Bid Management in Turbulent Times

Episode Description

The global situation is changing daily as a result of the pandemic and with no precedent to guide us there is a lot of uncertainty. That is why we are hosting a town hall style forum where you will hear from our panelists what they are seeing in PPC, and what they are doing to mitigate the impact.

The panel discusses:

• Impact of COVID-19 on PPC and Bid Management
• Utilization of Smart Bidding During COVID-19
• Strategies for Different Industries
• Future of PPC Post-COVID

Episode Takeaways

Impact of COVID-19 on PPC and Bid Management:

• Discussing how the pandemic has altered PPC strategies, with particular focus on bid management in an unstable market.
• Key takeaway: The pandemic has necessitated a more dynamic approach to bid management, recognizing shifts in conversion rates and search behaviors.

Utilization of Smart Bidding During COVID-19:

• Panelists discussed the effectiveness of Google’s smart bidding in adapting to rapid changes in consumer behavior and market conditions.
• Key takeaway: Smart bidding can adjust quickly to changes, but may still require manual adjustments or oversight to optimize for specific outcomes.

Strategies for Different Industries:

• Insights on how various sectors like automotive and travel are adjusting their PPC strategies in response to the pandemic.
• Key takeaway: Industries are adapting their advertising strategies to current consumer behavior, such as increased incentives in automotive and dream-building in travel.

Future of PPC Post-COVID:

• Discussion on potential long-term changes in PPC strategies post-pandemic, including the need for flexibility and increased use of digital tools.
• Key takeaway: Businesses should continue to adapt and prepare for ongoing changes in consumer behavior and digital engagement post-COVID.4

Episode Transcript

Frederick Vallaeys: Hello and welcome to another version of PPC Town Hall. So today, Wednesday, April 15th, we’re unfortunately still in the middle of the COVID crisis. So that will be one of the things we’re going to extensively talk about. So today we’re very fortunate to be joined by a new set of panelists. We actually have one returning person who was on the very first one we did, Susan.

So Susan, thank you for joining us again, but we also have three new people, and I’ll let all of them introduce themselves in just a minute here, but the core topic that we have in mind for today is bid management. So, because we have Googlers on the call today, We wanted to go a little bit deeper on the ad auction and start to understand a bit more about how bid management might work in a time like now, when everything is a bit wonky, things are not normal conversion rates might be different, surge volume is different, search behavior is different, and kind of understanding what does that mean when we have to do bid management and make sure we’re still hitting our conversion goals, cost per acquisition goals, and all of those things that we as PPC people have Care so deeply about.

So, as a quick reminder, PPC townhouse is not a 4th one that we’re doing. We started it specifically because of the crisis and because we figured that being in unprecedented times, everybody was looking for answers. But nobody has the answers and for my days at Google, I remember that one of the best things you can do in that situation is at least share as much information as possible.

So, by everyone sharing what they know, what they’re seeing, we’re able to at least come to a common understanding of what the situation may be. And given that we’re all smart people, we can make smart decisions with all that extra information that we have. So that’s really the point of this today is to share what we see.

Share what we think, and it’s not to pitch anything. So we’re not going to be pitching any software. We’re going to be pitching our companies. We just want to get out there and make sure that we all get through this crisis together. And we help the industry. So, again, thank you to the panelists for coming on.

So I’m gonna let them introduce themselves one at a time, and I’m actually going to turn off the screen share in just a minute because we have most people on video today. Emi’s video, unfortunately, wasn’t working, so I’m going to let Emi introduce herself first. So Emi and I have been working together for a couple of months.

She helps me with all sorts of Google related things over at Optmyzr. So it’s great to have her on the call today. Welcome, Emi.

Susan Wenograd: Hi, everyone. Can you hear me, Fred?

Frederick Vallaeys: Yeah, we can hear you perfectly. Tell us a little bit about yourself.

Emi Wayner: Sorry, my camera is not working today. I’m fixing as we go.

But hi, my name is Emi Wayner, platform partner lead from Google channel sales. We’ve helped grow advertisers through strategic partnership with marketing technology companies like Optmyzr. And Fred is a key partner for us. We build Any tools that helps marketers and agencies We also make the google product easily accessible for you guys So today i’m really just here to help you and share the industry insights.

We have so many information to share and then After that, we’re going to go through smart bidding, by peter And work together through this unprecedented time. So looking forward to the conversation And the panelist conversation today. Thank you

Frederick Vallaeys: Thanks for being here. And then Susan is here again.

So she was on that first call. Full disclosure, I actually work with Susan’s company. They helped me with press releases and a lot communications. But I, I actually work with her team and not directly with Susan Susan’s, the CMO. Also, I think she’ll bring a really unique perspective again to the call today.

So Susan, tell us a bit about yourself. Hey, everybody. I’m Susan. I am Chief Marketing Officer At. I help with overall paid media strategy for many different types of clients. So B2B, B2C pretty much any paid platform that you can think of is probably something that I’m managing or helping the team manage or exploring and figuring out testing with.

Susan Wenograd: So that’s pretty much what I spend my day doing is paid media. Awesome. And we also have Peter from Google Peter’s pretty in the weeds. He’s a more on the geeky, nerdy side, like myself. So Peter, tell us a bit about what we’re working on.

Peter Oliveira: Yeah, for sure. So along with that, I also work on some strategic partnerships here at Google specifically focusing on third party platform, marketing technology, platform, ad tech platforms.

And Fred is also one of my close points of contacts as well at Optmyzr. Basically my, my main focus is, is helping these third party platforms ideate and prioritize different, different products that, that use our Google solutions. So they’re as scalable and powerful as possible for both our agencies and marketers.

Frederick Vallaeys: Yeah. Good to have you on that. Sorry for calling you nerdy and geeky. But I love it. Exactly. And I see Martin sort of making an eye movement there. So Martin, I figure you belong to that club as well. So Martin and I, we go way back from SMX. So he just told me he’s bad at introducing himself. So I’ll give him a little kudos for something that many of us probably know about.

So anyone on the call who’s doing shopping campaigns, you’ve probably heard about the three campaigns structure, high, medium, low priority with differing bids to kind of funnel traffic to the right place. So Martin By any way that I can look at it, invented that methodology. And I know a lot of people on the call today are using that.

So Mark, good to have you tell us a little bit more about yourself.

Martin Röttgerding: Well, thank you. Shouldn’t say anyone was already perfect. Yeah. So I’m Martin. I’ve been doing this for about 15 years now. I’m head of search engine advertising at blue fusion Germany. So it’s actually the evening here. As an agency, we are kind of, we’ve kind of been lucky in this crisis.

Well, not lucky, but in comparison to others, I guess because we’ve been doing a lot of e commerce, most of our client base is e commerce. So I think we are relatively fortunate. How we get through this crisis.

Frederick Vallaeys: Yeah. And a lot of e commerce there, you said. So let’s go into a little bit of what we’re seeing in the industry right now. So I want to show the tenuity dashboard that we had last week. So this is the newest version of it, right? And anyone who wants to get this data themselves, you can go to tenuity. com and sign up and get this data. But what they’ve done is they’ve put. Facebook stats by vertical to show movements week over week and month over month in terms of spending changes.

And so panelists, I’ll take a look at this, but what stands out to me is that industries like automotive up 44 percent week over week, CPG up 50%, travel up 13% but travel is up 13%. But month over month, they’re actually down 80%. Right. So we all know travel was really hard hit, but it seems like they’re figuring out something as far as how to start to come back.

Anyone have any ideas about what they’re seeing here? About any of these industries

Susan Wenograd: for auto? I actually have a background working with GM. My guess is probably what’s happening as I’ve, I’ve seen the TV commercials for the the new incentives they’ve released, which is basically like. Okay.

No payments for six months Way extended zero percent financing. So my guess is they’re probably spending more to Back up the advertising for those incentives. That’s my best guess when it comes to the auto side It’s not necessarily that people are buying more autos yet But they’re they’ve they’re definitely concentrating their spend behind a certain message.

They want to mobilize and so my guess is It’s probably all the deals that we’re seeing roll out, which are deals they’ve really never done before,

Frederick Vallaeys: right? And you also figure there’s a shift to force shift to online. So people might not be going to the dealerships at the same rate as they used. I think some dealerships actually are operating, but if the only way you like for

Susan Wenograd: test drives and stuff like that, also, that’s the other messaging is they’ll drive the car to your house and you can test drive it from your driveway.

Okay.

Frederick Vallaeys: Exactly. So, as they get used to that new way of doing business, they’re actually turning those ads back on. It seems in travel, we talked a bit about this last week, and I don’t know if anyone has opinions on this, but people certainly still want to travel. They can’t. We also don’t know when we can travel again.

But so companies are still putting that message out there, right? Like making you dream about destinations, making you want to go out. So that the moment that you can, they they hopefully have identified an audience that’s been searching for these things and they can quickly get that business back.

Susan Wenograd: There may also be a component to that, that kind of brand brand defense and PR related for places like Delta that, you know, they’ve, they’ve proactively rolled over everyone’s medallion status until next year. I’m suspecting there’s probably increased brand search that could be driving that as well, just because people are looking specifically for like, what are they doing about travel?

So some of it could also not necessarily be commerce driven, but it could also just be you know, intent driven as well.

Frederick Vallaeys: Right. And Susan, I know that you wrote a post on Search Engine Journal. So I just wanted to show that to everyone here. So we’ll put that link, but go to Search Engine Journal, look for Susan Winograd.

It’s the second last article that you read, wrote, sorry. What happened in media performance during COVID 19. So tell us a bit more about what data you were looking at.

Susan Wenograd: Yeah, so there was a projection that eMarketer had made about where they thought things were going to get hit the hardest So it’s been interesting because they they made these assumptions in march so it’s been interesting to see how it has or hasn’t played out.

So this is the original one that they had talked about some of this has come true and that you know, we we have seen cuts in display But like this morning I was reading that programmatic is actually faring Well right now it’s just the publishers themselves are struggling a little bit You But they, they pretty much predicted that kind of display in social media paid social, we’re going to be the two things that were hit the hardest with Kind of the least decrease happening for paid search with the most retained from it.

So then I kind of compared that to what we’re seeing now that we have agencies that are creating these dashboards. So there’s an agency out of Boston called Gupta Media that I, I have a link to it in there and I took some screenshots, but you can actually look at kind of what they’re seeing overall, this aggregated data based on Facebook versus Instagram what the costs are looking like, all that kind of stuff.

And so it’s been interesting because you definitely see that there was a big hit, but when you break out Facebook and Instagram, Facebook starts to kind of be on the uptick again, but Instagram actually shows a pretty. Noted spike compared of the two. So Instagram kind of seems to be pulling Facebook back out of it.

Anecdotally, I also included some some things that some, you know, practitioners are seeing when it comes to paid social. One of the things that they noted is that something to keep in mind about, especially e comm, is that. Not, you know, the decreases in spend aren’t necessarily because things aren’t going well.

Some of them are actually experiencing that things went too well. So it’s like they sold out of stuff and they’re actually waiting on more shipments from overseas. So they literally can’t run ads because they can’t sell. So they’re saying there’s the data couldn’t paint a kind of a scarier picture than there might be only because In a lot of instances, they’re like, if we had more, we would be spending more.

We just can’t because we don’t have the inventory to fulfill it. So that’s another piece of the puzzle that I feel like isn’t necessarily told in these graphs, that’s important to remember on the e commerce side.

Frederick Vallaeys: Yeah. And that reminds me of some work that Martin has done connecting business data and inventory data to ads.

And so I guess Susan, what you’re talking about here is that the supply chain is slightly broken in some cases. And so now they’re pulling back. So do you think there’s a lot of that automated? Or what do you guys use at aimClear? Or Martin, what do you think about techniques people could use to stay on top of this very dynamic market from day to day?

One supply chain breaks, the other comes back online, one store opens, the other closes. How do we stay on top of all of that?

And Martin, I think you’re muted.

You’re muted, Martin.

Martin Röttgerding: I’m sorry. So I don’t have the same perspective as Susan, for example as our clients are rather, I don’t know. Let’s say the middle class. So for our clients, not everything is already so, so advanced that everything’s automated to, to that extent, I can say we have a lot of clients where inventory is is an issue or where the ability to, to pack and ship stuff is an issue because demand has increased a lot.

They can still fulfill the orders, but they have the inventory, but they don’t have enough people to ship it. So that has become a problem. It’s not really something that we can, can combat automatically, except that we have to, to scale back our campaigns. Because people will buy enough. Anyway, we have some clients where we’ve shut off the the campaigns actually not because the clients weren’t in trouble, but because they were doing so good that they didn’t need the campaigns anymore and we’re going to talk about bidding, so.

Bidding was an issue for us as well because well, we’ve tried to, to just scale back the campaigns and in many cases we had no luck. So, for example, we were, we were using target rowers on many campaigns and we would, just, you know, increase the target. So we want a better rowers. And the idea was that volume would go back, but volume didn’t go back.

Costs went down. Okay. That was nice. But actually the volume stayed the same. So it was kind of, kind of strange.

Frederick Vallaeys: And maybe that is a good point for Peter to jump in, but. Given that the CPCs in some cases have decreased and so what you’re still seeing on the screen here are the CPMs on Facebook decreasing.

I think you see some of the same on Google. But, yeah, I mean, Peter, what happens when you start bidding less in this market? Do you, do you expect that you’d get more volume or are you basically buying the junk traffic that others have identified as not that good?

Peter Oliveira: Yeah, I think it’s always important to take into account what we’re bidding on and what the return has been on both the conversions that we’re getting and on the robots.

If in a case like this you know, you were able to increase your row us and not see a hidden volume. I think that’s a really good situation right there. The mark is just changing. So so frequently. That you know, what a good row S was, what a certain row S that would give you a volume last week, maybe very different from the row S that would give you a volume this week.

So I think it’s just important to stay up to date with those forecasts and, you know, measure out what the impact would be. I think we have a pretty interesting tool within the Google ads UI, and I’m sure there there’s some other tools outside there too, called the performance planner, where you can actually like validate, okay, if I go to increase my, my row S by X much.

Like how, how many conversions will I be missing out of, or if I decrease my CPA, what’s the impact of that going to be? So I think it’s just important to stay up to date with, with those forecasts and seeing what the impact that that can have on volume, since it really is changing very frequently now,

Frederick Vallaeys: I mean, maybe you can chime in here, but like Susan’s chart showed a little bit of change in ad spend between different device types.

Is, is Google seeing any sort of big shift here

Susan Wenograd: in terms of e commerce?

Frederick Vallaeys: No, just in general, like I guess. People not working from home, they may not be on their desktop quite as much. Started shifting more to mobile devices. And as these shifts are happening, like has how that relates to bidding, right?

So does Google actually see shifts happening? And are they on top of how, what that means for the auction and conversion rates?

Emi Wayner: So in terms of spend I think it’s more query queries level that we see is a consumer definitely looking for hardware or computers and any technology related products. So queries actually increase 650 percent.

And then looking for best internet plan also 200. So what we see is People are looking for ways to work from home and looking for technologies and things that they need working from home So that’s directly I think impacted to e commerce side, too Right. So what you’re saying is if you sell the stuff that enables you to work from home, those queries are up 650%.

Frederick Vallaeys: But I think that’s also where you run into the issue that Susan and Martin were describing, which is you can not buy a webcam in the United States right now, right? They’re all sold. They’re all spoken for. So the demand is there, but the supply is not there. Right. So then you still have to figure out when do we get that back?

How do we notify people? Is it actually worth getting them on a mailing list? I just not going to lead to the ROAS that we need. I think Google also had some data about, like, people shifting to maybe spending more time on game consoles and TVs and, and that might open up some new ad opportunities.

Emi Wayner: Yeah, so we see that people spending more time mobile and a 50% increase in March. And gaming console is about 48%. Smart speakers, 44% up streaming, 38% up TV is 37% up, I think as a consumer. We think about ourselves just like today, I think it resonates to everyone that we spend more time on TV.

I do. And we do streaming and gaming. I think that really resonates. So this is also the opportunity, opportunity for advertisers. If they’re looking at TV or any other streaming advertising, then I do see lots of YouTube advertising coming in too. Thank you.

Frederick Vallaeys: And as we see these shifts Martin, tell us a little bit about the script.

I think you just published it on search engine land. It kind of helps us get on top of what these shifts are looking like, right?

Martin Röttgerding: Yeah. Well, the script is about analyzing exactly those things, but from your own accounts. So the script Is about comparing two periods of time before the Corona crisis, like February and what’s happening now, like for the past four weeks. And it gives you, the script just makes you a few charts it tells you what happened to your, To your clicks, for example how do they, how are they distributed across devices?

And Fred is showing the first example with, which is a chart comparing the traffic for computers, mobile devices, and tablets before and after. And in this example, we can see that yes computer traffic has increased. Mobile traffic has decreased a bit and tablet traffic in this instance, I think has decreased slightly.

The script isn’t about volume. It’s about percentage. So this, the, the share of traffic that goes to computers or mobile devices or tablets. And Well the script also looks at weekdays and hours of day, so it can tell you are people looking later at night? Are they staying up longer? Are they searching later at night?

Or are they searching or converting on different days of the week compared to before? Because I think it all makes sense that people staying at home patterns change. But actually what we found is that in for most of our clients, these patterns didn’t actually change that much. So I think we had 2 examples.

Maybe we could go back to the 2nd slide which showed that things remained fairly stable. So. Mobile didn’t really go down that much, if any. If if at all computers and tablets stayed stable, the clicks over the weekdays, okay, they changed a bit. But if you looked at the curve clicks by hour off day, it, they, well, they are almost on top of, of each other.

So all the things that may be different in the industry overall, they don’t actually have to happen in your accounts and you can just use this script to. To let it run and analyze your accounts, get a few charts. And that’s all it does. It works in single accounts and in in MCC accounts as well.

So yeah, just try it out. It’s on search engine land. I’ll post the link in a minute.

Frederick Vallaeys: Here is on in the chat, so everyone can grab that. And remember, like, what Martin is basically the averages that we keep talking about in the industry, like, an average combines everyone. Right? So this is a great way to see what’s actually happening for the accounts that you’re managing.

So, based on the fact that in some accounts, there is variance in other accounts, there’s not so much variance. Peter, one of the questions that came up from the audience just now is, the performance planner, does that work during turbulent times like now, or should we just take it with a grain of salt?

Because it’s, it’s expecting more of a consistent pattern than what we see today.

Peter Oliveira: Yeah, so we’re actually recommending that people stay more in tune with the performance planner. Now, I think you probably can’t look as far ahead as you would have before. Maybe do like monthly plans. I feel like that won’t be as accurate anymore.

But if you do want to invest your time in 1 thing, we certainly recommend you know, keeping up to date with these forecasts at any given time. The performance planner will be acting with the most up to date data. But that could change a week from now. Right. So as much as, as much as you can, maybe on a weekly basis, checking in on the performance planner, seeing what the impact of shifting different CPA ROAS goals or, or manual bids in any case that can be, that can be very insightful for, you know, what the impact on your business would be.

Frederick Vallaeys: Yeah, and so that’s the plan, right? And so what about those folks who are already running their ads and maybe using automated bidding? Is that safe to use today or do we need to be worried?

Peter Oliveira: Automated bidding as a whole? Yeah, so I think it’s a, it’s a very interesting topic, right? And I think when we’re talking about what the best bid strategy to use right now and automated bidding versus manual bidding.

I’ll promise I’ll try not to make this sound too salesy, but I think it’s helpful to go into a few of the core value propositions of Smart Bidding. At its core, it’s proactive auction time bidding that’s setting a unique bid for every single auction that comes its way. It’s also taking into account any changes that you make with Smart Bidding on the goal, on the targeting.

It’s taking that immediately into account and how it’s bidding on any auction coming through. It also gives you the capability of fully filtering out low or no conversion auctions, which can be very, very important at a time like this, right, where some businesses may be challenged and may have to filter out certain portions of their traffic.

How does it do that exactly? It uses a whole bunch of signals, I think something like over 70 million, but it’s not just the volume of signals, but how it uses those signals, right? Smart bidding has the capability to combine these signals and pair them up with other similar auctions in the industry.

So even if you don’t have that volume coming through and on your account, It’s taking the signals that it does have access to and comparing it to other things going on in the market in order to make those adjustments. And one thing that’s very, very important to note as well is that while it does leverage a lot of aggregated data, Smart Bidding actually favors what’s been happening recently, right?

So we found that Smart Bidding actually can adjust to certain transitions like this decently quickly, at least in comparison to what we can do through other strategies as well. Manual bidding, on the other hand, I think you’re missing out on a few of these proactive auction time bidding capabilities, right at its best, like you can, like, analyze the reactive set of data and adjust bids a couple times a week, maybe once a day, maybe a couple times a day, if you’re really, really committed to it, but you won’t be necessarily adjusting the bids on every single auction based on the unique context of that auction.

One of the benefits, on the other hand, that a lot of people would like is having that control, right? At the end of the day, a lot of us are thought leaders, we’re industry experts, we know a lot about our businesses, and we’re watching the news a lot. So we may know that something’s going on next week and we’re like, oh crap, does marketing not know what’s going to happen next week?

How can I make sure that I’m informing it of what’s going on right here? I think that the degree of control that you have is, Definitely higher on manual bidding, but there’s a lot of control that you can have that I think a lot of people miss out on with smart bidding. It comes down to transitioning the mentality of adjusting manual CPCs into a smart bidding world.

So at its core, it can start with, Hey, I’m just going to adjust my CPA instead of adjusting my CPC bids. If I’m expecting higher conversion rates coming in, then smart bidding is probably expecting. Maybe I’ll go ahead and adjust increase my CPA for that period of time. Step one is, you know, focusing on those bids.

And then step two is translating everything else targeting campaign structure making sure you’re keeping up to date with these forecasts so that you’re keeping up with having this control in a smart bidding world.

Frederick Vallaeys: Yeah. A lot of good points there, right, Peter. So. And this is not a pitch for smart bidding, but like Peter saying, the one capability does have is it bids the intersection of each of the adjustments that we could manually set.

Right? So we could set a geobit adjustment for New York and one for time of day and one for an audience, but then that’s still a fairly large group of query that goes into that combination. What a smart bidding can do is it can look at the actual scenario of that one auction and how that combination of things actually matters.

So I’m generally a fan of trying at the very least trying out automated bidding. I think what we’re seeing here is you know, when we advertise in the United States, just to take one example, right, but we’ve sort of been used to the fact that the United States as a whole, the same regulations, the same sort of store opening hours but that’s no longer the case, every location Has it’s something going on right now.

So for that reason, I think it’s really smart to at least monitor smart bidding and maybe see if there’s an anomaly like New York really hit, maybe something different is happening there. Right? So maybe smart doesn’t work so well there. Maybe you want to split that out. Right. And so Peter, what do you think about taking existing campaigns?

You may have had split them out for a while while this crisis is going on and then eventually bringing them back together. Is that okay to do?

Peter Oliveira: Yes, certainly. You know, I never in regular times, I wouldn’t necessarily encourage hyper segmentations if you don’t have different goals because smart bidding can actually pick up on on some of those changes in location data.

Since it has that focus on on the recent part of the performance, and it’s consistently comparing those, it can adjust that relatively quickly. But if there are cases where you see a discrepancy and you don’t want to compromise on that small adjustment time that may have. Separating different campaigns can definitely help a lot that allows us to have the control where, you know, as you would do some certain geographic bit adjustments on manual bidding, if there are like significant discrepancies between a certain location versus another or certain location group versus another location group, it can certainly help to have a separate levers on that

Frederick Vallaeys: and Martin.

I mean, maybe you are the king here of segmentation. To some degree. Right. So how do you, how do you feel about segmenting things and what have you tried or seen with bid management or, or just generally restructuring campaigns to deal with some of the, the differences we’re seeing, and by the way, I’d love a European perspective too, because I think most of what the other panelists are talking about is what’s happening in America, but like, what are you seeing in Germany?

Martin Röttgerding: Well, first of all, I’d say that there were a lot of like tips, what he could do better to manage the transition. So people are staying at home, stay at home. All of our issues everything changes. And I think most of these tips and tricks were valid, were nice, but now we are at a point where the transition is done and.

Even if we don’t trust smart bidding enough to really pick up on the changes so quickly, I think by now. We can safely say we are in this world now and we don’t have to manage a transition anymore. I think one thing I would I would be careful with, with smart bidding, picking up on things is When it’s low volume, I think smart bidding is great when you have a lot of data.

If you have the kind of account that I don’t know, you have one conversion per day, or I don’t know, you sell, you know, houses or I don’t know. Then certainly go back to manual bidding for a moment because at that kind of volume, you have no chance for smart bidding to pick up anything. And the other thing is if you have.

If you know more than smart bidding, if you have data or knowledge that you don’t translate into signals for Google I don’t know, you know, what’s coming or I don’t know. You know about your inventory that it’s going down. Smart bidding doesn’t know that for example, you might know that your inventory is very limited now and you don’t have to I don’t know, go after every conversion.

You can’t tell smart bidding to, to slow down in certain areas because you just have settings at your campaign level and that’s, it’s hard to do. And

Frederick Vallaeys: let me, but in there, Martin, but is that then a question of like, you’ve got to manipulate your budgets or you manipulate your targets or you segment it out, how do you deal with that specific scenario of like your inventory is slowly dwindling and you don’t need to spend quite as much to sell it.

Martin Röttgerding: I wouldn’t segment it out unless I had an easy way to do this. So for for Google shopping, I could just have like, like a custom attribute custom label, something in there that tells the campaign, okay, exclude this and let me. Do something manually. Otherwise I wouldn’t go ahead and segment a search campaign because something is going out of stock because changes too quickly.

Frederick Vallaeys: Right. And if you can’t segment it by campaign, then that means that you have to reduce your bid for that sub segment because it’s really the only control you have. So ideally, I think it sounds like you’d like to reduce your budget, but it’s too complicated. So we’re using the bid lever to achieve kind of the same thing.

Martin Röttgerding: Yeah, I think I’m, I’m a fan of, of smart bidding. But I think in some cases actually a bit very limited because you can’t tell it what to do. You can set a goal and then it will try to achieve that goal. You can’t say I don’t know in that area. Do this, in that area. Do that please. Here are some more signals for you to look at, please.

I don’t know. Something is coming up. You know, there’s a tool to, to handle short term changes. I forgot the name. Susan. Good adjustment. Sorry,

Frederick Vallaeys: seasonality bit adjustments.

Martin Röttgerding: Yeah, right. Which is just short term. You can’t tell the tool. Well, if there’s something happening to disregard something, or it’s very, very limited what you can do with this.

So, kind of the big lever that you have is setting goals. And so, if you want to reduce volume, you can set a higher goal. I don’t know, it’s, I think it’s still the best thing that we can do, but it’s not really perfect.

Frederick Vallaeys: Yeah, so here’s an article that Ginny Marvin wrote, I think, with a lot of input from Google, on the fact that seasoned multi bit adjustment is the wrong thing to use for COVID 19 fluctuations. Emi or Peter, you guys have a thought on this?

Peter Oliveira: Yeah, so I think the whole purpose of seasonality bid adjustments and why it exists as a product is to capture short term spikes, right? Something like a Black Friday sale or a Cyber Monday when we’re expecting there to be a spike that shoots up and then goes back down and then it normalizes. Smart bidding actually picks up pretty well in gradual changes in conversion rate or in actually massive changes in volume. What it doesn’t do as well on is pick up on massive changes in conversion rate. If those massive changes in conversion rate happen for a short period of time, seasonality, bid adjustments are great.

But if not, I would probably control that through the actual target CPA or target ROAS bid.

Frederick Vallaeys: Right. And I guess what we’re all coming back to here is that a lot of people refer to it as automated bidding. When in fact, it’s just automating a portion of what we used to do, but it’s not a set it and forget it type of thing.

So you still have to change those target CPAs, target ROASs you know, help the campaign do better by maybe putting in negative keywords based on search terms that you see that might not be so relevant. So there’s still a lot of stuff people can do, but Peter, the other question I have, and I guess kind of going to what Martin was talking about, right?

But you have a big catalog of products. Some of those products might be getting low on inventory, but you can’t really split them out. Right? So, but does portfolio bid management actually help with that or hurt with that? Is that and what is portfolio bid management? Because I know that some of what Google is doing.

Peter Oliveira: Yeah, I think portfolio bid management comes a lot in handy when you want to treat things when you got one had the most efficiency across a wide variety of segments and a wide variety of products. I think for advertisers that want to sort of set it and like, let the algorithm get as much as possible, then I think it’s a great solution.

I think if you want to optimize the efficiency, maybe of certain products that are running out of stock. You may actually be able to benefit from from the campaign segmentation. Obviously, it’s easier said than done, like Martin mentioned, right? Switching things over to campaigns based on their availability can be something that’s quite dynamic.

But I’d say segmentation is probably the way to go when we want to treat things differently. Portfolio bid management is the case where I’m imagining for most small businesses at least in the service industry, less so in the e com you know, we want to just get the most efficiency out of everything that we have access to.

Let’s use portfolio bid management. It has been something that we’ve been recommending quite a bit during a time like this.

Frederick Vallaeys: And then some audience questions. What bit strategy is best? I think that might be a tough one to answer. Right. But, but, so I know, let me chime in here. So last week we had Kirk Williams who said that very surprisingly, but maximize clicks with a very constrained budget was actually working quite well.

Under the notion that some advertisers have dropped out of the auction. So the CPCs have gone down so you can actually drive more volume. Do it seem like it might be more of a branding play, right? Cause I think. The counter argument is that clicks are cheap because, you know, there might be some problem in that vertical that with that product, right?

So you might not actually be getting a lot of sales. Peter, I know you had some thoughts on that too, right?

Peter Oliveira: Yeah, I think when it comes to the best bid strategy, I think if you’re, if you’re a constrained business, you should probably be sticking as much as possible to. Efficiency based strategies versus volume based strategies.

So I’d say as much as possible using something like Target CPA, Target ROAS. So, you know, you stay within your goals and you be, you can be very mindful within operating, you know, within the constraints that you’re given. If you’re, for some reason, expanding into different industries and you want to capture as much volume as possible, I would say a strategy like maximized conversions could be a pretty good or maximized conversion value.

Could be a pretty good fit for that as well. In terms of maximized clicks I think for branded terms, it can help out really well. In, in regular times, I would say that it can end up over indexing a bit on lower conversion likelihood queries depending on the market, right? If you assume that a lot of people in that area, in that market are using smart bidding and that smart bidding can accurately assess.

Or at least get close to assessing the conversion likelihood of queries. What can happen in that market is higher conversion likelihood queries can go up in price and lower conversion likelihood queries go down in price. Maximized clicks could, could end up sticking to that, to that bottom tier. I think depending on the unpredictability of the market at this term, you could actually end up getting a bit of a mix with, with maximized clicks.

But I, I would be a bit cautious, cautious with it. If you know, your, your goal has been to. Your goal is to get, get more conversions.

Frederick Vallaeys: There’s another audience question. This might be a good one for Susan, but people are asking about remarketing as part of the strategy. And I guess remarketing could be just in Google, but it could also go across to different channels, right?

And isn’t it a good time to use social media, to build your audiences so you can hit her on bringing that list to Google, any thoughts on that?

And Susan, I think you might be muted. I know we all have screaming kids in the conference, so we keep muting. It’s

Susan Wenograd: also like it’s muted. I muted on the screen, but my phone says I’m not muted, so try to coordinate technology. Yeah, I think, you know, one of the things that we’re seeing right now and this was kind of in the, the articles you were touching on earlier is that we’re seeing some of the cheapest media we’ve seen in Facebook in years where I mean, two, 3 CPMs on stuff, super cheap.

So you know, if you have the. In your budget to be focusing on some initial top of funnel stuff, it’s probably not a bad time to do that. Just because you’re going to be requiring new people for much less than you normally would. And we are actually seeing remarketing pick up a little bit as well, just because, again, in some verticals people are home, some people are shopping more, there’s certain things that are selling better, like home gym equipment, certain apparel segments and stuff like that are doing well.

So there are some where we’re actually seeing increased results for remarketing again, which is kind of what you would think would be the opposite. But top of funnel engagement video views, that kind of stuff is definitely a lot cheaper than what we have been seeing. So if you have, again, you know, the, the elasticity in your budget to, you know, be doing that and kind of tag them on their way in so you can reuse them and search, it’s a great time to be doing that.

Frederick Vallaeys: Okay. And I’m on the side of the screen here. So questions so Gary is and Gary, by the way, is going to be a panelist next week. So he’s in European fashion retail. So he’ll have some interesting things, but he was asking the panel. If anyone else has seen good results with smart things.

So we’ve had a couple of people weigh in on that. So here’s what we’re saying. We have seen control on spend and return, but healthcare e commerce with both TROAS and also brand new smart shopping campaign that we launched literally as this craziness was starting. We’ve all types of bidding strategies in our accounts and for whatever we have shifted over to smart bidding has in the most part done well.

In the past month. I believe that’s from Gazala. We have a Kelly saying that we’ve seen an increase in conversions over the last four weeks with increases in row as they’re in home goods and having Amazon out of the picture for a lot of these categories seems to have helped by increasing the click through rate.

So more impressions for them and better click through, click throughs. We have saying smart bidding is performing well as it has before. Right. So it’s good to hear what Peter’s from the Google perspective. People using and their accounts seem to be seeing that actually working. Martin, there’s a question from Claudia.

Do you combine your three stage strategy along with smart bidding?

And now you’re on the so far. Yes, I’m actually, I’m sure. We can hear you. Sorry. Go ahead. Sorry.

Martin Röttgerding: Yeah. No, okay we are combining this with smart bidding. I’m actually unsure whether I mean, in theory, smart bidding should already do this. I mean, with this with the segmentation, we are kind of giving smart baiting an additional signal, like here is a difference.

Especially if we use different strategies, then each of those can segment on where I can focus on, on a different segment and learn about. The difference is there. So we, we are doing this in theory. Google could already do the same thing with Just smart bidding. And if, if there’s like a signal, like, is, is there a brand name in there, which is kind of what my segmentation does, they could in theory do this.

I don’t know if they do. And if they do it, how much weight is given to this? Because I mean, if you have 70 million signals, even if some of those signals Will be more important than others. You will need some time to, to find those signals. So I see Peter nodding.

Frederick Vallaeys: Do you agree, Peter?

Peter Oliveira: Yeah, absolutely.

I think, you know, a lot of, I need to read up on, on your segmentation strategy, Martin, I haven’t looked into too far, but segmentation I think can come really in handy with certain things that smart bidding may or may not have access to, like I’ve worked in the past with let’s say like an e com advertiser that has different profitability goals.

In SmartFitting, right? So a certain portion of its segment may be higher profitability, medium profitability, low profitability. I think being able to segment based off of that, which is a signal that SmartFitting maybe might not be taking into account, right? It’s just looking at the conversion value.

That can be, that can be very helpful. Or in a case where we have inventory, if the inventory isn’t super dynamic, right? Maybe, the CPA and the ROAS lever are ultimately controlling the conversion volume that you want. If you have different desires for volume of of any given segment, I think it’s helpful to use these strategies in order to inform that to smart bidding.

Because it won’t have much of an idea of that otherwise, since it will be purely going after that efficiency.

Frederick Vallaeys: Right. So Peter’s alluding to the fact, how do you track and define conversions? And Martin, correct me if I’m wrong here, but so I think the three campaign structure is really to help you drive that last click attribution type sale.

It undervalues a little bit, the branding. To some degree, right? So, the brand does, or to their extent, to be expensive, but that’s because you have an opportunity to grow your funnel, even if that consumer is not brand loyal to you yet. And so if you’re a retailer and you stock all of these brands, and you leave it to the brands to do the promotion, and then people come to your store to buy that thing, Great.

Fantastic. But if you’re the brand and you actually want to hype up the new shoe that you just launched and you’re adidas, right? And people look for sneakers. You gotta build that brand and so that that that’s where I think now we’re actually in a stage where as the supply chain Maybe fails that branding and that being top of mind is still going to be super important, right?

So I do want to caution people against taking strategies that are too focused on the short term And thereby giving up the long term benefits. They could

All right kind

Martin Röttgerding: of in defense of the strategy usually yes, you would bid high high on the stuff that that converts very well like last click But you don’t have to you just segment stuff out and then you can do whatever you want. So if you want to know or if you want to treat things differently, like this is a generic term, you can.

So you can see that there’s something different for this kind of term compared to, to brand term or to product related terms. So segmenting this just gives you the ability to do this. You don’t have to bit higher on, on some things like everyone does. You can, can do your own thing with this.

Frederick Vallaeys: Really good point.

Right. And so I think what you’re saying is you got to have your strategy and. Your segmentation enables you to actually act on that strategy. You don’t have to take it verbatim from the example that people give, right. You can actually make it your own and that’s what the power of your technique is.

Martin Röttgerding: Yeah. So I’ll give you an example. Like if you are Adidas and think basically huh. So if, if you, you are Adidas or Adidas, as we actually call them in Germany Then you might want to promote your brand. So you don’t want to, to reach people that are already searching for them. Sorry.

Frederick Vallaeys: Yeah, sorry.

We have a little bit of an audio lag. You don’t

Martin Röttgerding: want to actually just get people who are already searching for them. Oh, sorry. Well, you don’t want to just get people who already are searching. Nothing I can do.

Frederick Vallaeys: Right. And now we have the satellite delay here between the United States and Europe. So I’m afraid to chime in. That’s a great point. And by the way, we call it Nike, not Nike. So we’ve got the Adidas, the German company and Nike, the American company, of course, but good bidding there. Actually, some of the audience is giving counterpoint to smart bidding.

So Fabian is coming in and making the good point that in the beginning of COVID 19, there were some big issues because people were searching, they were clicking, but they were looking to cancel their bookings. Obviously those were valuable clicks. And so they had to revert to manual CPC to take control over that. We have Dan Dan, thank you for being every time, how we’ve done so far. And you also spoke up in the first one. This is a question for Google related to COVID, but will TCPA bidding be coming to shopping? Peter, I don’t, I know you can’t say anything that’s not public, but I don’t know if we may have missed anything there.

Peter Oliveira: Yeah, I don’t necessarily have any updates on that. And unfortunately.

Frederick Vallaeys: And then we have a question that maybe for Susan quick service restaurants as a category. Do you feel there’s any positive negative trends and queries and transactions? Would this be a good time for quick service restaurants to push for the app promotion or build a negative ROI compared to non COVID duration?

I don’t know if you work in that at all, Susan. I muted again.

Susan Wenograd: I swear, I’m not an F in managing media, just in technology. I think the one thing to be careful of is you know, how tight you’re going on geotargeting with things like quick service restaurants. So, app installs for something that’s going to be a small radius might not perform great for actual activations and usage.

Because you’re going to have to use the, you know, the universal app install for that piece on the, on the paid search slide. I’d probably stay away from app install and, you know, stick more to just pushing. If you’re doing delivery that’s performing strongly. You know, the, I think the other thing to keep in mind, too, is there’s Possibly a lot more competition than there normally is in the search space because a lot of times people kind of just go out And get their food and now they’re trying to figure out who delivers who do I have to pick up from so they’re they’re evaluating different things so when it comes to things like, you know, your callout extensions your site links, think through all those things so that when people are searching, you’re making that information easily accessible.

Otherwise people are having to like click through to your site and see if there’s any information and if there’s not, they’re having to call. So trying to anticipate, you know, what their intent and their query is going to be like. You know, even if the search query itself doesn’t necessarily show the intent.

Try and keep in mind what people are likely looking for when they’re when they’re searching for that stuff right now It’s going to be different than what you’re used to presenting so it’s a good time to kind of help clean on your You know your site links your extensions and all that kind of stuff and make sure you’re speaking to that specifically

Frederick Vallaeys: Great and another audience question since we’re going off of the search topic here a bit, but the question is about And I just lost it.

It was about display and have you seen it’s from Emily. Do you have any data on how COVID 19 has affected traditional display campaign performance? Has the viewer behavior changed by platform? I mean, I’ll start what I’ve heard is that there’s certainly more people consume news, but and news obviously has display ads that you can put on, but there’s also a high sensitivity from advertisers to being put on those news pages.

So there’s all this new inventory. Yet, not necessarily. Advertisers wanting to buy into that inventory and there might be an associated decrease in some of the other media consumptions that people do 1 friend. That was interesting. That’s just come out. Is that people after 4 weeks are starting to fatigue of the right?

There’s actually. Broad swaths of people who knowingly do not want to get COVID news because they want some happy news for a change. Right. So that might also cause some shifts in display advertising. Susan, you have any thoughts on that?

Susan Wenograd: Yeah, I think that’s also been, you know, something I’ve been reading as well is like on the programmatic side, they’re doing okay because they have the ability to, you know, shift their spend pretty seamlessly.

Yeah. But especially for I think local brands, you know that relied on a lot of times display in those in those situations tend to be news stations I think it’s a struggle on both sides because they’re you know They don’t necessarily Want to show up on something that may or may not be you know, a controversial op ed piece about covid So they’re just kind of opting out of all of it so it’s it’s making it difficult for the publisher side because Most of what they’re publishing has to do with everything with COVID.

So to your point, it’s like, there’s this influx of new content, but it’s not usable from an advertising perspective, or it’s, you know, the demand for it is low relative to the supply of it. So definitely seeing that, you know, on the, on the display side it’s a little different on the paid social side because everyone’s kind of going there to escape anyway.

So I think that’s also part of the reason why, you know, the ad might be doing better than they have been is, you know, the lack of competition, but just also you don’t have as much problem with, you know, which content you’re going to show up against because. A little bit different world over there. So yeah, I think, you know, it goes back to the point you were making about what is on that page that they’re trying to place the ad on during this, this particular time period.

Frederick Vallaeys: I have one final question from the audience and then I’ll leave each of you or give you the opportunity to say some parting words, final points, but the end is fairly technical question here. But some people are saying that first page bid estimates, first position estimates, those metrics seem to be saying, I don’t know if that’s a.

One off instance here, or if there’s too much volatility due to COVID Peter and Emi, any thoughts on that?

Peter Oliveira: We made changes with the, the average position metric. I don’t know if that’s what, what they’re referencing, but I don’t, I haven’t necessarily seen any, any other changes since that.

Frederick Vallaeys: Yeah, and so Optmyzr did a study, this was way back when, and this was correlating quality score, the first page estimate, and what we noticed was that Google is calculating your quality metrics.

Yeah. And your page estimates on different cycles. So the quality score gets calculated roughly once a day and because it has a large impact on the first page bid estimate, you could see mismatches where you think you’re bidding at the right level. But in fact, not every auction is getting you to that level.

This is also again, the law of averages, right? Google giving you some number, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that 100 percent of the time you’re gonna be in that position. But I haven’t heard of anything related to those numbers, not currently showing or being burst and typical. Feel free to email us about that.

Maybe we can take a closer look anyway. So we’ll start wrapping up here. Martin, a lot of non correct or comments coming in about you, lots of fans of your methodologies. So people were really happy. You could make it here today. Departing words from you.

He’s blushing people. He’s blushing. If you’re just listening.

Martin Röttgerding: Cool. Parting words. I’m going to get a beer after this because it’s a 7 PM here. Sorry. I’m at a loss at the moment.

Frederick Vallaeys: Parting words, get a beer and carry on something like that. Peter and Emi from Google. Thank you so much. It’s been really enlightening.

Well,

Martin Röttgerding: thank you for having me. It’s been fun. It’s been

Frederick Vallaeys: good. Well, thank you for having Peter and Emi. You guys have any part again. That’s that. Yeah, I think that

can hear him. Yes, go ahead. I mean,

Emi Wayner: yeah, I think it’s a really good time to talk to the customers and we think about strategy and really show the empathy and help the customers. So we think of us for different stages. Some companies are challenged. Assessing and pivoting and investing. So those challenges, I think, based on the customer’s input and that we can really help asking the right questions and helping in pivoting the strategy.

And I think the audience is the people who can help. So thank you for attending and having us too.

Frederick Vallaeys: Thank you. And Susan, it’s great having you back again and bringing us sort of that higher level perspective on everything. Yeah, absolutely. Thanks for having me.

Susan Wenograd: Just hang in there, watch your numbers, keep tweaking things every day.

It’s going to continue to be, I think, a day by day reaction, that’s for sure. It doesn’t matter what platform you’re on, you’re probably going to be shuffling spend around a lot every week. So just hang in there, drink a lot of coffee.

Frederick Vallaeys: Drink your drink coffee. Well, good. Thanks to all the attendees for joining us again.

We’ll do another one next week with a different set of panelists, different main topics. So we’ll send out an email about that shortly. Tell your friends. Hopefully, this is a good therapy session for everyone. I know it is for us. So thanks to all the panelists and we’ll put this up on the podcast soon.

We’ll put it up on YouTube and we’ll also send up a video replay to everyone soon. Thanks everyone. Have a happy Wednesday.