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.