over multiple ad variations. But now if you put the RSA in a group and you have ETAs, forget it. Your ETAs are occasionally if you have a strong performing ETA, it will still get some.
I have a couple of ETAs that are still getting decent impression share. But they said again in that Welcome to 2022 presentation, they were talking about how once ETAs are deprecated that if you continue to run ETAs, they will “lose value” in the same way that if you are still running broad match modified keywords.
Now they have also “lost value”. So they’re very much kind of telling you very clearly you can keep doing it. But I wouldn’t recommend it because we’re not going to show it. It’s not going to have the value for you that the RSA which they want you to do is going to have.
Fred: Yeah, interesting. And so part of the study that we did as far as RSA versus ETA and the difference in impression volume. So to us, the biggest insight was literally how many more impressions you can drive by having an RSA.
So we did comparisons where it was an ad group and an RSA plus an ETA. It was four to five times as many impressions per ad going to the RSA ads.
Ed: And it’s not just that, Fred. I pulled the end of last year and I don’t know if you’ve done this if you got similar data. I was just looking at the data we pulled.
I can’t remember how many accounts it was. I know it was like 8 billion impressions, a 17% increase in top page rate for RSAs, and CPCs were flat. So not only is Google biasing the impression share to an RSA, you’re getting a higher ad rank, essentially.
So it really is rewarding RSA more. That was last year. I got the year before. I don’t know if you saw the same, but to me, that’s the page.
Fred: But that’s the promise of RSA. Right? As Google says, we can show a more relevant ad based on what we know for the auction.
And then yes, naturally you’re going to have a higher ad rank because it’s more relevant ads. Your predicted CTR is higher. And we can see that in the stats where we look at CTRs of RSA versus ETA.
And so even with the same bid, you’re going to score higher, you’re going to take more of those top impressions. But then we did a study on this not two years ago and it was basically, “Look at your keywords and look at when they serve with an ETA versus an RSA and start to understand the incrementality portion of that.”
“And let’s see how many queries search terms exist now that you have RSAs that didn’t exist in your account before.” And that’s really the fascinating thing is that searches that Google before said your expanded text ad is simply not good enough to qualify to show an ad.
All of a sudden with an RSA, they’ve kind of like put together some ad that for some reason now is good enough. And it’s not the only driver of this. But this year we are seeing 4x more impressions.
And then people sometimes complain. They’re like, well, and even if you look at our stats like you get 10% to 20% versus conversion rate from an RSA. But if you get five times the impressions and you’re controlling your bids in a smart way, like five times more impressions, 10% less conversion rate, well, that’s still a hell of a lot more conversions at the end of the day than before.
Ed: Yeah. If your business has got fixed costs, definitely. It makes a lot of sense to scale incrementally and take that additional volume. And there’s a lot of businesses that are volume play insurance and finances and stuff.
I think it hurts potentially sort of small to mid-tier retailers a bit more because they might get more volume. But ROAS, tends to dip, doesn’t it? in some of the conversion metrics of RSA. Excuse me, but then they’ve got shopping, so you can’t have it probably…
Fred: …should be the main thing for them anyway, right?
Yeah. And I know people are very curious too, about Performance Max. So since we’re talking about shopping and automation and all these different apps, did you guys have any thoughts on P Max that you can share with our viewers?
I know it’s not a topic, so it’s totally fine. If you don’t want to talk about it, let’s skip that one.
Ed: Look, Google is heading towards the target is you give me a URL, you give me a budget, and you bugger off and we do everything else for you.
That’s Google’s end game. And is it five years away? Is it ten? Who knows? But it’s understandable because it cuts out all the drift in the middle. Any issues and Performance Max is a bit of a test of that ideology, isn’t it?
But you start to create your ads.
Fred: Exactly. I’ll do a selfless promotion here, but my book came out recently. So this is my second book, ‘Unlevel the Playing Field’, and it’s based on that whole premise that everybody’s basically given the same automation tools from Google and for the most part being told to bugger off like you said.
But what if you don’t want to bugger off? What if we make a living at this, right, Julie and Ed? You find one. Plus your clients expect you to be the difference. So how do you level that playing field back in your favor? You’re right.
I mean, five to ten years down the road, who knows what it’s going to be like? But right now, yes, there are a lot of things you can do to make things better.
Ed: Also, Where’s my free book?
Fred: You’re in the UK. Do you know how there are no ships with containers going across anymore?
Ed: What nonsense? We’re open for business. Come over.
Fred: I actually am coming to London in March and leave it at that point. I’m going to be speaking at HeroConf London. So assuming that that happens also, you’re going to potentially be at SMX Paris that week and doing SMX Munich as well. So little Europe stint.
Ed: Well, let’s not talk about lockdowns and all that nonsense.
What’s the impact of RSAs on ad accounts?
Julie: So I have a question that I don’t know if you’ve looked at the data relative to this Friday when you guys are looking at stuff with RSA, but some of the stuff that’s been going on with RSA, it’s been concurrent with the continued fuzzying of all match types for keywords.
So part of me wonders like, yes, we’re talking about what impact does RSAs have when you’re using that and what data points we mirror. Advertisers don’t have access to what Google does that they’re using to make all of these auction time decisions on our behalf.
What role, again, I think it’s pretty much a black box. So I don’t know how we would tease this particular piece of information out, but I do feel like the Fuzzification, as I like to call it, of the keyword matching definitely is playing a role in all of this, too.
Because even if you’re not following Google’s Golden triangle recommendations and you’re not using full-on broad match with the smart bidding and the RSAs, you’ve got like broad match, like no matter what keyword matching you’ve chosen for your terms.
So that’s a piece that’s at play here at the same time, which is kind of behind the scenes and we’re not really factoring in necessarily, but I think it is playing a role in what happens with your ads as well.
Fred: It’s a great point for those of you not completely familiar with what Julie means with broad match lite, an exact match is no longer an exact match, and it’s becoming less and less exact as time goes on.
And I think that’s what you mean by broad matching. The problem is it’s hard to figure out what part of the incremental impressions and incremental conversions are driven by the match type versus the bid management automation versus the RSA automation.
But listen, one is going off on a bit of a tangent, but one big point in the book. And so, by the way, like the subtitle of the book, the biggest mind shift in PPC history. So what is that biggest mind shift?
To me, it’s like, wow, we’re so used we’ve been doing this for 20 years of managing keywords and search terms and specific bids and specific effects and like all these details and how they come together in these like for this query, we want to do this. For that query, we want to do that.
That’s no longer how ads are going to be managed. So to Julie’s point, it’s a black box and Google does all this stuff that we used to do for us, but the way that we can still influence it and steer the ship if you will, is by managing at the periphery of that system.
So how do we tell Google what we really want, right? We’re not writing them a blank check. We’re writing them a blank check in exchange for a conversion goal that we told them.
But if we don’t directly tell them that conversion goal, then that’s a huge miss because here’s an example. Like, if you say, I want phone calls for my business, well, I don’t want phone calls for my business.
Nobody wants phone calls for your business. You want phone calls that turn into new customers by just having the phone ring doesn’t mean anything. But that’s how a lot of people define to Google what success means.
And then you get all these automations coming together. And how do you find, like, the most conversions for the cheapest price is by giving you the conversions that nobody else wanted to buy?
The phone calls nobody else wanted to buy. The lead form fills that nobody else wanted to buy. The clicks to your shopping site from customers who return 100% of the time, most of 100% of the stuff you sent them. Right. That’s what makes stuff cheap.
And if you’re not, like, measuring that and reporting that back to Google, that’s a huge fail. And so what we have to think about much more is how do we steer the ship at the periphery? So how do we have a better data feed?
And RSAs, I think, is kind of a feed format, too, because instead of writing ads now, it’s like, well, here’s my list of calls to action. Here are my unique value propositions, and here are my brand headlines. That’s my feed. Here you go. Go at it.
But we can still optimize how we position our brand. Like, what is our unique value proposition and how do we communicate.
Julie: It’s harder for smaller organizations. I mean, all the stuff that you’re talking about there, Fred, it’s like, oh, yeah, that’s amazing, right?
Like, yeah, send the value back, figure these pieces out. Make sure that you’re clear inside of your organization. What is the quality of leads that are coming in and trying to put different values on different types of conversions?
That is such a bridge too far for so many organizations. This is where I think this gets really interesting. And this is sort of what happens as these platforms and these ecosystems evolve and mature over time.
They were a very level playing field. And you had a lot of opportunities for organizations of all types and sizes to be able to find success. And as happens as most platforms mature, then it becomes much more stratified.
And I would argue that Google is pretty stratified at this point as far as a lot of the things that the way that the system is built and the way that it’s clearly moving definitely favor larger organizations, retail organizations.
And then you have this whole other swath where figuring out it’s getting them to figure out what that conversion actually is. Or is there more than one type of conversion, and is a phone call more valuable than a form fill or whatever? Right. Like getting them over that line, it’s like, oh, my gosh, that was monumental.
So there’s a large amount of stratification that is happening, and I think it’s going to continue to happen as all the stuff…
Fred: Let me argue the opposite of that a little bit. And I’m the former Google Ads evangelist. Right. So I’ve clearly drank the Kool-Aid. And I need to defend I know how to defend Google’s position on these things.
But from my perspective, I think today it is easier for a novice Advertiser who would have tended to screw things up in the past to not screw it up quite as badly. Right. At the same time, I think those mid-level organizations, they just need to work a little bit harder to achieve that same level of success or a little bit more success than their competition.
And that’s where I think they need us. Right. They can’t go at it alone necessarily. They need expert help. And I think that’s really good for us in this field because as much as it’s become easier, it’s actually also become much harder because the problems we’re solving are no longer problems like keyword selection, but like business value.
And so we become a little bit more business consultants who know how to connect those pieces back into the ad system. Right. If you explain to someone how do you value a phone call, but the math is not that hard. Right?
And you just need to look in your books a little bit to figure that out. But then how do you communicate back to Google? That’s hard.
Luckily, that’s becoming easier. So Google is working on things like GCLID-less conversion tracking. It’s basically the next version of enhanced conversions where you no longer need a GCLID to be put into your CRM, which is really complicated right now. You can just use an email address much easier.
Ed: It’s about time, Fred, that PPC managers, agencies and freelancers became more business-savvy. And people are going to hate me. And I’m divisive probably saying this, but there’s your angle, there’s your edge.
If you know that your clients or potential clients are struggling with this connection between Google and their data, that should be your foot in the door. Not the PPC, not the ads, because every man and his dog does Ads and SEO and so on.
But to actually connect those dots for them, you’ll be their best friend for life. Because then all you got to do is turn on Performance Max.
I’d love that. If that was your book, Fred, it was just completely blank pages, apart from creating a Performance Max campaign. Done.
Fred: I think that’d be hilarious if people paid me money for that book. So, yeah, let’s try it.
Google does see this, or at least the way they position it is an additive campaign in addition to your search campaigns. It will replace smart shopping, but it doesn’t replace anything else.
It’s additive in many ways. But yeah, we’re getting very far afield here from ads, and I think we’re basically all saying the same thing, just different.
Ed: There’s an opportunity, I think.
Here are some RSA tips & tricks.
Fred: Yeah. Hey, so let’s talk about ads. Any other tips and tricks, Ed, I think. Were you talking about multiple RSAs in an ad group or how many headlines you should ideally have?
Ed: Yeah, it’s probably my fault. I know we had questions for this, but I don’t think we followed the script. I pulled some data again just to be Fred like, it’s good to be nerd data.
So essentially what I found from the data is sweet and it’s so difficult to give a one size fits all. So please, if you’re watching this bit of critical thinking, but the sweet spot seems to be around six, seven headlines unless you can genuinely say something unique.
Different. But yeah, six or seven headlines. It’s like combining two ETAs into one.
Fred: So when you say 6 or 7, do you tend to have multiple? Do you kind of classify it into types of headlines?
Ed: Yes. You’ve got probably 25, 30 different types of headlines. It might be a call to action, it might be a feature, it might be a benefit, it might be a location-sensitive thing.
So you have to compartmentalize them into different assets for your ad. What are they? Are they mentioning price? Are they mentioning delivery? Whatever. So obviously then you need to use a bit of common sense to say, Well, I only really need one call to action.
I could test two. I only need one feature benefit. Or I could just test features. I could just test benefits. That’s what I meant in terms of six or seven. Because writing 15 ads headlines, essentially for one bucket of queries is no mean feat to write 15 good headlines, not five good. And then ten shite.
Fred: Shite, you’ve only sworn one so far. You promised many more, Parker.
Ed: I nearly made it for an hour. But yeah, you get the point. So it’s quality over quantity.
If you try and game the system with three or four headlines, it’s very clear that we’ve touched on that. That doesn’t work. But six or seven seems to be at the okay range in terms of where impressions aren’t cut.
But I can see Google moved the goal post on that, unfortunately. But currently, it seems to be where you’re not putting the naughty corner.
Fred: Julie, what advice do you have as far as ad variations and other tips and tricks?
Julie: So in that presentation, I know I’m talking about this a lot, but it was very eye-opening.
As far as what is Google going to be pushing on us here in 2022? They said very clearly that you should only have one RSA going forward just to be like a single RSA in your ad groups.
Part of me can see the logic of that, right? Like, the idea is, okay, you’re going to give us all these assets and we’re going to figure it out and we’re going to serve the best ones, and then you should just not worry about it.
That clearly is Google’s point of view on all of this. I think that again, you have to consider how do you want to test things inside of an RSA? So do you want to create your six, seven, eight headlines?
Let’s say you let those run for a while, see what happens, see which ones are getting served the most, see which combinations are getting served the most, that type of thing. And then when you want to try something different, what will your method be?
Will you add a new headline? Will you create a new version of the RSA that maybe keeps the top three headlines that performed well? And then you’ll create another three or four. You have to think about what you want your methodology to be because again, it’s different.
Like, with ETAs, we would be like, all right, I found one that seems to really be resonating and doing well. Can I write one that’s better? But you don’t have those same capabilities in the same way inside of an RSA.
Fred: I mean, I totally agree with what you’re saying, but for us to do what Google wants us to do, they need to be more forthcoming.
Like, great that you tell me the impression data, but what about conversions? What about costs, right? If that’s not in the picture, I can’t make that decision about what are my best three headlines to keep and maybe vary some of the others.
Julie: I mean, it’s very clear that they don’t want you making those decisions. Right? Like, they want to make suggestions to you and they want to steer you very much in the direction of like, this is what we think you should do.
Now, do I think that that’s what’s going to be best for advertisers? No. Because a lot of times what Google wants you to do, you look at it, you’re like, are you joking?
You read the suggestions and you think like, oh my God, this system really has a long way to go before I would feel confident putting that much trust into this automated system when I see what it’s suggesting. They did also say that there is going to be “more reporting data” available around RSA that is coming at some point in 2022.
Now, what that means, what that data will be, they didn’t get into any specifics. So huge question mark there.
Ed: To be fair, when you’re spending other people’s money, which is what Google is doing, why they haven’t produced that before June, before the cutoff is a bit disgraceful, really.
Again, to touch on what you’re saying, Julie, with testing, I think what I prescribe in God Tier Adsis a dirty A/B. So essentially you run ad variant tests, one RSA, and I agree with you on that.
One RSA, one ETA dies off anyway, typically, and then just run an A/B because you’re forcing Google’s hand to at least try and deliver the impressions fairly across your RSAs. But test one thing in the RSA.
So I call it a dirty A/B because you’re testing a call to action, for example, and doing it on one ad group is probably not ideal. You want to run a theme. So, test the call to action across ten RSAs.
The reason I don’t create a second ad in the ad group is that the experiment works and it gives you a printout of the metrics. So you do actually get to see the A/B result.
And I know it’s not a true A/B, but it’s probably the safest way to do it at the minute, I’d say.
Fred: So I think what we’ve seen advertisers do successfully is a variation on that. So basically, think of so get rid of ETAs. Now run multiple RSAs in one ad group, but think of each RSA as having a theme. Right.
One may be focused on price, one may be focused on the speed of delivery, whatever other value benefits you have. And then don’t stick to just one headline variation that talks about that. But try three, four different variations. Right?
So to give Google some flexibility. But there’s a very clear theme between the two. And then you can start to see, well, does Google prefer one or the other? And then you can start to figure out, okay, maybe this theme is working better.
Now let me pin those thematic points to different positions. And now I run one RSA. Both RSAs are the same theme, but they’re pinning two different positions.
And now you can start to kind of A/B test. So there’s still a process that you can go through even before you get these new metrics where you can just see the end results of the whole entity as opposed to the individual components.
Ed: Yeah. And Ngrams for Ads, you do it. We do it because it makes sense. And I think Ngrams for our stay is useful. Certainly nice if you just did it for us. But yeah, I think the thematic approach is a good idea.
I think the smaller advertisers, smaller budgets struggle with that and might need the dirty A/B. Yeah. There are still options available, so it’s not the end of the road.
How to use ad strength and asset labels when optimizing RSAs?
Fred: So we’re coming close to time here, but there were two more things I wanted to talk about and get your take on.
So ad strength, whether you use that or not. And then the asset label, which is sort of the asset strength. How do you use that if you do currently?
Ed: Julie, do you want me to go?
Julie: Sure, go ahead.
Ed: I didn’t sound very enthusiastic. Did I? So again, I was just pulling data. I don’t know if you agree, but looking at 2019 to 2021 data, I don’t see any obvious correlation between the top of page rate versus the ad strength.
Fred: Yeah, and I agree on that. So ad strength is to explain to people ad strength is something that Google looks at based on best practices of what you submit that ad strength will never change based on how the ad is actually doing.
So there should be no correlation. Right. It’s just what the machine thinks is going to happen. It’s not what it never updates its thing.
Ed: Umm, but the impression share is different. So the top of page rate doesn’t seem to flux. But the ad strength does impact impressions.
Fred: Yeah. So Google has a correlation study, and I think they say for every point you go up and ad strength, you get 3% more impressions to the highest. It’s like 9% or 12% boost in impressions. Yeah.
So what you need to look at is the asset labels, because those are actually based off of historical performance. But the downside on those is that you don’t really get these until you have a fairly high volume.
Ed: Okay. Impressions and then they tell you an arbitrary thing. It’s good. Okay. Thanks for that. I knew it’s good. How good?
I just feel like we’ve got a two-tier quality score system going on, even though it’s not about ad rank, but it is because it impacts it. So I wish they just amalgamate the whole bloody thing and just got it over and just give us an ad score, rename quality score, whatever.
I think it’s tripping a few people up, to be honest with you.
Julie: Well, pinning comes into effect for that too. So when you pin things again, out of my own curiosity, like I said, I’ve been running the experiment with literally the exact same assets, but with things pinned, and then I have one that’s totally unpinned.
The unpinned one has a higher ad strength, like right from go, because you don’t pin anything. So as soon as you pin stuff, you’re dropping your ad, you’re dropping your ad strength right from the get-go.
And if you get it into it doesn’t take long to get to a poor ad strength, even if you had one that was average or good before you started pinning stuff. And then you get that little what does it say?
Like you get that little eligible and then in the parenthesis limited status where it’s like, well, yeah, we’ll show it, but we’re not going to show it as much as we would if you would make this better, except all they want you to do to make it better.
Like you could literally do nothing other than just unpinning stuff to make it better. So there are some areas of the system that I really hope are going to be further developed.
Fred: This is probably a software enforcing loop on the machine learning system, right? So it’s basically looking at what you did and it knows that system-wide bidding is going to hurt your performance.
So it makes a prediction the moment that you pin and says, well, you’re probably going to perform worse. But then it also says, well, I’ve got these million other advertisers for the same keywords and they didn’t pin.
So I’m going to give them preference because the prediction is they’re going to do better. So then the question is how flexible is Google at allowing some variation from the established best practice so that the system can learn?
Maybe, hey, maybe things have changed, right? Maybe pinning is okay in certain situations, but I think that’s where we’re fighting just a prediction mechanism that has made some large decisions that it’s not willing to change anymore.
Ed: And if you’re on a mid or large-size account, you can’t ignore this because you got to lose volume. So you’re going to lose auctions if you don’t comply, essentially.
So if you’re a volume play, if you’re an insurance company where you just want volume overly, you have got to reference this arbitrary score, throw spaghetti at it, and it patronizingly tells you you’ve created a great ad.
And it’s like, well, I didn’t really do much to create that great ad. It needs some tinkering and needs some work. Certainly, ML is all about iteration and it will, fingers crossed, improve, will it?
Julie: I was going to say it’s interesting looking at what it chooses to put together for you, too. You can see the combinations that got the most like it’s in descending order. So the combinations that got the most impressions.
I find that really interesting to look at that’s giving you an insight into obviously it’s showing the ones most frequently that it thinks will be most successful.
So I also think that that’s an interesting little area to keep your eye on too so that you get a little bit more insight into it because it’s one thing again, we’re used to looking at ads as a whole for ETAs, right.
And you know exactly what was in the ad, and you can see what happened, like what was the percentage that it was served and all of the stats for that.
But with the RSA, you don’t see those stats in the same way. So I find looking at that data where it shows you the combinations that can give you some insight too, for each particular client and each particular thing that you’re trying to advertise for.
What does Google think are the most important aspects?
Right. And again, when you look in there, it’s really interesting because again, they favor certain combinations a lot more than others.
So I think that’s really interesting to look at and start to sort of digest as well when you’re thinking about what you want to create and what kind of things you might want to test because you’ll find assets that they never pick ever.
So you can look in there and see that and be like, well, this headline in here is doing nothing for me, or they never serve this particular description. You might as well put something else in its place.
Right. Because those assets that are sitting in there, never getting served, are doing nothing for you. So I think that’s an interesting place to kind of us as humans, right? We’re talking about how to still have where do we have value in the system where everything is automated to a certain degree?
I think looking at that particular set of data, lets your human brain think about some things that, like the machine can’t think about as well.
Wrapping it up
Fred: I love that. I think let’s wrap up on that. Great advice!
Ed: I’d like to add one thing. Do you know the frustrating thing about looking at the combinations, seeing that one headline isn’t getting any impressions, then removing it from the RSA and your ad score dropping, saying, oh, you’re out of rubbish now it’s like, oh, you right?
Fred: And I think this is really important for people to understand. The ad relevant score is a prediction. It has nothing to do with your performance. And the asset labels are based on your performance. Two completely separate systems, so they don’t talk to each other and they’re going to tell you stupid stuff like that.
Ed: Good point.
Fred: Yeah. Well, this has been a great conversation. I feel like we need to do another one as this topic evolves and as more metrics hopefully become available, a final wrap of anything that we didn’t cover or just tell us where we can find you. Remind us. Let’s start with ladies first, Julie. Yes.
Julie: I mean, this is definitely a topic that we’re going to be talking about, I think, all through 2022, so I’d be happy to talk about it again anytime.
As for where you can find me, I’m really active on Twitter, so that’s the best place to find me.
My Twitter handle is @NeptuneMoon. I am always active on the #PPCchat, so you can find me in either of those places. And I’d encourage you to check out. We have a ton of resources and links to past chats and that type of thing on the PPC chat website as well, which you can find at officialppcchat.com.
Fred: All right. And I know your dinner is getting cold, so wrap it, Ed.
Ed: So, me, I’ve got a really awful load of websites. I won’t bother. I’m not very active on social media, but if you really want to find me, go to Edleak.com.
It’s a rubbish website, but you can find your way to my other stuff from there. That’s it. Really. I mean, I don’t have a lot more to add. I won’t get another invite.
Fred: Julie should we invite him again?
Julie: Yeah, I think so. Yeah.
Ed: Thanks. All right.
Fred: But only if you meet me in London.
Ed: Hey, I want a copy of that book. Did you say two books I got two books?
Fred: You still didn’t get the first one. It was like back in 2019. Anyway, bringing up the book so folks ‘Unlevel the Playing Field’, it’s on Amazon.
Ed: Where’d you find the time?
Fred: I’m efficient, I guess, but I hope the book is good. We did a couple of iterations of it. I wasn’t very happy with the first one I wrote. Kind of went back and made it I think, really good.
It talks it’s really about this evolving nature of automation in PPC and how we deal with it. RSAs are one great example.
So anyway, thank you both for being on. Julie, I think we’re going to hang out in Austin at Hero Conf.
Julie: No, sorry. I’m not going to be there with you. It’s a bummer.
Fred: Well, anyway, it’s been a pleasure having both of you on folks.
If you enjoyed this episode you want to see more of them. We’re doing them about twice a month subscribe to the YouTube channel. That way you’ll find out.
And if you have any questions for me or Optmyzr, I’m @siliconvallaeys on Twitter and you can always find me Optmyzr.com.
So thanks so much for watching. See you for the next one.
Do not pin assets in your RSAs. But if you absolutely have to then pin multiple texts to a single position. This gives you control over what the ad says and gives Google some flexibility.
Provide as many headlines and descriptions as possible to let Google generate the maximum number of ad variations.
Learn to become more business-savvy because with automation taking care of the basic stuff, the success of your campaigns depends on your expertise.
We’re at a point in PPC where automation is doing most of the work we used to do. There’s no escape from it, so we must find a way to coexist with the machines but stay in control of our PPC accounts.
Enter automation layering — you implement your own automation strategies over what Google or the other ad platforms are doing to put yourselves in charge.
And to tell you more about what automation layering is and how to go about it, we invited Joe Martinez, Michelle Morgan, and Aaron Levy — three of the top PPC experts and practitioners to our 50th episode of PPC Town Hall.
Here’s the full episode.
Full episode:
Transcript:
Fred’s introduction to the episode.
Fred: Hey, welcome to another episode of PPC Town Hall. This is episode number 50. So we’ve been doing this for quite a while and I’m so happy you’re watching this very special episode.
Today we’re going to talk about automation layering and automation layering is a very hot topic these days, right? I mean there’s so much automation coming out of places like Google, Microsoft, and the question is always in this world where everything seems to be automated, how do we as humans still remain relevant?
There’s this whole thing that we’d be talking about humans plus machines better than machines alone. But then automation layering came in because we started thinking about there’s quite a bit of work for humans to do manually when it comes to controlling and monitoring these machines.
Why don’t we try to automation layer and basically put our own automations on top of what Google’s doing so that we stay in control using sort of the methodology that we really like?
So that’s what we wanted to talk about today. “Robots fighting robots” is what some of the other panelists were saying. So I can’t wait to hear their take on this whole thing. But let me show you who we got for panelists today.
Let’s get rolling with PPC Town Hall.
Fred: Alright. Thank you for joining me, Aaron, Michelle. And who’s that guy in the top corner of the screen?
Aaron: I thought my headshot was outdated. Right.
Michelle: It’s just a Mr. T look alike. Don’t worry about it.
Joe: Yes, I pity all of you.
The panelists introduce themselves.
Fred: So yes, all of you have been on the show before. Thank you for coming back home. Now for those who may not know, you tell us a little bit about who you are. As my Alexa just turned around, she seems very interested in finding out more too.
So Joe, why don’t we start with you? Who are you?
Joe: I’m Joe Martinez, co-founder of the Paid Media Pros YouTube channel. Doing paid media for, I think January was my 10-year anniversary in the paid media space. So Hooray for me. Multiple anniversaries we’re celebrating this year.
Fred: Yes. And what about the other half of Pay Media Pros?
Michelle: Yeah, that’d be me.
Fred: So tell us a little bit more about you as well. Yeah.
Michelle: So my bio is going to sound pretty similar to Joe’s, except I have a different name and I look different.
So I am Michelle Morgan. I am the other co-founder of Paid Media Pros. Also been in the PPC space for about ten years now, working in agencies and in-house. All that good stuff. So excited to be here. Yeah.
Fred: And just when you said you look a little bit different, I was like, hey, anyone watching? If you’re good with Photoshop, we’d love to see it.
Michelle: I’d turn off my camera for the rest of the stream.
Fred: And then, unfortunately, we have Aaron hiding somewhere behind the bottom banner. There he is.
Aaron: First of all, Michelle, when you took a second there, I had that moment, like in elementary school when the teacher was calling you, but you weren’t paying attention.
Michelle: I was like, am I supposed to do my part? Yeah.
Aaron: Yeah. So I’m Aaron Levy. I’ve been in, I don’t want to say the number is now…I’ve been in SEM or Digital for 15 years. I run our paid search team at Tinuiti. We’re about 120 odd people, spend a lot of money.
And I’ve known Michelle and Joe forever and ever. So if we seem too comfortable with each other, that’s because we are. But honestly looking forward to talking about it because robots fighting robots just sounds like an awesome TV show.
Fred: I know, right? But these robots. Right. Let’s talk about what these robots really are and why we have our own robots.
So I want to start with what’s new with the engines and specifically, Google, I think is always most interesting. But anything there in the field of automation that you think we should talk about, Performance Max campaigns certainly come to mind for me.
So why don’t we start there?
Aaron: First of all, I’m a big golfer, as Michelle is. We’re about to find out shortly who is better than the other. I think it’s going to be neither one of us.
Michelle: Correct.
Aaron: First of all, this is going to be a swipe at Google. But in the golf world, there’s been a big trend of naming things like speed and Max.
The Max is always for the worst player that needs the most forgiveness. But no, I mean, Performance Max is obviously going to be huge. I think all of us are seeing it as the latest iteration of Google, saying, just give us a credit card, we’ll do it.
It’s going to be interesting to see because just based on our limited observations thus far, Performance Max does sort of what we expected to do that it just goes for the easiest conversion.
So deciding if it’s incrementally valuable or just taking credit for stuff that would happen anyway to tell. But it’s certainly a direction towards a more automated future and more input optimization rather than keywords or placements or topics like we’re used to.
Fred: Right. It’s a little bit the same problem that I think we had with smart shopping, where it kind of runs across channels, and it prioritizes remarketing because that’s the easiest and cheapest thing to capture.
Now with Performance Max, I mean, not everyone may be super familiar with it, but it basically runs your ads automatically across six sorts of channels that are part of Google. Right?
So it’ll do search, display, there’s YouTube, there’s Discover, there’s shopping, the other ones. Yeah. I think those are sort of the six main ones that they define. But really, where it’s headed is any place where Google can put an ad any place.
You just tell it a few things about yourself and your campaign, and then it runs with it and it’s kind of nice because in the past if you were sort of a newbie advertiser, probably not someone watching the show, but a newbie advertiser not very sophisticated, it was kind of a pain because you’d have to set up a shopping campaign and connect your merchant feed, and then you’d have to kind of give the same information for your DSA campaign and then kind of the same information for an ad campaign and then a whole bunch of campaign types that couldn’t really be automated.
So I can totally see the value for someone who’s a newbie making it quite easy. But then for people like us who actually care about the best performance possible because that’s how we get compensated by clients.
It is a bit painful, right, when everything becomes opaque and black boxish.
Michelle: Yes. It ends up being one of those things where, as you said, it’s basically you give a credit card, and then Google just takes the reins for you in some areas that can work really well.
I think a lot of it ends up being under the guise of we’re trying to help those small business advertisers who are doing it themselves and they don’t have anybody to help. So we’re simplifying things.
And basically, all it ends up being is that they’re taking things away or narrowing them and making it so it’s harder for the people who do have the budget and the traffic and all that kind of stuff to where it makes sense to invest more of the time.
I think Performance Max can be a good value add, but as Aaron said, it’s kind of hard to know sometimes if it’s just taking from campaigns you already have or if it’s actually adding value.
And it’s kind of tough to pinpoint when everything’s in the same environment.
Joe: There was one time that we just tested with a client and I’m working on that. They’re a startup, really. No brand awareness.
People aren’t looking for what they offer because they’re brand new. So it’s something where we’ve tried it just to get some sort of easier reach, instead of having to create since they do have a more limited budget, instead of having to create a separate display campaign, a separate discovery campaign, a separate YouTube campaign, just to have it all in one, just to get some baseline-type stuff.
But we purposely did that to keep the budget low just to see what it did and get some traction and hopefully get some learnings from it. And honestly, it did okay. There wasn’t any clear conclusion of, yeah, this is going to work great.
We’re going to keep building on this, but it gave some idea of, okay, we saw more engagement from the YouTube side. So now let’s go create a dedicated YouTube campaign and be a little bit more controlled with it.
What is the panelists’ take on Automation Layering?
Fred: That’s where I suppose automation layering comes in, Right? So you got this really complicated system from Google that we could not replicate and like you said, it drove okay results and you saw some success in some channels.
Now how do you take that success and automatically turn it into maybe a little bit more of a full-fledged campaign? Or how do you even figure out what portion of it is driving success and when that success has been established?
Now, for me, that’s automation layering, right? It’s like I don’t want to go into those campaigns on a daily basis and run the same analysis. I want that to be done for me. I want my system to tell me, hey, this automated thing from Google, it’s failing badly, so stop it or it’s working well, go and take a look at it and sort of spin it into something a little bit better.
What do you guys think about automation layering in these examples?
Aaron: I’m a little reticent, given that these Performance Max and some of the other new Google tools obviously have a bunch of data blind spots, which I think all of us know about.
Fred: Depending on your thoughts, let’s assume that not everyone listening knows about these databases and spots.
Aaron: Well. So from a Performance Max perspective, you get very little, primarily all that you can pull out right now.
And even this is a little hard. It’s pretty much impression reporting. And same for responsive search ads. So you won’t necessarily see as Joe peeled out himself, he figured out that YouTube was doing really well.
You won’t get active reporting on that. And there’s not necessarily a way to automate it. You have to understand and look into it. So when we think about automation layering number one, we want to prevent automation from being wrong, or at least being wrong in a place that’s destructive.
Like, if it’s wrong in a place that doesn’t hurt, that’s okay. If it’s wrong in a way where wrong causes problems, it’s a problem. So generally speaking, Fred, you make a good point about, you know, let’s automate this stuff.
Let’s say, like videos performing well, let’s fling it on YouTube and promote it, something like that. What we’ll generally do instead is try to think of a really funny cartoon character to relate this to, but it’s not working.
My robot brain is not as good. No, we’ll have an alert system like, hey, this thing was converted ten times this month. Like, you should look at it, maybe a desperate attention star robot.
But rather than have it make all these decisions where it could be making budgeting decisions or spending more money or things like that, that can make us a little sensitive. That and despite all of Google’s intelligence, their massive computing power or whatever, they don’t understand brand safety or what a brand is.
They can try it. But to be serious, it doesn’t think. So there are areas where we’ll have to think for it.
Joe: Like you said, the brand safety there, that part scares me a little bit. I haven’t worked on a finance client in a while, but the feed that I have years ago, every single piece of copy that you put in for banking and everything had to go through legal.
So it’s one of the things we’re like again, I don’t have anything now, but if you ever did again, I was like, we can’t have Google just spit out something or come up with whatever they want on their own.
There has to be some deep review for certain industries. So I understand why some people are scared or just flat out against it.
Aaron: Responsive search ads are very fun.
Fred: Those are fun. But at least you can pin right videos like what’s that going to look like.
Michelle: Yes. When it comes to all that kind of stuff, I think that the biggest thing that and really the only controls that we even get on some of those things are just making sure that we’re basically taking our robot and pointing it in the right direction to start with, one of the things for performance Max campaigns, when you set it up, you have to tell it what conversions you want.
And you have to be cognizant of the fact that some of those conversion actions can be created for you. It can be a phone call, it can be ‘get directions on the map’. I don’t know how many businesses actually make money anytime somebody clicks get directions on a map.
Now, that might be a lead into something that is useful, so it might make sense for you to try and optimize towards that. Or it might just be garbage, especially if you actually just want people to fill out your form online.
That’s not a good conversion action to even optimize for at all. So I mean, even just the first step in the set up process, it’s being simplified so that you don’t have quite as many levers that you have to pull and things to think about.
So it can be simplified. But if you’re even just accidentally pointing the robot in the wrong direction, it’s going to optimize for, like we said, the easiest conversion. And it’s probably going to be those get directions on the map when you’re trying to actually make online sales.
So even that first little input piece is going to be one of the bigger aspects of whether it’s going to work well or not.
Fred: Right. I would say that the cheapest conversion is cheap for a reason, right? I mean, there’s plenty of us bidding for the same keywords. If something is inexpensive, it’s probably because a more sophisticated advertiser has established that it’s not a high-quality click.
It’s not going to be a high-quality form fill. It’s not going to be a high-quality phone call. But if that’s what you’ve indicated that you care about to Google, I care about phone calls no matter what’s on the other side of the line, great.
We’ll give you those cheap phone calls and we’ll give you lots of them because nobody else wants to buy.
Joe: Yeah, because of it, I think I have shifted more towards the campaign level conversion tracking, which I’ll admit I didn’t do a ton when it first came out. We had the ability to do campaign levels.
But now to what Michelle said, there’s been times where just due to limited actions on websites just to get more signals, we have added just like click to call on your website as a conversion action.
Well, now it’s starting to lead to more junk and now we’re hearing like everything coming through is not that great. So like, okay, we’ll still leave it on there for some campaigns with lower touch points, but for certain ones we’ll just stick it to what is more important, which is the form submission ones.
Aaron: Well, and I think Joe and Michelle, you both raise an interesting point where Google is a closed system. Google is not your business. And so obviously those of us that have worked with our various Google reps, again, Google is trying to get as much information into the system as possible.
But that’s contingent on, number one, us being able to feed it everything that it really needs to make smart business decisions. And number two, making sure that and I’m going to be speaking about this at a conference, but making sure the human side of data is real.
It’s just an example that we saw from a real client of ours. They had this sales incentive thing going with their call center. So they got like extra bonus dollars if things got to be an SQL, if they sold something from an MQL to an SQL.
So guess what? The Friday at the end of that period, they had a huge spike in SQL because everybody wanted their $5 bonus per SQL. So then in turn, Google’s automated bidding, we feed it back and say, hey, we got all these SQLs, okay?
It doesn’t know that we had a promotion. It doesn’t know that these were like weird human motivations. So in turn, the system says I did great. So it’s going to do whatever it does really hard. But we have this sort of human leakage.
The challenge with robots fighting robots. Sometimes if a human feeds bad information to one of the robots, the fight is going to get dirty.
Michelle: It’s the whole idea of a system in and of itself. Right. The quality of data or input you get in is the same system you get out. I’ve used that for putting in things for lookalike audiences.
If you put in just some garbage audience of anybody who came to your website and it’s everybody in your CRM for the past 45 years, you’re probably not going to get a great thing coming out the other end.
But if you’ve got just your high paying customers, you’ll probably have a little bit better chance because there’s actually a pattern in there. So, yeah, kind of leaning into that, you’re only going to get as good a performance out of it as the indicators that you’re giving.
So going back to the idea of pointing it in the right direction, sometimes we think we’re doing such a good job and we’re the flawed portion of that relationship where we’re like, oh, I’m going to point a robot this way.
It’s like, oh, wait, that was right into the trash can. Maybe not the best choice there,
What do the panelists think about enhanced conversions?
Fred: Garbage in, garbage out right? Yeah, but that’s interesting because you’re even talking about something that’s already more sophisticated than what a lot of advertisers are doing, which is actually thinking about marketing qualified leads, sales qualified leads, things beyond just a form fill.
So I kind of want to shift here. There’s enhanced conversions now. Right. And I think a lot of the reasons why people haven’t done tracking of MQLs and SQLs is because it’s complicated.
You have to get the Gclid into your system. You have to persist it throughout your CRM. It’s not rocket science, but it’s also not necessarily super easy for a marketer who doesn’t necessarily have their engineering team support behind them.
But enhanced conversions, does anyone want to kind of explain what these are? And maybe does anyone want to volunteer?
Aaron: I was doing some reading about those the other day because we honestly haven’t used them very much. But my view of them is if you’re familiar with, like, a LiveRamp or an Epsilon or an audience enrichment platform, basically what it does is it tries to stitch data together more accurately than you could on your own.
And enhanced conversions can help with that. I might be talking about the wrong thing.
Fred: Yeah, you’re talking about the right thing.
Aaron: I read about a couple of things, but it starts stitching those things together.
Fred: Exactly. Stitching together. And so what’s fascinating to me is that instead of saying the Gclid is the thing that stitches together the original click. And Gclid, by the way, stands for Google Click ID. Right?
So the Google Click ID is unique when an impression of an ad is served, and then if somebody clicks on that impression, it has a parameter in it, a unique ID that Google can say later on.
It came from this search with this ad and this click. Now, the whole point as well, when the form gets filled or somebody calls you up, that Gclid feeds into your CRM system, and then two months later, after that customer becomes an MQL, an SQL, and finally a customer, you have that Gclid parameter that you can feed back to Google and say this new conversion, that’s actually more meaningful conversion was associated back to the Gclid.
And Google knows exactly what click it came from. So now it can go and machine learning can say, oh, well, these were the clicks that led to not just form fills, but actual sales. So let me prioritize more of these.
And to do that by the way you have to do tROAS bidding. You can’t do tCPA bidding. Right. And that’s a whole different story, but this Gclid is difficult.
And now here’s the thing that’s like so brilliantly simple from Google. When somebody fills out a lead Gen form, they probably put in their email address. When somebody becomes a customer, you probably know their email address.
So why don’t we use the email address to tie these two pieces of data back together? And assuming you’re not like getting thousands of clicks from the same email address, they can probably correlate that back to a single click.
And there you have it. It’s simpler offline conversion tracking that virtually anyone can do. You don’t have to have an engineering team anymore. And so that opens up this possibility of what you guys are talking about MQL SQL tracking to a lot more advertisers.
But kind of like, what could you do wrong in these scenarios? And I think you kind of covered it right, like human influences. But is there anything else people might mess up on?
Aaron: Well, we talk internally. And for the record, the other thing I was thinking about was Ads Data Hub, which is kind of similar but with mobile and video included.
But I think the thing that’s wrong and we talk about moving food around our plate and a lot of our conversations of Attribution or whatever it may be, it may be taking too much credit.
A person might have done a whole bunch of different stuff. Like, yeah, maybe they watched a YouTube video, but then maybe they downloaded a white paper somewhere offline or they read a newspaper article or whatever it may be.
And then Google’s, like, we touched it, we were there first, we’re involved. And so obviously you can make that deduction with frankly, any sort of conversion tracking, but that sort of automation saying we can stitch these together.
So therefore, like we did it, it can get a little bit aggressive. That said, the few that we’ve run, we’ve done it a few times, didn’t see a huge lift one way or the other. So that sort of conspiracy theory hasn’t really been proven out.
But of course, it still sticks in the back of my mind of “Are you just taking credit for stuff?”
Michelle: Because everything is always taking credit for stuff. Like stuff is not there. I mean, just the fact that even we have just a look back at windows, which a lot of the platforms obviously are much shorter than what they are now.
But if you have a bunch of people sign up for something and they first start in a CRM platform because they came through Google search or something like that, and then maybe an end of the month promotion, like maybe not on the sales side, but for the customer side.
So you send out something like the last two days of the month, we give 15% off, they come to the website, they convert and then it looks like, oh, our Google search went nuts. Not really.
I mean, it kind of did, but it kind of didn’t. So there’s a lot that is muddy in there, which you talk about here, presentations.
That’s actually what I’m talking about in my mind is trying to attribute performance to the top of the funnel. And the best takeaway is that it’s all just kind of a mess. So you guys don’t do the best you can. I think that’s the same thing with this is that there’s so many different things.
I mean, even just the idea that Fred, you had to tell us what enhanced conversion tracking was because it got slightly confused with something else. But also those are such bland words that like what does that even mean?
And we do this all the time every day. Like think about the people who don’t do this all the time every day trying to keep up with stuff. Like the idea of trying to get everything sorted out and making sure that everything is working well, especially when it’s just already this complicated with the automation just feels impossible to a lot of people, I bet.
Joe: So then how is.. This is an honest question, how is the offline data for these conversions being uploaded into Google? Who can do this? What type of CRM do you need and how do you get that back into Google?
So they can attribute everything just in general or for enhanced conversions?
Fred: For enhanced conversions, it’s the same as before, right. So in the past there’s a couple of mechanisms. You can either do a bulk upload or you can have an automated scheduled upload off of the spreadsheet.
Or you can use your CRM like you have a Salesforce integrator. But Salesforce is not a prerequisite, right? So anytime that you have an email address, you can basically feed that back and say this becomes this conversion action.
And so now you could have a conversion action that’s associated with an SQL, a different conversion action for an MQL, and a different one yet for your actual sale. And so on a daily, nightly basis, you feed it back in. Now there is a look back.
Joe: I was going to say I asked that for a reason, because Aaron and Michelle, have you ever worked with a client that had messy data within their CRM?
Michelle: Have I ever worked with a client who had clean data is the better question.
Joe: And that’s the thing too. That’s why I laugh at it. I know it’s like some bulk upload stuff too. It’s like there’s been somewhere if like salespeople or whoever’s managing the Salesforce team, they just don’t keep up with it.
But then if we want to try to work with it, that’s exactly how we could potentially steer the robots in the wrong direction. It’s just by uploading messy or out of date data because they forgot to upload customer status and everything like that.
What tools do the panelists use to create a layer of automation?
Fred: So it’s one of those types of messages. What do you guys think about that? Do you think sort of like that’s what you need to solve, that’s your value add?
Because the way that I’m thinking about it is like we used to do all these things like manage keywords, manage bids, like write ads, like all these little details in Google ads.
But now it’s more about how we steer the machine and this automation layering. So if their data in the CRM is messy, is that how we help them become better? Or do we sort of like say that here’s what we need to do.
Michelle: I do think that we end up being very much business coaches, more so than we used to be because it used to be something where we kind of play on our own little sandbox.
But now we do have to have all of that business data come in. I personally don’t really feel like having, especially with a lot of clients I work with, they end up being SaaS focused. They’re usually enterprise level, all that stuff which has its own unique challenges.
And one of them is the fact that it takes people a long time to go from a lead to an MQL and from an MQL to an SQL. On top of that, the data is messy and there’s only so much of a look back window.
And if you start uploading data to Google, that’s like six months old on a click. That was in June, it’s not going to be able to do much with it. So in that instance, I would probably maybe try and pass like an MQL into the system and use it as maybe a little bit of a guidance.
But we’re really talking about automation layering. I wouldn’t give the robots full control on this one. I wouldn’t import it and say, okay, and we want to optimize for these actions.
What I would do instead is basically just do a manual analysis and say, okay, on our side, we have all this data in Excel, and we know that this keyword typically has this return on investment.
So let’s make it so we can either make something dynamic or we create a different conversion action that has a different value associated with it.
So that on the conversion action, the initial one, you can have some sort of value associated and then maybe you optimize for Return On Ad Spend bidding or something like that, or you know, that something has to have a different cost per conversion because these leads are junk. These leads are good.
So these campaigns need to have a different target CPA bid model in place, even if it’s the same conversion action. Because otherwise I think it gets so bogged down trying to be too clever for itself, if you will, that it just automates itself into a circle of not being able to actually get what you want.
Fred: It’s a great point. Let’s shift a little bit. So what tools or technologies do you all like for helping you steer the machine and do automation layering? Yeah. Even like the reporting software where you like instead of moving the pieces around the plate, that’s to me an automation layer technology. Right?
What is a reporting suite that actually tells you the true picture?
Aaron: Yeah, we have a lot of toys. So number one, from an executional perspective, obviously using a tool like Optmyzr or Adalysis or things like that that can help build and dashboard a lot of things the way that we wouldn’t want Google to do and can help automate a lot of things that either we don’t trust Google to do or they’re not great at it.
Using those is helpful. We use those as well. We actually have a proprietary database tool in the data warehouse and Data Lake that we pump into Tableau for our own system called Mobius.
But having something like that and we have the luxury of having an entire team that can build these alerts and we can pipe in weather data and say like, “hey, it’s going to rain in the Midwest.”
So you’re going to have more bugs in three weeks. But having that information realistically, if any data sources in API, you can get it into your data warehouse.
How much you use that and fed to your point earlier, how many resources that takes and how many it has is something that you have to be a little bit judicious about. But I’d also echo from our free tool perspective, just using Data Studio is super powerful things plug in really easily.
You can set alerts pretty easily, even through Google’s own automated alert system and own rules like that. You can flash warning lights fairly easily and fairly free.
Just again, something that our philosophy does is not necessarily have the machine do it for us, but the machine tells us where to look.
Fred: Yeah. So an automated rule. I’m also obviously a big fan of scripts since we’re talking about unfortunately my session was not at the same time as Aaron’s. Now they are having us at the same time.
But Aaron is going to be really good. So go to his. I’m just talking about scripts turning ten years.
Aaron: Yeah. Fred is going to be brutal. Go to mine.
Joe: That’s pretty much what I’ve stuck to has been scripts and rules for the most part. I don’t have any sophisticated ways. It’s pretty much me for the most part. So I don’t have the huge data warehouses that Aaron’s company has.
Fred: Scripts, Joe, what do you do? You write them yourself? You got someone you know?
Joe: No, I pull from sources like you and Nils on Google or on Twitter as well. I rely on the smart coders and engineers to come up with those and then see if it fits. Not every… I’m not talking about just like the reporting ones, those automated ones, those.
Yeah, we can run in every single account, but some of them you’re going to have to look at depending on what type of account it is and the frequency and the volume. I do have a medical center in Florida in a small little radius.
So the data in there is pretty straightforward. Or we can pull information from Google Data Studio. We’ll look at the Attribution comparisons and then make some assumptions from there.
So we don’t need to get crazy. But on some of the bigger Lead-gen ones, that’s where we are. Even though I kind of ripped on some of the CRM data stuff, we’ll still import that information in and then run some more sophisticated bid scripts just based on understanding the lead times and everything of where we see them come in.
And those again, is based on volume and size of the account.
Fred: One thing that’s cool about scripts now is the new versions that are transitioning to Google Ads scripts instead of AdWords scripts, which basically just brings it in line with the new API that’s also currently rolling out, which is one of the reasons, for example, that WordStream is basically shutting down because they’re not transitioning to the new API.
But this new Ad script has the capability to set crowd targets, which the AdWords scripts didn’t have. Right? They kind of became very dated for modern PPC management and a smart bidding sort of world.
Now you can actually do this again. So I’m pretty excited about that capability.
Michelle: Yeah, I think that going back to kind of what you guys said. I think that having your reporting be automated is one of the things that is like the absolute best because one, we all hate reporting.
It takes forever to do anyway. But I would echo a smaller point that Joe made is that have your CRM data included in that and figure out how to enmesh the reports from the channels to your CRM.
Especially for a lot of the lead-gen accounts I work on, you’d be surprised how many people think that one campaign is doing great and then you will get the CRM data and it’s not.
Or they think that cost per lead is way too high, but then you incorporate it with the fact that people are coming through their customers. The lifetime value is huge, so it’s actually really not one lead pays for.
One customer pays for like a month or sometimes six months worth of marketing. So you need to have it all included to actually make sense with it. But then I personally really like automated rules, sometimes scripts, depending on what they’re trying to do.
Quite frankly, I do think they try to get too clever for what they’re trying to do. There’s a lot that goes into it and the more advanced you make it, that’s great. It just has a lot less use cases because there’s only so many places that you can use weather data because a lot of my accounts that doesn’t matter.
But I think that using automated rules is a great way to do it. It’s also just a little bit easier for people who don’t have quite as good of a handle on things. The automated rules are just a little bit more basic.
You just make sure that you’re not over optimizing on the same data, like don’t have your look back window be 30 days and then you run it every week because then you’re optimizing on that same one day like four times.
So make sure that you’ve got them spaced out appropriately. But I personally kind of like the pattern of going from manual monitoring of things like especially bids just for a basic example, and then noticing what the patterns are and then setting automated rule cadences so that I don’t have to do it, but then setting like calendar reminders to go in and say go check your automated rules.
Are they still doing what you want them to do? Are they still having the impact that you want them to have and just having that kind of check-in system of having the knowledge that we’ve got tapered into those automated rules and then checking back in every once in a while to make sure that the little machine we set up is actually doing what we wanted it to do? Yeah.
Aaron: I think Michelle and Joe, you both make an interesting point in a way of over automating. And Michelle like the phrase ‘over optimization’.
And Joe, to your point, if you were to pump weather data into a small regional facility, you’re going to make decisions that it’s stealing a cruise ship like a jet ski. You’re making too big of swings when you’re too small of a data set.
So it’s important as you go through all these things. And frankly, I see this when I look at some peers or friends’ accounts as you don’t necessarily have to use every tool at the same time.
So thinking about what tool will yield to seal our mutual friend Perna’s favorite phrase, what tool is the best route to return on time spent versus what tool is just doing a bunch of stuff for the sake of doing it.
I think it’s important to pay attention to that.
Joe: That’s what I think. That has really helped me embrace a lot of the automated bid strategies because do I really want to go in and look at bid adjustments from the audience level, then the device level, then the household income level, then the gender level?
To have a lot of that and do that for if you can trust that the data in there is right and your conversion actions are right, I’d rather have a script or an automated bid strategy.
Do that for me than having to do that every single week manually. Nobody wants to do that. So embrace that automation for sure.
Automation layering for bid management and messaging.
Fred: Let’s go deeper on that. Right. So let’s talk about automation layering for the sake of bid management. And we’ve already covered a number of things, but one thing that I’m looking at nowadays is value rules.
And so value rules is basically you get to communicate to Google for your conversions whether you want to value them more highly, depending on, for example, the geo or the device type or the audience segment.
So I could say if I get a conversion from California versus a conversion from New York, I’m going to value the one from California more highly.
And that’s kind of under the assumption that I haven’t done the sophisticated CRM integration. So I’m not really communicating my sale, but I’m maybe just communicating the form field.
And I think my form fills from California convert at a better rate. So this kind of is a way to do these bid adjustments on some of the factors that we used to do. But now you’ve got to think about, well, it’s not just what’s the likelihood of the person filling in the form, but the likelihood of when they fill in the form.
That being a better thing than another, I hope I’m explaining that sort of. Okay. So kind of curious, has anyone else looked at those bid adjustments? Because one thing that I love is the whole fact that you could look at your CRM and you could look at these factors that Google has previously looked at to predict conversion rate.
But you could look at it to predict through conversion rate without necessarily giving all that information to Google and just kind of steering the ship in little ways. Right. More budget towards California because that’s where my leads tend to become sales.
Michelle: Yeah, I really like those types of things. That’s kind of what I was alluding to, being able to create different values for different conversion actions, that sort of thing. This is just more sophisticated. So I really like this roll out personally, of being able to do this.
I haven’t used it yet, but that’s because I have too many areas where the data isn’t as sophisticated as I would like it to be for me to then tell Google the information. They would like me to tell them.
But I think that having this goes back to the same thing that I’ve been saying is like pointing your robot in the right direction. And these are just more controls that kind of help you lean into what is actually working.
So personally, I’m a big fan of these things. I think it’ll be really helpful to kind of layer those in with some of the automated stuff because you’re just giving it more data to go on, which is what all of the different types of automation pieces want.
Aaron: Really looking at it kind of like, I’m thinking a lot about my childhood and education today because they said how long I’ve been doing this job for. But I look at it like taking AP classes in high school so you don’t have to take the class in College.
You’re not paying tuition again for something that you already know in the sense that you’re not spending extra money for Google to learn that California is good. Now, obviously, if you don’t have the API integration, it might not learn that anyway.
But at the same time, again, this is assuming the API type stuff is set up. At the same time, you’ll probably get more out of relearning what you already know because what you already learned California leads are in the past.
People have been moving around a lot the past two years. So results that we had in the past or where people live or where their “base” might not be true anymore. So having that sort of persistent learning is nice.
But that said, Fred, to your point, there are some of these things where we know all this already. We don’t need to wait for Google or Microsoft or whoever to learn it. Again, much the same.
We haven’t used it a ton, but that’s partially because we have the, I call it luxury of working with larger accounts. So usually if a region is doing really better, we’ll just isolate it.
Fred: You guys have better data sets. If you can bring the Gclid data back into it and offline conversion tracking, that is better. But if you don’t have the luxury, then for sure, Value rules.
Joe: I haven’t used this yet, but they had a client that has warehousing data and they already know based on where the market is. I mean, a warehouse is not a virtual thing. It’s a physical place in a location.
So they know exactly where the main warehouse hubs are across the country. So they clearly see better conversion rates around where the main locations are. So that’s a perfect example of when you want to use it.
We have other clients where, yeah, they’re a national software brand. However, where their headquarters are converts way better just because that’s where they started. So they have much more brand recognition within the greater area of where their headquarters is based.
So that’s something where we can proactively say we know even for non branded keywords, we are going to do better in this area because we have better brand affinity in this area.
So we can be more aggressive here and always be aggressive and just feed Google the information. So there’s certain instances where, you know, it makes perfect sense.
Michelle: I think one additional piece that we have here is that we’re talking about all these performance-based stuff. But one thing that we haven’t talked about necessarily is like the human element, because there might not be a tangible reason why you like working with somebody who is from a specific state other than the fact that they’re easy to get along with.
There are also factors that don’t actually go into the numbers so that the machine can’t really learn it, but that you can guide certain things. Like if people in California are just nicer and you want to work with them more and there’s not like a monetary value for small business owners, that kind of stuff can be really important.
I have a number of clients who are like, okay, we’re going to target these areas but don’t target there because quite frankly we make money off of them, but I don’t like them.
So there are a lot of ways that you can have just like the human factor in some of these things that you can guide it to do whatever you want. It doesn’t always have to be numbers and data driven focus.
You can also make business decisions for yourself with these different controls too.
Aaron: Well, number one, this is funny being a person in California, a person in Philadelphia talking to two people in the Midwest, talking about people we want to work with who are nicer.
I don’t think anybody wants to work with me, but I think the other factor on that front too, looking outside of just outside of just B2B, SAAS, whatever it may be, is shipping costs, freight costs, supply chain maybe.
I think back when I did actual work and had a couple of clients, we had one client that could guarantee one day shipping anywhere that was within an hour of I95 on the East Coast.
So we had literally campaigns that targeted a road so we could say one day shipping conversion rates would be way higher on this little Causeway, it would be two day shipping and say this because he’s not here, sorry, Kirk Williams, we excluded Montana because it was too expensive to get stuff there.
So if they would run free shipping campaigns, they would lose money to stuff to Montana, Wyoming, the Dakotas, stuff like that. And so having a tool like this where we could say, look, we’ll ship orders to Montana, but they have to be at a way higher margin than we would get in a different place.
Okay, let’s have a much higher rise target there. Then along our dear friend I95, we could be just fine and go cheap.
Fred: Right. And I think what’s interesting here is that you have these sorts of decisions based off of stationary things like roads and States. So you make a one time decision to point the machine in the right direction.
But then when it gets fascinating is like you said, while there’s supply chain issues. So maybe it used to be possible to do the one day delivery on I95, but now half of my truckers are out sick with COVID, so maybe I can’t deliver on that.
So for a very short period of time, I need to modify my targets to account for that and I think that’s really where automation layering shines. Right? I don’t want to have to go in and modify 100 campaigns across a bunch of accounts.
I just want to have a thing where I put it on a spreadsheet. I’m like, “Hey, delivery time from one day to two days. It knows what campaigns to go and change, and it just handles it for me.”
And then when the truckers all come back in and they can do the delivery, go and change it back. All right, but let’s talk a little bit about automation layering for targeting.
And we could also get into messaging. Right? So targeting, placements, keywords, all that good stuff, and then messaging. RSAs, have you seen any good examples of automation layering in those fields? No.
Aaron: RSA’s data is still sort of limited or tools aren’t very limited. So you can’t really layer much. We’ve tried, believe us, we’ve tried. You get a lot more success for regional campaigns if you put the name of the neighborhood in the ad.
I don’t want to build campaigns for every neighborhood in the world. But so I’ve tried to do that with business data feeds, and our sales aren’t really there yet. What I’ll say from a targeting perspective, again, stealing other people.
But audiences has been super successful for us, and I’ll reluctantly call the new Broad Match automation debatable.
Fred: But hey, well, aren’t you the one who said keywords are dead? So to even, like, acknowledge that Broad Match exists?
Aaron: Did I say keywords? I didn’t say keywords. You did.
Fred: Okay.
Aaron: I said broad match. But no, I mean, you sort of set us up there what we’ve done in some cases, like example, that we actually want to use a search award for.
We have this company that sends out a ton of direct mail. So, yeah, we’ll have a, “regular campaign” that’s targeted based on that word that I just said. I wouldn’t say with tCPA, but then we would also have a campaign that was basically automated upload of when people got mail.
So, like, when a mailing list went out, their direct mail software would send in and be like, “Hey, here’s the people that got mail.” We bid through the roof on those folks if they search for anything that was even remotely close.
And it worked great because we knew that we were reaching the right people. We knew that the brand was already in the right mindset. And so in that particular case, words mattered but didn’t matter.
It was a little bit more of a thing of where we have this information that we know that they’ve already been contacted by us. We can do it easily enough.
We don’t have to upload the list by ourselves every time, and we can kind of get rid of it after a couple of weeks because we know that the postcards have already been dropped, recycled, and probably not opened.
Michelle: Yeah, I think the same thing can kind of be done for dynamic search ads as well. Like, you don’t have to necessarily use broad match. You can also use your website, which I think sometimes helps if your website is a good fit for that.
So if you want to decide if your website is a good fit, just reverse engineer the keyword planner. Go put your URL in it and see what keywords it suggests. If they’re good, you should use your website for DSA.
If they’re a bunch of garbage keywords about contact us and your Privacy terms. Probably don’t use your website for DSA, or you use page feed so you can control which pages it’s actually pulling from.
But yeah, going back to the idea of Google’s new favorite, the old broad match keywords with smart bidding, which are going to get you those low hanging conversions, that sort of thing.
The only real time that I like doing that is if I’ve also got a remarketing audience layered in. And Joe and I talked about that at a SMX presentation that we gave not too terribly long ago.
It’s like if you can control for the fact that you know the audience is the right fit, I’m a lot more lenient on what search terms people are typing in and misspellings and all things that are tangentially related and we can lean into the automated bidding.
But if I don’t know exactly who the audience is, then I’m a little bit more weary about doing that sort of thing. So it gets a little fuzzy. I really do like utilizing audiences and then kind of letting the machines take over within that confined playground, if you will.
Joe: We like using Retargeting with DSA too. That just kind of opened the floodgates up a little bit, because with DSA you can see search terms and certain headlines because we don’t create the headlines for DSA and that can feed you new ideas of what to potentially test for your responsive or if you still want to do expanded text ads just to get more information.
But you ran that on a DSA remarketing campaign, whether you use a page feed or your entire website.
Aaron: I think if one other thing to say, this is going to go maybe a little bit outside of PPC, there’s other marketing things that we can do. But if we run discovery ads, if we run Disco, if we run RSAs, if we run Retargeting, set an alert for audience weirdness, or have it get audience insights sent your way and then shift that over to your content team.
The best example that I can give get pointed to personal experience, but we had a wedding dress client. What do you think thematically people were going to in the remarketing audience?
Michelle: Dieting.
Aaron: Yes. Where else were they going thing I was guessing there’s that there’s obviously like Pinterest. There’s a lot of people looking at stuff index really high for weather.
Michelle: Yeah. There you go.
Aaron: So, of course, like, okay, now you have a content strategy for okay, what to do if it rains on your wedding day. How to aim your ceremony so that your audience isn’t blinded and you don’t have to wear sunglasses with your dress, whatever it may be.
But finding those things that are a little bit weird, that are highly indexed. And Fred, I saw you laughing. That was a real scenario. I performed at my sister’s wedding and could not read my script.
So literally all that you see in the photos is me looking down and my lovely little ball spot shining in the sun. Yeah, close to the heart. Anyway, but using things like that, using, again, all the wealth of information that we still do have within search to spike up other stuff that you can see to other aspects of the business.
Number one, it’s a good way to get other people in the business to care about search. And number two, it’s a way to increase the value of it. As CPCs get higher and higher every year, it’s a way to gain additional value outside of just they bought wedding dresses.
Joe: There’s one thing that’s kind of related to this. For any of the awareness type campaigns that you may be running on Google, it’s just there are auto created or auto-suggested audiences within Google.
When you’re looking at your audience targeting options where you can say it’s not really an in market audience, but it’s based upon your current keywords, maybe you want to try this audience targeting for your top of funnel campaigns. And some of those we found have worked better than some of the custom segments that we’ve created.
So it’s just something that we thought we tested out. But it’s all recommended stuff just either based on website behavior and all that type of stuff that you’ve done with your previous campaign performance.
Google has auto-created some additional targeting options for you to try.
Wrapping up
Fred: Great. Well, I love all the examples that you’ve shared and to talk about automation layering, both from a big company Tinuiti, with lots of PPC people, big budgets, sophisticated tools, all the way to Joe and Michelle kind of picking scripts from where they can find them using different automation.
So thank you so much for sharing all these examples. This has been fantastic. Also a lot of references to conferences. So SMX Next. I believe that’s where Michelle and Joe did a great session on automation layering that is recorded.
I think you do have to pay, but if you want to see that that is out there, look for SMX Next 2021 and then all of us are going to be speaking at HeroConf Austin, assuming that travel restrictions don’t all of a sudden pop up again.
But we’re all very hopeful to be there next week. By the time you see this, probably that session will have happened. But talk to us. We’ll share those slides, we’ll try to make those videos available.
So anything else? I’ll give each of you a quick minute to maybe tell people where to find you, what you want them to do. I would love people to actually go and buy my new book, ‘Unlevel the Playing Field’. It came out January 26.
So go and buy a copy of this. Talk about a lot of the concepts we cover today. Aaron, let’s start with you.
Aaron: You can take two approaches to automation. In my mind, you can either defend or you could befriend. And so I would encourage people, rather than trying to preserve what you used to do and try to have old search last forever.
Don’t defend against it. Just befriend. Understand what the robots are trying to do, what makes the robot happy, what makes him do his little robot thing or her. And then, of course, you can learn the pitfalls.
And so rather than trying to stop it from doing what it’s good at, instead, let it have a little freedom. Let it learn, and just make sure that you don’t let it fall off a cliff.
Fred: Friendly robot. Good advice. Michelle? What about you?
Michelle: Yeah, I would say I don’t have clever little words that rhyme and that kind of thing like Aaron does. I haven’t thought about that much, but I do think that that’s the right approach to it.
So set aside some amount for testing some of the automation pieces. You’d be surprised by some of the stuff that works better than you think. And you’d be surprised by some of the stuff that works absolutely atrociously.
And you thought that it might be the right way to go about it. So test some stuff. Don’t hold so tightly to what you used to do, especially if you’ve been in this industry for such a long time.
Like, it doesn’t help to complain about it. It really doesn’t. But don’t abandon those principles. Right. We got here for a certain thing. So try and think, maybe take a step back and say, okay, I know this is a foundational theory of the way that I always have done stuff.
How can I apply it here and utilize that to move forward and make sure that I’m staying up with the times? Because I can guarantee your competitors are probably trying to hold pretty tight to things.
So if you are staying up with the times and they’re not, it’s a great way to beat your competitors.
Fred: That’s how you ‘Unlevel the Playing Field’.
Michelle: Right, right. Buy Fred’s Book.
Joe: We need an affiliate link to that book.
Michelle: I know.
Fred: Listen, everyone likes these ideas, and these books come from conversations with really smart people like everyone on the call today. So really, a lot of credit goes to them as well.
Michelle: I’ll just take a kickback instead of an affiliate link. Thanks so much. Go ahead, Joe.
Aaron: So I’m an author. That’s awesome.
Joe: I think Aaron and Michelle kind of said what I would typically recommend. You’re going to find the complaining crowd on Twitter that likes to complain that things are changing, but it’s always going to change.
There’s always going to be new features, technology is always going to advance, user behavior is always going to change so embrace it as soon as possible. See where it figures in with your account.
You don’t have to blindly implement everything that Google lists in the recommendation but at the same time don’t ignore them or decline them because sometimes those recommendations or the automation can be very beneficial for your account.
There’s no one size fits all. You gotta do what’s better for your business but always make sure that you’re keeping your business goals first over Google.
Fred: Great. All right, so look up Joe and Michelle at Paid Media Pros, find Aaron at Tinuiti. We’re all on Twitter, we’re all at conferences so try to keep in touch. We love hearing from you.
Thank you for watching this episode. If you’ve enjoyed it and want to see more, subscribe to our YouTube channel and we’ll be back with another episode very soon. Thanks for watching.
It seems a bit counter-intuitive, but there really are things every advertiser knows that Google doesn’t – like how people act after they’ve converted from one of your Smart search or shopping campaigns. These are things like:
Customers who made a purchase but returned all or part of their order
People who submitted a form and took 12 actions outside of Google’s sight before converting
Loyal buyers who split repeat purchases between digital and in-store
There’s no question that Smart Bidding and offline conversions have completely changed advertising, but are you one of the few who feed information back to Google to get the most out of those systems?
Ad platforms like Google are automating rapidly, but they need all the information you can provide to speed up machine learning and make better decisions on your behalf. If you want to your ads in front of people who will give you profits instead of just sales, you have to rethink the way you perceive PPC optimization.
We sat down with two people at Google who understand this process best:
Emi Wayner, Platform Partner Lead, Channel Sales
Alex Ioch, Regional Product Lead, Automation
Alex is part of the team that builds the products at Google that enable this new wave of search advertising, and Emi helps businesses adapt to the new realities.
We talked about how to use offline conversions to get better leads, why non-retail models need to import post-conversion data, and how to run Smart Bidding to its full potential.
Customer data is the key to sustainable growth.
A study by Boston Consulting Group indicates that online advertisers see average gains of 20% incremental revenue and 30% cost efficiency when they integrate strategies with customer data across the purchasing journey.
Whether you choose to import or track offline conversions, there aren’t many arguments against the importance of first-party data when optimizing modern PPC campaigns.
Just remember that phased growth is the only way you can achieve results with any of these recommendations.
Automations like Smart Bidding require a considerable volume of manual conversions before they can begin making the right decisions for you. Lay the groundwork with manual optimizations, and allow at least two weeks for learning. That goes for search as well as shopping.
In other words, don’t expect huge gains from your campaign metrics within days of feeding in customer or post-conversion data.
Don’t measure everything. Here’s what to focus on.
While Google Ads can measure online activity, sometimes a user who clicks on your ad and enters your sales system converts offline where Google can’t see it, like your CRM or in person.
So there are two groups of components you want to keep track of.
Online: leads & sales
When you track only leads, you get a fair idea of the initial demand for your product or service. Extending tracking to the final sale gives you a better picture of your overall purchase journey:
How much interest does your brand generate online?
How long can you sustain that interest?
How well can you persuade people to give your business money?
Sometimes, even the final sale happens offline. And in these cases, it’s critical to feed that information back into Google Ads with offline conversion imports.
But even if you were to track both leads and sales online, you’d still only see a part of the picture. If a university gets 2,000 requests for information that ends up with 20 enrollments, all they know is they have a 1% conversion rate.
But what about all the other stuff that happens in between? How much did that contribute, if at all?
Offline: The middle funnel
There’s usually a big disconnect between what advertisers tell Google to track and what actually matters to their business. An online form submission is easy to fire a pixel on; you can’t do that for things that happen offline or on a channel that isn’t trackable.
But when you do measure what happens between lead and sale, you get a better idea of what actions are most profitable for your business. Let’s take the same university example Google showed on PPC Town Hall:
2,000 requests for info yield 200 applications started (10% conversion rate)
200 applications started end with 80 applications completed (40%)
80 applications completed lead to 20 students enrolled (25%)
All of a sudden, you can see more of what impacts the final conversion. When you feed that information back to Google is when the magic really happens.
It’s okay to estimate expected value.
When you import offline conversions into Google Ads, it helps to be able to assign values to them based on what level of value they contributed to your business.
The best way to do that is to work backwards:
You know that a student who enrolls contributes an average of $10,000 to your university
You account for some fluctuation and tell Google that a completed application is worth $2,000 (25%)
A started application is then worth $800 (40%)
And a request for info is worth $80 (10%)
These numbers make it easier for Google’s algorithms to piece together the signals that make a user worth $80/$800/$2,000/$10,000 to your university.
Important: “Don’t get hung up on the numbers,” Alex says. Conversion values are a tool to help Google score and prioritize different users, and these numbers do not directly impact your ad spend or ROAS.
Smart Bidding works best when it has offline data.
When you use Smart Bidding without offline data, Google will look at tens of millions of signals that are familiar to most online advertisers:
Demographics
Conversion rate
Audience segment
Browser
Language
Keywords
Bids
Time
Location
And much more
But when you import offline data, you can feed so much more information to Google that it uses to optimize future targeting. In the case of a university, this might include parameters like:
SAT scores
Preferred courses
Income
Credit history and score
Referrals and awards
Existing credits
All of a sudden, the jigsaw Google puts together of your ideal customer gets a bunch of new pieces added to it. They can tell with greater accuracy which bids to which clusters of users will give you the best long-term returns.
Value-Based Bidding strategies let you optimize Smart campaigns.
For education, that could look like assigning different values to students who request a brochure and ones who sign up for a free online course. In retail, it might mean segmenting customers who make frequent returns from those who end up keeping their purchases.
A value-based bidding strategy tells the Smart Bidding algorithms that one group of users/customers is worth more to the profitability of your business than another.
And so Smart Bidding then knows to optimize for the group that is worth 2x/3x/10x more to your bottom line, giving you greater value from your ad spend that goes beyond just ROAS.
Additionally, fixed-value bidding skews your spend and limits your returns. User segments with a higher average bid than your fixed value become missed opportunities, while you over-invest in segments with lower average bids.
Monitor. Intervene. Educate.
There’s no shortcut or a way around the work. Finding sweet spots for ROAS and CPA targets take time, so don’t resist or be intimidated by the learning process. Test your ideas, monitor the outcomes, and optimize as you hit subsequent rounds of statistical significance.
At no point should you keep Google’s machine learning algorithms in the dark, even if data visibility is something all advertisers would like more of from the platform. It only impacts your business negatively; Google’s automation will grow with or without your accounts.
Once you know what works, automate the solution and keep control over how and when you feed information back to Google. A third-party tool can make monitoring and intervention easier and limit damage from malfunctions in the ad platforms.
Optmyzr offers a 2-week free trial that’s helped teams like Sean’s preserve their time and mental fortitude for what matters, allowing them to double their managed ad spend.
As PPC advertisers, you need to constantly monitor and measure your marketing initiatives. The end goal being: determining the best way to spend your PPC budget while still understanding where your customers come from. With so many interactions leading to a purchase, attribution gives a bird’s-eye view of how different channels are performing and what gives the final conversion. While attribution surely helps you take important decisions regarding your business goals, often choosing the right model might be trickier than you’d imagine.
So in this episode on PPC Town Hall, we invited over some of the top data and attribution experts in the industry to share their tips and tactics on leveraging attribution with the help of Google Analytics.
Ken Williams, Senior Data Engineer, Search Discovery
Brooke Osmundson, Director of Paid Media, NordicClick Interactive
Christopher Gutknecht, Teamlead Acquisition & Optimization, Bergzeit
As always, you can view this week’s episode as well as previous editions of PPC Town Hall right here.
Here are 5 insights to attribution and Google Analytics.
1. The biggest measurement challenges in PPC
Chris: We’ve been working on profit bidding and attribution for a year now, and they’re both very challenging. The more you dig down into the rabbit hole, the more challenges you find. You’ve to make so many assumptions to move forward. So far, we’ve tested two models, one of them, the Markov chain model, is already in production. We use the Markov chain model, which we calculate on a daily basis and add the fresh results to attribute channel waste.
Brooke: If measuring different attribution models is new to you, start researching models to understand how your marketing efforts would benefit from each of the available models. If you have them built in Google Ads and Google Analytics, start comparing them against each other to understand the different touchpoints on what will work best for your business. These are the conversations worth having with our clients.
I feel like we’re a little bit behind ourselves in terms of adopting newer attribution models, especially with user behavior shifting. We’re seeing users take longer and there are other touchpoints to make a decision. If clients are still using last-click attribution, marketing efforts won’t show the full picture and can be detrimental in decision-making. Trying to find a model that doesn’t kill your upper funnel is extremely important.
2. Go for the ‘best choice’
Ken: We are working with pretty imperfect data. Being comfortable with acknowledging that, and thinking through the implications of different models to find the best fit is a business challenge. We have to start with the questions that the business needs to answer. And there’s no perfect fit. There’s going to be a ‘best choice’ for your customer experience and you just have to think through what your options are. Experimentation is really important!
3. What’s new with Google Analytics 4
Ken: There’s a lot that’s new in GA4. One of the most fundamental is the concept of an ‘event-driven’ data model, a structure that Firebase Analytics has used for years. It works well with mobile-apps, and now web and mobile will be sharing the same structure. Moreover, the way that we measured engagement has changed quite a bit. All of the key engagement metrics that we relied on with legacy versions of GA have been replaced by a new feature called ‘engagement time’ was rolled out with the ‘event-driven’ data model, which solves the problems with session-based engagement metrics. Finally, GA4 is built on the global site tag, which can help you make changes to the user interface that actually modify the code on your site without requiring a change in the tag manager.
4. Challenges with the tracking cookies fading out
Chris: The fading-out idea is hard to predict and focuses more on cross-site tracking than the first-party context. I think we should be working on small steps from the things that are already hurting us. So for instance, Safari ITP 2.1 kills first-party cookie data after 7 days, but they respect server-side cookies. One thing you could improve right now is to transfer to server-side cookies to preserve GA cookies on Safari devices.
Ken: There are two privacy-related things that we need to respond to: one of them is regulatory (we’ve been dealing with GDPR for a while and CCPA is new in the US), and the second is the momentum from popular browsers to restrict cookies. The vision that both Apple and Mozilla have put out is a desire to restrict the ability to monitor your cross-domain activities, by companies like Facebook.
One thing that you can do right now is to write your cookies from the server rather than with javascript. This is not a permanent solution, and it’s not easy for many companies because it requires the assistance of skilled developers.
5. Filling in data-gaps for attribution optimization
Brooke: I think that user-stitching or device ID attribution will be a more long-term solution. But right now, it’s extremely complicated. Whether you have the infrastructure in your team or at a large agency, but you do have essential people in roles that drive developmental work. Since you know what kind of data is available, the best thing will be to have these conversations with your clients. You should also do a bit of testing to figure out what works best for your organizational goals. We know that there will always be gaps in data, so until clients are able to invest in holistic solutions such as device ID attribution, you may have to make assumptions based on data trends available to you. It’s getting more difficult to understand everything there is about every customer, so focus on identifying what can move the needle for your company.
Ken: 10 years ago I believed very strongly in this 360° view of a customer. The idea was that since we’ve got all this digital data, we are gonna get better and better at understanding why customers behave the way they do. And we’ll eventually get to a point where we’ve got amazing data where we know everything. I feel like that is something we need to give up on as an industry because it was never a realistic aspiration. We’re never gonna fill all these data-gaps and have to get used to that.
Conclusion
Let’s be honest. There’s no ‘ideal’ answer to many of these questions regarding attribution. Even to pick the perfect model for your business, you have to constantly evaluate your marketing initiatives. And as Google continues to take away our data, we just have to become a little bit broader in our thinking and go back to the initial question - what’s the business trying to achieve?
This is where experimenting and doing multiple field tests with different models can pay off. The other thing that we can do is look for sophisticated attribution modeling to get that ‘best choice’ for the customer experience. Discussing this with your in-house/agency development teams can only help you finetune your buyer funnel better.
A common theme that we’ve all been talking about is how Google keeps automating more and more of the things that we as PPC practitioners tended to do. For an in-house team, this shift to automation might just be a godsend. They can do more work with less effort due to access to so many Google tools. But for an agency, this poses a completely different question. PPC agencies have to constantly evolve their strategies to provide value to their clients. But what processes will they need to deploy to remain competitive? And what can they really expect from automation tools in the market today?
So in this episode on PPC Town Hall, we asked some of the influential agency leaders to share their tips and tactics on growing a PPC business while making use of automation.
Wil Reynolds, Seer Interactive
Anu Adegbola, Brainlabs
Max Traylor, The Max Traylor
Tim Halloran, Aimclear (special guest)
As always, you can view this week’s episode as well as previous editions of PPC Town Hall right here.
Here are 5 insights on how leading agencies succeed in an automated PPC world.
1. Marketing strategy and older marketing resources
Wil: I have been lucky a few times where I’ve come up with a concept that has affected a good chunk of the industry. And these concepts came to me when I read things that usually the industry doesn’t read. So for a while, I decided to read books about marketing pre-1940. Because people back then had to go door to door, connecting to people and understanding their problems. So when you start reading books from that far back, you start finding ways of looking at the same marketing problems today. It’s just that we are so entrenched in PPC perspectives that we forget that we are still solving problems that were there for people 100 years ago.
The way that our world is going everyone is trying to find an algorithmic solution. So when everybody’s running one way (what keywords do I have to use in the title to please the algorithm), I’ve been studying the different types of ads and how they’ve connected to people in a meaningful way before the internet existed. And then I try to incorporate that into the way we do on a daily basis.
My favorite books on advertising are by Claude Hopkins called ‘My Life in Advertising’ and ‘Scientific Advertising’. Claude was literally talking about doing A/B testing, by going door-to-door conversing face-to-face, which was super inspiring to me.
2. Focus on getting loyal customers than clicks
Anu: We’ve got to be really careful about not just being all about ‘technology’ or ‘automation’. After all, it’s people who are at the end of all these clicks and reading our ads. It’s really important to try to think like a customer. When we look at an ad, what attracts us to click? What attracts us to click on a brand or get affiliated with a brand? All these decisions stem from who they are. Branding is important and knowing what that brand stands for, what they believe in, diversity, environmental consciousness, etc., are ultimately things that get loyal customers. I feel that we’re moving away from trying to build loyal customers and becoming too much about getting that ‘click’.
Wil: We don’t interact with our customers anymore. We don’t. We sit behind our tools. We’ve no idea what’s going on with them. One of the things that we started doing, and are slowly scaling in, is videoing our clients that are going through our search results and have them talk to us and understand their concerns. You become a very different level of a consultant when you talk to somebody. So often we look at these keywords and automation but don’t try to understand these people on a deeper level. But if go that one level deeper and find the right things, it could completely change the way you go to a market for a client. It’s because that ‘why’ will never show up on Google Ads.
3. Business of implementation
Max: Price premiums for implementation, doing these things with Google Ads, are going away.
If you want to build a job for yourself then you do what everyone else knows how to do and do it a little bit better. If you want to build profit, want people to seek you out, then you better invest in having the knowledge no one has. This all comes down to fundamentals: focus on a particular customer segment, understand who they are, what they want, and where they hang out. If you do this, people are bound to pay you a premium.
4. An automation ‘reformed skeptic’
Tim: I guess you can say that I am a reformed skeptic and that’s due to a lot of reading about when automation works and when it doesn’t. So I won’t say that I am a total believer in automation, but I’ve definitely eased up a little bit and gotten used to using it in my daily life.
I’ve been doing PPC for the last 10 years. And there wasn’t a lot of automation in the industry back in the 2012s or 2014s. I think when we got ‘lookalikes’ on Facebook by the end of 2015, which wasn’t working great at that time. But in 2017, everyone loved it. It had so many data inputs and it was working really well. Then they pulled back all the third-party data and the ‘lookalikes’ stopped working again. So it’s been pretty chaotic to go back and forth. Sometimes machine learning and automation work really well, and then they don’t, and then then they force it upon you. You have to find ways around it. So yeah, it’s a complex relationship for me.
5. In-house technology and funding good ideas
I am still learning about scripts. But my perspective as a business owner is ‘where can I fund good ideas?’ I tend to start from a place where I don’t want my team members to do ‘X’ task, or I don’t want them to have to worry when they have to check something. So, I’m constantly focused on being a vessel for really good ideas to come in really quickly, direct to the CEO or owner of the business, because I control what we do with our profits. So it’s very easy for me to direct resources and funds to people who solve problems. I want people’s jobs to be as enjoyable as possible. A part of my job is to understand what brings people down and take away their creativity. And I try my best to automate or outsource those to points in some way so that the team is efficient and increasing the quality of the work.
Conclusion
Only a week back, Google announced that it will soon phase our Broad Match Modified keywords and change how Phrase Match functions. Changes like this only mean one thing: the shift to automation is an inevitable one. While you don’t necessarily need to fear automation, making use of its capabilities can actually help you ease a lot of processes.
As an agency, it is important that you take a look at your strategies and talk to your clients to understand them on a deeper level. After all, no one can diminish the ‘human’ in this equation of a more automated PPC world. We just have to work around, get creative, and find solutions. Google might keep changing the playing field, but have to construct it using our own techniques to make it work for our clients.
Note: Smart Shopping campaigns have been upgraded to Performance Max in September 2022. We suggest you refer to these links below to know more about Performance Max.
2020 was anything but a normal year. The pandemic slowed day-to-day life as we know it, but it sped up years of e-commerce growth in just a few weeks. This acceleration is so huge that we can expect it to continue this year and beyond. Consumers are now looking for solutions online due to lockdowns, travel restrictions, and the unavailability of products in physical stores. While most retailers and businesses welcomed this shift to online shopping, many weren’t ready to cater to a virtual store experience.
To get a better look at the past year and discuss what to expect in 2021, we invited over some of our friends from Google and asked for their insights. We also heard from Andrew Lolk, an industry veteran and leading e-commerce expert, on his agency’s findings of what really works when the rubber meets the road.
Emi Wayner, Platform Partner Lead, Google
Peter Oliveira, Partner Development Analyst, Google
Andrew Lolk, Founder, SavvyRevenue
As always, you can view this week’s episode as well as previous editions of PPC Town Hall right here.
Here are 5 insights on tackling shopping ads and e-commerce in 2021.
1. Shopping & e-commerce predictions for 2021
Emi: As we all know, we have already shifted a lot since COVID happened. Digital is going to be a critical touchpoint for many shoppers. Searching locally and then confirming in-store availability. Consumers will also be looking to try new and safer services this year. We are also expecting a 600% increase in searches for ‘click + collect’ services.
Marketers can help raise awareness of differentiated omni-channel offerings and provide a great end-to-end experience for users who are increasingly selecting store pickup as their preferred fulfillment option. ‘Curbside Pickup’ and ‘Pickup Later’ are also useful to meet the needs of consumers. We have noticed that when you have ‘Pickup Today’ extension, the CVR increases 13% in ads while the CTR spikes 2%.
Andrew: It’s been interesting to see how lockdowns have affected the different markets around the world. As we have multiple office locations, we operate with e-commerce brands across the US, Europe, and Scandinavia. While we keep seeing different numbers and charts, we have seen e-commerce growth across all categories in different countries.
The interesting part is how in all the countries we’ve seen, the e-commerce levels almost stay at the same level even post-lockdowns. So the new e-commerce levels appear to be here to stay!
2. Thoughts on e-commerce in 2020
Emi: I think overall all categories went up in terms of purchase online. But we have particularly seen good growth in electronics, clothes and home furniture. Other categories like health and personal care also saw an increase in sales. On the search terms side, we noticed that people were more comfortable with purchasing non-brand items as they were more focused on inventory, looking for available items.
A lot of this can be based on ‘social e-commerce’. When you’re watching YouTube, you’d find a lot more advertising and useful information present that influences consumers to shop. Moreover, we have also observed a trend of personal services like fitness training, consulting, etc being offered online.
3. Smart vs Regular Shopping Campaigns
Peter: The key difference between the two is that Smart Shopping dynamically allocates your budget using machine learning across different channels and formats. So whereas in a traditional shopping campaign, you’d have a separate display campaign or a dynamic remarketing campaign, Smart Shopping is gonna do all that automatically for you. The good thing is that it still keeps your goal in mind while tapping into those additional formats and services to bring you more leads or sales.
The core levers that we have for scaling Smart Shopping Campaigns, in general, are ROAS, the budget, and also how many products are in the feed. The more products you have, the more inventory you get, which is similar to adding more keywords to your search campaign in order to generate more reach.
4. Smart Shopping outperforms Standard Shopping setups 9/10 times
Andrew: For in-house teams, or full-service agencies, Smart Shopping wins almost every time. Where we see Smart Shopping work really well is when we don’t have anything better to come up with. So let’s say a DTC advertiser that sells socks. We have little search term data, no price comparison data, no significant brands, etc. The complexity overall is almost non-existing. Smart Shopping does really well in those cases.
If you use external data like price comparison data, proactive seasonal bidding, weather data, inventory levels, promotions, etc, or have been running another more complex setup for a longer time, then making the switch will make Smart Shopping relearn some (maybe all) of those things again.
For Google Shopping campaigns to beat Smart Shopping, it’s paramount to use the priority levels to help it prioritize products is really the key to success:
The old school / easiest example to understand is using bestsellers in a high priority campaign, and others in a medium priority
But the sky’s the limit really, and we’ve tried a lot of different setups that all work well depending on the scenario.
5. Making Smart Bidding and Smart Shopping work for you
Peter: The core levers that we have for scaling Smart Shopping campaigns, in general, are ROAS, the budget, and also how many products are in the feed. The more products you have, the more inventory you get, which is similar to adding more keywords to your search campaign in order to generate more reach.
Andrew: For Smart Bidding to work optimally you have to keep optimizing your overall campaigns, but more importantly, you need to keep updating the ROAS/CPA targets. Not daily, not weekly, but only when you notice performance changes. This can be after a really good sales period where you’ve been hitting targets and then go into a slump. The algorithm will lower your bids to hit your target ROAS - but that might push you out of the auctions, which will start a negative spiral of you getting less and less data, which makes the algorithm work poorly.
Conclusion
The shift to an online shopping experience is a long pending one. We might see many businesses and buyers preferring the old-school brick-and-mortar stores. But due to health concerns, the necessity of having a fluid online shopping experience is now more prevalent than ever. PPC professionals and business owners need to re-assess, analyze and streamline their approaches to e-commerce in the upcoming months.
Using Google’s new setups and extensions, like Pickup Today, can only leverage us in the long run. Relying on automation, machine learning, and good data are sure to help us navigate new e-commerce and shopping trends in 2021. Now, you can get the slides from episode 32 of PPC Town Hall on optimizing shopping ads right here.
It’s 2021, and whether you’re a marketer or an agency, you would be preparing for yet another thrilling year of PPC. Right from the start, you need to be aware of the newest trends and features in paid marketing to leverage your PPC game. And that means you need to know of any curveballs that might come your way. In 2020, we saw experts deep-diving into topics like automation, privacy issues, and keywords, which we might be discussing more of the same this year as well.
To get a better perspective of what to expect in the coming months, we invited over some of the smartest minds of PPC and asked for their insights. Our panelists this week are some of your favorite experts from conferences like SMX, shedding light on what they expect from PPC in 2021.
Brad Geddes, Adalysis
Ginny Marvin, Independent Consultant
Matt Van Wagner, Find Me Faster
As always, you can view this week’s episode as well as previous editions of PPC Town Hall right here.
Here are 5 insights on what to expect from PPC in 2021.
1. RSAs vs ETAs
Brad: According to our data, we’ve seen more people trying out RSAs than Optmyzr users. We also see that a lot of people who still have them, have shrunk their usage. I’ve done a little bit of segmentation (since we did our session at SMX) on spending and account size versus declining RSA usage. And it’s definitely the smaller accounts that have declined their usage much less than the larger ones. We have seen that those who spend half a million to a million, plus have decreased usage more than those who spent 10-20 thousand dollars a month.
For a lot of these people, it’s more about results than getting that control. They don’t care if you’re a lead gen company. You may spend 10 million a month but in the end, you care about results.
Ginny: My question on it comes back to what are ‘results’? If we’re strictly looking at conversion rate or cost per conversion, then I can see where ETAs are often going to win. I’m wondering if advertisers might be looking at RSAs to open themselves up for more impression inventory. So is that a factor where people are considering more exposure than focusing on conversion rate?
Matt: In a lot of cases, you actually don’t have enough data for RSA to really even get their wheels spinning. It’s a multivariate type of testing and so often times we see that decisions are being made too quickly on winners and losers.
2. Identifying your business signals
Ginny: Having your own business signals mixed in with data you provide to the machine is becoming really critical now. This is where the real leverage can come, particularly the competitive leverage over your competitive sets. In order for people and businesses to identify their own business signals, they need to do some real analysis and investment, which takes a lot of digging. And then being able to present this in a way that can actually be used.
So the real question is, do advertisers keep pushing businesses to give more inputs even when some might want to keep that data to themselves rather than sharing it with Google? If yes, can we anonymize it and ensure that those inputs work within the algorithms.
3. Giving Google the right data and goals
Matt: Instead of fighting Google, let’s focus on giving them the right goals. One of our focuses will be feeding the data to the machine. And I think we’re actually going back to really seminal work in the whole web UX and web design area. If you look at Google Analytics, it’s moving away from discrete real things to events and connections that sort of represent proxies like scroll time or time on page. What I’d like to see is combinatorial data that would allow us to combine scroll depth and time on page, multimodally. How do we build up signals from the site we’ve got and trigger events that we can feed back to our bidding?
Our goal this year is to take a look at how we can understand what behaviors on the site represent good proxies to the next sort of actions. We also want to give those signals a little bit more attention, feed them, and try to develop audiences out of them.
4. Importance of setting up clean conversion
Brad: This is more important now than in the past because with all the privacy things happening, you doing your own data or attribution modeling is going to be essential. Even from a basic standpoint of modeling, you need to get it right because the privacy changes are going to mess up the data inside some of your platforms. Just to do some basic analysis, you actually need to have it yourself now and can’t rely on the platforms to give it to you because they’re not gonna have all the data they had previously.
5. 2021 Predictions
Brad: I will argue that as soon as Google removes keywords, their revenues decline significantly. Out of every advertising method out there, the intent of a search for someone saying ‘I want this’ is the strongest signal in advertising. It’s better than any programmatic, any audience or any other advertising methods. If people don’t get to use keywords for targeting, they might think of going programmatic.
Matt: I think that while Google may never take away keywords, they’ll definitely stop paying attention to what we’re actually telling them with our match-types. And I think that if you look at the loss of search query data may be Google feeding its AI and learning on all of our dimes! And they’re saying we don’t care what we [advertisers] know, they’re going to let their machines run wild, and decide for themselves what’s working or not!
Ginny: We still have some agency in all of this. I think we need to start using the machines in ways that they were meant to help us. And while they aren’t going to get it right all the time, we should be present to guide it. This is where your own data is going to be helpful. If you come in with a campaign that has been a disaster, all that data is not useful. For example, if you’ve set your campaign on broad match and end up reaching attorneys in Palm Beach when you actually run a hair salon, that data is useless. All of this can be avoided if you educate yourself and be an invested marketer. So much about this year is still going to be based on fundamentals.
Conclusion
Let’s face it - doing PPC in any year is tricky.
What with Google introducing changes, paid marketers need to leverage on every new trend that comes their way. Working along with the machine, feeding it good usable data, and relying on automation to boost your business goals might go a long way for PPC pros in 2021. To set yourselves apart from your competitors, consistently optimize your campaigns, utilize new tools, and look to expert strategies by industry leaders to pave your way to success.
Note: Smart Shopping campaigns have been upgraded to Performance Max in September 2022. We suggest you refer to these links below to know more about Performance Max.
One thing that we’ve learned about search in the past year is that we all need solid PPC strategies that account for all sorts of change. With all the automation that’s coming from Google, whether it’s smart shopping, smart bidding, or seasonality bid adjustments, it’s important to automate, optimize, and intervene our way to success. And what better way to understand the way forward than to ask some of the smartest minds of PPC.
Our panelists this week are among PPC Hero’s most influential paid search experts of 2020. And they shared their tips and experiences on working around outdated PPC strategies.
Kirk Williams, Founder, Zato Marketing
Aaron Levy, Group Director of SEM, Tinuiti
Joe Martinez, Director of Client Strategy, Clix Marketing
As always, you can view this week’s episode as well as previous editions of PPC Town Hall right here.
Here are 7 insights on revamping outdated PPC strategies.
1. Thoughts on Black Friday & Cyber Monday
Aaron: On our side, we saw that Black Friday was bigger than usual while Cyber Monday was slower than usual. It logically makes sense as on Balck Friday, everybody has a need to go bargain hunting, and that pent-up demand has shifted to online this year. Everyone thought Cyber Monday was kind of quiet because it’s the same as it has always been.
Kirk: We saw the same thing as Aaron [in a higher volume Black Friday than Cyber Monday this year, but we’ve heard others saying things a bit differently. It makes a lot of sense that the past weekend was a bit quiet as a lot of people were running sales earlier than normal. They had a Black Friday week-long or even month-long sale in November. Because of the earlier sale season, we saw consumers buying earlier than usual. So in some way what we saw in our numbers was that Black Friday was the main event, and Cyber Monday less so.
One of the reasons for this earlier shopping season is concern over shipping and delays. Because of this earlier-extended shopping season, we saw more out-of-stock products, more sales that went quicker this year.
Joe: While Black Friday was definitely much bigger than Cyber Monday and much earlier. For us in general, Black Friday was lower than expected but the entire month of November was higher than expected. Some stuff was reactionary to competitors starting early which was in the first-second week of November.
2. An unusual year for PPC
Aaron: At Tinuiti, we tend to work with larger data sets to focus on larger enterprise clients. So Smart Bidding in general tended to work pretty well for us. But one of the things that I always pick on Smart Bidding for is that it has too short of a memory. This Holiday season was one of those scenarios where that’s really valuable because it didn’t try to base itself off of what happened last year. We used seasonality adjustments pretty religiously for most of our clients. For example, if noon was a really popular time, we’d start tweaking our seasonality adjustments leading up to it and down after.
3. Using different shopping strategies
Kirk: We try to use a combination of both Standard and Smart. We constantly test them, see what’s working and what’s not. I’m always trying to figure out a better strategy to work for both Standard and Smart. With Standard, you get more of that control where you can give the system-specific search terms, which we’re focused on (even if they’re not always converting) as valuable information for brands.
Sometimes, we’d duplicate products or try something with the feed to get stuff in the upper funnel queries that might not be specific to one product. Smart shopping is not just on search but display, Youtube, and all that, so rather than be frustrated that we can’t control the search terms, we’re trying to figure out a way to group products around the ad content itself to emphasize specific call-outs in those Smart Shopping Ads for that specific group of products.
Joe: As I said earlier, our Black Friday started earlier than normal and our seasonality bidding was kind of thrown out of the window of what we expected to do. Since I work with smaller clients with very niche products (sometimes higher-ticket type item products). We understand that those really aren’t necessarily impulse-buys. So, we’re looking at the time of day, understanding that it’s gonna take multiple touchpoints for a user to buy this product. If we hit them enough with discovery, Google, and social initially, then we’re seeing that they later go back (late night hours) to purchase. We’re seeing a better performance as we’re adjusting the different schedules and updating how we want to boost our bidding and performance.
4. Converting digital newbies & feeding data to the system
Aaron: Something we’ve seen in the last six or so months, I’ve somewhat abandoned call to action. But giving turn-by-turn directions to these people who aren’t digitally native seems to work. You can tell them where to click, enter their details, make the purchase and know when it’s gonna get delivered or opt to come and pick-up yourself.
When you have data like shipping or pick-up preferences, you’ve to use it sensibly. It varies a lot depending on clients because it partially depends on cost and revenue centres as well. So maybe the digital team isn’t incentivized to drive people to the store and so we want to discourage it. But for those clients who are a bit more holistic, we’d look into the feeds and coach the bid tools to do what we want. For example, we see that for a certain demographic, this particular set of terms or ads tends to convert better as in-store pick-ups rather than a standard e-com shipping. Then we’d take that group, pivot it, and tell Smart Bidding that we want more store visits to set that group. The rest can be taken towards the more conventional way.
5. Get your messaging right in Responsive Search Ads
Joe: We utilize the pin option just to make sure that certain elements of the messaging show. It’s something that we definitely consider when we’re mapping it out. We will show it in front of clients too. We ask them if it really helps to add all these variations if four of them pretty much say the same thing. Google’s definitely gonna flag it, prompting you to add more keywords into your headlines.
Honestly, we’ve played around with what actually makes sense and that’s where we kind of focus on value prop. Maybe I’ll pin the first keyword which made more sense to the product type and then look at testing the other ones. Slowly, I’ve come to like RSAs. While they didn’t really work for me that well in the beginning, the more I see them working they are getting better. We’ve seen RSAs work pretty well with grants accounts by boosting impressions quickly.
6. Looking towards automation
Kirk: We’re looking more and more into automation to solve our problems. The whole idea of Google leaning hard into automation can be quite frustrating for PPC marketers like us who have been running things for a while. I may have practiced and learned something for over a decade, and then due to a specific change, I can find myself at the same level as an intern in my knowledge of the thing that changed. But the flip side of this frustration is – there’s an evolution that needs to happen in PPCers, too. We need to adapt to the system. And with automation at ZATO, we’re trying to think of reinventing the way we think about campaign structure and other things.
Specifically in thinking about broad match keywords, we’ve started testing things giving Google control over Target ROAS bidding, few very tightly controlled broad match keywords where everything else is excluded. We’re treating this less in terms of ‘what we want to get from this campaign in specific tracked ROAS’ and more of giving Google guidelines and then freedom for reaching the upper-funnel.
7. How do we structure our campaigns?
Aaron: When we think of structuring our campaigns in the present scenario, we’ve to look at conversion runways. If you think about Smart Bidding on its most practical level, it largely looks at the expected conversion rate. The way forward should start with the question – what do we expect from this group of people to do.
Talking about Skags and keywords, if the intent is fundamentally different then we’ll split it out. If not we’ll compress. We all know how Google is pushing towards consolidation and we’re establishing runways for the automation to make the right decisions. So we essentially split the groups out based on audience, demographic, keyword, or interaction. You don’t want to shrink data to the point where you’re making bad assumptions.
Conclusion
While automation has helped PPCers focus more on the strategic part of marketing, it has left us with little to control. With Google constantly introducing changes in 2020, it might be time to recondition the earlier approaches to get an edge over the competition. This is where all the expert advice and recommendations come into play by supporting marketers to operate in the periphery of the system and still manage it for better results.
Now more than ever, PPC marketers and strategists need to come together to figure out how to advance in the paid search industry. It might not be a bad idea to make use of efficient software systems, like Optmyzr, to track, manage, and optimize your campaigns. Try and experience our capabilities yourself by signing up for our 14-day free trial. You get full access to all our features – credit card free!
Over the past few years, marketers have seen Smart Bidding evolve with Google’s machine learning. In fact, it seems to be a way into the future of advertising by making the best use of AI and data to provide intelligent campaign adjustments. But while Smart Bidding does automate tedious tasks of PPC ad management and save time, it’s far from a ‘set it & forget it’ mentality. To make the most of it, advertisers need to monitor and optimize to get the best results for their campaigns.
So this week on Episode 28 of PPC Town Hall, we invited our friends from Google to discuss Smart Bidding campaigns and shed light on tactics for optimization.
Our panelists for the week:
Emi Wayner, Platform Partner Lead, Google
Peter Oliveira, Partner Development Analyst, Google
You can receive the exclusive Smart Bidding guide from Optmyzr and Google by signing up here! You can also view previous editions of PPC Town Hall right here.
Without further delay, here are the 6 insights to understanding and optimizing Smart Bidding campaigns.
1. Evolution of Modern Search
Emi: What we see today is really the evolution of machine learning. I think machine learning is getting smarter with people getting more comfortable using and leveraging it to the next level for better results. We search so differently compared to what we did three years ago. In fact, 15% of queries on google.com are new every day. That means there are tonnes of queries that Google misses as well. So, we really have to depend on Machine learning to capture maximum potential with search.
As machine learning gets smarter, the data that marketers provide is really going to be the key to be competitive and achieve your goals. Not from the CPA perspective, but broader profitability and customer lifetime value.
2. Analyzing Smart Bidding signals
Peter: Google looks at billions of signals to set the bid for every auction. We’re monitoring a bunch of different things more than just the signals, like the intersection of these signals. A lot of the things that we used to optimize manually like devices, day of week, time, location, all the different keywords, etc are now being taken care of for Smart Bidding. But there are some tactics which you can use to inform Smart Bidding what are the right ways you can treat some of these things.
Emi: So this is a recent performance review using selected US accounts. When we looked at the data, Smart Bidding outperformed Manual Bidding across most of the spend buckets on Optmyzr accounts.
A lot of people should take advantage of Smart Bidding regardless of the budgets (look at the right-hand side of the chart – ‘under 500 budget’). And we see significant performance even in smaller budgets as well as larger ones (above 50k).
3. Optimizing Discovery campaigns
Peter: I have seen some very strong results with Discovery campaigns for certain advertisers. For example, I worked with a real-estate partner who was seeing better results in Discovery campaigns than in Search!
If you’re having issues with the returns and getting conversions, make sure that you’re setting the CPAs properly. Setting up unrealistic CPAs that do not represent your goals can hamper your account health. And then there’s also the flipside. If you look at our audiences to whom we are comfortable suggesting Discovery Ads, you’ll see that the daily budget recommended is about 20 times the target CPA. So, if you have a tighter budget, I’d recommend maybe doing 10 times the target CPA.
That being said, I have seen success at a lower CPA. But if you have a smaller budget, I wouldn’t be actively recommending Discovery Ads to you. Layering on audience lists like remarketing and customer matching might help you see more successful results.
Emi: We have seen a pretty good performance in the use cases with Discovery campaigns, even for a first-time mid-sized account. So I would encourage marketers to keep looking into why they aren’t giving you a good performance. In terms of how long, usually we test for a week and then we regroup with the customers, and keep doing this. So one week at a time.
4. Common mistakes advertisers make with Smart Bidding
Start making sure what goals your Smart Bidding campaign will be optimizing and those goals align with what you’re trying to achieve. I have seen people set a Max Conversions strategy on a campaign that was spending half of its budget. We didn’t see any positive results CPA-wise as Max Conversions doesn’t necessarily focus on optimizing your CPA. It looks towards getting you as many conversions as possible within your budget. And if you’re spending only half of your budget, we don’t necessarily know whether that incremental conversion will come at a CPA that aligns with your historical ones.
The other thing is the target that we set. I would advise looking into your optimization score recommendations in the front-end to see what we are recommending there. You’ll probably want to start by setting a target in line with what you’re historically performing at. If you’re historically performing at a CPA of $100 and if you switch that down to $50, you can massively end up throttling the number of conversions and sales you were getting.
Just because we don’t want to necessarily start with Smart Bidding on the exact Target CPA, doesn’t mean we can’t get there. Start with where you’re historically performing at and slowly adjust to get where you want to be.
5. Structuring a Smart Bidding campaign with segmentation
Peter: When we segment our campaigns, Smart Bidding can actually take data and learn from the performance that’s happening throughout the account. While you don’t need to segment everything, if you do end up breaking up your campaigns, Smart Bidding will be able to learn from the performance of the campaigns. The only thing that I’ll caution about is to break down to the point where there isn’t a lot of conversion volume in each individual campaign. On top of that, if you have a Target ROAS or Target CPA that your campaigns aren’t able to meet, that’s something to watch out for.
If you put more constraints on the targets and segment the campaigns, you could end up throttling your campaigns altogether.
6. Marketing as a holistic approach
Emi: We think that a marketer can play a bigger role in PPC marketing than just making strategies or directing CPC. We look at a marketer as a growth engine for the company. Strategic points like profitability and value of customers can help bring value to your work and your business. I would really encourage everyone to think more than just PPC, think of how you can bring that value to your company and leverage for more growth.
Conclusion
Fred: When you start with something, like Smart Bidding, it’s better not to shock the system and be extremely aspirational. Machine learning functions on how things have worked consistently in the past. Even if you set up higher targets, it might take a while for the system to get you there. But at the end of the day, to achieve the target you really want, it all comes down to you, the advertiser, to set up the prerequisites and feed in impressionable data. You can add a lot of value to your ongoing campaigns by not taking bidding as something that just happens by itself.
Seasoned PPC professionals make use of efficient bid management tools, like Optmyzr, to keep their accounts top-notch and optimize your bids. Try and experience our capabilities yourself by signing up for our 14-day free trial.
If you’ve been watching the news over the last couple of years, you could be forgiven for thinking we live in a weird timeline where dreary writers like Edgar Allan Poe and Ray Bradbury reigned supreme.
Between climate change, terrorism, economic struggle, and the health crisis of 2020, this year has embodied the term VUCA — volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity. Yet this is the world we live in, and if digital marketers want to continue to have a place in it, we have to learn how to adapt our tactics and messaging to this reality.
So this week on Episode 27 of PPC Town Hall, I wanted to bring in the authors of the report “Digital Marketing in a VUCA World” to share some of their insights from the research they conducted and to discuss what the roadmap for the future could look like.
Our panelists for the week:
• Anders Hjorth, Digital Marketing Strategist at Innovell • Lukas Adamec, Freelance PPC/SEM Specialist
As always, you can view this week’s episode of PPC Town Hall embedded below, or click here to browse all our episodes. In the meantime, here are some of the insights from this week’s PPC Town Hall on how to do digital marketing in an unpredictable VUCA world.
1. What happens when agencies lose large amounts of revenue overnight
Anders: We asked 20 agencies that participated in the survey, “How bad were you hit?” About 15% said ‘no change’; a huge chunk — about 50% of respondents — said between 10-40% reduction in media spend; and a fairly large percentage saying 40-60% reduction.
When we’re looking at agencies having 40% of their media spend disappear, and as we know, a lot of the economic models are tied in some way to spend. Very few are on a retainer or consultancy basis. So this means they lose a lot of money and activity, and the rest of the activity had to be changed. Everybody’s panicking, so what do you do?
Lukas: It’s actually been the case in some instances that the agency-client relationship has ended because of volatility. Bearing in mind that the vast majority of agencies — particularly the bigger ones in the UK — have very diverse clients in their portfolios, so that’s why the impact was mostly in the 40-60% range.
But I definitely know of instances where clients have stopped their relationship with an agency because they were the most hit — tourism, hotels, and some retail as well. But other parts of retail, especially direct-to-consumer, actually thrived during this time.
2. If you put the wrong data in, the wrong prediction comes out
Anders: When we talk about volatility and VUCA, yes there’s health crises and lockdowns; but there’s also terrorism and the end of cookies. The direct impact is more easily measurable on this year’s health crisis because it’s such an abrupt change.
Over the past 2 years, we saw people adopt automated or machine-based bidding massively. We also observed that agencies used dedicated data analysts in fewer cases than they did before. This surprised us.
Lukas: It feels like the outcome was two sides of the same coin. On the one hand, there is less involvement from data analysts because there’s more reliance on AI. On the other hand, it’s not about the position of the analyst but the insight into performance is placed on marketers’ shoulders.
So where you’d previously have a data analyst to support you with looking at trends and performance, it’s almost a standard part of the marketer’s job instead of focusing on platform and creatives.
3. Data is the new oil
Anders: Can you extract more value from your data than if you give it to a platform? It’s a question of who controls it and whether you should give it away to a third party like Google or Amazon.
We think it’s very important to start controlling and protecting your own data. It doesn’t mean you shouldn’t make it flow; flowing data across platforms is extremely important to get better insights. But you need to consider each time you do that: what are you using, what are you giving away, and is there anything you can keep instead of letting someone else monetize it?
4. The connection between automation and who’s deploying it
Lukas: For me, the whole idea of paid search until now is its transparency. You can track everything down to each penny you spend and be able to show results. This is now changing the fundamentals of what paid search is for me, because I can’t explain everything (with less data).
5. How people can use automated bidding more effectively
Lukas: I personally see a huge degree of complacency when it comes to automated bidding, especially, in a lot of agencies. You’ll find that 90% of the time, you can set the AI to do your bidding for you and it’ll deliver decent performance.
But it’s that 10% of the time where something goes wrong, or when you have a promotion that suddenly skews the data — and suddenly, you have an impulse that the tool cannot account for and everything falls apart.
I even feel with some of the ways platforms sell automated bidding, like recommending not to touch things for 2 weeks to let the machines learn, you should never be in a position where you can’t change settings.
6. Preparing for the end of cookies
Anders: Will remarketing be in trouble as we see fewer and fewer cookies? Yes. Hopefully, the bad practices will die off and there’ll be some intelligent use of user data.
So start building direct relationships with your users, like email or another channel where you own that user data. If you only have access to your customers and clients via platforms or audiences, you’re probably going to lose a lot of that access. So start building that proprietary database today.
Conclusion
As I mentioned this week on PPC Town Hall, the role of the PPC manager is changing from being in the middle of account performance to managing the periphery (read my full thoughts on the topic in my post for Search Engine Journal).
But as we look to evolve our roles, we also have to remain aware of what’s happening in the wider world. From the geopolitical to the ecological, events transpire daily that impact the health of the digital marketing space… paid search included.
That’s why spaces of learning (like PPC Town Hall) will only become more important in the coming months and years. So sign up for our mailing list (and tell your PPC peers) to get notified of all our events in advance and early access to some of our upcoming resources!
Is there something on your mind? Do you have a topic you’d like us to cover on PPC Town Hall? Write to support@optmyzr.com and tell us about it, and we’ll try our best to address your concerns.
Ever since Google introduced a whole bunch of changes, things have been changing very fast in PPC. Taking away search query data, making it harder to create expanded text ads, doing more and more automated bidding, etc., is only making us unsure of the future of search marketing.
With the rising number of roadblocks that Google is putting in front of us, marketers need to be ready to overcome anything that the search giant throws at us. The question of the hour is: How much more can Google automate and change the way that we as PPC professionals go about business?
So this week on Episode 26 of PPC Town Hall, I wanted to talk to two industry specialists who have worked with a lot of accounts and have faced the implications of the changes in search marketing and automation.
Our panelists for the week:
Martin Röttgerding, Head of SEA, Bloofusion
Brady Cramm, Director of PPC, Directive Consulting
As always, you can view this week’s episode as well as previous editions of PPC Town Hall right here.
Here are the top 6 insights from this week’s PPC Town Hall on navigating the future of PPC automation.
1. How to optimize Google’s tax?
Martin: Some countries have started to raise the Digital Services Tax from Google. Now, Google intends to pass that on to advertisers. For example, for ads being shown in Austria and Turkey Google will add 5% to your invoice. This is tricky because it won’t show up in any of your regular KPI’s. Your costs and CPC’s in the interface will seem unaffected. This makes it easy to miss – which is probably the intention.
There’s a reason why you’ve decided on a certain bid or budget. In order to account for the new tax, you’ll have to lower your bids or budget by about 5%. Then you’ll end up paying the same as before. Of course, Google would rather have you pay the same amount to them and then the additional 5% in taxes, which is probably why they have little incentive to help us with this.
2. Taxes and Geo locations
Martin: Digital services taxes depend on where the advertising cost occurs. For example, if someone in the UK clicks an ad, a 2% tax charge will be added to the cost of that click. The problem here is that there’s a difference between the location of interest and user location. If you target the U.S. then that can include people elsewhere if Google somehow identifies the U.S. as their location of interest.
There used to be an easy way to evaluate physical user locations. That has been removed. Standard location reports no longer include physical location. In fact, Google got rid of any mention that there might be a difference between physical location and location of interest.
You can still get the data, though – it’s just less convenient. Google also removed the pre-defined report from its report editor, but you can still create your own from scratch. So while the data is no longer present front-and-center, you can still get it.
Brady: Let’s take the example of businesses dealing with ‘New York Pizza’. This is a specific style of pizza that practically anyone can search about. While the local pizza shops of New York have been capturing people around the world looking up for New York Pizza, the location settings in the user interface don’t show this happening. As a result, a lot of these small pizza places now could gain a UK tax or something without any idea why.
To find this specific information about locations, go to
Reports → Custom and build your own report.
If you search ‘user locations’ in your report, you’ll find all of the user location option that you can place within the rows of your report.
3. Managing accounts with less search data
Brady: We’re seeing a struggle for low volume accounts. So for accounts where you can spend every day digging into the search term reports, read them, and make decisions based on your finding, we are seeing a lot of frustration.
When it comes to high-volume accounts, I think it makes things like n-grams even more relevant. With access to less data, n-gram reports can help you find trends within the data set you have and make decisions accordingly.
4. Functioning with Google ‘roadblocks’
Brady: I’m not fully against these changes. In a handful of our campaigns, we do full broad keyword targeting paired with Target CPA, and it does fairly well. Looking at our search terms, we see that some of them are non-branded solution-based terms, while some are comparing our solution vs other competitors, and some are comparing between other competitors altogether. But, at the end of the day, the cost per conversion, and MQL, are pretty good.
When it comes to B2B software marketing, we’re really looking at an LTV/ CAC model. So modeling that out for both Google Ads and other channels, and helping the clients on that level is something we’re moving towards. With a higher level of automation, we would have time to focus on stuff like landing pages optimization, A/B testing, new offers, and analyzing the competition.
5. Shifting agencies and business goals while working with the same black box by Google
Martin: With Google doing everything with these black box campaigns like smart shopping, discovery, or local campaigns, it becomes more and more important to make sure that their systems have the right data to go on. This is also an important field for agencies and advertisers to set themselves apart from the crowd.
One way to do that is to further evolve conversion tracking. For the last ten or so years, everyone has focused on revenue. Before that, it was about conversions. The future is about margins and profit instead of revenue. Beyond that, there’s customer lifetime value. And just as important is incrementality – although that is something that you probably can’t expect much help from the platforms.
Brady: When everyone is competing armed with the same black boxes and no levers like before, you should:
Build your own audiences
Feed Google quality data (MQL, SQL, Opportunities, Pipeline Revenue, etc.)
Constantly audit competitor messaging
Test landing page messaging and offering
Create brand awareness
Educate others
Manage specific audiences and their campaigns
6. Future of Google
Brady: If we think of what to expect from Google in 2021, I think we’re going back ourselves into something like DSA campaigns. While we will see some new features, it seems like we’re getting back to something that’s already existed – Google having control over the search terms, the ads, and the pages.
I think that the future of Google already exists. While I don’t think the changes will be extreme, we’ll be moving towards something that existed previously.
Conclusion
It’s no doubt that the world of PPC is going through some changes. With Google introducing new features every now and then, we marketers must be flexible with our strategies. One thing is clear: it’s going to be extremely tough to stand out when every PPC professional relies on the same black box by Google. To be on par with the search giants evolving practices, we need to rely on automation to some level.
Automation is a great way to handle daily mundane tasks, but PPC professionals shouldn’t confuse it with ‘autopilot’. Though machines might be able to perform a high number of actions quickly and efficiently, they will still rely on us for timely inputs and tweaks.
So whether it’s now, or 5 years into the future, marketers will always have something to do for there is no replacement for human intellect, ingenuity, improvisation, and intuition.
There’s no doubt that 2020 has been an unusual year for all of us. Even though we’re just in the middle of October, people have already started shopping for the upcoming holidays.
Supply chains, delivery, and in-store experiences aren’t what they normally are, yet consumers are buying and spending more — which has forced marketers and agencies to run offers and deals a bit earlier than usual.
But even with so much uncertainty and change, e-commerce has been ahead of what we expected at the start of the year.
So this week on Episode 25 of PPC Town Hall, we wanted to gain a perspective on how we all could navigate the coming Holiday season and make the most of it. We talked to two amazing PPC experts from OMG Commerce, an Optmyzr user, who shared their insights on all things e-commerce and shopping.
Our panelists for the week:
Brett Curry, CEO, OMG Commerce
Greg Maycock, Sr. Google Strategist, OMG Commerce
As always, you can view this week’s episode as well as previous editions of PPC Town Hall right here.
Here are the top 5 insights from this week’s PPC Town Hall with OMG Commerce to help you make the most of Holiday e-commerce this year.
1. Changes in the last few years
Brett: One of the things that we did early on was manual bidding. In fact, as an agency, we were really good at it. So, we had some non-automated options where we were doing things with spreadsheets. We used formulas to sort our products and create bidding recommendations.
When Google launched Target ROAS, we were hesitant to try it out. But as it got better and better, we decided to test it out with a few of our campaigns. It took a little bit of convincing, but we slowly started to transition. I think that if there is some new tool that is better than our current approach, we need to embrace that!
One thing that we have to look at is how shifting our segmentation, breaking out campaigns, or even changing our targets can impact the full product-line visibility and sales. While we have come a long way from spreadsheets, we still have to think strategically and dig into the data regularly.
Greg: The smart bidding strategies have created opportunities to scale in terms of having multiple campaigns with multiple strategies. It has definitely changed how we look at campaign structures. In fact, I don’t think we have any accounts which don’t have three or more shopping campaigns. Earlier, with manual bidding, we ran a lot of campaigns with single product ad groups to focus our optimizations manually at the sku level. Now, it’s more about creating campaign structures that feed the smart-bidder the data and focus on what you want to optimize for.
2. Aligning PPC outcomes with business goals
Brett: As we do a lot of Youtube ads, we have all sorts of in-depth discussions with our clients. Usually, we have to ask them questions, about three or four times, in different ways with projected illustrations of results. We talk a lot about portfolios and how different campaigns work together. We also have to ask probing questions to really understand the client’s goals. In my opinion, we have to over-communicate.
Our role, as an agency, is to think strategically, ask questions, and revisit all of our findings. Ask a lot of questions so you get as much clarity as possible and keep evaluating what you’re doing. Eventually, this will help you align with your client.
3. Understanding YouTube campaign structure and formats
Brett: We primarily focus on Trueview for Action campaign where we can bid on a Target CPA basis. We found that if you give Google the goal of conversions, the smart-bidder becomes pretty good at finding people who convert. If you use Cost Per View as your bid strategy, Google’s pretty good at finding people who watch YouTube videos. So with CPV, your views will go up but your conversions will go way down. If you transition to Trueview for Action, you’ll get more clicks and certainly more conversions.
While we are looking for direct conversions through YouTube Trueview ads, we are also looking at the brand lift and Google trends to see the impact of our campaigns.
Greg: When we are retargeting viewed video audiences, who are still in the acquisition funnel, we turn to Trueview for action campaigns to re-engage people who saw the initial video. But we are also running YouTube for shopping campaigns, remarketing to people who did engage with the website but didn’t convert.
4. How to leverage audiences
Brett: Now’s the time to get your brand’s (or business’) message out there to drive not only conversions but build other kinds of audiences as well. We have a four-pronged marketing approach that can guide you better.
I think that this year, customers will be more interested in on-time delivery and getting the product they want than deals alone. It’s safe to say that most people also want deals or discounts. Done right, you can offer a deal that doesn’t negatively impact your brand. You can also look at free gifts, which is kind of like discounting but while making use of some unsold inventory.
5. Free PLAs and Deep Feed Analysis
Brett: In order to fill the gaps in your Search and Shopping, all you’ve to do is enable a setting inside Google merchant center to get free listings on surfaces across Google.
Most people search for a product on Google and then click on the Shopping ads on the main SERP. But some shoppers click through to the shopping or image tabs. Your free listings can appear on these tabs. If you’re paying for Google shopping ads, then surfaces across Google can deliver a 3-5% increase in conversions and clicks.
We do a deep feed analysis when we start with a client. This is compared with our keyword research and evaluated. After this, our feed specialist would craft the updated titles, descriptions, product categories, and even product types.
Conclusion
The way ahead for the world might be uncertain but it’s also exciting, and that’s true for PPC and e-commerce as well. As we get used to these regular changes, we also need to keep a strategic eye on everything we’ve done in the past.
Make informed decisions and align your PPC goals with what your clients want to achieve for their businesses. Re-check data, run tests, and communicate with your client to start the right way and keep the relationships strong.
Focus on the right messages to the right audience at the right time — the essence of Google Ads and PPC in general — and stay in touch with trends and updates to how search engines work for advertisers and users alike.
There’s no doubt that marketing is one of the most expensive aspects of running any business. And while advertisers might race ahead in the hopes of getting more clicks and profit, they can still end up making mistakes!
A classic PPC horror story is when marketers mix up traffic with solid leads and forget about optimizing their accounts. Not supervising the system and failing to make effective improvements can turn into wasting tons on bad clicks and setting that yield no returns!
So this week on Episode 24 of PPC Town Hall, we talked to two brilliant PPC pros and discussed actionable tips on how to stop burning budgets. We even got to learn about PPC community initiatives like PSA and new Microsoft Ad capabilities that can benefit marketers.
Our panelists for the week:
David Szetela, President of Paid Search Association & Owner of FMB Media
John Lee, Learning Strategist at Microsoft Advertising
As always, you can view this week’s episode as well as previous editions of PPC Town Hall right here.
Here are the top insights from this week’s PPC Town Hall to help you identify budget-burning areas, know Microsoft’s newest features, and understand the thought behind creating a successful PPC community.
1. What role does the Paid Search Association play in the industry?
David: Initially, I was attracted by the notion that there really wasn’t one consolidated source of credible and curated information/ resources for PPC managers. You basically had to pick and choose from among homogenous resources. There really wasn’t a one-stop-shop for people who wanted to train themselves and be updated with the developments.
So our core mission is to serve as a curated source of learning and news resources.
John: One of the things that we’ve talked about as a collective is about mentoring. It surely is a complex thing to figure out with variables like timings and schedules. But there are a lot of bright men and women on the board who have been eager to share what they’ve learned within the industry and their peers.
2. Microsoft’s Audits network
John: Not just us, but practically everybody is working on something related to customer privacy and a ‘cookie-less world’. In this industry, where all the platforms rely on cookie data presently, what would the future look like? Envisioning for this future, Microsoft just launched a partnership for brand safety. It’s neither an ad-on nor does it cost anything extra. If you run ads on the Microsoft Advertising network, you’re automatically opted into this brand safety application.
3. The 4 Google money grabs
David: These are the four key areas where marketers waste their spend:
Location targeting settings: When you look at the User Locations report, you would find that your ads are being shown either nation-wide or worldwide, even when you’re geo-targeting a smaller area. I’ve seen accounts spending thousands of dollars per year on clicks that are outside the geo-targetted area.
Targeting expansion: By default, Google turns on ‘Targetting expansion’ which generally would mean helping advertisers widen the reach of their display ad group. Extending the reach, in this case, means showcasing your ads on sites where people might convert.
Now, when you’re doing audience targeting, you shouldn’t be placing ads on sites based on just any criteria, but following your audience dedicatedly to any site. To avoid this, just disable that option altogether.
Ads showing up on mobile apps by default: When you go to placements to see where your ads are appearing, you will definitely see that your apps are showing up on mobile apps. You might even find a considerable amount of clicks coming from them, likely clicking by mistake. There might be a lot of kid’s apps and games that might not be relevant to your business.
I’m gonna let you in on a technique that Kirk Williams (from Zato Marketing) wrote about, which you can only do with Google Ads Editor.
Go to Display Campaigns → Keywords and Targetting → Mobile app categories Negative → Add two negative categories for both Google and Apple apps. And that’s it. From then on you’ll not see mobile apps in your list of placements.
Enhanced CPC vs Max CPC: I don’t like the fact that when you create a new campaign, by default the bidding model is Enhanced CPC. And my feeling is based out of a general distrust of the bidding algorithm to know anything about the conversion behavior of people as it relates to the offer.
In order to use target CPA bidding, Google says that you need to have 15 or more conversions over the course of 30 days. Which I think makes sense as you’ve got some behavior to fuel the algorithm. Whereas when a campaign starts out with CPC bidding, there is no pre-recorded data or behavior. This might contribute to the higher CPC values at the beginning of the campaign, which might be due to Google’s automation thrashing to attenuate the signal.
4. New Microsoft Ad Features for the win
John: Some new features in Microsoft Advertising are:
Use LinkedIn data to target ads: The LinkedIn Profile Targeting has been live for all for over a month. This is the first time when data sets from both Microsoft and LinkedIn are coming together. You can now layer in information from a LinkedIn profile like company name, job function, and industry to target highly relevant audiences in-text ads, DSAs, and Shopping Campaigns.
Multi-image extensions: Microsoft recently added to their Image Extensions capabilities so that users can now add multi images, effectively a carousel with your search ads in SERP.
Availability of Stock photos: Microsoft Advertising has partnered with Shutterstock to provide an access to 300 million commercially licensed images to advertisers.
Microsoft Audience Network: It’s a native ad platform where you can showcase search campaigns. You also get an opportunity to bid on placements on MSN.com, the Edge browser, Outlook.com, and a host of other publishing partner sites. In order to save marketers from double work, our new functionality can help you replicate information from Google Display Ads (which are truly working) to Microsoft Advertising.
5. Be mindful of your bid adjustments
John: Everyone needs to be really mindful when you’re applying bid adjustments. If you have bid adjustments at every layer, that can get out of control in a hurry. So things like age, gender, location, in however many audience groups you’ve stacked in a particular group or campaign need to be strategically placed.
Conclusion
PPC campaigns can prove to be of immense importance in paving way for your organization or business. With the ever-changing dynamics of search marketing, marketers need to be on alert about how they handle their accounts. Giving up complete control to default settings might hurt your accounts more than you can comprehend.
To make informed decisions, keep discussing strategies and tactics with the community and your peers. Look to industry leaders for actionable solutions that actually bring you results.
Next week on PPC Town Hall, we are jumping back in discussing best practices for Holiday shopping with prominent e-commerce and shopping experts. Join us in the session to ask your questions!
It’s true: the right bidding strategy can decide the fate of your PPC accounts.
With the ever-changing dynamics of search marketing, marketers need to be extra careful navigating the tough waters of bid management. Moreover, they also need to be conscious of Google’s take on limiting search query reports and pushing new limits on data access.
In order to gain big on leads, we have to do more than just focusing on bidding strategies. Metrics like quality score, tCPA, ROAS, etc., can also play a big role in influencing bid management.
So this week on episode 23 of PPC Town Hall, we discussed tips and tactics by specialists to improve your bid management for good lead generation and e-commerce.
Our panelists for the week:
Navah Hopkins, Director of Paid Media, Hennessey Digital
Frederick Vallaeys, Co-Founder, Optmyzr
Geetanjali Tyagi, Co-Founder, Optmyzr
As always, you can view this week’s episode as well as previous editions of PPC Town Hall right here.
Here are 5 tips that experts swear by to manage bids for leads and e-commerce.
1. The changing face of Search Terms Reports
Navah: Initially, when it was announced that the Search Terms Reports were being depreciated, I didn’t think much of it. Ultimately, you’re still gonna be able to see the click data, the keyword data, and your ROASes. It’s not that you’re getting fewer clicks, you’re just not getting that transparency on the queries.
But now, I think it is an actual problem as I have noticed an under-spending issue. Not being able to see where the budget is being funneled is really a problem. My theory is that a lot of the spend is being directed to local service ads rather than paid search. Local service ads come at a dramatic discount, without any pre-requirement of running a paid search ad.
Apart from this, there is no transparency for different automation strategies that are either underperforming or overperforming.
2. SKAGs vs STAGs
Navah: Lately, I’ve been pushing far more broad match ad groups and campaigns, especially with how much the match types have changed. The allocation of budget to broad match and exact match keywords seems much higher than phrase match keywords. Now, I’m finding one broad match skag, 3-4 exact match keywords, and then maybe one mod broad serves better than focusing on only exact/phrase.
The choice to use a match type or a keyword is entirely dependent on what I’ll see coming back in search terms. Did they match by the rules of exact? Or did exact close variants matched by the rules of broad, etc.,? The fact that we no longer have that visibility truly, is a bit of a problem.
In terms of delivery in account performance, I still see that STAGs (grouping of keywords) seems to perform better than SKAGs. In terms of match type, I’m very much pulling away from phrase match as they tend to get caught quite more in the delivery problem.
Fred: Match types don’t mean what they used to be earlier. With the loosening of the match types, most people can not figure out what a phrase match can achieve that another match type wouldn’t. For people, who haven’t been doing PPC quite that long, a phrase match meant that the words between the quotes were supposed to stay together. But that doesn’t actually work anymore.
Geetanjali: With the whole match types changing and close variants coming in, people who swear by SKAGs have still not completely let go. With the search terms changes, the whole alpha-beta structure of mining keywords using your broad match and then moving them to exact might not work that well. You probably don’t know all the search queries that are coming in with your broad match keywords, whether it’s SKAG or otherwise.
3. Let’s talk bidding
Navah: Bidding is one of those tactics that you should just delegate out. There isn’t a good reason to do truly manual bidding. Manual bidding can be helpful when you don’t trust native automation to bid enough for your important terms, however, there is no good reason to sit there adjusting bids all day. Use scripts/rules, or you can use an amazing tool like Optmyzr.
Geetanjali: If you are using smart bidding, it’s really important to send the right data into the system. I also think that having the right level of attribution is needed as well. I have come across customers who are completely using Google’s automated bidding strategies and running on last-click attribution. So, the system is automatically cutting the queries that would rise on top of the funnel, conversions and these customers keep wondering why it’s not working.
Also, if you’re delegating your bidding, you need to know which parts you’d be choosing. If you still have to set the right targets, you still have to have the attribution model, then that’s the part that you can’t delegate to Google. If you don’t give the system the right data, the systems, which are after all machines, can’t make the right decision.
4. The problem with AI and Maximize Conversions
Navah: Two things play here. One, in your Conversion settings, you can tell Google whether to count in your conversions or not. This means you can still track actions you’re interested in without having them derail your automated/smart bidding strategies. The other thing is don’t use smart bidding if you don’t trust your conversions. Just don’t.
You actually need to have an infrastructure in place that can track the lead through. Have an open conversation with your client about their intake. Part of it comes down to helping your client and helping them build infrastructure to report and have an internal intake system. The other part is doing the legwork yourself, having call tracking metrics, checking lead quality, etc.
5. Quality of leads
Navah: We need to understand the quality of leads in accepted leads against rejected leads and why they get rejected. One thing that we found in new advertisers is that a penchant for leaving search partners on and getting conversions. But then those conversions turn out really terrible.
We make sure that every quarter that there is this buy-in and we ask some core questions. How many leads are you getting per month? Where could that number grow to? How much do you make per service vertical? Are there any upcoming changes in this quarter that we need to be aware of?
Conclusion
I’ve noticed that as newer PPC managers come in who have never done manual bid management, they lack the understanding of how to manage bids or how the auctions work.
For some reason, people tend to believe that putting in a bid or a target for tCPA or tROAS is enough to walk away. That’s certainly not okay. Google is automating the conversions between expected conversion when you’re trying to achieve in terms of CPA and putting the bids in the auction.
But remember this: it doesn’t look at anything to do with your business! It doesn’t necessarily know all the things about your business as you do. At the end of the day, your priority in the type of leads you want should be reflected in your targets.
Keep in mind that nothing is fixed as we know them to be. Keep testing and discussing ways to make the most of your accounts.
Seasoned PPC professionals turn to efficient bid management tools, like Optmyzr, to keep their accounts top-notch and drive good leads. Try and experience our capabilities yourself by signing up for our 14-day free trial. Full access to all our features, credit card free!
No matter how many updates or changes happen in search marketing, some things remain constant, like the importance of data. It’s no secret that PPC marketers rely heavily on good data to influence their automation and build powerful strategies.
With all the changes taking place, we need to stay vigilant for anything Google throws at us. Setting up intelligent measurement systems to assess your PPC account success is a necessity, now more than ever.
So this week on episode 22 of PPC Town Hall, we decided to dive deep into all things data and analytics that give search marketers nightmares. Our expert panel, featuring some of the most experienced minds in the community, shared their tips and tactics to build solid PPC strategies.
Our panelists for the week:
Kirk Williams, Owner of Zato Marketing
Aaron Levy, Group Director of SEM at Tinuiti
As always, you can view this week’s episode as well as previous editions of PPC Town Hall right here.
Here are 5 insights to help you understand how to utilize data and analytics to encourage your PPC authority.
1. Living with Google’s limits to search terms reports
Kirk: So basically Google rolled out a change where they would no longer be showing search terms that are over a certain traffic level to advertisers. This is significant. Now in your search term reports, you don’t have access to around 30% of the data for the terms that are incurring costs. Marketers have been wondering what this means or whether it’s ok to make such a deduction.
Aaron: We haven’t put out a piece about it yet. But a lot of our clients have asked us questions like whether 50% of the data or so will become inaccessible. The thing to remember about search term reports is that a lot of it normalizes over time.
My theory is that it’s all one impression one-click searches, so if/when they’re searched a second time, they’ll start to show in SQR’s. There’s a lot of controversy around it but we need to see what happens. We are still trying to unpack what it is and what is the necessary criteria, but want to see the dust settle as the report fills out.
I actually predicted the end of keywords two years ago. For me, search is looking more and more like a DSP, like it’s a pragmatic land now. So if you think about an earlier time, a lot of this data was hidden or you’d have to pay more for full visibility. It kind of looks like how things were in the early 2000s.
2. Figuring out advertisers’ rights
Kirk: I truly don’t think that the advertisers own the data (that fight is between the user and platform). But the question is what is an advertiser paying for? Is it just strictly access to the platform? Or is access to the platform and the data that allows you to advertise well?
On another philosophical note around Google and advertisers, the constantly changing landscape from what was originally agreed upon to the system in which we are reliant on them. And Google pretty much has most market share. So they have created all this and now they keep shifting the goalposts.
Basically, this is all about search, the keyword, communication, or intent. And now all of this is starting to change. A lot of the advertisers’ frustration is not just around figuring out the shift, but also that the reforms keep getting worse for us.
Is it becoming more and more difficult to communicate to Google on what advertisers would like to see happen? Yes. Basically, Google is pursuing a strategy that pushes to kind of monopolize the whole dynamic. As Google pushes to wall off the data and turn to a more audience-focused programmatic type approach, they are behaving less and less like a paid search advertising platform and more like a traditional media platform.
3. Building runways for automation
Aaron: A lot of our philosophies are around building runways for automation. We know the automation is going to make mistakes, it will have its good days and bad days. So we make sure that these runways are appropriate to give enough room to help the automation succeed. Runways are basically more of how we structure things by intent, forecasted outcome, and conversion rate.
Talking specifically about Google’s automation and Smart Bidding, Google optimizes based on expected revenue and expected conversion rate. So it has to learn and figure out those points – if we can put things in runways, where we have different groups for different goals that get different optimizations.
This way the automation has a runway within a target, a consistent marketing goal and doesn’t have to guess much. If we can control the inputs and make sure that the machine is optimizing based on what we know is right as a business, agency, or customer, it minimizes the downside and lets it do what it’s good at to improve outputs.
4. Strategizing for the right data
We are trying to purposefully have more strategic conversations. Currently, the human element is used to determine the bounds and objectives for automation. There have been times when I have deliberately pulled out of smart bidding to go full manual, and not because I think smart bidding or automation can’t get to that level, but that it still lacks in certain ways right now.
Acknowledge the fact that at some point, some developers will write a code that will improve various forms of automation. We’re just not there in every way yet! And so you need to act accordingly. Understand the nature of the automation right now and build things around it and then adapt as automation evolves. Humans need to figure out how to utilize automation as it continually changes.
5. Accepting the demise of cookies
Aaron: It will be a lot more first-party data, the information you collect, and how you can use it. Privacy moves by Europe with GDPR will certainly be a lead-in to what the rest of the world is going to be. Just like we are seeing a rise in software companies just for Google Ads management, there will be a rise in data matching platforms that can operate best under GDPR regulations.
Figuring out how you can take out the important data, you do need to tie in all the information together. I am a bit encouraged by the concept of a cookie-less world as it will make us a little bit smarter and craftier in terms of branding and messaging.
Conclusion
One thing is clear: we’re never going to have everything perfect all at once. We can argue in favor of advertiser rights, automation, and bidding strategies all we want. But we need to be flexible and accommodating of any changes in order to keep doing better for our clients and businesses.
As for me, I’d like to see some updates to the Google API to make up for all the missing stuff. I hope in 2021, a lot of the things that we don’t have API access to (like competitor data in the auction) get fixed. At Optmyzr, we want to build out simpler automations that our customers can depend on to make smarter decisions.
What do you want to see from Google in 2021? Tweet us!
As the holiday season approaches, search marketers are busy preparing for a rush of shopping and e-commerce activity in Q4. You need to be ready to navigate the next few months with expert planning and monitoring to deploy successful PPC campaigns.
This year more than ever, it’s important to arm yourself with tips and tricks to crush holiday sales. So for episode 21 of PPC Town Hall, we brought in a couple of experts in the space to talk about best practices in all things shopping and e-commerce:
Purna Virji, Senior Manager of Global Engagement, Microsoft
Anders Hjorth, Digital Marketing Strategist, Innovell
As always, you can view this week’s episode as well as previous editions of PPC Town Hall right here.
Here are 6 insights that can help you top the e-commerce charts during Q4, Black Friday, and the holiday season.
1. Search is going to be a big place to be
Purna: In 2020, we have been seeing three proverbial ‘elephants in the room’ – the economy, the COVID-19 crisis, and the upcoming elections in the US.
1. Recession: During the last financial crisis in 2008, consumers reported that they would pull back their holiday spending by 29%. However, these claims proved overly conservative as sales dipped by only 4.7% YoY. Even during the .com bubble, Retail sales continued to grow.
Search will be this big place where everyone will come to look for gifts. While retailers continue to cut back on budgets for other channels, Search seems to be least affected.
2. COVID-19: With 75% of U.S. consumers avoiding in-store shopping malls and 53% avoiding shops in general because of COVID-19₂, in-store holiday traffic will likely decline this year.
Online sales, however, are projected to astronomically increase this holiday season as COVID-19 continues to boost eCommerce activity. Anticipate holiday shopping to begin earlier as both retailers and customers offset the unprecedented shipping delays unearthed by COVID-19.
Even as the economy re-opens, and physical stores allow for customers to return, we expect BOPIS (buy online, pick up in-store) interest to remain exponentially higher than it would have without the health concerns related to physical distance.
3. Election: The election in 2016 did not impact search, yet we expect 2020 to perform very differently based on a multitude of factors
Moreover, with physical locations being restricted, more and more people have been coming online to find things. Due to this, we are expecting a double-digit growth to online sales for the Holiday season.
2. Shifts in Search Advertising don’t give a solid outlook
Anders: While analyzing Google’s quarterly reports, I saw that Google had negative growth in Q2 2020 compared with the year before, something which we have never seen before. Combining this information with the rumors of reducing search term reports or negative keywords, I believe that they might be panicking a bit.
3. Seeing the pandemic as an opportunity
Anders: I think people are very uncertain about the current situation. While certain brands closed up and waited for the changes to still, others took this up as an opportunity to talk and communicate with their audience. We have seen brands emerging, others pulling out of auctions, or bidding higher to get all the attention. So if you are a brand that hasn’t interacted at all, take this chance to tell the community that you are still around.
4. Impact on data analytics and audiences
Anders: One of the things that we noticed while talking to some of the big names of the industry, is that bidding strategies were radically changed in about 25% of all projects they managed. But even with the data, you simply can’t predict in the same manner as you did before. Depending on the circumstances, you may have to reset the data, or even set a ‘before’ and ‘after’ lockdown, to learn user behaviors.
I remember what Fred says in his book (Digital Marketing in an AI World), that we need to take a step back to look at the data. I think this is the time that we need to step back and look at things. Earlier on, we could trust the machines for the data they had and their ability to predict, but it might not be so reliable right now, as the data is changing. You need to be extra careful before fully trusting the algorithms.
5. Rely on Machine learning and add your insights
Purna: It’s true that the old models and strategies have somehow seen huge changes from predictable patterns. But I think there’s still a strong case for things like automated bidding. eCPC bidding can work well for Product Ads, and Microsoft recently launched Target ROAS bidding for shopping as well, and we have been seeing some really good performance there.
So with so much unpredictability, leave some of the signals to the machine. But wherever you can put in your own inputs, give the system the best information possible such as through Custom Labels to manage campaign/product group optimization.
You can download Microsoft’s holiday shopping checklist as seen during Purna’s segment by clickinghere.
6. Microsoft recommendations for feed management
Purna: Remember to check the following things:
Be sure to add an email address in the Microsoft Merchant Center – even if you work with a third party feed management system- to keep track of feed rejections and notifications such as alerts if your feed is going to expire or if there’s a sudden increase in rejected offers.
Audit duplicate titles. (Considered duplicate titles only if the entry has both the same title and the same price.)
Pay attention to your descriptions as they show up on shopping tabs.
Optimize for the shopping tab for it can help boost CTRs and Conversion rates.
Don’t ignore optional columns like Product Variants and Product Categories, as adding these can give the search engines more information to help show your SKUs for higher relevancy searches.
Conclusion
As we near the end of September, last-minute preparations for the coming quarter are in full swing. Search marketing has changed, and we need to be watchful of these changes as they affect data analytics and audience behaviors.
At Optmyzr, we’ve seen a massive shift across industries as businesses took recent months as an opportunity to go online. More and more marketers and agencies are starting to trust machine learning, automation, and data-driven optimizations.
One thing is clear: In order to thrive in Q4, PPC professionals need to look for powerful search systems and highly effective management tools. Being careful of the minutiae like descriptions or optional columns could prove to be game-changers.
Video ads are a powerful way to showcase and communicate your products or services to potential customers. They’re also a great way to drive leads and growth through PPC campaigns.
Experts are more in tune than ever with different platforms and the audience groups they attract, rather than focusing on just driving content. As the landscape changes, marketers need to find new ways to create the right kinds of video campaigns to resonate with their target segments.
So this week on episode 20 of PPC Town Hall, we spoke to two experienced video ad gurus, who shared their rich experience and insights with our audience:
Joe Martinez, Director of Client Services at Clix Marketing
Cory Henke, Founder and CEO of Variable Media
As always, you can view this week’s episode as well as previous editions of PPC Town Hall right here.
Here are 5 insights to help you deploy effective and powerful video ads.
1. Hook your audience in the first 5 seconds
Joe: For me, the message in the first 5 seconds of a video can have more impact than anything else. What is the narrator or character trying to convey? For people like me, who listen to YouTube while working, the first five seconds of any ad will trigger me to pay attention to it. So that message is going to be extremely important.
Make sure that your logo is visible so that even if your audience is paying attention or skips the ad, they will see the brand name.
2. Look at audience intent rather than channel
Joe: If you have a limited budget and have a specific goal in mind with your campaign, it’s always important to optimize to whatever is working. Think about whether you would want your content shown on a particular channel.
We’ve seen people converting from a music channel because we focus on a very customer-intent audience rather than the type of channel. Now, if a customer is looking for SaaS products, we’re targeting them and not the placement or the channel.
Be proactive. If you think your audience isn’t on certain channels, then block those. You can get help from several exclusion lists created to guide you better.
3. Target wisely for a TV-only campaign
Joe: Looking specifically at a TV-only campaign, your ad’s performance depends on the various targeting options. Even if you don’t see a spike in the initial days, keep watching as the percentage of people watching your ads on TV increases gradually.
Go back to check your initial targeting options and whether you’ve been remarketing to the same audience. If your targeting is specific, try to expand it to check if that gives you the exposure you want on TV.
4. Drive your ads through IGTV
Cory: On Instagram, the areas that are most promotable are the stories and the newsfeed. The areas that you can’t advertise are IGTV and live streams. And that is where, we believe, we get the most organic reach for our videos.
Now, the trouble with IGTV lies in promoting it. How do you get people to see it? That’s one of the most difficult things with long-form videos. To help increase your view count, run your long-form video ads on Facebook.
Another way would be to take the IGTV videos and embed them into a webpage. You can use the URLs to guide users onto your Instagram with a call to action like ‘Watch now’.
5. Don’t neglect lead forms
Cory: We focus on CPC as that shows how the audience engages with the content rather than just visiting the website or channel. It shows how much impact the ads could have, especially when there isn’t much of a lead flow.
Don’t forget to test your bid types. We think that one of the biggest variables to look at is Target CPS vs Maximized Conversions. That’s great to potentially find some more lead volume that could help you decide what works for the audience better.
Keep an eye on the engagement with the lead form and experiment with your call-to-action.
Conclusion
The effectiveness of video ads is because they’re so easy to consume. With the way the world is right now, it’s no surprise people prefer video content over other types. The surging popularity of apps like Instagram, Snapchat, and TikTok (for now) is a testament to the balance of power shifting towards video ads.
While it’s definitely not easy to succeed with such a dynamic ad type, marketers need to be mindful of audience interests, broadcasting channels and mediums, and content type.
Go a step further to cater to your target audience by customizing your very own exclusion list. Start by checking out Joe and Clix’s list of over 1,400 children’s YouTube channels to exclude from your campaigns.
As we enter September, PPC marketers everywhere are gearing up for Q4 and the coming holiday season. Online retail will come alive, with businesses planning their strategies to woo consumers.
After a challenging year, and as many advertisers and agencies are regaining their footing, Black Friday and Christmas could be exactly what the PPC doctor ordered.
So as you start planning for your brands and clients, we thought you could use a hand.
This week on episode 19 of PPC Town Hall, we spoke to some experts on the cutting edge of e-commerce and shopping campaigns:
Katie Wilson, Head of Ecommerce Southwest, Google Customer Solutions
Elizabeth Marsten, Senior Director of Strategic Marketplaces, Tinuiti
Duane Brown, Founder & Head of Strategy, Take Some Risk
As always, you can view this week’s episode as well as previous editions of PPC Town Hall right here.
Here are the top insights from this week to help you navigate, plan for, and dominate e-commerce in Q4 2020:
1. How 2020 is different for e-commerce
Katie: One thing that we know for sure is that this year, we are going to experience a different kind of holiday. At Google, we are preparing on all fronts to help our customers. We have been seeing a penetration of e-commerce on all fronts.
According to various studies, e-commerce has grown more in the last two months than in the last decade. There’s a potential that the level of demand starts increasing as early as October. Being prepared for this, for example on inventory and logistics, is going to be incredibly important as we enter the Holiday season.
This year, around 72 % of Holiday shoppers are going to shop online which is bound to create a huge demand. Brand loyalty is starting to become a thing of the past as people start discovering new brands through Google and social media.
So newer brands can take this time to get discovered more to drive their sales.
2. Getting ready for Q4
Katie: In 2020, we are already 27% above demand levels as compared to last year. Getting ready for that demand as we get close to November and December, or even as early as October is extremely important.
At present, we are at a planning stage with our clients where we are discussing their Q4 goals. Essential things like logistics, promotions, inventory, or even shipping criteria are super important to plan for right now. This way you are preparing for any possible scenarios (like delays) in the future.
From an advertising perspective, this is the time to get the fundamentals down. Do you have tracking set up correctly? Have you looked into automation solutions? Have you checked out your shopping feeds?
Polish everything to make sure you are ready to go and are up to date in the months prior to Q4.
3. Explore free product listing ads by Google
Katie: Free listings are a great way for people to dip their toes if they are curious about feeds. It is really important to be there and have your inventory aligned. We have found that both from the paid and unpaid standpoints, they work better together when you’re covering all bases.
Free listing is a very powerful tool for research and easy to set up with third-party apps. You also get an option of integrating if you have a physical store. So, there’s a lot of things one can do with feeds and that is going to be really important this year.
Elizabeth: Working with many channels like Amazon, Walmart, or Google, being able to understand inventory levels in real-time is very critical. For example, if you happen to over-sell in one or more marketplaces, they will penalize you heavily. If you cancel your orders, your cancellation rate goes up and you could lose the channel.
4. Account for changes and demand
Duane: All automations are correct but in the right context. When you see too much data being fed into the system and that not every system can handle it, shift to something else. We try to keep a last 7-day average as long as we are on track. Beyond that, it becomes a question of whether the systems can handle the changes.
We had certain accounts where smart bidding did amazing, while with others, it just spiked the CPA. When the CPA kept on rising, it made sense to shift to manual. So really it depends on a case to case basis, taking into account what happened in the last 7 or 30 days.
5. Accounting for customer lifetime value
Elizabeth: LTV (life time value) always depends on the brands and how they are set up as a business.
We’ve set up Amazon attribution for some brands that are unable to measure how consumers who begin at Google, convert at Amazon. Some clients are able to do things like LiveRamp and audience matching.
We are dependent on our clients to fill us in at some places since we don’t get to see the level of their financials and how they see their businesses.
6. Look at different platforms to gain more audience
Duane: A lot of people will spend all their money on just Google and Facebook which limits their audience scope. Apart from these two channels, people do spend a lot of time on TikTok, Snapchat, and even Pinterest. So if all your capital is directed to just a few channels, you are bound to lose this shopping season.
Look at different platforms to really make use of your spend. While it’s easier to manage one platform, if you can bring in a contractor or hire an agency, you can benefit from other channels as well.
Being successful in Google or Facebook is definitely not enough. For example, YouTube, which is owned by Google, is a whole other world. And you need to be there if your customers are there.
Elizabeth: It’s likely necessary to be on 3-4 different platforms this holiday season. Just so you can be where your customers are when they are ready to convert.
Conclusion
The coming months tend to form a large chunk of revenue for any retail-focused business.
Think holistically — this year more than ever — about what can actually attract customers to stores and drive them to purchase. Logistics like last-mile delivery, payment methods, and supply chains can make or break a successful plan.
Keep your eyes open for more shopping content from Optmyzr in the coming weeks, including another e-commerce PPC Town Hall on September 16.
PPC marketers are always optimizing — some monitoring here, an adjustment there, and then you start to see (better) results. When you have that much to do, it’s impossible to do it manually and scale your output.
So there’s no reason to fear automation — like scripts. They not only speed up the process, but also allow you to be much more efficient in running your business. That’s right — scripts can drive business impact.
Best of all, anyone can use scripts, even if you haven’t written even a single line of code in your life!
So this week on episode 18 of PPC Town Hall, we spoke to our panelists who live and breathe scripts:
As always, you can view this week’s episode as well as previous editions of PPC Town Hall right here.
Here are 5 insights to help you grow your business by automating your PPC accounts with scripts.
1. Update price extensions
Nils: Price extensions are very popular extensions that you can use in your Google Ads accounts to display actual prices. But prices tend to change quite often. If you have different products, and the product manager or account manager is changing the prices of the products because of inventory or competition, you need to update the price extensions with the actual prices.
Up until a year ago, it was impossible to update them through scripts. Fortunately, now we can access the price extensions via the scripts API to keep them in sync with your inventory.
To check the price extensions, you need to do the following: Google Ads scripts → References → AdsApp → Ad Extensions → Prices.
2. When to turn to scripts
Steve: ‘This is taking too much manual work’ is the point where we begin to think about building scripts to shorten the whole process. Most of the time, it’s brought up due to some amount of laziness on our part. For example, I’m currently working on Search Query reports and rely on scripts to deliver automated reports to me.
One of the best things about scripts is that you get to see this functionality and dozens of ways one can apply that across campaigns. The fun of scripts is finding something and imagining creative ways to apply them.
3. The business value of scripts
Nils: Scripts deliver great benefits all over the place. I’ve created a list of the Top 7 benefits of using scripts. Personally I try to automate as much as possible by using scripts. It has helped my remote PPC agency succeed and apply consistent processes to operations. With scripts, you can come up with new ideas to test your account, which wouldn’t have been possible manually. For example, we know that N-gram analysis is very tedious and time-taking. But with scripts, something that complex becomes quicker and can be done more frequently.
The biggest benefit of scripts for my agency has been quality assurance. As the scripts are monitoring everything, any mistake done by my team comes under notice quickly. This way I can be alerted when anything goes haywire and sleep easy.
Steve: We recently shifted to a new revenue model — cost per deliverable, where we charge our customers a fixed amount for our services. Scripts allow me to do that a lot more efficiently.
It’s not a discussion of hours anymore. Our clients are more focused on whether the product runs efficiently rather than how. This allows me to take my expertise and focus on deliverables rather than time.
4. Copy-pasting and modifying scripts
Steve: I think in blocks, which is basically the JavaScript way of thinking. Figuring out which functions do what, and letting them flow through until you get all the pieces for the script. In a lot of cases, you will get pre-built scripts to work on.
For example, Google’s Account Anomaly script is very easy to adjust to things that you are looking for in your anomalies. This can be a good base to get started with scripts.
5. Using scripts to monitor Google’s AI
Nils: We know that Google AI uses machine learning to predict performances on clicks. And machine learnings involves a ‘learning phase’. We are basically providing Google money and data to feed it to the machine learning algorithms. This is where I love to use scripts to track how AI is handling my accounts. If it goes haywire, and does a bad job for my clients my scripts would alert me immediately.
For example, for close variants, I have created a script to monitor the performance of the real keyword against the close variant. If there’s a significant difference in the performance, like in CPA or ROAS, I get alerted of that. You need to layer scripts and Google’s AI to make the most of it.
Conclusion
It’s important to look at Google Ads holistically. Everything — bids, budgets, ad text — influences this interconnected system. It’s not enough to set a script and forget it; you have to monitor it periodically as well.
As you gain experience, you can try modifying them to suit your specific needs. Experiment with existing rules to see how they affect the performance of your PPC accounts, and remember to preview your script before applying it.
Nothing ventured, nothing gained. So experiment away!
Many marketers who live and breathe ad spend value ROAS as the holy grail of advertising. For many, it’s a way of calculating and formulating next steps to achieve high(er) revenue. While this metric does forecast quite well, one question that arises is how useful it is for long-term growth.
With the use of retargeting as a way of fulfilling ROAS targets, PPC professionals might not consider incrementality as a way to get good results. Some sharp minds, however, have turned to customer lifetime value for better optimization with maximum profits.
So this week on episode 17 of PPC Town Hall, we spoke to our panelists who are obsessed with driving better results for PPC campaigns:
Andreas Reiffen, Founder and CEO at Crealytics
Frederik Boysen, Founder and CEO at Profitmetrics.io
As always, you can view this week’s episode as well as previous editions of PPC Town Hall right here.
Here are 5 insights on how to look beyond ROAS to optimize PPC.
1. Understand the problem with ROAS
Andreas: In large retail organizations, Finance is responsible for both budgeting and setting performance targets. While finance has profitability KPIs and new customer acquisition goals in mind, they translate them into ROAS targets. Often they don’t understand profitability or CLV isn’t a random byproduct of some advertising campaign, but rather something which you can explicitly optimize for.
Once ROAS targets are set, the easiest way to achieve them is to sell products with low margins and high return rates…usually to their existing customers. However, at the end of the budgeting cycle, they usually find that even though they have achieved their ROAS targets, profitability is down.
In the subsequent budgeting cycle, the ROAS target is tightened based upon the weak profitability. This vicious cycle can only be broken by setting other targets than RAS.
2. Consider profit on ad spend
Frederik: You need to calculate the real gross profit on every single order, followed by doing the attribution and looking at customer LTV (lifetime value). You need to work on the profit on the first attribution.
We use POAS (profit on ad spend), which is richer in ad spend before sending out the data to the channels. We calculate all our orders, profits on them, cost price, shipping cost, and payment fees. Then we send these to the platform so that one can make transparent decisions.
3. Put the right information in the system
Andreas: There’s a fundamental difference between how we once did things and what we’re doing now. The levers once used to excel in digital marketing have changed dramatically. In the early days we optimized keywords, ad copies, and landing pages; things that weren’t fully automated.
But AI has made all of these activities redundant. To differentiate from the competition today you need to ensure you optimize for the right targets and that you can accurately measure the value of each single click…and feed your algorithm with first-party data. Putting the right information back into the system is key to optimizing beyond ROAS.
In order to activate your data you need to first assess the exact order margin, then deduct the expected returns. As a second step you need to know whether an order was done by a new customer or an existing one. If it was a new customer who purchased, future purchases are to be expected, so you add a (residual customer lifetime value on top of the first-order-margin.
Ultimately, you need to slice this entire value if there were several clicks involved. The end goal should be to attain the value of each and every click. This is a prerequisite for bidding systems to work for your specific business.
4. To retarget or not?
Andreas: Whoever is curious to see the impact of data activation should do one experiment. First off? Let tROAS run. Then, in one instance, you provide the first-click data. In the other, last-click data. Analyze the retargeting share of both settings and you’ll see only a small retargeting share through the first click; as all the credits get allocated to it.
What happens if you test for incrementality? You’ll see that the more likely a user is to buy, the better the results will look, albeit with lower incremental impact. Nobody today can answer this question: whether to bid up – or down – on your retargeting activity.
I believe that attribution systems have completely failed. They assume that advertising must be responsible for the sale…and so it allocates credits based on different parameters. The only thing of value is to run isolated incremental audience-based models. It’s here where you can truly find out the scope of impact.
5. Go beyond attribution
Frederik: We have a dashboard where we take away the attribution fully. We actually look at gross profits, usage on ad spend, and gross profit after ad spend by keeping their ratios the same. This way you can actually see whether your gross profit will increase or decrease if you don’t change the ratios. After this, you can try to allocate with some attribution. This way you can look at the financials rather than just the attribution.
Conclusion
While ROAS might have been the guiding light of the past, one can’t forget that what are essentially Google’s metrics might not accurately reflect your client’s or company’s goals.
The only way to sustain a ROAS-driven system is to layer different rules on product categories. Even geolocations seem to have an effect on ROAS targets; you might find, for example, that the customer acquisition rate is higher in New York than in San Francisco.
It’s hard to automate some things fully as you might not have the same targets across different locations and products. The only way to fix that right now is to move towards a conversion tracking and attribution system that takes smaller things into account, like locations and incrementality.
While every marketer wants to leave their mark on the industry, very few become true experts. To be influential in the market today, you need to have credibility, and invest time and effort to hone your craft.
The reward: Not only do you get a chance to be a part of something bigger, but you get to shape others who’ll also make a difference to your industry.
Furthermore, having a strong personal brand helps win more business opportunities, both for yourself and your organization.
So this week on episode 16 of PPC Town Hall, we spoke to the two most influential PPC experts of 2020, who brought their shared experience to the table:
Michelle Morgan, Director of Client Services at Clix Marketing
Purna Virji, Senior Manager of Global Engagement at Microsoft
As always, you can view this week’s episode as well as previous editions of PPC Town Hall right here.
Here are 5 insights to help you start building your personal PPC brand.
1. Learn how to build a good pitch
Michelle: I’ve spent a lot of time writing pitches, submitting them, and getting rejected over and over again.
The thing that helped was to reach out to people who had spoken on similar panels to mine. I asked them how to make a good pitch. Their insights helped me understand what to write or which format to use. I also reached out to session moderators to get their take on the subject.
Purna: For anyone who wants to submit a pitch, I have two tips that have been helpful for me.
Ask yourself what the key takeaways are for your audience; make sure you’re sharing three or four actionable tips. And add more specificity to your content; discuss the angle you’re bringing to the topic.
2. Conquer your fear of speaking on stage
Purna: Look through the material delivered by your favorite speakers to see what actually resonates with you, and practice to remove the barriers in your head that are making you nervous.
Make sure your content is adding value to your audience. Keep an eye on the discussions happening in your industry, and keep up with different topics and themes. Then get feedback; reach out to other experts to get their opinion.
Enjoy yourself and have fun!
3. Keep your audience engaged
Purna: Try to bring everyone onto the same page by asking your audience if they don’t understand something. I take 60 seconds to go over it and then take it from there. You want everyone to benefit from your content and not miss out due to a lack of background knowledge.
4. Start writing
Michelle: If you can’t speak at shows, write. Start writing and put your smarts out there. This way, you’ll always have something to refer to and it will show others that you know your business. Don’t be afraid to start sharing your thoughts within relevant communities.
You’ll never get better unless you do it, so don’t be afraid that you’re not as good as you’d like to be. Don’t let perfection get in the way. Just start.
5. Quantify your passion project to your employer
Michelle: I’m fortunate to have superiors that understand the value and importance of writing and speaking. Being visible helps you bring in clients who have seen you on different platforms and at events, but also helps convey the expertise you and your team have to companies who may not have seen you speak at those events.
Conclusion
Juggling your job, a personal life, and your passion project can definitely be a handful. But if you’re passionate about what you do and believe you can help your fellow marketers, start now.
Be consistently active in discussions about your areas of interest. Look out for updates and news on new products or paradigms. Talk to established experts and get their feedback on your content.
More importantly, be consistent — Rome wasn’t built in a day. Keep making the effort and you’ll soon be growing your brand and business.
Running a PPC agency is challenging enough. Clients have to be kept happy, your teams have to stay on top of hundreds of fluctuations, and ad platforms are constantly changing and adding features to their mix.
Throw in something as unexpected as a pandemic and it can be easy to feel like you’re drowning.
So this week on episode 15 of PPC Town Hall, we spoke to two PPC experts with a track record of success in helping their agencies weather numerous storms over the years:
Matt Umbro, Key Account Director at Brainlabs and Founder of PPCChat
Brittni Swenson, Chief Marketing Officer at Tandem Interactive
As always, you can view this week’s episode as well as previous editions of PPC Town Hall right here.
Here are 6 tips to help you steer your team through these challenging times.
1. Be a partner, not a vendor
Matt: It’s important to work out an ideal solution for an effective strategy. We have to be compassionate and understand everyone’s circumstances.
During the early months of COVID, we saw a few clients who wanted to pause their accounts or significantly cut down on their budget due to a lot of restrictions. We had to work with those clients, figuring out a way to remain working with them; something that works for both parties.
As places have started to open up, we can see that some of clients are coming back to get into business again.
2. Educate your clients
Brittni: When we take over a new account from a previous agency, we ask for KPIs or benchmarks that the previous agency was asked to deliver. It can be a little difficult, especially when clients have unrealistic expectations.
ROAS can be one way, but if a client is looking for a 4x return on $100 a month ($400 in sales), that’s not going to be as beneficial as spending $2,000 a month and getting $4,000 in sales, and then incrementally increasing ROAS.
Trying to find a balance between what clients are looking for and attainable goals is really important.
3. Set expectations from the start
Matt: It’s really important to understand what clients want to do with their business. What do they want from agencies? A lot of it goes back to how clients want to be. Do they want you to help them formulate a strategy and work together as partners, or do they want you to just pull levers?
If the client works with you as a partner, it’s important to go back to expectations and make your client understand your apprehensions and ideas. This way they can make informed decisions to best manage their accounts and goals.
4. Inspire confidence through your history
Brittni: A lot of it comes down to partnership, time and patience. Once you start to show growth and success, a client is able to have trust and confidence in what you’re doing. With time, they’re going to give you those levels of referrals, and those partners are going to be able to trust you. And then you can guide them through their strategies.
If you’re capable of running a successful campaign on a very limited budget, especially dealing with unglamorous products like tires, it indicates a strong sense of strategy which helps build client confidence.
5. Understand a price-sensitive market
Matt: In the context of COVID, a client that doesn’t have a major sticking point when it comes to price, that’s where things like curbside pickup and contactless delivery will help gain consumers.
While additional platforms for selling products definitely work for users, it’s beyond price. It’s more about offering something unique, especially in the time of COVID.
6. Know how to come back from a lull in business
Brittni: There’s definitely been a change in the type of messaging and targeting for different clients. Earlier, a lot of our clients shifted from paid advertising to SEO or local ads.
But as things are opening, these same clients are coming back to paid advertising with a different approach. Many of the campaigns we see today promote COVID safety and precautions. These are the clients who want to maintain customer safety. We need to focus on building brand awareness through any type of display advertising.
Conclusion
Most contingencies can be planned, but sometimes life throws you a curveball that no one can predict. In times like these, trust in your track record of success.
When client business is suffering, they can often have multiple fires to fight: supply chain, hygiene, and delivery come to mind. So a great agency that can continue to create value on the advertising front is worth its weight in gold.
Join us next week for PPC Town Hall 16 where we’ll be speaking to two of the leading ladies of PPC: Michelle Morgan and Purna Virji.
Advertising your business online can be intimidating. There are so many options available that it can be tough to figure out your first move.
If you ever wished you had a step-by-step guide to figuring out your first steps in PPC, look no further. We picked one platform to start with — Google Ads, because it’s user-friendly and provides a high degree of assistance to newcomers.
This week on episode 14 of PPC Town Hall, two of the brightest minds in digital advertising shared lessons from their combined decades of PPC and marketing experience:
As always, you can view this week’s episode as well as previous editions of PPC Town Hall right here.
Complete with actionable insights, here’s our 6-step starter guide for PPC beginners.
1. Get set up on Google My Business
Julie: Google My Business (GMB) is very important, especially for local and service-area businesses; the map is important even if you don’t have a physical location where people come to you. And the way you get on Maps, organically or through ads, is GMB. Additionally, if you want to run location extensions on your ads, you have to connect your verified GMB listing to your Google Ads account.
2. Define your conversion actions
Julie: Sometimes you can drown in data. Or you can have data that seems like it’s telling you things but it really isn’t. If you’re in e-commerce, it’s pretty obvious what your conversion action is: you want people to buy things.
But if you’re not e-commerce, one of the first things you have to do is define what a conversion is to you; it’s the lens through which you view everything else. It helps you set things up at different stages in a way that collects data in the best way possible for you to get conversions and build a remarketing plan.
3. Don’t be intimidated by product feeds
Susan: Shopping is always difficult because it involves feeds, and I think that scares a lot of people because it can feel more like coding than advertising. So if you’re a small business, you can set up easily on a platform like Shopify that will automatically export a feed to Google Merchant Center for you.
It’s also worth going through the process of building a local inventory feed; you have to submit that to Google, and they’ll call to verify your identity and the accuracy of that feed. But that results in a bit more visibility when people search for what you’re selling, and they’ll know they can come pick it up from you.
4. Experiment with Dynamic Search Ads
Julie: If you’re new to PPC and you’re not really sure what terms you want to advertise on, dynamic search ads (DSAs) can reveal information like what Google thinks of your business.
When you run regular search ads, you’re telling Google what keywords you want, what ads to run, and which landing pages they should lead to. With DSAs, you still decide the message behind your ad copy, but Google decides when to show your ad (and what keyword triggers it).
It’s a bit of a window into what they believe you’re relevant to. So running DSAs alongside some of your more obvious keywords can help you identify opportunities to build full campaigns.
5. Use supplemental feeds to prevent brand dilution
Susan: I love supplemental feeds. A lot of time, retailers will do a great job of building a brand — it feels like it has personality, the products have quirky names, and it feels unique to them.
The challenge you run into there is those product titles and descriptions aren’t always SEO-friendly. Google Shopping is looking to see what you feed it and then showing you for searches it believes you’re relevant for.
If you’re missing that text, you can set up logic within Google Merchant Center that says ‘use my regular feed, but for product title, use this’. And you can direct it to a Google Sheet where you have your unique product name with the SEO keywords.
So it’s essentially a translator between your feed and Merchant Center to make sure your ads are as search term-rich as possible.
For more on the pitfalls of PPC,read Susan’s articleon why Google Ads might not be working for you.
6. Know what to look for from your campaign results
Susan: Part of the challenge with Smart campaigns on Google is the automatically generated conversions. If business owners and campaign managers don’t know how to see what those are, they might think they have a ton of real conversions, but they might not actually be very high-value. You can always find out more about those automatic conversions, but someone starting out in PPC might not know that you can go out and find that information.
Conclusion
Whether you’ve been struggling to see results or are just taking your business online, PPC can be challenging if you don’t know exactly what you’re doing.
But even in a normal business landscape, you can’t keep spending PPC dollars without any meaningful results.
That’s why agencies like Aimclear and Neptune Moon can be exactly what your business needs — a partner who doesn’t just know how to get results, but is fully invested in the success of your online campaigns and overall business.
People use the moving picture to sway opinion, win hearts, and tell stories. In a marketing setting, it brings consumers as close to a brand or product as the online experience will allow.
But video continues to be ignored by many businesses for a variety of reasons
“It’s expensive.”
“We don’t have the resources.”
“Our target audience isn’t on YouTube.”
All these misconceptions were dismantled this week during episode 12 of PPC Town Hall, where we discussed the intricacies of YouTube (and video in general) with:
Joe Martinez, Director of Client Strategy at Clix Marketing (email, Twitter)
Cory Henke, Founder and CEO of Variable Media (email, Twitter)
As always, you can view this week’s episode as well as previous editions of PPC Town Hall right here.
Here are five tips from our panelists on how to use YouTube and video to drive growth and learning.
1. Exclude ads from content you don’t want to show for.
Joe: In terms of content exclusions, we’ve seen really good hand-curated lists from other marketers. I’ve created one that stops your ads from running on channels geared towards children; others have created exclusion lists for news, political and controversial channels.
So there are options if you don’t want to run your ads on specific types of content. Some of the ad formats, like TrueView discovery campaigns, give advertisers greater control. They let you limit yourself to targeting just YouTube search results; you don’t have to be a pre-roll or in-stream ad all the time.
2. Use the data to learn about your audience.
Cory: When you start to find different channels and videos that work well, that’s a key insight into your consumer — you see the videos they watch after your ad play. One advertiser we worked with had a baby product that was not really succeeding on YouTube.
What we found was that the minimal conversions that happened all came before hurricane-related news content. We saw that was driving conversions, and we learned that it was a fear-based action. Before people watch hurricane content, they’re in a heightened state of awareness or fear; serving something that could potentially help your future child play into that mood.
3. Try out the YouTube Video Builder.
Joe: For me, there’s no longer an excuse for a brand to not be on YouTube. It no longer matters if you don’t have someone with video editing skills or high-value assets because Google basically takes your visuals and does the work for you.
There are dozens of templates based on what you want to promote — product, service, mobile app. When you pick a template you like, it shows you what images you need, as well as the format and sizes for those images. I did a few demos of my own to show some clients. For a free tool, it’s very good.
Get Access: Opt into the beta of YouTube Video Builderhere.
4. Learn from skippable and non-skippable video ads.
Cory: Non-skippable ads usually drive very high CPCs with high completion rates; with a 15-second interstitial ad, you usually get a completion rate similar to a bumper ad. I think you’ll find people who are willing to watch your ad until the end, but not necessarily willing to click through and find out more.
So it’s kind of like a brand placement. I like it, but it’s harder to learn from.
With a skippable ad where you don’t pay for a user until 30 seconds, there’s a lot you can learn in that time — and greater scope to optimize these ads to make them more effective. With a skippable ad, there’s also unlimited time; your ad can be 10 seconds or 40 minutes. That variation lets you learn what your customers want to see from your future video content.
We could take this episode of PPC Town Hall and run it as a skippable ad, and compare it to another episode that we also promote similarly. You would know which users are willing to stay longer versus who ends the video early, and you might even see a link between that and who’s in the video.
We ran a test for a client’s 20-minute yoga ad where we used two versions with a black male and a white female to see what people would respond to. We also created a funny version and a more serious one. The white female version had better CTR and CPC, as did the serious version. What we learned from that is who to put on the next Instagram post or in-feed ad. The goal is to present that variation at the beginning of the video to maximize your learning.
5. Repurpose video beyond YouTube.
Joe: It’s absolutely worth doing video — especially if you’re budget-conscious — because it goes so much further than just YouTube.
You can use videos in responsive display ads, in your universal app campaigns and engagement display ads, in your Gmail ads. Or use video to really boost other campaigns and awareness; it’s still video views we can create audiences from to do remarketing with fresh video content.
To do this, you’ll need to optimize your videos for different online platforms and purposes. And make sure to use good video editing software for your needs to edit your videos quickly and professionally without breaking the bank.
Remember that different video formats work best on different digital platforms, so it’s important to optimize them properly when you’re repurposing this content outside of YouTube.
You don’t have to make a video and use it once on YouTube when there are ways to enhance your other paid media campaigns within Google.
Must Read:Check out Joe’s adviceon how to use YouTube to power your non-video Google campaigns.
Conclusion
YouTube advertising is all about two things: freedom and flexibility.
You have the freedom to present your product, service, app, or brand in a way that offers something different from search, display, and shopping campaigns.
At the same time, different ad formats and product innovations give you the flexibility to set up variant campaigns to test what works best for your business.
There’s never been a better time to invest in content (YouTube is cheaper than ever), experiment with ads (more people are online), and learn from the data (you might discover an audience you didn’t know you had).
Note: Smart Shopping campaigns have been upgraded to Performance Max in September 2022. We suggest you refer to these links below to know more about Performance Max.
While many locations are exiting lockdown restrictions and business has been allowed to resume, the realities of the pandemic mean that many people are still unable or unwilling to shop in person. But that doesn’t necessarily mean demand is lower.
Enter e-commerce: the reigning champion of helping businesses make money through the internet.
This week on PPC Town Hall, Optmyzr CEO Frederick Vallaeys spoke to a couple of the world’s sharpest minds on the subject:
Duane Brown, Founder and Head of Strategy, Take Some Risk
As always, you can view this week’s episode as well as previous editions of PPC Town Hall right here.
Here are 5 tips from this week’s panelists on how e-commerce done right can make more money for your clients and your business.
1. Build a robust product feed
Every digital marketer knows that e-commerce success begins and ends with the product feed, so it’s paramount to get this in order before even trying to get creative with placements or extensions.
“We’ve seen big e-commerce stores come in and do really well with a feed where the titles are optimized for organic traffic. At the same time, we’ve seen time and time again that if you take the time to really build out the rest of the feed values so that your feed is as good as it can be, it can drastically improve Google Shopping results over time,” Andrew shared.
“The problem is this improvement doesn’t happen from one day to the next. With some of the stores we’ve worked with, where the product feed was very weak and where we optimized the feed (added keywords to the titles, etc.), it took months for it to actually show overall great results.
“My takeaway from this is that the feed really has a quality factor to it; we can’t see it, it’s not listed like Quality Score, but there is a component that determines how many searches you get shown for. It won’t necessarily boost your rank for a single keyword, but how far and wide Google can and will spread your product exposure.”
2. Give your products visibility
On the other hand, building a good feed means nothing unless you utilize it the right way.
“The vast majority of our clients are on Shopify, but we also work with businesses that are on WooCommerce and Magento as well. One of our clients on WooCommerce uses their app, and we used a supplemental feed to augment/change the product titles. It was easy to do because they only have 74 SKUs, so I was able to build out what I wanted in 5-6 hours. We push clients until they make the changes we want,” Duane shared.
“We’re not going to do subpar work, so if you’re not going to let us use Feedonomics, we don’t want you as a client. We don’t have time to waste building out feeds when we can think more strategically about how to use that feed to make our clients more money.”
3. Know when to use Smart and Standard campaigns
If you’re listing your products via Google Shopping campaigns, you have a choice to make: control the parameters yourself via a Standard campaign, or let Google use its machine-driven Smart campaign to optimize things for you.
“My recommendation depends on who you are. If you’re an in-house marketing coordinator and need to run your Google campaigns because you’ve had a bad experience with several agencies, Smart Shopping usually outperforms anything average PPC managers can do by themselves,” Andrew said.
“If you’re on the agency side or have a lot of experience, then you can usually utilize more of the complex structures to generate better results than Smart Shopping can. That said, I think it’s one of the best things to come out of Google in a long time.”
Duane had a word of advice for anyone leaning toward a Smart campaign.
“You can only use Smart Shopping if you have enough data in your Standard campaigns, so you can’t just launch a Smart Shopping campaign on day one even if you wanted to. I would recommend hitting a consistent 75-100 conversions per month before moving to Smart Shopping.”
4. Look beyond Google
While Google offers many effective ways to advertise, over-reliance on one platform can be limiting.
“I love Google, but sometimes people get so focused on Google and forget that there’s so much other opportunity in the world,” Duane said. “This article from Modern Retail talks about Levi’s doing a test with TikTok — an app that’s very big with influencers, celebrities and content creators. They have shopping ads now and around 200-250 million users in the US; so does Snapchat with its 229 million users.”
Duane knows other opportunities exist — and he’s already taking advantage of them.
“We’re making shopping work on Google; where else can we go? Does it make sense to go to Snap? It’s not just for people under 18; a good 15-20% of users are above the age of 25 and have disposable income. We’ve had clients sell products on there with an average order value of $100-150, so there’s money there. TikTok only launched shopping ads a few months ago, but it could work for brands that have a lot of video content.”
5. Track profit, not revenue
While it’s almost standard practice to track return on advertising spend (ROAS) as the defining financial metric, simply keeping score of revenue might not account for the actual goal of advertising: to make more money.
“Tracking profit over ROAS enables you to be more dynamic in the way you work with bidding,” Andrew observed.
“PPC marketers and businesses try to figure out what the optimal ROAS should be, and it all comes from analyzing margins on products; some work on a category basis and identify the ones that have higher margins than others. But this misses the point completely, because some brands have high margins and others have low ones. And if you’re running a sale, your margin is severely limited.
“During COVID, we worked with a client who had trouble getting inventory for a specific category — one we’d had problems with for a long time. We increased prices by 25% and all of a sudden, we started turning a profit. The profit margin earlier was so low that we couldn’t compete; with the new and improved conversions, we could own Shopping for that category.
“We’ve had other instances where we tracked profit over ROAS and the profit had doubled, or increased by 50-80%. When we looked at the analytics and measured ROAS, nothing had changed. It all comes from changing which products we’re actually pushing, because we can see which ones are selling well and turn a better profit instead of having empty revenue going through the stream.”
Conclusion
Nothing hurts an e-commerce program like a strategy in disarray. That’s why it’s critical to treat every step of the process with care.
If you’re an in-house marketer or a business owner, you might not have the time or resources to get it right every time. Tools like Optmyzr can make it easier to streamline and automate large parts of your PPC efforts, just as they help agencies achieve efficiency at scale.
You might also be completely new to e-commerce, in which case it’s not a bad idea to speak with an expert.
If you joined us for PPC Town Hall this week, you probably noticed that we look different! Everyone is combating Zoom fatigue, so we streamlined the show to be more visually engaging and appealing.
Joining us for the first new-look PPC Town Hall were two of the most insightful experts in paid search:
Ann Stanley is the Managing Director of the multi-award-winning agency Anicca Digital based in Leicester, England. You can tune in to Ann’s weekly webinars at 9 am GMT/UTC.
Gianpaolo Lorusso is the man behind the ADworld Experience series of events. As a courtesy to PPC Town Hall viewers, Gianpaolo is offering a 10% discount (use code optmyzr10) on the upcoming event in October and resources from previous editions.
As always, you can view this week’s episode as well as previous editions of PPC Town Hall right here.
Let’s dive into this week’s observations on Google’s initiatives during Q2 of 2020 — and we might even have an additional surprise for you at the end!
1. A shift in messaging is overdue.
With businesses reopening in the post-lockdown phase, COVID messaging is in need of a change in tone. Ann thinks now is a good time for brands to realign themselves.
“I do think some messages have been played out — how to do virtual conferences, how to spend your day on Zoom. People are getting fed up with that and it’s time for messaging to come out on the other side,” she noted.
“People are once again able to do things they weren’t able to do before; certain shops are reopening and we’re trying to get back to business. In the UK, our furlough grants have been very helpful in making sure a lot of people have salaries and are able to spend.”
2. E-commerce isn’t as simple as some people think.
With millions of consumers unable or unwilling to visit brick and mortar locations, small businesses and those dependent on tourism income are turning to e-commerce to plug revenue gaps.
But Gianpaolo has a word of caution for anyone who thinks setting up a Shopify store or listing on Amazon is the catch-all solution.
“In Italy, it’s been a couple of years now that almost everyone wants to get into e-commerce, even if they don’t need it,” he shared. “But starting an e-commerce operation is only the beginning; you cannot set up an online store and think you’re done.”
Gianpaolo recommends leveraging the power of search and other forms of paid advertising to get people to your online stores — a critical step that some businesses new to e-commerce may not account for.
With Google already rolling out its mandatory advertiser verification program, businesses that use their paid advertising services will have 21 days from the moment they’re contacted to verify their identities.
Ann believes that legitimate businesses will universally welcome this move, and that it will help filter out some of the more unsavory players.
“I’m very much in favor of Google’s advertiser verification. I feel there are so many questionable agencies and other businesses that rip people off. I’ve been in this industry nearly 20 years now, and I’ve seen and heard so many stories about this,” she shared.
4. Google’s ad credits are here — and they’ll be useful.
It didn’t take too long after global lockdowns started to take effect for Google to announce that they would be disbursing millions of dollars in free ad credits to small businesses. While this move to prop up some of Google’s hardest-hit customers took some time, America and Europe are now seeing results.
“This week in Italy, we received the first COVID ad credits from Google, so they are coming to Europe as well. They are set in fixed amounts: €75, €210, €590 and probably €1000 (I haven’t seen this yet), depending on last year’s range of spend,” Gianpaolo told us.
“Anything helps to get out of this situation. Even if €1,000 can’t change your business landscape, it can still help. If you found something that was working, I suggest putting part of your credits back on that. Of course, you can also try something new.
“Personally, my approach to the situation has been not to stop campaigns, but to lower budgets and CPCs to the minimum possible. Spending a tenth of what you normally do is a good solution, especially in search.
“If someone is searching for something they are likely to convert — maybe not now, but at some point. Why lose those hyper-competitive slots if you can keep them while spending a fraction of what you spent before?”
5. Agencies want Google to rethink their partner program.
Google’s partner program has long been a source of contention with many agencies, especially those who focus on quality and results. With the program postponed to next year due to the pandemic, this offers Google a chance to bring requirements in line with agency realities.
“As an MCC owner, we’ve got so many accounts linked to us. We had to have 70 people take the exam in organizations that have nothing to do with us. I’m hoping Google will have second thoughts about the way they do these qualifications because there’s no way we can oversee all the organizations we are linked to,” Ann said.
“The other thing I don’t like about the partner status is it’s based on volume and growth in spend. At a premium agency like ours, not every client is looking for massive growth. In some cases, the first thing we do with a new client is cut out a load of wasted spend. And then we get penalized for bringing the spend down while we’re trying to improve the quality and make more money for the client. Google’s program isn’t always aligned with client needs.”
Bonus: LinkedIn targeting is coming to Microsoft.
Towards the end of this week’s show, Gianpaolo had some interesting news and advice for users of Microsoft Advertising.
“Keep an eye on the Microsoft Audience Network. They’re integrating it with LinkedIn targeting options for B2B campaigns in their display network,” he told us.
“This is something I would try to test even more deeply when I have an occasion to do so. I think it’s probably the first time that Microsoft is a little bit ahead of Google in something. I’m happy they’re doing this, and I’d definitely do some testing on this.”
Conclusion
Ever since the COVID-19 pandemic began, Google has been active in rolling out initiatives to help businesses and the PPC industry ride the storm. And while some of those programs were hyped up to be a lot more than they turned out to be, there’s no doubt they’ve done more than most advertising platforms.
It will be interesting to see how they adapt and what new ideas they roll out as the landscape continues to morph based on restrictions and developments in different geographies.
Join us again next week for PPC Town Hall, where we’ll be discussing e-commerce and Google Shopping campaigns. Catch the details on our PPC Town Hall landing page or follow us on Twitter.
After a break last week, PPC Town Hall returned on May 27 with a revamped format. With the ‘doom and gloom’ phase of the pandemic behind us, PPC marketers are increasingly focused on solutions.
Going forward, PPC Town Halls will be more topical and focus on key areas of concern, with actionable advice to help PPC marketers and their teams overcome ongoing challenges. You’ll also be able to ask questions of panelists before and during each episode, and watch and listen to previous PPC Town Halls anytime you like.
Here are 6 key insights from our panelists on how PPC professionals can help B2B brands position themselves for post-COVID success.
1. Start building your pipeline now.
B2B as a space is notorious for having lengthy sales cycles, ranging from the challenging (30-60 days) to the laborious (12-18 months). Depending on the size of a lead’s company, conversions may not happen for multiple quarters or fiscal years.
AJ believes that now is a good time to get ahead of that curve, and he thinks LinkedIn is the place to do it.
“Because of the uncertainty right now, people are afraid to sign big deals and contracts. So these leads who were in the pipeline are not closing,” he shared. “I get that B2B marketers are scared, but now is the time to be advertising — ad costs are the lowest they will ever be across all networks, it’s the cheapest way to get in with an audience, and people are spending more time on LinkedIn. More people, more attention, and lower costs — take advantage of that to build your pipeline and have conversations to build those relationships on the longer sales cycles.
2. Be ready for the coming rise in demand.
At the start of the pandemic, it was difficult to extrapolate any meaningful stories from relevant data. Now that we’re a few months in, there’s something to work with.
“Around mid-March when the pandemic was taking hold, there was a huge spike in e-commerce traffic, conversion rates and revenue,” he said.
“This good write-up on this COVID-19 e-commerce bubble by Mike Ryan, product management lead for Smarter Ecommerce in Austria, shows what they observed in Europe. The bubble was mostly likely a result of panic-buying of essentials like food, and business items like headsets and cameras for work-from-home remote meetings. After that spike, it settled into a pattern and we’re now in a trough.”
He also provided some advice for businesses whose products and services are in high demand, which might drastically shorten a once-drawn out sales cycle.
“If you’re a company that sells something directly related to reopening safely, your biggest issue is when things open back up, purchasing managers are going to want to buy your product and they’re going to want it fast. So in terms of messaging, be clear about what you can deliver quickly — and don’t discount.”
3. Keep your ads dynamic.
From messaging to responsiveness to inventory, nothing during this pandemic has been static or predictable. Businesses need to stay flexible in order to occupy a positive space in the minds of those who will buy their products and services.
Frank believes that one good way to do that is by structuring your ad content to follow a prospect’s progress through your funnel.
“At Digitopia, we have a concept called ‘follow the funnel’. That means as your prospect engages with your brand digitally and moves through that experience, the ads on all networks should recognize where they’re at and change to offer the next thing in the relationship,” he told our audience.
“So if they visit a cornerstone piece of content but didn’t take advantage of your lead magnet, then the ad should change to (drive them to) the lead magnet.”
4. LinkedIn is an expensive but high-quality filter.
One question that came up during this week’s conversation focused on filtering out unwanted clicks from tire-kickers and businesses that can’t afford your product or service.
AJ’s advice is to leverage LinkedIn’s built-in filtering capabilities — without breaking the bank.
“LinkedIn is very good at getting the best quality of prospects to your offers and sites. What it requires is that you have a great content offer, because their CPCs are too high to treat it as a true top-of-funnel channel; you’re paying bottom-of-funnel prices for a top-of-funnel visitor,” he said.
His advice?
“Get people to an offer that is gated — some kind of lead magnet — where it’s valuable enough that people will drop down past the top of the funnel into the middle.”
5. Evaluate. Communicate. Re-evaluate.
At the start of this crisis, many agencies shifted priorities from performance to strategy. While the needle is slowly moving back, Matt feels that it’s more vital than ever to truly understand what clients are going through.
“What’s really important now is staying on top of relationships with clients, and we’re talking to them about what they’re seeing — is the phone ringing, are RFQ numbers going up, is lead gen going up?”
He even provided an example of when communication can overcome a roadblock that might have otherwise been overlooked.
“In B2B, summertime tends to get a bit quieter. Things might be reopening but we still see a flat revenue line, and it may be due to that seasonal trend. So constant communication and re-evaluation is important.”
6. Consistency leads to revenue
Few things are more harmful to B2B marketing than irregularity — except perhaps consistently making communication sound like a pitch. Combine the two, and you have a recipe for disaster.
Frank reminded our audience that messaging is everything, and how you structure that messaging can make or break your success in the current environment.
“When a company is trying to engage their audience but hasn’t been consistent with it, there’s a ramp up period of 12-24 months before you see it become a consistent process,” he cautioned.
“Now add in what’s going on, and we see a lot of companies immediately jump ship. They say ‘We’re not going to do anything because now’s a bad time to be marketing’. Well, if your approach to marketing was product pitch-focused to begin with, you were doing B2B marketing wrong all along.”
Conclusion
It became apparent to us a couple of weeks ago that the PPC community was done feeling sorry for ourselves. As always, our resilience and analytical minds meant that we now needed to focus on fixing what we have the power to fix.
Now that we’ve moved to a topical format with discussions revolving around solutions, we hope the time you spend engaging with us on PPC Town Hall yields even greater returns. So be sure to bookmark this page to stay on top of everything.
In the meantime, we’re still here to provide all the support we can with new content, product features and more!
The last time we sat down with Google to talk shop, the discussion found its way to managing PPC campaigns during the COVID-19 pandemic.
With supply chains disrupted and business models being tested, companies around the world are facing a variety of new conditions. And though the results aren’t uniform, what’s consistent is how every business has been affected in some way.
Many are struggling to find customers. Some are facing uncertain futures. A few fortunate ones are doing better than ever — will they struggle when things return to normal?
We put together some advice for PPC marketers that took the shape of this blog post. But in the weeks since, we’ve seen and heard the debate over automated bidding become one of the prevailing industry conversations.
Thankfully, our friends at Google had plenty more to say.
Here are their recommendations for 6 secret tips that can help you impact Smart Bidding and more reliably navigate a marketplace in flux.
6 Secret Tips to Impact Smart Bidding
As you monitor shifting trends and course-correct your business plan, you’ll also need to bring your strategic approach in line with what the current situation demands. To help you provide clients and customers with a fruitful experience without eating too much of your time, Google recommends Smart Bidding.
Let’s recap the tactics we recommended last time, as well as explore how they impact Smart Bidding.
1. Keywords
Recommended Tactics
Use negative keywords as a safeguard against undesired clicks that might drive lots of cost but no conversions.
The way users are searching for your business may have changed, which is why it’s important to capture those shifts in search behavior through broad match keywords.
When bidding on keywords with your brand name, adjust goals for Impression Share or use tCPA/tROAS.
How does this impact Smart Bidding?
Keyword optimization helps deliver more at the same CPA/ROAS goal, and ensures that brand strategies align with business goals. Broad match keywords allow the Smart Bidding machine to discover new opportunities for conversions.
Optmyzr Tip: You’ll still want to keep other match types and regularly review new search terms with tools like Optmyzr. The Rule Engine’s latest addition takes high-performing keywords with one match type and lets you add new match types at the ad group level.
2. Creatives
Recommended Tactics
Use Dynamic Search Ads to show up on new relevant searches your keywords may be missing out on.
Use Responsive Search Ads to adapt ad content to more closely match user search terms.
Make offers stand out and take customers to the right page with promo and site extensions.
How does this impact Smart Bidding?
Getting your creatives right prevents your message and customer experience are on the same page, which ensures that each bid brings relevant engagement.
Optmyzr Tip: Regulations and restrictions can change frequently. With the Ad Text Optimization tool, you can quickly and consistently change ad copy to reflect the real-world operating conditions of your business. The Add Responsive Search Ad tool is also useful to build RSAs for each of your ad groups.
The Responsive Search Ads tool lets you maximize your chances of getting meaningful clicks
3. Bids and Budgets
Recommended Tactics
Move unused parts of your budget to the ads that need it most.
Raise the budgets of campaigns that are performing well to drive more traffic.
Use Performance Planner to understand the implications of different budget scenarios.
How does this impact Smart Bidding?
Putting your marketing dollars where they’re likely to yield the best returns is PPC 101. You capture more leads at the same CPA/ROAS goal, and forecasting often captures the most recent demand trends.
Optmyzr Tip: Campaigns that worked a few months ago might not be winners today, for no fault of their own or yours. Put your dollars where they need to be with the Optimize Budgets tool. It can help you quickly re-allocate budgets based on how different campaigns are doing against your goals.
Optimize Budgets lets you see how to adjust spend to achieve specific goals
4. Target Constraints/Goals
Recommended Tactics
Evaluate your new business strategies and confirm target goals.
Set performance targets and customize settings to your unique business goals.
How does this impact Smart Bidding?
Using CPA/ROAS goal adjustments can help you control spend and volume. But to achieve the same thing for Max strategies, Google recommends using budget adjustments.
Optmyzr Tip: Use the Optimize Target CPA & ROAS on campaigns with automated bidding to increase conversions and Impression Share. You can also see converting ad groups that use other automated bidding strategies.
5. Account-Wide Best Practices
Recommended Tactics
Capture all signals using Data-Driven or Non-Last Click Attribution.
Only include conversions that are relevant to the business.
How does this impact Smart Bidding?
Smart Bidding uses account-wide signals (cross-account under MCC, if applicable). If you’re struggling to see results from Smart Bidding, it might be because you’re still using Last Click Attribution in an era of erratic search behavior.
Optmyzr Tip: The Rule Engine allows you to create data-based strategies, like removing non-converting keywords related to COVID-19. Or for a fun way to keep your account in shape, try the Workouts that combine multiple optimizations to achieve a specific objective.
6. Audiences
Recommended Tactics
Add all RSLA, Similar Audiences, and Customer Match lists to Smart Bidding campaigns.
How does this impact Smart Bidding?
First-party audience lists improve Smart Bidding algorithms, but Google lists have a neutral impact on Smart Bidding. For best results, provide your own customer information.
Optmyzr Tip: You always want Smart Bidding to have the latest and greatest information about your customers. Use the Customer Match List Updates tool (under Optimizations > Utilities) to keep your audiences in sync between your business data and Google’s audience repository.
6 Ways to Fully Control & Adjust Smart Bidding
While Smart Bidding might make PPC a bit less time-consuming, it’s far from a ‘set it and forget it’ mentality. There are many things you can do to affect the degree of control and influence you have over your bids.
Check out these 6 ways to fully control and adjust Smart Bidding.
1. Goals
Goals are the end objectives of your campaign; think of them as a destination. Tweaking goal values can change the way Smart Bidding tries to get there.
CPA/ROAS goal adjustments
Ad Group targets
Portfolio targets
Device CPA modifier
Operationalize forecasts
2. Conversions
Current market realities have impacted conversions across the board. Use the information in this space to inform your strategy and reshape the Smart Bidding process.
Conversion value adjustments
Campaign-level conversion setting
“Hack” data exclusion (seasonal adjustment)
New secondary KPIs
3. Constraints
Setting hard limits on your financials can enable Smart Bidding to look at creating value over volume. As always, keep an eye on things as you implement this approach.
Limiting budgets on purpose
Portfolio CPC max/min bid limits
4. Targeting
Audience is one of the most influential factors in PPC, and there’s no doubt that who and how you choose to target can make a difference to Smart Bidding results.
Pausing targeting
Opening targeting
Split testing
5. Budgets
At the end of the day, it’s all about the dollars. Experimenting with budgetary values can provide some of the most significant influence on Smart Bidding.
Shared budgets
Uncapped budgets
Constrained budgets
6. Misc. Adjustments
There are other adjustments you can make to shape Smart Bidding, including seasonal adjustments. We suggest exercising oversight when using some of these in today’s market.
Seasonal adjustments
Campaign structure
Split testing bid strategies
Conclusion
It’s been said before but bears repeating: There’s only one way PPC professionals can do right by their businesses and clients — by having as much information as possible. That’s why we’ve partnered with Google to bring you these posts on how to gain maximum value from the tools at your disposal.
These recommendations from Google are intended to supplement a brand’s unique business strategy. Both Google and Optmyzr suggest you balance any automated bidding strategy by keeping a close eye on your accounts. After all, only humans can provide context to the data.
And be on the lookout for the third part of our collaboration with Google, when we discuss what advertisers in hard-hit industries can do to prepare for the end of lockdown.
One of the most rewarding things about PPC Town Hall is how support and demand for our webinar isn’t just restricted to a few markets. And recently, we found out that the PPC community in Australia was missing out on joining us live.
That’s all the reason we needed to move this week’s webinar to accommodate our friends down under. Joining us for this week’s episode were three of Australia’s most seasoned digital marketers:
As always, you can view and listen to previous PPC Town Hall episodes here.
So let’s take a look at our panelists’ 7 digital marketing lessons from their experiences managing local and global accounts from Australia.
1. How long can the ‘new normal’ last?
“I’ve been amazed with how quickly everyone has adapted. Two months ago, working from home full time was ‘impossible’ for many organizations,” Mike observed.
“The knock-on effects — less pollution, less time in the car, property prices — will be pretty interesting to see. I don’t know yet what cultural changes will stick, but I feel like we might roll back some things if we don’t consciously design differences into our lives. And it would be a shame to lose this opportunity to make our supply chains more local or improve food security. In terms of consumer buying behavior, Amazon is an example of a company that comes out of this stronger than before.”
With that said, Mike also urged marketers to remain empathetic by remembering that we’re not all equally fortunate.
“We have to remember this is a pandemic of two halves. We and our teams are very fortunate to be able to work from home. Meanwhile, a whole bunch of jobs and businesses are just gone.”
2. Small businesses need all the support they can get.
Hit hardest during this crisis are small businesses, irrespective of industry. Many operate on low margins and don’t have the cash reserves to continue meeting expenses without regular revenue.
“Google My Business has done a lot for companies during COVID. One example is the ability to list that you’re not open to walk-ins, but are offering delivery or pickups. So for cafés and restaurants, GMB has done some very positive things,” Monte noted.
“That said, knowing a lot of people in restaurants and catering, they’re trying to move a bit away from services like UberEats and Deliveroo because of the huge margins (up to 30%). Most restaurants don’t operate on a 20% or 30% gross margin in normal times. So now they have their wait staff doing deliveries, and they’re finding new services that charge them a flat fee to place the order and have their own employees fulfill it. This needs to pick up, because the bigger services aren’t sustainable for small businesses.”
If you can, we recommend you buy local to support small businesses and give your economy the best shot at bouncing back quickly.
3. Hybrid business models are in.
While the situation is improving in many countries, there’s no clear and definitive end to the pandemic. Ben believes that businesses will need to look at combining different strategies to maximize profitability for some time.
“There are only two ways out of COVID: a vaccine or herd immunity. Every time lockdowns open up, there’s a spike in cases. So we’re probably indoors for a period of time, and this will change people’s buying psychology — it takes 30 days to form a habit and 60 days to break one.”
“Google is still the first thing people use to search for and find things. In April, we saw categories like restaurants go through the roof — and they’re still there. Earlier, restaurants used to have people walk down the street and pop in, but they will have to adopt a hybrid business model for a while yet. This might look like deliveries and takeout supported by limited dine-in capacity.”
4. Size does matter.
Every few decades, history throws us a curveball that creates winners and losers. Pandemics are one of these events, and the current one is drawing out the divide between the haves and the have-nots.
“It might not be common knowledge, but large organizations that have dedicated logistics and transport facilities have been able to maintain their supply lines,” Monte said.
“But for a lot of small businesses that might be importing from China for distribution in Australia, that product is usually in the belly of a commercial airliner carrying passengers. That all came to a halt and as a result, these companies found their supply chains had collapsed for a while. We actually had some clients who put their e-commerce stores on hold because of a lack of inventory.”
5. Work around the logistics.
There’s no doubt that the world’s supply chains are under stress. Businesses have two choices: crib about it or work around it. Ben has been helping clients achieve the latter.
“In March, stock was an issue. We had big online retailers who couldn’t get product, going from huge revenues to thinking about maybe closing the doors. So we pivoted to make sure they could do pre-orders and give attention to what was in stock. It’s amazing what little things like that and a bit of common sense can do for a business,” he shared.
“I think Display and remarketing are useful to make sure you’re getting in front of these changing business strategies, like curbside pickup. We believed we were seeing a lot of those trends here in Australia as well. We did some analysis of our MCCs and it looks like the data matches that.”
6. Pausing campaigns is unpreferred in both hemispheres.
During last week’s PPC Town Hall, Navah Hopkins made a passionate case for keeping campaigns on at minimal cost. This week, Mike echoed her sentiments.
“I’m reluctant to pause campaigns, having done that in the past with bad results. If we think a client will come back in a few weeks, we’ll wind stuff down to 1-cent budgets and leave it there. We’d rather spend a little bit than pause entirely,” he said.
“Interestingly enough, some European campaigns for one of our US clients have been on these 1-cent budgets. There was some trickle of clicks coming through. Every now and then you get a sale, so the ROAS was staggering at 500x. Of course, those outliers don’t make for very pleasant reporting!”
7. Truly great agencies are partnerships.
Led by people like Ben, PPC agencies and consultants are proving to be worth their weight in gold during this crisis.
“We have great clarity about our mission as a business — to serve and help SMBs succeed online. Many of our client managers see themselves as digital marketing business coaches, so they’re there not just to talk about Google Ads but what else we can do with client businesses,” he shared.
“When COVID hit, they needed our help more than ever. We immediately thought about all these industries that were going to be affected and how we can help them stop from shutting their doors. We developed some e-commerce packages, rolled them out at cost price, and built them out in two days. One thing we achieved was helping a coffee shop sell coffee beans online and survive that way.”
Conclusion
It’s always reassuring to learn that people doing the same work around the world share your mentality and vision. So it was refreshing to speak with not just one, but three champions of human and empathy-focused marketing (we heard plenty of support for local and small businesses). Next week, we’re back to our usual time of 9 am PT / 12 pm ET / 18:00 CET and will be joined by two exciting panelists. Check out the details here!
For the past six weeks, we’ve discussed how to adjust to this new normal and find hope in difficult situations. With signs of life starting to creep back into the digital advertising space, this week’s episode focused on solutions as we start to emerge from the sense of doom.
The panel for episode 6 included:
David Szetela, President, Paid Search Association and CEO, FMB Media
Navah Hopkins, Director of Paid Media, Hennessey Digital
Brandon Jones, Director of Client Operations, (un)Common Logic
So without further delay, let’s dive into 9 insights that consultants, brands and agencies can use to guide the next phase of their PPC strategy.
And remember, you can watch or listen to past episodes of PPC Town Hall on our dedicated page.
1. People are starting to spend again.
“I saw something interesting with a furniture client who has both B2B and B2C e-retail,” David said. “Each one had a moment of total crisis where sales just stopped, and we were all trying to figure out why. In retrospect, consumer confidence had vanished — along with their money. But then it started to pick up around late March and early April.”
But that’s only half the story. While David’s client experienced slowdowns on both fronts at the same time, the recovery has been dramatically different.
“The interesting thing is the pickup for B2B has not yet brought them to parity with what they saw in January and February, while B2C is higher than they’ve ever experienced.”
2. Businesses are more flexible than ever.
During one of our first PPC Town Hall events, Julie Friedman Bacchini of Neptune Moon predicted that businesses can only succeed if they adapted to the prevailing situation.
Brandon has seen that play out firsthand.
“SMBs experienced a number of weeks with a lot of reluctance and trying to figure out what exactly was going on,” he said.
“I’ve been really impressed and surprised with our clients and the conversations we’ve had, and their attitude to getting back out there and maintaining their presence on digital. I’ve seen that more often than I expected.”
3. Courage is paying off.
According to Navah, “Clients who stayed the course throughout the flux are in an amazing position; the ones who pulled back their spend are experiencing a far more intense recovery. The former have been able to capitalize on cheaper CPCs and really own the ‘compassion conversation’ to stay top of mind.”
So what’s the final verdict: should you turn your campaigns off or keep them on?
“We can debate turning campaigns off versus keeping them on with a $5 budget, but leaving the campaign on can be worth the $400 or $500 you’d spend. It can help make sure you don’t face thousands of dollars in wasted time when you want to ramp things back up.”
4. There’s no formula for recovery.
Once again, another set of panelists confirmed that the absence of a playbook means they are handling each situation independently.
“I don’t have set times or dollar amounts [as benchmarks for the recovery phase], as the variables differ greatly from client to client,” David said. “When I sense that we’re going to have to adjust the budget significantly, I will often switch to manual bidding and try to steer the account in the right direction.”
5. Manual bidding might be necessary as advertising activity picks back up.
The lack of data to guide Google’s machine means that advertisers who paused campaigns will find it a challenge to jump right back into Automated Bidding.
“I’ve seen about a two-week period where campaigns coming back on benefit from manual bidding before re-transitioning to automated bidding,” Navah said. “What’s also been useful is target Impression Share with a bid cap just to protect the system. But for manual bidding, I don’t go more than two weeks provided we have conversion data.”
Read more of Navah’s thoughts on the subject in her latest blog post for Search Engine Journal.
6. Digital marketers can’t stay isolated.
With data scarce and attribution not so clear, the divide between digital and traditional media is narrower than ever.
“Bridging the gap between traditional and digital media has become a far more important conversation, and digital marketers need to be more comfortable interfacing with their traditional media counterparts,” Navah commented.
“Pre-COVID, we were comfortable living in our tower of data with perfect attribution, and this crisis has shaken the foundations of having a pure data approach.”
7. There is no ‘one channel to rule them all’.
Even hardcore specialist agencies that focused on one or two channels have been open to new things, like Brandon’s organization (un)Common Logic.
“One of the learnings of the last few months for me relates to diversification and having a few more channels at our disposal. We’re typically a direct response and PPC-heavy agency, and connected TV is one of the things I’ve been interested in,” he commented.
And speaking of exploring new things…
8. Now’s the time to experiment with creativity.
If you need an example of agency and brand teaming up to succeed by trying something unconventional, you’ll love this anecdote from David.
“We have a client who’s around the middle in terms of market share, and they noticed their competitors were drawing back in advertising. So we did a branding campaign of all Display Ads using no CTA,” he told us.
“We featured their name and logo, and something about the position they wanted to occupy in the minds of their consumers. We ran those ads on the sites of every major city’s media outlets and got many millions of impressions for almost nothing. It was surprising how much it affected sales — the numbers truly did shoot up.
“It’ll be another conversation whether that altered their position in the market, but a lot of those purchases were new.”
Talk about a curveball!
9. Years of pivoting have made agencies priceless.
Anyone who’s worked for an agency knows how agile and flexible they have to be. Turnaround times are short, deadlines are always looming, and agency pros have made a life out of pivoting at superhuman speed.
So who better to call when you need a partner who can change direction in a heartbeat?
“What we’re doing more of is double-checking and making sure things are working well. I think we’ve seen fairly consistent performance, but we’re spending a lot more time in the accounts making changes where necessary, and just providing that oversight where it’s needed,” Brandon shared.
“Our approach with clients has been highly consultative. The first thing we did was start having conversations not just about marketing needs, but what their businesses were going through. So we’re trying to adapt our strategy to that.
“We’re primarily a PPC shop, but we do have expertise in other areas, so we tailor our solutions to each client. Being able to pivot and stay flexible has been key for us.”
A glimmer of hope
It’s May, and while it feels like more than just a few months since the COVID crisis began, we’re starting to see some positive signs around consumer behavior and supply chains. With luck, we’ll start to see additional medical advances and a subsequent restart of the economy in earnest.
As we’ve said from the beginning, the only way out of this for the PPC community is by sharing all the information we have. One graph, one observation, one insight — any of these could spark an idea that leads to a solution we can all use.
Please continue to join us for our weekly PPC Town Hall sessions. You can add it on your calendar, subscribe to email notifications, access the podcast and videos from previous sessions, or catch the live Town Hall on ppctownhall.com. It’s one hour that might be the most valuable investment you make all week!
When brilliant marketers share insights, we can get a sense of clarity in troubling times. This week Optmyzr hosted the sixth episode of our weekly PPC Town Hall gatherings. To date, we’ve had nearly 1,000 attendees participating in these timely, essential discussions about search marketing in the COVID-19 era.
The response to our Town Hall concept has been terrific. We deeply appreciate the involvement of amazing panelists and the hundreds of attendees who watch, submit questions, and follow up with us.
This week’s event focused heavily on the tools, data, and creative thinking that is helping PPC pros navigate the strange times we’re in.
Innovative Insight Tools
There are some great new tools to help us make sense of search behaviors and underlying dynamics that may be flummoxing marketers.
Aaron showcased the really cool COVID dashboard from the data and analytics experts at Tinuiti. We’ve referenced this dashboard in a few venues ourselves. The dashboard provides visualizations of month-over-month and week-over-week spend trends as well as indexed spend trends covering a wide range of sectors.
Explore the dashboard. It’s free. All you need to do is provide your email address.
Christi also showed some powerful insight tools that Microsoft is generating to provide intelligence into weekly trends in automotive, financial services, health & wellness, retail, tech & telcos, and travel. The Microsoft resources analyze marketplace impacts and provide meaningful context into indicators of recovery by sector.
I encourage you to watch the replay of the session for deeper analysis, but some key takeaways from our panel:
The data shows that uncertainty is a key factor, but plays out differently by industry.
Travel and automotive are still among the biggest challenge areas. Volume fell off a cliff, but are showing signs of tepid uptick. In automotive, promotions about extended finance deals and payment relief prove powerful.
The pandemic affects everyone differently, even within a sector. So performance for one provider in a vertical could vary from a counterpart in a different geo. Use the data as a guide, but apply your own critical thinking as a marketer for your specific audiences. https://about.ads.microsoft.com/en-us/insights/covid19-insights-for-advertisers
Seeing clarity in the data
Is it even possible to trust the data that is out there? The brilliant AI machines and smart automations are, in many cases, confused. The machines know it’s a weird time, but they don’t know we’re in a crisis. The machines understand data from the past to predict the future. But the past doesn’t factor in massive global shifts in how people are living their lives.
Christi, Aaron, Jim, and I talked specifically about the use of RSAs and applying data to decision making. Aaron talked about moving from being data-driven to being data-informed. Look at data and best practices as very relevant, but we all need to view this information through very different lenses than we did two months ago.
Christi encouraged search marketers to take a much more manual mindset with RSAs. The days of set-and-forget are gone (for now). The challenge for marketers today will be to apply critical thinking, creativity, assessment of messaging, geo differences, and other factors to make decisions better than the machines can do right now.
Jim echoed the same RSA points, and said he is heavily annotating analytics right now, due to the wildy dynamic environment marketers are in. We simply cannot compare anything from 12 months ago to make decisions now. He noted that like-for-like may never exist again, or at least not for quite some time.
Panelists also encouraged marketers to allow themselves to be wrong on occasion. In many cases, hindsight will be the only indicator of the decisions being made right now.
Amazon, Ecommerce, and “Black Friday” thinking
As panelists have discussed in earlier episodes, Amazon’s impact on the market is far different today than it was two months ago. Still the ecommerce behemoth, shifting priorities and temporary shipping extensions create opportunities for other providers to step in the ecom gap.
Aaron and Jim both credited Amazon’s quick move to communicate extended shipping timeframes as a means of protecting the Prime brand. People associate Prime with same-day and two-day shipping more than they may associate it with the other services like Prime Video. Noting it’s better to underpromise and overdeliver on shipping. Cart abandonment that happens when people see shipping dates weeks out can help other providers – assuming their supply chains, inventory, and distribution can fill the void.
Christi added that for those doing Amazon sponsored ads, it’s essential to be sure the ads, promotions, and messaging actually align with what people are purchasing now. Careful consideration of how sponsored ads are being applied now is essential to prevent needless spend or to capitalize on filling near-term needs for things people will actually purchase.
The ecommerce discussion also covered “Black Friday” thinking by many retailers. Balancing the potential perception that a provider is desperate against the perception of being viewed as opportunistic, the panel advised retailers to avoid keeping Black Friday type discounts from going on too long.
Aaron summed up the panel’s thoughts when he noted, “The people who market well are doing well. The people who market poorly are doing poorly. With the Black Friday concept, some can look a little desperate and it can seem like some are addicted to focusing on month-over-month or ROAS on last click. Longer term marketers are looking at the edge of the funnel – seeing the whole funnel as opposed to just the bottom.”
Light at the End of the Tunnel?
Nobody knows a timeline for returning to something resembling normal, but the week-6 panel expressed optimism with discussions beginning to shift to recovery versus managing through the crisis.
The tools shared above and all other data points can help search marketers have a better understanding of immediate factors, but also are now setting the stage for longer term thinking and decision making. Clearly we have a long way to go, but with each subsequent Town Hall, discussions are morphing and adjusting. Week-1 was more about being together and commiserating and trying to gauge “what the heck is happening?” Five weeks later, discussions are dramatically different.
Invest an hour of your time and watch the replay of episode 6 on our Town Hall web page or listen to it as a podcast. Then sign up for next week’s live session, which will feature Navah Hopkins and David Szetela, both on the list of top 25 most influential PPC experts in 2019, and Brandon Jones from un(Common) Logic, an Austin-based agency.
Register today and we will see you Wednesday for PPC Town Hall #7.
As PPC Town Hall turns a month old, we wanted to take a moment to thank all our guest speakers, attendees, and everyone who has embraced the idea. From the beginning, you’ve expressed your support and helped share news of the Town Hall with new parts of the global PPC community.
Thank you for being part of the journey so far!
We created a new page for PPC Town Hall to make it easy to sign up for the next one and find old episodes.
Joining Optmyzr CEO Fred Vallaeys this week for episode 5 in an all-new panel were:
Andrew McGarry, Owner & Founder, The McGarry Agency
Ginny Marvin, Editor-in-Chief, Third Door Media
Joe Martinez, Director of Client Strategy, Clix Marketing
Let’s take a look at some of the core takeaways from this week’s edition.
1. No business remains unaffected by the pandemic.
“It’s almost a ‘feast or famine’ situation across commerce and service, and there are challenges with both scenarios,” Ginny observed.
Whichever side your business or clients fall on, there’s plenty to do.
“You’re either trying to drum up interest where demand has sunk through the floor, or figuring out how to deal with a surge in demand when the supply chain isn’t ready or you don’t have the resources to manage that surge.”
Joe observed similar trends in the context of site traffic.
“In many instances, brands are changing spending habits and adapting messaging. But some are simply getting so much traffic that they either can’t keep up with inventory, or because people are looking for anything even slightly related to their product, a lot of that traffic is unqualified.”
2. People want brands to add value to their lives.
Our panelists also provided some advice on how PPC pros can provide added value to businesses and clients by shaping conversations that their brands are part of.
“Don’t sound like a used car salesman; be your customers’ partner in solving a problem,” Joe recommended. “People are nervous, bored, and anxious; reminding people of that doesn’t inspire them to fall in love with a brand. Shift that messaging to talk about how you’re going to help consumers come out of this.”
Andrew believes brands should continue to talk about more than just pandemic-related topics.
“No one wants to hear about you supplying hand sanitizer; we want to be reassured. We want someone to talk about the things that mattered to us before, because it matters even more now. We should still care about climate change, talk about sustainability, and promote and support local businesses.”
3. Google is looking out for its loyal advertisers.
It’s no surprise that small and medium businesses have been disproportionately affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. For many of them, online advertising budgets have either dropped sharply or stopped altogether.
Google took notice and announced $340 million in ad credits to help keep these SMBs active on the Google Ads network.
“We’re going to start seeing these credits for SMBs in late May, which will be the first phase followed by a continuous rollout,” said Ginny. “These are designed to help SMBs and smaller accounts sustain ad spend in the future. The credit amount will vary based on your historical spend.”
“To be eligible, you need to have been advertising (had active campaigns) for 10 out of 12 months in 2019, and also have been advertising in January or February of this year.”
It’s worth noting that Google is not extending these ad credits to franchise businesses, even if they meet the SMB criteria.
4. Now’s the time to try new things.
The hallmark of COVID-19 for marketing professionals is the absence of a playbook or historical data that shows you how to solve current problems. Instead, two of this week’s guests recommend a more experimental, open-minded approach.
“With the exponential intelligence of what Google can do every quarter, we go back and often find out that what didn’t work so well six months ago is doing better now,” Andrew observed. “Go back and look at some of your Google Ads audiences; they may be capable of delivering things your Google Analytics audiences can’t, and vice versa.”
Joe, meanwhile, favors experimenting with channels you didn’t get to play around with earlier.
“Test those Instagram story ads, do some brand-building, build out new targeting options, stretch your budget with more affordable media like Facebook CPMs, and use YouTube to generate awareness. In time, when inventory stabilizes, you can double down on search and shopping ads to capitalize on that new intent.”
5. Google Shopping ads will soon be free (yes, free).
The announcement that advertisers can list Google Shopping ads at no cost is a game-changer, and Ginny explained how it will work in greater detail.
“Google is going to start showing free listings for shopping ads. It’s a really big change going from all-paid for the last eight years to primarily free, with paid ads at the top and bottom, just like a regular SERP.”
It’s a big shift for the Shopping tab of the search results pages, but it’s also part of a larger evolution over the past year.
“Google first opened up the Merchant Center to anyone to upload their feeds without needing to be an advertiser, and then opt in to services across Google,” Ginny elaborated. “The other thing Google announced is a new integration with PayPal so that you can connect that account to the Merchant Center to speed up data flow and merchant verification.”
6. There’s an opportunity to beat Amazon at its own game.
With non-essential deliveries shut off and two-day shipping a pipe dream at this stage, Amazon suddenly finds itself unable to deliver what it’s conditioned the marketplace to expect.
Businesses that can help consumers get what they need and want with minimal delay have an opportunity to capitalize on that, and possibly retain a significant chunk of business even after the crisis abates.
“If I still need a new pair of running shoes, and I can’t walk into a store and get them, I’m going to wherever I can get them soon,” Joe explained. “I’ve got more time to go for a run or a walk, and I’m not waiting for Amazon. So it’s about diversifying your marketing and finding where your users are, because they still want those products now.”
7. There’s more than one way to stretch a budget.
Despite knowing that investing in advertising is paramount, smaller businesses are having a tough time finding marketing dollars. But even with lower-than-ever Facebook CPMs, media on leading platforms isn’t within reach for every business.
Joe provided some advice for restaurants looking to make their budgets go further.
“If you’ve lost budget and you still want to run ads, look at different channels than the ones you’re used to. Waze local and Quora can help take your budget further than Facebook, for example. It’s a good time to test new things and see what works.”
8. COVID-19 is creating a new breed of agile businesses.
With supply chains unsteady and normal processes interrupted, businesses have to stay on their feet to survive. The result is a great deal more creativity not just in PPC, but across the marketing spectrum.
Ginny spoke about one Amazon seller she knows. “Her products are made in the US, but she was worried the manufacturing plant might shut down for health reasons. So she ordered thousands of dollars in new inventory, but then Amazon shut off non-essential shipments.”
“She was stuck, so she explored her network and found a new way to fulfil those orders. We’re seeing businesses adapt and pivot quickly.”
More specific to PPC strategy, Andrew noted that changes further back than COVID-19 have compounded the challenges paid search pros face in the current environment.
“The ad-tech industry has gone through a lot in the last 6-9 months due to ITP and how cookies work now. Marketers need to realize that betting the house on last-click, bottom-of-funnel tactics is not a sustainable approach.”
9. The worst consumer is a disappointed one.
With the supply chain disrupted, consumers no longer know where exactly to go to make certain purchases. They’re relying more than ever on search to guide them to a marketplace that has what they need.
So what happens if a consumer finds it on your site, only to later discover that the product is actually unavailable? Andrew believes it’s a real problem that needs immediate attention.
“The big danger is advertising products that are out of stock or have low stock, and disappointing users when they land on the page. As an industry we need to do better because it’s a common complaint I keep seeing.”
“Low stock and a product feed’s ability to easily adjust to that remains a major area where things can fall down for SMBs. Either in-house teams lack the setup skills, or SMBs on low-cost PPC packages don’t get the attention they need to react to demand peaks,” he added.
The ongoing crisis has made it difficult for people to see their loved ones and close friends, causing some of us to feel powerless and lonely.
A less impactful effect is that it’s also isolated professionals from their community networks.
While we still have the power of technology to stay connected and learn from one another, the PPC industry is still dealing with the absence of events. HeroConf Austin, for example, was canceled due to COVID-19, impacting the learning and development of hundreds of marketing teams.
Crushing his workout in the morning and building scripts in the evening! Get Fred’s COVID-19 scripthere!
“Events such as HeroConf provide genuine insight into what industry leaders are seeing and experiencing every day, and we all can learn from their insights,” Andrew noted. “So maintaining that is absolutely necessary from an education perspective. Virtual events can help, and I really hope they happen.”
Fortunately, the Paid Search Association is hosting their annual conference as a virtual event. You can learn more about PSAC 2020 and register for the conference here (seats are limited).
Conclusion
We love hearing from our attendees about the PPC Town Hall helping them see new ways of thinking, or reassuring them that they’re not the only ones experiencing challenges at this time. It’s why we do what we do!
Following last week’s successful PPC Town Hall, we returned with a 4th edition featuring some of the most knowledgeable minds in the PPC and paid search space.
If you happened to miss this week’s chat or any previous editions, check them all out on our YouTube channel or listen to them as podcasts over here.
This week, we focused on bid management in dynamic environments (such as the one created by COVID-19). Optmyzr CEO, Frederick Vallaeys, moderated a panel that included:
Emi Wayner, Platform Partner Lead, Channel Sales, Google
Peter Oliveira, Partner Development Analyst, Google
Susan Wenograd, Chief Marketing Officer, Aimclear
Martin Röttgerding, Head of SEM, Bloofusion Germany
Let’s take a look at 9 key insights from this week’s conversation that every agency, advertiser, and consultant can act on.
1. Market volatility continues to influence paid search.
We’re still in the middle of the COVID-19 crisis and unfortunately, it doesn’t look like we’ll be achieving any degree of ‘normal’ in the immediate future. With so much volatility across markets, it might be a good time to explore Google’s Performance Planner if you haven’t already.
To quote Google, “Performance Planner is a tool that lets you create plans for your advertising spend, and see how changes to campaigns might affect key metrics and overall performance.”
Google Ads Performance Planner. Image courtesy of Google.com.
Performance Planner works with the latest data at any given time, but the current climate means that said data is rarely predictable and stable from one week to the next.
Peter recommended checking in on Performance Planner every week to explore the impact of shifting CPA, ROAS goals, and manual bids.
“The market is changing so frequently that a target ROAS that gave you a great volume last week might not do the same this week.”
2. Not all businesses have been affected equally.
Just like in every crisis, certain businesses are doing well even as others struggle to stay afloat.
You might have a client whose product or service is experiencing incredibly low demand, or one that’s waiting on overseas shipments and can’t run more ads until they’re able to fulfill additional orders.
Martin has seen that spectrum play out for some of Bloofusion’s client base.
“With our e-commerce clients, we’ve seen a number of differing challenges in the current crisis. Some were overwhelmed by demand. In a few cases, supply is an issue. Others have problems to keep up with packing and shipping. They’ve scaled back or turned off their campaigns to gain a little breathing room.”
3. Products that make isolation less boring are in demand.
With most states in the US (and many geographies around the world) under ‘shelter in place’ orders, it’s no surprise that Google has observed a significant uptick in volume for search terms related to products that make the experience more tolerable.
“We’re seeing that as people are spending more time online, usage is increasing across multiple devices,” Emi said.
“Consumers are searching for many things including technology that helps them work from home (+750%) as well as connected televisions (+37%), streaming devices (+38%), and gaming consoles (+48%).”
4. Consumers want to stay healthy and informed.
But not everything is about work and recreation. Consumers are also looking to maintain their health — and that of their finances.
“In healthcare, consumers are looking to keep themselves physically and mentally healthy while at home. For example, searches related to ‘online workouts’ increased 12x in the past 90 days,” Emi revealed.
Alongside that, people are also preoccupied with what’s happening in their bank accounts. With unemployment hitting record levels and even those in secure jobs suddenly looking cash flow issues in the eye, there’s been a surge in search volume for many related topics.
She added, “Consumers are also looking for financial help, professional advice, and mobile apps to plan for the future with a 9x increase in ‘financial help’ queries e.g. rent/mortgage relief, loan relief, deferred payments.”
5. Hard-hit industries are starting to figure a way out.
It’s worth noting that Tinuiti has an insightful tracker that monitors Facebook spend performance segmented by vertical (signup required).
A quick glance shows that travel is down 79.5% month-on-month but has risen 13.5% week-on-week. Fred speculated that this could be a sign that some of the industries COVID forced to pump the brakes are starting to put new strategies in place.
“People still want to travel; we just can’t,” he said. “These companies could realistically be building desire and demand, identifying an audience searching for these things during this restrictive phase, so they can convert them when travel opens up again.”
Google Trends. Image courtesy of Google.com.
In the case of the automotive industry, which is also showing signs of resurgent spending, Susan speculated that it could be an effort to supplement TV commercials advertising never-before-seen offers like extended windows for no payments and 0% financing.
Either way, it’s evident that businesses that can’t convert at their usual pace are starting to acquire new users to fill the top of their funnel. Which means…
6. It’s a great time to use social media to build TOF.
You don’t have to be as hard-hit as travel or hospitality to consider taking advantage of low-priced social media.
Given that your clients have the budget to do so, now’s as strategic a time as ever to front-load your pipeline with consumers who are high on intent but limited in their capacity to act.
In other words, you can build desire and demand to a fever pitch — and do so with a fraction of the budget you’d normally need.
“We’re seeing some of the cheapest Facebook media with CPMs as low as $2-3. If you have the flexibility and the budget to focus on some top-of-funnel activity, it’s not a bad time to acquire users even if they’re not all going to convert right away,” Susan observed.
7. Smart bidding offers more control than you realize.
While some advertisers and agencies might be hesitant to allow machines more than a modicum of control over their paid search strategies in the current environment, Smart Bidding might actually empower you more than you thought.
By using tens of millions of data signals, Smart Bidding pairs your inputs with similar auctions in the industry, so it works even if you’re short on first-party data.
“Smart bidding has the ability to pick up signals and compare it to other things going on in the market to make those adjustments. While it uses both aggregated and recent trends, it favors what’s been happening recently,” Peter noted.
Google Smart Bidding considers a multitude of signals to set the right bid for every query. Image courtesy of Google.com.
The key is to remember that as human operators, we’re capable of watching the news and observing the world around us, and then using those observations to provide context to your paid search programs.
You really can influence Smart Bidding to work for you as long as you don’t ‘set it and forget it’!
8. Hyper-segmentation might actually be a good idea.
Under normal circumstances, it’s not absurd to look at the US as a single market: largely the same regulations, similar opening hours, and common methods of fulfillment.
Today, that’s simply not the case. States are enforcing their own COVID-19 restrictions, and even individual counties and cities can impose their own limitations.
So while it’s not the best idea to hyper-segment under normal circumstances, it might be useful to at least try it out right now — and Smart Bidding could be of help.
“Smart Bidding lets you bid at the intersection of each bid adjustment you can manually set,” Fred shared. “One example is adjustments for a location like New York which has been hit hard, one for time of day, and then another for the audience. It can look at the actual scenario of that one auction and how that combination actually matters.”
Peter agreed that if you see significant discrepancies in a geography or other parameter, separating campaigns can afford you a greater degree of control by putting individual levers on your campaigns.
9. Experts are making it easy for PPC pros to stay informed.
As the PPC community continues to face a number of hardships with finding reliable data, some of the industry’s leading experts have developed scripts that enable marketers to make quick observations about the shift in behavior.
One example is this COVID-19 visualization script developed by Fred, which overlays government actions related to the pandemic on Google Ads performance metrics.
“The idea is to help you see if certain events, like store closures, the start of shelter in place, the closing of schools, or the introduction of social distancing correlates in any way with drop-offs or spikes in performance.”
Google Ads script by Bloofusion and Martin Röttgerding generates charts showing account performance before and during COVID-19. Image courtesy of Bloofusion.
“Overall trends may be a traffic shift from mobile devices to desktop computers, people searching later at night, and weekdays blurring,” he said.
“However, we’ve found that this is not true for every account. In many cases, these things have remained more or less stable. The script can give you some handy charts about the situation in your own accounts.”
Conclusion
We started the first PPC Town Hall with two objectives in mind: to provide a safe space for paid search pros to vent and share their thoughts on everything that’s been happening, and to steer clear of using it as an opportunity to promote any kind of software or services.
Since then, the PPC community has embraced these weekly conversations, and they’ve evolved into a source of insights on how to approach these new problems that none of us really have all the answers to.
We’re in this together, and we’ll get out of it together.
After a couple of highly popular editions, the Optmyzr PPC Town Hall returned for a third week to give the PPC community a space to hear what their peers are doing, ask questions, and hopefully gain a few additional insights into how to conduct business during the COVID-19 pandemic.
This week’s conversation touched on a number of themes, including how virtually every agency and advertiser is navigating these uncharted waters at the same time.
As always, the goal was to put these learnings and insights out in the open to help the PPC community learn and adapt quickly.
With that in mind, let’s take a look at three takeaways from this week’s PPC Town Hall. You can watch the full session on the Optmyzr YouTube channel.
Keep an eye on the technical stuff.
In “Can we trust automation in a time of crisis” for Search Engine Land, Aaron Levy writes that marketers should avoid returning to “the stone age of SEM”. He goes on to outline eight elements of automation that call for a “watch and adjust” approach.
“Each situation is different, so you must evaluate your own business under your own lens,” he advises.
Optmyzr CEO Frederick Vallaeys also recommends merging manual control with automation-driven strategies.
“It feels like deferred conversions are happening, so you might be in a branding stage rather than getting sales over the line. If you’ve been running last-click attribution, you might not be valuing those early-stage interactions. Automated bid management systems don’t know what to do to get you more top-of-funnel activity if you’re not using the right attribution model.”
Another great piece of advice from this week’s panelists is to check your automations, bid management, and extensions on a more regular basis. If ever there was a time to avoid a “set it and forget it” mentality, it’s now.
Kirk Williams shared the results of his tests comparing performance on some accounts from March 12 to April 5 against previous weeks. During his analysis, he found that automated bidding by Google seemed to do relatively well. Conversions were worse in the most recent weeks (as one would expect), but ROAS had actually improved.
Williams surmised that CPCs have become so low, they drove more traffic. Even with lower conversion, overall ROAS was better across some important accounts.
Look for fresh opportunities.
As with every major market shift, the COVID-19 crisis presents opportunities for businesses to explore new opportunities in meaningful ways — if you know where to look.
“Here’s a major company that runs a large part of the planet’s ecommerce saying it can no longer deliver what it’s conditioned us to expect, and not everyone realizes how disruptive this is,” said Elizabeth Marsten on Amazon’s decision to reprioritize certain FBA products.
“For paid search advertisers who have the ability to self-fulfill or sell via another platform, this is a huge opportunity as FBA shipping times become longer.”
Kirk Williams also believes that there are opportunities for the more nimble organizations out there, though not without their own challenges.
“At some point, you can’t make marketing do what it can’t do,” he warns. “While it’s worth exploring a change in position or new audiences, this is a very difficult time for B2B. But these are interesting times that will segment out not only who has the cash to survive a lean period, but who has a loyal customer base and who can pivot in a business and strategic way.”
Performance marketing agency Tinuiti has also developed a COVID-19 hub, where you’ll find a number of valuable resources to inform your decision-making and strategic planning.
Know the new consumer.
Earlier this week, we wrote about Google’s tips for running ads during COVID-19 in our blog post “PPC During COVID-19: 5 Ways to Optimize Your Search Ads”. Many of these revolved around consumer sentiment and came up again during this week’s discussion.
While it was unanimous that ad copy and extensions need to be reviewed for sensitivity and to avoid sounding tone-deaf, Julie Friedman Bacchini also did a deep dive into what it means to rethink your audience at this time.
“What worked a month ago may not be the right message for today,” she observed. “Audiences are important as well. In travel, for example, you may want to avoid targeting people who work in industries that have been hit especially hard by COVID-19 when advertising for certain segments or verticals.”
The fact is COVID-19 has completely undone everything we consider “normal”. People who worked and lived in different locations are now largely in one location, so Google’s data is not the most informed right now when it comes to audience profiling.
Observations & Conclusion
In addition to these lessons, the Town Hall panel shared several anecdotes and observations that offer refreshing insights into the mechanics and logistics that power ecommerce. Some of these include:
• Amazon is buying fewer Google shopping and search ads in recent weeks, impacting the overall market in terms of competition, CPC, visibility, and availability.
• CPG as a segment is so varied and diverse; some product categories are under stress, while others are booming. As a result, performance data that isn’t granular may not accurately reflect overall sentiment.
• Ad spend for travel is down month-on-month yet up week-on-week. One potential explanation is hopeful purchasing for late 2020/early 2021 travel plans.
• Timelines for recovery are difficult to estimate at best and gloomy at worst. Lufthansa CEO Carsten Spohr has said it will be years before they return to pre-COVID levels of demand.
• For sellers with inventory at their warehouses, Amazon is working to waive or defer storage costs. However, retailers could potentially have pallets of their goods stuck in a warehouse where they can’t be fulfilled on priority or even at all.
It’s certainly a confusing time; what would have been considered absurd a few months ago is par for the course today. Brands are trying to figure out the right moves and messages, and it will take our entire community of nimble, creative marketers to help them overcome these challenges.
We plan to continue hosting weekly Town Halls to give our customers and the wider PPC community a place to learn, share, or simply vent.
Last week, on the occasion of Women’s Day, we premiered a special PPC Town Hall episode where we spoke to three influential women who built great careers and personal brands in digital marketing.
They shared their success stories, how they overcame challenges, and tips & advice to building great careers.
Here’s the full episode with the transcript.
Full episode:
Transcript:
Fred’s introduction to the episode.
Fred: Hello and welcome to another episode of PPC Town Hall. My name is Fred Vallaeys. I’m co-founder and CEO at Optmyzr.
I’m also going to be your host for today’s episode. So this episode is airing or premiering during Women’s week. So we decided we wanted to bring together some of the most influential women in PPC and digital marketing.
Some of the folks you’re going to see here today are usually on the top 25 list of PPCers. One of them is not on that list because they don’t just do PPC. They do a whole lot more than that. So they have broader skills.
But we thought it’d be interesting to have a conversation and see how these women have built their own brains and built their careers in PPC.
Now, I’m going to be honest, I’m a white privileged male, so leading this conversation can be a little bit awkward for me. What do I know about the issues we’re going to discuss today?
So my role here today is really to facilitate the discussion, but let it flow where it needs to. And all three of our panelists are just as much the host of today’s episode as I am. But I can’t wait to hear how they did it, how they got to where they are today, and some of the hurdles and challenges that they may have faced along the way.
Now, that said, I hope that this episode is also broadly interesting to everyone, just from a PPC career perspective. There are differences whether you’re a man, a woman, a person of color, all of these things change it.
But there are also many things we have in common as humans. Right? So let’s not forget about that element as well. So with that, welcome to this episode of PPC Town Hall.
Akvile, Anu, and Navah introduce themselves.
Fred: All right, so here are my guests for today. Welcome, everyone. Get everyone to introduce themselves a little bit. Akvile Defazio, let’s start with you.
Akvile: Thank you for having me. My name is Akvile DeFazio. I’m the President of AKvertise, and we are a social media advertising agency.
Fred: And hence, you don’t make it on the top 25 PPC list because you do social. But it’s still digital marketing, and all of these things are very interconnected.
So I’m very happy to have an excuse to actually bring you onto the show for the first time.
Akvile: Thank you so much.
Fred: All right, next on the screen, we have Navah Hopkins.
Navah: Thank you very much for having me. Hi, I’m Navah Hopkins, President of Navah Hopkins, LLC. We help brands unlock the profit and solve business problems, whether it’s SaaS, whether it’s managing Ad accounts.
I am very grateful to be on the top 25 list with Fred. But more importantly, I’m very excited to have those conversations about how people can take meaningful steps in their career, whether it’s PPC or otherwise, regardless of gender.
So thank you very much for having me.
Fred: Yeah. And you’ve certainly made many steps over your illustrious career. So I can’t wait to hear a little bit about how you made those decisions and what happened.
All right. And then we have Anu Adegbola. Welcome to the show. You’re coming back for the second time. I believe it’s great to see you again. You have made some career changes since we last spoke. So tell us what you’re up to these days.
Anu: Of course, I’m very happy to be here and sharing the stage with two ladies. And I absolutely very much respect over the years.
I’m working recently, very much recently this year, I joined Marin Software as an account director to really be the paid search expert, the page search lead to help our clients do paid search very well.
And I remember speaking about that to one of the clients I was talking to recently when they were like, oh, is Marin good for us? And I was like, look, I will tell you that it is.
I am someone who’s very much part of the #PPCchat Twitter community, especially, and even on LinkedIn, trying to really talk about all the changes that’s always going on that’s coming out from Google, Microsoft, Facebook, and the likes.
And my key thing is just to make sure that they are doing paid search really well. And that’s really a passion of mine. And I love talking about it and discussing all the different updates and how to use it and test it.
Fred: Yeah. And we somehow seem to keep bringing on competitors. Marin, this week. They give you permission to be on the show?
Anu: Yes, I got the permission just today. It came in like half an hour before I was like, yeah, we’re good to go. And they’re like, as long as you mentioned Marin, how Marin is amazing.
And it’s a great third party tool. You’re good to go.
Akvile, Anu, and Navah talk about how they got into marketing.
Fred: I obviously have no qualms about bringing on competitors because at the end of the day, this is such a big space and it’s about education. So that’s why we’re here today.
But let’s just kind of go around the table again and talk a little bit more about the careers that you’ve had, the many places you’ve been.
Akvile. Let’s go back to you. Tell us a little bit about how you came to be where you are today.
Akvile: Sure. So I have an unconventional path, I guess you could say. But I feel like most of us come from many different backgrounds in our industry. But I went to school for physical therapy, and I realized after graduating that it’s not what I wanted to be doing.
And any time there are marketing tasks at the clinics I worked at, I jumped all over them. And I didn’t know what I was doing, but I was very interested to learn more. So I took the leap and got an internship that I fought for way back when I lived in Seattle.
It’s a place called Evo in there and outdoor snow ski apparel company. And out of all 30 some applicants, I think I was the only one they said that didn’t have a communications, marketing or business degree.
And they went with me as a wild card. And I’m so grateful to them because that’s where my career really started. And I was there for several years. And then unfortunately, the recession hit in 2008, so my school loans had kicked in at that point and we had to scale back on hours.
So I needed to find something else and some really good friends and people that work there to this day. But I went and moved to a pet insurance company and helped them from the ground up and I was their first PPC person.
So I did come from a paid search background way back when, but I’ve migrated over to Paid Social. So after that I went to Third Door Media, which was a publication. So over there doing Organic Social, Paid Social, Paid Search I learned a lot in that.
Fred: That’s like sort of being at the powerhouse that tells them SEO and PPC and now having to do it for them.
Akvile: It was so great. I’ve met so many wonderful people, all of you and many more. And I made lifelong friends and I just loved working. There was such a fun time. But also marketing to marketers was quite the challenge.
So I took it on as a welcome challenge and a lot of fruitful things have come from it.
Fred: Quick question. Who of us here actually clicks on ads on Google or are we all like “No!” You click on ads? I’m like 50-50.
Navah: There’s two reasons why I’ll click on an ad. One, I genuinely just need it and it’s actually better than where the organic listing would be, but the other.
And then I make up prior to the marketing gods to apologize for clicking on an ad that I have no intention of actually engaging with, but to actually see what is the ad creative to the landing page so I can build content of what is good and what is bad.
Fred: I suppose you put it in a presentation. So now a lot of people see this brand and they still get the exposure for the $5 click that you just cost them. Anyway, let’s jump into the gender thing here. Right.
But you feel bad about having clicked on that ad. Do you think that’s like, women feel more bad about doing these things than men?
Navah: I don’t know. So I’m a fairly apologetic person. It was a real shift just to stop saying I’m sorry for everything and shifting to thank you for XYZ. I forget who sent it to me first.
I’ve heard several people put this shift out there where rather than you saying I am sorry for this. I am sorry for that. You say thank you for XYZ things.
So I guess what I should be saying is thank you, Brand, for providing the opportunity for us to have an even greater education so that even more people can benefit rather than I’m sorry for costing you money, but I will say I don’t think it’s a women versus men thing.
I think it’s an empathy thing. And how many people are in touch with the empathy of what their actions are, but just the confidence that comes from saying thank you incentive, I’m sorry, I think is more of the growth opportunity there.
Fred: Yeah, I really like that. I’ll try starting. I’ve also been shying away from saying I’m sorry because if you believe what you do, you should never have to apologize for it.
But just how you position it then as being thankful. I really like that. Anyway, I interrupted you Akvile.
Akvile: No worries. Those were good questions. I do the same thing. I’m like, I don’t want to click this out or don’t want to look for the organic results right below it. But the last part of it is about seven and a half years ago, I’ve always kind of had an inkling of I want to work for myself.
But some things have transpired at that point to where I just really needed to take that leap. So I finally had the courage and I asked another industry friend of ours, her name is Pamela Lund, if I could just shadow her for a day because I knew nothing about running my own agency.
I had never worked for an agency before, which I kind of wish I did in the past, since I was always in-house. But she’s like, I’ll do you one better and I’ll teach you everything I know.
And I’ll give you half my clients because I’ve taken on too much work myself and I want to start a completely different business. So she’s like, you give me half my time back and I’ll teach you everything and let you run from there.
So I’m still thankful to this day for her because I took that leap. And here we are, seven and a half years later, and we’re working with some really cool brands, and I’ve been working for myself.
Fred: That’s so generous of Pamela. Question on that. You don’t have to answer if you don’t want to write. But did she literally just give you half the business or did she kind of…
Akvile: She still has her agency consultancy, but she did give me half of her clients. And then I did a lot of paid search back then. But then I realized that I wanted to do paid social.
So we’re both separate entities. We’re doing our own things. But I helped her out, and then she kind of just we split it up to where she would do paid search. I would do paid social.
So to this day, we still have like a couple of clients that we team up on for who wants to do collaboration.
Fred: And if you get the PPC client, the search clients, you kind of pass it on to her.
Akvile: Yes.
Fred: Got it. Interesting. All right, so Anu, why don’t we go to you next, tell us a little bit about how you got to where you are today.
Anu: Of course, it’s been a long, winding road of a journey, to be honest. If anyone told me like, yeah, ten years ago I’d be working tech sites. I’d be like, I don’t know, it’s really weird.
I thought I’d be the person always in the weeds of paid search reports. I love Excel. That’s really what really got me into it. Seriously. Like, in my first interview was, do you like data analysis? Do you like being Excel?
I was like, oh my God, I was that geeky kid. So weird when I used to play with my dad’s laptop and pulling up VLOOKUPs and doing tables.
Fred: So strange on you.
Anu: Yeah, he’s a bit of a nerd, but I am.
Fred: I can call you.
Anu: It’s fine. I started off working in digital agencies, which was really great for looking at seeing the breadth of the different kind of brands you could work on, the different kind of account types and B2B, B2C, small, large, all that kind of stuff.
But one thing I really didn’t like and unfortunately I hear still going on today is like just all the silos. There’s only like there’s a paid search team that never talked to SEO or never talked to like email marketing or never talked to CRO and never talked to anybody else.
And it was just paid search targeting and all that kind of stuff. And I was always interested in business goals. How does paid search actually work within the whole ecosystem of the digital marketing efforts that have been made for a brand?
So I moved to in-house side and worked with these guys called Prime Inferno for now, which is how I became first in contact with Marin because their third party tool was Marin.
That’s when it really started. I started really liking the idea of automation and even also I started talking at conferences and came in touch with the lads from Brain Labs. So Dan Gilbert and Dan Botiglary as well and they were really into the script.
We give a loose script up for free. Unfortunately, Fred, you, me and you, we didn’t come in contact quite a bit later because I know you’re very much into the script world as well with Optmyzr, but I really got into your automation way back then.
We’re talking about like eight, nine years ago because I’ve always also seen myself as a bit of an efficiently lazy person. If something can take you an hour to do instead of the three, 4 hours that some long reports could do, let’s get done in an hour and get on to the next thing.
I was huge to be a fan of automation straight away and I’d always like to push all different kinds of automations on my clients. And I love the fact that what paid search also allowed me to do is come across a lot of third party tools, the likes of Kenshoo, IgnitionOne, DC Storm, way back when, SA360, of course, and the like.
So it really gave me the breath and the amazing journey to then become going in-house on with a tech tool. And I’m really seeing not just the experience of my agency side and in-house, but also the experience of being part of the community.
I feel being part of the #PPCchat community is my secondary job. It’s like literally just being there, showing up, giving my advice, hearing what’s going on, and great to be able to bring that back into the community to help us do things better. For paid search advertisers.
Fred: Yes. And for the people who don’t know #PPCchat. So that happens, I believe, Wednesdays on Twitter at 09:00.
Anu: Tuesdays. Well, on Wednesday, I’m sure that’s what you were thinking of.
Fred: Exactly. And then you also recently became the President of the PSA. So like, you’re not very busy, are you?
Anu: No, not busy at all. Yes. From the beginning of my career, I have been one of those people. I come from an amazing family of philanthropists, doctors and PhD holders who do amazing things for people.
And I’ve always been trying to find that that is in my DNA. I find what do I do? What has been part of my job is helping people. And I think the truth is a lot of advertising is really about making more money for somebody else.
So for me, for many years I used to think I was not really comfortable with that. And every once in a while I think maybe I’ll leave marketing at some point because I don’t really see how I’m helping people.
So when I started really doing the podcast and when started being part of the community and being a mentor and seeing others, especially women, other black females, other people who are like me, who thought the entry to this industry was so hard, a light bulb moment went in my head.
It was like, okay, maybe I should stick around for this. I should definitely stick around for this because this is where my desire, my love to actually help people and get people doing paid search better, being able to get into the industry a lot, getting into the industry easier and making them not how to deal with imposter syndrome.
Everyone has it. That whole I’m not doing things right. I should be learning this a lot quicker. Oh my God. How come that other person knows how to do this and I don’t?
These questions that I have, should I be asking them it might make me look stupid to be able to debunk all those like, yeah, it’s not okay to ask those questions. Like, no, it’s really okay how to just help people get along in that way.
So that’s become a really good big passion of mine.
Fred: Yeah. Even Google changes things basically every week. So, we’re all imposters. We’ve never done this before. Julie Bacchini was on the show not that long ago and she’s been doing PPC for over 20 years.
And she basically said, Listen, this is like the fourth time that I’m relearning how Google Ads works, because every couple of years it’s just different. And then I looked this up for a speech that I gave.
The human body replaces itself every seven years. After seven years, every cell in your body has basically been replaced by a new one. Just like Google Ads. Right.
Except Google Ads replaces itself faster than every seven years.
Anu: Every few months replaces itself.
Fred: Exactly. Navah, do you ever feel like an imposter and tell us how you got to where you are?
Navah: All the time. All the time. I feel like an imposter. I don’t think I’ve ever had a close colleague that has ever not had to walk me off a ledge and remind me that I’m actually competent.
And I think it’s because when one is clever, one is able to know what one doesn’t know. So in a bridged history of me, I actually wanted to be a high school English teacher, but I pivoted from that because I saw that I would be both poor and ineffective in the current education system and I couldn’t do it.
And I had this really impactful conversation with a relative who basically said, what are you doing? You are denying your nature. You are denying what you are good at. Go into marketing, like, you are good at this. Go do it.
So I ended up transferring, and while I was in College, I got my certifications. I started doing some kind of like, freelance side work. Got my first gig actually in SEO. That was probably both the best and worst experience because it taught me that in order to really convey and to be heard, you have to have an authority voice and a professional voice and your friend voice.
And if you allow too many to see only the friend voice, you can sometimes not be taken as seriously. But if you own your authority voice, that’s when you can really enact change and you can empower people to do well.
So after sometimes sent in the SEO space, I actually took the money I earned to start up trying to go back to education called AngelEd, which was meant to help education be as debt free and employable as possible, connecting students to scholarships and mentors.
It ended up failing, but it was a great educational experience and it built a lot of really good connections for me, actually. Now in the University space to help disseminate digital marketing knowledge to help the next generation of digital marketers, analysts, so on and so forth.
All the while I was working on that startup, I was doing freelance work on the PPC side, ended up in Fred’s tradition of inviting competitors on WordStream. I spent five years at WordStream and I fell in love with the idea of SaaS or software as a service.
And the reason why I fell in love with it is much like has been discussed, there is a genuine love of helping people. I truly, truly love seeing the benefit that a brand can get. But unfortunately it’s not scalable.
To have one-to-one assistance, you’re not going to be able to enact as much good one to one as you could through software. And so what was nice about WordStream is not only was I able to help people and work on individual accounts, spread interesting knowledge, but also work on software that could scale really clever strategies.
And so that piece of product really stuck with me. I ended up, after WordStream going to build the paid arm for Hennessy Digital. We ended up managing a book of business of about 1.5 million ad spend per month.
So built a kind of entity there. An agency ended up then at Justuno, which is the CRO software, then went to AdZooma which is the PPC management software. And I realized after those two software jumps that, you know what, I need to take a break belonging to a brand.
AdZooma was based in the UK, I had to set up a Corporation for myself to be paid because they were going to have to pay me as a contractor. So the decision that I had been weighing and I wish I could give you a hug through this call.
I feel a lot of really good advice and a lot of really good encouragement. Like, you know what? Just make that leap. You are meant to do this. You have the brain and the workflow to do it this way.
And so after I realized, you know what? I need to take a break, I made the call. We’re going to just focus on my consulting business. And what’s nice is that because of the width and breadth of my experience working with the thousands of brands from the WordStream side, the thought leadership piece, speaking, writing Ask A PPC for Search Engine Journal.
I’m about to also write for Search Engine Land’s Public Speaking Circuit. I had enough inbound interest that I could just say I’m going to go off on my own. And it was a fairly easy decision.
I could not have done that at the beginning of my career, even though I tried. So it’s really nice kind of coming full circle and being in a place where I can help the people I really want to help, I can solve the problems I really want to solve.
Taking again every moment of sadness based on a moment of happiness. And I firmly, firmly believe that all the things I get to work on are direct result of that.
How did Akvile, Navah, and Anu build their personal brands?
Fred: Nice. So I love the whole personal branding thing and how that’s enabled you to get to where you are today, having more control over the decisions that you make. So let’s jump into that a little bit.
So all three of you have amazing personal brands in the industry. Was that a conscious decision to start building that for you?
Navah: Yes! Oh, 100%! I’m sorry, I’m jumping right now. Oh, no, thank you for letting me jump back in. I got to catch myself. So this is actually really important and this is something that everyone should have a brand outside of the brand that they work for.
Because no matter how good you are, you are replaceable. Nothing outside of you that will retain like you could always be pushed aside. So after a series of interesting working experiences where I would work really, really bloody hard and maybe things would work out.
Maybe things wouldn’t. From a pragmatist standpoint, I knew I had to start to come up with my own brand so that I could have leverage to push forward. Things I knew had to happen because it wasn’t just some quiet little kid banging on the door with an opinion.
This was Navah Hopkins or before I got married, Navah Fuchs saying, this needs to happen there’s outside clout there that if we don’t listen, what are the repercussions of that?
I was very aware that as I started to build my own external clout, I not only was able to knock those things, I was able to add more value to the company, so I was able to command a greater salary.
Of course, the main motivation was helping people and spreading useful information. But there is a certain degree of selfishness that I think is important that everyone owns and pragmatism that everyone owns.
When thinking about your brand and how you leverage your brand in internal discussions.
Fred: Exactly. I think having a personal brand has huge benefits, but it’s also a fair amount of additional work and it’s not easy to get there right. So it is a trade off.
And I guess that’s why that selfish component is necessary. Otherwise, I think people just wouldn’t want to put in the extra work for it. Akvile, talk about your personal branding and how you use it to get new clients.
Akvile: Similarly to what Navah said. My mom said this to me when I was younger. She’s like, no one’s going to come knocking on your door unless you put yourself out there.
So I try to take that in many different aspects of my life, especially professionally. But when Twitter came out, I loved it. It took me a little while to figure it out, but once we connected with marketers, it was just like I was genuinely excited to just share things, but the helpfulness aspect of it is what really I thrive on sharing, helping that generally makes me happy.
That’s the tradeoff for me. Like, I share something and I get personal fulfillment from it because people have shared with me. My career wouldn’t be where it is if there were other people in our industry that were so helpful selfless and sharing different information.
There’s plenty of work to go out there. So I love that we’re competitive, but we’re still all very intertwined and very willing to help people reaching out just without anything. You don’t expect anything in return necessarily, but for me, I just think Twitter really helps things take off, and you do have to be a little bit healthy, selfish, as Navah put it.
You do have to say, I’m good at this. I can do this if I’m accepting clients. Put it out there. I was so hesitant the first time. It was year two of my business. I lost two of our biggest clients in one week.
One got acquired by a larger company that came back to us six months later. Another one, their CEO, resigned, and I was not prepared for something like that. And I was trying to learn how to do business development.
And that’s where I really decided to lean further into my social network and offline, online. I very reluctantly just tweeted, hey, we’re accepting clients. I felt like it’s such a failure at that moment. And everyone’s like, oh, you just incorporated, you’re growing. Congratulations.
And I was like, oh, that is not how I felt. But now I’m not afraid to put that out in there anymore because other people can have different perspectives, and your closest group of confidants will know what’s going on behind the scenes.
But there’s no shame in telling people what you’re good at, what you can do to help others. And I think just being a helpful person that’s excited about the industry that we’re in, maybe updates.
I work more on the paid social side of things, and Facebook has a lot of challenges that come along with it, and there’s a lot of people complaining about it. So I’m guilty.
I’ve done it once in a while. But I think as long as you’re genuine, you’re helpful, and you’re focused on not just putting out content that’s going to be interesting and helpful to someone else, but also getting things back from the community.
So I think there’s a really good kind of equal trade going on. And using your personal brand so people know who you are and what you do and how you can help them is very important for the success of you, whether you’re working in-house at a brand, an agency, or for yourself.
Fred: Thank you for sharing, because that’s very actionable. I think. How do you start building this personal brand while it can be as easy as going on Twitter and engaging in #PPCchat and chiming in.
So #PPCchat is basically there’s five to six questions that get asked and everyone gets to weigh in and you can weigh in. But hey, here’s what I think about Performance Max campaigns.
And so you start building up that reputation, that credibility, and then that can lead into like you’re saying, a chance to tell people, hey, I’m taking new clients. Please reach out to me.
Anu, you’re obviously engaged with #PPCchat, is that a channel that you use to build your personal brand or how did you go about it?
Anu: Absolutely. #PPCchat definitely really helped to make it almost like an easy Tuesday, Wednesday strategy of like, this is how I’ll interact, this is how I’ll show what I know about our industry.
I think it is one of the little positives that came out of the pandemic years. Like, I was in my house, I was in front of a screen more times than ever now. And so honestly, the #PPCchat community dubbed me out of some of my lowest moments of just going there.
And it wouldn’t necessarily always be a tweet about paid search. It will be about something that makes people laugh, the wages, just talking about the frustration, all the frustrations everybody is going through.
There’s definitely amazing feeling of you are not alone in the feelings you’re having about your frustrations about the situation, the industry, the clients you could be working on, frustrating clients, wanted to move on things that you have to do because you need to keep a client and there was just so much joy to just get involved with that.
And especially during the pandemic, I also picked up on trying to be more regular, even on LinkedIn. For me, that was just an opportunity to not need to job hunt anymore, not need to be the one searching for what the next great opportunity needs to be.
I saw a direct correlation with more people head hunting me, more people looking out for me to participate, to partner with something. Once I started leaning into posting more on LinkedIn, even it was just about sharing some of my difficult moments, the winds and the tough times and moving around.
And you’d always find that there’ll be some things that you think to yourself, I don’t want to share, this will be annoying or nobody wants to hear about this.
And it will be those posts that get the most interaction, the most engagement, the most. Oh my God, I can’t believe that you’re doing this because sometimes and I have moved around a lot because I’ve always had a strong sense of I’m not going to stay with somewhere. I’m not happy.
Even if it’s only been there for three years. I’ve only been there for three months. And then you have this weird feeling of like, oh God, I’m not going to post them in a new job. I just have to three months. What would people say?
What would people think? And you get so much amazing support from the get so much amazing support from the community. And I’m like, oh, Jesus, all of these things is just in my head, all this weird in my head.
And so actually now that almost even motivated me to even do more of it and to encourage other people as well who are also having that whole, Lord, I want to leave, but I don’t know whether I should.
And there are just some things that a lot of it is just in your head, and you just need to push it out to realize that.
Managing personal and professional voices on social media
Fred: Sorry to interject here. I said sorry, let me take the opportunity. Thank you for letting me interject. But I find this really interesting because I think you’re going into the personal voice and the professional voice that Navah brought up earlier in the show.
And that’s actually something that I personally struggle with. I think I have way more of a professional voice. For some reason, all digital marketers are on Twitter. That’s the place. Like nobody else in the world seems to enjoy Twitter anymore.
And then people come up and they’re like, well, why aren’t you doing more Instagram? Why aren’t you making TikTok videos about PPC? Is that something that you have all looked at and talk more about?
That how you draw the line between the personal and the brand voice? Because it sounds like you kind of mix both together. You do that across platforms as well?
Anu: Yeah, I do that together, probably on this one. All the different paid social channels have different ways of working. Instagram is not going to work the same way Facebook will work.
It’s not the same with Twitter. So you cannot just say, oh, paid social voice. And I’ll do the same thing across all the different channels. That will fail. So I think it’s definitely very important to realize what works for you.
How many voices can you materialize? And that might sound a bit like for personality disorder, but no, I think with LinkedIn, I know that I can handle just posting like, let’s say once a day, Monday to Friday, because that is a professional network.
That’s how I see it. I see some people doing it in different ways. And it worked very well for them. And for me, I see it in a way that they probably put in a lot more work, a lot more time into it than I have.
And I don’t. And the pace at which I’m going, the growth that I’m seeing works for me. I’m happy with it. With Twitter, it’s a lot more conversational. It’s a lot more like nuance. You can have a little bit of fun and play with it.
So I’ll do more long posts on LinkedIn, but I can throw in like a random thought that has just come in my head at 1:00 P.m. Might be about coffee, might be about Google, either one.
I might post it, it might work. It might not work. And I think one thing also has to remember people that have to remember is that because one post doesn’t work, doesn’t mean the next won’t.
So because you’ve failed one or two posts or didn’t get rid of the engagement.
Fred: Now you get back in your head and you’re like, oh my God, people don’t like what I’m talking about working today.
Anu: No, just keep going with some of their channels. You just need to keep going with it.
Fred: And, Akvile. I realize we should definitely bring this one back to you because you’re the social expert. So what do you think about that?
Akvile: I feel like I’ve been struggling the last two years. I have a toddler now, so juggling that with COVID and a baby. I haven’t done as much as I want to year into, but the creativity that tries to resurface is not something that’s been really great the last two years.
But before that, I try to figure out who the audience is, what I want to convey with Twitter, I use it mostly for marketing. I’ll throw in a few things that are personally just to add that human component because I also do want to share certain things with that community and other people that might be my followers with LinkedIn, the professional as well.
But something like Instagram. I do enjoy sharing some work related things, but I know that it’s much more a lot of marketing friends on there from the industry, but also just people that don’t work in this space.
So I try to be a little respective of like what would they be interested in as well from my profile.
Fred: And you use your personal profile but you share marketing stuff through it.
Akvile: Yes, because there’s too much to handle too. I try to do just one for AKvertise, but I’m like, I work remotely. I’ve been working remotely for ten years and there’s only so much you can do.
And I know I can get creative there, but I’m just limited on bandwidth. So for instance on Instagram, since it is my personal account and people know what I do, I will share things like when we used to go more to in-person events like, hey, I’m here, this is what we’re doing just to make it exciting for people that are also not in this space.
So for instance, I just moved last weekend and finally set up my office again little by little. So I shared the thing like, oh, you know, my office is set up and about to do this really great conversation with some people I respect and have learned or come from.
So that type of stuff is still career related, but it kind of intertwines with personal. So I think it’s best to understand how do you want to be conveyed to the people that follow you, whether you’re public or private on different channels, or if you’re younger, maybe greener to the industry, what your goal is, what do you want to be known for?
How do you want to evolve your account, your persona per se, but just try to mix in a little bit personal so people know that there is a more human warmth component to you if they can approach you about something else.
Because while we do work most of our week, most of our lives, I think it’s also important to show that life is not just work. We should work to live, to work whatever you want to do.
But at some point, it’s not 100% right. We’re multifaceted beings. So I think it’s okay to put out some personal stuff in between career oriented posts as well.
Navah, Akvile, and Anu share how to get buy-in for your ideas
Fred: Thanks for sharing that. All right, let’s shift topics here a little bit. And Navah maybe we’ll go back to you. Okay, so now you run a consultancy. You’re having to go out there. I’m sure people are knocking down your door to work with you, but at the end, you still have to sell. Right?
So how do you get buy-in sales situations and throughout your career, when you were perhaps presenting to a room full of men, how do you get buy-in how do you get them to trust you?
I know the personal brand that you built was something that helped you before. Those people listening today who haven’t quite gotten to that personal brand level, what advice would you give to be like that trusted expert in getting buy-in more easily.
Navah: So I’m going to give advice of what you should do and then give advice of what you shouldn’t do. We’re going to start with what you should do. Be genuine and authentic in what you can reasonably provide.
Do not allow anyone to pressure you into hard metrics, hard goals that you will deliver on. Instead, lean into what you can specifically provide. So, for example, one client I’ve taken on, we’re now going into a monthly retainer.
They started off on just projects. They wanted hard metrics of what the fixes that I was proposing would be able to deliver them. And I flat out refused. I will not promise you something that I cannot guarantee will happen.
These are the things I’m expecting to happen. This is why I’m expecting to happen and give data behind why. And it all worked out. And now they kept asking me, hey, what do you think about this?
What do you think about this? Like, you know what, if you would like to be on a monthly retainer, let’s be on a monthly retainer. Otherwise, we’re going to need to make these projects.
And they found the advice, they found the value I was able to provide useful that they ended up going with that retainer.
Fred: What I’m hearing is you’re kind of doing the pushback earlier on rather than sort of like going with the flow.
Navah: Correct. And this goes to what you shouldn’t do. Don’t devalue yourself by giving away your brilliant mind for free. A lot of times when I was younger, I was so insecure in my intelligence that I felt the need to prove it, and I would give away everything of value right up front.
And so by the time it came to actually selling and the time it came to actually securing the clients, they didn’t need me because I had already given them everything away for free.
Fred: You built a software to make it easy to run it?
Navah: Yeah, exactly. And I think that’s actually one of the reasons why I lean so heavily on software is because you’re able to build out solutions. And even if you solve one thing with a lot of wit for free at the beginning, just to kind of what the appetite, you still can then build those really interesting Iterative solutions.
So I find it easiest to work in that space. But for those that are just getting started, it is okay to give a tidbit of advice. You do not need to give everything away for free. The other thing that’s very important to own is what kind of tone do you need to bring to the conversation.
There are certain people when I’m speaking to them. I am a very clean cut. I lean very much into the fact that I am a well-educated college grad. I’ve been in the industry 15 years. I will lean into every single award I’ve won.
There are other people where I’m far more casual, far more accessible. I have sold more high value deals on my Star Wars geekery than my actual PPC knowledge. Because when you like who you do business with, it’s so much easier to have that conversation, so much easier to grow that relationship.
If everything feels like it’s nickel and diming or a fight that it’s not a healthy relationship. And it doesn’t matter if you get one really big month of MRR or one really big month of spend, if the relationship will be poor, if there will be a lack of trust, if there will always be this question of value, you will hate that work and you will ultimately do bad work.
And then that will feed your impostor syndrome. And then it’ll just be bad. So find folks that you enjoy working with own your value. Do not give everything away for free, and test the limit of how much people are willing to charge.
Like I started off when I was first doing my pricing at $100 an hour. I now get $250 an hour for just consultative work. And people don’t bat an eye at it because they know that they are going to get much more value out of that spend.
So don’t be afraid to test your prices and look for those friend relationships within your authority voice.
Fred: And then I guess we all go about pricing a little bit the same way, right? When I ran an agency, maybe I can shortly, briefly in between doing Google and Optmyzr, but I was like, okay, let me charge this much.
That’s my comfort limit of what I can ask for. And then people would consistently say yes. And I was like, oh, maybe I can increase it a little. So that’s how you get there. But also ask around in the industry, because if everyone’s saying yes because you’re under pricing yourself by half, then that’s no good, right?
Hey, Akvile, let’s go to you about getting buy-in from clients, existing clients, new clients. How have you handled it?
Akvile: It’s easier now. I feel like since I have a lot of experience throughout the years, but when I was younger, it was certainly more challenging being green, and I feel like I wasn’t very confident in my voice.
I was nervous about public speaking, so I feel like people can pick up the tone in your voice. And if you’re not sounding very confident, it’s much more difficult to get a buy-in. So few years back, I knew this was an issue for myself and I needed to overcome it, especially if I wanted to be successful in business and I wanted to start speaking at conferences.
So I went to Toastmasters. And if this is an issue for you, it’s wonderful, wonderful global organization. I didn’t miss a single weekly meeting for a year, and my first speaking engagement was a keynote at the Adobe campus in Salt Lake City, which I never thought I could get to that point.
But going to Toastmasters helped me so much in being able to be present when I’m speaking to use a more confident tone, even if I’m not feeling confident, if I’m having a bad day and I have to do a presentation or do a sales call with a prospective client.
I’ve noticed that same thing. Like, I’ll test different prices, and I was so worried about doing that. I’m like to say it with confidence, even if I’m not feeling confident, maybe practice before I hop on the call.
And I have not had anybody push back. So that gave me more confidence to the next call, the next call. And I feel like even if you’re feeling like an imposter, you’re not feeling at your best, just practicing it out loud.
And don’t hesitate to try not to stumble. Of course, we all stumble from time to time, but as long as you convey it that way, then that prospective client will be confident in your scales and be like, okay, she can say that voice or that price, then she’s worth that most likely.
And as Navah pointed out, definitely sense out how that relationship is going to be and set the boundaries. Set the expectations early on because there are so many red flags that you can pick up over the years as you do this longer of what a good relationship is and sense it out.
Trust your gut, because one has anyone ever said I shouldn’t have trusted my gut? Right. Especially if you’re more intuitive and working with people. But I feel like that’s very important to do, especially if you are looking to be more forward facing, work up at a company to more executive position or a VP of some sort or just working for yourself, because that will help set the tone for your business and your success.
Fred: It’s amazing advice and I have to make light of this, sadly. But I should have not trusted my gut when my good friend told me five, six years ago that I should have bought Bitcoin, I was like, no, in the world that this can be right.
Akvile: You’re not alone.
Fred: So, yeah, we all have regrets. But in the end, you’re right. I mean, trust your gut, because I think there’s regrets of opportunities missed are very different from regrets of having taken on a bad client who’s made your life so stressful that you hate your job, you don’t get time with your kids.
I think those are two very different things. So that’s great advice. Anu, what about you?
Anu: What about me about?
Fred: Pushing back, right so a room full of men you got to present to them first time, they don’t believe you. Maybe before you had your personal brain, before you were who you are today, you’re younger. How would you have dealt with that room?
Anu: I think I definitely have to give credit for that for me to again, it’s something that I’ve mentioned, like my family, I come from a very overachieving, confident family, and I’ve always been like, I have that running through my veins.
Like, if I’m in a room, I deserve to be in a room. If I’m on a stage, I deserve to be on that stage. Especially my first speaking gig, I had a bit of stage fright and I just mentioned it and I was like, yeah, let’s just throw it out there.
Look very nervous my first one, and then I just got into my talk and it had such great feedback, and I was like, well, that’s not too hard. In fact, the way I started thinking about it is that if you’re the person brave enough to be the one standing up there and talking, you’ve got something of value to say.
You’ve done the brave thing. You’ve done the good thing to start off with. So your audience have every right to listen to you. And so I’ve always just made sure that I always come well prepared, always come with my confidence, and never feel bad about not being able to answer certain questions because you don’t necessarily need to have all the answers, all the questions on the spot.
It’s okay to say, Sorry, that bit that you’ve just asked me, I don’t know, but this is what I know. And that bit that I don’t know, I’ll research it and come back to you because everyone’s learning, everyone’s going, and you won’t always have the answers all the time.
So at the end of the day, it’s just about making sure that you do your preparation, but you don’t get flustered if there’s something that has been up about that you do not know and just keeping at it.
It’s also very much a relentless game. I think how I’ve really stuck in is that even in the good days and bad days, just realizing I just need to get back in there people, things will fail. Things will not always go right.
But there’s a 50 50% chance that you could get something if you present yourself. There’s 100% chance you won’t get it if you don’t show up at all.
So the biggest thing is to just continue to showing up and try to be better than the last time. All right.
Fred: Wayne Gretzky said you missed 100% of the shots you don’t take.
Anu: Absolutely.
Fred: I love the whole preparation thing and being true to your voice. Right. So when presentations go badly, whether that’s a presentation on stage or a presentation in front of a bunch of clients, it’s when you’re presenting somebody else’s work and you don’t know the detail. Right.
And it’s okay to not have all the answers like you said, but you should be the expert. You should really know what you’re talking about because people will call you the bullshit. All right.
So this has been amazing. I want to have a lightning round here one piece of advice you would give your younger you.
Akvile, Anu, and Navah share one piece of advice they give their younger selves
Akvile: All right, I’ll go first. Kind of piggybacking off the last question. I wish I had a stronger voice when I was younger. I think a lot and I internalized a lot, but it doesn’t. And I feel like I just had this wall up where I wouldn’t externalize it, which I didn’t learn until much later.
And I finally started speaking up and telling people my opinion. I used to be afraid of not being liked, and I’m getting to the point where not everyone’s going to like you, and that’s okay.
So I would just tell myself to not be afraid to speak up and to have gone to Toastmasters when I was younger. It’s great advice.
Fred: Who wants to go next?
Anu: My advice. The first thing that came to my mind is your imposter syndrome voice is wrong. That’s really the biggest advice. There will be situations, especially there are situations that you feel that maybe I shouldn’t have done that or that went wrong.
I shouldn’t speak my mind up here. That voice is wrong. Almost like similar to speak up, it’s better to speak up and maybe to be corrected than to just not speak up at all.
It’s better to still speak up because your imposter syndrome voice is wrong.
Fred: About the imposter syndrome. There’s this whole notion that experts it’s like this self-fulfilling prophecy. Once you’re an expert, you can say almost anything you want and people will believe it because you are the expert.
And so I think if you’re that younger person sitting in the room with someone with much more experience, I mean, do realize that often they may not be quite as hands-on with these very rapidly shifting tool sets and systems.
And so their perception on it may not be as accurate as yours. Right. And so there may be a disconnect between what you think and what you hear from the experts, but that doesn’t necessarily mean the expert is right.
And that’s where I think it’s really important. What you’re saying is don’t necessarily challenge them, because challenging someone doesn’t necessarily lead to productive outcome, but help them see the other side, ask about the other side.
Maybe they haven’t thought about it and start having that conversation because everybody gets smarter that way.
Anu: Absolutely. It’s important that we can discuss and that’s what’s so amazing about the #PPCchat community. It’s important that we can discuss what’s working for one person and might not be working for another person.
And how Google brings a lot of striving with all the updates. And some people like, oh, it’s working for me. And other people are like, no, it’s not. It’s the worst thing ever. And it’s really great to be part of that community that lets you see that, well, it’s not about it’s good or it’s bad.
It’s all about testing it to see if it works. And you can test loads of different things. And a test will work for one client. It will not work for another client. And there’ll be different loads of different caveats you need to put into place to say things work.
Because, yeah, you have all these thought leaders on Twitter who was like, bring this big sentence, bring this big statement. And I think it’s important that they be like, the caveat, though, is that always missed out.
That’s why sometimes I add to the conversation, someone put this big sentence, I was like, well, “It depends”. “It depends” is one of our favorite phrases in this industry.
Fred: That’s what makes Twitter so difficult for PPC, because it’s like, well, here’s the answer. And then here’s the ten caveats to that.
Akvile: Hot take.
Anu: Yeah, right. Navah, sorry. You go ahead. You give us your amazing tidbit.
Navah: I back up all that’s been said, I guess simply just own your power. You have power in your questions. You have power in your wit. You have power in your work ethic. You have power in every single choice that you make.
And even if something is not quite right, and even if you get set back a little bit, there is power in overcoming it and having that data point that you have overcome that adversity and you own your voice and your power.
There have been several instances in my career where people have tried to shake that. And I think one of the reasons why I appreciate so much this industry is that there are so many opportunities for true teeth in technical expertise and then also witness strategy to kind of protect those that are actually good and put to the side those that might try to shake confidence of the worthy.
So own your power, own your worth. Do not allow anyone to make you question that.
Wrapping it up
Fred: Great advice from everyone. Well, thank you so much. Viewers, thanks for watching. If you’ve enjoyed this episode you want to get more of PPC Town Hall, use the subscribe button.
You can also subscribe to the email list on our website. That way you’ll find out when we have new episodes. They roughly happen about twice a month. So thank you to our panelists - Akvile, Navah, and Anu. You’ve been fantastic.
Thank you for sharing all these wonderful insights and for remaining thought leaders, experts and educators. Most of all, let’s get rid of that box. We’re covering Anu’s face. Let’s go to this view.
No, that doesn’t work. Okay, how about this view? This is better. We can see everyone. So thanks for joining us. That little thing that was up at the bottom of the screen. My producer is trying to tell you that I just wrote a book “Unlevel the playing field”.
Go ahead and check that out on Amazon but again, thank you so much for being here. Thanks for sharing. Hope to have you again on another episode and have a wonderful day, everyone.
With RSAs going to be the only standard text format starting from July 1, 2022, there’s going to be a pretty big shift in how PPC marketers approach text ads.
In this episode of PPC Town Hall, we spoke to Julie Bacchini and Ed Leake — two well-known PPC experts with great RSA experience under their belt — to talk about how to deal with this transition.
Here’s the full episode with the transcript.
Full episode:
Transcript:
Fred’s introduction to the episode.
Fred: Hello, and welcome to another episode of PPC Town Hall. My name is Fred Vallaeys. I’m your host and I’m also the co-founder and CEO of Optmyzr.
So hot topics in PPC…Well, let’s see. Automation, Performance Max, RSAs.
So let’s talk about one of these. This week we’re going to talk about RSAs. Responsive Search Ads, as you all know, is the ad format that’s going to become the standard ad text format in Google Ads. It’s replacing the long-loved Expanded Text Ad.
And before that, regular text ad. But basically what’s happening is Google is saying, you no longer have to write a fully qualified ad text with a bunch of headlines and a bunch of descriptions.
Instead, just give Google the components. Give them a bunch of headlines, a bunch of descriptions, a bunch of calls to action. And Google’s automation will put it together based on what it thinks is going to be the best ad to serve for that specific auction, that specific search.
So there’s a pretty big shift that’s happening. And we’ve got some great experts with us today to talk about what you would do as the shift happens to RSAs. And we really have to start thinking differently about how we manage messaging and attics on Google.
I’m really excited about this episode. Let’s get rolling with PPC Town Hall.
The panelists introduce themselves.
Fred: All right. Our two guests this week are Ed and Julie. Welcome to the show.
Ed: Thanks for having me.
Julie: Thanks for having me. Yeah.
Fred: Thanks for coming back, Julie. We’ll start with you. So let’s do a quick introduction to who you are, what you do, and what you know about RSAs.
Julie: Okay. I’m Julie Friedman Bacchini, and I have sort of dual roles in the world of PPC. I have my own consultancy, Neptune Moon. I’ve been in paid search since literally the beginning, so I’ve seen it all.
This is yet another change that is happening. And I also manage PPC chat on Twitter. So I am managing all of the weekly chats and trying to be a source of the latest information gathered.
It’s hard to keep up with everything. So I do my best every week to try to gather information and make sure people can easily find what they need to keep up with what’s going on in the ever-changing world of PPC. Yeah.
Fred: And thank you for doing PPC chat. We’re big fans here. It’s just a different format to get your news, basically, and then have a great discussion around it. So I’m a fan of Search Engine Land. I’m a fan of PPC Town Hall if you prefer video.
But PPC chat is awesome because it’s just on Twitter. And even if you don’t have time when it’s live. And Julie, it’s usually what, Wednesdays at 09:00 AM Pacific?
Julie: We have two chats per week now. One is the traditional Twitter-based chat, and that’s at 12:00 Eastern on Tuesdays and then at 12:00 Eastern on Thursdays. We have been doing an audio version in Twitter spaces of typically the same topic that we talked about on Tuesday of that week.
Fred: Nice. So, yeah, check those out. And Ed, first time on the show. It’s great to have you on. So tell us a little bit about who you are, what you’re doing, what you know about RSA.
Ed: Yeah. Hi, I’m Ed. Thanks for having me on. So I’ve been an agency owner for twelve years and my side project is Ad Evolver, which is a Google Ads optimization tool.
Not sure if I’m allowed to mention this, Fred.
Fred: Yeah (laughs).
Ed: You can edit this bit out (laughs).
Fred: There are many great tools out there. Right. So let’s use them for what they’re best at. Not a problem at all.
Ed: And then to keep myself busy, I also started God Tier Ads about a year or so ago, which is a Google Ads training framework and product, that sort of thing.
Fred: So you’re basically saying you don’t do so much.
Ed: I don’t sleep. I don’t have kids, though. So I’ve got an excuse to work, unfortunately. That does help.
Google’s latest update on RSAs.
Fred: So, yeah, let’s talk a little bit about RSAs then. I think maybe we’ll start with what is happening. So I talked about how this is becoming the new ad format.
The latest news we have from Google is that the end of Q2 is the last day that you can still put in traditional text ads. These are called ETAs.
ETAs are expanded text ads because before that they were not expanded. So ETA is just like a regular ad, but basically end of Q2 and then starting in Q3, I think you can still pause and enable ETAs, or you can no longer make edits.
You can no longer make a new one. So that’s kind of the timeline we’re working with now. How aggressive have both of you and or your customers been with kind of this transition?
How are Julie and Ed dealing with Google’s transition to RSAs?
Ed: Julie? Ladies first.
Julie: Oh, thank you. I have been working with RSAs for quite a while because it feels so different when you’re creating. It’s so different from how we’ve done ads up until this point, even the regular text ads and then the expanded text ads where you had more characters to work with and the extra headlines and that kind of thing.
RSAs are just a totally different animal. And so when you’re used to writing and I’ve been doing this for a long time. So when you’re used to writing the more traditional ads, you’re used to coming up with your ideas for testing like, oh, what if we test this offer against this or we move this in this position and whatnot.
It’s really different when you start to create the RSA because you’re putting in so many elements into a single ad. So you’re like, my God, I have to come up with ten headlines. I have to come up with four different descriptions.
It’s a very different way of thinking and a different process that you have to go through. So I’ve been working with them for a while now and knowing that this date was coming when you wouldn’t even have the option to create new ones.
I’ve been working harder on them, and I know we’re going to get into this later, but once you start using our sales in your ad groups, your ETAs don’t tend to serve a whole lot.
So there’s that whole dynamic that you start to deal with as well.
Ed: Yeah, I mean, pretty much the same as me. We essentially adopted them as soon as they were available because Fred shared at the start of this call, actually, sorry to do the thing of sharing information that we haven’t recorded, but what was it? 17% of people haven’t tried an RSA yet.
So the argument is that they’re behind. We always test new features as soon as they come out, to be honest with you. And it’s normally an easy sell to clients anyway, because new things normally mean you get a little bit of an edge.
But yeah, with what Julie said, RSA is a different mindset because it’s less about the A/B. You’ve got one version versus the other. It’s more about making the struggle of writing 15 headlines that make sense, which is why you shouldn’t write 15 headlines, probably.
So our approach to the RSA situation overtime was essentially treated like two ETAs. So you have to do twice the work but compress your two ETAs down to a single RSA. That’s the way I sold it to the team anyway, to make it sound like it’s no more work to do an RSA.
Fred: Exactly. I think when Google launches new stuff, we don’t always jump in feet first because there are plenty of things that they launch and they just go to advertisers and they say, hey, can you please try this?
Because they’re honestly just trying to see if this is any good. In the case of RSA, I guess it was pretty clear relatively early on that, it was going to be a winner for Google and that they were going to push it through.
Right. But always be a little bit cautious. I suppose you don’t want to be the guinea pig in the Alpha necessarily, but once it comes to a beta stage, I tend to agree to jump in, because being early on may give you some benefits.
Even if you don’t get benefits, there’s this whole benefit, right. When Google introduces something new like you’re the only ad on the page doing that new thing. And even if you do it horribly, it looks different and you’re still going to get more clicks because people are like, oh, what’s that like?
There are four lines of something or there’s a little image next to it, so they just gravitate towards it.
Right. But then even the early learnings that you have in those extra couple of months that you’ve sort of figured out what’s the strategy. What’s the best process here that can be really beneficial?
So the RSA study that we did at Optmyzr, so we’ve done two of them.
We did it once for SMX Next in 2020, and then we did it again in SMX next 2021. But we ran through a bunch of ads, millions and millions of ads that we run through the Optmyzr system.
And we looked at how many advertisers had not yet tried RSAs at all. Last year, that was at about 25%. This year, that’s down to about 17%. But that’s still kind of a shocking number like you said. Right.
So 17% of people, given that this is going to go away in about four months, have still not experimented with the new ad format. What’s also fascinating is that for those who have tried it, only a very tiny portion of 0.2% tried RSAs and then stopped all RSAs.
So what that kind of tells me, and you’re welcome to take a different angle on this, but it kind of tells me that when you turn on RSAs, they seem to do something good enough that people want to stick with it.
Do you think that’s an okay read, or do you think it’s just that people are like, well, this is the thing I’m going to have to deal with, so I might as well fight the bullet and go with it?
Ed: I think it’s all the above, isn’t it? It’s easier as well. To a certain degree, you can be RSA is going to create a few lazy account managers. Dare I say it? And I know a lot watching this stream, but that’s an opportunity for other people that aren’t so lazy. No offense.
Fred: I’m kind of curious as far as the lazy account manager. So what were both of your strategies in the beginning? So say that a new client comes to you and they haven’t done RSAs? Like, would you go and write entirely new ad units, or would you just do the conversion and take their existing ETAs and turn them into like chunk them out into headline pieces and description pieces and put them in the right place in the RSA?
Ed: Right now? So one of that 17.5% turned up, knocked on the door, and said, we don’t have any RSAs, take the best ETAs. Hopefully, they’ve got a good year’s data and more than two ETAs and take the best components and create an RSA.
I don’t want to jump ahead because now we’re going to talk about optimization and stuff, but there are some sweet spots as well for the amount of headlines and that sort of thing.
But yeah, easy street. And also, I just want to say that when I said lazy, by the way, I don’t want to offend anyone if they’re really good at ad copy and really smart. Then be lazy because you could create an awesome RSA and get away with it for some time, probably.
Julie: Well, I mean, RSAs are definitely testing of ads as we have historically known. It isn’t just not going to exist anymore in the world of RSA. Right.
Historically, up until this point, when you wanted to kind of test different things and figure out maybe what would be more successful in your ads, you would do A/B test between expanded text ads, and then you would know the variable that you were testing, hopefully.
You had a testing plan of like what you were doing. You weren’t just kind of like randomly doing things. But if you had any method to what you were doing as far as what you were testing, it was pretty clear where you were going.
And then you could record those results and then try to build off of that. The way that RSAs function is completely different. Like that traditional mindset and that traditional method of I’m going to test headline A against headline B. Right. Like everything else in the ad is going to be the same.
But I want to see what happens if we have a different headline. You can’t do that, really. Theoretically, I guess you could do that with pinning of things. That’s the whole piece I’m sure we’re going to get into.
But just the whole way that you think about RSAs and how you use them and what kind of information you can glean from them, it’s totally new territory.
Fred: I have this fascinating example that I always give, which is you have an ad group and then the ad group has ten keywords. Okay. And now you have an A/B test, but you actually decide to make the B version the same as the A version, but you just make it as a new ad and you see what happens.
And then traditional A/B testing, where you’re usually looking for what is the best headline, you will often actually find that the A/A test has a winner and a loser. It doesn’t make sense. It’s the same ad. Right. But the thing that people then forget is while you had ten keywords and this ad group is running for all those ten keywords.
And by the way, these keywords might be broad matches. So the thing that the person actually typed in wasn’t that keyword.
It was some fairly out their variation, because broad match, as we know, is not that restrictive. And then it’s a different audience, it’s a different time of day. Like it’s different geography that is coming in from they Typed in a different query and they saw an A/A test and one of the ads starts winning. Right?
So then the question is, was it really the ad that was driving that change, or was it the fact that other circumstances with the keyword and clearly the second. But that’s a mistake people make.
And so that’s where I think you have to be careful. And RSAs are a bit better because if they do their job, as Google promises it, they should figure out what are those circumstances around each search inquiry and then put together the right ad for that person so that even if you’re not doing the AB testing, they kind of do it for you.
Ed: Yeah, but I agree with that. But the example of A/B testing with ten broads is that’s a setup issue as well. Don’t get me wrong, a lot of people do it wrong and don’t have a controlled test.
But yeah, I agree, and people misread them. And as a result of that, you got 10,000 queries driving two ads off the back of a dozen keywords, and then within seven days pick a winning ad. It wasn’t really the winner.
And as Julie said, it’s not that straightforward anymore, RSAs, is it? But also to touch on what Julie said, we’re going to lose that compounding benefit of doing proper AB tests. The trial and error of A/B tests over a period of time does give incremental value to an account. We’re going to lose that.
So I’m interested to see for the people that are quite strict with AB testing, how that will that compounding performance will go away, potentially, unless the machine learning is that good, that this is all mute, then we just stick a light about it and walk away.
Fred: So given that there’s this compounded benefit of continuous AB testing, obviously with RSA you can still do pinning, right? So you could technically make the equivalent of an ETA by pinning everything to a certain position.
Google says, well, you lose the benefit of the machine learning doing its thing. But as you would argue, you get the benefit back of the A/B testing, I guess.
How good and dedicated are you? And then you can do better than the machine? Or is there a happy medium?
Ed: I think analytical people really struggle with ad copy and add writing. I’ve looked at God knows, hundreds, maybe thousands of accounts. I don’t know, I’ve lost count. And I think it’s the single weakness of most PPC managers is the ad copy.
So can they beat the machine? Probably not over the long run. So I’m defending Google now and the machine. So hold on, I’ve offended PPC managers, and now, oh God! Do know evil.
I think, in fact, that is one of the angles that a PPC manager, particularly freelancers and small agencies, can take is to team up with really good copywriters and admit that it’s not their strength.
And if you’re going to fill stuff, if you’re going to fill an RSA, make it worthwhile. But I’m going off on a tangent.
Fred: Well, yeah, let’s hear from you, Julie. How do you feel about that? So you work with a number of accounts. How many people do you work with right now?
Julie: Neptune Moon is just me. It’s been various sizes over the years, but currently, in the pandemic world, it’s just me.
Fred: How important is the ad testing and what do you think of Ed’s point?
Because I do agree we tend to be so analytical, and the reason that I got into PPC was more my technical side and my analytical side more so than being a marketer or a great messenger. How do you feel about that?
Julie: So I come from more of a creative background. I was a marketing person, but I also did design, I did PR and marketing, and design. I have more of that writing background.
So for me, I like writing the ads. That’s not a challenging piece for me. That’s well within my particular wheelhouse.
But I think one of the challenges is this is what happens a lot with stuff with Google. They have a particular type of advertiser in mind when they move forward in different directions, and then everyone else kind of has to figure out how to work within the parameters of what ends up happening.
So I think I’m hopeful that because RSAs, in the grand scheme of things, is relatively new, as it becomes the only option, some things will evolve. So we talked a little bit about this on #PPCchat.
Within the last week, we were talking about how there are quite a few instances in industries where you have to pin stuff like, from a compliance standpoint, not every Advertiser in every industry is on even footing as far as how flexible you can be in what happens in your ad copy.
And I think RSAs are not equipped to deal with that properly right now. I hope that that’s something that is being thought about inside of Google because right now the big push is to go broad match plus RSA plus smart bidding. Right?
That’s the golden triangle that they talked about, in their Welcome to 2022 presentation from last week. And that’s all well and good, but there are quite a few industries, and then there are other businesses who feel strongly like, I want to make sure that my business name, for example, is in that first headline.
So I don’t feel like RSAs right now do a great job with that. They clearly want you to not have anything pinned. Like, the preference is definitely I’m running an experiment right now in a couple of my accounts where I’m running the exact same ad where I have pinned some of the assets, and I have everything else unpinned, and it’s really preferring the unpinned ad.
So I think there are definitely some things that I’m keeping my eye on as far as things that you might want to adopt. Right. Because it’s like, okay, well, Google is telling you this is where it’s going, and we all know that you can’t swim upstream against Google forever.
Right? It’s futile. So you have to figure out how to work within the parameters and with the system that Google is going to provide for you. But I still have some questions, and I hope that these are things that are kind of like on the board over at Google where they’re figuring out, like, hey, we might want to think about this, or this is something that is going to affect a certain percentage of advertisers.
So that kind of remains to be seen. So those are some holes that I’m seeing right now.
What’s the impact of pinning assets in RSAs?
Fred: Yeah. And let’s get into the tactics a little bit. And I know you wanted to get into those two and the strategies, but before we do, like on the pinning topic that Julie brought up.
So part of our study looked at the impact of pinning. So you can see the chart on the screen. And for those of you listening, not watching, basically, if you pin, your conversion rate goes up slightly, but your cost also goes up.
So your cost per click is higher, your cost per conversion is higher, CPR is lower. Right. And that’s kind of the whole premise that Google believes that if you let them figure out how to make the ad, it’s going to be more relevant.
Hence have a higher click-through rate. But then it might be the wrong message. So maybe that’s why the conversion rate gets slightly worse.
And then I think the cost per click is heavily associated with the CTR that’s the ad rank, the quality score component. If you have a lower CTR, you just have to pay more to maintain that same position.
So that’s why the cost goes up. From that perspective, pinning helps you with your metrics to some degree, but it’s very counterintuitive to what Google wants you to do. Of course, if you’re in an industry where you have to do it, then you have no choice.
Ed: Okay, sorry, Fred. To interrupt. Did you do multi-pinning versus single-pinning?
Fred: We did. Where is that one? We did multi versus single pinning as well.
Ed: Because I think that would be interesting because I definitely see that pinning impacts the impression share, particularly top of page rate as well, which, again, that’s Google being.
I’m not allowed to swear, am I?
Julie: Googley. They’re being Googley.
Ed: Yeah, it’s…But it screws over. Found the word that didn’t have an FC or B in it. Screws over the people that can’t… They have very strict brand guidelines that Julie was just talking about because we found a single pin is quite damaging to impression share, not necessary to performance metrics.
I’m just trying to look at the screen. If you took a few outliers there, really conversion rates, I mean, cost per click, look at that bumps. But the conversion metrics look similarish for a pin, but they hurt click-through rate and they bump CPC.
So essentially you’re losing the auction. If you pin so Google’s forcing your hand, it’s like another layer to qualify for.
Fred: So one interesting thing about pinning and this is a tactic people should definitely try. In the beginning of RSAs, you could pin a single thing to a single position. So you could be like, this needs to be my headline one, and maybe that was your brand, whatever.
Right? But then over time, I don’t think they really announced it kind of like snuck in. But now you can pin multiple variations to the same position. So one technique that seems to make sense to me is I want my headline to be something about my brand.
How do I portray my brand? I don’t know. Is it my domain name? Is it my company name? I don’t know. But I’m going to have three variations as headlines that are something to do with my brand.
I’m going to pin all of those to position one, and that’s what this chart on the screen shows is if you do no pinning, then Google prefers your ad because they have the most liberty to do whatever.
If you pin a single thing to a single position, Google doesn’t like it because you’re basically going back to kind of an ETA, very highly defined. If you do the thing where you pin multiple things to one position, then the results do improve.
Now it’s kind of like that happy medium. Google’s happier because they have flexibility. You’re happier because you got some control. So that seems to be kind of the way to go. If you feel like you want more control, does that make sense?
All right, since we’re talking about tactics, Julie, you were talking to about once you start RSA, your ETAs get very little love from Google, their impressions go way down. Do you want to talk about that a little bit more about what you saw?
How have RSAs impacted ETA impression share so far?
Julie: Yeah, I’ve certainly seen it in my own accounts that once you put an RSA into your ad group, it gets the lion’s share of the impressions almost right away.
I feel like even as a predecessor to this, before RSAs got the amount of preference that they get. Now, even Google had been picking the “winning ETA” almost from Go for probably the last two years.
It’s been really fascinating how they’ve been kind of like in the background, moving us towards this idea of we’re going to pick like, you’re going to tell us some stuff, but we’re going to pick what the best ad is.
So even if you had all your settings and you were just using ETA, where theoretically you wanted to have your ETAs, be able to kind of battle it out a little bit. Google has been choosing a winner, like fast, and you will find that one of your ETAs even was getting the lion’s share of impressions.
So it’s been difficult to even have impressions spread out over multiple ad variations. But now if you put the RSA in a group and you have ETAs, forget it. Your ETAs are occasionally if you have a strong performing ETA, it will still get some.
I have a couple of ETAs that are still getting decent impression share. But they said again in that Welcome to 2022 presentation, they were talking about how once ETAs are deprecated that if you continue to run ETAs, they will “lose value” in the same way that if you are still running broad match modified keywords.
Now they have also “lost value”. So they’re very much kind of telling you very clearly you can keep doing it. But I wouldn’t recommend it because we’re not going to show it. It’s not going to have the value for you that the RSA which they want you to do is going to have.
Fred: Yeah, interesting. And so part of the study that we did as far as RSA versus ETA and the difference in impression volume. So to us, the biggest insight was literally how many more impressions you can drive by having an RSA.
So we did comparisons where it was an ad group and an RSA plus an ETA. It was four to five times as many impressions per ad going to the RSA ads.
Ed: And it’s not just that, Fred. I pulled the end of last year and I don’t know if you’ve done this if you got similar data. I was just looking at the data we pulled.
I can’t remember how many accounts it was. I know it was like 8 billion impressions, a 17% increase in top page rate for RSAs, and CPCs were flat. So not only is Google biasing the impression share to an RSA, you’re getting a higher ad rank, essentially.
So it really is rewarding RSA more. That was last year. I got the year before. I don’t know if you saw the same, but to me, that’s the page.
Fred: But that’s the promise of RSA. Right? As Google says, we can show a more relevant ad based on what we know for the auction.
And then yes, naturally you’re going to have a higher ad rank because it’s more relevant ads. Your predicted CTR is higher. And we can see that in the stats where we look at CTRs of RSA versus ETA.
And so even with the same bid, you’re going to score higher, you’re going to take more of those top impressions. But then we did a study on this not two years ago and it was basically, “Look at your keywords and look at when they serve with an ETA versus an RSA and start to understand the incrementality portion of that.”
“And let’s see how many queries search terms exist now that you have RSAs that didn’t exist in your account before.” And that’s really the fascinating thing is that searches that Google before said your expanded text ad is simply not good enough to qualify to show an ad.
All of a sudden with an RSA, they’ve kind of like put together some ad that for some reason now is good enough. And it’s not the only driver of this. But this year we are seeing 4x more impressions.
And then people sometimes complain. They’re like, well, and even if you look at our stats like you get 10% to 20% versus conversion rate from an RSA. But if you get five times the impressions and you’re controlling your bids in a smart way, like five times more impressions, 10% less conversion rate, well, that’s still a hell of a lot more conversions at the end of the day than before.
Ed: Yeah. If your business has got fixed costs, definitely. It makes a lot of sense to scale incrementally and take that additional volume. And there’s a lot of businesses that are volume play insurance and finances and stuff.
I think it hurts potentially sort of small to mid-tier retailers a bit more because they might get more volume. But ROAS, tends to dip, doesn’t it? in some of the conversion metrics of RSA. Excuse me, but then they’ve got shopping, so you can’t have it probably…
Fred: …should be the main thing for them anyway, right?
Yeah. And I know people are very curious too, about Performance Max. So since we’re talking about shopping and automation and all these different apps, did you guys have any thoughts on P Max that you can share with our viewers?
I know it’s not a topic, so it’s totally fine. If you don’t want to talk about it, let’s skip that one.
Ed: Look, Google is heading towards the target is you give me a URL, you give me a budget, and you bugger off and we do everything else for you.
That’s Google’s end game. And is it five years away? Is it ten? Who knows? But it’s understandable because it cuts out all the drift in the middle. Any issues and Performance Max is a bit of a test of that ideology, isn’t it?
But you start to create your ads.
Fred: Exactly. I’ll do a selfless promotion here, but my book came out recently. So this is my second book, ‘Unlevel the Playing Field’, and it’s based on that whole premise that everybody’s basically given the same automation tools from Google and for the most part being told to bugger off like you said.
But what if you don’t want to bugger off? What if we make a living at this, right, Julie and Ed? You find one. Plus your clients expect you to be the difference. So how do you level that playing field back in your favor? You’re right.
I mean, five to ten years down the road, who knows what it’s going to be like? But right now, yes, there are a lot of things you can do to make things better.
Ed: Also, Where’s my free book?
Fred: You’re in the UK. Do you know how there are no ships with containers going across anymore?
Ed: What nonsense? We’re open for business. Come over.
Fred: I actually am coming to London in March and leave it at that point. I’m going to be speaking at HeroConf London. So assuming that that happens also, you’re going to potentially be at SMX Paris that week and doing SMX Munich as well. So little Europe stint.
Ed: Well, let’s not talk about lockdowns and all that nonsense.
What’s the impact of RSAs on ad accounts?
Julie: So I have a question that I don’t know if you’ve looked at the data relative to this Friday when you guys are looking at stuff with RSA, but some of the stuff that’s been going on with RSA, it’s been concurrent with the continued fuzzying of all match types for keywords.
So part of me wonders like, yes, we’re talking about what impact does RSAs have when you’re using that and what data points we mirror. Advertisers don’t have access to what Google does that they’re using to make all of these auction time decisions on our behalf.
What role, again, I think it’s pretty much a black box. So I don’t know how we would tease this particular piece of information out, but I do feel like the Fuzzification, as I like to call it, of the keyword matching definitely is playing a role in all of this, too.
Because even if you’re not following Google’s Golden triangle recommendations and you’re not using full-on broad match with the smart bidding and the RSAs, you’ve got like broad match, like no matter what keyword matching you’ve chosen for your terms.
So that’s a piece that’s at play here at the same time, which is kind of behind the scenes and we’re not really factoring in necessarily, but I think it is playing a role in what happens with your ads as well.
Fred: It’s a great point for those of you not completely familiar with what Julie means with broad match lite, an exact match is no longer an exact match, and it’s becoming less and less exact as time goes on.
And I think that’s what you mean by broad matching. The problem is it’s hard to figure out what part of the incremental impressions and incremental conversions are driven by the match type versus the bid management automation versus the RSA automation.
But listen, one is going off on a bit of a tangent, but one big point in the book. And so, by the way, like the subtitle of the book, the biggest mind shift in PPC history. So what is that biggest mind shift?
To me, it’s like, wow, we’re so used we’ve been doing this for 20 years of managing keywords and search terms and specific bids and specific effects and like all these details and how they come together in these like for this query, we want to do this. For that query, we want to do that.
That’s no longer how ads are going to be managed. So to Julie’s point, it’s a black box and Google does all this stuff that we used to do for us, but the way that we can still influence it and steer the ship if you will, is by managing at the periphery of that system.
So how do we tell Google what we really want, right? We’re not writing them a blank check. We’re writing them a blank check in exchange for a conversion goal that we told them.
But if we don’t directly tell them that conversion goal, then that’s a huge miss because here’s an example. Like, if you say, I want phone calls for my business, well, I don’t want phone calls for my business.
Nobody wants phone calls for your business. You want phone calls that turn into new customers by just having the phone ring doesn’t mean anything. But that’s how a lot of people define to Google what success means.
And then you get all these automations coming together. And how do you find, like, the most conversions for the cheapest price is by giving you the conversions that nobody else wanted to buy?
The phone calls nobody else wanted to buy. The lead form fills that nobody else wanted to buy. The clicks to your shopping site from customers who return 100% of the time, most of 100% of the stuff you sent them. Right. That’s what makes stuff cheap.
And if you’re not, like, measuring that and reporting that back to Google, that’s a huge fail. And so what we have to think about much more is how do we steer the ship at the periphery? So how do we have a better data feed?
And RSAs, I think, is kind of a feed format, too, because instead of writing ads now, it’s like, well, here’s my list of calls to action. Here are my unique value propositions, and here are my brand headlines. That’s my feed. Here you go. Go at it.
But we can still optimize how we position our brand. Like, what is our unique value proposition and how do we communicate.
Julie: It’s harder for smaller organizations. I mean, all the stuff that you’re talking about there, Fred, it’s like, oh, yeah, that’s amazing, right?
Like, yeah, send the value back, figure these pieces out. Make sure that you’re clear inside of your organization. What is the quality of leads that are coming in and trying to put different values on different types of conversions?
That is such a bridge too far for so many organizations. This is where I think this gets really interesting. And this is sort of what happens as these platforms and these ecosystems evolve and mature over time.
They were a very level playing field. And you had a lot of opportunities for organizations of all types and sizes to be able to find success. And as happens as most platforms mature, then it becomes much more stratified.
And I would argue that Google is pretty stratified at this point as far as a lot of the things that the way that the system is built and the way that it’s clearly moving definitely favor larger organizations, retail organizations.
And then you have this whole other swath where figuring out it’s getting them to figure out what that conversion actually is. Or is there more than one type of conversion, and is a phone call more valuable than a form fill or whatever? Right. Like getting them over that line, it’s like, oh, my gosh, that was monumental.
So there’s a large amount of stratification that is happening, and I think it’s going to continue to happen as all the stuff…
Fred: Let me argue the opposite of that a little bit. And I’m the former Google Ads evangelist. Right. So I’ve clearly drank the Kool-Aid. And I need to defend I know how to defend Google’s position on these things.
But from my perspective, I think today it is easier for a novice Advertiser who would have tended to screw things up in the past to not screw it up quite as badly. Right. At the same time, I think those mid-level organizations, they just need to work a little bit harder to achieve that same level of success or a little bit more success than their competition.
And that’s where I think they need us. Right. They can’t go at it alone necessarily. They need expert help. And I think that’s really good for us in this field because as much as it’s become easier, it’s actually also become much harder because the problems we’re solving are no longer problems like keyword selection, but like business value.
And so we become a little bit more business consultants who know how to connect those pieces back into the ad system. Right. If you explain to someone how do you value a phone call, but the math is not that hard. Right?
And you just need to look in your books a little bit to figure that out. But then how do you communicate back to Google? That’s hard.
Luckily, that’s becoming easier. So Google is working on things like GCLID-less conversion tracking. It’s basically the next version of enhanced conversions where you no longer need a GCLID to be put into your CRM, which is really complicated right now. You can just use an email address much easier.
Ed: It’s about time, Fred, that PPC managers, agencies and freelancers became more business-savvy. And people are going to hate me. And I’m divisive probably saying this, but there’s your angle, there’s your edge.
If you know that your clients or potential clients are struggling with this connection between Google and their data, that should be your foot in the door. Not the PPC, not the ads, because every man and his dog does Ads and SEO and so on.
But to actually connect those dots for them, you’ll be their best friend for life. Because then all you got to do is turn on Performance Max.
I’d love that. If that was your book, Fred, it was just completely blank pages, apart from creating a Performance Max campaign. Done.
Fred: I think that’d be hilarious if people paid me money for that book. So, yeah, let’s try it.
Google does see this, or at least the way they position it is an additive campaign in addition to your search campaigns. It will replace smart shopping, but it doesn’t replace anything else.
It’s additive in many ways. But yeah, we’re getting very far afield here from ads, and I think we’re basically all saying the same thing, just different.
Ed: There’s an opportunity, I think.
Here are some RSA tips & tricks.
Fred: Yeah. Hey, so let’s talk about ads. Any other tips and tricks, Ed, I think. Were you talking about multiple RSAs in an ad group or how many headlines you should ideally have?
Ed: Yeah, it’s probably my fault. I know we had questions for this, but I don’t think we followed the script. I pulled some data again just to be Fred like, it’s good to be nerd data.
So essentially what I found from the data is sweet and it’s so difficult to give a one size fits all. So please, if you’re watching this bit of critical thinking, but the sweet spot seems to be around six, seven headlines unless you can genuinely say something unique.
Different. But yeah, six or seven headlines. It’s like combining two ETAs into one.
Fred: So when you say 6 or 7, do you tend to have multiple? Do you kind of classify it into types of headlines?
Ed: Yes. You’ve got probably 25, 30 different types of headlines. It might be a call to action, it might be a feature, it might be a benefit, it might be a location-sensitive thing.
So you have to compartmentalize them into different assets for your ad. What are they? Are they mentioning price? Are they mentioning delivery? Whatever. So obviously then you need to use a bit of common sense to say, Well, I only really need one call to action.
I could test two. I only need one feature benefit. Or I could just test features. I could just test benefits. That’s what I meant in terms of six or seven. Because writing 15 ads headlines, essentially for one bucket of queries is no mean feat to write 15 good headlines, not five good. And then ten shite.
Fred: Shite, you’ve only sworn one so far. You promised many more, Parker.
Ed: I nearly made it for an hour. But yeah, you get the point. So it’s quality over quantity.
If you try and game the system with three or four headlines, it’s very clear that we’ve touched on that. That doesn’t work. But six or seven seems to be at the okay range in terms of where impressions aren’t cut.
But I can see Google moved the goal post on that, unfortunately. But currently, it seems to be where you’re not putting the naughty corner.
Fred: Julie, what advice do you have as far as ad variations and other tips and tricks?
Julie: So in that presentation, I know I’m talking about this a lot, but it was very eye-opening.
As far as what is Google going to be pushing on us here in 2022? They said very clearly that you should only have one RSA going forward just to be like a single RSA in your ad groups.
Part of me can see the logic of that, right? Like, the idea is, okay, you’re going to give us all these assets and we’re going to figure it out and we’re going to serve the best ones, and then you should just not worry about it.
That clearly is Google’s point of view on all of this. I think that again, you have to consider how do you want to test things inside of an RSA? So do you want to create your six, seven, eight headlines?
Let’s say you let those run for a while, see what happens, see which ones are getting served the most, see which combinations are getting served the most, that type of thing. And then when you want to try something different, what will your method be?
Will you add a new headline? Will you create a new version of the RSA that maybe keeps the top three headlines that performed well? And then you’ll create another three or four. You have to think about what you want your methodology to be because again, it’s different.
Like, with ETAs, we would be like, all right, I found one that seems to really be resonating and doing well. Can I write one that’s better? But you don’t have those same capabilities in the same way inside of an RSA.
Fred: I mean, I totally agree with what you’re saying, but for us to do what Google wants us to do, they need to be more forthcoming.
Like, great that you tell me the impression data, but what about conversions? What about costs, right? If that’s not in the picture, I can’t make that decision about what are my best three headlines to keep and maybe vary some of the others.
Julie: I mean, it’s very clear that they don’t want you making those decisions. Right? Like, they want to make suggestions to you and they want to steer you very much in the direction of like, this is what we think you should do.
Now, do I think that that’s what’s going to be best for advertisers? No. Because a lot of times what Google wants you to do, you look at it, you’re like, are you joking?
You read the suggestions and you think like, oh my God, this system really has a long way to go before I would feel confident putting that much trust into this automated system when I see what it’s suggesting. They did also say that there is going to be “more reporting data” available around RSA that is coming at some point in 2022.
Now, what that means, what that data will be, they didn’t get into any specifics. So huge question mark there.
Ed: To be fair, when you’re spending other people’s money, which is what Google is doing, why they haven’t produced that before June, before the cutoff is a bit disgraceful, really.
Again, to touch on what you’re saying, Julie, with testing, I think what I prescribe in God Tier Adsis a dirty A/B. So essentially you run ad variant tests, one RSA, and I agree with you on that.
One RSA, one ETA dies off anyway, typically, and then just run an A/B because you’re forcing Google’s hand to at least try and deliver the impressions fairly across your RSAs. But test one thing in the RSA.
So I call it a dirty A/B because you’re testing a call to action, for example, and doing it on one ad group is probably not ideal. You want to run a theme. So, test the call to action across ten RSAs.
The reason I don’t create a second ad in the ad group is that the experiment works and it gives you a printout of the metrics. So you do actually get to see the A/B result.
And I know it’s not a true A/B, but it’s probably the safest way to do it at the minute, I’d say.
Fred: So I think what we’ve seen advertisers do successfully is a variation on that. So basically, think of so get rid of ETAs. Now run multiple RSAs in one ad group, but think of each RSA as having a theme. Right.
One may be focused on price, one may be focused on the speed of delivery, whatever other value benefits you have. And then don’t stick to just one headline variation that talks about that. But try three, four different variations. Right?
So to give Google some flexibility. But there’s a very clear theme between the two. And then you can start to see, well, does Google prefer one or the other? And then you can start to figure out, okay, maybe this theme is working better.
Now let me pin those thematic points to different positions. And now I run one RSA. Both RSAs are the same theme, but they’re pinning two different positions.
And now you can start to kind of A/B test. So there’s still a process that you can go through even before you get these new metrics where you can just see the end results of the whole entity as opposed to the individual components.
Ed: Yeah. And Ngrams for Ads, you do it. We do it because it makes sense. And I think Ngrams for our stay is useful. Certainly nice if you just did it for us. But yeah, I think the thematic approach is a good idea.
I think the smaller advertisers, smaller budgets struggle with that and might need the dirty A/B. Yeah. There are still options available, so it’s not the end of the road.
How to use ad strength and asset labels when optimizing RSAs?
Fred: So we’re coming close to time here, but there were two more things I wanted to talk about and get your take on.
So ad strength, whether you use that or not. And then the asset label, which is sort of the asset strength. How do you use that if you do currently?
Ed: Julie, do you want me to go?
Julie: Sure, go ahead.
Ed: I didn’t sound very enthusiastic. Did I? So again, I was just pulling data. I don’t know if you agree, but looking at 2019 to 2021 data, I don’t see any obvious correlation between the top of page rate versus the ad strength.
Fred: Yeah, and I agree on that. So ad strength is to explain to people ad strength is something that Google looks at based on best practices of what you submit that ad strength will never change based on how the ad is actually doing.
So there should be no correlation. Right. It’s just what the machine thinks is going to happen. It’s not what it never updates its thing.
Ed: Umm, but the impression share is different. So the top of page rate doesn’t seem to flux. But the ad strength does impact impressions.
Fred: Yeah. So Google has a correlation study, and I think they say for every point you go up and ad strength, you get 3% more impressions to the highest. It’s like 9% or 12% boost in impressions. Yeah.
So what you need to look at is the asset labels, because those are actually based off of historical performance. But the downside on those is that you don’t really get these until you have a fairly high volume.
Ed: Okay. Impressions and then they tell you an arbitrary thing. It’s good. Okay. Thanks for that. I knew it’s good. How good?
I just feel like we’ve got a two-tier quality score system going on, even though it’s not about ad rank, but it is because it impacts it. So I wish they just amalgamate the whole bloody thing and just got it over and just give us an ad score, rename quality score, whatever.
I think it’s tripping a few people up, to be honest with you.
Julie: Well, pinning comes into effect for that too. So when you pin things again, out of my own curiosity, like I said, I’ve been running the experiment with literally the exact same assets, but with things pinned, and then I have one that’s totally unpinned.
The unpinned one has a higher ad strength, like right from go, because you don’t pin anything. So as soon as you pin stuff, you’re dropping your ad, you’re dropping your ad strength right from the get-go.
And if you get it into it doesn’t take long to get to a poor ad strength, even if you had one that was average or good before you started pinning stuff. And then you get that little what does it say?
Like you get that little eligible and then in the parenthesis limited status where it’s like, well, yeah, we’ll show it, but we’re not going to show it as much as we would if you would make this better, except all they want you to do to make it better.
Like you could literally do nothing other than just unpinning stuff to make it better. So there are some areas of the system that I really hope are going to be further developed.
Fred: This is probably a software enforcing loop on the machine learning system, right? So it’s basically looking at what you did and it knows that system-wide bidding is going to hurt your performance.
So it makes a prediction the moment that you pin and says, well, you’re probably going to perform worse. But then it also says, well, I’ve got these million other advertisers for the same keywords and they didn’t pin.
So I’m going to give them preference because the prediction is they’re going to do better. So then the question is how flexible is Google at allowing some variation from the established best practice so that the system can learn?
Maybe, hey, maybe things have changed, right? Maybe pinning is okay in certain situations, but I think that’s where we’re fighting just a prediction mechanism that has made some large decisions that it’s not willing to change anymore.
Ed: And if you’re on a mid or large-size account, you can’t ignore this because you got to lose volume. So you’re going to lose auctions if you don’t comply, essentially.
So if you’re a volume play, if you’re an insurance company where you just want volume overly, you have got to reference this arbitrary score, throw spaghetti at it, and it patronizingly tells you you’ve created a great ad.
And it’s like, well, I didn’t really do much to create that great ad. It needs some tinkering and needs some work. Certainly, ML is all about iteration and it will, fingers crossed, improve, will it?
Julie: I was going to say it’s interesting looking at what it chooses to put together for you, too. You can see the combinations that got the most like it’s in descending order. So the combinations that got the most impressions.
I find that really interesting to look at that’s giving you an insight into obviously it’s showing the ones most frequently that it thinks will be most successful.
So I also think that that’s an interesting little area to keep your eye on too so that you get a little bit more insight into it because it’s one thing again, we’re used to looking at ads as a whole for ETAs, right.
And you know exactly what was in the ad, and you can see what happened, like what was the percentage that it was served and all of the stats for that.
But with the RSA, you don’t see those stats in the same way. So I find looking at that data where it shows you the combinations that can give you some insight too, for each particular client and each particular thing that you’re trying to advertise for.
What does Google think are the most important aspects?
Right. And again, when you look in there, it’s really interesting because again, they favor certain combinations a lot more than others.
So I think that’s really interesting to look at and start to sort of digest as well when you’re thinking about what you want to create and what kind of things you might want to test because you’ll find assets that they never pick ever.
So you can look in there and see that and be like, well, this headline in here is doing nothing for me, or they never serve this particular description. You might as well put something else in its place.
Right. Because those assets that are sitting in there, never getting served, are doing nothing for you. So I think that’s an interesting place to kind of us as humans, right? We’re talking about how to still have where do we have value in the system where everything is automated to a certain degree?
I think looking at that particular set of data, lets your human brain think about some things that, like the machine can’t think about as well.
Wrapping it up
Fred: I love that. I think let’s wrap up on that. Great advice!
Ed: I’d like to add one thing. Do you know the frustrating thing about looking at the combinations, seeing that one headline isn’t getting any impressions, then removing it from the RSA and your ad score dropping, saying, oh, you’re out of rubbish now it’s like, oh, you right?
Fred: And I think this is really important for people to understand. The ad relevant score is a prediction. It has nothing to do with your performance. And the asset labels are based on your performance. Two completely separate systems, so they don’t talk to each other and they’re going to tell you stupid stuff like that.
Ed: Good point.
Fred: Yeah. Well, this has been a great conversation. I feel like we need to do another one as this topic evolves and as more metrics hopefully become available, a final wrap of anything that we didn’t cover or just tell us where we can find you. Remind us. Let’s start with ladies first, Julie. Yes.
Julie: I mean, this is definitely a topic that we’re going to be talking about, I think, all through 2022, so I’d be happy to talk about it again anytime.
As for where you can find me, I’m really active on Twitter, so that’s the best place to find me.
My Twitter handle is @NeptuneMoon. I am always active on the #PPCchat, so you can find me in either of those places. And I’d encourage you to check out. We have a ton of resources and links to past chats and that type of thing on the PPC chat website as well, which you can find at officialppcchat.com.
Fred: All right. And I know your dinner is getting cold, so wrap it, Ed.
Ed: So, me, I’ve got a really awful load of websites. I won’t bother. I’m not very active on social media, but if you really want to find me, go to Edleak.com.
It’s a rubbish website, but you can find your way to my other stuff from there. That’s it. Really. I mean, I don’t have a lot more to add. I won’t get another invite.
Fred: Julie should we invite him again?
Julie: Yeah, I think so. Yeah.
Ed: Thanks. All right.
Fred: But only if you meet me in London.
Ed: Hey, I want a copy of that book. Did you say two books I got two books?
Fred: You still didn’t get the first one. It was like back in 2019. Anyway, bringing up the book so folks ‘Unlevel the Playing Field’, it’s on Amazon.
Ed: Where’d you find the time?
Fred: I’m efficient, I guess, but I hope the book is good. We did a couple of iterations of it. I wasn’t very happy with the first one I wrote. Kind of went back and made it I think, really good.
It talks it’s really about this evolving nature of automation in PPC and how we deal with it. RSAs are one great example.
So anyway, thank you both for being on. Julie, I think we’re going to hang out in Austin at Hero Conf.
Julie: No, sorry. I’m not going to be there with you. It’s a bummer.
Fred: Well, anyway, it’s been a pleasure having both of you on folks.
If you enjoyed this episode you want to see more of them. We’re doing them about twice a month subscribe to the YouTube channel. That way you’ll find out.
And if you have any questions for me or Optmyzr, I’m @siliconvallaeys on Twitter and you can always find me Optmyzr.com.
So thanks so much for watching. See you for the next one.
Do not pin assets in your RSAs. But if you absolutely have to then pin multiple texts to a single position. This gives you control over what the ad says and gives Google some flexibility.
Provide as many headlines and descriptions as possible to let Google generate the maximum number of ad variations.
Learn to become more business-savvy because with automation taking care of the basic stuff, the success of your campaigns depends on your expertise.
We’re at a point in PPC where automation is doing most of the work we used to do. There’s no escape from it, so we must find a way to coexist with the machines but stay in control of our PPC accounts.
Enter automation layering — you implement your own automation strategies over what Google or the other ad platforms are doing to put yourselves in charge.
And to tell you more about what automation layering is and how to go about it, we invited Joe Martinez, Michelle Morgan, and Aaron Levy — three of the top PPC experts and practitioners to our 50th episode of PPC Town Hall.
Here’s the full episode.
Full episode:
Transcript:
Fred’s introduction to the episode.
Fred: Hey, welcome to another episode of PPC Town Hall. This is episode number 50. So we’ve been doing this for quite a while and I’m so happy you’re watching this very special episode.
Today we’re going to talk about automation layering and automation layering is a very hot topic these days, right? I mean there’s so much automation coming out of places like Google, Microsoft, and the question is always in this world where everything seems to be automated, how do we as humans still remain relevant?
There’s this whole thing that we’d be talking about humans plus machines better than machines alone. But then automation layering came in because we started thinking about there’s quite a bit of work for humans to do manually when it comes to controlling and monitoring these machines.
Why don’t we try to automation layer and basically put our own automations on top of what Google’s doing so that we stay in control using sort of the methodology that we really like?
So that’s what we wanted to talk about today. “Robots fighting robots” is what some of the other panelists were saying. So I can’t wait to hear their take on this whole thing. But let me show you who we got for panelists today.
Let’s get rolling with PPC Town Hall.
Fred: Alright. Thank you for joining me, Aaron, Michelle. And who’s that guy in the top corner of the screen?
Aaron: I thought my headshot was outdated. Right.
Michelle: It’s just a Mr. T look alike. Don’t worry about it.
Joe: Yes, I pity all of you.
The panelists introduce themselves.
Fred: So yes, all of you have been on the show before. Thank you for coming back home. Now for those who may not know, you tell us a little bit about who you are. As my Alexa just turned around, she seems very interested in finding out more too.
So Joe, why don’t we start with you? Who are you?
Joe: I’m Joe Martinez, co-founder of the Paid Media Pros YouTube channel. Doing paid media for, I think January was my 10-year anniversary in the paid media space. So Hooray for me. Multiple anniversaries we’re celebrating this year.
Fred: Yes. And what about the other half of Pay Media Pros?
Michelle: Yeah, that’d be me.
Fred: So tell us a little bit more about you as well. Yeah.
Michelle: So my bio is going to sound pretty similar to Joe’s, except I have a different name and I look different.
So I am Michelle Morgan. I am the other co-founder of Paid Media Pros. Also been in the PPC space for about ten years now, working in agencies and in-house. All that good stuff. So excited to be here. Yeah.
Fred: And just when you said you look a little bit different, I was like, hey, anyone watching? If you’re good with Photoshop, we’d love to see it.
Michelle: I’d turn off my camera for the rest of the stream.
Fred: And then, unfortunately, we have Aaron hiding somewhere behind the bottom banner. There he is.
Aaron: First of all, Michelle, when you took a second there, I had that moment, like in elementary school when the teacher was calling you, but you weren’t paying attention.
Michelle: I was like, am I supposed to do my part? Yeah.
Aaron: Yeah. So I’m Aaron Levy. I’ve been in, I don’t want to say the number is now…I’ve been in SEM or Digital for 15 years. I run our paid search team at Tinuiti. We’re about 120 odd people, spend a lot of money.
And I’ve known Michelle and Joe forever and ever. So if we seem too comfortable with each other, that’s because we are. But honestly looking forward to talking about it because robots fighting robots just sounds like an awesome TV show.
Fred: I know, right? But these robots. Right. Let’s talk about what these robots really are and why we have our own robots.
So I want to start with what’s new with the engines and specifically, Google, I think is always most interesting. But anything there in the field of automation that you think we should talk about, Performance Max campaigns certainly come to mind for me.
So why don’t we start there?
Aaron: First of all, I’m a big golfer, as Michelle is. We’re about to find out shortly who is better than the other. I think it’s going to be neither one of us.
Michelle: Correct.
Aaron: First of all, this is going to be a swipe at Google. But in the golf world, there’s been a big trend of naming things like speed and Max.
The Max is always for the worst player that needs the most forgiveness. But no, I mean, Performance Max is obviously going to be huge. I think all of us are seeing it as the latest iteration of Google, saying, just give us a credit card, we’ll do it.
It’s going to be interesting to see because just based on our limited observations thus far, Performance Max does sort of what we expected to do that it just goes for the easiest conversion.
So deciding if it’s incrementally valuable or just taking credit for stuff that would happen anyway to tell. But it’s certainly a direction towards a more automated future and more input optimization rather than keywords or placements or topics like we’re used to.
Fred: Right. It’s a little bit the same problem that I think we had with smart shopping, where it kind of runs across channels, and it prioritizes remarketing because that’s the easiest and cheapest thing to capture.
Now with Performance Max, I mean, not everyone may be super familiar with it, but it basically runs your ads automatically across six sorts of channels that are part of Google. Right?
So it’ll do search, display, there’s YouTube, there’s Discover, there’s shopping, the other ones. Yeah. I think those are sort of the six main ones that they define. But really, where it’s headed is any place where Google can put an ad any place.
You just tell it a few things about yourself and your campaign, and then it runs with it and it’s kind of nice because in the past if you were sort of a newbie advertiser, probably not someone watching the show, but a newbie advertiser not very sophisticated, it was kind of a pain because you’d have to set up a shopping campaign and connect your merchant feed, and then you’d have to kind of give the same information for your DSA campaign and then kind of the same information for an ad campaign and then a whole bunch of campaign types that couldn’t really be automated.
So I can totally see the value for someone who’s a newbie making it quite easy. But then for people like us who actually care about the best performance possible because that’s how we get compensated by clients.
It is a bit painful, right, when everything becomes opaque and black boxish.
Michelle: Yes. It ends up being one of those things where, as you said, it’s basically you give a credit card, and then Google just takes the reins for you in some areas that can work really well.
I think a lot of it ends up being under the guise of we’re trying to help those small business advertisers who are doing it themselves and they don’t have anybody to help. So we’re simplifying things.
And basically, all it ends up being is that they’re taking things away or narrowing them and making it so it’s harder for the people who do have the budget and the traffic and all that kind of stuff to where it makes sense to invest more of the time.
I think Performance Max can be a good value add, but as Aaron said, it’s kind of hard to know sometimes if it’s just taking from campaigns you already have or if it’s actually adding value.
And it’s kind of tough to pinpoint when everything’s in the same environment.
Joe: There was one time that we just tested with a client and I’m working on that. They’re a startup, really. No brand awareness.
People aren’t looking for what they offer because they’re brand new. So it’s something where we’ve tried it just to get some sort of easier reach, instead of having to create since they do have a more limited budget, instead of having to create a separate display campaign, a separate discovery campaign, a separate YouTube campaign, just to have it all in one, just to get some baseline-type stuff.
But we purposely did that to keep the budget low just to see what it did and get some traction and hopefully get some learnings from it. And honestly, it did okay. There wasn’t any clear conclusion of, yeah, this is going to work great.
We’re going to keep building on this, but it gave some idea of, okay, we saw more engagement from the YouTube side. So now let’s go create a dedicated YouTube campaign and be a little bit more controlled with it.
What is the panelists’ take on Automation Layering?
Fred: That’s where I suppose automation layering comes in, Right? So you got this really complicated system from Google that we could not replicate and like you said, it drove okay results and you saw some success in some channels.
Now how do you take that success and automatically turn it into maybe a little bit more of a full-fledged campaign? Or how do you even figure out what portion of it is driving success and when that success has been established?
Now, for me, that’s automation layering, right? It’s like I don’t want to go into those campaigns on a daily basis and run the same analysis. I want that to be done for me. I want my system to tell me, hey, this automated thing from Google, it’s failing badly, so stop it or it’s working well, go and take a look at it and sort of spin it into something a little bit better.
What do you guys think about automation layering in these examples?
Aaron: I’m a little reticent, given that these Performance Max and some of the other new Google tools obviously have a bunch of data blind spots, which I think all of us know about.
Fred: Depending on your thoughts, let’s assume that not everyone listening knows about these databases and spots.
Aaron: Well. So from a Performance Max perspective, you get very little, primarily all that you can pull out right now.
And even this is a little hard. It’s pretty much impression reporting. And same for responsive search ads. So you won’t necessarily see as Joe peeled out himself, he figured out that YouTube was doing really well.
You won’t get active reporting on that. And there’s not necessarily a way to automate it. You have to understand and look into it. So when we think about automation layering number one, we want to prevent automation from being wrong, or at least being wrong in a place that’s destructive.
Like, if it’s wrong in a place that doesn’t hurt, that’s okay. If it’s wrong in a way where wrong causes problems, it’s a problem. So generally speaking, Fred, you make a good point about, you know, let’s automate this stuff.
Let’s say, like videos performing well, let’s fling it on YouTube and promote it, something like that. What we’ll generally do instead is try to think of a really funny cartoon character to relate this to, but it’s not working.
My robot brain is not as good. No, we’ll have an alert system like, hey, this thing was converted ten times this month. Like, you should look at it, maybe a desperate attention star robot.
But rather than have it make all these decisions where it could be making budgeting decisions or spending more money or things like that, that can make us a little sensitive. That and despite all of Google’s intelligence, their massive computing power or whatever, they don’t understand brand safety or what a brand is.
They can try it. But to be serious, it doesn’t think. So there are areas where we’ll have to think for it.
Joe: Like you said, the brand safety there, that part scares me a little bit. I haven’t worked on a finance client in a while, but the feed that I have years ago, every single piece of copy that you put in for banking and everything had to go through legal.
So it’s one of the things we’re like again, I don’t have anything now, but if you ever did again, I was like, we can’t have Google just spit out something or come up with whatever they want on their own.
There has to be some deep review for certain industries. So I understand why some people are scared or just flat out against it.
Aaron: Responsive search ads are very fun.
Fred: Those are fun. But at least you can pin right videos like what’s that going to look like.
Michelle: Yes. When it comes to all that kind of stuff, I think that the biggest thing that and really the only controls that we even get on some of those things are just making sure that we’re basically taking our robot and pointing it in the right direction to start with, one of the things for performance Max campaigns, when you set it up, you have to tell it what conversions you want.
And you have to be cognizant of the fact that some of those conversion actions can be created for you. It can be a phone call, it can be ‘get directions on the map’. I don’t know how many businesses actually make money anytime somebody clicks get directions on a map.
Now, that might be a lead into something that is useful, so it might make sense for you to try and optimize towards that. Or it might just be garbage, especially if you actually just want people to fill out your form online.
That’s not a good conversion action to even optimize for at all. So I mean, even just the first step in the set up process, it’s being simplified so that you don’t have quite as many levers that you have to pull and things to think about.
So it can be simplified. But if you’re even just accidentally pointing the robot in the wrong direction, it’s going to optimize for, like we said, the easiest conversion. And it’s probably going to be those get directions on the map when you’re trying to actually make online sales.
So even that first little input piece is going to be one of the bigger aspects of whether it’s going to work well or not.
Fred: Right. I would say that the cheapest conversion is cheap for a reason, right? I mean, there’s plenty of us bidding for the same keywords. If something is inexpensive, it’s probably because a more sophisticated advertiser has established that it’s not a high-quality click.
It’s not going to be a high-quality form fill. It’s not going to be a high-quality phone call. But if that’s what you’ve indicated that you care about to Google, I care about phone calls no matter what’s on the other side of the line, great.
We’ll give you those cheap phone calls and we’ll give you lots of them because nobody else wants to buy.
Joe: Yeah, because of it, I think I have shifted more towards the campaign level conversion tracking, which I’ll admit I didn’t do a ton when it first came out. We had the ability to do campaign levels.
But now to what Michelle said, there’s been times where just due to limited actions on websites just to get more signals, we have added just like click to call on your website as a conversion action.
Well, now it’s starting to lead to more junk and now we’re hearing like everything coming through is not that great. So like, okay, we’ll still leave it on there for some campaigns with lower touch points, but for certain ones we’ll just stick it to what is more important, which is the form submission ones.
Aaron: Well, and I think Joe and Michelle, you both raise an interesting point where Google is a closed system. Google is not your business. And so obviously those of us that have worked with our various Google reps, again, Google is trying to get as much information into the system as possible.
But that’s contingent on, number one, us being able to feed it everything that it really needs to make smart business decisions. And number two, making sure that and I’m going to be speaking about this at a conference, but making sure the human side of data is real.
It’s just an example that we saw from a real client of ours. They had this sales incentive thing going with their call center. So they got like extra bonus dollars if things got to be an SQL, if they sold something from an MQL to an SQL.
So guess what? The Friday at the end of that period, they had a huge spike in SQL because everybody wanted their $5 bonus per SQL. So then in turn, Google’s automated bidding, we feed it back and say, hey, we got all these SQLs, okay?
It doesn’t know that we had a promotion. It doesn’t know that these were like weird human motivations. So in turn, the system says I did great. So it’s going to do whatever it does really hard. But we have this sort of human leakage.
The challenge with robots fighting robots. Sometimes if a human feeds bad information to one of the robots, the fight is going to get dirty.
Michelle: It’s the whole idea of a system in and of itself. Right. The quality of data or input you get in is the same system you get out. I’ve used that for putting in things for lookalike audiences.
If you put in just some garbage audience of anybody who came to your website and it’s everybody in your CRM for the past 45 years, you’re probably not going to get a great thing coming out the other end.
But if you’ve got just your high paying customers, you’ll probably have a little bit better chance because there’s actually a pattern in there. So, yeah, kind of leaning into that, you’re only going to get as good a performance out of it as the indicators that you’re giving.
So going back to the idea of pointing it in the right direction, sometimes we think we’re doing such a good job and we’re the flawed portion of that relationship where we’re like, oh, I’m going to point a robot this way.
It’s like, oh, wait, that was right into the trash can. Maybe not the best choice there,
What do the panelists think about enhanced conversions?
Fred: Garbage in, garbage out right? Yeah, but that’s interesting because you’re even talking about something that’s already more sophisticated than what a lot of advertisers are doing, which is actually thinking about marketing qualified leads, sales qualified leads, things beyond just a form fill.
So I kind of want to shift here. There’s enhanced conversions now. Right. And I think a lot of the reasons why people haven’t done tracking of MQLs and SQLs is because it’s complicated.
You have to get the Gclid into your system. You have to persist it throughout your CRM. It’s not rocket science, but it’s also not necessarily super easy for a marketer who doesn’t necessarily have their engineering team support behind them.
But enhanced conversions, does anyone want to kind of explain what these are? And maybe does anyone want to volunteer?
Aaron: I was doing some reading about those the other day because we honestly haven’t used them very much. But my view of them is if you’re familiar with, like, a LiveRamp or an Epsilon or an audience enrichment platform, basically what it does is it tries to stitch data together more accurately than you could on your own.
And enhanced conversions can help with that. I might be talking about the wrong thing.
Fred: Yeah, you’re talking about the right thing.
Aaron: I read about a couple of things, but it starts stitching those things together.
Fred: Exactly. Stitching together. And so what’s fascinating to me is that instead of saying the Gclid is the thing that stitches together the original click. And Gclid, by the way, stands for Google Click ID. Right?
So the Google Click ID is unique when an impression of an ad is served, and then if somebody clicks on that impression, it has a parameter in it, a unique ID that Google can say later on.
It came from this search with this ad and this click. Now, the whole point as well, when the form gets filled or somebody calls you up, that Gclid feeds into your CRM system, and then two months later, after that customer becomes an MQL, an SQL, and finally a customer, you have that Gclid parameter that you can feed back to Google and say this new conversion, that’s actually more meaningful conversion was associated back to the Gclid.
And Google knows exactly what click it came from. So now it can go and machine learning can say, oh, well, these were the clicks that led to not just form fills, but actual sales. So let me prioritize more of these.
And to do that by the way you have to do tROAS bidding. You can’t do tCPA bidding. Right. And that’s a whole different story, but this Gclid is difficult.
And now here’s the thing that’s like so brilliantly simple from Google. When somebody fills out a lead Gen form, they probably put in their email address. When somebody becomes a customer, you probably know their email address.
So why don’t we use the email address to tie these two pieces of data back together? And assuming you’re not like getting thousands of clicks from the same email address, they can probably correlate that back to a single click.
And there you have it. It’s simpler offline conversion tracking that virtually anyone can do. You don’t have to have an engineering team anymore. And so that opens up this possibility of what you guys are talking about MQL SQL tracking to a lot more advertisers.
But kind of like, what could you do wrong in these scenarios? And I think you kind of covered it right, like human influences. But is there anything else people might mess up on?
Aaron: Well, we talk internally. And for the record, the other thing I was thinking about was Ads Data Hub, which is kind of similar but with mobile and video included.
But I think the thing that’s wrong and we talk about moving food around our plate and a lot of our conversations of Attribution or whatever it may be, it may be taking too much credit.
A person might have done a whole bunch of different stuff. Like, yeah, maybe they watched a YouTube video, but then maybe they downloaded a white paper somewhere offline or they read a newspaper article or whatever it may be.
And then Google’s, like, we touched it, we were there first, we’re involved. And so obviously you can make that deduction with frankly, any sort of conversion tracking, but that sort of automation saying we can stitch these together.
So therefore, like we did it, it can get a little bit aggressive. That said, the few that we’ve run, we’ve done it a few times, didn’t see a huge lift one way or the other. So that sort of conspiracy theory hasn’t really been proven out.
But of course, it still sticks in the back of my mind of “Are you just taking credit for stuff?”
Michelle: Because everything is always taking credit for stuff. Like stuff is not there. I mean, just the fact that even we have just a look back at windows, which a lot of the platforms obviously are much shorter than what they are now.
But if you have a bunch of people sign up for something and they first start in a CRM platform because they came through Google search or something like that, and then maybe an end of the month promotion, like maybe not on the sales side, but for the customer side.
So you send out something like the last two days of the month, we give 15% off, they come to the website, they convert and then it looks like, oh, our Google search went nuts. Not really.
I mean, it kind of did, but it kind of didn’t. So there’s a lot that is muddy in there, which you talk about here, presentations.
That’s actually what I’m talking about in my mind is trying to attribute performance to the top of the funnel. And the best takeaway is that it’s all just kind of a mess. So you guys don’t do the best you can. I think that’s the same thing with this is that there’s so many different things.
I mean, even just the idea that Fred, you had to tell us what enhanced conversion tracking was because it got slightly confused with something else. But also those are such bland words that like what does that even mean?
And we do this all the time every day. Like think about the people who don’t do this all the time every day trying to keep up with stuff. Like the idea of trying to get everything sorted out and making sure that everything is working well, especially when it’s just already this complicated with the automation just feels impossible to a lot of people, I bet.
Joe: So then how is.. This is an honest question, how is the offline data for these conversions being uploaded into Google? Who can do this? What type of CRM do you need and how do you get that back into Google?
So they can attribute everything just in general or for enhanced conversions?
Fred: For enhanced conversions, it’s the same as before, right. So in the past there’s a couple of mechanisms. You can either do a bulk upload or you can have an automated scheduled upload off of the spreadsheet.
Or you can use your CRM like you have a Salesforce integrator. But Salesforce is not a prerequisite, right? So anytime that you have an email address, you can basically feed that back and say this becomes this conversion action.
And so now you could have a conversion action that’s associated with an SQL, a different conversion action for an MQL, and a different one yet for your actual sale. And so on a daily, nightly basis, you feed it back in. Now there is a look back.
Joe: I was going to say I asked that for a reason, because Aaron and Michelle, have you ever worked with a client that had messy data within their CRM?
Michelle: Have I ever worked with a client who had clean data is the better question.
Joe: And that’s the thing too. That’s why I laugh at it. I know it’s like some bulk upload stuff too. It’s like there’s been somewhere if like salespeople or whoever’s managing the Salesforce team, they just don’t keep up with it.
But then if we want to try to work with it, that’s exactly how we could potentially steer the robots in the wrong direction. It’s just by uploading messy or out of date data because they forgot to upload customer status and everything like that.
What tools do the panelists use to create a layer of automation?
Fred: So it’s one of those types of messages. What do you guys think about that? Do you think sort of like that’s what you need to solve, that’s your value add?
Because the way that I’m thinking about it is like we used to do all these things like manage keywords, manage bids, like write ads, like all these little details in Google ads.
But now it’s more about how we steer the machine and this automation layering. So if their data in the CRM is messy, is that how we help them become better? Or do we sort of like say that here’s what we need to do.
Michelle: I do think that we end up being very much business coaches, more so than we used to be because it used to be something where we kind of play on our own little sandbox.
But now we do have to have all of that business data come in. I personally don’t really feel like having, especially with a lot of clients I work with, they end up being SaaS focused. They’re usually enterprise level, all that stuff which has its own unique challenges.
And one of them is the fact that it takes people a long time to go from a lead to an MQL and from an MQL to an SQL. On top of that, the data is messy and there’s only so much of a look back window.
And if you start uploading data to Google, that’s like six months old on a click. That was in June, it’s not going to be able to do much with it. So in that instance, I would probably maybe try and pass like an MQL into the system and use it as maybe a little bit of a guidance.
But we’re really talking about automation layering. I wouldn’t give the robots full control on this one. I wouldn’t import it and say, okay, and we want to optimize for these actions.
What I would do instead is basically just do a manual analysis and say, okay, on our side, we have all this data in Excel, and we know that this keyword typically has this return on investment.
So let’s make it so we can either make something dynamic or we create a different conversion action that has a different value associated with it.
So that on the conversion action, the initial one, you can have some sort of value associated and then maybe you optimize for Return On Ad Spend bidding or something like that, or you know, that something has to have a different cost per conversion because these leads are junk. These leads are good.
So these campaigns need to have a different target CPA bid model in place, even if it’s the same conversion action. Because otherwise I think it gets so bogged down trying to be too clever for itself, if you will, that it just automates itself into a circle of not being able to actually get what you want.
Fred: It’s a great point. Let’s shift a little bit. So what tools or technologies do you all like for helping you steer the machine and do automation layering? Yeah. Even like the reporting software where you like instead of moving the pieces around the plate, that’s to me an automation layer technology. Right?
What is a reporting suite that actually tells you the true picture?
Aaron: Yeah, we have a lot of toys. So number one, from an executional perspective, obviously using a tool like Optmyzr or Adalysis or things like that that can help build and dashboard a lot of things the way that we wouldn’t want Google to do and can help automate a lot of things that either we don’t trust Google to do or they’re not great at it.
Using those is helpful. We use those as well. We actually have a proprietary database tool in the data warehouse and Data Lake that we pump into Tableau for our own system called Mobius.
But having something like that and we have the luxury of having an entire team that can build these alerts and we can pipe in weather data and say like, “hey, it’s going to rain in the Midwest.”
So you’re going to have more bugs in three weeks. But having that information realistically, if any data sources in API, you can get it into your data warehouse.
How much you use that and fed to your point earlier, how many resources that takes and how many it has is something that you have to be a little bit judicious about. But I’d also echo from our free tool perspective, just using Data Studio is super powerful things plug in really easily.
You can set alerts pretty easily, even through Google’s own automated alert system and own rules like that. You can flash warning lights fairly easily and fairly free.
Just again, something that our philosophy does is not necessarily have the machine do it for us, but the machine tells us where to look.
Fred: Yeah. So an automated rule. I’m also obviously a big fan of scripts since we’re talking about unfortunately my session was not at the same time as Aaron’s. Now they are having us at the same time.
But Aaron is going to be really good. So go to his. I’m just talking about scripts turning ten years.
Aaron: Yeah. Fred is going to be brutal. Go to mine.
Joe: That’s pretty much what I’ve stuck to has been scripts and rules for the most part. I don’t have any sophisticated ways. It’s pretty much me for the most part. So I don’t have the huge data warehouses that Aaron’s company has.
Fred: Scripts, Joe, what do you do? You write them yourself? You got someone you know?
Joe: No, I pull from sources like you and Nils on Google or on Twitter as well. I rely on the smart coders and engineers to come up with those and then see if it fits. Not every… I’m not talking about just like the reporting ones, those automated ones, those.
Yeah, we can run in every single account, but some of them you’re going to have to look at depending on what type of account it is and the frequency and the volume. I do have a medical center in Florida in a small little radius.
So the data in there is pretty straightforward. Or we can pull information from Google Data Studio. We’ll look at the Attribution comparisons and then make some assumptions from there.
So we don’t need to get crazy. But on some of the bigger Lead-gen ones, that’s where we are. Even though I kind of ripped on some of the CRM data stuff, we’ll still import that information in and then run some more sophisticated bid scripts just based on understanding the lead times and everything of where we see them come in.
And those again, is based on volume and size of the account.
Fred: One thing that’s cool about scripts now is the new versions that are transitioning to Google Ads scripts instead of AdWords scripts, which basically just brings it in line with the new API that’s also currently rolling out, which is one of the reasons, for example, that WordStream is basically shutting down because they’re not transitioning to the new API.
But this new Ad script has the capability to set crowd targets, which the AdWords scripts didn’t have. Right? They kind of became very dated for modern PPC management and a smart bidding sort of world.
Now you can actually do this again. So I’m pretty excited about that capability.
Michelle: Yeah, I think that going back to kind of what you guys said. I think that having your reporting be automated is one of the things that is like the absolute best because one, we all hate reporting.
It takes forever to do anyway. But I would echo a smaller point that Joe made is that have your CRM data included in that and figure out how to enmesh the reports from the channels to your CRM.
Especially for a lot of the lead-gen accounts I work on, you’d be surprised how many people think that one campaign is doing great and then you will get the CRM data and it’s not.
Or they think that cost per lead is way too high, but then you incorporate it with the fact that people are coming through their customers. The lifetime value is huge, so it’s actually really not one lead pays for.
One customer pays for like a month or sometimes six months worth of marketing. So you need to have it all included to actually make sense with it. But then I personally really like automated rules, sometimes scripts, depending on what they’re trying to do.
Quite frankly, I do think they try to get too clever for what they’re trying to do. There’s a lot that goes into it and the more advanced you make it, that’s great. It just has a lot less use cases because there’s only so many places that you can use weather data because a lot of my accounts that doesn’t matter.
But I think that using automated rules is a great way to do it. It’s also just a little bit easier for people who don’t have quite as good of a handle on things. The automated rules are just a little bit more basic.
You just make sure that you’re not over optimizing on the same data, like don’t have your look back window be 30 days and then you run it every week because then you’re optimizing on that same one day like four times.
So make sure that you’ve got them spaced out appropriately. But I personally kind of like the pattern of going from manual monitoring of things like especially bids just for a basic example, and then noticing what the patterns are and then setting automated rule cadences so that I don’t have to do it, but then setting like calendar reminders to go in and say go check your automated rules.
Are they still doing what you want them to do? Are they still having the impact that you want them to have and just having that kind of check-in system of having the knowledge that we’ve got tapered into those automated rules and then checking back in every once in a while to make sure that the little machine we set up is actually doing what we wanted it to do? Yeah.
Aaron: I think Michelle and Joe, you both make an interesting point in a way of over automating. And Michelle like the phrase ‘over optimization’.
And Joe, to your point, if you were to pump weather data into a small regional facility, you’re going to make decisions that it’s stealing a cruise ship like a jet ski. You’re making too big of swings when you’re too small of a data set.
So it’s important as you go through all these things. And frankly, I see this when I look at some peers or friends’ accounts as you don’t necessarily have to use every tool at the same time.
So thinking about what tool will yield to seal our mutual friend Perna’s favorite phrase, what tool is the best route to return on time spent versus what tool is just doing a bunch of stuff for the sake of doing it.
I think it’s important to pay attention to that.
Joe: That’s what I think. That has really helped me embrace a lot of the automated bid strategies because do I really want to go in and look at bid adjustments from the audience level, then the device level, then the household income level, then the gender level?
To have a lot of that and do that for if you can trust that the data in there is right and your conversion actions are right, I’d rather have a script or an automated bid strategy.
Do that for me than having to do that every single week manually. Nobody wants to do that. So embrace that automation for sure.
Automation layering for bid management and messaging.
Fred: Let’s go deeper on that. Right. So let’s talk about automation layering for the sake of bid management. And we’ve already covered a number of things, but one thing that I’m looking at nowadays is value rules.
And so value rules is basically you get to communicate to Google for your conversions whether you want to value them more highly, depending on, for example, the geo or the device type or the audience segment.
So I could say if I get a conversion from California versus a conversion from New York, I’m going to value the one from California more highly.
And that’s kind of under the assumption that I haven’t done the sophisticated CRM integration. So I’m not really communicating my sale, but I’m maybe just communicating the form field.
And I think my form fills from California convert at a better rate. So this kind of is a way to do these bid adjustments on some of the factors that we used to do. But now you’ve got to think about, well, it’s not just what’s the likelihood of the person filling in the form, but the likelihood of when they fill in the form.
That being a better thing than another, I hope I’m explaining that sort of. Okay. So kind of curious, has anyone else looked at those bid adjustments? Because one thing that I love is the whole fact that you could look at your CRM and you could look at these factors that Google has previously looked at to predict conversion rate.
But you could look at it to predict through conversion rate without necessarily giving all that information to Google and just kind of steering the ship in little ways. Right. More budget towards California because that’s where my leads tend to become sales.
Michelle: Yeah, I really like those types of things. That’s kind of what I was alluding to, being able to create different values for different conversion actions, that sort of thing. This is just more sophisticated. So I really like this roll out personally, of being able to do this.
I haven’t used it yet, but that’s because I have too many areas where the data isn’t as sophisticated as I would like it to be for me to then tell Google the information. They would like me to tell them.
But I think that having this goes back to the same thing that I’ve been saying is like pointing your robot in the right direction. And these are just more controls that kind of help you lean into what is actually working.
So personally, I’m a big fan of these things. I think it’ll be really helpful to kind of layer those in with some of the automated stuff because you’re just giving it more data to go on, which is what all of the different types of automation pieces want.
Aaron: Really looking at it kind of like, I’m thinking a lot about my childhood and education today because they said how long I’ve been doing this job for. But I look at it like taking AP classes in high school so you don’t have to take the class in College.
You’re not paying tuition again for something that you already know in the sense that you’re not spending extra money for Google to learn that California is good. Now, obviously, if you don’t have the API integration, it might not learn that anyway.
But at the same time, again, this is assuming the API type stuff is set up. At the same time, you’ll probably get more out of relearning what you already know because what you already learned California leads are in the past.
People have been moving around a lot the past two years. So results that we had in the past or where people live or where their “base” might not be true anymore. So having that sort of persistent learning is nice.
But that said, Fred, to your point, there are some of these things where we know all this already. We don’t need to wait for Google or Microsoft or whoever to learn it. Again, much the same.
We haven’t used it a ton, but that’s partially because we have the, I call it luxury of working with larger accounts. So usually if a region is doing really better, we’ll just isolate it.
Fred: You guys have better data sets. If you can bring the Gclid data back into it and offline conversion tracking, that is better. But if you don’t have the luxury, then for sure, Value rules.
Joe: I haven’t used this yet, but they had a client that has warehousing data and they already know based on where the market is. I mean, a warehouse is not a virtual thing. It’s a physical place in a location.
So they know exactly where the main warehouse hubs are across the country. So they clearly see better conversion rates around where the main locations are. So that’s a perfect example of when you want to use it.
We have other clients where, yeah, they’re a national software brand. However, where their headquarters are converts way better just because that’s where they started. So they have much more brand recognition within the greater area of where their headquarters is based.
So that’s something where we can proactively say we know even for non branded keywords, we are going to do better in this area because we have better brand affinity in this area.
So we can be more aggressive here and always be aggressive and just feed Google the information. So there’s certain instances where, you know, it makes perfect sense.
Michelle: I think one additional piece that we have here is that we’re talking about all these performance-based stuff. But one thing that we haven’t talked about necessarily is like the human element, because there might not be a tangible reason why you like working with somebody who is from a specific state other than the fact that they’re easy to get along with.
There are also factors that don’t actually go into the numbers so that the machine can’t really learn it, but that you can guide certain things. Like if people in California are just nicer and you want to work with them more and there’s not like a monetary value for small business owners, that kind of stuff can be really important.
I have a number of clients who are like, okay, we’re going to target these areas but don’t target there because quite frankly we make money off of them, but I don’t like them.
So there are a lot of ways that you can have just like the human factor in some of these things that you can guide it to do whatever you want. It doesn’t always have to be numbers and data driven focus.
You can also make business decisions for yourself with these different controls too.
Aaron: Well, number one, this is funny being a person in California, a person in Philadelphia talking to two people in the Midwest, talking about people we want to work with who are nicer.
I don’t think anybody wants to work with me, but I think the other factor on that front too, looking outside of just outside of just B2B, SAAS, whatever it may be, is shipping costs, freight costs, supply chain maybe.
I think back when I did actual work and had a couple of clients, we had one client that could guarantee one day shipping anywhere that was within an hour of I95 on the East Coast.
So we had literally campaigns that targeted a road so we could say one day shipping conversion rates would be way higher on this little Causeway, it would be two day shipping and say this because he’s not here, sorry, Kirk Williams, we excluded Montana because it was too expensive to get stuff there.
So if they would run free shipping campaigns, they would lose money to stuff to Montana, Wyoming, the Dakotas, stuff like that. And so having a tool like this where we could say, look, we’ll ship orders to Montana, but they have to be at a way higher margin than we would get in a different place.
Okay, let’s have a much higher rise target there. Then along our dear friend I95, we could be just fine and go cheap.
Fred: Right. And I think what’s interesting here is that you have these sorts of decisions based off of stationary things like roads and States. So you make a one time decision to point the machine in the right direction.
But then when it gets fascinating is like you said, while there’s supply chain issues. So maybe it used to be possible to do the one day delivery on I95, but now half of my truckers are out sick with COVID, so maybe I can’t deliver on that.
So for a very short period of time, I need to modify my targets to account for that and I think that’s really where automation layering shines. Right? I don’t want to have to go in and modify 100 campaigns across a bunch of accounts.
I just want to have a thing where I put it on a spreadsheet. I’m like, “Hey, delivery time from one day to two days. It knows what campaigns to go and change, and it just handles it for me.”
And then when the truckers all come back in and they can do the delivery, go and change it back. All right, but let’s talk a little bit about automation layering for targeting.
And we could also get into messaging. Right? So targeting, placements, keywords, all that good stuff, and then messaging. RSAs, have you seen any good examples of automation layering in those fields? No.
Aaron: RSA’s data is still sort of limited or tools aren’t very limited. So you can’t really layer much. We’ve tried, believe us, we’ve tried. You get a lot more success for regional campaigns if you put the name of the neighborhood in the ad.
I don’t want to build campaigns for every neighborhood in the world. But so I’ve tried to do that with business data feeds, and our sales aren’t really there yet. What I’ll say from a targeting perspective, again, stealing other people.
But audiences has been super successful for us, and I’ll reluctantly call the new Broad Match automation debatable.
Fred: But hey, well, aren’t you the one who said keywords are dead? So to even, like, acknowledge that Broad Match exists?
Aaron: Did I say keywords? I didn’t say keywords. You did.
Fred: Okay.
Aaron: I said broad match. But no, I mean, you sort of set us up there what we’ve done in some cases, like example, that we actually want to use a search award for.
We have this company that sends out a ton of direct mail. So, yeah, we’ll have a, “regular campaign” that’s targeted based on that word that I just said. I wouldn’t say with tCPA, but then we would also have a campaign that was basically automated upload of when people got mail.
So, like, when a mailing list went out, their direct mail software would send in and be like, “Hey, here’s the people that got mail.” We bid through the roof on those folks if they search for anything that was even remotely close.
And it worked great because we knew that we were reaching the right people. We knew that the brand was already in the right mindset. And so in that particular case, words mattered but didn’t matter.
It was a little bit more of a thing of where we have this information that we know that they’ve already been contacted by us. We can do it easily enough.
We don’t have to upload the list by ourselves every time, and we can kind of get rid of it after a couple of weeks because we know that the postcards have already been dropped, recycled, and probably not opened.
Michelle: Yeah, I think the same thing can kind of be done for dynamic search ads as well. Like, you don’t have to necessarily use broad match. You can also use your website, which I think sometimes helps if your website is a good fit for that.
So if you want to decide if your website is a good fit, just reverse engineer the keyword planner. Go put your URL in it and see what keywords it suggests. If they’re good, you should use your website for DSA.
If they’re a bunch of garbage keywords about contact us and your Privacy terms. Probably don’t use your website for DSA, or you use page feed so you can control which pages it’s actually pulling from.
But yeah, going back to the idea of Google’s new favorite, the old broad match keywords with smart bidding, which are going to get you those low hanging conversions, that sort of thing.
The only real time that I like doing that is if I’ve also got a remarketing audience layered in. And Joe and I talked about that at a SMX presentation that we gave not too terribly long ago.
It’s like if you can control for the fact that you know the audience is the right fit, I’m a lot more lenient on what search terms people are typing in and misspellings and all things that are tangentially related and we can lean into the automated bidding.
But if I don’t know exactly who the audience is, then I’m a little bit more weary about doing that sort of thing. So it gets a little fuzzy. I really do like utilizing audiences and then kind of letting the machines take over within that confined playground, if you will.
Joe: We like using Retargeting with DSA too. That just kind of opened the floodgates up a little bit, because with DSA you can see search terms and certain headlines because we don’t create the headlines for DSA and that can feed you new ideas of what to potentially test for your responsive or if you still want to do expanded text ads just to get more information.
But you ran that on a DSA remarketing campaign, whether you use a page feed or your entire website.
Aaron: I think if one other thing to say, this is going to go maybe a little bit outside of PPC, there’s other marketing things that we can do. But if we run discovery ads, if we run Disco, if we run RSAs, if we run Retargeting, set an alert for audience weirdness, or have it get audience insights sent your way and then shift that over to your content team.
The best example that I can give get pointed to personal experience, but we had a wedding dress client. What do you think thematically people were going to in the remarketing audience?
Michelle: Dieting.
Aaron: Yes. Where else were they going thing I was guessing there’s that there’s obviously like Pinterest. There’s a lot of people looking at stuff index really high for weather.
Michelle: Yeah. There you go.
Aaron: So, of course, like, okay, now you have a content strategy for okay, what to do if it rains on your wedding day. How to aim your ceremony so that your audience isn’t blinded and you don’t have to wear sunglasses with your dress, whatever it may be.
But finding those things that are a little bit weird, that are highly indexed. And Fred, I saw you laughing. That was a real scenario. I performed at my sister’s wedding and could not read my script.
So literally all that you see in the photos is me looking down and my lovely little ball spot shining in the sun. Yeah, close to the heart. Anyway, but using things like that, using, again, all the wealth of information that we still do have within search to spike up other stuff that you can see to other aspects of the business.
Number one, it’s a good way to get other people in the business to care about search. And number two, it’s a way to increase the value of it. As CPCs get higher and higher every year, it’s a way to gain additional value outside of just they bought wedding dresses.
Joe: There’s one thing that’s kind of related to this. For any of the awareness type campaigns that you may be running on Google, it’s just there are auto created or auto-suggested audiences within Google.
When you’re looking at your audience targeting options where you can say it’s not really an in market audience, but it’s based upon your current keywords, maybe you want to try this audience targeting for your top of funnel campaigns. And some of those we found have worked better than some of the custom segments that we’ve created.
So it’s just something that we thought we tested out. But it’s all recommended stuff just either based on website behavior and all that type of stuff that you’ve done with your previous campaign performance.
Google has auto-created some additional targeting options for you to try.
Wrapping up
Fred: Great. Well, I love all the examples that you’ve shared and to talk about automation layering, both from a big company Tinuiti, with lots of PPC people, big budgets, sophisticated tools, all the way to Joe and Michelle kind of picking scripts from where they can find them using different automation.
So thank you so much for sharing all these examples. This has been fantastic. Also a lot of references to conferences. So SMX Next. I believe that’s where Michelle and Joe did a great session on automation layering that is recorded.
I think you do have to pay, but if you want to see that that is out there, look for SMX Next 2021 and then all of us are going to be speaking at HeroConf Austin, assuming that travel restrictions don’t all of a sudden pop up again.
But we’re all very hopeful to be there next week. By the time you see this, probably that session will have happened. But talk to us. We’ll share those slides, we’ll try to make those videos available.
So anything else? I’ll give each of you a quick minute to maybe tell people where to find you, what you want them to do. I would love people to actually go and buy my new book, ‘Unlevel the Playing Field’. It came out January 26.
So go and buy a copy of this. Talk about a lot of the concepts we cover today. Aaron, let’s start with you.
Aaron: You can take two approaches to automation. In my mind, you can either defend or you could befriend. And so I would encourage people, rather than trying to preserve what you used to do and try to have old search last forever.
Don’t defend against it. Just befriend. Understand what the robots are trying to do, what makes the robot happy, what makes him do his little robot thing or her. And then, of course, you can learn the pitfalls.
And so rather than trying to stop it from doing what it’s good at, instead, let it have a little freedom. Let it learn, and just make sure that you don’t let it fall off a cliff.
Fred: Friendly robot. Good advice. Michelle? What about you?
Michelle: Yeah, I would say I don’t have clever little words that rhyme and that kind of thing like Aaron does. I haven’t thought about that much, but I do think that that’s the right approach to it.
So set aside some amount for testing some of the automation pieces. You’d be surprised by some of the stuff that works better than you think. And you’d be surprised by some of the stuff that works absolutely atrociously.
And you thought that it might be the right way to go about it. So test some stuff. Don’t hold so tightly to what you used to do, especially if you’ve been in this industry for such a long time.
Like, it doesn’t help to complain about it. It really doesn’t. But don’t abandon those principles. Right. We got here for a certain thing. So try and think, maybe take a step back and say, okay, I know this is a foundational theory of the way that I always have done stuff.
How can I apply it here and utilize that to move forward and make sure that I’m staying up with the times? Because I can guarantee your competitors are probably trying to hold pretty tight to things.
So if you are staying up with the times and they’re not, it’s a great way to beat your competitors.
Fred: That’s how you ‘Unlevel the Playing Field’.
Michelle: Right, right. Buy Fred’s Book.
Joe: We need an affiliate link to that book.
Michelle: I know.
Fred: Listen, everyone likes these ideas, and these books come from conversations with really smart people like everyone on the call today. So really, a lot of credit goes to them as well.
Michelle: I’ll just take a kickback instead of an affiliate link. Thanks so much. Go ahead, Joe.
Aaron: So I’m an author. That’s awesome.
Joe: I think Aaron and Michelle kind of said what I would typically recommend. You’re going to find the complaining crowd on Twitter that likes to complain that things are changing, but it’s always going to change.
There’s always going to be new features, technology is always going to advance, user behavior is always going to change so embrace it as soon as possible. See where it figures in with your account.
You don’t have to blindly implement everything that Google lists in the recommendation but at the same time don’t ignore them or decline them because sometimes those recommendations or the automation can be very beneficial for your account.
There’s no one size fits all. You gotta do what’s better for your business but always make sure that you’re keeping your business goals first over Google.
Fred: Great. All right, so look up Joe and Michelle at Paid Media Pros, find Aaron at Tinuiti. We’re all on Twitter, we’re all at conferences so try to keep in touch. We love hearing from you.
Thank you for watching this episode. If you’ve enjoyed it and want to see more, subscribe to our YouTube channel and we’ll be back with another episode very soon. Thanks for watching.
It seems a bit counter-intuitive, but there really are things every advertiser knows that Google doesn’t – like how people act after they’ve converted from one of your Smart search or shopping campaigns. These are things like:
Customers who made a purchase but returned all or part of their order
People who submitted a form and took 12 actions outside of Google’s sight before converting
Loyal buyers who split repeat purchases between digital and in-store
There’s no question that Smart Bidding and offline conversions have completely changed advertising, but are you one of the few who feed information back to Google to get the most out of those systems?
Ad platforms like Google are automating rapidly, but they need all the information you can provide to speed up machine learning and make better decisions on your behalf. If you want to your ads in front of people who will give you profits instead of just sales, you have to rethink the way you perceive PPC optimization.
We sat down with two people at Google who understand this process best:
Emi Wayner, Platform Partner Lead, Channel Sales
Alex Ioch, Regional Product Lead, Automation
Alex is part of the team that builds the products at Google that enable this new wave of search advertising, and Emi helps businesses adapt to the new realities.
We talked about how to use offline conversions to get better leads, why non-retail models need to import post-conversion data, and how to run Smart Bidding to its full potential.
Customer data is the key to sustainable growth.
A study by Boston Consulting Group indicates that online advertisers see average gains of 20% incremental revenue and 30% cost efficiency when they integrate strategies with customer data across the purchasing journey.
Whether you choose to import or track offline conversions, there aren’t many arguments against the importance of first-party data when optimizing modern PPC campaigns.
Just remember that phased growth is the only way you can achieve results with any of these recommendations.
Automations like Smart Bidding require a considerable volume of manual conversions before they can begin making the right decisions for you. Lay the groundwork with manual optimizations, and allow at least two weeks for learning. That goes for search as well as shopping.
In other words, don’t expect huge gains from your campaign metrics within days of feeding in customer or post-conversion data.
Don’t measure everything. Here’s what to focus on.
While Google Ads can measure online activity, sometimes a user who clicks on your ad and enters your sales system converts offline where Google can’t see it, like your CRM or in person.
So there are two groups of components you want to keep track of.
Online: leads & sales
When you track only leads, you get a fair idea of the initial demand for your product or service. Extending tracking to the final sale gives you a better picture of your overall purchase journey:
How much interest does your brand generate online?
How long can you sustain that interest?
How well can you persuade people to give your business money?
Sometimes, even the final sale happens offline. And in these cases, it’s critical to feed that information back into Google Ads with offline conversion imports.
But even if you were to track both leads and sales online, you’d still only see a part of the picture. If a university gets 2,000 requests for information that ends up with 20 enrollments, all they know is they have a 1% conversion rate.
But what about all the other stuff that happens in between? How much did that contribute, if at all?
Offline: The middle funnel
There’s usually a big disconnect between what advertisers tell Google to track and what actually matters to their business. An online form submission is easy to fire a pixel on; you can’t do that for things that happen offline or on a channel that isn’t trackable.
But when you do measure what happens between lead and sale, you get a better idea of what actions are most profitable for your business. Let’s take the same university example Google showed on PPC Town Hall:
2,000 requests for info yield 200 applications started (10% conversion rate)
200 applications started end with 80 applications completed (40%)
80 applications completed lead to 20 students enrolled (25%)
All of a sudden, you can see more of what impacts the final conversion. When you feed that information back to Google is when the magic really happens.
It’s okay to estimate expected value.
When you import offline conversions into Google Ads, it helps to be able to assign values to them based on what level of value they contributed to your business.
The best way to do that is to work backwards:
You know that a student who enrolls contributes an average of $10,000 to your university
You account for some fluctuation and tell Google that a completed application is worth $2,000 (25%)
A started application is then worth $800 (40%)
And a request for info is worth $80 (10%)
These numbers make it easier for Google’s algorithms to piece together the signals that make a user worth $80/$800/$2,000/$10,000 to your university.
Important: “Don’t get hung up on the numbers,” Alex says. Conversion values are a tool to help Google score and prioritize different users, and these numbers do not directly impact your ad spend or ROAS.
Smart Bidding works best when it has offline data.
When you use Smart Bidding without offline data, Google will look at tens of millions of signals that are familiar to most online advertisers:
Demographics
Conversion rate
Audience segment
Browser
Language
Keywords
Bids
Time
Location
And much more
But when you import offline data, you can feed so much more information to Google that it uses to optimize future targeting. In the case of a university, this might include parameters like:
SAT scores
Preferred courses
Income
Credit history and score
Referrals and awards
Existing credits
All of a sudden, the jigsaw Google puts together of your ideal customer gets a bunch of new pieces added to it. They can tell with greater accuracy which bids to which clusters of users will give you the best long-term returns.
Value-Based Bidding strategies let you optimize Smart campaigns.
For education, that could look like assigning different values to students who request a brochure and ones who sign up for a free online course. In retail, it might mean segmenting customers who make frequent returns from those who end up keeping their purchases.
A value-based bidding strategy tells the Smart Bidding algorithms that one group of users/customers is worth more to the profitability of your business than another.
And so Smart Bidding then knows to optimize for the group that is worth 2x/3x/10x more to your bottom line, giving you greater value from your ad spend that goes beyond just ROAS.
Additionally, fixed-value bidding skews your spend and limits your returns. User segments with a higher average bid than your fixed value become missed opportunities, while you over-invest in segments with lower average bids.
Monitor. Intervene. Educate.
There’s no shortcut or a way around the work. Finding sweet spots for ROAS and CPA targets take time, so don’t resist or be intimidated by the learning process. Test your ideas, monitor the outcomes, and optimize as you hit subsequent rounds of statistical significance.
At no point should you keep Google’s machine learning algorithms in the dark, even if data visibility is something all advertisers would like more of from the platform. It only impacts your business negatively; Google’s automation will grow with or without your accounts.
Once you know what works, automate the solution and keep control over how and when you feed information back to Google. A third-party tool can make monitoring and intervention easier and limit damage from malfunctions in the ad platforms.
Optmyzr offers a 2-week free trial that’s helped teams like Sean’s preserve their time and mental fortitude for what matters, allowing them to double their managed ad spend.
As PPC advertisers, you need to constantly monitor and measure your marketing initiatives. The end goal being: determining the best way to spend your PPC budget while still understanding where your customers come from. With so many interactions leading to a purchase, attribution gives a bird’s-eye view of how different channels are performing and what gives the final conversion. While attribution surely helps you take important decisions regarding your business goals, often choosing the right model might be trickier than you’d imagine.
So in this episode on PPC Town Hall, we invited over some of the top data and attribution experts in the industry to share their tips and tactics on leveraging attribution with the help of Google Analytics.
Ken Williams, Senior Data Engineer, Search Discovery
Brooke Osmundson, Director of Paid Media, NordicClick Interactive
Christopher Gutknecht, Teamlead Acquisition & Optimization, Bergzeit
As always, you can view this week’s episode as well as previous editions of PPC Town Hall right here.
Here are 5 insights to attribution and Google Analytics.
1. The biggest measurement challenges in PPC
Chris: We’ve been working on profit bidding and attribution for a year now, and they’re both very challenging. The more you dig down into the rabbit hole, the more challenges you find. You’ve to make so many assumptions to move forward. So far, we’ve tested two models, one of them, the Markov chain model, is already in production. We use the Markov chain model, which we calculate on a daily basis and add the fresh results to attribute channel waste.
Brooke: If measuring different attribution models is new to you, start researching models to understand how your marketing efforts would benefit from each of the available models. If you have them built in Google Ads and Google Analytics, start comparing them against each other to understand the different touchpoints on what will work best for your business. These are the conversations worth having with our clients.
I feel like we’re a little bit behind ourselves in terms of adopting newer attribution models, especially with user behavior shifting. We’re seeing users take longer and there are other touchpoints to make a decision. If clients are still using last-click attribution, marketing efforts won’t show the full picture and can be detrimental in decision-making. Trying to find a model that doesn’t kill your upper funnel is extremely important.
2. Go for the ‘best choice’
Ken: We are working with pretty imperfect data. Being comfortable with acknowledging that, and thinking through the implications of different models to find the best fit is a business challenge. We have to start with the questions that the business needs to answer. And there’s no perfect fit. There’s going to be a ‘best choice’ for your customer experience and you just have to think through what your options are. Experimentation is really important!
3. What’s new with Google Analytics 4
Ken: There’s a lot that’s new in GA4. One of the most fundamental is the concept of an ‘event-driven’ data model, a structure that Firebase Analytics has used for years. It works well with mobile-apps, and now web and mobile will be sharing the same structure. Moreover, the way that we measured engagement has changed quite a bit. All of the key engagement metrics that we relied on with legacy versions of GA have been replaced by a new feature called ‘engagement time’ was rolled out with the ‘event-driven’ data model, which solves the problems with session-based engagement metrics. Finally, GA4 is built on the global site tag, which can help you make changes to the user interface that actually modify the code on your site without requiring a change in the tag manager.
4. Challenges with the tracking cookies fading out
Chris: The fading-out idea is hard to predict and focuses more on cross-site tracking than the first-party context. I think we should be working on small steps from the things that are already hurting us. So for instance, Safari ITP 2.1 kills first-party cookie data after 7 days, but they respect server-side cookies. One thing you could improve right now is to transfer to server-side cookies to preserve GA cookies on Safari devices.
Ken: There are two privacy-related things that we need to respond to: one of them is regulatory (we’ve been dealing with GDPR for a while and CCPA is new in the US), and the second is the momentum from popular browsers to restrict cookies. The vision that both Apple and Mozilla have put out is a desire to restrict the ability to monitor your cross-domain activities, by companies like Facebook.
One thing that you can do right now is to write your cookies from the server rather than with javascript. This is not a permanent solution, and it’s not easy for many companies because it requires the assistance of skilled developers.
5. Filling in data-gaps for attribution optimization
Brooke: I think that user-stitching or device ID attribution will be a more long-term solution. But right now, it’s extremely complicated. Whether you have the infrastructure in your team or at a large agency, but you do have essential people in roles that drive developmental work. Since you know what kind of data is available, the best thing will be to have these conversations with your clients. You should also do a bit of testing to figure out what works best for your organizational goals. We know that there will always be gaps in data, so until clients are able to invest in holistic solutions such as device ID attribution, you may have to make assumptions based on data trends available to you. It’s getting more difficult to understand everything there is about every customer, so focus on identifying what can move the needle for your company.
Ken: 10 years ago I believed very strongly in this 360° view of a customer. The idea was that since we’ve got all this digital data, we are gonna get better and better at understanding why customers behave the way they do. And we’ll eventually get to a point where we’ve got amazing data where we know everything. I feel like that is something we need to give up on as an industry because it was never a realistic aspiration. We’re never gonna fill all these data-gaps and have to get used to that.
Conclusion
Let’s be honest. There’s no ‘ideal’ answer to many of these questions regarding attribution. Even to pick the perfect model for your business, you have to constantly evaluate your marketing initiatives. And as Google continues to take away our data, we just have to become a little bit broader in our thinking and go back to the initial question - what’s the business trying to achieve?
This is where experimenting and doing multiple field tests with different models can pay off. The other thing that we can do is look for sophisticated attribution modeling to get that ‘best choice’ for the customer experience. Discussing this with your in-house/agency development teams can only help you finetune your buyer funnel better.
A common theme that we’ve all been talking about is how Google keeps automating more and more of the things that we as PPC practitioners tended to do. For an in-house team, this shift to automation might just be a godsend. They can do more work with less effort due to access to so many Google tools. But for an agency, this poses a completely different question. PPC agencies have to constantly evolve their strategies to provide value to their clients. But what processes will they need to deploy to remain competitive? And what can they really expect from automation tools in the market today?
So in this episode on PPC Town Hall, we asked some of the influential agency leaders to share their tips and tactics on growing a PPC business while making use of automation.
Wil Reynolds, Seer Interactive
Anu Adegbola, Brainlabs
Max Traylor, The Max Traylor
Tim Halloran, Aimclear (special guest)
As always, you can view this week’s episode as well as previous editions of PPC Town Hall right here.
Here are 5 insights on how leading agencies succeed in an automated PPC world.
1. Marketing strategy and older marketing resources
Wil: I have been lucky a few times where I’ve come up with a concept that has affected a good chunk of the industry. And these concepts came to me when I read things that usually the industry doesn’t read. So for a while, I decided to read books about marketing pre-1940. Because people back then had to go door to door, connecting to people and understanding their problems. So when you start reading books from that far back, you start finding ways of looking at the same marketing problems today. It’s just that we are so entrenched in PPC perspectives that we forget that we are still solving problems that were there for people 100 years ago.
The way that our world is going everyone is trying to find an algorithmic solution. So when everybody’s running one way (what keywords do I have to use in the title to please the algorithm), I’ve been studying the different types of ads and how they’ve connected to people in a meaningful way before the internet existed. And then I try to incorporate that into the way we do on a daily basis.
My favorite books on advertising are by Claude Hopkins called ‘My Life in Advertising’ and ‘Scientific Advertising’. Claude was literally talking about doing A/B testing, by going door-to-door conversing face-to-face, which was super inspiring to me.
2. Focus on getting loyal customers than clicks
Anu: We’ve got to be really careful about not just being all about ‘technology’ or ‘automation’. After all, it’s people who are at the end of all these clicks and reading our ads. It’s really important to try to think like a customer. When we look at an ad, what attracts us to click? What attracts us to click on a brand or get affiliated with a brand? All these decisions stem from who they are. Branding is important and knowing what that brand stands for, what they believe in, diversity, environmental consciousness, etc., are ultimately things that get loyal customers. I feel that we’re moving away from trying to build loyal customers and becoming too much about getting that ‘click’.
Wil: We don’t interact with our customers anymore. We don’t. We sit behind our tools. We’ve no idea what’s going on with them. One of the things that we started doing, and are slowly scaling in, is videoing our clients that are going through our search results and have them talk to us and understand their concerns. You become a very different level of a consultant when you talk to somebody. So often we look at these keywords and automation but don’t try to understand these people on a deeper level. But if go that one level deeper and find the right things, it could completely change the way you go to a market for a client. It’s because that ‘why’ will never show up on Google Ads.
3. Business of implementation
Max: Price premiums for implementation, doing these things with Google Ads, are going away.
If you want to build a job for yourself then you do what everyone else knows how to do and do it a little bit better. If you want to build profit, want people to seek you out, then you better invest in having the knowledge no one has. This all comes down to fundamentals: focus on a particular customer segment, understand who they are, what they want, and where they hang out. If you do this, people are bound to pay you a premium.
4. An automation ‘reformed skeptic’
Tim: I guess you can say that I am a reformed skeptic and that’s due to a lot of reading about when automation works and when it doesn’t. So I won’t say that I am a total believer in automation, but I’ve definitely eased up a little bit and gotten used to using it in my daily life.
I’ve been doing PPC for the last 10 years. And there wasn’t a lot of automation in the industry back in the 2012s or 2014s. I think when we got ‘lookalikes’ on Facebook by the end of 2015, which wasn’t working great at that time. But in 2017, everyone loved it. It had so many data inputs and it was working really well. Then they pulled back all the third-party data and the ‘lookalikes’ stopped working again. So it’s been pretty chaotic to go back and forth. Sometimes machine learning and automation work really well, and then they don’t, and then then they force it upon you. You have to find ways around it. So yeah, it’s a complex relationship for me.
5. In-house technology and funding good ideas
I am still learning about scripts. But my perspective as a business owner is ‘where can I fund good ideas?’ I tend to start from a place where I don’t want my team members to do ‘X’ task, or I don’t want them to have to worry when they have to check something. So, I’m constantly focused on being a vessel for really good ideas to come in really quickly, direct to the CEO or owner of the business, because I control what we do with our profits. So it’s very easy for me to direct resources and funds to people who solve problems. I want people’s jobs to be as enjoyable as possible. A part of my job is to understand what brings people down and take away their creativity. And I try my best to automate or outsource those to points in some way so that the team is efficient and increasing the quality of the work.
Conclusion
Only a week back, Google announced that it will soon phase our Broad Match Modified keywords and change how Phrase Match functions. Changes like this only mean one thing: the shift to automation is an inevitable one. While you don’t necessarily need to fear automation, making use of its capabilities can actually help you ease a lot of processes.
As an agency, it is important that you take a look at your strategies and talk to your clients to understand them on a deeper level. After all, no one can diminish the ‘human’ in this equation of a more automated PPC world. We just have to work around, get creative, and find solutions. Google might keep changing the playing field, but have to construct it using our own techniques to make it work for our clients.
Note: Smart Shopping campaigns have been upgraded to Performance Max in September 2022. We suggest you refer to these links below to know more about Performance Max.
2020 was anything but a normal year. The pandemic slowed day-to-day life as we know it, but it sped up years of e-commerce growth in just a few weeks. This acceleration is so huge that we can expect it to continue this year and beyond. Consumers are now looking for solutions online due to lockdowns, travel restrictions, and the unavailability of products in physical stores. While most retailers and businesses welcomed this shift to online shopping, many weren’t ready to cater to a virtual store experience.
To get a better look at the past year and discuss what to expect in 2021, we invited over some of our friends from Google and asked for their insights. We also heard from Andrew Lolk, an industry veteran and leading e-commerce expert, on his agency’s findings of what really works when the rubber meets the road.
Emi Wayner, Platform Partner Lead, Google
Peter Oliveira, Partner Development Analyst, Google
Andrew Lolk, Founder, SavvyRevenue
As always, you can view this week’s episode as well as previous editions of PPC Town Hall right here.
Here are 5 insights on tackling shopping ads and e-commerce in 2021.
1. Shopping & e-commerce predictions for 2021
Emi: As we all know, we have already shifted a lot since COVID happened. Digital is going to be a critical touchpoint for many shoppers. Searching locally and then confirming in-store availability. Consumers will also be looking to try new and safer services this year. We are also expecting a 600% increase in searches for ‘click + collect’ services.
Marketers can help raise awareness of differentiated omni-channel offerings and provide a great end-to-end experience for users who are increasingly selecting store pickup as their preferred fulfillment option. ‘Curbside Pickup’ and ‘Pickup Later’ are also useful to meet the needs of consumers. We have noticed that when you have ‘Pickup Today’ extension, the CVR increases 13% in ads while the CTR spikes 2%.
Andrew: It’s been interesting to see how lockdowns have affected the different markets around the world. As we have multiple office locations, we operate with e-commerce brands across the US, Europe, and Scandinavia. While we keep seeing different numbers and charts, we have seen e-commerce growth across all categories in different countries.
The interesting part is how in all the countries we’ve seen, the e-commerce levels almost stay at the same level even post-lockdowns. So the new e-commerce levels appear to be here to stay!
2. Thoughts on e-commerce in 2020
Emi: I think overall all categories went up in terms of purchase online. But we have particularly seen good growth in electronics, clothes and home furniture. Other categories like health and personal care also saw an increase in sales. On the search terms side, we noticed that people were more comfortable with purchasing non-brand items as they were more focused on inventory, looking for available items.
A lot of this can be based on ‘social e-commerce’. When you’re watching YouTube, you’d find a lot more advertising and useful information present that influences consumers to shop. Moreover, we have also observed a trend of personal services like fitness training, consulting, etc being offered online.
3. Smart vs Regular Shopping Campaigns
Peter: The key difference between the two is that Smart Shopping dynamically allocates your budget using machine learning across different channels and formats. So whereas in a traditional shopping campaign, you’d have a separate display campaign or a dynamic remarketing campaign, Smart Shopping is gonna do all that automatically for you. The good thing is that it still keeps your goal in mind while tapping into those additional formats and services to bring you more leads or sales.
The core levers that we have for scaling Smart Shopping Campaigns, in general, are ROAS, the budget, and also how many products are in the feed. The more products you have, the more inventory you get, which is similar to adding more keywords to your search campaign in order to generate more reach.
4. Smart Shopping outperforms Standard Shopping setups 9/10 times
Andrew: For in-house teams, or full-service agencies, Smart Shopping wins almost every time. Where we see Smart Shopping work really well is when we don’t have anything better to come up with. So let’s say a DTC advertiser that sells socks. We have little search term data, no price comparison data, no significant brands, etc. The complexity overall is almost non-existing. Smart Shopping does really well in those cases.
If you use external data like price comparison data, proactive seasonal bidding, weather data, inventory levels, promotions, etc, or have been running another more complex setup for a longer time, then making the switch will make Smart Shopping relearn some (maybe all) of those things again.
For Google Shopping campaigns to beat Smart Shopping, it’s paramount to use the priority levels to help it prioritize products is really the key to success:
The old school / easiest example to understand is using bestsellers in a high priority campaign, and others in a medium priority
But the sky’s the limit really, and we’ve tried a lot of different setups that all work well depending on the scenario.
5. Making Smart Bidding and Smart Shopping work for you
Peter: The core levers that we have for scaling Smart Shopping campaigns, in general, are ROAS, the budget, and also how many products are in the feed. The more products you have, the more inventory you get, which is similar to adding more keywords to your search campaign in order to generate more reach.
Andrew: For Smart Bidding to work optimally you have to keep optimizing your overall campaigns, but more importantly, you need to keep updating the ROAS/CPA targets. Not daily, not weekly, but only when you notice performance changes. This can be after a really good sales period where you’ve been hitting targets and then go into a slump. The algorithm will lower your bids to hit your target ROAS - but that might push you out of the auctions, which will start a negative spiral of you getting less and less data, which makes the algorithm work poorly.
Conclusion
The shift to an online shopping experience is a long pending one. We might see many businesses and buyers preferring the old-school brick-and-mortar stores. But due to health concerns, the necessity of having a fluid online shopping experience is now more prevalent than ever. PPC professionals and business owners need to re-assess, analyze and streamline their approaches to e-commerce in the upcoming months.
Using Google’s new setups and extensions, like Pickup Today, can only leverage us in the long run. Relying on automation, machine learning, and good data are sure to help us navigate new e-commerce and shopping trends in 2021. Now, you can get the slides from episode 32 of PPC Town Hall on optimizing shopping ads right here.
It’s 2021, and whether you’re a marketer or an agency, you would be preparing for yet another thrilling year of PPC. Right from the start, you need to be aware of the newest trends and features in paid marketing to leverage your PPC game. And that means you need to know of any curveballs that might come your way. In 2020, we saw experts deep-diving into topics like automation, privacy issues, and keywords, which we might be discussing more of the same this year as well.
To get a better perspective of what to expect in the coming months, we invited over some of the smartest minds of PPC and asked for their insights. Our panelists this week are some of your favorite experts from conferences like SMX, shedding light on what they expect from PPC in 2021.
Brad Geddes, Adalysis
Ginny Marvin, Independent Consultant
Matt Van Wagner, Find Me Faster
As always, you can view this week’s episode as well as previous editions of PPC Town Hall right here.
Here are 5 insights on what to expect from PPC in 2021.
1. RSAs vs ETAs
Brad: According to our data, we’ve seen more people trying out RSAs than Optmyzr users. We also see that a lot of people who still have them, have shrunk their usage. I’ve done a little bit of segmentation (since we did our session at SMX) on spending and account size versus declining RSA usage. And it’s definitely the smaller accounts that have declined their usage much less than the larger ones. We have seen that those who spend half a million to a million, plus have decreased usage more than those who spent 10-20 thousand dollars a month.
For a lot of these people, it’s more about results than getting that control. They don’t care if you’re a lead gen company. You may spend 10 million a month but in the end, you care about results.
Ginny: My question on it comes back to what are ‘results’? If we’re strictly looking at conversion rate or cost per conversion, then I can see where ETAs are often going to win. I’m wondering if advertisers might be looking at RSAs to open themselves up for more impression inventory. So is that a factor where people are considering more exposure than focusing on conversion rate?
Matt: In a lot of cases, you actually don’t have enough data for RSA to really even get their wheels spinning. It’s a multivariate type of testing and so often times we see that decisions are being made too quickly on winners and losers.
2. Identifying your business signals
Ginny: Having your own business signals mixed in with data you provide to the machine is becoming really critical now. This is where the real leverage can come, particularly the competitive leverage over your competitive sets. In order for people and businesses to identify their own business signals, they need to do some real analysis and investment, which takes a lot of digging. And then being able to present this in a way that can actually be used.
So the real question is, do advertisers keep pushing businesses to give more inputs even when some might want to keep that data to themselves rather than sharing it with Google? If yes, can we anonymize it and ensure that those inputs work within the algorithms.
3. Giving Google the right data and goals
Matt: Instead of fighting Google, let’s focus on giving them the right goals. One of our focuses will be feeding the data to the machine. And I think we’re actually going back to really seminal work in the whole web UX and web design area. If you look at Google Analytics, it’s moving away from discrete real things to events and connections that sort of represent proxies like scroll time or time on page. What I’d like to see is combinatorial data that would allow us to combine scroll depth and time on page, multimodally. How do we build up signals from the site we’ve got and trigger events that we can feed back to our bidding?
Our goal this year is to take a look at how we can understand what behaviors on the site represent good proxies to the next sort of actions. We also want to give those signals a little bit more attention, feed them, and try to develop audiences out of them.
4. Importance of setting up clean conversion
Brad: This is more important now than in the past because with all the privacy things happening, you doing your own data or attribution modeling is going to be essential. Even from a basic standpoint of modeling, you need to get it right because the privacy changes are going to mess up the data inside some of your platforms. Just to do some basic analysis, you actually need to have it yourself now and can’t rely on the platforms to give it to you because they’re not gonna have all the data they had previously.
5. 2021 Predictions
Brad: I will argue that as soon as Google removes keywords, their revenues decline significantly. Out of every advertising method out there, the intent of a search for someone saying ‘I want this’ is the strongest signal in advertising. It’s better than any programmatic, any audience or any other advertising methods. If people don’t get to use keywords for targeting, they might think of going programmatic.
Matt: I think that while Google may never take away keywords, they’ll definitely stop paying attention to what we’re actually telling them with our match-types. And I think that if you look at the loss of search query data may be Google feeding its AI and learning on all of our dimes! And they’re saying we don’t care what we [advertisers] know, they’re going to let their machines run wild, and decide for themselves what’s working or not!
Ginny: We still have some agency in all of this. I think we need to start using the machines in ways that they were meant to help us. And while they aren’t going to get it right all the time, we should be present to guide it. This is where your own data is going to be helpful. If you come in with a campaign that has been a disaster, all that data is not useful. For example, if you’ve set your campaign on broad match and end up reaching attorneys in Palm Beach when you actually run a hair salon, that data is useless. All of this can be avoided if you educate yourself and be an invested marketer. So much about this year is still going to be based on fundamentals.
Conclusion
Let’s face it - doing PPC in any year is tricky.
What with Google introducing changes, paid marketers need to leverage on every new trend that comes their way. Working along with the machine, feeding it good usable data, and relying on automation to boost your business goals might go a long way for PPC pros in 2021. To set yourselves apart from your competitors, consistently optimize your campaigns, utilize new tools, and look to expert strategies by industry leaders to pave your way to success.
Note: Smart Shopping campaigns have been upgraded to Performance Max in September 2022. We suggest you refer to these links below to know more about Performance Max.
One thing that we’ve learned about search in the past year is that we all need solid PPC strategies that account for all sorts of change. With all the automation that’s coming from Google, whether it’s smart shopping, smart bidding, or seasonality bid adjustments, it’s important to automate, optimize, and intervene our way to success. And what better way to understand the way forward than to ask some of the smartest minds of PPC.
Our panelists this week are among PPC Hero’s most influential paid search experts of 2020. And they shared their tips and experiences on working around outdated PPC strategies.
Kirk Williams, Founder, Zato Marketing
Aaron Levy, Group Director of SEM, Tinuiti
Joe Martinez, Director of Client Strategy, Clix Marketing
As always, you can view this week’s episode as well as previous editions of PPC Town Hall right here.
Here are 7 insights on revamping outdated PPC strategies.
1. Thoughts on Black Friday & Cyber Monday
Aaron: On our side, we saw that Black Friday was bigger than usual while Cyber Monday was slower than usual. It logically makes sense as on Balck Friday, everybody has a need to go bargain hunting, and that pent-up demand has shifted to online this year. Everyone thought Cyber Monday was kind of quiet because it’s the same as it has always been.
Kirk: We saw the same thing as Aaron [in a higher volume Black Friday than Cyber Monday this year, but we’ve heard others saying things a bit differently. It makes a lot of sense that the past weekend was a bit quiet as a lot of people were running sales earlier than normal. They had a Black Friday week-long or even month-long sale in November. Because of the earlier sale season, we saw consumers buying earlier than usual. So in some way what we saw in our numbers was that Black Friday was the main event, and Cyber Monday less so.
One of the reasons for this earlier shopping season is concern over shipping and delays. Because of this earlier-extended shopping season, we saw more out-of-stock products, more sales that went quicker this year.
Joe: While Black Friday was definitely much bigger than Cyber Monday and much earlier. For us in general, Black Friday was lower than expected but the entire month of November was higher than expected. Some stuff was reactionary to competitors starting early which was in the first-second week of November.
2. An unusual year for PPC
Aaron: At Tinuiti, we tend to work with larger data sets to focus on larger enterprise clients. So Smart Bidding in general tended to work pretty well for us. But one of the things that I always pick on Smart Bidding for is that it has too short of a memory. This Holiday season was one of those scenarios where that’s really valuable because it didn’t try to base itself off of what happened last year. We used seasonality adjustments pretty religiously for most of our clients. For example, if noon was a really popular time, we’d start tweaking our seasonality adjustments leading up to it and down after.
3. Using different shopping strategies
Kirk: We try to use a combination of both Standard and Smart. We constantly test them, see what’s working and what’s not. I’m always trying to figure out a better strategy to work for both Standard and Smart. With Standard, you get more of that control where you can give the system-specific search terms, which we’re focused on (even if they’re not always converting) as valuable information for brands.
Sometimes, we’d duplicate products or try something with the feed to get stuff in the upper funnel queries that might not be specific to one product. Smart shopping is not just on search but display, Youtube, and all that, so rather than be frustrated that we can’t control the search terms, we’re trying to figure out a way to group products around the ad content itself to emphasize specific call-outs in those Smart Shopping Ads for that specific group of products.
Joe: As I said earlier, our Black Friday started earlier than normal and our seasonality bidding was kind of thrown out of the window of what we expected to do. Since I work with smaller clients with very niche products (sometimes higher-ticket type item products). We understand that those really aren’t necessarily impulse-buys. So, we’re looking at the time of day, understanding that it’s gonna take multiple touchpoints for a user to buy this product. If we hit them enough with discovery, Google, and social initially, then we’re seeing that they later go back (late night hours) to purchase. We’re seeing a better performance as we’re adjusting the different schedules and updating how we want to boost our bidding and performance.
4. Converting digital newbies & feeding data to the system
Aaron: Something we’ve seen in the last six or so months, I’ve somewhat abandoned call to action. But giving turn-by-turn directions to these people who aren’t digitally native seems to work. You can tell them where to click, enter their details, make the purchase and know when it’s gonna get delivered or opt to come and pick-up yourself.
When you have data like shipping or pick-up preferences, you’ve to use it sensibly. It varies a lot depending on clients because it partially depends on cost and revenue centres as well. So maybe the digital team isn’t incentivized to drive people to the store and so we want to discourage it. But for those clients who are a bit more holistic, we’d look into the feeds and coach the bid tools to do what we want. For example, we see that for a certain demographic, this particular set of terms or ads tends to convert better as in-store pick-ups rather than a standard e-com shipping. Then we’d take that group, pivot it, and tell Smart Bidding that we want more store visits to set that group. The rest can be taken towards the more conventional way.
5. Get your messaging right in Responsive Search Ads
Joe: We utilize the pin option just to make sure that certain elements of the messaging show. It’s something that we definitely consider when we’re mapping it out. We will show it in front of clients too. We ask them if it really helps to add all these variations if four of them pretty much say the same thing. Google’s definitely gonna flag it, prompting you to add more keywords into your headlines.
Honestly, we’ve played around with what actually makes sense and that’s where we kind of focus on value prop. Maybe I’ll pin the first keyword which made more sense to the product type and then look at testing the other ones. Slowly, I’ve come to like RSAs. While they didn’t really work for me that well in the beginning, the more I see them working they are getting better. We’ve seen RSAs work pretty well with grants accounts by boosting impressions quickly.
6. Looking towards automation
Kirk: We’re looking more and more into automation to solve our problems. The whole idea of Google leaning hard into automation can be quite frustrating for PPC marketers like us who have been running things for a while. I may have practiced and learned something for over a decade, and then due to a specific change, I can find myself at the same level as an intern in my knowledge of the thing that changed. But the flip side of this frustration is – there’s an evolution that needs to happen in PPCers, too. We need to adapt to the system. And with automation at ZATO, we’re trying to think of reinventing the way we think about campaign structure and other things.
Specifically in thinking about broad match keywords, we’ve started testing things giving Google control over Target ROAS bidding, few very tightly controlled broad match keywords where everything else is excluded. We’re treating this less in terms of ‘what we want to get from this campaign in specific tracked ROAS’ and more of giving Google guidelines and then freedom for reaching the upper-funnel.
7. How do we structure our campaigns?
Aaron: When we think of structuring our campaigns in the present scenario, we’ve to look at conversion runways. If you think about Smart Bidding on its most practical level, it largely looks at the expected conversion rate. The way forward should start with the question – what do we expect from this group of people to do.
Talking about Skags and keywords, if the intent is fundamentally different then we’ll split it out. If not we’ll compress. We all know how Google is pushing towards consolidation and we’re establishing runways for the automation to make the right decisions. So we essentially split the groups out based on audience, demographic, keyword, or interaction. You don’t want to shrink data to the point where you’re making bad assumptions.
Conclusion
While automation has helped PPCers focus more on the strategic part of marketing, it has left us with little to control. With Google constantly introducing changes in 2020, it might be time to recondition the earlier approaches to get an edge over the competition. This is where all the expert advice and recommendations come into play by supporting marketers to operate in the periphery of the system and still manage it for better results.
Now more than ever, PPC marketers and strategists need to come together to figure out how to advance in the paid search industry. It might not be a bad idea to make use of efficient software systems, like Optmyzr, to track, manage, and optimize your campaigns. Try and experience our capabilities yourself by signing up for our 14-day free trial. You get full access to all our features – credit card free!
Over the past few years, marketers have seen Smart Bidding evolve with Google’s machine learning. In fact, it seems to be a way into the future of advertising by making the best use of AI and data to provide intelligent campaign adjustments. But while Smart Bidding does automate tedious tasks of PPC ad management and save time, it’s far from a ‘set it & forget it’ mentality. To make the most of it, advertisers need to monitor and optimize to get the best results for their campaigns.
So this week on Episode 28 of PPC Town Hall, we invited our friends from Google to discuss Smart Bidding campaigns and shed light on tactics for optimization.
Our panelists for the week:
Emi Wayner, Platform Partner Lead, Google
Peter Oliveira, Partner Development Analyst, Google
You can receive the exclusive Smart Bidding guide from Optmyzr and Google by signing up here! You can also view previous editions of PPC Town Hall right here.
Without further delay, here are the 6 insights to understanding and optimizing Smart Bidding campaigns.
1. Evolution of Modern Search
Emi: What we see today is really the evolution of machine learning. I think machine learning is getting smarter with people getting more comfortable using and leveraging it to the next level for better results. We search so differently compared to what we did three years ago. In fact, 15% of queries on google.com are new every day. That means there are tonnes of queries that Google misses as well. So, we really have to depend on Machine learning to capture maximum potential with search.
As machine learning gets smarter, the data that marketers provide is really going to be the key to be competitive and achieve your goals. Not from the CPA perspective, but broader profitability and customer lifetime value.
2. Analyzing Smart Bidding signals
Peter: Google looks at billions of signals to set the bid for every auction. We’re monitoring a bunch of different things more than just the signals, like the intersection of these signals. A lot of the things that we used to optimize manually like devices, day of week, time, location, all the different keywords, etc are now being taken care of for Smart Bidding. But there are some tactics which you can use to inform Smart Bidding what are the right ways you can treat some of these things.
Emi: So this is a recent performance review using selected US accounts. When we looked at the data, Smart Bidding outperformed Manual Bidding across most of the spend buckets on Optmyzr accounts.
A lot of people should take advantage of Smart Bidding regardless of the budgets (look at the right-hand side of the chart – ‘under 500 budget’). And we see significant performance even in smaller budgets as well as larger ones (above 50k).
3. Optimizing Discovery campaigns
Peter: I have seen some very strong results with Discovery campaigns for certain advertisers. For example, I worked with a real-estate partner who was seeing better results in Discovery campaigns than in Search!
If you’re having issues with the returns and getting conversions, make sure that you’re setting the CPAs properly. Setting up unrealistic CPAs that do not represent your goals can hamper your account health. And then there’s also the flipside. If you look at our audiences to whom we are comfortable suggesting Discovery Ads, you’ll see that the daily budget recommended is about 20 times the target CPA. So, if you have a tighter budget, I’d recommend maybe doing 10 times the target CPA.
That being said, I have seen success at a lower CPA. But if you have a smaller budget, I wouldn’t be actively recommending Discovery Ads to you. Layering on audience lists like remarketing and customer matching might help you see more successful results.
Emi: We have seen a pretty good performance in the use cases with Discovery campaigns, even for a first-time mid-sized account. So I would encourage marketers to keep looking into why they aren’t giving you a good performance. In terms of how long, usually we test for a week and then we regroup with the customers, and keep doing this. So one week at a time.
4. Common mistakes advertisers make with Smart Bidding
Start making sure what goals your Smart Bidding campaign will be optimizing and those goals align with what you’re trying to achieve. I have seen people set a Max Conversions strategy on a campaign that was spending half of its budget. We didn’t see any positive results CPA-wise as Max Conversions doesn’t necessarily focus on optimizing your CPA. It looks towards getting you as many conversions as possible within your budget. And if you’re spending only half of your budget, we don’t necessarily know whether that incremental conversion will come at a CPA that aligns with your historical ones.
The other thing is the target that we set. I would advise looking into your optimization score recommendations in the front-end to see what we are recommending there. You’ll probably want to start by setting a target in line with what you’re historically performing at. If you’re historically performing at a CPA of $100 and if you switch that down to $50, you can massively end up throttling the number of conversions and sales you were getting.
Just because we don’t want to necessarily start with Smart Bidding on the exact Target CPA, doesn’t mean we can’t get there. Start with where you’re historically performing at and slowly adjust to get where you want to be.
5. Structuring a Smart Bidding campaign with segmentation
Peter: When we segment our campaigns, Smart Bidding can actually take data and learn from the performance that’s happening throughout the account. While you don’t need to segment everything, if you do end up breaking up your campaigns, Smart Bidding will be able to learn from the performance of the campaigns. The only thing that I’ll caution about is to break down to the point where there isn’t a lot of conversion volume in each individual campaign. On top of that, if you have a Target ROAS or Target CPA that your campaigns aren’t able to meet, that’s something to watch out for.
If you put more constraints on the targets and segment the campaigns, you could end up throttling your campaigns altogether.
6. Marketing as a holistic approach
Emi: We think that a marketer can play a bigger role in PPC marketing than just making strategies or directing CPC. We look at a marketer as a growth engine for the company. Strategic points like profitability and value of customers can help bring value to your work and your business. I would really encourage everyone to think more than just PPC, think of how you can bring that value to your company and leverage for more growth.
Conclusion
Fred: When you start with something, like Smart Bidding, it’s better not to shock the system and be extremely aspirational. Machine learning functions on how things have worked consistently in the past. Even if you set up higher targets, it might take a while for the system to get you there. But at the end of the day, to achieve the target you really want, it all comes down to you, the advertiser, to set up the prerequisites and feed in impressionable data. You can add a lot of value to your ongoing campaigns by not taking bidding as something that just happens by itself.
Seasoned PPC professionals make use of efficient bid management tools, like Optmyzr, to keep their accounts top-notch and optimize your bids. Try and experience our capabilities yourself by signing up for our 14-day free trial.
If you’ve been watching the news over the last couple of years, you could be forgiven for thinking we live in a weird timeline where dreary writers like Edgar Allan Poe and Ray Bradbury reigned supreme.
Between climate change, terrorism, economic struggle, and the health crisis of 2020, this year has embodied the term VUCA — volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity. Yet this is the world we live in, and if digital marketers want to continue to have a place in it, we have to learn how to adapt our tactics and messaging to this reality.
So this week on Episode 27 of PPC Town Hall, I wanted to bring in the authors of the report “Digital Marketing in a VUCA World” to share some of their insights from the research they conducted and to discuss what the roadmap for the future could look like.
Our panelists for the week:
• Anders Hjorth, Digital Marketing Strategist at Innovell • Lukas Adamec, Freelance PPC/SEM Specialist
As always, you can view this week’s episode of PPC Town Hall embedded below, or click here to browse all our episodes. In the meantime, here are some of the insights from this week’s PPC Town Hall on how to do digital marketing in an unpredictable VUCA world.
1. What happens when agencies lose large amounts of revenue overnight
Anders: We asked 20 agencies that participated in the survey, “How bad were you hit?” About 15% said ‘no change’; a huge chunk — about 50% of respondents — said between 10-40% reduction in media spend; and a fairly large percentage saying 40-60% reduction.
When we’re looking at agencies having 40% of their media spend disappear, and as we know, a lot of the economic models are tied in some way to spend. Very few are on a retainer or consultancy basis. So this means they lose a lot of money and activity, and the rest of the activity had to be changed. Everybody’s panicking, so what do you do?
Lukas: It’s actually been the case in some instances that the agency-client relationship has ended because of volatility. Bearing in mind that the vast majority of agencies — particularly the bigger ones in the UK — have very diverse clients in their portfolios, so that’s why the impact was mostly in the 40-60% range.
But I definitely know of instances where clients have stopped their relationship with an agency because they were the most hit — tourism, hotels, and some retail as well. But other parts of retail, especially direct-to-consumer, actually thrived during this time.
2. If you put the wrong data in, the wrong prediction comes out
Anders: When we talk about volatility and VUCA, yes there’s health crises and lockdowns; but there’s also terrorism and the end of cookies. The direct impact is more easily measurable on this year’s health crisis because it’s such an abrupt change.
Over the past 2 years, we saw people adopt automated or machine-based bidding massively. We also observed that agencies used dedicated data analysts in fewer cases than they did before. This surprised us.
Lukas: It feels like the outcome was two sides of the same coin. On the one hand, there is less involvement from data analysts because there’s more reliance on AI. On the other hand, it’s not about the position of the analyst but the insight into performance is placed on marketers’ shoulders.
So where you’d previously have a data analyst to support you with looking at trends and performance, it’s almost a standard part of the marketer’s job instead of focusing on platform and creatives.
3. Data is the new oil
Anders: Can you extract more value from your data than if you give it to a platform? It’s a question of who controls it and whether you should give it away to a third party like Google or Amazon.
We think it’s very important to start controlling and protecting your own data. It doesn’t mean you shouldn’t make it flow; flowing data across platforms is extremely important to get better insights. But you need to consider each time you do that: what are you using, what are you giving away, and is there anything you can keep instead of letting someone else monetize it?
4. The connection between automation and who’s deploying it
Lukas: For me, the whole idea of paid search until now is its transparency. You can track everything down to each penny you spend and be able to show results. This is now changing the fundamentals of what paid search is for me, because I can’t explain everything (with less data).
5. How people can use automated bidding more effectively
Lukas: I personally see a huge degree of complacency when it comes to automated bidding, especially, in a lot of agencies. You’ll find that 90% of the time, you can set the AI to do your bidding for you and it’ll deliver decent performance.
But it’s that 10% of the time where something goes wrong, or when you have a promotion that suddenly skews the data — and suddenly, you have an impulse that the tool cannot account for and everything falls apart.
I even feel with some of the ways platforms sell automated bidding, like recommending not to touch things for 2 weeks to let the machines learn, you should never be in a position where you can’t change settings.
6. Preparing for the end of cookies
Anders: Will remarketing be in trouble as we see fewer and fewer cookies? Yes. Hopefully, the bad practices will die off and there’ll be some intelligent use of user data.
So start building direct relationships with your users, like email or another channel where you own that user data. If you only have access to your customers and clients via platforms or audiences, you’re probably going to lose a lot of that access. So start building that proprietary database today.
Conclusion
As I mentioned this week on PPC Town Hall, the role of the PPC manager is changing from being in the middle of account performance to managing the periphery (read my full thoughts on the topic in my post for Search Engine Journal).
But as we look to evolve our roles, we also have to remain aware of what’s happening in the wider world. From the geopolitical to the ecological, events transpire daily that impact the health of the digital marketing space… paid search included.
That’s why spaces of learning (like PPC Town Hall) will only become more important in the coming months and years. So sign up for our mailing list (and tell your PPC peers) to get notified of all our events in advance and early access to some of our upcoming resources!
Is there something on your mind? Do you have a topic you’d like us to cover on PPC Town Hall? Write to support@optmyzr.com and tell us about it, and we’ll try our best to address your concerns.
Ever since Google introduced a whole bunch of changes, things have been changing very fast in PPC. Taking away search query data, making it harder to create expanded text ads, doing more and more automated bidding, etc., is only making us unsure of the future of search marketing.
With the rising number of roadblocks that Google is putting in front of us, marketers need to be ready to overcome anything that the search giant throws at us. The question of the hour is: How much more can Google automate and change the way that we as PPC professionals go about business?
So this week on Episode 26 of PPC Town Hall, I wanted to talk to two industry specialists who have worked with a lot of accounts and have faced the implications of the changes in search marketing and automation.
Our panelists for the week:
Martin Röttgerding, Head of SEA, Bloofusion
Brady Cramm, Director of PPC, Directive Consulting
As always, you can view this week’s episode as well as previous editions of PPC Town Hall right here.
Here are the top 6 insights from this week’s PPC Town Hall on navigating the future of PPC automation.
1. How to optimize Google’s tax?
Martin: Some countries have started to raise the Digital Services Tax from Google. Now, Google intends to pass that on to advertisers. For example, for ads being shown in Austria and Turkey Google will add 5% to your invoice. This is tricky because it won’t show up in any of your regular KPI’s. Your costs and CPC’s in the interface will seem unaffected. This makes it easy to miss – which is probably the intention.
There’s a reason why you’ve decided on a certain bid or budget. In order to account for the new tax, you’ll have to lower your bids or budget by about 5%. Then you’ll end up paying the same as before. Of course, Google would rather have you pay the same amount to them and then the additional 5% in taxes, which is probably why they have little incentive to help us with this.
2. Taxes and Geo locations
Martin: Digital services taxes depend on where the advertising cost occurs. For example, if someone in the UK clicks an ad, a 2% tax charge will be added to the cost of that click. The problem here is that there’s a difference between the location of interest and user location. If you target the U.S. then that can include people elsewhere if Google somehow identifies the U.S. as their location of interest.
There used to be an easy way to evaluate physical user locations. That has been removed. Standard location reports no longer include physical location. In fact, Google got rid of any mention that there might be a difference between physical location and location of interest.
You can still get the data, though – it’s just less convenient. Google also removed the pre-defined report from its report editor, but you can still create your own from scratch. So while the data is no longer present front-and-center, you can still get it.
Brady: Let’s take the example of businesses dealing with ‘New York Pizza’. This is a specific style of pizza that practically anyone can search about. While the local pizza shops of New York have been capturing people around the world looking up for New York Pizza, the location settings in the user interface don’t show this happening. As a result, a lot of these small pizza places now could gain a UK tax or something without any idea why.
To find this specific information about locations, go to
Reports → Custom and build your own report.
If you search ‘user locations’ in your report, you’ll find all of the user location option that you can place within the rows of your report.
3. Managing accounts with less search data
Brady: We’re seeing a struggle for low volume accounts. So for accounts where you can spend every day digging into the search term reports, read them, and make decisions based on your finding, we are seeing a lot of frustration.
When it comes to high-volume accounts, I think it makes things like n-grams even more relevant. With access to less data, n-gram reports can help you find trends within the data set you have and make decisions accordingly.
4. Functioning with Google ‘roadblocks’
Brady: I’m not fully against these changes. In a handful of our campaigns, we do full broad keyword targeting paired with Target CPA, and it does fairly well. Looking at our search terms, we see that some of them are non-branded solution-based terms, while some are comparing our solution vs other competitors, and some are comparing between other competitors altogether. But, at the end of the day, the cost per conversion, and MQL, are pretty good.
When it comes to B2B software marketing, we’re really looking at an LTV/ CAC model. So modeling that out for both Google Ads and other channels, and helping the clients on that level is something we’re moving towards. With a higher level of automation, we would have time to focus on stuff like landing pages optimization, A/B testing, new offers, and analyzing the competition.
5. Shifting agencies and business goals while working with the same black box by Google
Martin: With Google doing everything with these black box campaigns like smart shopping, discovery, or local campaigns, it becomes more and more important to make sure that their systems have the right data to go on. This is also an important field for agencies and advertisers to set themselves apart from the crowd.
One way to do that is to further evolve conversion tracking. For the last ten or so years, everyone has focused on revenue. Before that, it was about conversions. The future is about margins and profit instead of revenue. Beyond that, there’s customer lifetime value. And just as important is incrementality – although that is something that you probably can’t expect much help from the platforms.
Brady: When everyone is competing armed with the same black boxes and no levers like before, you should:
Build your own audiences
Feed Google quality data (MQL, SQL, Opportunities, Pipeline Revenue, etc.)
Constantly audit competitor messaging
Test landing page messaging and offering
Create brand awareness
Educate others
Manage specific audiences and their campaigns
6. Future of Google
Brady: If we think of what to expect from Google in 2021, I think we’re going back ourselves into something like DSA campaigns. While we will see some new features, it seems like we’re getting back to something that’s already existed – Google having control over the search terms, the ads, and the pages.
I think that the future of Google already exists. While I don’t think the changes will be extreme, we’ll be moving towards something that existed previously.
Conclusion
It’s no doubt that the world of PPC is going through some changes. With Google introducing new features every now and then, we marketers must be flexible with our strategies. One thing is clear: it’s going to be extremely tough to stand out when every PPC professional relies on the same black box by Google. To be on par with the search giants evolving practices, we need to rely on automation to some level.
Automation is a great way to handle daily mundane tasks, but PPC professionals shouldn’t confuse it with ‘autopilot’. Though machines might be able to perform a high number of actions quickly and efficiently, they will still rely on us for timely inputs and tweaks.
So whether it’s now, or 5 years into the future, marketers will always have something to do for there is no replacement for human intellect, ingenuity, improvisation, and intuition.
There’s no doubt that 2020 has been an unusual year for all of us. Even though we’re just in the middle of October, people have already started shopping for the upcoming holidays.
Supply chains, delivery, and in-store experiences aren’t what they normally are, yet consumers are buying and spending more — which has forced marketers and agencies to run offers and deals a bit earlier than usual.
But even with so much uncertainty and change, e-commerce has been ahead of what we expected at the start of the year.
So this week on Episode 25 of PPC Town Hall, we wanted to gain a perspective on how we all could navigate the coming Holiday season and make the most of it. We talked to two amazing PPC experts from OMG Commerce, an Optmyzr user, who shared their insights on all things e-commerce and shopping.
Our panelists for the week:
Brett Curry, CEO, OMG Commerce
Greg Maycock, Sr. Google Strategist, OMG Commerce
As always, you can view this week’s episode as well as previous editions of PPC Town Hall right here.
Here are the top 5 insights from this week’s PPC Town Hall with OMG Commerce to help you make the most of Holiday e-commerce this year.
1. Changes in the last few years
Brett: One of the things that we did early on was manual bidding. In fact, as an agency, we were really good at it. So, we had some non-automated options where we were doing things with spreadsheets. We used formulas to sort our products and create bidding recommendations.
When Google launched Target ROAS, we were hesitant to try it out. But as it got better and better, we decided to test it out with a few of our campaigns. It took a little bit of convincing, but we slowly started to transition. I think that if there is some new tool that is better than our current approach, we need to embrace that!
One thing that we have to look at is how shifting our segmentation, breaking out campaigns, or even changing our targets can impact the full product-line visibility and sales. While we have come a long way from spreadsheets, we still have to think strategically and dig into the data regularly.
Greg: The smart bidding strategies have created opportunities to scale in terms of having multiple campaigns with multiple strategies. It has definitely changed how we look at campaign structures. In fact, I don’t think we have any accounts which don’t have three or more shopping campaigns. Earlier, with manual bidding, we ran a lot of campaigns with single product ad groups to focus our optimizations manually at the sku level. Now, it’s more about creating campaign structures that feed the smart-bidder the data and focus on what you want to optimize for.
2. Aligning PPC outcomes with business goals
Brett: As we do a lot of Youtube ads, we have all sorts of in-depth discussions with our clients. Usually, we have to ask them questions, about three or four times, in different ways with projected illustrations of results. We talk a lot about portfolios and how different campaigns work together. We also have to ask probing questions to really understand the client’s goals. In my opinion, we have to over-communicate.
Our role, as an agency, is to think strategically, ask questions, and revisit all of our findings. Ask a lot of questions so you get as much clarity as possible and keep evaluating what you’re doing. Eventually, this will help you align with your client.
3. Understanding YouTube campaign structure and formats
Brett: We primarily focus on Trueview for Action campaign where we can bid on a Target CPA basis. We found that if you give Google the goal of conversions, the smart-bidder becomes pretty good at finding people who convert. If you use Cost Per View as your bid strategy, Google’s pretty good at finding people who watch YouTube videos. So with CPV, your views will go up but your conversions will go way down. If you transition to Trueview for Action, you’ll get more clicks and certainly more conversions.
While we are looking for direct conversions through YouTube Trueview ads, we are also looking at the brand lift and Google trends to see the impact of our campaigns.
Greg: When we are retargeting viewed video audiences, who are still in the acquisition funnel, we turn to Trueview for action campaigns to re-engage people who saw the initial video. But we are also running YouTube for shopping campaigns, remarketing to people who did engage with the website but didn’t convert.
4. How to leverage audiences
Brett: Now’s the time to get your brand’s (or business’) message out there to drive not only conversions but build other kinds of audiences as well. We have a four-pronged marketing approach that can guide you better.
I think that this year, customers will be more interested in on-time delivery and getting the product they want than deals alone. It’s safe to say that most people also want deals or discounts. Done right, you can offer a deal that doesn’t negatively impact your brand. You can also look at free gifts, which is kind of like discounting but while making use of some unsold inventory.
5. Free PLAs and Deep Feed Analysis
Brett: In order to fill the gaps in your Search and Shopping, all you’ve to do is enable a setting inside Google merchant center to get free listings on surfaces across Google.
Most people search for a product on Google and then click on the Shopping ads on the main SERP. But some shoppers click through to the shopping or image tabs. Your free listings can appear on these tabs. If you’re paying for Google shopping ads, then surfaces across Google can deliver a 3-5% increase in conversions and clicks.
We do a deep feed analysis when we start with a client. This is compared with our keyword research and evaluated. After this, our feed specialist would craft the updated titles, descriptions, product categories, and even product types.
Conclusion
The way ahead for the world might be uncertain but it’s also exciting, and that’s true for PPC and e-commerce as well. As we get used to these regular changes, we also need to keep a strategic eye on everything we’ve done in the past.
Make informed decisions and align your PPC goals with what your clients want to achieve for their businesses. Re-check data, run tests, and communicate with your client to start the right way and keep the relationships strong.
Focus on the right messages to the right audience at the right time — the essence of Google Ads and PPC in general — and stay in touch with trends and updates to how search engines work for advertisers and users alike.
There’s no doubt that marketing is one of the most expensive aspects of running any business. And while advertisers might race ahead in the hopes of getting more clicks and profit, they can still end up making mistakes!
A classic PPC horror story is when marketers mix up traffic with solid leads and forget about optimizing their accounts. Not supervising the system and failing to make effective improvements can turn into wasting tons on bad clicks and setting that yield no returns!
So this week on Episode 24 of PPC Town Hall, we talked to two brilliant PPC pros and discussed actionable tips on how to stop burning budgets. We even got to learn about PPC community initiatives like PSA and new Microsoft Ad capabilities that can benefit marketers.
Our panelists for the week:
David Szetela, President of Paid Search Association & Owner of FMB Media
John Lee, Learning Strategist at Microsoft Advertising
As always, you can view this week’s episode as well as previous editions of PPC Town Hall right here.
Here are the top insights from this week’s PPC Town Hall to help you identify budget-burning areas, know Microsoft’s newest features, and understand the thought behind creating a successful PPC community.
1. What role does the Paid Search Association play in the industry?
David: Initially, I was attracted by the notion that there really wasn’t one consolidated source of credible and curated information/ resources for PPC managers. You basically had to pick and choose from among homogenous resources. There really wasn’t a one-stop-shop for people who wanted to train themselves and be updated with the developments.
So our core mission is to serve as a curated source of learning and news resources.
John: One of the things that we’ve talked about as a collective is about mentoring. It surely is a complex thing to figure out with variables like timings and schedules. But there are a lot of bright men and women on the board who have been eager to share what they’ve learned within the industry and their peers.
2. Microsoft’s Audits network
John: Not just us, but practically everybody is working on something related to customer privacy and a ‘cookie-less world’. In this industry, where all the platforms rely on cookie data presently, what would the future look like? Envisioning for this future, Microsoft just launched a partnership for brand safety. It’s neither an ad-on nor does it cost anything extra. If you run ads on the Microsoft Advertising network, you’re automatically opted into this brand safety application.
3. The 4 Google money grabs
David: These are the four key areas where marketers waste their spend:
Location targeting settings: When you look at the User Locations report, you would find that your ads are being shown either nation-wide or worldwide, even when you’re geo-targeting a smaller area. I’ve seen accounts spending thousands of dollars per year on clicks that are outside the geo-targetted area.
Targeting expansion: By default, Google turns on ‘Targetting expansion’ which generally would mean helping advertisers widen the reach of their display ad group. Extending the reach, in this case, means showcasing your ads on sites where people might convert.
Now, when you’re doing audience targeting, you shouldn’t be placing ads on sites based on just any criteria, but following your audience dedicatedly to any site. To avoid this, just disable that option altogether.
Ads showing up on mobile apps by default: When you go to placements to see where your ads are appearing, you will definitely see that your apps are showing up on mobile apps. You might even find a considerable amount of clicks coming from them, likely clicking by mistake. There might be a lot of kid’s apps and games that might not be relevant to your business.
I’m gonna let you in on a technique that Kirk Williams (from Zato Marketing) wrote about, which you can only do with Google Ads Editor.
Go to Display Campaigns → Keywords and Targetting → Mobile app categories Negative → Add two negative categories for both Google and Apple apps. And that’s it. From then on you’ll not see mobile apps in your list of placements.
Enhanced CPC vs Max CPC: I don’t like the fact that when you create a new campaign, by default the bidding model is Enhanced CPC. And my feeling is based out of a general distrust of the bidding algorithm to know anything about the conversion behavior of people as it relates to the offer.
In order to use target CPA bidding, Google says that you need to have 15 or more conversions over the course of 30 days. Which I think makes sense as you’ve got some behavior to fuel the algorithm. Whereas when a campaign starts out with CPC bidding, there is no pre-recorded data or behavior. This might contribute to the higher CPC values at the beginning of the campaign, which might be due to Google’s automation thrashing to attenuate the signal.
4. New Microsoft Ad Features for the win
John: Some new features in Microsoft Advertising are:
Use LinkedIn data to target ads: The LinkedIn Profile Targeting has been live for all for over a month. This is the first time when data sets from both Microsoft and LinkedIn are coming together. You can now layer in information from a LinkedIn profile like company name, job function, and industry to target highly relevant audiences in-text ads, DSAs, and Shopping Campaigns.
Multi-image extensions: Microsoft recently added to their Image Extensions capabilities so that users can now add multi images, effectively a carousel with your search ads in SERP.
Availability of Stock photos: Microsoft Advertising has partnered with Shutterstock to provide an access to 300 million commercially licensed images to advertisers.
Microsoft Audience Network: It’s a native ad platform where you can showcase search campaigns. You also get an opportunity to bid on placements on MSN.com, the Edge browser, Outlook.com, and a host of other publishing partner sites. In order to save marketers from double work, our new functionality can help you replicate information from Google Display Ads (which are truly working) to Microsoft Advertising.
5. Be mindful of your bid adjustments
John: Everyone needs to be really mindful when you’re applying bid adjustments. If you have bid adjustments at every layer, that can get out of control in a hurry. So things like age, gender, location, in however many audience groups you’ve stacked in a particular group or campaign need to be strategically placed.
Conclusion
PPC campaigns can prove to be of immense importance in paving way for your organization or business. With the ever-changing dynamics of search marketing, marketers need to be on alert about how they handle their accounts. Giving up complete control to default settings might hurt your accounts more than you can comprehend.
To make informed decisions, keep discussing strategies and tactics with the community and your peers. Look to industry leaders for actionable solutions that actually bring you results.
Next week on PPC Town Hall, we are jumping back in discussing best practices for Holiday shopping with prominent e-commerce and shopping experts. Join us in the session to ask your questions!
It’s true: the right bidding strategy can decide the fate of your PPC accounts.
With the ever-changing dynamics of search marketing, marketers need to be extra careful navigating the tough waters of bid management. Moreover, they also need to be conscious of Google’s take on limiting search query reports and pushing new limits on data access.
In order to gain big on leads, we have to do more than just focusing on bidding strategies. Metrics like quality score, tCPA, ROAS, etc., can also play a big role in influencing bid management.
So this week on episode 23 of PPC Town Hall, we discussed tips and tactics by specialists to improve your bid management for good lead generation and e-commerce.
Our panelists for the week:
Navah Hopkins, Director of Paid Media, Hennessey Digital
Frederick Vallaeys, Co-Founder, Optmyzr
Geetanjali Tyagi, Co-Founder, Optmyzr
As always, you can view this week’s episode as well as previous editions of PPC Town Hall right here.
Here are 5 tips that experts swear by to manage bids for leads and e-commerce.
1. The changing face of Search Terms Reports
Navah: Initially, when it was announced that the Search Terms Reports were being depreciated, I didn’t think much of it. Ultimately, you’re still gonna be able to see the click data, the keyword data, and your ROASes. It’s not that you’re getting fewer clicks, you’re just not getting that transparency on the queries.
But now, I think it is an actual problem as I have noticed an under-spending issue. Not being able to see where the budget is being funneled is really a problem. My theory is that a lot of the spend is being directed to local service ads rather than paid search. Local service ads come at a dramatic discount, without any pre-requirement of running a paid search ad.
Apart from this, there is no transparency for different automation strategies that are either underperforming or overperforming.
2. SKAGs vs STAGs
Navah: Lately, I’ve been pushing far more broad match ad groups and campaigns, especially with how much the match types have changed. The allocation of budget to broad match and exact match keywords seems much higher than phrase match keywords. Now, I’m finding one broad match skag, 3-4 exact match keywords, and then maybe one mod broad serves better than focusing on only exact/phrase.
The choice to use a match type or a keyword is entirely dependent on what I’ll see coming back in search terms. Did they match by the rules of exact? Or did exact close variants matched by the rules of broad, etc.,? The fact that we no longer have that visibility truly, is a bit of a problem.
In terms of delivery in account performance, I still see that STAGs (grouping of keywords) seems to perform better than SKAGs. In terms of match type, I’m very much pulling away from phrase match as they tend to get caught quite more in the delivery problem.
Fred: Match types don’t mean what they used to be earlier. With the loosening of the match types, most people can not figure out what a phrase match can achieve that another match type wouldn’t. For people, who haven’t been doing PPC quite that long, a phrase match meant that the words between the quotes were supposed to stay together. But that doesn’t actually work anymore.
Geetanjali: With the whole match types changing and close variants coming in, people who swear by SKAGs have still not completely let go. With the search terms changes, the whole alpha-beta structure of mining keywords using your broad match and then moving them to exact might not work that well. You probably don’t know all the search queries that are coming in with your broad match keywords, whether it’s SKAG or otherwise.
3. Let’s talk bidding
Navah: Bidding is one of those tactics that you should just delegate out. There isn’t a good reason to do truly manual bidding. Manual bidding can be helpful when you don’t trust native automation to bid enough for your important terms, however, there is no good reason to sit there adjusting bids all day. Use scripts/rules, or you can use an amazing tool like Optmyzr.
Geetanjali: If you are using smart bidding, it’s really important to send the right data into the system. I also think that having the right level of attribution is needed as well. I have come across customers who are completely using Google’s automated bidding strategies and running on last-click attribution. So, the system is automatically cutting the queries that would rise on top of the funnel, conversions and these customers keep wondering why it’s not working.
Also, if you’re delegating your bidding, you need to know which parts you’d be choosing. If you still have to set the right targets, you still have to have the attribution model, then that’s the part that you can’t delegate to Google. If you don’t give the system the right data, the systems, which are after all machines, can’t make the right decision.
4. The problem with AI and Maximize Conversions
Navah: Two things play here. One, in your Conversion settings, you can tell Google whether to count in your conversions or not. This means you can still track actions you’re interested in without having them derail your automated/smart bidding strategies. The other thing is don’t use smart bidding if you don’t trust your conversions. Just don’t.
You actually need to have an infrastructure in place that can track the lead through. Have an open conversation with your client about their intake. Part of it comes down to helping your client and helping them build infrastructure to report and have an internal intake system. The other part is doing the legwork yourself, having call tracking metrics, checking lead quality, etc.
5. Quality of leads
Navah: We need to understand the quality of leads in accepted leads against rejected leads and why they get rejected. One thing that we found in new advertisers is that a penchant for leaving search partners on and getting conversions. But then those conversions turn out really terrible.
We make sure that every quarter that there is this buy-in and we ask some core questions. How many leads are you getting per month? Where could that number grow to? How much do you make per service vertical? Are there any upcoming changes in this quarter that we need to be aware of?
Conclusion
I’ve noticed that as newer PPC managers come in who have never done manual bid management, they lack the understanding of how to manage bids or how the auctions work.
For some reason, people tend to believe that putting in a bid or a target for tCPA or tROAS is enough to walk away. That’s certainly not okay. Google is automating the conversions between expected conversion when you’re trying to achieve in terms of CPA and putting the bids in the auction.
But remember this: it doesn’t look at anything to do with your business! It doesn’t necessarily know all the things about your business as you do. At the end of the day, your priority in the type of leads you want should be reflected in your targets.
Keep in mind that nothing is fixed as we know them to be. Keep testing and discussing ways to make the most of your accounts.
Seasoned PPC professionals turn to efficient bid management tools, like Optmyzr, to keep their accounts top-notch and drive good leads. Try and experience our capabilities yourself by signing up for our 14-day free trial. Full access to all our features, credit card free!
No matter how many updates or changes happen in search marketing, some things remain constant, like the importance of data. It’s no secret that PPC marketers rely heavily on good data to influence their automation and build powerful strategies.
With all the changes taking place, we need to stay vigilant for anything Google throws at us. Setting up intelligent measurement systems to assess your PPC account success is a necessity, now more than ever.
So this week on episode 22 of PPC Town Hall, we decided to dive deep into all things data and analytics that give search marketers nightmares. Our expert panel, featuring some of the most experienced minds in the community, shared their tips and tactics to build solid PPC strategies.
Our panelists for the week:
Kirk Williams, Owner of Zato Marketing
Aaron Levy, Group Director of SEM at Tinuiti
As always, you can view this week’s episode as well as previous editions of PPC Town Hall right here.
Here are 5 insights to help you understand how to utilize data and analytics to encourage your PPC authority.
1. Living with Google’s limits to search terms reports
Kirk: So basically Google rolled out a change where they would no longer be showing search terms that are over a certain traffic level to advertisers. This is significant. Now in your search term reports, you don’t have access to around 30% of the data for the terms that are incurring costs. Marketers have been wondering what this means or whether it’s ok to make such a deduction.
Aaron: We haven’t put out a piece about it yet. But a lot of our clients have asked us questions like whether 50% of the data or so will become inaccessible. The thing to remember about search term reports is that a lot of it normalizes over time.
My theory is that it’s all one impression one-click searches, so if/when they’re searched a second time, they’ll start to show in SQR’s. There’s a lot of controversy around it but we need to see what happens. We are still trying to unpack what it is and what is the necessary criteria, but want to see the dust settle as the report fills out.
I actually predicted the end of keywords two years ago. For me, search is looking more and more like a DSP, like it’s a pragmatic land now. So if you think about an earlier time, a lot of this data was hidden or you’d have to pay more for full visibility. It kind of looks like how things were in the early 2000s.
2. Figuring out advertisers’ rights
Kirk: I truly don’t think that the advertisers own the data (that fight is between the user and platform). But the question is what is an advertiser paying for? Is it just strictly access to the platform? Or is access to the platform and the data that allows you to advertise well?
On another philosophical note around Google and advertisers, the constantly changing landscape from what was originally agreed upon to the system in which we are reliant on them. And Google pretty much has most market share. So they have created all this and now they keep shifting the goalposts.
Basically, this is all about search, the keyword, communication, or intent. And now all of this is starting to change. A lot of the advertisers’ frustration is not just around figuring out the shift, but also that the reforms keep getting worse for us.
Is it becoming more and more difficult to communicate to Google on what advertisers would like to see happen? Yes. Basically, Google is pursuing a strategy that pushes to kind of monopolize the whole dynamic. As Google pushes to wall off the data and turn to a more audience-focused programmatic type approach, they are behaving less and less like a paid search advertising platform and more like a traditional media platform.
3. Building runways for automation
Aaron: A lot of our philosophies are around building runways for automation. We know the automation is going to make mistakes, it will have its good days and bad days. So we make sure that these runways are appropriate to give enough room to help the automation succeed. Runways are basically more of how we structure things by intent, forecasted outcome, and conversion rate.
Talking specifically about Google’s automation and Smart Bidding, Google optimizes based on expected revenue and expected conversion rate. So it has to learn and figure out those points – if we can put things in runways, where we have different groups for different goals that get different optimizations.
This way the automation has a runway within a target, a consistent marketing goal and doesn’t have to guess much. If we can control the inputs and make sure that the machine is optimizing based on what we know is right as a business, agency, or customer, it minimizes the downside and lets it do what it’s good at to improve outputs.
4. Strategizing for the right data
We are trying to purposefully have more strategic conversations. Currently, the human element is used to determine the bounds and objectives for automation. There have been times when I have deliberately pulled out of smart bidding to go full manual, and not because I think smart bidding or automation can’t get to that level, but that it still lacks in certain ways right now.
Acknowledge the fact that at some point, some developers will write a code that will improve various forms of automation. We’re just not there in every way yet! And so you need to act accordingly. Understand the nature of the automation right now and build things around it and then adapt as automation evolves. Humans need to figure out how to utilize automation as it continually changes.
5. Accepting the demise of cookies
Aaron: It will be a lot more first-party data, the information you collect, and how you can use it. Privacy moves by Europe with GDPR will certainly be a lead-in to what the rest of the world is going to be. Just like we are seeing a rise in software companies just for Google Ads management, there will be a rise in data matching platforms that can operate best under GDPR regulations.
Figuring out how you can take out the important data, you do need to tie in all the information together. I am a bit encouraged by the concept of a cookie-less world as it will make us a little bit smarter and craftier in terms of branding and messaging.
Conclusion
One thing is clear: we’re never going to have everything perfect all at once. We can argue in favor of advertiser rights, automation, and bidding strategies all we want. But we need to be flexible and accommodating of any changes in order to keep doing better for our clients and businesses.
As for me, I’d like to see some updates to the Google API to make up for all the missing stuff. I hope in 2021, a lot of the things that we don’t have API access to (like competitor data in the auction) get fixed. At Optmyzr, we want to build out simpler automations that our customers can depend on to make smarter decisions.
What do you want to see from Google in 2021? Tweet us!
As the holiday season approaches, search marketers are busy preparing for a rush of shopping and e-commerce activity in Q4. You need to be ready to navigate the next few months with expert planning and monitoring to deploy successful PPC campaigns.
This year more than ever, it’s important to arm yourself with tips and tricks to crush holiday sales. So for episode 21 of PPC Town Hall, we brought in a couple of experts in the space to talk about best practices in all things shopping and e-commerce:
Purna Virji, Senior Manager of Global Engagement, Microsoft
Anders Hjorth, Digital Marketing Strategist, Innovell
As always, you can view this week’s episode as well as previous editions of PPC Town Hall right here.
Here are 6 insights that can help you top the e-commerce charts during Q4, Black Friday, and the holiday season.
1. Search is going to be a big place to be
Purna: In 2020, we have been seeing three proverbial ‘elephants in the room’ – the economy, the COVID-19 crisis, and the upcoming elections in the US.
1. Recession: During the last financial crisis in 2008, consumers reported that they would pull back their holiday spending by 29%. However, these claims proved overly conservative as sales dipped by only 4.7% YoY. Even during the .com bubble, Retail sales continued to grow.
Search will be this big place where everyone will come to look for gifts. While retailers continue to cut back on budgets for other channels, Search seems to be least affected.
2. COVID-19: With 75% of U.S. consumers avoiding in-store shopping malls and 53% avoiding shops in general because of COVID-19₂, in-store holiday traffic will likely decline this year.
Online sales, however, are projected to astronomically increase this holiday season as COVID-19 continues to boost eCommerce activity. Anticipate holiday shopping to begin earlier as both retailers and customers offset the unprecedented shipping delays unearthed by COVID-19.
Even as the economy re-opens, and physical stores allow for customers to return, we expect BOPIS (buy online, pick up in-store) interest to remain exponentially higher than it would have without the health concerns related to physical distance.
3. Election: The election in 2016 did not impact search, yet we expect 2020 to perform very differently based on a multitude of factors
Moreover, with physical locations being restricted, more and more people have been coming online to find things. Due to this, we are expecting a double-digit growth to online sales for the Holiday season.
2. Shifts in Search Advertising don’t give a solid outlook
Anders: While analyzing Google’s quarterly reports, I saw that Google had negative growth in Q2 2020 compared with the year before, something which we have never seen before. Combining this information with the rumors of reducing search term reports or negative keywords, I believe that they might be panicking a bit.
3. Seeing the pandemic as an opportunity
Anders: I think people are very uncertain about the current situation. While certain brands closed up and waited for the changes to still, others took this up as an opportunity to talk and communicate with their audience. We have seen brands emerging, others pulling out of auctions, or bidding higher to get all the attention. So if you are a brand that hasn’t interacted at all, take this chance to tell the community that you are still around.
4. Impact on data analytics and audiences
Anders: One of the things that we noticed while talking to some of the big names of the industry, is that bidding strategies were radically changed in about 25% of all projects they managed. But even with the data, you simply can’t predict in the same manner as you did before. Depending on the circumstances, you may have to reset the data, or even set a ‘before’ and ‘after’ lockdown, to learn user behaviors.
I remember what Fred says in his book (Digital Marketing in an AI World), that we need to take a step back to look at the data. I think this is the time that we need to step back and look at things. Earlier on, we could trust the machines for the data they had and their ability to predict, but it might not be so reliable right now, as the data is changing. You need to be extra careful before fully trusting the algorithms.
5. Rely on Machine learning and add your insights
Purna: It’s true that the old models and strategies have somehow seen huge changes from predictable patterns. But I think there’s still a strong case for things like automated bidding. eCPC bidding can work well for Product Ads, and Microsoft recently launched Target ROAS bidding for shopping as well, and we have been seeing some really good performance there.
So with so much unpredictability, leave some of the signals to the machine. But wherever you can put in your own inputs, give the system the best information possible such as through Custom Labels to manage campaign/product group optimization.
You can download Microsoft’s holiday shopping checklist as seen during Purna’s segment by clickinghere.
6. Microsoft recommendations for feed management
Purna: Remember to check the following things:
Be sure to add an email address in the Microsoft Merchant Center – even if you work with a third party feed management system- to keep track of feed rejections and notifications such as alerts if your feed is going to expire or if there’s a sudden increase in rejected offers.
Audit duplicate titles. (Considered duplicate titles only if the entry has both the same title and the same price.)
Pay attention to your descriptions as they show up on shopping tabs.
Optimize for the shopping tab for it can help boost CTRs and Conversion rates.
Don’t ignore optional columns like Product Variants and Product Categories, as adding these can give the search engines more information to help show your SKUs for higher relevancy searches.
Conclusion
As we near the end of September, last-minute preparations for the coming quarter are in full swing. Search marketing has changed, and we need to be watchful of these changes as they affect data analytics and audience behaviors.
At Optmyzr, we’ve seen a massive shift across industries as businesses took recent months as an opportunity to go online. More and more marketers and agencies are starting to trust machine learning, automation, and data-driven optimizations.
One thing is clear: In order to thrive in Q4, PPC professionals need to look for powerful search systems and highly effective management tools. Being careful of the minutiae like descriptions or optional columns could prove to be game-changers.
Video ads are a powerful way to showcase and communicate your products or services to potential customers. They’re also a great way to drive leads and growth through PPC campaigns.
Experts are more in tune than ever with different platforms and the audience groups they attract, rather than focusing on just driving content. As the landscape changes, marketers need to find new ways to create the right kinds of video campaigns to resonate with their target segments.
So this week on episode 20 of PPC Town Hall, we spoke to two experienced video ad gurus, who shared their rich experience and insights with our audience:
Joe Martinez, Director of Client Services at Clix Marketing
Cory Henke, Founder and CEO of Variable Media
As always, you can view this week’s episode as well as previous editions of PPC Town Hall right here.
Here are 5 insights to help you deploy effective and powerful video ads.
1. Hook your audience in the first 5 seconds
Joe: For me, the message in the first 5 seconds of a video can have more impact than anything else. What is the narrator or character trying to convey? For people like me, who listen to YouTube while working, the first five seconds of any ad will trigger me to pay attention to it. So that message is going to be extremely important.
Make sure that your logo is visible so that even if your audience is paying attention or skips the ad, they will see the brand name.
2. Look at audience intent rather than channel
Joe: If you have a limited budget and have a specific goal in mind with your campaign, it’s always important to optimize to whatever is working. Think about whether you would want your content shown on a particular channel.
We’ve seen people converting from a music channel because we focus on a very customer-intent audience rather than the type of channel. Now, if a customer is looking for SaaS products, we’re targeting them and not the placement or the channel.
Be proactive. If you think your audience isn’t on certain channels, then block those. You can get help from several exclusion lists created to guide you better.
3. Target wisely for a TV-only campaign
Joe: Looking specifically at a TV-only campaign, your ad’s performance depends on the various targeting options. Even if you don’t see a spike in the initial days, keep watching as the percentage of people watching your ads on TV increases gradually.
Go back to check your initial targeting options and whether you’ve been remarketing to the same audience. If your targeting is specific, try to expand it to check if that gives you the exposure you want on TV.
4. Drive your ads through IGTV
Cory: On Instagram, the areas that are most promotable are the stories and the newsfeed. The areas that you can’t advertise are IGTV and live streams. And that is where, we believe, we get the most organic reach for our videos.
Now, the trouble with IGTV lies in promoting it. How do you get people to see it? That’s one of the most difficult things with long-form videos. To help increase your view count, run your long-form video ads on Facebook.
Another way would be to take the IGTV videos and embed them into a webpage. You can use the URLs to guide users onto your Instagram with a call to action like ‘Watch now’.
5. Don’t neglect lead forms
Cory: We focus on CPC as that shows how the audience engages with the content rather than just visiting the website or channel. It shows how much impact the ads could have, especially when there isn’t much of a lead flow.
Don’t forget to test your bid types. We think that one of the biggest variables to look at is Target CPS vs Maximized Conversions. That’s great to potentially find some more lead volume that could help you decide what works for the audience better.
Keep an eye on the engagement with the lead form and experiment with your call-to-action.
Conclusion
The effectiveness of video ads is because they’re so easy to consume. With the way the world is right now, it’s no surprise people prefer video content over other types. The surging popularity of apps like Instagram, Snapchat, and TikTok (for now) is a testament to the balance of power shifting towards video ads.
While it’s definitely not easy to succeed with such a dynamic ad type, marketers need to be mindful of audience interests, broadcasting channels and mediums, and content type.
Go a step further to cater to your target audience by customizing your very own exclusion list. Start by checking out Joe and Clix’s list of over 1,400 children’s YouTube channels to exclude from your campaigns.
As we enter September, PPC marketers everywhere are gearing up for Q4 and the coming holiday season. Online retail will come alive, with businesses planning their strategies to woo consumers.
After a challenging year, and as many advertisers and agencies are regaining their footing, Black Friday and Christmas could be exactly what the PPC doctor ordered.
So as you start planning for your brands and clients, we thought you could use a hand.
This week on episode 19 of PPC Town Hall, we spoke to some experts on the cutting edge of e-commerce and shopping campaigns:
Katie Wilson, Head of Ecommerce Southwest, Google Customer Solutions
Elizabeth Marsten, Senior Director of Strategic Marketplaces, Tinuiti
Duane Brown, Founder & Head of Strategy, Take Some Risk
As always, you can view this week’s episode as well as previous editions of PPC Town Hall right here.
Here are the top insights from this week to help you navigate, plan for, and dominate e-commerce in Q4 2020:
1. How 2020 is different for e-commerce
Katie: One thing that we know for sure is that this year, we are going to experience a different kind of holiday. At Google, we are preparing on all fronts to help our customers. We have been seeing a penetration of e-commerce on all fronts.
According to various studies, e-commerce has grown more in the last two months than in the last decade. There’s a potential that the level of demand starts increasing as early as October. Being prepared for this, for example on inventory and logistics, is going to be incredibly important as we enter the Holiday season.
This year, around 72 % of Holiday shoppers are going to shop online which is bound to create a huge demand. Brand loyalty is starting to become a thing of the past as people start discovering new brands through Google and social media.
So newer brands can take this time to get discovered more to drive their sales.
2. Getting ready for Q4
Katie: In 2020, we are already 27% above demand levels as compared to last year. Getting ready for that demand as we get close to November and December, or even as early as October is extremely important.
At present, we are at a planning stage with our clients where we are discussing their Q4 goals. Essential things like logistics, promotions, inventory, or even shipping criteria are super important to plan for right now. This way you are preparing for any possible scenarios (like delays) in the future.
From an advertising perspective, this is the time to get the fundamentals down. Do you have tracking set up correctly? Have you looked into automation solutions? Have you checked out your shopping feeds?
Polish everything to make sure you are ready to go and are up to date in the months prior to Q4.
3. Explore free product listing ads by Google
Katie: Free listings are a great way for people to dip their toes if they are curious about feeds. It is really important to be there and have your inventory aligned. We have found that both from the paid and unpaid standpoints, they work better together when you’re covering all bases.
Free listing is a very powerful tool for research and easy to set up with third-party apps. You also get an option of integrating if you have a physical store. So, there’s a lot of things one can do with feeds and that is going to be really important this year.
Elizabeth: Working with many channels like Amazon, Walmart, or Google, being able to understand inventory levels in real-time is very critical. For example, if you happen to over-sell in one or more marketplaces, they will penalize you heavily. If you cancel your orders, your cancellation rate goes up and you could lose the channel.
4. Account for changes and demand
Duane: All automations are correct but in the right context. When you see too much data being fed into the system and that not every system can handle it, shift to something else. We try to keep a last 7-day average as long as we are on track. Beyond that, it becomes a question of whether the systems can handle the changes.
We had certain accounts where smart bidding did amazing, while with others, it just spiked the CPA. When the CPA kept on rising, it made sense to shift to manual. So really it depends on a case to case basis, taking into account what happened in the last 7 or 30 days.
5. Accounting for customer lifetime value
Elizabeth: LTV (life time value) always depends on the brands and how they are set up as a business.
We’ve set up Amazon attribution for some brands that are unable to measure how consumers who begin at Google, convert at Amazon. Some clients are able to do things like LiveRamp and audience matching.
We are dependent on our clients to fill us in at some places since we don’t get to see the level of their financials and how they see their businesses.
6. Look at different platforms to gain more audience
Duane: A lot of people will spend all their money on just Google and Facebook which limits their audience scope. Apart from these two channels, people do spend a lot of time on TikTok, Snapchat, and even Pinterest. So if all your capital is directed to just a few channels, you are bound to lose this shopping season.
Look at different platforms to really make use of your spend. While it’s easier to manage one platform, if you can bring in a contractor or hire an agency, you can benefit from other channels as well.
Being successful in Google or Facebook is definitely not enough. For example, YouTube, which is owned by Google, is a whole other world. And you need to be there if your customers are there.
Elizabeth: It’s likely necessary to be on 3-4 different platforms this holiday season. Just so you can be where your customers are when they are ready to convert.
Conclusion
The coming months tend to form a large chunk of revenue for any retail-focused business.
Think holistically — this year more than ever — about what can actually attract customers to stores and drive them to purchase. Logistics like last-mile delivery, payment methods, and supply chains can make or break a successful plan.
Keep your eyes open for more shopping content from Optmyzr in the coming weeks, including another e-commerce PPC Town Hall on September 16.
PPC marketers are always optimizing — some monitoring here, an adjustment there, and then you start to see (better) results. When you have that much to do, it’s impossible to do it manually and scale your output.
So there’s no reason to fear automation — like scripts. They not only speed up the process, but also allow you to be much more efficient in running your business. That’s right — scripts can drive business impact.
Best of all, anyone can use scripts, even if you haven’t written even a single line of code in your life!
So this week on episode 18 of PPC Town Hall, we spoke to our panelists who live and breathe scripts:
As always, you can view this week’s episode as well as previous editions of PPC Town Hall right here.
Here are 5 insights to help you grow your business by automating your PPC accounts with scripts.
1. Update price extensions
Nils: Price extensions are very popular extensions that you can use in your Google Ads accounts to display actual prices. But prices tend to change quite often. If you have different products, and the product manager or account manager is changing the prices of the products because of inventory or competition, you need to update the price extensions with the actual prices.
Up until a year ago, it was impossible to update them through scripts. Fortunately, now we can access the price extensions via the scripts API to keep them in sync with your inventory.
To check the price extensions, you need to do the following: Google Ads scripts → References → AdsApp → Ad Extensions → Prices.
2. When to turn to scripts
Steve: ‘This is taking too much manual work’ is the point where we begin to think about building scripts to shorten the whole process. Most of the time, it’s brought up due to some amount of laziness on our part. For example, I’m currently working on Search Query reports and rely on scripts to deliver automated reports to me.
One of the best things about scripts is that you get to see this functionality and dozens of ways one can apply that across campaigns. The fun of scripts is finding something and imagining creative ways to apply them.
3. The business value of scripts
Nils: Scripts deliver great benefits all over the place. I’ve created a list of the Top 7 benefits of using scripts. Personally I try to automate as much as possible by using scripts. It has helped my remote PPC agency succeed and apply consistent processes to operations. With scripts, you can come up with new ideas to test your account, which wouldn’t have been possible manually. For example, we know that N-gram analysis is very tedious and time-taking. But with scripts, something that complex becomes quicker and can be done more frequently.
The biggest benefit of scripts for my agency has been quality assurance. As the scripts are monitoring everything, any mistake done by my team comes under notice quickly. This way I can be alerted when anything goes haywire and sleep easy.
Steve: We recently shifted to a new revenue model — cost per deliverable, where we charge our customers a fixed amount for our services. Scripts allow me to do that a lot more efficiently.
It’s not a discussion of hours anymore. Our clients are more focused on whether the product runs efficiently rather than how. This allows me to take my expertise and focus on deliverables rather than time.
4. Copy-pasting and modifying scripts
Steve: I think in blocks, which is basically the JavaScript way of thinking. Figuring out which functions do what, and letting them flow through until you get all the pieces for the script. In a lot of cases, you will get pre-built scripts to work on.
For example, Google’s Account Anomaly script is very easy to adjust to things that you are looking for in your anomalies. This can be a good base to get started with scripts.
5. Using scripts to monitor Google’s AI
Nils: We know that Google AI uses machine learning to predict performances on clicks. And machine learnings involves a ‘learning phase’. We are basically providing Google money and data to feed it to the machine learning algorithms. This is where I love to use scripts to track how AI is handling my accounts. If it goes haywire, and does a bad job for my clients my scripts would alert me immediately.
For example, for close variants, I have created a script to monitor the performance of the real keyword against the close variant. If there’s a significant difference in the performance, like in CPA or ROAS, I get alerted of that. You need to layer scripts and Google’s AI to make the most of it.
Conclusion
It’s important to look at Google Ads holistically. Everything — bids, budgets, ad text — influences this interconnected system. It’s not enough to set a script and forget it; you have to monitor it periodically as well.
As you gain experience, you can try modifying them to suit your specific needs. Experiment with existing rules to see how they affect the performance of your PPC accounts, and remember to preview your script before applying it.
Nothing ventured, nothing gained. So experiment away!
Many marketers who live and breathe ad spend value ROAS as the holy grail of advertising. For many, it’s a way of calculating and formulating next steps to achieve high(er) revenue. While this metric does forecast quite well, one question that arises is how useful it is for long-term growth.
With the use of retargeting as a way of fulfilling ROAS targets, PPC professionals might not consider incrementality as a way to get good results. Some sharp minds, however, have turned to customer lifetime value for better optimization with maximum profits.
So this week on episode 17 of PPC Town Hall, we spoke to our panelists who are obsessed with driving better results for PPC campaigns:
Andreas Reiffen, Founder and CEO at Crealytics
Frederik Boysen, Founder and CEO at Profitmetrics.io
As always, you can view this week’s episode as well as previous editions of PPC Town Hall right here.
Here are 5 insights on how to look beyond ROAS to optimize PPC.
1. Understand the problem with ROAS
Andreas: In large retail organizations, Finance is responsible for both budgeting and setting performance targets. While finance has profitability KPIs and new customer acquisition goals in mind, they translate them into ROAS targets. Often they don’t understand profitability or CLV isn’t a random byproduct of some advertising campaign, but rather something which you can explicitly optimize for.
Once ROAS targets are set, the easiest way to achieve them is to sell products with low margins and high return rates…usually to their existing customers. However, at the end of the budgeting cycle, they usually find that even though they have achieved their ROAS targets, profitability is down.
In the subsequent budgeting cycle, the ROAS target is tightened based upon the weak profitability. This vicious cycle can only be broken by setting other targets than RAS.
2. Consider profit on ad spend
Frederik: You need to calculate the real gross profit on every single order, followed by doing the attribution and looking at customer LTV (lifetime value). You need to work on the profit on the first attribution.
We use POAS (profit on ad spend), which is richer in ad spend before sending out the data to the channels. We calculate all our orders, profits on them, cost price, shipping cost, and payment fees. Then we send these to the platform so that one can make transparent decisions.
3. Put the right information in the system
Andreas: There’s a fundamental difference between how we once did things and what we’re doing now. The levers once used to excel in digital marketing have changed dramatically. In the early days we optimized keywords, ad copies, and landing pages; things that weren’t fully automated.
But AI has made all of these activities redundant. To differentiate from the competition today you need to ensure you optimize for the right targets and that you can accurately measure the value of each single click…and feed your algorithm with first-party data. Putting the right information back into the system is key to optimizing beyond ROAS.
In order to activate your data you need to first assess the exact order margin, then deduct the expected returns. As a second step you need to know whether an order was done by a new customer or an existing one. If it was a new customer who purchased, future purchases are to be expected, so you add a (residual customer lifetime value on top of the first-order-margin.
Ultimately, you need to slice this entire value if there were several clicks involved. The end goal should be to attain the value of each and every click. This is a prerequisite for bidding systems to work for your specific business.
4. To retarget or not?
Andreas: Whoever is curious to see the impact of data activation should do one experiment. First off? Let tROAS run. Then, in one instance, you provide the first-click data. In the other, last-click data. Analyze the retargeting share of both settings and you’ll see only a small retargeting share through the first click; as all the credits get allocated to it.
What happens if you test for incrementality? You’ll see that the more likely a user is to buy, the better the results will look, albeit with lower incremental impact. Nobody today can answer this question: whether to bid up – or down – on your retargeting activity.
I believe that attribution systems have completely failed. They assume that advertising must be responsible for the sale…and so it allocates credits based on different parameters. The only thing of value is to run isolated incremental audience-based models. It’s here where you can truly find out the scope of impact.
5. Go beyond attribution
Frederik: We have a dashboard where we take away the attribution fully. We actually look at gross profits, usage on ad spend, and gross profit after ad spend by keeping their ratios the same. This way you can actually see whether your gross profit will increase or decrease if you don’t change the ratios. After this, you can try to allocate with some attribution. This way you can look at the financials rather than just the attribution.
Conclusion
While ROAS might have been the guiding light of the past, one can’t forget that what are essentially Google’s metrics might not accurately reflect your client’s or company’s goals.
The only way to sustain a ROAS-driven system is to layer different rules on product categories. Even geolocations seem to have an effect on ROAS targets; you might find, for example, that the customer acquisition rate is higher in New York than in San Francisco.
It’s hard to automate some things fully as you might not have the same targets across different locations and products. The only way to fix that right now is to move towards a conversion tracking and attribution system that takes smaller things into account, like locations and incrementality.
While every marketer wants to leave their mark on the industry, very few become true experts. To be influential in the market today, you need to have credibility, and invest time and effort to hone your craft.
The reward: Not only do you get a chance to be a part of something bigger, but you get to shape others who’ll also make a difference to your industry.
Furthermore, having a strong personal brand helps win more business opportunities, both for yourself and your organization.
So this week on episode 16 of PPC Town Hall, we spoke to the two most influential PPC experts of 2020, who brought their shared experience to the table:
Michelle Morgan, Director of Client Services at Clix Marketing
Purna Virji, Senior Manager of Global Engagement at Microsoft
As always, you can view this week’s episode as well as previous editions of PPC Town Hall right here.
Here are 5 insights to help you start building your personal PPC brand.
1. Learn how to build a good pitch
Michelle: I’ve spent a lot of time writing pitches, submitting them, and getting rejected over and over again.
The thing that helped was to reach out to people who had spoken on similar panels to mine. I asked them how to make a good pitch. Their insights helped me understand what to write or which format to use. I also reached out to session moderators to get their take on the subject.
Purna: For anyone who wants to submit a pitch, I have two tips that have been helpful for me.
Ask yourself what the key takeaways are for your audience; make sure you’re sharing three or four actionable tips. And add more specificity to your content; discuss the angle you’re bringing to the topic.
2. Conquer your fear of speaking on stage
Purna: Look through the material delivered by your favorite speakers to see what actually resonates with you, and practice to remove the barriers in your head that are making you nervous.
Make sure your content is adding value to your audience. Keep an eye on the discussions happening in your industry, and keep up with different topics and themes. Then get feedback; reach out to other experts to get their opinion.
Enjoy yourself and have fun!
3. Keep your audience engaged
Purna: Try to bring everyone onto the same page by asking your audience if they don’t understand something. I take 60 seconds to go over it and then take it from there. You want everyone to benefit from your content and not miss out due to a lack of background knowledge.
4. Start writing
Michelle: If you can’t speak at shows, write. Start writing and put your smarts out there. This way, you’ll always have something to refer to and it will show others that you know your business. Don’t be afraid to start sharing your thoughts within relevant communities.
You’ll never get better unless you do it, so don’t be afraid that you’re not as good as you’d like to be. Don’t let perfection get in the way. Just start.
5. Quantify your passion project to your employer
Michelle: I’m fortunate to have superiors that understand the value and importance of writing and speaking. Being visible helps you bring in clients who have seen you on different platforms and at events, but also helps convey the expertise you and your team have to companies who may not have seen you speak at those events.
Conclusion
Juggling your job, a personal life, and your passion project can definitely be a handful. But if you’re passionate about what you do and believe you can help your fellow marketers, start now.
Be consistently active in discussions about your areas of interest. Look out for updates and news on new products or paradigms. Talk to established experts and get their feedback on your content.
More importantly, be consistent — Rome wasn’t built in a day. Keep making the effort and you’ll soon be growing your brand and business.
Running a PPC agency is challenging enough. Clients have to be kept happy, your teams have to stay on top of hundreds of fluctuations, and ad platforms are constantly changing and adding features to their mix.
Throw in something as unexpected as a pandemic and it can be easy to feel like you’re drowning.
So this week on episode 15 of PPC Town Hall, we spoke to two PPC experts with a track record of success in helping their agencies weather numerous storms over the years:
Matt Umbro, Key Account Director at Brainlabs and Founder of PPCChat
Brittni Swenson, Chief Marketing Officer at Tandem Interactive
As always, you can view this week’s episode as well as previous editions of PPC Town Hall right here.
Here are 6 tips to help you steer your team through these challenging times.
1. Be a partner, not a vendor
Matt: It’s important to work out an ideal solution for an effective strategy. We have to be compassionate and understand everyone’s circumstances.
During the early months of COVID, we saw a few clients who wanted to pause their accounts or significantly cut down on their budget due to a lot of restrictions. We had to work with those clients, figuring out a way to remain working with them; something that works for both parties.
As places have started to open up, we can see that some of clients are coming back to get into business again.
2. Educate your clients
Brittni: When we take over a new account from a previous agency, we ask for KPIs or benchmarks that the previous agency was asked to deliver. It can be a little difficult, especially when clients have unrealistic expectations.
ROAS can be one way, but if a client is looking for a 4x return on $100 a month ($400 in sales), that’s not going to be as beneficial as spending $2,000 a month and getting $4,000 in sales, and then incrementally increasing ROAS.
Trying to find a balance between what clients are looking for and attainable goals is really important.
3. Set expectations from the start
Matt: It’s really important to understand what clients want to do with their business. What do they want from agencies? A lot of it goes back to how clients want to be. Do they want you to help them formulate a strategy and work together as partners, or do they want you to just pull levers?
If the client works with you as a partner, it’s important to go back to expectations and make your client understand your apprehensions and ideas. This way they can make informed decisions to best manage their accounts and goals.
4. Inspire confidence through your history
Brittni: A lot of it comes down to partnership, time and patience. Once you start to show growth and success, a client is able to have trust and confidence in what you’re doing. With time, they’re going to give you those levels of referrals, and those partners are going to be able to trust you. And then you can guide them through their strategies.
If you’re capable of running a successful campaign on a very limited budget, especially dealing with unglamorous products like tires, it indicates a strong sense of strategy which helps build client confidence.
5. Understand a price-sensitive market
Matt: In the context of COVID, a client that doesn’t have a major sticking point when it comes to price, that’s where things like curbside pickup and contactless delivery will help gain consumers.
While additional platforms for selling products definitely work for users, it’s beyond price. It’s more about offering something unique, especially in the time of COVID.
6. Know how to come back from a lull in business
Brittni: There’s definitely been a change in the type of messaging and targeting for different clients. Earlier, a lot of our clients shifted from paid advertising to SEO or local ads.
But as things are opening, these same clients are coming back to paid advertising with a different approach. Many of the campaigns we see today promote COVID safety and precautions. These are the clients who want to maintain customer safety. We need to focus on building brand awareness through any type of display advertising.
Conclusion
Most contingencies can be planned, but sometimes life throws you a curveball that no one can predict. In times like these, trust in your track record of success.
When client business is suffering, they can often have multiple fires to fight: supply chain, hygiene, and delivery come to mind. So a great agency that can continue to create value on the advertising front is worth its weight in gold.
Join us next week for PPC Town Hall 16 where we’ll be speaking to two of the leading ladies of PPC: Michelle Morgan and Purna Virji.
Advertising your business online can be intimidating. There are so many options available that it can be tough to figure out your first move.
If you ever wished you had a step-by-step guide to figuring out your first steps in PPC, look no further. We picked one platform to start with — Google Ads, because it’s user-friendly and provides a high degree of assistance to newcomers.
This week on episode 14 of PPC Town Hall, two of the brightest minds in digital advertising shared lessons from their combined decades of PPC and marketing experience:
As always, you can view this week’s episode as well as previous editions of PPC Town Hall right here.
Complete with actionable insights, here’s our 6-step starter guide for PPC beginners.
1. Get set up on Google My Business
Julie: Google My Business (GMB) is very important, especially for local and service-area businesses; the map is important even if you don’t have a physical location where people come to you. And the way you get on Maps, organically or through ads, is GMB. Additionally, if you want to run location extensions on your ads, you have to connect your verified GMB listing to your Google Ads account.
2. Define your conversion actions
Julie: Sometimes you can drown in data. Or you can have data that seems like it’s telling you things but it really isn’t. If you’re in e-commerce, it’s pretty obvious what your conversion action is: you want people to buy things.
But if you’re not e-commerce, one of the first things you have to do is define what a conversion is to you; it’s the lens through which you view everything else. It helps you set things up at different stages in a way that collects data in the best way possible for you to get conversions and build a remarketing plan.
3. Don’t be intimidated by product feeds
Susan: Shopping is always difficult because it involves feeds, and I think that scares a lot of people because it can feel more like coding than advertising. So if you’re a small business, you can set up easily on a platform like Shopify that will automatically export a feed to Google Merchant Center for you.
It’s also worth going through the process of building a local inventory feed; you have to submit that to Google, and they’ll call to verify your identity and the accuracy of that feed. But that results in a bit more visibility when people search for what you’re selling, and they’ll know they can come pick it up from you.
4. Experiment with Dynamic Search Ads
Julie: If you’re new to PPC and you’re not really sure what terms you want to advertise on, dynamic search ads (DSAs) can reveal information like what Google thinks of your business.
When you run regular search ads, you’re telling Google what keywords you want, what ads to run, and which landing pages they should lead to. With DSAs, you still decide the message behind your ad copy, but Google decides when to show your ad (and what keyword triggers it).
It’s a bit of a window into what they believe you’re relevant to. So running DSAs alongside some of your more obvious keywords can help you identify opportunities to build full campaigns.
5. Use supplemental feeds to prevent brand dilution
Susan: I love supplemental feeds. A lot of time, retailers will do a great job of building a brand — it feels like it has personality, the products have quirky names, and it feels unique to them.
The challenge you run into there is those product titles and descriptions aren’t always SEO-friendly. Google Shopping is looking to see what you feed it and then showing you for searches it believes you’re relevant for.
If you’re missing that text, you can set up logic within Google Merchant Center that says ‘use my regular feed, but for product title, use this’. And you can direct it to a Google Sheet where you have your unique product name with the SEO keywords.
So it’s essentially a translator between your feed and Merchant Center to make sure your ads are as search term-rich as possible.
For more on the pitfalls of PPC,read Susan’s articleon why Google Ads might not be working for you.
6. Know what to look for from your campaign results
Susan: Part of the challenge with Smart campaigns on Google is the automatically generated conversions. If business owners and campaign managers don’t know how to see what those are, they might think they have a ton of real conversions, but they might not actually be very high-value. You can always find out more about those automatic conversions, but someone starting out in PPC might not know that you can go out and find that information.
Conclusion
Whether you’ve been struggling to see results or are just taking your business online, PPC can be challenging if you don’t know exactly what you’re doing.
But even in a normal business landscape, you can’t keep spending PPC dollars without any meaningful results.
That’s why agencies like Aimclear and Neptune Moon can be exactly what your business needs — a partner who doesn’t just know how to get results, but is fully invested in the success of your online campaigns and overall business.
People use the moving picture to sway opinion, win hearts, and tell stories. In a marketing setting, it brings consumers as close to a brand or product as the online experience will allow.
But video continues to be ignored by many businesses for a variety of reasons
“It’s expensive.”
“We don’t have the resources.”
“Our target audience isn’t on YouTube.”
All these misconceptions were dismantled this week during episode 12 of PPC Town Hall, where we discussed the intricacies of YouTube (and video in general) with:
Joe Martinez, Director of Client Strategy at Clix Marketing (email, Twitter)
Cory Henke, Founder and CEO of Variable Media (email, Twitter)
As always, you can view this week’s episode as well as previous editions of PPC Town Hall right here.
Here are five tips from our panelists on how to use YouTube and video to drive growth and learning.
1. Exclude ads from content you don’t want to show for.
Joe: In terms of content exclusions, we’ve seen really good hand-curated lists from other marketers. I’ve created one that stops your ads from running on channels geared towards children; others have created exclusion lists for news, political and controversial channels.
So there are options if you don’t want to run your ads on specific types of content. Some of the ad formats, like TrueView discovery campaigns, give advertisers greater control. They let you limit yourself to targeting just YouTube search results; you don’t have to be a pre-roll or in-stream ad all the time.
2. Use the data to learn about your audience.
Cory: When you start to find different channels and videos that work well, that’s a key insight into your consumer — you see the videos they watch after your ad play. One advertiser we worked with had a baby product that was not really succeeding on YouTube.
What we found was that the minimal conversions that happened all came before hurricane-related news content. We saw that was driving conversions, and we learned that it was a fear-based action. Before people watch hurricane content, they’re in a heightened state of awareness or fear; serving something that could potentially help your future child play into that mood.
3. Try out the YouTube Video Builder.
Joe: For me, there’s no longer an excuse for a brand to not be on YouTube. It no longer matters if you don’t have someone with video editing skills or high-value assets because Google basically takes your visuals and does the work for you.
There are dozens of templates based on what you want to promote — product, service, mobile app. When you pick a template you like, it shows you what images you need, as well as the format and sizes for those images. I did a few demos of my own to show some clients. For a free tool, it’s very good.
Get Access: Opt into the beta of YouTube Video Builderhere.
4. Learn from skippable and non-skippable video ads.
Cory: Non-skippable ads usually drive very high CPCs with high completion rates; with a 15-second interstitial ad, you usually get a completion rate similar to a bumper ad. I think you’ll find people who are willing to watch your ad until the end, but not necessarily willing to click through and find out more.
So it’s kind of like a brand placement. I like it, but it’s harder to learn from.
With a skippable ad where you don’t pay for a user until 30 seconds, there’s a lot you can learn in that time — and greater scope to optimize these ads to make them more effective. With a skippable ad, there’s also unlimited time; your ad can be 10 seconds or 40 minutes. That variation lets you learn what your customers want to see from your future video content.
We could take this episode of PPC Town Hall and run it as a skippable ad, and compare it to another episode that we also promote similarly. You would know which users are willing to stay longer versus who ends the video early, and you might even see a link between that and who’s in the video.
We ran a test for a client’s 20-minute yoga ad where we used two versions with a black male and a white female to see what people would respond to. We also created a funny version and a more serious one. The white female version had better CTR and CPC, as did the serious version. What we learned from that is who to put on the next Instagram post or in-feed ad. The goal is to present that variation at the beginning of the video to maximize your learning.
5. Repurpose video beyond YouTube.
Joe: It’s absolutely worth doing video — especially if you’re budget-conscious — because it goes so much further than just YouTube.
You can use videos in responsive display ads, in your universal app campaigns and engagement display ads, in your Gmail ads. Or use video to really boost other campaigns and awareness; it’s still video views we can create audiences from to do remarketing with fresh video content.
To do this, you’ll need to optimize your videos for different online platforms and purposes. And make sure to use good video editing software for your needs to edit your videos quickly and professionally without breaking the bank.
Remember that different video formats work best on different digital platforms, so it’s important to optimize them properly when you’re repurposing this content outside of YouTube.
You don’t have to make a video and use it once on YouTube when there are ways to enhance your other paid media campaigns within Google.
Must Read:Check out Joe’s adviceon how to use YouTube to power your non-video Google campaigns.
Conclusion
YouTube advertising is all about two things: freedom and flexibility.
You have the freedom to present your product, service, app, or brand in a way that offers something different from search, display, and shopping campaigns.
At the same time, different ad formats and product innovations give you the flexibility to set up variant campaigns to test what works best for your business.
There’s never been a better time to invest in content (YouTube is cheaper than ever), experiment with ads (more people are online), and learn from the data (you might discover an audience you didn’t know you had).
Note: Smart Shopping campaigns have been upgraded to Performance Max in September 2022. We suggest you refer to these links below to know more about Performance Max.
While many locations are exiting lockdown restrictions and business has been allowed to resume, the realities of the pandemic mean that many people are still unable or unwilling to shop in person. But that doesn’t necessarily mean demand is lower.
Enter e-commerce: the reigning champion of helping businesses make money through the internet.
This week on PPC Town Hall, Optmyzr CEO Frederick Vallaeys spoke to a couple of the world’s sharpest minds on the subject:
Duane Brown, Founder and Head of Strategy, Take Some Risk
As always, you can view this week’s episode as well as previous editions of PPC Town Hall right here.
Here are 5 tips from this week’s panelists on how e-commerce done right can make more money for your clients and your business.
1. Build a robust product feed
Every digital marketer knows that e-commerce success begins and ends with the product feed, so it’s paramount to get this in order before even trying to get creative with placements or extensions.
“We’ve seen big e-commerce stores come in and do really well with a feed where the titles are optimized for organic traffic. At the same time, we’ve seen time and time again that if you take the time to really build out the rest of the feed values so that your feed is as good as it can be, it can drastically improve Google Shopping results over time,” Andrew shared.
“The problem is this improvement doesn’t happen from one day to the next. With some of the stores we’ve worked with, where the product feed was very weak and where we optimized the feed (added keywords to the titles, etc.), it took months for it to actually show overall great results.
“My takeaway from this is that the feed really has a quality factor to it; we can’t see it, it’s not listed like Quality Score, but there is a component that determines how many searches you get shown for. It won’t necessarily boost your rank for a single keyword, but how far and wide Google can and will spread your product exposure.”
2. Give your products visibility
On the other hand, building a good feed means nothing unless you utilize it the right way.
“The vast majority of our clients are on Shopify, but we also work with businesses that are on WooCommerce and Magento as well. One of our clients on WooCommerce uses their app, and we used a supplemental feed to augment/change the product titles. It was easy to do because they only have 74 SKUs, so I was able to build out what I wanted in 5-6 hours. We push clients until they make the changes we want,” Duane shared.
“We’re not going to do subpar work, so if you’re not going to let us use Feedonomics, we don’t want you as a client. We don’t have time to waste building out feeds when we can think more strategically about how to use that feed to make our clients more money.”
3. Know when to use Smart and Standard campaigns
If you’re listing your products via Google Shopping campaigns, you have a choice to make: control the parameters yourself via a Standard campaign, or let Google use its machine-driven Smart campaign to optimize things for you.
“My recommendation depends on who you are. If you’re an in-house marketing coordinator and need to run your Google campaigns because you’ve had a bad experience with several agencies, Smart Shopping usually outperforms anything average PPC managers can do by themselves,” Andrew said.
“If you’re on the agency side or have a lot of experience, then you can usually utilize more of the complex structures to generate better results than Smart Shopping can. That said, I think it’s one of the best things to come out of Google in a long time.”
Duane had a word of advice for anyone leaning toward a Smart campaign.
“You can only use Smart Shopping if you have enough data in your Standard campaigns, so you can’t just launch a Smart Shopping campaign on day one even if you wanted to. I would recommend hitting a consistent 75-100 conversions per month before moving to Smart Shopping.”
4. Look beyond Google
While Google offers many effective ways to advertise, over-reliance on one platform can be limiting.
“I love Google, but sometimes people get so focused on Google and forget that there’s so much other opportunity in the world,” Duane said. “This article from Modern Retail talks about Levi’s doing a test with TikTok — an app that’s very big with influencers, celebrities and content creators. They have shopping ads now and around 200-250 million users in the US; so does Snapchat with its 229 million users.”
Duane knows other opportunities exist — and he’s already taking advantage of them.
“We’re making shopping work on Google; where else can we go? Does it make sense to go to Snap? It’s not just for people under 18; a good 15-20% of users are above the age of 25 and have disposable income. We’ve had clients sell products on there with an average order value of $100-150, so there’s money there. TikTok only launched shopping ads a few months ago, but it could work for brands that have a lot of video content.”
5. Track profit, not revenue
While it’s almost standard practice to track return on advertising spend (ROAS) as the defining financial metric, simply keeping score of revenue might not account for the actual goal of advertising: to make more money.
“Tracking profit over ROAS enables you to be more dynamic in the way you work with bidding,” Andrew observed.
“PPC marketers and businesses try to figure out what the optimal ROAS should be, and it all comes from analyzing margins on products; some work on a category basis and identify the ones that have higher margins than others. But this misses the point completely, because some brands have high margins and others have low ones. And if you’re running a sale, your margin is severely limited.
“During COVID, we worked with a client who had trouble getting inventory for a specific category — one we’d had problems with for a long time. We increased prices by 25% and all of a sudden, we started turning a profit. The profit margin earlier was so low that we couldn’t compete; with the new and improved conversions, we could own Shopping for that category.
“We’ve had other instances where we tracked profit over ROAS and the profit had doubled, or increased by 50-80%. When we looked at the analytics and measured ROAS, nothing had changed. It all comes from changing which products we’re actually pushing, because we can see which ones are selling well and turn a better profit instead of having empty revenue going through the stream.”
Conclusion
Nothing hurts an e-commerce program like a strategy in disarray. That’s why it’s critical to treat every step of the process with care.
If you’re an in-house marketer or a business owner, you might not have the time or resources to get it right every time. Tools like Optmyzr can make it easier to streamline and automate large parts of your PPC efforts, just as they help agencies achieve efficiency at scale.
You might also be completely new to e-commerce, in which case it’s not a bad idea to speak with an expert.
If you joined us for PPC Town Hall this week, you probably noticed that we look different! Everyone is combating Zoom fatigue, so we streamlined the show to be more visually engaging and appealing.
Joining us for the first new-look PPC Town Hall were two of the most insightful experts in paid search:
Ann Stanley is the Managing Director of the multi-award-winning agency Anicca Digital based in Leicester, England. You can tune in to Ann’s weekly webinars at 9 am GMT/UTC.
Gianpaolo Lorusso is the man behind the ADworld Experience series of events. As a courtesy to PPC Town Hall viewers, Gianpaolo is offering a 10% discount (use code optmyzr10) on the upcoming event in October and resources from previous editions.
As always, you can view this week’s episode as well as previous editions of PPC Town Hall right here.
Let’s dive into this week’s observations on Google’s initiatives during Q2 of 2020 — and we might even have an additional surprise for you at the end!
1. A shift in messaging is overdue.
With businesses reopening in the post-lockdown phase, COVID messaging is in need of a change in tone. Ann thinks now is a good time for brands to realign themselves.
“I do think some messages have been played out — how to do virtual conferences, how to spend your day on Zoom. People are getting fed up with that and it’s time for messaging to come out on the other side,” she noted.
“People are once again able to do things they weren’t able to do before; certain shops are reopening and we’re trying to get back to business. In the UK, our furlough grants have been very helpful in making sure a lot of people have salaries and are able to spend.”
2. E-commerce isn’t as simple as some people think.
With millions of consumers unable or unwilling to visit brick and mortar locations, small businesses and those dependent on tourism income are turning to e-commerce to plug revenue gaps.
But Gianpaolo has a word of caution for anyone who thinks setting up a Shopify store or listing on Amazon is the catch-all solution.
“In Italy, it’s been a couple of years now that almost everyone wants to get into e-commerce, even if they don’t need it,” he shared. “But starting an e-commerce operation is only the beginning; you cannot set up an online store and think you’re done.”
Gianpaolo recommends leveraging the power of search and other forms of paid advertising to get people to your online stores — a critical step that some businesses new to e-commerce may not account for.
With Google already rolling out its mandatory advertiser verification program, businesses that use their paid advertising services will have 21 days from the moment they’re contacted to verify their identities.
Ann believes that legitimate businesses will universally welcome this move, and that it will help filter out some of the more unsavory players.
“I’m very much in favor of Google’s advertiser verification. I feel there are so many questionable agencies and other businesses that rip people off. I’ve been in this industry nearly 20 years now, and I’ve seen and heard so many stories about this,” she shared.
4. Google’s ad credits are here — and they’ll be useful.
It didn’t take too long after global lockdowns started to take effect for Google to announce that they would be disbursing millions of dollars in free ad credits to small businesses. While this move to prop up some of Google’s hardest-hit customers took some time, America and Europe are now seeing results.
“This week in Italy, we received the first COVID ad credits from Google, so they are coming to Europe as well. They are set in fixed amounts: €75, €210, €590 and probably €1000 (I haven’t seen this yet), depending on last year’s range of spend,” Gianpaolo told us.
“Anything helps to get out of this situation. Even if €1,000 can’t change your business landscape, it can still help. If you found something that was working, I suggest putting part of your credits back on that. Of course, you can also try something new.
“Personally, my approach to the situation has been not to stop campaigns, but to lower budgets and CPCs to the minimum possible. Spending a tenth of what you normally do is a good solution, especially in search.
“If someone is searching for something they are likely to convert — maybe not now, but at some point. Why lose those hyper-competitive slots if you can keep them while spending a fraction of what you spent before?”
5. Agencies want Google to rethink their partner program.
Google’s partner program has long been a source of contention with many agencies, especially those who focus on quality and results. With the program postponed to next year due to the pandemic, this offers Google a chance to bring requirements in line with agency realities.
“As an MCC owner, we’ve got so many accounts linked to us. We had to have 70 people take the exam in organizations that have nothing to do with us. I’m hoping Google will have second thoughts about the way they do these qualifications because there’s no way we can oversee all the organizations we are linked to,” Ann said.
“The other thing I don’t like about the partner status is it’s based on volume and growth in spend. At a premium agency like ours, not every client is looking for massive growth. In some cases, the first thing we do with a new client is cut out a load of wasted spend. And then we get penalized for bringing the spend down while we’re trying to improve the quality and make more money for the client. Google’s program isn’t always aligned with client needs.”
Bonus: LinkedIn targeting is coming to Microsoft.
Towards the end of this week’s show, Gianpaolo had some interesting news and advice for users of Microsoft Advertising.
“Keep an eye on the Microsoft Audience Network. They’re integrating it with LinkedIn targeting options for B2B campaigns in their display network,” he told us.
“This is something I would try to test even more deeply when I have an occasion to do so. I think it’s probably the first time that Microsoft is a little bit ahead of Google in something. I’m happy they’re doing this, and I’d definitely do some testing on this.”
Conclusion
Ever since the COVID-19 pandemic began, Google has been active in rolling out initiatives to help businesses and the PPC industry ride the storm. And while some of those programs were hyped up to be a lot more than they turned out to be, there’s no doubt they’ve done more than most advertising platforms.
It will be interesting to see how they adapt and what new ideas they roll out as the landscape continues to morph based on restrictions and developments in different geographies.
Join us again next week for PPC Town Hall, where we’ll be discussing e-commerce and Google Shopping campaigns. Catch the details on our PPC Town Hall landing page or follow us on Twitter.
After a break last week, PPC Town Hall returned on May 27 with a revamped format. With the ‘doom and gloom’ phase of the pandemic behind us, PPC marketers are increasingly focused on solutions.
Going forward, PPC Town Halls will be more topical and focus on key areas of concern, with actionable advice to help PPC marketers and their teams overcome ongoing challenges. You’ll also be able to ask questions of panelists before and during each episode, and watch and listen to previous PPC Town Halls anytime you like.
Here are 6 key insights from our panelists on how PPC professionals can help B2B brands position themselves for post-COVID success.
1. Start building your pipeline now.
B2B as a space is notorious for having lengthy sales cycles, ranging from the challenging (30-60 days) to the laborious (12-18 months). Depending on the size of a lead’s company, conversions may not happen for multiple quarters or fiscal years.
AJ believes that now is a good time to get ahead of that curve, and he thinks LinkedIn is the place to do it.
“Because of the uncertainty right now, people are afraid to sign big deals and contracts. So these leads who were in the pipeline are not closing,” he shared. “I get that B2B marketers are scared, but now is the time to be advertising — ad costs are the lowest they will ever be across all networks, it’s the cheapest way to get in with an audience, and people are spending more time on LinkedIn. More people, more attention, and lower costs — take advantage of that to build your pipeline and have conversations to build those relationships on the longer sales cycles.
2. Be ready for the coming rise in demand.
At the start of the pandemic, it was difficult to extrapolate any meaningful stories from relevant data. Now that we’re a few months in, there’s something to work with.
“Around mid-March when the pandemic was taking hold, there was a huge spike in e-commerce traffic, conversion rates and revenue,” he said.
“This good write-up on this COVID-19 e-commerce bubble by Mike Ryan, product management lead for Smarter Ecommerce in Austria, shows what they observed in Europe. The bubble was mostly likely a result of panic-buying of essentials like food, and business items like headsets and cameras for work-from-home remote meetings. After that spike, it settled into a pattern and we’re now in a trough.”
He also provided some advice for businesses whose products and services are in high demand, which might drastically shorten a once-drawn out sales cycle.
“If you’re a company that sells something directly related to reopening safely, your biggest issue is when things open back up, purchasing managers are going to want to buy your product and they’re going to want it fast. So in terms of messaging, be clear about what you can deliver quickly — and don’t discount.”
3. Keep your ads dynamic.
From messaging to responsiveness to inventory, nothing during this pandemic has been static or predictable. Businesses need to stay flexible in order to occupy a positive space in the minds of those who will buy their products and services.
Frank believes that one good way to do that is by structuring your ad content to follow a prospect’s progress through your funnel.
“At Digitopia, we have a concept called ‘follow the funnel’. That means as your prospect engages with your brand digitally and moves through that experience, the ads on all networks should recognize where they’re at and change to offer the next thing in the relationship,” he told our audience.
“So if they visit a cornerstone piece of content but didn’t take advantage of your lead magnet, then the ad should change to (drive them to) the lead magnet.”
4. LinkedIn is an expensive but high-quality filter.
One question that came up during this week’s conversation focused on filtering out unwanted clicks from tire-kickers and businesses that can’t afford your product or service.
AJ’s advice is to leverage LinkedIn’s built-in filtering capabilities — without breaking the bank.
“LinkedIn is very good at getting the best quality of prospects to your offers and sites. What it requires is that you have a great content offer, because their CPCs are too high to treat it as a true top-of-funnel channel; you’re paying bottom-of-funnel prices for a top-of-funnel visitor,” he said.
His advice?
“Get people to an offer that is gated — some kind of lead magnet — where it’s valuable enough that people will drop down past the top of the funnel into the middle.”
5. Evaluate. Communicate. Re-evaluate.
At the start of this crisis, many agencies shifted priorities from performance to strategy. While the needle is slowly moving back, Matt feels that it’s more vital than ever to truly understand what clients are going through.
“What’s really important now is staying on top of relationships with clients, and we’re talking to them about what they’re seeing — is the phone ringing, are RFQ numbers going up, is lead gen going up?”
He even provided an example of when communication can overcome a roadblock that might have otherwise been overlooked.
“In B2B, summertime tends to get a bit quieter. Things might be reopening but we still see a flat revenue line, and it may be due to that seasonal trend. So constant communication and re-evaluation is important.”
6. Consistency leads to revenue
Few things are more harmful to B2B marketing than irregularity — except perhaps consistently making communication sound like a pitch. Combine the two, and you have a recipe for disaster.
Frank reminded our audience that messaging is everything, and how you structure that messaging can make or break your success in the current environment.
“When a company is trying to engage their audience but hasn’t been consistent with it, there’s a ramp up period of 12-24 months before you see it become a consistent process,” he cautioned.
“Now add in what’s going on, and we see a lot of companies immediately jump ship. They say ‘We’re not going to do anything because now’s a bad time to be marketing’. Well, if your approach to marketing was product pitch-focused to begin with, you were doing B2B marketing wrong all along.”
Conclusion
It became apparent to us a couple of weeks ago that the PPC community was done feeling sorry for ourselves. As always, our resilience and analytical minds meant that we now needed to focus on fixing what we have the power to fix.
Now that we’ve moved to a topical format with discussions revolving around solutions, we hope the time you spend engaging with us on PPC Town Hall yields even greater returns. So be sure to bookmark this page to stay on top of everything.
In the meantime, we’re still here to provide all the support we can with new content, product features and more!
The last time we sat down with Google to talk shop, the discussion found its way to managing PPC campaigns during the COVID-19 pandemic.
With supply chains disrupted and business models being tested, companies around the world are facing a variety of new conditions. And though the results aren’t uniform, what’s consistent is how every business has been affected in some way.
Many are struggling to find customers. Some are facing uncertain futures. A few fortunate ones are doing better than ever — will they struggle when things return to normal?
We put together some advice for PPC marketers that took the shape of this blog post. But in the weeks since, we’ve seen and heard the debate over automated bidding become one of the prevailing industry conversations.
Thankfully, our friends at Google had plenty more to say.
Here are their recommendations for 6 secret tips that can help you impact Smart Bidding and more reliably navigate a marketplace in flux.
6 Secret Tips to Impact Smart Bidding
As you monitor shifting trends and course-correct your business plan, you’ll also need to bring your strategic approach in line with what the current situation demands. To help you provide clients and customers with a fruitful experience without eating too much of your time, Google recommends Smart Bidding.
Let’s recap the tactics we recommended last time, as well as explore how they impact Smart Bidding.
1. Keywords
Recommended Tactics
Use negative keywords as a safeguard against undesired clicks that might drive lots of cost but no conversions.
The way users are searching for your business may have changed, which is why it’s important to capture those shifts in search behavior through broad match keywords.
When bidding on keywords with your brand name, adjust goals for Impression Share or use tCPA/tROAS.
How does this impact Smart Bidding?
Keyword optimization helps deliver more at the same CPA/ROAS goal, and ensures that brand strategies align with business goals. Broad match keywords allow the Smart Bidding machine to discover new opportunities for conversions.
Optmyzr Tip: You’ll still want to keep other match types and regularly review new search terms with tools like Optmyzr. The Rule Engine’s latest addition takes high-performing keywords with one match type and lets you add new match types at the ad group level.
2. Creatives
Recommended Tactics
Use Dynamic Search Ads to show up on new relevant searches your keywords may be missing out on.
Use Responsive Search Ads to adapt ad content to more closely match user search terms.
Make offers stand out and take customers to the right page with promo and site extensions.
How does this impact Smart Bidding?
Getting your creatives right prevents your message and customer experience are on the same page, which ensures that each bid brings relevant engagement.
Optmyzr Tip: Regulations and restrictions can change frequently. With the Ad Text Optimization tool, you can quickly and consistently change ad copy to reflect the real-world operating conditions of your business. The Add Responsive Search Ad tool is also useful to build RSAs for each of your ad groups.
The Responsive Search Ads tool lets you maximize your chances of getting meaningful clicks
3. Bids and Budgets
Recommended Tactics
Move unused parts of your budget to the ads that need it most.
Raise the budgets of campaigns that are performing well to drive more traffic.
Use Performance Planner to understand the implications of different budget scenarios.
How does this impact Smart Bidding?
Putting your marketing dollars where they’re likely to yield the best returns is PPC 101. You capture more leads at the same CPA/ROAS goal, and forecasting often captures the most recent demand trends.
Optmyzr Tip: Campaigns that worked a few months ago might not be winners today, for no fault of their own or yours. Put your dollars where they need to be with the Optimize Budgets tool. It can help you quickly re-allocate budgets based on how different campaigns are doing against your goals.
Optimize Budgets lets you see how to adjust spend to achieve specific goals
4. Target Constraints/Goals
Recommended Tactics
Evaluate your new business strategies and confirm target goals.
Set performance targets and customize settings to your unique business goals.
How does this impact Smart Bidding?
Using CPA/ROAS goal adjustments can help you control spend and volume. But to achieve the same thing for Max strategies, Google recommends using budget adjustments.
Optmyzr Tip: Use the Optimize Target CPA & ROAS on campaigns with automated bidding to increase conversions and Impression Share. You can also see converting ad groups that use other automated bidding strategies.
5. Account-Wide Best Practices
Recommended Tactics
Capture all signals using Data-Driven or Non-Last Click Attribution.
Only include conversions that are relevant to the business.
How does this impact Smart Bidding?
Smart Bidding uses account-wide signals (cross-account under MCC, if applicable). If you’re struggling to see results from Smart Bidding, it might be because you’re still using Last Click Attribution in an era of erratic search behavior.
Optmyzr Tip: The Rule Engine allows you to create data-based strategies, like removing non-converting keywords related to COVID-19. Or for a fun way to keep your account in shape, try the Workouts that combine multiple optimizations to achieve a specific objective.
6. Audiences
Recommended Tactics
Add all RSLA, Similar Audiences, and Customer Match lists to Smart Bidding campaigns.
How does this impact Smart Bidding?
First-party audience lists improve Smart Bidding algorithms, but Google lists have a neutral impact on Smart Bidding. For best results, provide your own customer information.
Optmyzr Tip: You always want Smart Bidding to have the latest and greatest information about your customers. Use the Customer Match List Updates tool (under Optimizations > Utilities) to keep your audiences in sync between your business data and Google’s audience repository.
6 Ways to Fully Control & Adjust Smart Bidding
While Smart Bidding might make PPC a bit less time-consuming, it’s far from a ‘set it and forget it’ mentality. There are many things you can do to affect the degree of control and influence you have over your bids.
Check out these 6 ways to fully control and adjust Smart Bidding.
1. Goals
Goals are the end objectives of your campaign; think of them as a destination. Tweaking goal values can change the way Smart Bidding tries to get there.
CPA/ROAS goal adjustments
Ad Group targets
Portfolio targets
Device CPA modifier
Operationalize forecasts
2. Conversions
Current market realities have impacted conversions across the board. Use the information in this space to inform your strategy and reshape the Smart Bidding process.
Conversion value adjustments
Campaign-level conversion setting
“Hack” data exclusion (seasonal adjustment)
New secondary KPIs
3. Constraints
Setting hard limits on your financials can enable Smart Bidding to look at creating value over volume. As always, keep an eye on things as you implement this approach.
Limiting budgets on purpose
Portfolio CPC max/min bid limits
4. Targeting
Audience is one of the most influential factors in PPC, and there’s no doubt that who and how you choose to target can make a difference to Smart Bidding results.
Pausing targeting
Opening targeting
Split testing
5. Budgets
At the end of the day, it’s all about the dollars. Experimenting with budgetary values can provide some of the most significant influence on Smart Bidding.
Shared budgets
Uncapped budgets
Constrained budgets
6. Misc. Adjustments
There are other adjustments you can make to shape Smart Bidding, including seasonal adjustments. We suggest exercising oversight when using some of these in today’s market.
Seasonal adjustments
Campaign structure
Split testing bid strategies
Conclusion
It’s been said before but bears repeating: There’s only one way PPC professionals can do right by their businesses and clients — by having as much information as possible. That’s why we’ve partnered with Google to bring you these posts on how to gain maximum value from the tools at your disposal.
These recommendations from Google are intended to supplement a brand’s unique business strategy. Both Google and Optmyzr suggest you balance any automated bidding strategy by keeping a close eye on your accounts. After all, only humans can provide context to the data.
And be on the lookout for the third part of our collaboration with Google, when we discuss what advertisers in hard-hit industries can do to prepare for the end of lockdown.
One of the most rewarding things about PPC Town Hall is how support and demand for our webinar isn’t just restricted to a few markets. And recently, we found out that the PPC community in Australia was missing out on joining us live.
That’s all the reason we needed to move this week’s webinar to accommodate our friends down under. Joining us for this week’s episode were three of Australia’s most seasoned digital marketers:
As always, you can view and listen to previous PPC Town Hall episodes here.
So let’s take a look at our panelists’ 7 digital marketing lessons from their experiences managing local and global accounts from Australia.
1. How long can the ‘new normal’ last?
“I’ve been amazed with how quickly everyone has adapted. Two months ago, working from home full time was ‘impossible’ for many organizations,” Mike observed.
“The knock-on effects — less pollution, less time in the car, property prices — will be pretty interesting to see. I don’t know yet what cultural changes will stick, but I feel like we might roll back some things if we don’t consciously design differences into our lives. And it would be a shame to lose this opportunity to make our supply chains more local or improve food security. In terms of consumer buying behavior, Amazon is an example of a company that comes out of this stronger than before.”
With that said, Mike also urged marketers to remain empathetic by remembering that we’re not all equally fortunate.
“We have to remember this is a pandemic of two halves. We and our teams are very fortunate to be able to work from home. Meanwhile, a whole bunch of jobs and businesses are just gone.”
2. Small businesses need all the support they can get.
Hit hardest during this crisis are small businesses, irrespective of industry. Many operate on low margins and don’t have the cash reserves to continue meeting expenses without regular revenue.
“Google My Business has done a lot for companies during COVID. One example is the ability to list that you’re not open to walk-ins, but are offering delivery or pickups. So for cafés and restaurants, GMB has done some very positive things,” Monte noted.
“That said, knowing a lot of people in restaurants and catering, they’re trying to move a bit away from services like UberEats and Deliveroo because of the huge margins (up to 30%). Most restaurants don’t operate on a 20% or 30% gross margin in normal times. So now they have their wait staff doing deliveries, and they’re finding new services that charge them a flat fee to place the order and have their own employees fulfill it. This needs to pick up, because the bigger services aren’t sustainable for small businesses.”
If you can, we recommend you buy local to support small businesses and give your economy the best shot at bouncing back quickly.
3. Hybrid business models are in.
While the situation is improving in many countries, there’s no clear and definitive end to the pandemic. Ben believes that businesses will need to look at combining different strategies to maximize profitability for some time.
“There are only two ways out of COVID: a vaccine or herd immunity. Every time lockdowns open up, there’s a spike in cases. So we’re probably indoors for a period of time, and this will change people’s buying psychology — it takes 30 days to form a habit and 60 days to break one.”
“Google is still the first thing people use to search for and find things. In April, we saw categories like restaurants go through the roof — and they’re still there. Earlier, restaurants used to have people walk down the street and pop in, but they will have to adopt a hybrid business model for a while yet. This might look like deliveries and takeout supported by limited dine-in capacity.”
4. Size does matter.
Every few decades, history throws us a curveball that creates winners and losers. Pandemics are one of these events, and the current one is drawing out the divide between the haves and the have-nots.
“It might not be common knowledge, but large organizations that have dedicated logistics and transport facilities have been able to maintain their supply lines,” Monte said.
“But for a lot of small businesses that might be importing from China for distribution in Australia, that product is usually in the belly of a commercial airliner carrying passengers. That all came to a halt and as a result, these companies found their supply chains had collapsed for a while. We actually had some clients who put their e-commerce stores on hold because of a lack of inventory.”
5. Work around the logistics.
There’s no doubt that the world’s supply chains are under stress. Businesses have two choices: crib about it or work around it. Ben has been helping clients achieve the latter.
“In March, stock was an issue. We had big online retailers who couldn’t get product, going from huge revenues to thinking about maybe closing the doors. So we pivoted to make sure they could do pre-orders and give attention to what was in stock. It’s amazing what little things like that and a bit of common sense can do for a business,” he shared.
“I think Display and remarketing are useful to make sure you’re getting in front of these changing business strategies, like curbside pickup. We believed we were seeing a lot of those trends here in Australia as well. We did some analysis of our MCCs and it looks like the data matches that.”
6. Pausing campaigns is unpreferred in both hemispheres.
During last week’s PPC Town Hall, Navah Hopkins made a passionate case for keeping campaigns on at minimal cost. This week, Mike echoed her sentiments.
“I’m reluctant to pause campaigns, having done that in the past with bad results. If we think a client will come back in a few weeks, we’ll wind stuff down to 1-cent budgets and leave it there. We’d rather spend a little bit than pause entirely,” he said.
“Interestingly enough, some European campaigns for one of our US clients have been on these 1-cent budgets. There was some trickle of clicks coming through. Every now and then you get a sale, so the ROAS was staggering at 500x. Of course, those outliers don’t make for very pleasant reporting!”
7. Truly great agencies are partnerships.
Led by people like Ben, PPC agencies and consultants are proving to be worth their weight in gold during this crisis.
“We have great clarity about our mission as a business — to serve and help SMBs succeed online. Many of our client managers see themselves as digital marketing business coaches, so they’re there not just to talk about Google Ads but what else we can do with client businesses,” he shared.
“When COVID hit, they needed our help more than ever. We immediately thought about all these industries that were going to be affected and how we can help them stop from shutting their doors. We developed some e-commerce packages, rolled them out at cost price, and built them out in two days. One thing we achieved was helping a coffee shop sell coffee beans online and survive that way.”
Conclusion
It’s always reassuring to learn that people doing the same work around the world share your mentality and vision. So it was refreshing to speak with not just one, but three champions of human and empathy-focused marketing (we heard plenty of support for local and small businesses). Next week, we’re back to our usual time of 9 am PT / 12 pm ET / 18:00 CET and will be joined by two exciting panelists. Check out the details here!
For the past six weeks, we’ve discussed how to adjust to this new normal and find hope in difficult situations. With signs of life starting to creep back into the digital advertising space, this week’s episode focused on solutions as we start to emerge from the sense of doom.
The panel for episode 6 included:
David Szetela, President, Paid Search Association and CEO, FMB Media
Navah Hopkins, Director of Paid Media, Hennessey Digital
Brandon Jones, Director of Client Operations, (un)Common Logic
So without further delay, let’s dive into 9 insights that consultants, brands and agencies can use to guide the next phase of their PPC strategy.
And remember, you can watch or listen to past episodes of PPC Town Hall on our dedicated page.
1. People are starting to spend again.
“I saw something interesting with a furniture client who has both B2B and B2C e-retail,” David said. “Each one had a moment of total crisis where sales just stopped, and we were all trying to figure out why. In retrospect, consumer confidence had vanished — along with their money. But then it started to pick up around late March and early April.”
But that’s only half the story. While David’s client experienced slowdowns on both fronts at the same time, the recovery has been dramatically different.
“The interesting thing is the pickup for B2B has not yet brought them to parity with what they saw in January and February, while B2C is higher than they’ve ever experienced.”
2. Businesses are more flexible than ever.
During one of our first PPC Town Hall events, Julie Friedman Bacchini of Neptune Moon predicted that businesses can only succeed if they adapted to the prevailing situation.
Brandon has seen that play out firsthand.
“SMBs experienced a number of weeks with a lot of reluctance and trying to figure out what exactly was going on,” he said.
“I’ve been really impressed and surprised with our clients and the conversations we’ve had, and their attitude to getting back out there and maintaining their presence on digital. I’ve seen that more often than I expected.”
3. Courage is paying off.
According to Navah, “Clients who stayed the course throughout the flux are in an amazing position; the ones who pulled back their spend are experiencing a far more intense recovery. The former have been able to capitalize on cheaper CPCs and really own the ‘compassion conversation’ to stay top of mind.”
So what’s the final verdict: should you turn your campaigns off or keep them on?
“We can debate turning campaigns off versus keeping them on with a $5 budget, but leaving the campaign on can be worth the $400 or $500 you’d spend. It can help make sure you don’t face thousands of dollars in wasted time when you want to ramp things back up.”
4. There’s no formula for recovery.
Once again, another set of panelists confirmed that the absence of a playbook means they are handling each situation independently.
“I don’t have set times or dollar amounts [as benchmarks for the recovery phase], as the variables differ greatly from client to client,” David said. “When I sense that we’re going to have to adjust the budget significantly, I will often switch to manual bidding and try to steer the account in the right direction.”
5. Manual bidding might be necessary as advertising activity picks back up.
The lack of data to guide Google’s machine means that advertisers who paused campaigns will find it a challenge to jump right back into Automated Bidding.
“I’ve seen about a two-week period where campaigns coming back on benefit from manual bidding before re-transitioning to automated bidding,” Navah said. “What’s also been useful is target Impression Share with a bid cap just to protect the system. But for manual bidding, I don’t go more than two weeks provided we have conversion data.”
Read more of Navah’s thoughts on the subject in her latest blog post for Search Engine Journal.
6. Digital marketers can’t stay isolated.
With data scarce and attribution not so clear, the divide between digital and traditional media is narrower than ever.
“Bridging the gap between traditional and digital media has become a far more important conversation, and digital marketers need to be more comfortable interfacing with their traditional media counterparts,” Navah commented.
“Pre-COVID, we were comfortable living in our tower of data with perfect attribution, and this crisis has shaken the foundations of having a pure data approach.”
7. There is no ‘one channel to rule them all’.
Even hardcore specialist agencies that focused on one or two channels have been open to new things, like Brandon’s organization (un)Common Logic.
“One of the learnings of the last few months for me relates to diversification and having a few more channels at our disposal. We’re typically a direct response and PPC-heavy agency, and connected TV is one of the things I’ve been interested in,” he commented.
And speaking of exploring new things…
8. Now’s the time to experiment with creativity.
If you need an example of agency and brand teaming up to succeed by trying something unconventional, you’ll love this anecdote from David.
“We have a client who’s around the middle in terms of market share, and they noticed their competitors were drawing back in advertising. So we did a branding campaign of all Display Ads using no CTA,” he told us.
“We featured their name and logo, and something about the position they wanted to occupy in the minds of their consumers. We ran those ads on the sites of every major city’s media outlets and got many millions of impressions for almost nothing. It was surprising how much it affected sales — the numbers truly did shoot up.
“It’ll be another conversation whether that altered their position in the market, but a lot of those purchases were new.”
Talk about a curveball!
9. Years of pivoting have made agencies priceless.
Anyone who’s worked for an agency knows how agile and flexible they have to be. Turnaround times are short, deadlines are always looming, and agency pros have made a life out of pivoting at superhuman speed.
So who better to call when you need a partner who can change direction in a heartbeat?
“What we’re doing more of is double-checking and making sure things are working well. I think we’ve seen fairly consistent performance, but we’re spending a lot more time in the accounts making changes where necessary, and just providing that oversight where it’s needed,” Brandon shared.
“Our approach with clients has been highly consultative. The first thing we did was start having conversations not just about marketing needs, but what their businesses were going through. So we’re trying to adapt our strategy to that.
“We’re primarily a PPC shop, but we do have expertise in other areas, so we tailor our solutions to each client. Being able to pivot and stay flexible has been key for us.”
A glimmer of hope
It’s May, and while it feels like more than just a few months since the COVID crisis began, we’re starting to see some positive signs around consumer behavior and supply chains. With luck, we’ll start to see additional medical advances and a subsequent restart of the economy in earnest.
As we’ve said from the beginning, the only way out of this for the PPC community is by sharing all the information we have. One graph, one observation, one insight — any of these could spark an idea that leads to a solution we can all use.
Please continue to join us for our weekly PPC Town Hall sessions. You can add it on your calendar, subscribe to email notifications, access the podcast and videos from previous sessions, or catch the live Town Hall on ppctownhall.com. It’s one hour that might be the most valuable investment you make all week!
When brilliant marketers share insights, we can get a sense of clarity in troubling times. This week Optmyzr hosted the sixth episode of our weekly PPC Town Hall gatherings. To date, we’ve had nearly 1,000 attendees participating in these timely, essential discussions about search marketing in the COVID-19 era.
The response to our Town Hall concept has been terrific. We deeply appreciate the involvement of amazing panelists and the hundreds of attendees who watch, submit questions, and follow up with us.
This week’s event focused heavily on the tools, data, and creative thinking that is helping PPC pros navigate the strange times we’re in.
Innovative Insight Tools
There are some great new tools to help us make sense of search behaviors and underlying dynamics that may be flummoxing marketers.
Aaron showcased the really cool COVID dashboard from the data and analytics experts at Tinuiti. We’ve referenced this dashboard in a few venues ourselves. The dashboard provides visualizations of month-over-month and week-over-week spend trends as well as indexed spend trends covering a wide range of sectors.
Explore the dashboard. It’s free. All you need to do is provide your email address.
Christi also showed some powerful insight tools that Microsoft is generating to provide intelligence into weekly trends in automotive, financial services, health & wellness, retail, tech & telcos, and travel. The Microsoft resources analyze marketplace impacts and provide meaningful context into indicators of recovery by sector.
I encourage you to watch the replay of the session for deeper analysis, but some key takeaways from our panel:
The data shows that uncertainty is a key factor, but plays out differently by industry.
Travel and automotive are still among the biggest challenge areas. Volume fell off a cliff, but are showing signs of tepid uptick. In automotive, promotions about extended finance deals and payment relief prove powerful.
The pandemic affects everyone differently, even within a sector. So performance for one provider in a vertical could vary from a counterpart in a different geo. Use the data as a guide, but apply your own critical thinking as a marketer for your specific audiences. https://about.ads.microsoft.com/en-us/insights/covid19-insights-for-advertisers
Seeing clarity in the data
Is it even possible to trust the data that is out there? The brilliant AI machines and smart automations are, in many cases, confused. The machines know it’s a weird time, but they don’t know we’re in a crisis. The machines understand data from the past to predict the future. But the past doesn’t factor in massive global shifts in how people are living their lives.
Christi, Aaron, Jim, and I talked specifically about the use of RSAs and applying data to decision making. Aaron talked about moving from being data-driven to being data-informed. Look at data and best practices as very relevant, but we all need to view this information through very different lenses than we did two months ago.
Christi encouraged search marketers to take a much more manual mindset with RSAs. The days of set-and-forget are gone (for now). The challenge for marketers today will be to apply critical thinking, creativity, assessment of messaging, geo differences, and other factors to make decisions better than the machines can do right now.
Jim echoed the same RSA points, and said he is heavily annotating analytics right now, due to the wildy dynamic environment marketers are in. We simply cannot compare anything from 12 months ago to make decisions now. He noted that like-for-like may never exist again, or at least not for quite some time.
Panelists also encouraged marketers to allow themselves to be wrong on occasion. In many cases, hindsight will be the only indicator of the decisions being made right now.
Amazon, Ecommerce, and “Black Friday” thinking
As panelists have discussed in earlier episodes, Amazon’s impact on the market is far different today than it was two months ago. Still the ecommerce behemoth, shifting priorities and temporary shipping extensions create opportunities for other providers to step in the ecom gap.
Aaron and Jim both credited Amazon’s quick move to communicate extended shipping timeframes as a means of protecting the Prime brand. People associate Prime with same-day and two-day shipping more than they may associate it with the other services like Prime Video. Noting it’s better to underpromise and overdeliver on shipping. Cart abandonment that happens when people see shipping dates weeks out can help other providers – assuming their supply chains, inventory, and distribution can fill the void.
Christi added that for those doing Amazon sponsored ads, it’s essential to be sure the ads, promotions, and messaging actually align with what people are purchasing now. Careful consideration of how sponsored ads are being applied now is essential to prevent needless spend or to capitalize on filling near-term needs for things people will actually purchase.
The ecommerce discussion also covered “Black Friday” thinking by many retailers. Balancing the potential perception that a provider is desperate against the perception of being viewed as opportunistic, the panel advised retailers to avoid keeping Black Friday type discounts from going on too long.
Aaron summed up the panel’s thoughts when he noted, “The people who market well are doing well. The people who market poorly are doing poorly. With the Black Friday concept, some can look a little desperate and it can seem like some are addicted to focusing on month-over-month or ROAS on last click. Longer term marketers are looking at the edge of the funnel – seeing the whole funnel as opposed to just the bottom.”
Light at the End of the Tunnel?
Nobody knows a timeline for returning to something resembling normal, but the week-6 panel expressed optimism with discussions beginning to shift to recovery versus managing through the crisis.
The tools shared above and all other data points can help search marketers have a better understanding of immediate factors, but also are now setting the stage for longer term thinking and decision making. Clearly we have a long way to go, but with each subsequent Town Hall, discussions are morphing and adjusting. Week-1 was more about being together and commiserating and trying to gauge “what the heck is happening?” Five weeks later, discussions are dramatically different.
Invest an hour of your time and watch the replay of episode 6 on our Town Hall web page or listen to it as a podcast. Then sign up for next week’s live session, which will feature Navah Hopkins and David Szetela, both on the list of top 25 most influential PPC experts in 2019, and Brandon Jones from un(Common) Logic, an Austin-based agency.
Register today and we will see you Wednesday for PPC Town Hall #7.
As PPC Town Hall turns a month old, we wanted to take a moment to thank all our guest speakers, attendees, and everyone who has embraced the idea. From the beginning, you’ve expressed your support and helped share news of the Town Hall with new parts of the global PPC community.
Thank you for being part of the journey so far!
We created a new page for PPC Town Hall to make it easy to sign up for the next one and find old episodes.
Joining Optmyzr CEO Fred Vallaeys this week for episode 5 in an all-new panel were:
Andrew McGarry, Owner & Founder, The McGarry Agency
Ginny Marvin, Editor-in-Chief, Third Door Media
Joe Martinez, Director of Client Strategy, Clix Marketing
Let’s take a look at some of the core takeaways from this week’s edition.
1. No business remains unaffected by the pandemic.
“It’s almost a ‘feast or famine’ situation across commerce and service, and there are challenges with both scenarios,” Ginny observed.
Whichever side your business or clients fall on, there’s plenty to do.
“You’re either trying to drum up interest where demand has sunk through the floor, or figuring out how to deal with a surge in demand when the supply chain isn’t ready or you don’t have the resources to manage that surge.”
Joe observed similar trends in the context of site traffic.
“In many instances, brands are changing spending habits and adapting messaging. But some are simply getting so much traffic that they either can’t keep up with inventory, or because people are looking for anything even slightly related to their product, a lot of that traffic is unqualified.”
2. People want brands to add value to their lives.
Our panelists also provided some advice on how PPC pros can provide added value to businesses and clients by shaping conversations that their brands are part of.
“Don’t sound like a used car salesman; be your customers’ partner in solving a problem,” Joe recommended. “People are nervous, bored, and anxious; reminding people of that doesn’t inspire them to fall in love with a brand. Shift that messaging to talk about how you’re going to help consumers come out of this.”
Andrew believes brands should continue to talk about more than just pandemic-related topics.
“No one wants to hear about you supplying hand sanitizer; we want to be reassured. We want someone to talk about the things that mattered to us before, because it matters even more now. We should still care about climate change, talk about sustainability, and promote and support local businesses.”
3. Google is looking out for its loyal advertisers.
It’s no surprise that small and medium businesses have been disproportionately affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. For many of them, online advertising budgets have either dropped sharply or stopped altogether.
Google took notice and announced $340 million in ad credits to help keep these SMBs active on the Google Ads network.
“We’re going to start seeing these credits for SMBs in late May, which will be the first phase followed by a continuous rollout,” said Ginny. “These are designed to help SMBs and smaller accounts sustain ad spend in the future. The credit amount will vary based on your historical spend.”
“To be eligible, you need to have been advertising (had active campaigns) for 10 out of 12 months in 2019, and also have been advertising in January or February of this year.”
It’s worth noting that Google is not extending these ad credits to franchise businesses, even if they meet the SMB criteria.
4. Now’s the time to try new things.
The hallmark of COVID-19 for marketing professionals is the absence of a playbook or historical data that shows you how to solve current problems. Instead, two of this week’s guests recommend a more experimental, open-minded approach.
“With the exponential intelligence of what Google can do every quarter, we go back and often find out that what didn’t work so well six months ago is doing better now,” Andrew observed. “Go back and look at some of your Google Ads audiences; they may be capable of delivering things your Google Analytics audiences can’t, and vice versa.”
Joe, meanwhile, favors experimenting with channels you didn’t get to play around with earlier.
“Test those Instagram story ads, do some brand-building, build out new targeting options, stretch your budget with more affordable media like Facebook CPMs, and use YouTube to generate awareness. In time, when inventory stabilizes, you can double down on search and shopping ads to capitalize on that new intent.”
5. Google Shopping ads will soon be free (yes, free).
The announcement that advertisers can list Google Shopping ads at no cost is a game-changer, and Ginny explained how it will work in greater detail.
“Google is going to start showing free listings for shopping ads. It’s a really big change going from all-paid for the last eight years to primarily free, with paid ads at the top and bottom, just like a regular SERP.”
It’s a big shift for the Shopping tab of the search results pages, but it’s also part of a larger evolution over the past year.
“Google first opened up the Merchant Center to anyone to upload their feeds without needing to be an advertiser, and then opt in to services across Google,” Ginny elaborated. “The other thing Google announced is a new integration with PayPal so that you can connect that account to the Merchant Center to speed up data flow and merchant verification.”
6. There’s an opportunity to beat Amazon at its own game.
With non-essential deliveries shut off and two-day shipping a pipe dream at this stage, Amazon suddenly finds itself unable to deliver what it’s conditioned the marketplace to expect.
Businesses that can help consumers get what they need and want with minimal delay have an opportunity to capitalize on that, and possibly retain a significant chunk of business even after the crisis abates.
“If I still need a new pair of running shoes, and I can’t walk into a store and get them, I’m going to wherever I can get them soon,” Joe explained. “I’ve got more time to go for a run or a walk, and I’m not waiting for Amazon. So it’s about diversifying your marketing and finding where your users are, because they still want those products now.”
7. There’s more than one way to stretch a budget.
Despite knowing that investing in advertising is paramount, smaller businesses are having a tough time finding marketing dollars. But even with lower-than-ever Facebook CPMs, media on leading platforms isn’t within reach for every business.
Joe provided some advice for restaurants looking to make their budgets go further.
“If you’ve lost budget and you still want to run ads, look at different channels than the ones you’re used to. Waze local and Quora can help take your budget further than Facebook, for example. It’s a good time to test new things and see what works.”
8. COVID-19 is creating a new breed of agile businesses.
With supply chains unsteady and normal processes interrupted, businesses have to stay on their feet to survive. The result is a great deal more creativity not just in PPC, but across the marketing spectrum.
Ginny spoke about one Amazon seller she knows. “Her products are made in the US, but she was worried the manufacturing plant might shut down for health reasons. So she ordered thousands of dollars in new inventory, but then Amazon shut off non-essential shipments.”
“She was stuck, so she explored her network and found a new way to fulfil those orders. We’re seeing businesses adapt and pivot quickly.”
More specific to PPC strategy, Andrew noted that changes further back than COVID-19 have compounded the challenges paid search pros face in the current environment.
“The ad-tech industry has gone through a lot in the last 6-9 months due to ITP and how cookies work now. Marketers need to realize that betting the house on last-click, bottom-of-funnel tactics is not a sustainable approach.”
9. The worst consumer is a disappointed one.
With the supply chain disrupted, consumers no longer know where exactly to go to make certain purchases. They’re relying more than ever on search to guide them to a marketplace that has what they need.
So what happens if a consumer finds it on your site, only to later discover that the product is actually unavailable? Andrew believes it’s a real problem that needs immediate attention.
“The big danger is advertising products that are out of stock or have low stock, and disappointing users when they land on the page. As an industry we need to do better because it’s a common complaint I keep seeing.”
“Low stock and a product feed’s ability to easily adjust to that remains a major area where things can fall down for SMBs. Either in-house teams lack the setup skills, or SMBs on low-cost PPC packages don’t get the attention they need to react to demand peaks,” he added.
The ongoing crisis has made it difficult for people to see their loved ones and close friends, causing some of us to feel powerless and lonely.
A less impactful effect is that it’s also isolated professionals from their community networks.
While we still have the power of technology to stay connected and learn from one another, the PPC industry is still dealing with the absence of events. HeroConf Austin, for example, was canceled due to COVID-19, impacting the learning and development of hundreds of marketing teams.
Crushing his workout in the morning and building scripts in the evening! Get Fred’s COVID-19 scripthere!
“Events such as HeroConf provide genuine insight into what industry leaders are seeing and experiencing every day, and we all can learn from their insights,” Andrew noted. “So maintaining that is absolutely necessary from an education perspective. Virtual events can help, and I really hope they happen.”
Fortunately, the Paid Search Association is hosting their annual conference as a virtual event. You can learn more about PSAC 2020 and register for the conference here (seats are limited).
Conclusion
We love hearing from our attendees about the PPC Town Hall helping them see new ways of thinking, or reassuring them that they’re not the only ones experiencing challenges at this time. It’s why we do what we do!
Following last week’s successful PPC Town Hall, we returned with a 4th edition featuring some of the most knowledgeable minds in the PPC and paid search space.
If you happened to miss this week’s chat or any previous editions, check them all out on our YouTube channel or listen to them as podcasts over here.
This week, we focused on bid management in dynamic environments (such as the one created by COVID-19). Optmyzr CEO, Frederick Vallaeys, moderated a panel that included:
Emi Wayner, Platform Partner Lead, Channel Sales, Google
Peter Oliveira, Partner Development Analyst, Google
Susan Wenograd, Chief Marketing Officer, Aimclear
Martin Röttgerding, Head of SEM, Bloofusion Germany
Let’s take a look at 9 key insights from this week’s conversation that every agency, advertiser, and consultant can act on.
1. Market volatility continues to influence paid search.
We’re still in the middle of the COVID-19 crisis and unfortunately, it doesn’t look like we’ll be achieving any degree of ‘normal’ in the immediate future. With so much volatility across markets, it might be a good time to explore Google’s Performance Planner if you haven’t already.
To quote Google, “Performance Planner is a tool that lets you create plans for your advertising spend, and see how changes to campaigns might affect key metrics and overall performance.”
Google Ads Performance Planner. Image courtesy of Google.com.
Performance Planner works with the latest data at any given time, but the current climate means that said data is rarely predictable and stable from one week to the next.
Peter recommended checking in on Performance Planner every week to explore the impact of shifting CPA, ROAS goals, and manual bids.
“The market is changing so frequently that a target ROAS that gave you a great volume last week might not do the same this week.”
2. Not all businesses have been affected equally.
Just like in every crisis, certain businesses are doing well even as others struggle to stay afloat.
You might have a client whose product or service is experiencing incredibly low demand, or one that’s waiting on overseas shipments and can’t run more ads until they’re able to fulfill additional orders.
Martin has seen that spectrum play out for some of Bloofusion’s client base.
“With our e-commerce clients, we’ve seen a number of differing challenges in the current crisis. Some were overwhelmed by demand. In a few cases, supply is an issue. Others have problems to keep up with packing and shipping. They’ve scaled back or turned off their campaigns to gain a little breathing room.”
3. Products that make isolation less boring are in demand.
With most states in the US (and many geographies around the world) under ‘shelter in place’ orders, it’s no surprise that Google has observed a significant uptick in volume for search terms related to products that make the experience more tolerable.
“We’re seeing that as people are spending more time online, usage is increasing across multiple devices,” Emi said.
“Consumers are searching for many things including technology that helps them work from home (+750%) as well as connected televisions (+37%), streaming devices (+38%), and gaming consoles (+48%).”
4. Consumers want to stay healthy and informed.
But not everything is about work and recreation. Consumers are also looking to maintain their health — and that of their finances.
“In healthcare, consumers are looking to keep themselves physically and mentally healthy while at home. For example, searches related to ‘online workouts’ increased 12x in the past 90 days,” Emi revealed.
Alongside that, people are also preoccupied with what’s happening in their bank accounts. With unemployment hitting record levels and even those in secure jobs suddenly looking cash flow issues in the eye, there’s been a surge in search volume for many related topics.
She added, “Consumers are also looking for financial help, professional advice, and mobile apps to plan for the future with a 9x increase in ‘financial help’ queries e.g. rent/mortgage relief, loan relief, deferred payments.”
5. Hard-hit industries are starting to figure a way out.
It’s worth noting that Tinuiti has an insightful tracker that monitors Facebook spend performance segmented by vertical (signup required).
A quick glance shows that travel is down 79.5% month-on-month but has risen 13.5% week-on-week. Fred speculated that this could be a sign that some of the industries COVID forced to pump the brakes are starting to put new strategies in place.
“People still want to travel; we just can’t,” he said. “These companies could realistically be building desire and demand, identifying an audience searching for these things during this restrictive phase, so they can convert them when travel opens up again.”
Google Trends. Image courtesy of Google.com.
In the case of the automotive industry, which is also showing signs of resurgent spending, Susan speculated that it could be an effort to supplement TV commercials advertising never-before-seen offers like extended windows for no payments and 0% financing.
Either way, it’s evident that businesses that can’t convert at their usual pace are starting to acquire new users to fill the top of their funnel. Which means…
6. It’s a great time to use social media to build TOF.
You don’t have to be as hard-hit as travel or hospitality to consider taking advantage of low-priced social media.
Given that your clients have the budget to do so, now’s as strategic a time as ever to front-load your pipeline with consumers who are high on intent but limited in their capacity to act.
In other words, you can build desire and demand to a fever pitch — and do so with a fraction of the budget you’d normally need.
“We’re seeing some of the cheapest Facebook media with CPMs as low as $2-3. If you have the flexibility and the budget to focus on some top-of-funnel activity, it’s not a bad time to acquire users even if they’re not all going to convert right away,” Susan observed.
7. Smart bidding offers more control than you realize.
While some advertisers and agencies might be hesitant to allow machines more than a modicum of control over their paid search strategies in the current environment, Smart Bidding might actually empower you more than you thought.
By using tens of millions of data signals, Smart Bidding pairs your inputs with similar auctions in the industry, so it works even if you’re short on first-party data.
“Smart bidding has the ability to pick up signals and compare it to other things going on in the market to make those adjustments. While it uses both aggregated and recent trends, it favors what’s been happening recently,” Peter noted.
Google Smart Bidding considers a multitude of signals to set the right bid for every query. Image courtesy of Google.com.
The key is to remember that as human operators, we’re capable of watching the news and observing the world around us, and then using those observations to provide context to your paid search programs.
You really can influence Smart Bidding to work for you as long as you don’t ‘set it and forget it’!
8. Hyper-segmentation might actually be a good idea.
Under normal circumstances, it’s not absurd to look at the US as a single market: largely the same regulations, similar opening hours, and common methods of fulfillment.
Today, that’s simply not the case. States are enforcing their own COVID-19 restrictions, and even individual counties and cities can impose their own limitations.
So while it’s not the best idea to hyper-segment under normal circumstances, it might be useful to at least try it out right now — and Smart Bidding could be of help.
“Smart Bidding lets you bid at the intersection of each bid adjustment you can manually set,” Fred shared. “One example is adjustments for a location like New York which has been hit hard, one for time of day, and then another for the audience. It can look at the actual scenario of that one auction and how that combination actually matters.”
Peter agreed that if you see significant discrepancies in a geography or other parameter, separating campaigns can afford you a greater degree of control by putting individual levers on your campaigns.
9. Experts are making it easy for PPC pros to stay informed.
As the PPC community continues to face a number of hardships with finding reliable data, some of the industry’s leading experts have developed scripts that enable marketers to make quick observations about the shift in behavior.
One example is this COVID-19 visualization script developed by Fred, which overlays government actions related to the pandemic on Google Ads performance metrics.
“The idea is to help you see if certain events, like store closures, the start of shelter in place, the closing of schools, or the introduction of social distancing correlates in any way with drop-offs or spikes in performance.”
Google Ads script by Bloofusion and Martin Röttgerding generates charts showing account performance before and during COVID-19. Image courtesy of Bloofusion.
“Overall trends may be a traffic shift from mobile devices to desktop computers, people searching later at night, and weekdays blurring,” he said.
“However, we’ve found that this is not true for every account. In many cases, these things have remained more or less stable. The script can give you some handy charts about the situation in your own accounts.”
Conclusion
We started the first PPC Town Hall with two objectives in mind: to provide a safe space for paid search pros to vent and share their thoughts on everything that’s been happening, and to steer clear of using it as an opportunity to promote any kind of software or services.
Since then, the PPC community has embraced these weekly conversations, and they’ve evolved into a source of insights on how to approach these new problems that none of us really have all the answers to.
We’re in this together, and we’ll get out of it together.
After a couple of highly popular editions, the Optmyzr PPC Town Hall returned for a third week to give the PPC community a space to hear what their peers are doing, ask questions, and hopefully gain a few additional insights into how to conduct business during the COVID-19 pandemic.
This week’s conversation touched on a number of themes, including how virtually every agency and advertiser is navigating these uncharted waters at the same time.
As always, the goal was to put these learnings and insights out in the open to help the PPC community learn and adapt quickly.
With that in mind, let’s take a look at three takeaways from this week’s PPC Town Hall. You can watch the full session on the Optmyzr YouTube channel.
Keep an eye on the technical stuff.
In “Can we trust automation in a time of crisis” for Search Engine Land, Aaron Levy writes that marketers should avoid returning to “the stone age of SEM”. He goes on to outline eight elements of automation that call for a “watch and adjust” approach.
“Each situation is different, so you must evaluate your own business under your own lens,” he advises.
Optmyzr CEO Frederick Vallaeys also recommends merging manual control with automation-driven strategies.
“It feels like deferred conversions are happening, so you might be in a branding stage rather than getting sales over the line. If you’ve been running last-click attribution, you might not be valuing those early-stage interactions. Automated bid management systems don’t know what to do to get you more top-of-funnel activity if you’re not using the right attribution model.”
Another great piece of advice from this week’s panelists is to check your automations, bid management, and extensions on a more regular basis. If ever there was a time to avoid a “set it and forget it” mentality, it’s now.
Kirk Williams shared the results of his tests comparing performance on some accounts from March 12 to April 5 against previous weeks. During his analysis, he found that automated bidding by Google seemed to do relatively well. Conversions were worse in the most recent weeks (as one would expect), but ROAS had actually improved.
Williams surmised that CPCs have become so low, they drove more traffic. Even with lower conversion, overall ROAS was better across some important accounts.
Look for fresh opportunities.
As with every major market shift, the COVID-19 crisis presents opportunities for businesses to explore new opportunities in meaningful ways — if you know where to look.
“Here’s a major company that runs a large part of the planet’s ecommerce saying it can no longer deliver what it’s conditioned us to expect, and not everyone realizes how disruptive this is,” said Elizabeth Marsten on Amazon’s decision to reprioritize certain FBA products.
“For paid search advertisers who have the ability to self-fulfill or sell via another platform, this is a huge opportunity as FBA shipping times become longer.”
Kirk Williams also believes that there are opportunities for the more nimble organizations out there, though not without their own challenges.
“At some point, you can’t make marketing do what it can’t do,” he warns. “While it’s worth exploring a change in position or new audiences, this is a very difficult time for B2B. But these are interesting times that will segment out not only who has the cash to survive a lean period, but who has a loyal customer base and who can pivot in a business and strategic way.”
Performance marketing agency Tinuiti has also developed a COVID-19 hub, where you’ll find a number of valuable resources to inform your decision-making and strategic planning.
Know the new consumer.
Earlier this week, we wrote about Google’s tips for running ads during COVID-19 in our blog post “PPC During COVID-19: 5 Ways to Optimize Your Search Ads”. Many of these revolved around consumer sentiment and came up again during this week’s discussion.
While it was unanimous that ad copy and extensions need to be reviewed for sensitivity and to avoid sounding tone-deaf, Julie Friedman Bacchini also did a deep dive into what it means to rethink your audience at this time.
“What worked a month ago may not be the right message for today,” she observed. “Audiences are important as well. In travel, for example, you may want to avoid targeting people who work in industries that have been hit especially hard by COVID-19 when advertising for certain segments or verticals.”
The fact is COVID-19 has completely undone everything we consider “normal”. People who worked and lived in different locations are now largely in one location, so Google’s data is not the most informed right now when it comes to audience profiling.
Observations & Conclusion
In addition to these lessons, the Town Hall panel shared several anecdotes and observations that offer refreshing insights into the mechanics and logistics that power ecommerce. Some of these include:
• Amazon is buying fewer Google shopping and search ads in recent weeks, impacting the overall market in terms of competition, CPC, visibility, and availability.
• CPG as a segment is so varied and diverse; some product categories are under stress, while others are booming. As a result, performance data that isn’t granular may not accurately reflect overall sentiment.
• Ad spend for travel is down month-on-month yet up week-on-week. One potential explanation is hopeful purchasing for late 2020/early 2021 travel plans.
• Timelines for recovery are difficult to estimate at best and gloomy at worst. Lufthansa CEO Carsten Spohr has said it will be years before they return to pre-COVID levels of demand.
• For sellers with inventory at their warehouses, Amazon is working to waive or defer storage costs. However, retailers could potentially have pallets of their goods stuck in a warehouse where they can’t be fulfilled on priority or even at all.
It’s certainly a confusing time; what would have been considered absurd a few months ago is par for the course today. Brands are trying to figure out the right moves and messages, and it will take our entire community of nimble, creative marketers to help them overcome these challenges.
We plan to continue hosting weekly Town Halls to give our customers and the wider PPC community a place to learn, share, or simply vent.
