Turning Points: Reacting To Digital Marketing Updates

“Pivot!” - Ross Geller, 1999

When we talk about digital marketing, one of the major points we focus on is the speed of change and how successful past approaches aren’t guaranteed to work in the future.

It’s a tough environment to operate in. On the one hand, we want to build smart, well thought out strategies that set our clients up for long term success. On the other hand, we know that we need to build space into our plans for changes, updates and new opportunities as they arise.

So, how can we as digital marketers do this efficiently and effectively while still maintaining the great results we’re already getting from our accounts? Luckily, there are a few straightforward steps we can follow to maximise our chances of success.

1) Building Strong Fundamentals

In a previous post we discussed the importance of having strong fundamentals in place for a well performing account. We used a house of cards analogy where you can have the most complex and well segmented campaign structure but, if you’re targeting the wrong people, none of this will have a positive impact on performance.

Keeping this in mind is crucial when new developments happen. Whatever the change, go back to basics and ensure that your account is set up correctly and you have the right kind of traffic coming through. Whether it’s a new campaign type, a new targeting method, changes to automation options or anything else, having the essential building blocks in place will ensure that performance remains stable as you learn about the longer term impact of a new feature.

2 Do Your Research

One of the best parts of our industry is the culture of openness and knowledge sharing. While you might not have dealt with a particular challenge before, someone else in the industry almost certainly has and they’ve shared a video, article or diagram on the best way to address and solve the problem.

When a change comes up, remember that everyone is in the same boat and working hard on finding ways to use this change to drive results for their clients. Rather than rushing in, take a day or two to research how other experts have approached this change, any lessons they’ve learned so far and what unexpected challenges have come up. Using this time for deep research will help you work out exactly where your account might benefit from a strategic tweak and is almost certain to drive better long term outcomes for your client.

3) Set The Scene Early

While we don’t always know the details of changes that will happen in any given year, we do know that they’re going to happen. To ease the impact, factoring potential changes and updates into your planning can help to create space while you analyse the best response.

As you forecast at the beginning of the year, allocate a small percentage of your budget as testing spend where results will be reported separately to your existing activity. This means less pressure to get things right immediately and encourages a forward thinking approach to account management.

In line with this, be open and honest with your client when discussing the plan for the year. Addressing the fact that there will be unplanned changes in the industry helps to tell your story and gives a great opportunity to prove expertise by showing you’re already thinking ahead.

It’s not easy to adjust on the fly and we’re not always going to get things right. However, it doesn’t need to be an emergency or a major cause for concern. Slowing down, thinking deliberately about next steps and addressing that change is the reality of our industry means a better chance of success and growth for your account.

For forward thinking, proactive digital marketing, get in touch.

Degree Or Not Degree: Rethinking The Digital Marketing Pipeline

Doctors, lawyers, engineers. All examples where a degree-to-job pipeline makes perfect sense.

While you technically could learn how to remove an appendix via YouTube videos, I’m pleased the doctor who took out mine had gone through a standardised university course so they were able to do their job safely and correctly.

But what about Digital Marketing?

Over the past decade in this industry, I’ve worked with hundreds of smart, talented and able colleagues. When I first started, most of these people had degrees, generally in Marketing, English or Maths. In the past five years there’s been a huge change as more and more people join the industry without a degree, instead coming with knowledge they’ve gained via their own use of digital channels or as a result of self-guided learning from digital marketing content creators sharing their own lessons and experiences.

To be clear, I’m not against degrees at all - I paid for one! But as this industry evolves and we continue to question best practice and approaches, we also need to look at the recruitment pipeline and whether an insistence by some businesses that applicants have a degree is limiting the talent pool in our industry.

To kick off 2025, let’s look at why Digital Marketing degrees may not be necessary for a successful career.

1) The Speed Of Change

Putting together a degree programme is a costly, involved and challenging exercise. Course structure and content needs to be planned years in advance and has to remain relatively consistent to ensure students are building on what they’ve learned. To oversimplify medicine as an example, the structure of the human body hasn’t changed a great deal in the past 25 years so a first-year anatomy student is still learning the same bones and organs as a student in 2000.

In contrast, the digital marketing landscape is completely different now to where it was just ten years ago. Mass automation has revolutionised the industry, TikTok has gone from launch to being one of the most used apps in the world & digital marketing has become a must-have part of the marketing mix for businesses.

With such rapid change, how can a university possibly put together a programme that will account for the huge industry changes that happen over any given year of a degree while still trying to gradually build on what was learned the previous year? When marketers themselves are rewriting their approach every few months, universities have their work cut out for them in trying to do the same.

2) Knowledge Sharing, Content Creators & Industry Accessibility

There are some exceptional lecturers out there who’ve had great digital marketing careers before switching to academics. They know the industry, what does & doesn’t work and they know how to clearly communicate this information to their students.

However, there are equally exceptional digital marketing content creators who are regularly posting information to help marketers build their skills with the added advantage of these concepts being free and extremely up to date.

Is it more useful for a new marketer to be in a classroom learning concepts from five years ago, or to watch videos from creators discussing last week's campaign updates in real time? As long as the student is diligent about their self-directed learning and the creator is reliable, the second option seems to give more immediate value.

Perhaps more importantly, recognising the importance and validity of self-directed learning via content creators and free courses means we open up our talent pool to all those who may have wanted to attend university but weren’t able for various reasons. This creates a more accessible industry and means we’re not missing out on smart new marketers who will make an impact.

3) Changing Expectations

This may be slightly circular reasoning, but Digital Marketing degrees are becoming less of a necessity because the industry is starting to view them as less of a necessity. More and more, agencies are recognising the value of self-directed learning and are expanding out their grad programme to everyone with an interest in marketing regardless of degree status.

As an industry, we’re increasingly focusing on bringing in smart new marketers with a positive attitude, trusting that we can train them on up to date techniques as they go. Learning in real time means they’ll deeply understand how quickly things can change and what remains consistent regardless of year, platform or client.

So, if you’re doing a Digital Marketing degree - that’s great! You’re building valuable skills, certifying that you have a base of knowledge and creating relationships with other students that you’ll run into again later in your career.

If you’re not - that’s also great! You’re learning in real time from people who are actively running accounts and solving problems as they occur. As long as you’re taking your learning seriously and building on what you know with more advanced content, any forward thinking business would be happy to have you.

For digital marketing knowledge backed by experience, get in touch.

Making An Impression: Understanding The Auction Insights Report

As James Bond said, “In poker, you never play your hand. You play the man across from you.”

Admittedly, a career in Paid Search has fewer speedboats and shootouts than a career as a secret agent, but we do have our own villains to battle - other marketers running the accounts we’re competing against.

Luckily, like 007, we have a few tools at our disposal to help us understand what our competitors are doing and where we should be focusing our efforts. Alongside the Ads Transparency Centre and some excellent third-party tools, we also have the Auction Insights report, which provides a clear view of competitor activity and how their strategies evolve over time.

With detailed information about each competitor’s Impression Share and how it changes over time, reviewing this data should be a straightforward task, leading to clear, actionable insights for clients - right?

Well, sort of.

The problem I keep seeing with Auction Insights analysis is that only focuses on one column - overall Impression Share. While this is a great metric to understand general visibility, it doesn’t account for the tactical tweaks to a strategy and if broad coverage is being sacrificed for higher position. Instead, we should be looking at Overall, Top and Absolute Top Impression Share together to understand exactly what competitors are doing and how their approach is evolving as they tweak their account.

Let’s look at some examples.

Scenario 1: Every Metric Has Increased

A simple one to start with. We look in the Auction Insights report to see that a competitor has increased across every type of Impression Share. It’s clear what’s happening—they’ve increased their budgets to raise total coverage while adopting a more aggressive bidding strategy to appear higher on the results page.

This is a tough situation to optimise for. Unless you also have additional budget, you risk burning through your spend trying to keep up while CPC and CPA continuously rise. Instead, focus on your top performing keywords where you can afford some inefficiency. There’s no point in trying to compete on everything so pick your battles and hang on until your competitor starts to pull back.

Scenario 2: Broader Coverage With Less Aggressive Bidding

Here, we see a competitor is increasing their total Impression Share but their Top and Absolute Top Impression Share is dropping away. In this situation, it’s likely that they’re operating with the same budget but have made a strategic decision to increase coverage while sacrificing their top spot on the results page.

In this situation, automated bidding is your friend. A strategy like Max Conversions will work well to combat this by focusing budget and visibility on searches likely to convert while pulling back on those that won’t generate results. You don’t need to compete for 100% of the search volume - only for users ready to convert.

Scenario 3: Less Coverage With More Aggressive Bidding

This is the other direction your competitor could have gone. In this scenario, they’ve sacrificed broad Impression Share and are instead focusing their budget on maximising visibility for a smaller number of searches. Given that overall Impression Share has decreased, it’s likely that their total budget has remained stable but it’s worth keeping an eye on how much Top & Absolute Top Impression Share increases to confirm this.

A change like this tends to mean your competitor is testing out a new automated bid strategy focused on efficient conversions so the previous solution doesn’t apply. Instead, look at how you can efficiently allocate budget to ensure that your ads are appearing more often than your competitors. You don’t need to outbid them if they’re not appearing in the auction, so a Target Impression Share strategy set well above their current level will mean you can guarantee that a certain percentage of your ads won’t be impacted by your competitor’s aggressive bid strategy - just keep an eye on conversion efficiency.

Scenario 4: Every Metric Has Decreased

It seems like a dream scenario - that competitor you’ve been battling against for months has started to drop out of the auction completely. Their overall Impression Share has steadily decreased along with reductions to Top & Absolute Top Impression Share.

When this happens, it’s important to ask why. Why would a business suddenly stop running ads on a platform that can generate strong results and reaches people at the exact moment they’re searching for something?

The first thing to do is to look at the performance of your own campaigns. If it’s not great, perhaps your competitor has seen the same thing in their account and made the call that Google Ads isn’t right for them and their marketing budget is better spent elsewhere. Hopefully not, so the next step is analysing Auction Insights for another set of campaigns. Perhaps your competitor has decided to discontinue Product A and is starting to push Product B - in that case you’ll see Scenario 1 when you review that set of campaigns and you can start to take action.

Auction Insights is a powerful tool but so many marketers only use a fraction of the data available to them. Reviewing every column and how they interact together helps to paint a vivid picture of what competitors are doing in their accounts and where their strategy is headed. Using this information enables smarter optimisation decisions and ensure you continue to drive results, regardless of how competitive the auction gets.

For data driven Paid Search solutions, get in touch.

Staying Present: December Account Management

Black Friday is over and, hopefully, we’ve all seen positive results in our accounts. Weeks of preparation making sure campaigns are set up correctly, offers are in place and the site is working as planned have paid off with a significant bump to revenue and a boost to Q4 results.

It’s important to take a moment to reflect and enjoy the results of the hard work but we can’t relax for too long because the next challenge is already here - ensuring we make the most of December and all the sales that come with it.

With so many factors at play, managing accounts in December is completely different from any other month with a range of considerations to maximise the chances of success. Luckily, none of these are overly complicated by themselves but it’s how they work together that can make the difference.

This week, let’s look at the major points to consider when managing your account for positive December results.

1) Budget Pacing

Perhaps the most important thing to get right in December is accurately pacing your budget based on demand and the logistics of your business. When you think about the unique trends over the course of the month, the normal method of dividing spend by available days and steadily pacing quite literally doesn’t add up.

With the Black Friday weekend extending into the first few days of December and customers getting their Christmas shopping out of the way in the first half of the month, we need to take a more active approach to pacing than we normally would. Accounting for these weekly trends is crucial to make sure we have enough budget to support search volume and so we don’t leave any revenue on the table.

Rather than pacing steadily, a smarter approach is to weight your budget heavily towards the first two weeks of the month. By the time we’re a week out from Christmas, sales decrease significantly and businesses can’t guarantee that orders will arrive in time to be under the tree on Christmas morning. Focusing on periods where search volume and sales intent is highest will mean maximum performance for your account without having to scramble for sales.

2) Factoring In Competition

It’s not just about how much budget you have to spend, it’s also about how efficiently you can spend it. We’ve talked at length about how the auction space is becoming more competitive every year and Christmas is a great example of this with a higher number of competitors who are increasingly proficient at managing their accounts.

When reviewing budgets for December, be sure to factor in that CPCs will be far higher than normal and forecast accordingly. Without accounting for this, it’s nearly impossible to operate efficiently and meet your targets. We already know that conversion rate will be much higher in the leadup to Christmas so a higher CPC can be easily balanced by an increase in sales & revenue if the account is managed correctly.

Don’t be afraid to highlight this and ask for additional budget, backed up by account data, to ensure that you can stay competitive and get the results you need.

3) Scheduling Changes

By the time Christmas arrives, even the most motivated marketer is running on empty. They’ve spent the last two months setting up, optimising and reporting on campaigns during the busiest retail period of the year. With so much going on, it’s easy for things to fall through the cracks and for errors to appear.

A simple way to guard against this is to use scheduling options to ensure that things happen when they’re meant to. When setting up campaigns, ad copy or promotions, take a moment to create a rules ensuring these finish at the appropriate time. Having an ad talking about your Christmas discounts and same-day shipping options is great, unless it’s running on the 26th of December!

The peace of mind in knowing that your Christmas ads and campaigns will pause when they need to is well worth the extra hour that it will take to set these up across the account during the planning stage and will mean no nasty surprises when you log on in January.

December brings so much opportunity to our accounts but also brings its own unique challenges. Considering the things which make this month different and what you need to do to set your accounts up for success will mean a strong end to 2024 and a relaxing, well-earned holiday once it’s all said and done.

To get your accounts Christmas ready, get in touch.

Getting Defensive: The Case For Paid Search Brand Campaigns

At the risk of stating the obvious, it’s tough out there for Paid Search marketers. Budgets are being slashed, targets remain as high as ever and our clients have increasingly sophisticated knowledge of Paid Search which leads to tougher questions for those running the accounts. With such a challenging financial climate, there’s one question that comes up over and over again.

Why are we paying to bid on our own brand name?

On the surface, this question makes sense. Brand spend can make up a significant chunk of an account’s total budget and, hopefully, the SEO team are doing the right things to make sure that the official site appears in top position when a new customer makes a search. If you’re already appearing at the top of the results page, does that mean that these campaigns are a redundant tactic?

Not quite - here’s a few good reasons why Brand is still an important part of Paid Search strategy.

1) Competition

A well executed SEO strategy will put a business at the top of the organic listings, but it can’t do anything about what happens above that in the paid results.

Picture this: you’re a Paid Search marketer battling it out for conversions in a competitive industry. One day you’re looking at the Auction Insights report and you notice that one of your main competitors has completely vanished from the graph. What’s your next move?

If you’re anything like me, you’d immediately push budget into a campaign bidding on their brand name with the goal of stealing clicks, conversions and market share while their campaigns are turned off. Sure, some of those searchers will scroll down to the Organic listing but if you’re in an industry where products are comparable between businesses you’re almost guaranteed to steal some customers and grow your own brand.

On the flip side, if you’re a business that’s turned off your Brand ads, you lose valuable data from Auction Insights about what your competitors are doing with your brand name and how the market is changing. Without this information, you need to rely on third party tools that don’t give you the full picture of what’s happening in the search space.

2) Extending Your Reach

A deceptively simple one here - a Paid Search ad with all the extensions applied takes up more physical space on the results page. With this in place, competitors will be pushed down below the fold, meaning more likelihood of a click coming through to your business even if competitors are heavily bidding on your own brand name.

Alongside taking up space, making use of extensions means that you can share additional messaging that would be lost if you were solely relying on an Organic listing. Relevant sitelinks, promo extensions and contact details give extra information to searchers that might just push them over the line into paying customers.

3) Sending A Message

One of the most underrated elements of Brand campaigns is the ability to rapidly change messaging in a way that’s not possible with SEO. Changing site titles and descriptions can be a major task and there’s very few SEO marketers who are going to recommend this on a regular basis given the risk of reduction in site rank and time needed for post-change analysis.

In contrast, through Paid ads we can update our Brand messaging within the space of a few minutes to make sure that we’re calling out the most relevant details for that point in time. Combined with the relevant extensions we’ve talked about earlier, this amplifies our presence and gives us another angle to reach our customers in a way that’s risk free for our SEO team.

With that said, there’s validity to the question of how efficient Brand ads are. The best approach is to test different levels of visibility and work out what’s most effective for you. In some cases, running at an Impression Share of 20-30% will help to save budget while ensuring enough visibility that competitors decide it’s not worth competitively bidding on your brand name. In other cases, you might need to keep your 100% Impression Share target and focus on other ways to improve cost efficiency through bid adjustments and negative keywords.

If your client decides to pause Brand ads completely, it’s crucial to keep a close eye on analytics tools to measure the uplift in traffic and conversion volume. The best case scenario is that Organic picks up the slack but, more likely, there will be a 10-20% gap where competitors are stealing clicks that they wouldn’t have got previously. If this happens, use the data to make a case for why Brand should remain part of the account and look at how this can run most efficiently.

For smarter Brand Paid Search, get in touch.

Peak Period: A Marketer's Survival Guide

As another year starts to wind down, everyone is looking forward to some time off. Christmas and New Year holidays are booked in and projects start to get put in the “let’s look at this next year” basket. It’s a time with reflection of the year that’s been and planning for the year that’s to come - unless you’re a digital marketer.

For marketers, this is a period of high pressure and even higher expectations. Black Friday approaches with targets that are more ambitious than last year and there’s barely time to catch your breath before pushing hard for sales in the leadup to Christmas. Everyone is in the same boat so competition is intense and one bad day can mean disaster for even the most well run account.

There’s plenty of advice on the technical side of this period and how to approach things. Getting a remarketing strategy in place, making sure bid strategies are set correctly and getting your ad scheduling correct has been discussed at length. What hasn’t been touched on is the human side - how can marketers protect themselves and their mental health to make sure that the pressure of this period doesn’t overwhelm them and spill over into their life outside work?

This week, we’ll look at a few things marketers can do to set themselves up for success in an increasingly difficult and draining environment.

1) Setting Structure & Priorities

Losing control and working reactively is a major cause of anxiety for marketers. Constantly being on the back foot means you spend your time chasing your tail and, ultimately, leads to burned out marketers doing work that falls short of their own standards which leads to even more anxiety.

During peak period, it’s critical to approach each day with a clear structure in place. Knowing what to expect and where to focus energy means you work in a proactive way and can be sure you’re tackling the main challenges that come up rather than focusing energy on things that aren’t going to make a measurable difference.

We’ve all struggled with an impossible task list and wondered where to start. This peak period, order your task list by the impact each will have and tune out anything that isn’t going to move the needle. Unexpected issues will always pop up but, by being clear about what you need to accomplish, it’s so much easier to find the space to address and solve these problems as they occur.

2) Using Support Structures

On most accounts we’ll work as a part of a team with skilled marketers filling different roles to drive the account forward. That team isn’t just there to support the client - it’s also there to support each other and step in when things become too much for one person to handle.

During peak period, we should be checking in with our team at least once a day to understand what everyone has on, where they’re at with their priorities and the support each person needs. If things are becoming too much, reach out for support. It’s best to be clear about the specific support and resource that you need so that it can be allocated appropriately. This is a team sport and it’s in everyone’s best interests to make sure all members are supported and motivated by the work they’re doing.

3) Accept What You Can’t Control

At a certain point, we’ve done everything we can. The budgets are set, the ads are updated and the technical side of the account is in place. While there are always small optimisations that can happen, the account is going to perform how it’s going to perform.

With such intense pressure and constant communication, there’s a temptation to constantly check the account and let anxiety and stress spill over into your life outside of work. Every marketer I’ve spoken to has fallen into this pattern before and it’s much easier said than done to step away from the account.

With that said, setting clear boundaries between work and life is so important during this period. A tired, burned out marketer is no good to anyone - particularly themselves. Taking breaks to rest and reset means that you come back to the account energised and with fresh ideas that can help get those incremental gains that you might have otherwise missed. If you do have to check in on the account outside of hours, set a timer and be strict about closing the laptop once it’s finished.

The stress and anxiety from peak period lasts a lot longer than peak period itself so any approach to maintain composure can only help in the long run. Trust yourself, your skills and the work that you’ve done and know that you’ll see the payoff in the account and in positive feedback from your client. Setting priorities during this period is so important but don’t forget the biggest one - yourself and your mental health.

For marketing support during peak period, get in touch.

Things I've Been Wrong About: A Non-Exhaustive List

Any experienced digital marketer knows that there’s a constant flow of new opportunities, ideas and tactics that emerge as ad platforms change and best practice develops. They also know that with a constant flow of new information they’re bound to make mistakes and focus energy on things that just don’t work as expected.

Ultimately this is a good thing. Without calculated risk taking, accounts start to stagnate and competitors pull ahead. Even if a test doesn’t work, there’s still opportunity to learn from it and gather valuable information for the next roll of the dice.

In the spirit of learning from our mistakes, here’s a list of some of the ideas I’ve had that didn’t quite pan out as expected. More importantly, I’ll also share what I learned from each of them and what I’d do differently next time.

1) Smart Campaigns

Partial credit for this one - the general idea was OK but it came at the wrong time. Smart Campaigns were a precursor to automated campaign types like Performance Max and Demand Gen where broad targeting was used to serve a mix of creative types to a wider audience than pure Search campaigns.

The problem? The technology wasn’t quite there yet.

Ad platform machine learning was still in the early stages which resulted in less relevant traffic, overlap with existing campaigns and poor results. Now that these campaigns have been replaced with PMax / Demand Gen and there’s been years of development in AI powered campaigns, it’s a much safer time to hand over control to Google.

With the benefit of hindsight, I would have run Display & Video campaigns rather than trying to make Smart Campaigns work.

2) Rushing Results

Ironic given I have an article specifically talking about this but, like all marketers, I’ve been guilty of moving too quickly and calling results prematurely rather than making sure there’s been enough time allocated for a definitive answer. There’s a couple of reasons this can happen.

The first is to do with the context that we operate in. Everyone is under time pressure in this industry from the marketers running campaigns through to our clients who are facing internal questions about performance. When everything needs to be done yesterday and results are viewed at a daily, weekly or monthly level, sticking to a long term roadmap and emphasising patience can be a hard sell.

As marketers, we need to clearly communicate what our strategy is and the timeframe that we need to see results. To make life easier, we can identify milestones throughout this period where we can provide updates on performance and answer any questions that are coming in. Hopefully, this will help to give us the time we need and ease the pressure on everyone involved with the account.

The second reason is slightly more positive. As marketers, we should be excited about our accounts. We have so many things that we want to try as we learn more about our accounts and spot new opportunities. The problem with this comes when those things overlap with existing tests and strategies.

Imagine this - you’ve built a new test and everything seems to be going well. Results are starting to pick up and you’re learning about a new way that you can drive performance for your client. All of a sudden, Google releases a new campaign type that you think would be absolutely perfect for your account goals.

In this situation, the temptation is to call your test early and go all in on the exciting new thing. After all, you’ve seen some positive early results so surely that’s enough to call the test a success, right? Not quite.

Take the time to learn more about new developments and build them into your roadmap. There’s nothing wrong with changing a roadmap to accommodate a new development but we (hopefully) have a good reason for every test that we run and it’s important to see things through to their conclusion. Who knows - sticking with your current plan could give you some extra insights that help to push that next test even further.

3) Broad Match

Another controversial one here and evidence of the sometimes strained relationship between agencies and their counterparts at the ad platforms. From 2021 onwards there was a major push to reintroduce Broad Match keyword targeting into accounts and move away from the classic Exact Match / Phrase Match split.

Marketers were rightly skeptical of this. It’s rare to find someone in Paid Search who hasn’t been mystified by the search term report and some of the phrases that their Broad Match keywords have matched to. This led to significant pushback and frustration as marketers stuck to what they know and the platforms pushed even harder.

Like automated campaigns, this was a case of technology catching up to the sales pitch. In the early days of Paid Search, Broad Match was exactly that - a very broad interpretation of keywords with wildly varying relevance depending on the account and targeting options at play.

However, targeting signals have improved dramatically since then and the volume of available data means that platforms can better understand the intent and motivation behind a search which has led to Broad Match becoming an integral part of the modern search approach.

Like anything digital, this comes with some caveats. It’s still on the marketer to make sure that their account is well set up and targeting is correct. Without audiences and negative keywords, Broad Match will still throw up some unusual matches so getting the basics right is crucial for success as we move into an audience first period of Paid Search.

As marketers, we’re never going to get everything right. The goal isn’t to be perfect - it’s to make new mistakes as we learn from the old ones and to try approaches based on where digital is at that moment. These are just a few of the things that I’ve learned and I know there’s plenty more to come in the future.

For forward facing Paid Search, get in touch.

Staying Safe: Content Suitability For Automated Paid Search

2023 has seen automated campaign types become one of the most important parts of Paid Search. After a shaky start for Performance Max in late 2021, the algorithms have rapidly improved to the point where most marketers can’t imagine their strategy without the inclusion of automated campaigns.

Whether it’s Performance Max being used to drive sales for an ecommerce account or the introduction of Demand Gen & Video View campaigns for brand awareness, marketers are finding new and innovative use cases for these campaigns and for their clients.

While the performance of these campaigns isn’t in question, there are still concerns about transparency and brand safety. How can marketers be sure that their ads will appear in the right places when the specifics of targeting & ad placements are left up to the ad platforms? We’ve all had emails from clients asking why their ad appeared next to a particular piece of content and, in the worst cases, businesses can choose to pull their spend completely when ads are placed next to content that risks destroying the credibility of their brand.

There are already strong controls in place for Display & Youtube campaigns. Marketers can exclude content themes and categories & they can even restrict their campaigns to only show on specific placements. These tools have been in place for years and they’re an invaluable tool for avoiding irrelevant impressions and awkward emails from clients.

Since the launch of Performance Max, marketers have been looking for similar assurances in terms of content restrictions. These concerns are focused around lack of transparency and control and always come back to protecting the best interests of their clients. The common consensus in the Paid Search space is that there’s no workable solution to this and all we can do is wait for Google to introduce these options in the same way as is already available for other campaign types. It’s a shame because automated campaigns can unlock entirely new sources of performance and significantly expand the scope of an account.

There is an answer though, you just need to go looking for it.

The Content Suitability Tool is hidden in the account level settings of your Google Ads account. To access it, click on Tools and settings > Setup > Content suitability

From here, marketers can choose exclusions that will be applied to all campaigns running on the Display & Youtube network in their accounts, including Performance Max, Demand Gen & Video View. Whether it’s the exclusion of content types, themes, keywords or even specific placements, the Content Suitability tool gives marketers all the control they need to ensure their automated ads are just as targeted as their existing campaigns.

There are a few limitations to keep in mind here. This tool is about exclusions rather than inclusions, so we’re still not able to restrict automated campaigns to only show on specific placements. The Excluded Placements list should be regularly reviewed and updated as new placements are identified along with updates to the Excluded Keywords list depending on current events, brand updates and other factors. As with any marketing activity, staying on top of things and making regular adjustments is the best way to maintain performance.

By definition, marketers will have less control over automated campaigns than what they’ve been used to in the past. While this can be a daunting prospect, if managed correctly these campaigns are one of the best ways to open up new opportunity and stand out from competitors. Smart, strategic use of the Content Suitability tool can benefit every business and with automated campaigns here to stay learning how to use it to your advantage is a must for 2024.

For effective automated Paid Search, get in touch.

Quick Wins: Low Effort Changes For Incremental Gains

As marketers, we’re constantly making time to think about the bigger picture. Whether it’s meeting with senior decision makers to understand the strategic direction of the business, analysing years of past data to find patterns we can exploit or doing deep audience research to build more effective customer profiles, we’re always looking for the next major project to drive the account forward.

Luckily, it’s not always that difficult.

Any account needs a well built out strategy behind it to ensure that things are moving in the right direction and the activity that’s running is supporting both the immediate goals of the campaigns and the longer term goals of the business. However, there’s also the opportunity to find quick tactical fixes that can immediately improve account performance.

The best part? These require almost zero effort to implement and they’re almost guaranteed to lead to a bump in performance, especially for smaller accounts where spend is limited.

1) Ad Scheduling

Managing budgets is a constant battle, especially for smaller accounts. Overspending by even a few percent a day can quickly add up, leading to stretched budgets as the month comes to an end and difficult decisions about where to allocate spend.

Often you’ll find that the bulk of your performance is centred around a specific time of the day or week. For ecommerce accounts, people often do their shopping after work or on the weekend. For B2B accounts, you’ll see your leads coming in during the working day with interest significantly dropping outside of working hours. With this in mind, why waste spend during the times when your customers aren’t converting?

It only takes an hour to review day & time information for your account and you’ll immediately be able to identify the periods when your ads should be active. Scheduling ads to only appear during the times customers are proven to convert means that you won’t be wasting spend outside of those times leading to improved account efficiency. Whether it’s through the platform interface or in your site analytics, taking the time to review this information and make the necessary campaign changes more than pays off in the long run.

2) IP Exclusions

Everyone loves seeing their ad “in the wild”. Whether it’s an online ad, a billboard or a TV commercial, seeing the end result of your work out in the world is always satisfying. There is a problem with this though - every time you or your client see your online ad, that’s registered as an impression on the campaign which over time leads to a lower clickthrough rate and a less efficient account. In the worst case scenario, someone involved with the ad can click on it - meaning that you’re now paying for internal traffic that has no value.

Setting up IP Exclusions in your account is a simple way around this problem. Adding your IP address, your client’s office IP address and the IP addresses of those who work from home helps to ensure that your ads won’t appear to anyone involved with the campaign and will ensure budget is spent on your actual customers.

To help get this across the line, it’s important to remind your clients that IP addresses aren’t personally identifiable and they’re still able to check in on ads via the platform ad preview tools or third party sites like ISearchFrom.

3) Account Level Negative Keywords

We all know the importance of Google’s Search Term Report in helping you identify irrelevant searches that your keywords are matching to. This is a routine part of optimisation to make sure that each campaign is bringing in the highest quality traffic possible.

While campaign level negative keywords are crucial, the importance of account level negative keywords can often go overlooked. Applied at the top level to the entire account, these are negative keywords that are applicable to most campaigns and should be excluded from the day the campaign launches.

Here’s a list of 400 common account level negative keywords, split out by category including;

• Academic Terms (Classes, Courses, Enrolments)

• Careers (Job Openings, Hiring, Applications)

• Informational (Articles, Posts, Stories)

• Competitor Sites (eBay, Amazon, Wikipedia)

Reviewing and applying these terms is a simple and effective way to make sure you’re paying for the right kind of traffic and it only takes a few minutes to do.

Digital marketing is hard with every day bringing a new challenge and something new to learn. However, keep your eyes open for the quick wins and you’ll find that sometimes effectiveness doesn’t have to correlate to effort. With Q4 well underway, making sure that the small things are done well will help to ensure that results stay positive whatever peak period throws at you.

For more quick wins, get in touch.

Back To The Future: Forecasting For Success In 2024

Coming towards the end of the year, most digital marketers are hard at work getting their accounts ready for peak period. Black Friday & Christmas are on us before we know it and one wrong move can mean the difference between celebrations or awkward conversations in January.

In a way, it’s nice. Peak period is so all-consuming that marketers have the chance to block out the outside world and entirely focus their energy on the success of their campaigns. When conversion rates are soaring and revenue is flooding in, there’s nothing else to worry about, right?

Well, not quite.

The end of one year means the start of another and in between all the peak period hype marketers will find themselves facing the task of building out an accurate, forward thinking forecast for 2024. It’s this forecast that teams will be held to for the next 12 months and it’s crucial that it’s given the attention it deserves. While it’s tough to carve out the time that forecasting deserves, getting it right pays off in the long run and there’s a few simple things to keep in mind to ensure that there’s no nasty surprises as Q1 2024 comes to an end.

1) Find The Patterns

Most industries have a fairly predictable cycle. If you’re an ecommerce store you know that Q4 is where the real sales volume is. If you’re selling home insulation, it makes sense that you’ll be pushing your budgets as autumn comes to an end. If you’re a university, the day exam results are released is the day you start pushing your spend.

Breaking down your annual cycle to understand the patterns of when your customers are searching and when they’re converting is the first step to accurately forecasting the year ahead. The budgets might change but the percentage split between months will stay similar and give you a strong guide as to where you should be focusing your attention. Unless something dramatically changes in your industry, previous data is your best source to start your future planning.

2) It’s Not All About You

It’s easy to get laser focused on your account and forget the bigger picture. When you’re working with national or global businesses, your marketing channel is just one piece of the wider marketing mix.

Understanding the strategic priorities and marketing goals of your business is critical to accurate forecasting. If you’re working in Paid Search but your business is significantly pushing Paid Social & Display for brand awareness in 2024, you need to factor in that you’ll see increasing search volume as the year goes on and more customers find the business.

Similarly, the business could be releasing a new product line or pivoting their entire operation into a new market or industry. Without accounting for this change and the impact on your channel, the forecast will quickly become inaccurate, leading to the need for a whole new plan just a few months into the year.

As with any planning piece, asking questions and getting the full story is crucial to making sure that channel specific planning is as accurate as possible.

3) What’s New?

By December, the digital marketing landscape looks completely different to how it appeared in January. New campaign types are released, tools are launched and the marketing community comes up with increasingly innovative ways to get the most out of their campaigns.

Performance Max is a great example of this. First launched in late 2021, this year has seen mass adoption of this campaign type and a complete change in Paid Search strategies to account for greater automation options and new opportunities.

Accounting for potential new campaign strategies and the implications that this will have on your account will help to make forecasting as accurate as possible. Even if you’re not running a particular campaign type at the moment there’s any number of case studies available that will give clear benchmarks of what to expect as new tactics are introduced into marketing plans.

No forecast is ever 100% accurate and there’s always adjustments to be made as the year goes on. However, keeping these points in mind will make reforecasting an opportunity for learning rather than a mistake fixing exercise while helping to build trust between marketing teams and businesses. Whatever the strategy for 2024, using past data, available case studies, research on opportunities and your own knowledge will help set your account up for the most successful year yet.

For a clear picture of the year ahead, get in touch.

More Money Less Problems: Why PPC On A Budget Is So Hard

As marketers progress through their career, there’s a tendency for the budgets that they manage to increase in line with their experience. It makes sense - larger budgets tend to correlate with larger brands and you’re only given responsibility for those budgets if you have the skills to match.

While this is true, it only tells half the story. As strange as it sounds, larger budgets don’t always equate to more difficult accounts. Sure, larger accounts tend to have more campaigns to keep track of, but many marketers find the actual work of managing them is far less complex than what they faced when they were running accounts with a fraction of the spend.

In a previous post, we looked at the challenges that marketers face at different account spend levels. With Q4 fast approaching and businesses getting their accounts ready for Black Friday & Christmas, now is a good time to revisit the challenges faced at lower spend levels & give a shoutout to our marketing friends doing the hard work on smaller accounts.

1) Choosing Your Priorities

On a small budget account, you simply can’t do everything. One of the first challenges marketers have to deal with is deciding what is and isn’t possible within the available spend.

When building out the account structure, this means making tough decisions about what products or business categories get promoted. Often, there’s simply not enough spend to give everything the budget it needs so prioritising one or two focus areas is likely to drive better results than spreading budget thinly across three or more.

At the campaign level, this can mean that more experimental tactics need to be put on hold in order to spend the majority of the budget on tried and true approaches. While best practice is best practice for a reason, digital marketing moves quickly and new ideas can often lead to incremental gains that wouldn’t have been possible with a more traditional approach. This puts marketers in a tough position where they have to experiment to get the edge on competition but if those experiments don’t work it could tank the whole account.

There’s no easy answer to this problem. However, as always, doing your research and making decisions backed by data is likely to lead to the best results. When deciding on categories to promote or experiments to try, look at past data and case studies to get an idea of potential performance & the challenges to be aware of.

2) Beating The Competition

By definition, there can only be a handful of top players in any industry. Unfortunately for marketers, if your account has a very small budget it’s unlikely that you’re one of them and it’s up to you to work out how to compete and win in the auction space.

Directly competing against online giants like Amazon is a very effective way to eat up your entire marketing budget with little to show for it at the end. Rather than going head to head on competitive keywords, smart marketers will instead look for gaps where competition is lower or try cheaper campaign types to stretch their budgets further.

Another competitive option that’s been forgotten in the era of automated ads and character limits is the idea of storytelling through marketing. When every other ad on the results page is shouting about the range of products available and the discounts on offer, smaller budget accounts can cut through the noise by using their ad copy to tell a story about their brand and how it fits into their ideal customer’s life.

Instead of simply increasing spend to mitigate competition, taking a measured approach is likely to lead to better results. Gap analysis and well written ad copy is a time investment that will pay a far better ROI than an additional budget investment.

3) Knowledge Gaps

As account budgets increase, a marketer’s point of contact tends to change. On a high budget global account you’ll tend to talk directly to a marketing manager within the business who has experience of digital marketing and can have high level conversations about strategy and tactics. On smaller accounts, particularly when freelancing, you’ll often be working directly with the business owner who may have a very different level of experience and understanding.

This knowledge gap can be be challenging as ideas need to be communicated in a way that gets the overall point across while avoiding complex or high level details that will cause confusion. It can also be an opportunity to build a stronger, more productive working relationship as the business owner develops their own digital marketing knowledge and is able to share business insights and context to drive strategy forward.

The key here is patience and a willingness to ask and answer questions. Recognising that all parties in the conversation are on the same team and are working towards the same business goal is a useful approach and, over time, increasing knowledge and trust will mean that marketers are given more autonomy to run activity in the way that they would like.

Small budget marketing isn’t easy and there are considerations to be made that aren’t relevant at higher spend levels. Managing larger spends doesn’t necessarily mean you’re a better marketer and there are some outstanding talents who choose to focus on the challenge of getting the best out of a restricted budget. Whatever spend you have throughout Q4, taking a well thought out & measured approach will give the best odds of success.

For expert digital marketing advice & management, whatever your budget, get in touch.

Big Decisions: Choosing The Right Freelance Digital Marketer

Any business owner will tell you there’s not enough time in the day to complete everything that’s asked of them. Depending on the day, a business owner can be everything from an accountant to an office manager while still having to stay on top of their own daily task list. With so many things competing for attention it’s tough to stay focused and make sure everything is being done to the required standard.

In the early days, business owners will often take responsibility for marketing as a priority task. It makes sense - without sales & revenue you don’t have a business at all so keeping these coming in is crucial. However, over time, owners can realise that their knowledge of specific marketing platforms and wider marketing strategy isn’t where it needs to be to continue driving the business forward.

The question is - what do business owners need to look for to make the right choice when outsourcing their digital marketing to a freelancer?

1) An Honest & Realistic Approach

The single biggest red flag in digital marketing is a guarantee that a specific result will be achieved. We’ve all received cold emails from prospective marketers promising unbelievable results with no downside;

“Position #1 On Google Or Your Money Back”

“We Will 10x Your Traffic In One Month”

“Here’s How To Triple Your Online Sales In A Week”

The bad news for business owners is that results like that are difficult to achieve at all, let alone guarantee. The good news for business owners is that they can filter out dishonest marketers simply by looking out for claims guaranteeing results that seem to good to be true.

The truth is, there are too many moving parts in digital marketing to be able to claim with 100% certainty that a specific result is going to happen. Rather than making guarantees with no context, honest and experienced marketers will work with business owners to identify specific goals before tailoring a long term marketing strategy aimed at reaching them in a realistic way. Of course, marketers have benchmark figures that are useful for estimating performance, but these should always be viewed and communicated as a guide rather than a guarantee.

2) General Knowledge, Specialist Skills

We’ve all been to a restaurant where the menu is just too big. Flipping through multiple pages containing a variety of different dishes (and sometimes cuisines), the same thought always pops up - surely they can’t be great at making all of this? To some extent, it’s the same with digital marketing.

In an increasingly splintered field with new strategies, tools and platforms emerging every month, skilled marketers tend to focus on honing their expertise in a particular area. In some cases this can be relatively broad, for example a marketer focused on Facebook & Instagram. In other cases, a marketer can build an entire career around being an industry specific expert in one campaign type, for example Google App Campaigns in the Wellness space.

Narrowing down to a specific skillset allows freelancers to deliver high quality, expert work to the businesses that engage with them. However, it’s also important for these freelancers to have a broad base of general digital marketing knowledge to give extra insights and guidance that can help drive a business forward. A working knowledge of wider digital marketing platforms, tools & strategies is invaluable information to share with an ambitious business owner and helps to create a deeper, more productive working relationship.

3) Communication & Education

Every industry has its jargon and digital marketing is no different. CTR, CPC, CRO & ROAS are all everyday acronyms for experienced marketers but can be indecipherable for the average business owner viewing a freelancer’s monthly performance report. In a previous post, we’ve discussed how marketers can work to bridge the knowledge gap between themselves and businesses that they work with and these principles all still apply.

When choosing a marketer to work with, pay attention to how they communicate complex concepts in a way that respectfully acknowledges a gap in expertise. As Einstein said, “if you can’t explain it to a six year old, you don’t understand it yourself”. A skilled marketer will be able to filter complex marketing strategies and challenges to their most basic elements, ensuring everyone involved understands the core of the conversation and what actions need to be taken to drive performance forward.

Along with clarity of communication, a marketer with a business’s best interests at heart will also welcome questions as part of building a strong ongoing business relationship. The best marketers will look beyond the direct question being asked and follow up with extra information that answers the obvious follow-up questions as well.

Choosing to bring in external marketing help is a nerve wracking decision for any business. However, making the right choice can lead to sustained, long term growth and a productive working relationship based on expert knowledge & skills.

For honest & transparent freelance digital marketing, get in touch.

Planning Ahead: Maximising Ecommerce Performance In Q4

If you're not in digital marketing, you might think there's a typo in the headline. Why would you be focused on Q4 when Christmas is a full five months away and summer sale campaigns are still running? On the other hand, if you are in digital marketing, you’ll understand exactly why Q4 is the focus from August onwards and what can happen if you leave it too late.

With the ecommerce advertising space becoming more competitive every year and marketers seeking out increasingly granular ways to get the edge on their competition, there’s no substitute for time and forward planning when it comes to building out the best possible strategy for maximising ecommerce performance in Q4.

This week, we’ll look at strategies retailers can use over the next few months to ensure that their accounts are in the best possible position to maximise performance throughout Q4.

1) Introducing High Quality Data

If you’ve been on the internet in the past year, you’ve heard about Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning. You’d be hard pressed to find an industry that hasn’t adopted AI in some form and digital marketing is no exception with ad platforms investing heavily to drive better results for advertisers and consumers.

At the heart of success with AI is the quality of the input that the system receives. We’ve already spoken about the importance of input in relation to using tools like ChatGPT to write effective ad copy, however there are other sources of information that can be added to an account to improve performance.

Introducing responsibly sourced 1st Party Data and highly relevant interest & intent audiences to your account well ahead of Q4 will give the ad platforms time to analyse this data and determine how to use it most effectively. By the time Black Friday and Christmas comes around and budgets increase, the ad platforms will know exactly who to show ads to leading to stronger ROI and overall performance.

2) Reviewing Past Performance

The complexity of modern digital marketing means it’s no longer possible to simply repeat what worked last year. Increased competition, new ad formats and changes to platform policies mean that the tactics from last year aren’t guaranteed to drive the same results. While it’s no longer a case of simply re-enabling the same campaigns, the data can still provide valuable insights and a foundation to build this year’s peak period activity from.

Quality data analysis takes time and making space for this in Q3 will ensure that high quality, usable insights can be discovered in time for peak period. Information from the previous year can be layered with insights from 2023 to develop a customised, real time strategy that accounts for historical trends along with recent account performance to ensure the best chance of success.

3) Seeking Approval

The worst case scenario for a digital marketer is looking at their account at the peak of a sale only to find that campaigns and ads have been disapproved. Cue frantic adjustments to assets, ad copy and campaign settings followed by a nervous wait as activity is re-reviewed while revenue is lost with each passing minute.

One of the most effective and most underrated uses of Q3 is uploading and troubleshooting the campaigns, ad copy and assets to be used during the Q4 sales. Uploading these well ahead of time ensures that they’ll go through the review process with any disapprovals able to be flagged and fixed well ahead of the campaign start date. As an added bonus, the upload process itself ensures the team managing the campaigns will be very familiar with the structure and setup making optimisation simple.

In a perfect world, you’d have your campaigns ready to go a month before the sale. Realistically? Two weeks before is fine as long you’re on top of the account and clear on what needs fixing.

Q4 is stressful enough for marketers without running into unexpected issues. For guidance on how to plan for successful ecommerce performance and strategic advice, get in touch.

Extending Your Reach: Strategic Use Of Google Ads Sitelink Extensions

Over time, the definition of what constitutes an effective Google Ads account structure has significantly changed.

In the early days before widespread machine learning techniques, the focus was on account structures with tight keyword lists that could be manually optimised. The introduction of smart bidding strategies allowed marketers to loosen the reins, trusting Google to interpret a broader keyword list and automatically increase bids for searchers with high conversion intent. In recent years, the Hagakure Structure has become the preferred method for advertisers with a mix of Broad Match keywords, automatically generated ads & URL based targeting allowing Google’s machine learning techniques to do the heavy lifting.

While the structure of accounts may have changed significantly, the overall goal hasn’t - ensuring that searchers have the best experience possible when seeing an ad by including information that’s relevant, timely and related to their query. Along with ensuring the ad itself is as high quality as possible, Sitelink Extensions are an extremely useful element of any account that can significantly boost performance and the likelihood of a conversion. A well run account will strategically use sitelinks to highlight the most relevant aspects of a business for each search and in this week’s post we’ll look at a few examples of how these can be used for success.

1) Moving Searchers Down The Funnel

Whatever the business, sitelinks should be implemented across an account to allow searchers the opportunity to visit additional pages that are also relevant to their search. These can be implemented at the account level or applied to specific campaigns to show pages related to that keyword grouping.

When using sitelinks, the best approach is to think one level down the funnel from the keyword itself. Using Nike as an example, a user making a branded search sees sitelinks for the different product ranges that Nike has - Men’s, Women’s, Kids & Nike Training. This allows Nike to hedge their bets on the intent of the search, ensuring that a user can easily navigate to the category that’s right for them despite not knowing their gender, age or specific category interest.

At a branded search level, this is great. A user can easily navigate to the page that’s relevant to them and browse through the range. What about if they already have a clear idea of what they’re looking for beyond just searching the brand name?

Here, we can see how this strategy is applied for a higher intent search where the user is specifically searching for Men’s Running Shoes. Linking to the general Men’s page wouldn’t be appropriate here as it contains non-shoe products while the Women’s and Kids page is no use as the search is specific to Men. Instead, Nike has applied campaign level sitelinks to highlight shoe category pages such as Running Shoes along with links to the product pages for specific models such as the Vaporfly 3.

2) Increasing Ad Size

It sounds obvious, but it’s important to remember - using extensions increases the physical size of your ad on the results page. In the examples above, Nike’s sitelinks add an additional eight lines of text below their main ad, pushing the next highest competitor further down the results page and making them less visible to searchers. For mobile searches, this can often result in the next competitor completely disappearing from view, ensuring that the top ad is the only business visible to searchers.

In competitive spaces with high CPCs, physically pushing competitors off the page can make all the difference between a high performing account and one that’s struggling for conversions, particularly when other competitors also have well written ads and are using their own extensions.

Of course it’s important to have well written, relevant sitelinks and, all things being equal, an ad with high quality sitelinks will outperform one with poor versions. However, the benefits of implementing sitelinks to simply increase the size of your ad can’t be overstated and are another key reason to ensure these are running wherever possible.

3) Following Google’s Best Practices

Ask any marketer their thoughts on Google’s Account Optimisation Score and you’ll understand why there’s a healthy level of cynicism in the industry. The automated recommendations can range from somewhat useful to flat out dangerous for an account and the optimisation score percentage is almost entirely dependent on how many of these recommendations are enabled.

While the majority of the recommendations are open to interpretation, some of them are easy fixes that will help to improve optimisation score and lead to higher account performance. One that continually comes up is the recommendation to implement sitelinks and other extension types within an account.

Google (along with other ad platforms), tends to reward advertisers who follow best practice in their accounts with lower CPCs and better long term account performance. Implementing extensions is a simple way to boost optimisation score, signalling to Google that an account is up to standard and providing users with an engaging, high quality ad experience. Along with improving optimisation score, these changes will also boost account performance leading to long term sustainable gains from a relatively low effort change.

While some recommendations should be taken with a grain of salt, implementing extensions isn’t one of them and should be a priority action when the recommendation comes up - if it hasn’t been already done.

For strategic, sustainable Google Ads optimisation & management, get in touch.

Quiet Time: Strategic Optimisation During Low Activity Periods

When we think of a career in digital marketing there’s a tendency to imagine an account manager who’s rushed off their feet trying to complete a hundred tasks at once. With new campaign builds, optimisation of existing activity, building out reports and getting ready for the next promotion, having space to breathe is a precious commodity.

However, every now and then you’ll find yourself in a situation where all your tasks have been completed, the campaigns are ticking along nicely and, just for a second, there’s no looming crisis on the horizon. It’s a rare occurrence and it’s definitely not going to last forever but when that time does come around it presents an opportunity to work in a way that’s not possible during day to day management.

This week, we’ll look at a few ways this downtime can be used to effectively drive performance by discovering opportunities and insights that can be missed during routine optimisation.

1) Relax & Recharge

The fact is, if you weren’t doing a good job at managing the account you wouldn’t have this downtime in the first place. Account performance is driven by consistent, high quality management and a well run account is a direct reflection of the quality of the person running it.

Digital marketing can be a high stress career and it’s important to recognise this during periods of less activity. Making space to relax and give the brain a chance to recharge is an excellent use of this time as it helps to rebuild mental energy for the next busy period which is always just around the corner. Whether it’s taking a walk or scaling back optimisation to focus on the basics for a few days, a temporary reduction in stress will help ensure that the quality of work remains consistent whatever the account throws at you. Often, you’ll find that you’ve been subconsciously thinking about problems and potential solutions over this period which will mean you come back with fresh ideas as activity begins to ramp up.

2) Develop Deeper Business Context

During day to day optimisation, managers can be so wrapped up in campaign performance that they forget to see the bigger picture. Campaign data is useful, but the business being advertised has a huge amount of additional information that can be used to build more effective marketing strategies for long term performance.

During periods of less activity, speaking directly to your client contacts about the state of the business, other marketing activity that’s live and long term strategic focuses is a very effective way to use time. Not only will these conversations give valuable information that will help to drive account performance forward, they’re also a useful way to build deeper relationships and create trust between businesses and the people running their marketing activity.

3) Lower Priority Optimisations

Any account manager will be able to give you a list of tasks they’d love to take a look at on their account, if only they had the time. These tasks aren’t critical to account performance but they’d drive incremental gains and ensure that all activity is running according to best practice.

These lower priority optimisation tasks can cover things like negative keyword list reviews, analysis of audiences applied to the account, demographic & time segmentation data and even a strategic review of ad copy that’s been continually pushed back as more urgent tasks take priority.

Focusing on a few of these “nice to have” optimisation tasks is an excellent use of downtime when all the crucial optimisations have been taken care of. Taking the time to properly review these areas leads to the discovery of opportunities for optimisation and helps to ensure the long term stability of the account.

Prioritisation will always be a crucial part of managing an account and during periods of high activity it’s understandable that some things will be forced to take a back seat. Noting areas that could be improved is a great start so that when those quiet periods do come around there’s already a list of potential tasks in place to ensure that the period is spent productively and effectively. Along with a focus on the account, it’s also important for managers to focus on themselves and ensure these periods are used to relax and recharge, ready for the next busy period.

For world class digital marketing strategies during peak & quiet periods, get in touch.

Trust Me Bro: Google's Ads Transparency Centre & Its Marketing Applications

Anyone working in marketing would have noticed the increased push towards ad transparency and user verification over the past 18 months. Platforms are actively working to build a more informative, transparent ad offering for both end customers and the advertisers themselves.

One aspect of this is account verification, with advertisers now required to provide information about their business & the individuals who’ll be running the ads in order to ensure that any activity is safe, well run and set up according to best practices.

On the other side, users seeing ads are now able to get more information about the business that’s doing the advertising along with information about why they’re being targeted and examples of other ads that are in market at the same time.

For users, this is great. It’s building digital literacy as information about ad targeting and how it works becomes readily available while also creating trust as users can easily discover who is running an ad and where a click will take them.

What’s not so obvious is the benefit for advertisers. For smart marketers, the increase in available information opens up opportunities that weren’t there previously to discover new trends, deep dive into competitor tactics and understand the landscape in a way that wasn’t possible just a few years prior. This week, we’ll look at Google’s Ad Transparency Centre to understand how marketers can use this to their advantage.

1) Ad Copy Research

Writing ads is tough, particularly when you’re operating in a crowded market alongside global brands. With so many ways to promote your products, how can you be sure that your offer is as compelling as your competitors?

By entering the name of key competitors in the Ads Transparency Centre search bar, you’ll see all the ads that they’re running across Google properties. By reviewing the messaging your competitors are using, you’ll be able to tell if your own copy is up to scratch or if it needs to be updated. This doesn’t mean directly copying messaging but rather taking inspiration from the way that offers and brand messages are phrased to create your own compelling ads.

After all, global brands are likely using professional marketers to write their ads, so why not use some of that knowledge for free when creating your own?

2) Ad Format Research

At the start of a new campaign, one of the most important tasks is identifying the mix of different channels to use and how budget should be weighted between them. When you’re working on a global brand you’ll have the budget to push Search, Shopping, Display & Youtube all at the same time. Unfortunately, smaller advertisers don’t have this luxury and have to make choices between formats based on the expected return from each. Once again, the Ads Transparency Centre can help with this.

By looking up specific competitors, you’ll be able to see not only the messaging that they’re using, but also the different ad formats at play. Through entering a number of competitors as part of your research, you’ll understand the general marketing mix being used and be able to identify coverage gaps and areas of opportunity for your own campaigns.

If your research reveals that none of your competitors are using Google Display it could mean two things. Either it’s an underutilised channel that presents a strong opportunity for cheap traffic & performance gains, or they’ve all tried it in the past and it just doesn’t work for the product on offer. Like any other tool, the information from the Ads Transparency Centre needs to be analysed and looked at as part of marketing planning rather than being the only factor in where budget is allocated.

3) Market Research

Your campaigns are up and running, great! In fact, they’re running so well that you want to expand the reach of the campaigns to additional countries. It’s an exciting opportunity but one that presents new challenges & luckily the Ads Transparency Centre can help with this too.

In the same way that you can filter for ad formats, you can also filter by country to see the specific markets where businesses are running ads to help understand the ad landscape in that area and avoid wasting budget.

As an example, you have a UK based client who’s looking at launching ads in several European countries. The process here would be to review the list of competitors, filtering by each country to understand where the majority of budget is going. If all goes well, you’ll identify an underserved market, allowing you to launch your ads there and gain market share in the absence of competition.

There are a few things to watch out for here.

First, the Ads Transparency Centre lists businesses by their verified location and some businesses may have country-specific verification to run ads in different regions. In the example below, Adidas has many different verified locations for individual countries so it’s important to check you’re looking at the right location before doing country specific analysis.

Secondly, just because competitors aren’t running ads in a location doesn’t mean they won’t do so in the future. When a new competitor appears with a goal of gaining market share, major brands are likely to start advertising as well in order to maintain visibility. It’s important to communicate this as part of competitor gap analysis so that everyone involved understands that the landscape may change over time.

Increased verification and ad transparency is only a good thing for the digital marketing landscape and it shows no signs of slowing down. Understanding how to use these tools from a marketing perspective will give advertisers an edge on the competition and lead to improved performance across their accounts, whatever the industry.

For quality digital marketing advice & analysis, get in touch.

The New Gold Rush: AI & Parallels To The Dotcom Boom

With the digital space increasingly monopolised by a small number of companies it’s easy to forget that it wasn’t always this way. Not so long ago, the internet was far more decentralised with a wide array of providers all vying for market share as millions of new users dialled up to the internet for the first time.

Excite, Hotbot, WebCrawler, Ask Jeeves, Dogpile, AltaVista, Lycos, Infoseek, Netscape & MetaCrawler. At one point these were all major names in the search engine space, now you’d be hard pressed to find anyone who even remembers they existed. What happened? Google invested in user experience, prioritising page quality, number of links & ad relevance in order to become the world’s most used search engine with 90% of global search share in 2022 despite stiff competition from Bing.

Search engine technology saw a wide playing field eventually narrow to contain only a few dominant competitors. Market preferences, smart use of technology and a deep understanding of user needs meant that Google was able to rise to the top of a crowded field and become the main name in search. This wasn’t just limited to search engines either with web browsers, ecommerce businesses and streaming services all seeing a competitive landscape eventually come to be monopolised by just a few winning companies.

Looking at the current AI landscape, it’s hard not to draw parallels between the two time periods. Rapid technological expansion and user uptake couple with a vast number of companies all vying to be the leader in their field is setting up the digital space for another gold rush followed by a significant contraction as the clear winners emerge. With this in mind, how can marketers set themselves up for success with AI in a turbulent, uncertain period?

1) Embrace Change & Uncertainty

Accepting the unknown is tough, but in digital marketing it’s almost always a useful strategy. When no one knows what the landscape will look like in six months, choosing the best solution in the current moment is a winning strategy. Smart marketers will embrace new AI technologies and be willing to experiment with new platforms and marketing strategies that incorporate AI.

While it’s true that a particular AI tool may not be around in a year’s time as competitors come and go, using that tool to its full capacity while it’s available will ensure that your campaigns have a competitive edge & you stay one step ahead of the competition.

2) Test & Learn

A particular tool might not be around in a year’s time, but the learnings and experience that you’ve gained from it will be. Whatever AI tool you’re using, take note of the features you like and the things that could be improved.

As an example, there are currently dozens of AI tools that automatically join meetings, take notes and provide a summary of actions listed by the people responsible. They all achieve this in slightly different ways so test several and work out the one that’s best for you. If your preferred tool doesn’t end up making it through the competitive contraction, you’ll still have a clear idea of the features to look out for in the next iteration of your AI strategy. Along with looking at features you like, work out what’s missing from your favourite tool. When it’s time to pick a new one, you’ll be clear on what additional features to look out for.

3) Transparency & Communication

When working with a new client, open and transparent communication is always a winning strategy. No one knows what the AI landscape will look like in a year’s time, let alone further down the road, so being open about the potential for change and the necessity of an evolving AI strategy is crucial for a positive client relationship.

When recommending a specific AI tool, or a general AI based approach, be clear about the potential for change and the possibility that tool won’t be around forever. Clients will appreciate the honesty & be more willing to adopt an iterative approach as new opportunities emerge. Expertise isn’t about predicting the future, it’s about being open to change and making the best possible decisions based on the currently available information.

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B2B Search Strategy: Using LinkedIn Targeting For Microsoft Search Ads

B2B marketing is tough, whatever the platform. High competition levels, long purchase cycles, expensive service offerings & a narrow set of potential keywords makes generating conversions much more difficult than lower funnel B2C campaigns targeted directly at individuals.

Paid Search best practices still apply, but there’s a very different way of thinking and performing optimisation that needs to be understood in order to drive the best possible results from a B2B focused account. Taking a patient, long term approach will lead to long term success but, in the meantime, there’s an effective tactic that can be used to boost performance and ensure ads are shown to relevant, highly engaged users.

Microsoft has made significant progress in the past few years with heavy investment in Microsoft Ads (formerly Bing Ads) starting to pay off. Previously seen as a clone of Google Ads and a Paid Search afterthought, Microsoft Ads now leverages information from other Microsoft owned platforms to improve campaign targeting and efficiency. One of the most exciting developments first emerged in 2018 and has since been improved on to make it one of the best tactics to use for B2B Paid Search - leveraging LinkedIn’s targeting for Microsoft Ads campaigns.

When setting up a campaign in Microsoft Ads, or optimising an existing campaign, advertisers have the ability to create audiences based on a specific company, industry or job function. Just like any other audience, this can then ben added to a campaign or ad group to generate specific data to assist with optimisation. Building out audiences based on the specific job function of your target user means that keywords and messaging can be continually optimised based on actual performance data to ensure that results continue to improve and campaigns are reaching the most relevant users possible.

To find this targeting option, navigate to the Settings tab of a specific Campaign or Ad Group. Once there, you’ll find Company, Industry & Job Function as options in the Campaign Targets section. Selecting any or all of these options will create a new targeting block at the bottom of the section where specific information can be entered for each category. The usual rules of audience research apply here - look at other data sources to determine the most relevant targeting options and apply them to your search campaigns for the best chance of success.

As with all Paid Search tactics, there are a few things to look out for. Most importantly, this targeting option works as an audience signal, rather than as a specific audience by itself. That means that ads may still show to users who aren’t working at a company or in a role that you’ve specified. However, Microsoft Ads will take this targeting into account and, over time, should begin to prioritise impressions towards users who fit into the LinkedIn targeting criteria. In the meantime, you’ll be able to filter data specific to these users, allowing you to make smarter manual optimisation decisions while the automatic optimisation gets up to speed.

There are also some geographic restrictions at play here. While this targeting option can be implemented by marketers located anywhere in the world, for now it’s only available in campaigns targeted to the US, the UK, Canada, Australia, France & Germany. Over time this is likely to be expanded out but it’s a point worth keeping in mind when planning any new campaign activity for advertisers located outside these countries.

Despite being available since 2018, LinkedIn targeting remains a very underutilised and unappreciated benefit of Microsoft Ads. When used correctly it’s a powerful tool for any B2B marketers looking to get the edge on their competitors and, as Microsoft Ads grows in popularity, should be built into every B2B Paid Search strategy. As incremental tactics go it’s hard to beat and is further evidence of the work that Microsoft is doing to break Google’s grip on the Paid Search landscape.

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Keeping It Simple: Why Maximise Conversions Is Always A Good Choice

When setting up a new Google Ads campaign, one of the most important decisions is choosing the right bid strategy to maximise the chances of success. From Target CPA & Target ROAS through to no bid strategy at all via Manual CPC, there’s a wide range of options to choose from. However, for a new campaign with no previous data to learn from, Maximise Conversions stands alone as the best choice to get the ball rolling. What makes it so useful?

1) Simplicity

Maximise Conversions does what it says on the tin - it tries to generate the most conversions possible from a given daily budget. With this bid strategy, you don't need to have any specific knowledge of your Target CPA or ROAS. Instead, Google will automatically adjust your bids to get the most conversions possible within an assigned budget. This makes it an excellent choice for new advertisers who do not have enough information to set a specific CPA or ROAS goal and would be risking underperformance by assigning one so early in the campaign.

No bid strategy is truly “set it and forget it”, but Maximise Conversions simplicity makes it an excellent choice for advertisers in the early stages of a new campaign or account who are juggling any number of tasks as things get up to speed.

2) Flexibility

Of all the options out there, Maximise Conversions is one of the most flexible bid strategies available to advertisers. It works with all conversion types and optimises based on a range of factors including ad placement, time of day, and audience. Given that it’s not restricted to value-based conversions like Target ROAS, this means that Maximse Conversions is an effective bid strategy for nearly any campaign looking to generate strong early performance.

3) Crossover With Other Strategies

Because Maximise Conversions works to get as many conversions as possible within a given budget, there’s already significant crossover with the Target CPA & Target ROAS strategies. By definition, achieving as many conversions as possible within your budget will give you the best possible CPA, so rather than artificially restricting a campaign with a CPA goal, why not let Maximise Conversions do the work for you?

Similarly, when all conversions are of a similar value, Maximise Conversions will drive ROAS just as effectively as a specific Target ROAS strategy. Of course, when conversion values can vary significantly there’s an argument for introducing Target ROAS, but early on in the lifetime of a campaign Maximise Conversions is almost always a better option.

There are any number of bid strategies to choose from when setting up a new Google Ads campaign and ongoing optimisation and management is just as important as making the right choice of strategy. Over time, more specific bid strategies will almost always give campaigns an edge over their competitors, but in the early days Maximise Conversions is a great choise. It’s simple, flexible, and will provide valuable data for future campaigns.

For more information on bid strategies and simple, effective digital marketing approaches, get in touch.

Broad Match: Proceed With Caution

Get talking to any experienced digital marketer and you’ll notice they all have one thing in common.

Whatever platform, industry or business they work in, every single one will have developed a healthy level of cynicism over the course of their career. It makes sense - constantly adjusting activity based on unannounced platform changes, market trends, and the motivations of the major advertising platforms would create doubts for even the most optimistic marketer.

In Paid Search, one trend has stood out from the pack as a focus for skepticism over the past year. That trend? The heavy push across multiple advertising platforms towards the use of Broad Match keywords as a solution for all your account problems. You’d be hard-pressed to find a marketer who’s unwaveringly enthusiastic about Broad Match given some of the historical challenges with this keyword type and the most recent push has been met with all the cynicism that would be expected from experienced marketers.

So where is this skepticism coming from? Let’s look at some of the key challenges Broad Match creates.

1) Broad Means Broad

Broad Match does what it says on the tin. Advertising platforms will take a Broad Match keyword and apply it to searches that it considers related to that keyword. The search may contain some of the actual words in the keyword, it may contain synonyms for those words, and in some cases, it may match to something completely unrelated. For example, if you're targeting the keyword "running shoes" with broad match, an ad could appear for searches like "tennis shoes" or "workout gear", which are only somewhat related to the product on offer.

While the relevance of clicks will improve over time as the platform learns which search terms to match to, many accounts don’t have the budget to spare on irrelevant clicks while the algorithm learns. This is particularly challenging for accounts with a smaller budget as it’s a chicken and egg scenario - more data means the algorithm can learn faster, but generating more data means spending more budget on irrelevant search terms early on.

2) Lack Of Transparency

Irrelevant search terms are frustrating, but smart use of negative keywords can help to minimize the impact these have on an account, right? Well, not quite.

Google Ads now collates up to 50% of clicks into a single line on the search term report called “Filtered Search Terms” with no option to expand this to see the individual search terms driving spend. While the announcement of this change mentioned that it would only consist of search terms without significant data, even one irrelevant click is too many and marketers are rightly skeptical of how quality optimization can be done without full access to search term data.

Given the choice between a well-built out Exact Match keyword list where marketers know exactly what terms users are visiting the site from compared to optimizing based on 50% of Broad Match traffic volume, it makes sense that uptake has been lower than anticipated.

3) Questioning Motivations

The relationship between marketers and advertising platforms has been increasingly fractured in recent years, with marketers feeling the platforms are increasingly pushing automation and giving recommendations based on increasing spend rather than increasing performance.

The recommendations tab in Google Ads often contains strange suggestions that even at a glance would obviously decrease performance while pushing up spend. These automatic suggestions, combined with recommendations from Google’s own reps that don’t align with an account’s goals, have created a lack of trust between marketers and platforms. As one marketer pointed out, if widespread adoption of recommendations leads to an average monthly increase in account spend of $20, when multiplied by the total number of Paid Search accounts that’s a significant increase in monthly revenue for the advertising platforms.

So, what’s the solution? The key idea here is trust and mutual information sharing. Marketers are rightly skeptical of the push towards Broad Match and the impact it might have on their accounts. After all, we all want to run the best activity possible for our clients.

If the platforms want to encourage adoption of this tactic, they need to make concessions such as giving marketers full access to the search term report rather than hiding up to 50% of information. Automatic recommendations need to be continually improved with a focus on account performance rather than spend. Finally, reps should acknowledge the historical reasons marketers have for hesitation about Broad Match and address these concerns specifically, rather than continually pushing a product without room for conversation - that’s what true sales is about.

For more information on Broad Match & how to run a well optimised account, get in touch.