What Is the ‘Workday Consumer’ and How to Target Them the Right Way

Episode Description

Microsoft, in a latest report, said that working from home has blurred the lines between our work and personal time which created a new buyer persona called the ‘workday consumer’.

This presents a unique challenge for #PPC advertisers because our audience targeting depends on consumer demographics, past behaviors, purchase histories, etc.

In this episode of PPC Town Hall, we brought in John Lee and Melissa Mackey to help us understand the findings from this report, how consumer behavior has changed as a result, and more importantly how to target this new persona. In this episode, you’re going to learn: - What is the ‘workday consumer’ - How consumer behavior has changed - What are the findings from this report that impact PPC advertisers - How to act on these findings and target this new persona

Episode Takeaways

Understanding the ‘Workday Consumer’: This concept highlights how consumers now integrate their work-related and personal tasks throughout the day. As traditional work hours blend with personal time, shopping and researching online increasingly occur during what used to be strictly professional hours. This new behavior pattern, spurred by changes in work environments due to the pandemic, is reshaping when and how consumers engage with content and make purchasing decisions.

Changes in Consumer Behavior: The shift in consumer behavior due to the pandemic, with a notable increase in online activities, including research and purchases during what used to be considered typical work hours.

Key Findings from the Report: Insights from research conducted by Microsoft and Forrester Consulting, revealing that consumers place equal importance on work and personal tasks during work hours and engage significantly in online shopping and research.

Implications for PPC Advertisers: Discussion on how PPC advertisers can adapt to these changing behaviors, including refining targeting strategies to engage the ‘workday consumer’ effectively.

Strategies to Target the New Persona: Recommendations on using a mix of device targeting, understanding customer decision journeys across multiple channels, and balancing personalization with privacy.

Additional Takeaways: Emphasis on the importance of adapting PPC strategies in real-time to meet the evolving needs and behaviors of consumers, especially as traditional distinctions between ‘work’ and ‘personal’ time continue to blur.

Episode Transcript

Frederick Vallaeys: Hello, my name is Fred. I’m the host of PPC Town Hall. I’m also the co founder and CEO of Optmyzr. Thank you for joining us for another episode. And this time we have two great panelists who are going to come and talk to us about a new persona. It’s called the Workday Consumer. Obviously, a lot of things have changed in the world in the past couple of years.

And how has that changed how people behave? Consumers behave when they’re online. Doing research and potentially looking to buy the thing that it is you saw. So we have some great updates we’re going to hear about. And then we’re also going to hear about how you take those new insights, those new findings and how you act on them and how you target these new personas that we’ve discovered.

So welcome to another episode of PPC Town Hall.

All right, let’s bring in my two guests today. So we have. John Lee from Microsoft and Melissa Mackey from Merkle B2B. Welcome to you both.

John Lee: Yeah, thanks for having us.

Melissa Mackey: Great to be here, Fred.

Frederick Vallaeys: Melissa long time viewer long time PPC industry expert. I can’t believe it’s taken us until now to finally get you on the show.

I know, I’m

Melissa Mackey: super excited.

Frederick Vallaeys: Yeah. Tell people a little bit about yourself.

Melissa Mackey: Yeah. So I’ve done PPC since 2002 started in house and then went agency side. And I’ve been with well, I’ve been with Merkle B2B since Gyro, the agency that I worked at for 10 years was acquired by Merkle. So I’ve done B2B for 10 years, so I’m super excited to be here to talk about that.

Frederick Vallaeys: Nice. And I know we’ve got lots of people viewing who can’t wait to hear B2B tips. We’re always talking about e commerce and consumer, and it’s like, Hey, let’s, let’s talk about how we get those big deals, right? The ones that take forever to, to close.

Melissa Mackey: Absolutely.

Frederick Vallaeys: John, good to have you back. I can’t remember if you’ve done one of these, but I know you have given keynotes at our user conference.

So certainly people who know about Optmyzr are no stranger to you, but but remind people who are you and what you do.

John Lee: Yeah, well, I’m John Lee, head of evangelism for Microsoft advertising. That is an ambiguous title, but it means I get to be here talking to all of you today at the very least. And I’ve been on the town hall a couple of times.

I think I was on a career panel at one time. And, and I know at one point I got to show off my Surface Duo for you and David Sotela. So we’ve been on the show a couple of times.

Frederick Vallaeys: Yeah, that was one of the really early ones here, right? Well, it’s great to have you back for the third time. I lose count.

I’m sorry but good. So yeah, I mean like one of these things that’s been happening. I think it was who’s talking about this? We’re basically saying that consumers no longer go shopping. It was kind of like this Statement. That’s very contentious. Like consumers don’t go shopping. Like, what do you mean?

But, but the point was consumers no longer go shopping as an event. They are constantly shopping on their mobile devices. And there’s another shift that Microsoft has looked at, which is how consumers behave. When they’re researching stuff for personal use that no longer seems to just happen in the home setting anymore, right?

They’re on their personal device, but it’s kind of shifted. So John, what are we talking about here with that?

John Lee: Yeah, we’re talking about the workday consumer. And so I’m going to talk and share at the same time. Hopefully we get this right.

Frederick Vallaeys: Yeah. So you Microsoft is on that research on the Workday Consumer, and that’s what we’re talking about here, right?

That’s

John Lee: correct. That’s correct. So, let’s look at the last two years, right? There’s been a lot of change with the pandemic. And, you know, the bottom line is that the way that we work and live has gone through transformation, where The digitization, quote unquote, of our lives has rapidly accelerated. So now as advertisers, right on the flip side of this, again, there’s been a, there’s been a rush right over the past two years to say, okay.

What’s happening with these changes, what’s happening with these emerging targets as it were. And so, you know, seeing the swell of e commerce people buying everything online you know, we thought e commerce was big before the pandemic, but who, buddy? We, we, we saw a massive change in that, but it’s not just e commerce.

It’s, it’s all sorts of consumer decisions and journeys. And these were all flipped upside down due to the, the, the verging of work and life. And so that, that led us. Microsoft advertising to wonder is there a new consumer journey and our advertisers actually adapting to this new journey. And so that’s why we set out to do some research with a partner, Forrester Consulting.

We talked with over 5, 000 consumers and over 1, 300 advertising executives globally to really get to the crux of what’s been happening. Not to put too fine a point on it. So long ago from Monday through Friday consumers went to offices where they were engaged in work life activities. And then they went home and immersed themselves in personal life activities.

And there, there was some blending of that, but it was minimal at best. Then the pandemic hit, right? And that line became extremely blurred. And so what, what’s been really surprising here is that of those surveyed. In this research, almost 60 percent of these people consider their work and personal tasks of equal importance during work time, underscore that last part, right?

Work and personal tasks are of equal importance during work time. That’s a massive shift in consumer thinking. And the most profound outcome of this, as we say, innovation of life is that it disrupted the well planned consumer decision journey as we know it. And so 62 percent of our respondents are regularly research, researching proper grammar, they’re researching and purchasing products and services during work time.

So again, I’ll underscore commerce and services as we think about that B to B side of things.

Frederick Vallaeys: Let me ask you a question about that.

John Lee: Yeah.

Frederick Vallaeys: So my question is, you’re talking about work time here a lot, right? But you think that the pandemic has changed what it means for what is work time? Or is that still 9 to 5 or something like it?

John Lee: So when we, when we reference work time here, we’re talking about the, the historical. Assumption, right? Of that, that working, working 9 to 5, right? That’s, that’s the working assumption, but right, that, that has blurred, right? So not only are behaviors different you know, I, I won’t say post pandemic because we’re not completely out of the pandemic, but behaviors are different, but that also means that work time has shifted as well.

I think that most employers are still going to say, You know, on average, generally log in nine to five, but I mean, I’ll speak for myself and that is, you know, sometimes I work early in the morning and less so in the late afternoon, right, and kind of juggled that schedule around, and that’s, you know, That’s something that is very different and I know that I’m not alone in that.

Frederick Vallaeys: Melissa, what does it look like for you at Merkle?

Melissa Mackey: Well, work time kind of almost doesn’t exist anymore. It’s almost like there’s core hours where from probably 10am to 3pm most people are working. But You know, it varies so much. And because people are working from home the workday really stretches out to include just about anything from six o’clock in the morning to midnight and sometimes beyond that depends

Frederick Vallaeys: on your time zone, too, right?

So

Melissa Mackey: absolutely. Yeah, it absolutely does.

Frederick Vallaeys: Good. Yeah. Thanks for clarifying that a bit, John. So, so, yeah, you were saying that there’s this huge shift, right? So continue on that. Yeah.

John Lee: Yeah, and then what is worth pointing out here is that we looked at both the changing behaviors, right, this emerging behavior shift, but also being that, you know, we are marketers working with marketers thinking through, okay, are our advertisers and marketers responding to this change?

And what we learned is that 57 percent of brand decision makers are rating their companies as intermediates or novices at using the right combination of tactics. To target each consumer persona and that be that the work day consumer or any other right? And so that’s a very broad statement to say intermediate or novice.

That was a surprise to say the least. But when we when we think about this, this work day consumer and you know, people that are seamlessly going from I’m working right now, but I’m going to take a quick pause. I’m going to jump onto Bing or I’m going to jump onto Google and do some quick research before I go back to my next project.

What exactly are people researching? And so we see travel, clothing and apparel, sporting goods, electronics and tools, you know, round out the top five in terms of research categories. But then when we think actual purchase, a little bit of a different story. We see media come up at the top of the list, followed by travel, financial services.

general tools. So think, think software and things like that. And then hotel. So travel, you’re kind of showing up twice in the actual purchased category.

Frederick Vallaeys: And I’m a little curious here, and Melissa, I’d love to hear from you too, but stuff like travel, I mean, listen, the average consumer has not bought that by going to a travel agency in two decades.

But something like clothes and sporting goods. Yeah. I mean, we used to go to Macy’s. We used to go to Dick’s sporting goods, but we didn’t. And then the pandemic made that really challenging because they, they were closed. But now it seems like we can do both, right? So we can go online or we can go back to the store.

It seems like a lot of people are going back to the stores. Um, based on the timing of this analysis and research that you did, like, do you think this is going to go back the other way or this is like continuing I’m going to continue, even though right back to stores.

John Lee: So that’s a great question. So, you know, store store activity is certainly picking up.

But what we’re seeing is, is that the research, right? So the research is still happening in a big way online. And when we think about the overall consumer journey, the CDJ, right? The customer decision journey, the research elements are still happening. In bulk online whether or not the in purchases online or in store.

Frederick Vallaeys: And to, to maybe validate that point that you just made, Dan, stuff like clothes and sporting goods are high in the research bucket, but not the top five in actual purchases. So it’s online research leading to offline purchases.

John Lee: Which is absolutely important in all of this. And, you know, I think an important question to ask ourselves is.

People have been doing online research for a very long time, as you as you eloquently pointed out, but what what is the key differentiator here? And, you know, kind of the underscore of all this is how the the quote unquote workday consumer operates. And that is before it was different devices, right?

You’ve got your phone, you’ve got your, your iPad, you’ve got your work computer, maybe even your personal computer. And there’s some you know, interchange between those devices through the course of the day. And your workday was on that work machine, but then in your personal time, and now I’m on my phone, now I’m on my tablet with the workday consumer, what we’ve seen is that people are switching back and forth so quickly that they’re staying on one device.

And there’s been an upswell in the use of the work PC. And so that’s, that’s, that’s the one area where it’s worth calling out because that’s, that’s a big difference. You know, so yes, people were doing research and, and, and all of these things before, and maybe, maybe cutting out through the course of the work day, maybe to do some of that, but it’s that behavior change that is inclusive of device, you know, Even and so mobile, of course, is still massively important, but the P.

C. Has has I wouldn’t say it’s made a comeback because it never went anywhere, but usage trends on PCs have, I’ve seen a massive increase over the last year.

Frederick Vallaeys: I was talking to my dad yesterday and I was like Hey, I just bought a windows machine. And he was like, what do you mean? Is this, is this something that cleans windows?

And I was like, no. And then he’s like, Oh, you mean a PC? And I’m like, yeah, I meant a PC, but yes, I’m back with a PC. That’s brilliant.

Melissa Mackey: I would say too, that You know, we’ve lost the commute, right? So a lot of people used to commute. And if you were on public transportation, you were on your phone researching whatever.

We saw that a lot in B2B, where especially executives would be doing research during their commuting time. Nobody’s commuting. So why would you sit there on your little phone and small screen when you could sit down in front of your PC at your desk that’s five steps away from your computer? Where you just had your morning coffee.

So I think that’s having an impact too.

Frederick Vallaeys: Yeah, that’s really interesting. But, but that said, I mean, we still live in a mobile first world. I don’t think that’s changing, right? It’s just that given the choice, you can now use equally, both equally.

John Lee: The matter of not discounting one or the other. Right, exactly.

Frederick Vallaeys: And then the other interesting thing is the measurement across devices. So John, you were talking about how people hop from one device to another and back and forth throughout the day. That’s historically been somewhat challenging to measure.

So, and especially then in B2B where we already deal with such long sales cycles, if you lose the connection, oh, the person Did research upper funnel these keywords and then they came in and maybe they filled out my lead gen form But that was on a desktop and now you don’t know what that original Mobile search was so has that been getting easier?

That’s a tough question.

Melissa Mackey: Yeah, I mean, I would say it’s a little easier. For one thing, you don’t have people in different locations. They’re, it’s all taking place from the same home, the same IP address. A lot of people are logged in. On, if they’re using their computer, their work computer for personal activities, they’re logged into their personal.

accounts more frequently than they may have been, you know, pre pandemic when they were just logged into a business account, which has always been the challenge, right? You know, people, companies have work addresses for folks, but they don’t have personal addresses, but now we’re able to do a little bit more in the way of retargeting and things because people are logged in on, on the same machine more, more than they were before at the same location.

Frederick Vallaeys: So I suppose that’s the pro. So the attribution becomes easier, the retargeting becomes easier but do you lose any element of being able to identify who’s a B2B prospect because they used to be on a work machine, but now maybe they aren’t so much anymore?

Melissa Mackey: It’s difficult also matching up those locations.

You know, a lot of, we used to do a lot of IP targeting based on, you know, where the business was located. Well, that’s meaningless now. So, you know, IP targeting is a thing of the past for sure.

Frederick Vallaeys: Well, that’s

John Lee: the distributed workforce, right? Yeah.

Frederick Vallaeys: So you, I mean, you fully say it’s a thing of the past. You don’t think people are going to, there’s going to be core people in the office a couple of days a week.

Melissa Mackey: I’m not seeing, we’re not seeing it. I mean, we’re not seeing it with our own employees. They, you know, they opened up the offices and said, we’re capped at 50%.

And I think we’re at about 10%. People just are not embracing going back to the office. And I believe that’s the case widespread.

John Lee: Well, and that’s, that, that speaks to this idea of the hybrid workplace. Right. So I’m an exception to the rule. I’ve been work from home for a very long time. I think I’m going on 12 years as a work from home entity.

So take me out of the equation. But, you know, Microsoft as a whole has moved towards what we call a hybrid workplace. And that means that you know, a couple days in the office, a couple days at home. Every week, and that’s going to change. And so to your point, Melissa, that makes IP targeting next to impossible.

Yeah, you’re going to catch some of those people when they’re at the office, but you don’t know who they are. You don’t know when they’re going to be at the office one day. And then those days that they’re at home, it’s, you know, a completely different story. And I know that the idea of the hybrid workplace is bigger than just Microsoft, right?

There’s a lot of businesses that are adapting and adopting to similar strategies.

Melissa Mackey: Yeah, all of Dentsu is that way.

Frederick Vallaeys: But I suppose, I mean, with IP targeting, even if you’re not maybe getting the volume you did before, because only 10 percent of people in this case are working from the office, those 10 percent of people, if they’re at the right IP, looking for the right keywords, you know, you still want those, right?

Because it is more specific than finding those distributed workforce people.

Melissa Mackey: Exactly. Well, and if people are using a VPN through their office, then you can kind of get around it with that. But not everybody does. It’s amazing. People, I would say most people don’t bother logging into their VPN, even though they’re supposed to.

Frederick Vallaeys: Right. So let’s teach people how to be more secure. And then we can again do business with them. But good. So John, very interesting research on the Workday consumer. What do you do with this? I mean, now that we know people are working with stuff on their work computers how do we tell

John Lee: them? I’ll riff on a couple of things first off.

And that would be one, we already talked about devices. And so making sure that your targeting is inclusive of all device types. And so I think we’re mostly talking about mobile and, and, you know, desktop laptops, but tablets are still a thing. We don’t want to dismiss those, even though they are on, on a decline at least from a sales perspective.

And so, you know, devices notwithstanding, we also need to be considerate of, you know, I’ve, I’ve mentioned it a dozen times already, and that’s the consumer journey or the customer decision journey. And that’s that’s device, of course, but it’s also inclusive of channels. And so you know, what we’ve seen in our, our research and what we can see in the data is that people are using multiple search engines.

Right. It’s not just Google. It’s not just being people are using and referencing multiple touch points. And so this is where display and native advertising come into play. And the retargeting that Melissa mentioned a minute ago. All of these play a role in Making sure that you are getting the right level of attention and that, that impression share with your target audience, whether that’s regardless of industry or vertical and last but not least would be.

You know, and I think you might have touched on it, Frederick, right? And this idea of privacy teaching people how to be privacy minded. But, you know, I think that you know, when we think about consumer personas, you know, we really think about how can we be as targeted as possible. And so really, I think we need to be mindful.

Particularly as we think about what comes next in our industry, right? The future, the cookie, this world, et cetera, is this balancing, balancing act of personalization and privacy. And I think honestly, we need to test, see what’s going to work best. What’s going to fit into the changes that come ahead of us and make, make the best of what we can.

Frederick Vallaeys: Yeah, Melissa, what’s your POV on privacy and loss of third party cookies? Because obviously, I mean, you’re a big proponent of audience targeting. So how do we keep that going?

Melissa Mackey: Yeah. Advertisers, if you have not gotten your first party audiences figured out, now is the time. It’s past time. Those that are doing it well are going to succeed.

And those that were depending on in market audiences and affinity audiences and topics and All of those, you know, third party audience targeting options are going to be. And a lot of trouble. Once we, you know, kind of move into this, no more third party cookies. It’s really important to get a DMP in place if you don’t have one, figure out some way to segment your, your first party audiences.

We’re, we’re seeing it with our own clients. Those that are doing that are really having success and are able to, to take advantage of everything that the search engines offer, all the native advertising, all the, you know, the multimedia ads that Microsoft has, the, you know, discovery campaigns on Google because they have this audience in the background, but you really aren’t going to succeed with those just trying to layer on, you know, affinity audiences.

So now’s the time get on board, get those built.

Frederick Vallaeys: Yeah. So talk a little bit about technology stack, what that means. Do people need. I mean, you said DMP was one of them, but does anything else change?

Melissa Mackey: You know, the biggest thing is having some way to connect your audience to the platforms. A DMP is the easiest way to do it.

That’s a data management platform. So it’s something like live ramp, or there’s a bunch of different ones out there where you can just upload your, you can create audiences on your side and then upload them to the engines and advertise against them. But you could just use lists of emails. It’s just a little bit harder to manage.

A DMP will help you keep it all straight and up to date. And regularly push those updates so that your audiences don’t get outdated.

Frederick Vallaeys: Right. So that’s a way to build your true first party audience. John touched maybe a little bit on in market audiences, affinity groups, topics. My understanding on the Google side is that they feel very positive that even though technically the third party cookie goes away, they are going to be quite good at emulating sort of like in finding who’s who and not who’s who, but like interests, right?

So it’s no longer like privacy invasive. What, what’s Microsoft stance on that?

John Lee: I would say that it’s a very similar standpoint, right? The, those, those let’s call it the Microsoft data set isn’t going away. And so where, where we’ve had in market audiences, LinkedIn profile targeting, all of these things, none of that is going away.

And, and those data sets are only getting richer. You know, by the by the day. And so, yeah, I would say it’s a very similar standpoint that, yeah, you know, we’re moving into this, this new future, but we still have a ton of data and we have it locked down in such a way that it is. It is private, right?

There’s nothing that’s coming through that’s going to break the privacy with the end user.

Frederick Vallaeys: Exactly. But that said, still do what Melissa is advocating. Your first party data is gold and too few people have been using that correctly. And that’s a really good way to differentiate yourself from your competitors.

Melissa Mackey: Absolutely. I would also say that the LinkedIn targeting for Microsoft is a giant plus because it’s so B2B focused that the challenge that we see a lot of times with search engines saying we know who people are is they’re not thinking of it through a B2B lens. They’re thinking of it through a B2C lens.

And so we really struggle with even finding categories that we can target. Our customers appropriately. LinkedIn makes it really easy. The challenge is just scale, but I think you’ll get there. And if people aren’t using that, they should be.

John Lee: And I would say that’s, oh, sorry, Frederick.

Frederick Vallaeys: No, no, absolutely.

Go ahead, Joe.

John Lee: Yeah. I was just gonna say that’s, that’s also an opportunity for creativity, right? Melissa. So on the B2B side. You know, that’s not to say that you can’t leverage some of those more traditionally B2C in market audiences, particularly if you’re, you know, setting them in as optimization or, you know, bid only, right?

To see, hey, you know, my assumption of my B2B audiences is that they like golf. And you know, you know what I mean and throws against the wall and if they stick they stick right because As smart marketers, we know some of these things about our potential customers. And so Not to be ignored for sure via linkedin profile targeting definitely changed the game and continues to do so

Frederick Vallaeys: Okay.

So now we have linkedin we have audiences. Let’s get a bit more specific, right? So melissa, would you have like different audiences for sort of the same prospect? Do you have different messaging like tactically? How do you? How do you play on this?

Melissa Mackey: Yeah, so different audiences for different stages of the buyer journey based on what actions they took.

So, you know, if somebody is brand new to you, you don’t know anything about them, then they go into one audience. If they’ve downloaded a white paper, then they go into a different audience. And these could be the same person going through the journey. If they’ve taken a demo, you know, then, then they go into a different audience.

If they Sign up and become a lead. Then they go into an exclusion audience. Exclusion audiences are something that is surprisingly overlooked in B2B. For B2C, we’re used to saying, okay, somebody purchased and let’s take them out of the, out of the funnel. But in B2B, you see people just targeting the website visitors, you know, is showing them the same thing.

They’re showing people who haven’t been to the website. Be smart about this. Think about, you know, who the people are. Basically, you have data about them. Think about how, you know, what the, what is that person? Where are they in the stage? What’s the information they’re looking for? It’s not hard. You just have to do a little bit of thinking about it, but it, we tend to think about it as if the person took a particular action, where does that mean they are in the buyer journey and what should they see next?

Frederick Vallaeys: And so what should they see next? That’s a little bit more complicated in the. Day and age of RSAs, right? So it used to be that we had Extas, expanded text ads or ETAs on Google. Now it’s all RSAs and we give 15 headlines and a bunch of descriptions and it’s much less certainty. How, how do you work with that?

Melissa Mackey: A lot of pinning. One of the challenges we’re having with RSAs, frankly, is you, you Asset testing is really hard. You’re limited to three RSAs. So if you want to test more than three assets in an ad group, you, you can’t, you have to do it systematically. That’s something that’s a little bit different, but if the message has to be very specific, we just use pinning We’re not real fans of RSAs in many cases, cause it’s, it’s challenging to make them work for B2B because it’s so granular.

So it’s, it’s not like a, you know, you want a red shirt or a blue shirt or a green shirt. It’s, it’s very specific.

Frederick Vallaeys: John, I’m sure you have a different point of view on that.

John Lee: Yeah. I mean, look, I mean, I, I understand the limitations and the frustrations, but I would say there, there are still some levels of creativity that can be I know on the Microsoft advertising side, we’ve recently reintroduced into keyword insertion, something that we don’t necessarily talk about a whole lot these days used to be all the rage, right?

But that is, that could still be a way to. Make your RSA assets a little bit more relevant, but it’s, it’s not just that it’s also location, it’s countdowns. I mean, a lot of the things that weren’t available for RSAs out of the gate are now there and can help you say, okay, yes, I know I have to test multiple assets, multiple headlines and body copies, but I at least know that regardless of which asset shows I’m going to be relevant for X or Y.

And so I think that there’s still. There’s still some controls that are, that are coming your way to, to make it a slightly less painful experience.

Melissa Mackey: Yeah. Yeah. I agree that the DKI and the ad customizers are, that’s a big help for sure.

Fred, you’re mute.

Frederick Vallaeys: I had to blow my nose. Sorry. Not

Melissa Mackey: allowed. We’re

Frederick Vallaeys: all human.

John Lee: It’s okay.

Frederick Vallaeys: I know. But yeah, one thing we saw in our RSA study was that certainly if you do full on pinning to make your RSA behave like an ETA, then. You know, you’re going to get very low impression. Volume is not going to be great. If you go all the way to the other end of the spectrum, you let the engines do whatever they want to do.

You get huge impressions, but of course you lose a lot of control. But we did see there was a happy medium, right? So multi pinning. So pin multiple texts to headline one. So that it’s still controlling that. Okay. Maybe line one needs to show my brand, but there’s a couple of variations of how you position your brand position to maybe pinning a couple of calls to action.

So, so that kind of like brought results back in line to a happy medium. So that’s one way that we recommend testing things.

Melissa Mackey: Yep, definitely. We’ve done that as well. Doing a lot of testing with multi pinning. It’s, it’s kind of cool. I don’t know that a lot of people know you can do that.

Frederick Vallaeys: Exactly. And that’s the problem, right?

So in the beginning of RSA is like, you couldn’t do anything. Like John was saying, now you can do DKIs and you can do ad customizers and you can do multi pinning. I don’t know if you can do it in Microsoft, but in Google, you can now do ad variations. So you can literally do a proper A B test of two headlines.

You can use an ad variation to do. To test pinning. Right. So you don’t even have to run two RSAs, but you can do run the test within one RSA And get statistically significant results. Yeah, a lot of people they just they miss out on like this week’s new features and RSAs And then they just assume it doesn’t do anything.

All right, so we’ve talked about the audiences We’ve talked about what to say in the ad. Let’s talk about where you want to show these ads So obviously the promise and the beauty of search advertising is the intent expressed by the keyword and showing you right on the search results page, but it goes far beyond that nowadays, right?

So there’s all types of display ad formats, there’s video, there’s discovery sort of campaigns. They’re shopping ads. So, so Melissa, talk maybe a little bit about how do you layer these together together with audiences?

Melissa Mackey: Yeah. So if you have audiences, you know, the, all the issues with display, with video, with, you know, any kind of the multimedia formats that were particularly B2B.

I mean, display networks can be a wild west, but if you have an audience that you’re advertising against. You know who these people are. You know that they’re prospects, that they’re somebody that’s, you know, likely to be interested in your product. You’re not going to just be showing your ad to whoever.

Now you can actually use those, those channels very successfully. Without having to worry about, you know, who, who’s seeing my ad. Is it some little kid or is it, you know, whoever. So we’ve seen great success. We’ve gotten back into display in a big way. We’ve also gotten into, like I mentioned earlier, discovery campaigns, multimedia campaigns on Microsoft.

All of these formats that for, for many years for B2B were just strictly off limits because there was no way to target the audience appropriately. Now that we have first party audiences and better targeting even outside of first party audiences, much more accurate and better data that we’re getting from it and bid modifiers and all the things that we have now that we didn’t have before.

If you haven’t tested these things in a while now is the time to do it because We’re seeing phenomenal results from even from google display for clients who are using them with first party audiences John any take on that?

John Lee: Well, I know that you know in my in my days of managing campaigns I know that one area that always Was was a fascination for myself and my team but something that we found success and that was You know, break, we have our audiences and we’ve broken them down.

Particularly when you think B2B stages of the sales cycle, right? What action have they taken up to this point? And Melissa, I think you painted a pretty picture on that a few minutes ago. But even breaking that down at the keyword level of, you know, if they’ve already achieved a certain stage, there’s likely their, their search intent is different.

And if they’re still doing research, they’re still kicking the proverbial tire, so to speak. That’s a different query than what got them into the funnel in the first place. And so making sure that, you know, Even having the granular audiences, but going even, even more granular with, with layering that on top of keywords as well to make sure that we’re getting the right people to the right content.

Melissa Mackey: Yeah. We have all of our keywords bucketed by buyer journey for most of our, at least for our enterprise clients. Broader keywords at the top of the funnel and then going all the way down to specific and brand at the bottom. That’s a generalization, but yeah.

Frederick Vallaeys: Cool. And Melissa, I have some rapid fire questions for you.

For the B2B audience, automated bidding. Yes or no? Yes. Yes. What form? Whatever is your objective. We’ve had great results with automated bidding.

Okay. And then as far as objective, how do you communicate your objective and the actual results? Do you do offline conversion imports, enhanced conversions restating conversions, cheek lids,

Melissa Mackey: all of the above, all of the above.

We do a lot of Salesforce importing. The, the Salesforce plugin to Google is, is really helpful. A lot, a lot of our clients are using Salesforce but we use GCLIDs and Google conversions, Bing conversion UET. All we use all of it.

Frederick Vallaeys: Okay. Those are my rapid fire. Well, what, what did I miss?

Whatever B2B tips or like.

Melissa Mackey: Wow, audiences is really the big one and we’ve covered that a lot today that, you know, you, B2B is tough because you don’t know who the person is when they’re searching. You know, with social, you know, a lot about them, but you don’t know if there’s any intent with search, you know what they’re searching for, but you don’t know if they’re looking for a security system.

You don’t know if it’s for their home or for their business. So layering on that audience data and anything you know about them is, is super important and it’s going to get you better results. And then you don’t have to worry about all these other details, like should I be on mobile or should I use GDN or whatever.

Frederick Vallaeys: Cool. And John, so with this workday consumer where it’s kind of like a hybrid of, it’s a B2B audience, but they’re really doing B2C type of research. Are you guys going to make it easier for us to like pinpoint who’s who?

John Lee: We are indeed no official announcement to make today, but there’s work that’s happening as an actual identifiable target for this to come.

And so TBD.

Frederick Vallaeys: Okay, we’ve identified the problem. Smart people are working on a solution.

John Lee: That they are. Smarter than me. Awesome. Awesome.

Frederick Vallaeys: I’m excited. So Melissa, where can people learn more about you and reach out to Merkle?

Melissa Mackey: Yeah, you can find me on Twitter @beyondthepaid and you can find us online at merkleb2b.

com.

Frederick Vallaeys: And Melissa is a frequent watcher of PPC Town Hall. I know she’s also super engaged on the comments. So if you watch any of the live premieres, hey, you have a question just at Melissa, and I’m sure she’ll be there.

Melissa Mackey: Absolutely.

Frederick Vallaeys: John, how do people find Microsoft and your stuff?

John Lee: The easiest way to find me is on Twitter.

I don’t have nearly as cool of a Twitter handle though. John_a_lee. It’s very on the nose. If you have any questions, that’s a great place to start. And I can get you introduced into whoever to get your question answered. But otherwise, yeah, I mean, Microsoft advertising is everywhere at this point.

So kind of a hard to miss brand.

Frederick Vallaeys: Are either of you going to be speaking at any upcoming conferences?

Melissa Mackey: I’ll be speaking at SMX advanced.

Frederick Vallaeys: Okay. Likewise

Melissa Mackey: we are doing a round table on the, the new things like performance max, our keywords going away, all that fun stuff should be a good round table.

Frederick Vallaeys: And John, you’re speaking at SMX advanced as well. I am actually on this very topic, the Workday Consumer. However, the, the different flavor of that will be I’ll have a co presenter named Kelly who will be coming in with a lot of the data and the analytics side of the story. Whereas I’m painting the fun work pictures at the front end of

it.

So

John Lee: but more, more on the Workday Consumer and SMX advances.

Frederick Vallaeys: Okay. And I’ll be speaking on the topic of RSAs with about a month left between that session and when you have to use them and there’s no more ETAs at least within Google. I think Microsoft it’s end of August or something.

John Lee: That’s correct.

Yeah. The 29th of August.

Frederick Vallaeys: Yeah. So we’re going to keep talking about RSAs and how to optimize them. SMX Advanced, I believe, is actually free this time. It is. It’s

Melissa Mackey: amazing. Everybody sign up.

Frederick Vallaeys: Exactly. That’s a big deal. So go and sign up and we’ll see all three of us. So if you’ve enjoyed this episode of PPC Town Hall, please subscribe.

We’ll have new episodes coming soon. I’ll also put in the comments what you want to hear more about. We have a post session survey. Thanks everybody. We’ve gotten some feedback in those surveys that people want to be more tactical. Optmyzr does have a separate YouTube series. It’s called Learn with Optmyzr.

So we’ll take some of the concepts that we talk about in these types of sessions, and we’ll show you how to actually do those things within the tools that we have. So thank you for watching. Thank you, John. Thank you, Melissa. And we’ll see everyone next time.