30-second summary:

• Make no mistake, Google Shopping is still mostly a paid PPC channel, but you can also enjoy its free traffic
• Video and display formats are not the type of ad you think of when it comes to online acquisition
• They are more popular for brand awareness and influence targets
• All conversions are not born equal, especially, when it comes to acquisition channels – a purchase on your site from a new customer has more value than one from a returning one
• It’s easy to forget that most of the business still happens offline and that Zoom calls and online shopping are not all there is to life
• Yet offline conversion trackings are not always taken into account
• With Gallery Ads, Google offers a new ad format integrated into the Search Network
• As these ad formats are for mobile displays only, their dimensions enable advertisers to make a stronger impact than with a text ad

Google released new smart features and ways to buy ads on its different channels. They allow marketers to increase their reach and to try new approaches. As always with the novelty, there will be a learning curve.

At SEISO, the reference PPC insight platform, we analyzed the impact of these updates on more than 13,000 accounts. Here is how you can make them work for you.

Content created in partnership with SEISO.

1. Get listed for free on Google Shopping

Make no mistake, Google Shopping is still mostly a paid PPC channel, but you can also enjoy its free traffic. Why is there a free option? After the introduction of the shopping channel, Google ousted most of the other price comparison websites from its SERP (Shopping.com, Shopzilla, BizRate, and others). The move was so aggressive that in 2017, the European Commission fined Google €2.42 billion (~$3 billion) for breaching EU antitrust rules by “giving an illegal advantage to another Google product, its comparison shopping service.” Although it is still going through appeal, Google has made changes to ensure other options are present on its services and SERP than its own. As for organic search optimization, you need to ensure your products appear in the first positions.

How to make it work for you

First, you need to start by optimizing your Shopping Ads and understand what products click and convert the most. For example, you can use SEISO Google Shopping Analyzer (Free to try) to get shopping reports. From there you can adapt your product feed and product pages to ensure you focus on products that are margin positive.  

Source: SEISO Report for non-performing products in your shopping feed

Once you have trimmed the feed and pages, you can go to your Google Merchant Center account in the Growth Menu. There you will find a channel called “Surfaces across Google”. You want to set it to “ACTIVE”. This feature was initially available only in the USA and India but is being rolled out worldwide. 

2. Get impressions on display and YouTube ads but only pay for sales

Video and display formats are not the type of ad you think of when it comes to online acquisition. They are more popular for brand awareness and influence targets. 

But now Google wants to convince you otherwise. Why? Google has so much data on users’ profiles and their intents that they can predict what they will buy. Facebook has built its platform on what they know about the users from their browsing and sharing. Google knows the users very well: from the search queries, from the media they consume on its surfaces (videos and AMP pages), and its past purchases thanks to receipts received in Gmail. 

Thanks to this treasure trove of data points, the algorithm identifies which new video game console the user wants. And it only shows him the relevant ads when he is ready to buy. The ad will be more likely to convert and Google will get a higher revenue per page by only showing converting ads to users: win/win. 

Now you can run performance-based targeting for YouTube Ads and on the Display network. It usually means a lower reach than a CPM or a Trueview campaign but you will get incremental conversions while controlling your budget. 

But remember, this is a black box. The algorithm will decide to display your ad or not based on how much money it will generate for Google. If your products find an audience this is a virtuous cycle and you will get a lot of volume. If not, your campaign might not pick up at all. 

How to make it work for you

• Use Smart Display with a tCPA or tROAS bidding strategy. This allows you to retain the benefits of the Smart Display framework without losing control.
• Based on 13,000+ Google Ads accounts audited by SEISO, the best targeting are: “Similar converters” & “Custom Intent on your competitors”

You can use the audience analysis section of SEISO to identify which audience is the most relevant for you. And you can try it for free.

3. Customer acquisition is good but NEW customer acquisition is better

All conversions are not born equal. When it comes to acquisition channels, a purchase on your site from a new customer has more value than one from a returning one. Of course, loyalty is key and you need to take care of existing customers. But Search engine marketing is neither the main nor the most money-efficient channel to do so. CRM, whether through email marketing or earned social media are more efficient to re-engage your customers. The symbiosis between acquisition and loyalty is the best way to maximize your customer lifetime value.

Once you know how much money you can expect from a user in the long term, you are able to adapt the amount you are willing to pay for a new customer vs. an old one.

In Google Shopping, you can now take the lifetime value into account. Go in the conversion goals by clicking “Settings” in the left navigation of your Smart Shopping campaign. Use the “New Customer Acquisition” option. There, indicate the incremental price you are willing to pay per conversion for this type of customer versus a returning one. For example, if your CPA for a conversion is $42 and you set the new customer value to $38. It will let the campaign pay up to $80 for new customers and $42 for existing ones.

How to make it work for you

Make sure you are tracking your new customers, there are two ways to do so and you should use both:

• Make sure your Google Ads account and your Google Analytics account are connected. This way, the algorithm is aware of all sales made on your website even if they came from another channel.
• Set differentiated tags for new and old customers and let your ecommerce platform or your tag manager. You need to show one or the other tag depending on the status of the customer.

As a rule of thumb, you should align this with your promotion strategy. Focus on your product selection to boost your best-recruiting products. The ones that usually trigger the first sale on your website for new customers. 

4. Get offline! How to keep tracks on offline conversions

In these days and times, it is easy to forget that most of the business still happens offline and that zoom calls and online shopping are not all there is to life. Yet offline conversions tracking are not always taken into account. According to Google, 30 percent of mobile queries are local searches and it is the fastest-growing segment. And 75 percent of users making a local search will go to a store within 24 hours. This is a lot of conversions lost to online tracking.

The new version of the Google Ads’ local campaigns is here just for that. Local campaigns use GPS and Wifi to identify the location of the user. Google will display ads related to business advertising presence around the user’s current location. 

How to make it work for you

To succeed, you will need to set up an omnichannel tracking that integrates offline elements. From there you will be able to measure different types of conversion. You should create a set of conversion actions for each campaign:

• In-store visits: Google automatically tracks walk-in traffic from user’s location captured from their Apps and OS). You will need to register all your points of sales addresses or GPS coordinates. 
• Offline purchase thanks to offline the Conversions API or bulk sheets upload.
• Online purchase through your regular tracking pixel.

Once your conversions start to show in the interface you will be able to optimize against each of these goals. Moving further you will be able to optimize the new full potential of each campaign against each target! To do so you try the SEISO campaign optimization tool for free. 

Source: SEISO PPC Campaign Optimisation Tool

5. Be creative! Push gallery ads over all networks

Gallery Ads and Showcase Shopping Ads on Search are good to be tested! 85 percent of respondents put more importance on visual information than text information. Visual information is preferred over text by at least 50% of respondents in all categories except for electronics, household goods, and wine and spirits (Intent Lab research, Feb 2019).

With Gallery Ads Google offers a new ad format integrated into the Search Network. As these ad formats are for mobile displays only, their dimensions enable advertisers to make a stronger impact than with a text ad. Google will continue to serve the same user with your creatives on new placements such as: 

• YouTube: On the “Home” screens where more than 90% of users say they discover new brands & new products.
• Discovery: Google Discovery App while scrolling the news feed and searching by interest.
• Gmail: Through discovery, even though Gmail Ads are being rolled out, Discovery ads allow you to expand your reach from Gmail to other Google-owned surfaces. 

And of course, they are shown in the main result pages as Showcase Shopping Ads.

Google is always bringing in new features to test, The key to having a State of the Art Google Ads account is to test early. Once the features reach mass adoption you are already fully optimized and have secured the best positions.

There is much more to discover in the SEISO analysis report, including expert tips and best practices, account activity analysis, and more than 75 criteria sifted.

Are your Google Ads Campaigns optimized? Try SEISO for free TODAY, click on this link: www.seiso.io/en.

The post The five latest Google Ads features and how to make the most of them appeared first on Search Engine Watch.

30-second summary:

• Today, digital business is gaining ground fast, especially with the coronavirus pandemic pushing more business and marketing operations online.
• In the virtual business space, it is all about each enterprise targeting the maximum interested audience as the center of its campaigns.
• Indeed, audience targeting has become a common measure to enhance enterprise marketing campaigns.
• Co-founder and Director of eSparkBiz Technologies shares all the tricks and tips to use in-market audiences for better search campaigns.

Audience targeting refers to establishing networks with audiences that are present in ad groups. Thereby, you can shout out to customers according to their personality, behavior, likes and dislikes, research and information, and previous liaisons with your business. So how does audience targeting bring positive results to come ad and marketing campaigns? Where does the in-market audience come into play?

Firstly, audience targeting maximizes the reach of your campaign: more people get redirected to your campaign link while surfing other webpages, applications, or content. So, how does the audience target exactly function? We will go into details of in-market audiences.

The mechanism of audience targeting

There are different kinds of campaigns for which audience targeting is applicable. For instance, display campaigns are personalized for groups of users with distinct likes, tastes, and personalities.

Moreover, Google allows you to choose from a vast assortment of fanbases, such that those belonging to the travel and tourism, global business, the sports world, and the others. To help in your effort, Google Ads curates your advertisement as per such groups and caters to their specific group-oriented interests. Keep in mind that the information used to select audience groups, like, page visit history, past Google searches can also enhance the targets and measures of your campaign effort.

How do you locate and address various types of audiences in your campaigns? Given below are some examples.

1. Display campaigns

• Preferences: Deal with preferences, customized affinity, behavior-pattern, and interest-based targeting of users.
• Demographic data: Extensive information with overarching implications on targeting
• Life events: Come to the big occasions, come to the targeted campaigns
• Individual in-market intent: Target users according to their latest buyer preferences
• Remarketing: Shout out to your loyal customers and previous users
• Customer resource management (CRM) factor: Use your detailed CRM information to address interested buyers
• Other interested clients: Expand your horizons by branching out to new customer bases

2. Search campaigns

• Affinity: Regular activities, patterns, and preferences of individual users are evaluated and targeted
• Demographic information: Target users based on their individual social, economic, and health data
• In-market traits: Gauge the specific buying intent and target clients accordingly
• Remarketing: Renew your relationship with your loyal customer base
• CRM utility: Use your CRM information solutions to reach out to customers
• Related customers: Find and engage with new potential customers who display preferences identical to your existing customer base

3. Video campaigns

• Affinity/curated affinity: Interact with users while catering to their strongest passions and preferences
• Demographic data: Again, personal information regarding age, work, livelihood, etc. can be used to infer buying decisions
• In-market behavior: Based on your campaign on the latest buying decisions of your users
• Remarketing: Reach users that have already availed of your products in the past
• CRM customers: Based on nuanced CRM information, reach out to your most active and keen audience
• Related users: Again, branch out your customer base by attracting new ones with similar likes and interests

How to target your audience

What do you do after the buyer preferences, desires, behavior patterns, and reasons have been analyzed and integrated? In the next step, you need to classify your user base into specific groups, each of which will be targeted for unique marketing campaigns that cater to its needs. In turn, your promotional content and advertisements will vary from group to group. Time to pick, choose, and advertize. So, we will look at the different types of audiences and how to address them via your campaigns.

1. Affinity audience

An affinity audience is the easiest to rouse! By finding out their income, lifestyle, interests, and purchase goals, you can integrate and use such data to attract them to your products and services. These customers are more likely to showcase their preferences in the market.

All those who place ads on Google are allowed to address their affinity audiences through Gmail, video, display, and search efforts.

2. Custom affinity audience

This is more specific than an affinity audience, a custom affinity audience is synced to its preferred brand. If affinity audiences are floating users whose attention towards your products may falter at times, custom affinity audiences are anchored to your company. How are customer affinity audience groups evaluated? Given below are the salient factors:

• Likes and habits, marked as crucial keyword phrases
• Relevant website URLs, utilized to categorize interest groups
• Novel and interesting locations, trends, and lifestyles that grab eyeballs
• Sleek, smooth, and speedy applications that aid and abet affirmative customer decisions! In turn, all your advertisements will turn up on the smartphone devices of your app users

3. Major milestones/life events

How do you keep yourself in the good books of your customers? How do you encourage them to associate your brand with positive, happy emotions? For this purpose, you must gather certain data on your best audience: this includes major milestones like a degree, a job, or an award, birthdays, weddings, and anniversaries. Make your customers feel special on auspicious occasions. Wish them via YouTube notifications, Facebook videos, Gmail, and more. Because a little bit of daily joy goes a long way!

However, you want to ensure that your tone and messaging appeals to the audience without overdoing it.

Compared to various life achievements, occasions and events are less in number. Therefore, a campaign targeting major life events is bound to have limited outreach. Still, such events are likely to coincide with buying decisions, maybe even some binge shopping. Thus, the field becomes open for a couple celebrating their anniversary: from apparel, crockery, furniture, to packers and movers, smartphones, food, and unique gifts, every product stands a chance.

4. In-market audience

In-market audiences are either loyal customers who are delighted by your products or interested clients who have been checking your brand out on virtual media. You can create your in-market audience group from these customers and facilitate leads by targeting them in your marketing campaigns.

Simply put, in-market audiences are potential leads that have a high probability of conversion. Thus, by focusing your campaigns on such groups you can not only reach more interested customers but also maximize your subsequent sales!

5. Demographic data

Using thorough demographic information about your customers, you can address broad sections of people with similar or identical interests, such as high school students, homemakers, caregivers, and more.

6. Customer match

Why is customer match so helpful in relation to inspired campaigns? Because it slows you to deploy customer information (online as well as offline) to attract and retain customers across a wide range of virtual platforms. With such helpful data, customer match designs and presents the best ads to the most interested customers. The kind of advertisement depends on the customers’ preferences and decisions.

7. Other relevant audiences

Always look to broaden your horizon, as new customers await your amazing products! Other relevant audiences with similar or identical behavior or tastes (in relation to your industry, brand, or products) are the future of your brand, new customers waiting to be enticed. To this end, Google Ads deploying state-of-the-art machine learning algorithms to create and modify similar audience lists.

It is common knowledge that the method of targeting audiences has heavily influenced the context in which pay-per-click (PPC) experts design their marketing efforts. It makes their efforts more nuanced and updated as per pre-existing and real-time data. Thus, they can zero in on plenty of potential customers who are uninitiated with regard to your brand.

How can you leverage in-market audiences for more enhanced and fruitful search campaigns? Given below are some effective ways in which you can approach this task.

Remarketing Lists for Search Ads (RLSA)

RLSA is the easiest method by which you can integrate your special audience with your current keyword strategy. Here, you must aim to attract customers who are already in your marketing list, who have already had a satisfying experience of product purchase and use and are likely to be back for more.

In turn, RLSA provides abundant research and analysis possibilities for those who want to make their products sell in standard marketing and sales platforms, both real and digital.

Using timely but standalone campaigns, you can deploy all the marketing and buzz-creating tools provided that you use them to curate your campaigns in line with the interests of broad customer groups.

Remarketing with Dynamic Search Ads (RDSA)

Just like RLSA, RDSA involves the merging of retargeting lists with a unique kind of advertisement: Dynamic Search Ads (DSAs). This enlivens the process of audience interaction and lead generation.

In a nutshell, DSAs expand the outreach of search efforts by including keywords that do not necessarily belong to the existing list of search keywords. From the content available in a given webpage, DSAs seek outstanding queries.

If you use RLSA and DSA in tandem, your search campaign will allow you to stay connected and consolidate relationships with users already on your in-marketing list and inputting keywords that turn out to be crucial but are absent from your keyword lists.

Omission of users

Just like selective inclusion, selective exclusion regarding PPC can also be beneficial to your marketing campaigns. How so?

Think about a client whom you have already engaged with once. For instance, a local business trying to attract new customers need users to only log their personal information once, perhaps in a form. Why should this business spend on trying to get the same clients to click on its ads? That amounts to overspending without a cost-effective plan.

Therefore, make it a habit to create concrete lists or groups of audiences according to their affinities and pet peeves. Once you have the informed lists in your hands, you can rest assured about including the same clients for repeated search/PPC campaigns. As a result, you can increase the possibility of conversion and reach out to more customers.

Other relevant audiences related to search campaigns

A positive attitude towards search campaigns always seeks to branch out, foray into new customer groups and spaces where they browse niche products and brand new services. To grab and hold their attention, you need to go off your customer lists and into uncharted waters.

Here, Google comes in handy as it revises your remarketing audience groups to create a refined list of customers with increasingly identical browsing patterns. With such crucial aid from the search engine, you get a readymade list of interest clients waiting for the experience only you can provide!

More often than not, these clients will be uninitiated to your brand and its amazing search campaigns. After they become part of your campaign lists, you can interact with them in the same manner as your previous search campaigns.

In-market audience

Last but definitely not the least, in-market audiences are those customers who you do not directly target but still obliquely address in your search campaigns. Clearly, catering to their likes wants, and behavior is a step that will require innovations from current and future marketers.

Found on Google Display Network, in-market audiences are created by Google algorithms mainly depending on buyer behavior. In turn, you can use such lists to enhance and strengthen your search campaigns. This audience group behaves like a lot of relevant or similar audiences and generally displays high-quality latest, and dominant consumer trends across particular markets.

In summary

This article presents a comprehensive account of how to make the best use of in-market audiences for successful search campaigns. Indeed, there are plenty of approaches through which you can utilize your audience lists in your search campaigns.

Most of them don’t even require much exertion or time on your part. The one golden rule? Always prioritize your re-marketing lists, so that you can update and use them frequently to reach out to your best clients.

If you devote a little bit of your time and effort to these lists, they will pay great dividends to come search campaigns. Therefore, you must not only update your lists but also modify them according to criteria such as client preferences, general behavior, and buyer trends, to name a few. As a result, you can use the clients include in this list and target audiences to be included or excluded, depending on your plans. All the best!

Harikrishna Kundariya Co-founder and Director of eSparkBiz Technologies, a mobile app development company. His 8+ experience enables him to provide digital solutions to new start-ups based on IoT and chatbot. You can connect with him on LinkedIn.

The post How to use in-market audiences for better search campaigns appeared first on Search Engine Watch.

In an increasingly digital world, where everybody’s eyes are glued to a screen, most advertising can seem like white noise. So you want to make sure you’re designing and promoting worthwhile ads in a proper venue.

Here we’ll go over some simple best practices for creating a display ad: how to decide where to advertise, and what type of advertising you want to pursue. You can reach out to websites directly and do the dirty work yourself, or you can also utilize a marketing network to manage your marketing.

Lastly, you want to make sure that you are spending your dollars wisely, so you’ll need to measure the impact of your campaign.

What are the main types of display advertising?

Display advertising is a bit of a blanket term because it covers just about any visual advertisement on a website. However, this broad category can be divided up into a few main types:

• Site placement advertising: This is when a marketer/advertiser chooses the site they would like to advertise on.
• Contextual advertising: This is when you advertise your product or service on a website with similar content. IE- promoting wedding dresses on a honeymoon destination website.
• Remarketing advertising: These ads appear when a user has already been to your website. A service uses cookies to track the visit, and then your ad would appear on another website they visit, and ideally this causes the user to return to your website. This would be done through a marketing network like Google Display Network (more on that later).

Display ad standards

When it comes to digital advertising, there are standards that both advertisers and publishers must adhere to.

The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) is an organization that provides insight on industry standards for digital media. In its display ad guidelines, the IAB states that display ads should be “distinguishable from normal web page content and the ad unit must have clearly defined borders and not confused with normal web content”.

They also recommend flexible ad sizing, meaning the ad units are defined by aspect ratios that can adjust based on the screen size the user is viewing. In their guide to ad sizes, Google lists top performing ad sizes as 300×350 (medium rectangle), 336×280 (large rectangle), 728×90 (leaderboard), 300×600 (half page), and 320×100 (large mobile banner).

Display ad creation best practices

When working on design it is important to create ads that are unique and clearly identify your goal, here are some simple practices for creation.

Make sure you are relevant

Ads need to be relevant to your audience as well as your main objective. You want to entice a viewer, not annoy them.

If you are using contextual display advertising, your ad is already on a website with similar content to your product. When a user clicks on your ad, it’s important that it leads to a corresponding landing page, not just your main website.

For instance, if the viewer clicks on a banner ad for a Valentine’s Day sale, you should have this link to a stand-alone landing page that focuses on that topic, not your main ecommerce site.

Keep mobile in mind

Display ads were originally geared towards a desktop user, and mobile users were considered second. However tides have turned and that has flipped around.

According to recent eMarketer research 70.5% of all display ads in the US are mobile. Meaning depending on the audience you are trying to target, you may want to create ads with mobile-viewing in mind first.

Compelling, concise, clear design

Google Marketing advises to use the “3 C’s” when it comes to creating display ads: compelling, concise, clear. You want your ad to stand out by using eye-catching design, with a clear call to action button (CTA).

Use high resolution images. Display ads can be very compact, so your pitch and CTA need to be brief. Lastly, your marketing goal needs to be clear, only advertise one message- sign up now, check out our holiday sale, etc. You want to avoid overloading your viewer.

How to start display ad marketing 

With site placement advertising you can directly approach a website or publisher on your own. This could work for a small local business that knows its market.

For instance, if you are an event planning company, you could approach your local chamber of commerce about advertising on their website. However, depending on your digital marketing goals, it might be better to work with a third-party service.

Here are three popular options:

Google Display Network

This is the display ad arm of Google AdWords. Google Display Network offers over 2 million websites that your ad can appear on. It also promotes ads across other platforms like apps and mobile-based programs.

They use contextual and remarketing advertising to target your audience. Their guidelines can be somewhat strict to adhere to, but this is one of the largest audiences you will be able to reach, all with the backing of Google. AdWords also offers deep analysis of your campaign’s performance.

Facebook Audience Network

With over 1 billion users worldwide, Facebook offers a  huge audience for digital marketing. Their ads not only appear on Facebook, but other high traffic apps and sites. If you are already using Facebook advertising for your business page, transitioning to using the audience network is fairly simple, their advertising guidelines are the same.

Media.net

This allows you to display ads on the Yahoo! Bing Network, which may not be as large as it once was (or as Google’s), but they claim that they reach 46 million unique searchers who aren’t using Google.

Measure your results

However you chose to display advertise, you need to track your ad performance. What is your marketing goal, and is your digital campaign getting you there?

Hubspot recommends tracking the following KPIs:

• New site visitors: How many new visits after launching the campaign
• Engagement: Time spent on your site, page views, bounce rate
• Number of conversions

If you are individually managing your display advertising, you can request this info from your publishing website, or track where traffic is coming from on your landing pages.

If you are using a service like Google Display Network you can download analytic reports and use their tools to monitor conversion tracking.

Is it worth it?

Display advertising can help you reach a targeted customer base, drive engagement, and get users to your site. Navigating this type of digital marketing can be complicated. The click-through rate on display ads hovers around 0.07% worldwide, which often scares marketers away.

Yet in spite of this, display advertising is continuing to grow. A recent IAB study found that display ads grew 13.1% in 2017 (compared to search ads at just 12.8%). If you have a measurable goal for your campaign, create compelling ads, and you keep track of results you can see a high ROI in a short amount of time.

If you found this guide useful, don’t miss our other beginner’s guides to search marketing and advertising:

• Google AdWords: The Beginner’s Guide
• PPC 101: Eight tips to get started with paid search
• How to get started with Facebook advertising: A step-by-step guide
• A search marketer’s guide to using paid social media

Amanda DiSilvestro is a writer for No Risk SEO, an all-in-one reporting platform for agencies. You can connect with Amanda on Twitter and LinkedIn, or check out her content services at amandadisilvestro.com.

The post A beginner’s guide to display advertising appeared first on Search Engine Watch.

Use the wrong channel and you potentially ruin the maximum success of your whole campaign.

Thankfully, there are ways to decide which is the best for your business and which will generate the most conversions.

Display advertising

Display advertising is everywhere online. Every website you visit has ads that showcase products for sale. But have you ever noticed you keep seeing the same ads on your social media feeds and the like?

That’s because display advertising tracks a user’s behavior in order to put the right ads in front of the right customers. Display ads are also sometimes known as banner ads, like this one:

Major advantages

Brand awareness

In order to properly utilize display advertising, you need to understand its purpose. In short, display ads are great for driving brand awareness because, generally, these types of ads are found in a place a potential customer may be found.

For example, if a customer is on a website for vegetarian recipes, a display ad that may show up would be an advertisement for a health food store. The customer may not be aware of this type of store, but the ad would drive awareness. Marketers generally gather this information by studying customer behaviors, demographics, and previous search histories.

Retargeting

Let’s say a user has visited your website but hasn’t converted. Display ads give you the opportunity to pull those users back in with retargeting. Your display ad reminds the user about your brand; thus improving the chance of them converting. Check out our ‘5 remarketing strategies to prep for Q4‘ to learn more about retargeting as a whole.

High volume

Display ads may promote your brand to the right people, but they also have high visibility. When you use display ads, they’re also being shown to customers who may not have thought to look for your products or services (even if they’re not part of your demographic).

Even if you’re not targeting an audience, they’ll still see your business in front of them.

Search advertising

Search advertising, or pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, is an easy, low-budget way to reach the right audience. You’re able to control who sees the ads with nearly instant results. The PPC ads are shown directly on search engine websites after a keyword or phrase has been searched.

For example, here’s two PPC ads that might show up at the top of a Google search:

Major advantages

Qualified leads

A PPC campaign, done effectively, boosts traffic to your website and drives higher conversions. This is because customers are actively searching for keywords that result in seeing your PPC ads, so long as their keywords match your product or service. PPC ad campaigns generally drive higher click-through rates than display ads because of qualified leads.

Measurable data

Google AdWords is not only the place to setup your search advertising campaign, but it makes it easy to track how well your PPC campaign is doing. Simply pull up your AdWords account, choose the Campaigns tab, and choose “Keywords.” This shows you exactly how well customers are responding to your keywords and phrases.

Budget-friendly

If you’re just starting out or starting your campaign on a lower budget, PPC may be the best bang for your buck. With a PPC campaign, you’re not paying for the ads unless a user has clicked on them—hence their name.

This means, if you’re choosing and bidding on keywords that are relevant to your product or service, the users are most likely qualified leads, resulting in higher conversion rates.

It’s a great way to test what works before moving on to more time-intensive marketing strategies like SEO and content.

Determining factors

Now that you’re aware of the major differences between search and display advertising, consider some of the factors that you should take into account before making a decision.

Search volume

What are your potential customers searching for? Are they already actively looking for the products you’re selling? Here’s where Google AdWords helps yet again. Use this tool to determine if the keywords you’re using are high volume.

If relevant keywords for your business are showing as high competition keywords, your best bet is to start with a PPC campaign. Here’s an example using the keywords “health foods.”

Awareness

Brand awareness is another determining factor when deciding. The first question you should be asking: How many people are aware of your brand already? If you’re looking to increase brand awareness, display ads are your best bet. However, a search campaign can also benefit from brand awareness, especially if your campaign focuses on brand-specific keywords.

Type of services or products

Certain ads may not bring you the highest ROI right away depending on the type of product or service you’re offering.

For example, services like towing, locksmiths, and doctors (also known as “urgent” services) are all services that users will specifically look for, and need, quickly. Using a display ad to advertise may not be the most beneficial if your service is something potential customers may need immediately.

However, this doesn’t mean your services wouldn’t benefit from a display ad—it just won’t be as beneficial to the customer in their time of need.

Mobile first

Did you know that almost 60% of searches are done on a mobile device? Typically, search ad campaigns are better equipped at handling mobile searches.

For example, a user may search for a service on their mobile device, which means they won’t be scrolling through a website. They’ll choose the first ad that comes up, and that’s generally going to be a PPC ad.

The takeaway

When you’re starting a new campaign, it’s not always easy to identify which type of advertising to use. Factors such as your budget, your search volume, and your main goal are only some of the things you should consider before choosing one.

Sometimes, it’s in your best interest to utilize both platforms to maximize your ROI. Using both at the same time means you’re reaching customers at different points in the customer journey, which may be a huge payoff for you in the end.

What has worked for you when it comes to search versus display advertising? Let us know your thoughts and your story in the comment section below!

Amanda DiSilvestro is a writer for No Risk SEO, an all-in-one reporting platform for agencies. You can connect with Amanda on Twitter and LinkedIn, or check out her content services at amandadisilvestro.com.

The post Search advertising vs. display advertising: Which delivers the best returns? appeared first on Search Engine Watch.

Adblock Plus’s new service is called the ‘Acceptable Ads Platform’. It is a natural evolution of the‘Acceptable Ads Initiative” – effectively working as a SSP (Supply Side Platform).

It hoped this would establish itself as an important player in the advertising technology ecosystem.

However just 24 hours later those plans appear to lie in tatters.

Adblock Plus (ABP) has an impressive user base and product, so what’s holding it back? We’ll take a look at what happened after the announcement and its implication for publishers and advertisers.

Adblock Plus and its rollercoaster week

From its origin, ABP has frustrated publishers and advertisers alike. Adblockers started out as an esoteric, fringe activity but have become more mainstream, attracting 26% of all adults in the US (emarketer 2015), powered by rapid uptake in Asia, and mobile (accelerated by Apple’s release of iOS 9 last June which enabled browser plug-ins on mobile devices).

On Tuesday at the DMEXCO conference ABP announced its intention to become a grown-up player in the global ad-tech industry. Today that dream appears to have been quashed by two of the tech giants that ABP have spent years trying to undermine.

Since ABP has not historically had a great relationship with many publishers, it has partnered with an Israeli ad-tech company called Combotag which has an established network of publishers.

Combotag sees it as beneficial for the web user to be able to have better quality ads and an enhanced web experience.

The partnership with Combotag allows online publishers and bloggers to choose from a “marketplace of pre white-listed ads” to be served on their sites.

The other party at the table is the advertisers, and Combotag has an existing relationship with Google and AppNexus to serve ads which are bought via their DSP (Demand Side Platform).

In theory this should allow publishers to monetise ad inventory which is otherwise blocked, and allows advertisers to reach users who would normally be unreachable and ABP take their cut along the way.

Within hours of the announcement Google and AppNexus terminated their relationship with Combotag and have gone on to express their disdain for the model with Google saying,

“Ad blocking is a symptom of bad ads online and that’s why we believe the industry needs to align around a standard – backed by data and insights from conversations with real consumers – for what constitutes a better ads experience online.”

Appnexus similarly pulled no punches:

“AppNexus does not work with companies like Eyeo; we regard their business practices as fundamentally harmful to the ecosystem. Essentially, Eyeo, via its Adblock product, erects toll booths on a public road and siphons off advertising dollars that should be going directly to publishers. We hold that practice in low regard.”

With 500m downloads across the globe, ABP claims a mandate to fight on behalf of users to achieve a better web experience for all.

ABP is still engaged in an arms race with Facebook, who continually try to circumvent ABP and in effect block them, followed by counter-measures from ABP.

ABP have tried to take the moral high ground by claiming that Facebook is ‘anti-user’. But it is hard to take the moral high ground and talk about putting users’ needs first when many of their users see this latest move as effectively undermining ABP’s own raison d’etre, “So, the program that is supposed to block ads is going to be showing ads…. It will be uninstalled” (Comments on ABP’s blog).

Further attempts to commercialise their platform by selling ads can only alienate their base further, and negatively impact their ongoing user growth. Having irked Google and Facebook, who together control two thirds of the world’s ad inventory, it is unclear where ABP will go from here.

On paper ABP has some valuable assets, such as:

• More than 500m downloads – although what proportion are active users is unclear.
• An internationally recognised brand name that is synonymous with the product category.
• A treasure trove of data of how users behave.

If I were an investor in Eyeo, the German company behind ABP that was founded in 2011, I would want to see a plan that shows how to start monetising this year.

It can’t be cheap to fight all the legal battles with publishers, nor constantly be developing new releases to counteract blocking moves from publishers with deeper pockets like Facebook.

As a consequence ABP are attempting to reach out to both Publishers and Advertisers with more conciliatory language and opportunities to participate through Acceptable Ads.

The critical element that ABP is missing is trust

In addition to making enemies of some powerful players they have exacerbated the negative perception of adblockers amongst the publisher and advertising community and now their own users.

They are still seen as being subversive, or at best mercenary. They’ve got a long way to go to convince highly reputable publishers and advertisers that they are a dependable and long term partner.

ABP solved a problem very successfully, now they have to decide whether to remain outside the advertising establishment as an ad-blocker continuing to solve that problem for their users or try to become an advertising technology company serving publishers and advertisers. They cannot do both with their existing brand and business model.

This article is adapted from a post originally published on our sister site ClickZ: What’s is blocking AdBlocker Plus’s ambition?

Have your say on the future of online advertising and take our 5 minute survey looking at some of the challenges faced by publishers and advertisers. Take the survey now. 

The post What’s next for Adblock Plus and its Acceptable Ads Platform? appeared first on Search Engine Watch.

Supported by founding members like Google, Facebook, Unilever, Procter & Gamble, GroupM and the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB), the new organization represents the latest effort of players in the online advertising industry to cope with soaring ad blocker usage.

According to Randall Rothenberg, the president and CEO of the IAB:

Advertising funds the diversity of information, entertainment, and services on the free Internet, but that doesn’t give business a license to abuse the good will of consumers. It is essential that industry create standards to assure that consumers get safe, fast, secure delivery of the sites and services they love.

The IAB has already launched an initiative, LEAN, that aims to promote digital ads that light, encrypted, ad choice supported, and non-invasive, and a set of DEAL recommendations that publishers can follow to address ad blocking.

The Coalition for Better Ads looks to bring together a broader consortium of ad industry players to identify new standards that can improve the digital ad experience, implement the technologies needed for these standards, and promote the standards so that they’re put into use.

The Coalition will work with the IAB’s Tech Lab, which is already involved in implementing technical standards for the online ad industry, so it appears possible that some of the early work of The Coalition for Better Ads will build off of the IAB’s existing work, such as the LEAN initiative, which includes plans for ad scoring technology that can be used to determine whether ads meet the target user experience standards.

Is the industry too late?

While research shows that most consumers are not opposed to online advertising on principle, the continued growth of ad blockers reflects the fact that large numbers of consumers are simply fed up with the bad apples and would rather block all ads by default.

Absent broad change that can protect consumers from the bad apples, it seems unlikely that ad blockers are going away. And now that one of the most popular ad blockers is getting into the ad business with the launch of an RTB platform, the situation is becoming more complex, which could make it more difficult for organizations like the IAB and The Coalition for Better Ads to effect broad change.

The good news is that the industry isn’t helpless. Consumers are willing to disable their ad blockers when asked under the right circumstances, so while they wait for the industry-wide solutions The Coalition for Better Ads aims to deliver, publishers can fight back by producing high-value content and taking responsibility for the ads that they serve.

The post Coalition for Better Ads to make digital ads great again appeared first on Search Engine Watch.

Of particular note are the revelations that:

• Google search spending growth has slowed to 22% as CPCs fall 9%
• Desktop PLA growth rate jumps while mobile growth is strong but slowing
• Shopping Ads traffic from Google image search and Yahoo surges
• Google’s expanded text ads have had only a modest impact

The full report (registration needed) covers the latest trends in paid search, organic search, social media, display advertising, and comparison shopping engines, so let’s cherry-pick some of the highlights…

Paid Search

• Advertiser spending on Google paid search grew 22% Y/Y in Q2 2016, a slight deceleration from 25% growth in Q1.
• Click growth increased slightly to 34%, but CPCs fell 9%.
• Spending growth for Google text ads slowed to 10% Y/Y as CPC growth for brand keywords fell from 10% in Q1 to 0% in Q2.
• Google Shopping Ad spending growth rose to 43% as an influx of partner traffic bolstered total click volume.
• Combined spending on Bing Ads and Yahoo Gemini search ads fell 17% Y/Y as click declines continued to worsen.
• Bing Product Ad spending fell for the first time since the format’s launch, likely the result of Yahoo moving to show more Google PLAs.
• Phones and tablets produced 53% of all paid search clicks in Q2, the same rate as a quarter earlier, but up 12 points from a year earlier. Google’s share of clicks from mobile increased slightly to just over 57%

Organic Search & Social

• Organic search visits fell 7% Y/Y in Q2, down from 11% Y/Y growth a year earlier, as organic listings face increased competition from paid search ads, particularly on mobile.
• Mobile’s share of organic search visits rose to 46%, but that still lags behind the 53% of paid search clicks that mobile produces, as well as the 47% share that mobile produced for organic search a year ago.
• Google produced 86% of all organic search visits in the US and 90% of mobile organic search visits.
• Google’s share of mobile organic search has increased by nearly two points in the past year.
• Social media sites accounted for 2.8% of site visits in Q2 2016, with Facebook producing 63% of all site visits driven by social media.

Comparison Shopping Engines

• The eBay Commerce Network commanded a majority of advertisers’ comparison shopping engine (CSE) spending for the first time in Q2. Along with Connexity, the two dominant CSE platforms accounted for 97% of all CSE ad spending.
• Advertiser revenue produced by eBay Commerce Network and Connexity listings grew by 33% and 23% Y/Y respectively; however, the two platforms combined for less than 10% of the revenue produced by Google Shopping Ads, among advertisers participating in all three platforms.

Display Advertising

• Total display advertising spending grew 62% Y/Y, driven by very strong results from Facebook, where Merkle advertisers increased their investment by 121% Y/Y.
• Retargeting accounted for 62% of all display spending in Q2.
• The Google Display Network (GDN) also delivered spending growth, with advertisers seeing its share of total Google ad spending increase to 12%.

The post 17 useful search marketing stats from Merkle’s Q2 2016 report appeared first on Search Engine Watch.

Of course the terrain of display advertising in the last few years has become a rocky place. With more and more people subconsciously becoming used to ignoring display and the rise of other content-led marketing methods.

However, display ads can theoretically bring in revenue if they are targeted properly and are relevant to the user, context and device.

And now that 21% of internet users globally only use their smartphone to access the internet, spurring Google to strengthen its mobile-friendly algorithm, it’s critical for all businesses to optimise their advertising for mobile.

AdSense has recently issued its own report on tips for mobile web success, and in among the general advice and lovely graphics, there are some brief tips for ad placement that you may not be aware of, so let’s take a quick look at them now.

Mobile ad placement best practice

As the report says, you should focus on creating “a flow between your content and the ad placements.” Basically your ads should feel like part of the user experience, and served when your visitors are most receptive.

The following tips are taken directly from the report…

Tip #1

When using enhanced features in text ads, decrease accidental clicks by moving the ad units a minimum of 150 pixels away from content.

Tip #2

Think about peeking your ad units above the fold for a great UX while maximizing revenue potential.

Tip #3

Potential eCPMs increase when you swap 320×50 for 320×100 ad units.

Tip #4

Anchor social links to make sharing easy.

Tip #5

Use the 300×250 ad unit for a potential increase in fill rates and eCPM.

Of course all these tips merely apply to AdSense display ads. There are many more pitfalls to be aware of when using other ad formats, especially if you use full-screen app ads on mobile sites, which you will be punished for.

And much of this is moot if you don’t have the fundamentals of mobile optimisation correct in the first place.

So your site needs to be responsive or adaptive to every screen size, the page speed needs to be fast, content should be easy to read… in fact, you should definitely read our comprehensive guide to mobile optimisation for more details.

The post Five brief but helpful tips for Google AdSense placement appeared first on Search Engine Watch.

To counter this, marketers should keep the language and definitions simple. This was a key takeaway from a panel of experts discussing programmatic at a recent ClickZ Live digital marketing conference.

“In programmatic we have a tendency to use a lot of jargon, which creates a lot of fear, even within the industry,” said Aswin Regawa, managing director, platforms, OmnicomMediaGroup.

What is programmatic?

Matt Harty, senior vice president, Asia Pacific, The Trade Desk, kicked off the discussion by asking the panel to put forward their elevator pitch when defining programmatic.

“It’s ‘programmable advertising’… You want to target a set audience and until that audience is engaged, you don’t buy the ad placement,” Harty said.

Melvin Goo, general manager, OMD Indonesia added that the essence of programmatic is in its automated ability to buy not sites, but the audience. “It’s about buying the audience when [the ad] is most relevant to them,” Goo said.

The LUMAscape

An important, but complex map of images all marketers should have at their fingertips, is the LUMAscape.

There are different versions of the LUMAscape, here’s one for display:

The LUMAscape is a document (of company logos) showing all the different partners that make up the programmatic ad-buying journey. On one side are the advertisers and on the other are the publishers. In between are all the different businesses that support programmatic buying.

These include the agencies; agency holding companies; agency trading desks; demand side platforms (DSPs); and supporting technologies such as brand safety and viewability. On the supply side are the platforms working closely with the publishers.

It raises an important question. How do marketers navigate the crowded adtech landscape?

“How do you turn this crowded page of logos into partners to work with?” asked Harty.

Each logo has to be relevant to the final business objective, said Regawa.

“You have a lot of people who will collaborate with you, but if the essence of it has no meaning to the end goal – which is reaching consumers and delivering on whatever KPIs have been set – what is the relevance?” Regawa added.

What is the agency’s role, and can they do a better job?

The perception of programmatic isn’t always a positive one. The panel agreed that for marketers, programmatic is a beautiful thing, but for consumers, it can be annoying.

“When I tell people what I do, they say: Oh, you’re that guy that follows me around the whole Internet, and if I go to the bathroom, you follow me in there and serve me up a travel ad,” said Harty. This prompted him to ask the panel: “Can we do a better job? Can we be more subtle?”

Goo said programmatic was still in its infancy, as was the digital industry as a whole. Agencies, marketers and partners should manage retargeting with frequency tapping. “As an industry we have to get it right,” said Goo.

The rise in ad blocking means advertisers need to be even smarter about how they serve ads. “It’s about ensuring high relevancy for the consumer. I want to see what I want to see, and if you can project that, I will absorb that,” said Regawa.

How to use programmatic to target the user with relevancy

Goo said all parties were guilty of not being up to speed on programmatic. The technology is not only cost effective, but gives marketers enormous amounts of data to learn about their consumers.

“Programmatic is really important for speaking to your audience and to continually learn and retarget a lot of people to get better ROI,” said Goo.

Measurement and ROI

Current limitations to programmatic technology mean measurement is still largely action based around cost per mile (CPM), cost per click (CPC) or cost per impression (CPI) models.

The panel agreed that a fundamental shift needed to take place around media measurement.

“We need to stop worrying about the science and worry more about the real people and the real targets we are going after,” said Harty.

He suggested that might involve dropping click through rates (CTR) as a metric completely.

Goo agreed that CTR was not a good benchmark for measurement, and opened up advertisers to robots and fraud.

“What really matters to businesses is sales and growth. What if we start moving into the metric of ‘cost per valuable impression’ or ‘cost per growth’ or ‘cost per market share’,” asked Goo.

First party data and lookalike modeling

Educating clients on the value of sharing first party data (the information a brand or business has collected about their audience) beyond its use for retargeting, was highlighted as a key objective for marketers. Rather than using first party data to intrude and blast existing customers with more ads, marketers can use it to tighten and reduce the amount of media going out.

It can also be used for lookalike modelling. By profiling existing consumers and then cross-matching with the same, gives advertisers a stronger reach to engage new, potential customers or clients.

“We only want to see your data so we can see who has the highest probability to come and convert and become your next customer,” said Harty.

Conclusion

Awareness is playing an integral role to programmatic adoption.

“The whole point of programmatic is it is action based, or it leads the person to a particular action, and once brands get that initial bit of understanding, then they are more keen, and then the actions speak for themselves,” said Goo.

Harty added that programmatic was new to everyone. “How do we communicate or show them that it is just a change in work flow, it’s not a change in anything fundamental. We’ve just finally got the tools now to advertise properly for the first time ever,” he said.

Programmatic is a great tool but can only grow if everyone is confident enough to actually use it, said Regawa.

He said that while investments in programmatic globally were rising, local [Indonesian] adoption was slow.

“That’s because not everyone understands the platform or functionality or what impact it will have on the business. In the ad world, it’s cool. But from my side at least, it’s a constant education of what the tool can do in a very simple marketing purpose, instead of programmatic jargon.”

The post Everything you always wanted to know about programmatic but were too afraid to ask appeared first on Search Engine Watch.

Paul Lomax is CTO and Head of Product Development at Dennis Publishing (founded by the great Felix Dennis), an independent group which publishes many different titles, online and offline.

We caught up with Paul to ask his views on the growth of adblocking and how Dennis Publishing will look to deal with this issue.

How much of an issue is adblocking for Dennis Publishing? 

Not insignificant but still very much in the minority. It varies hugely by market, with tech and younger brands affected more than say our automotive brands.

We have a fairly diverse portfolio, thankfully. Obviously we’re concerned the numbers may grow, so we’re not resting on our laurels. 

Will adblocking force some publishers to abandon ad revenue models in favour of other revenue streams, such as ecommerce? 

I think if other revenue models were viable enough to be a primary revenue stream, they’d already be in wider use. Ecommerce is far from being a new thing. There’s clearly opportunity to further diversify revenue steams, but that doesn’t mean abandoning ad revenue models which are still very strong.

Also, ecommerce (in the publishing sense, usually affiliate based) is not immune from ad-blocking in so far as many ad blockers stop affiliate cookies being dropped, which means the publisher won’t get paid for referrals.

Some publishers may diversify more drastically into real ecommerce, ie shipping products themselves rather than via partners. Dennis, for example, now sells cars and finance online having acquired buyacar.co.uk in November 2014.

It could be argued that poor usability (intrusive ads etc) from publishers has driven the rise of adblocking. Is it too late now to change tack on ad formats?

There’s an argument that Pandora’s Box has been opened and can never be closed – even if publishers clean up their sites, there will be enough bad sites out there for users to leave ad blockers on, and there are other concerns too (malware, privacy). There’ll always be an element of ‘I ad block because I can’.

Remember though that publishers don’t create the adverts – advertisers, agencies and ad-tech companies have all played their part in this. There’s a drive towards good ‘acceptable ad’ formats, although the fact it sometimes requires payment is of course controversial, but there’s an element of user backlash about ad blockers letting any ads through. Some blockers that allow no ads are springing up. There will always be anti-ad zealots, but they’re in the minority.

The problem is when this filters over to mainstream users who have more legitimate concerns and would be happy for some value exchange to take place. At the moment ad blockers are mostly indiscriminate. I think we need to improve ad formats, but that alone isn’t enough. 

You have been experimenting with ways to deal with adblocking. What do those experiments look like?

Like other publishers, we want to see whether our readers are happy to white list our sites, or if they’re more aggressively anti-advertising. There are also many questions about ad blockers’ ability to circumvent measures. And we want to look at discrepancies between various tracking and measurement methods.

We think solutions may vary depending on the brand and its market – for example a B2B IT website with pretty unique content might be in a better position to block users than say a news or more mass-market website.

And some of our brands may do a ‘data wall’, where we could ask for their contact details rather than require them to view advertising. More mass-market brands such as Coach might have more of a soft message, or an ad recovery solution. We’re open minded. 

What have you learnt from other publishers’ attempts at combating the negative impact of adblocking? Did you use them as a reference when designing your experiments?

I don’t think we’ve seen studies long enough to draw any conclusions. For example, the much publicised Forbes trial data ends the day before the Adblock Plus community added rules to circumvent their message.

This resulted in ad block users seeing the ‘thank you for whitelisting’ message but not actually seeing any ads. If you have an absolute ‘whitelist to view this site’ wall, then ad block developers are going to try and circumvent it – it becomes, to quote Sourcepoint, a knife fight. 

Do you think that adblocking could be a blessing in disguise for publishers, who will be encouraged to consider their sites’ user experiences?

For users, maybe, for publishers, no, because of the largely indiscriminate nature of ad blockers. Let’s be clear, ad blockers aren’t all about users either – there are companies involved in ad blocking who are and will be making millions from the protection racket of pay to display.

It’s also a massive threat to net neutrality, if ISPs and mobile networks starting using technology like Shine, as has happened in Trinidad.  

I’ve heard of examples where mobile and other adblockers are blocking even native posts. Many imagine that adblockers target only popups and banners, but are there other consequences? 

People also think they only block third party content, eg ad-served, but they can block anything that can be pinned down via it’s HTML pattern (eg a CSS class name). All it takes is a user to right click on something they think is an ad for it to be reported to the community developers, who then figure out how to block it. And those creating the block lists tend to be anti-ad zealots.

They can and do block logos from sponsored blocks, any content or links labelled sponsored or similar (which given the ASA are starting to crack down on native labelling in the UK will become easier), anything they consider ‘annoying’.

Also things like related content blocks (if some of the items are paid-for), or newsletter sign up promos, or paywall notices. Ironically some even block cookie privacy notices. Many also have privacy options, which can stop affiliate or attribution tracking, retargeting, personalisation, ad effectiveness measurement, analytics (eg GA), A/B testing. The latter could have an impact on web professionals being able to optimise user experience or improve conversion rates. 

The post Dennis Publishing’s Paul Lomax on adblocking and ‘anti-ad zealots’ appeared first on Search Engine Watch.