Custom Segments: Google's Most Underrated Targeting Option

“I trust Google’s default audiences to reach the most relevant users for my campaigns while minimising wasted spend.” - No one, ever.

In a perfect world, we would all be running accounts that fit neatly into Google’s default audiences. Targeting would be as simple as selecting the relevant audience, applying it to the campaigns and then watching the conversions roll in. Unfortunately for many marketers, while Google’s default audiences are useful, the categories are too broad to ensure that they’ll only contain the users who are most relevant to their specific business.

So what if there was a better way? Enter, Custom Segments.

One of the most underutilised and underrated targeting options available in Google Ads, Custom Segments allow marketers to create their own Interest & In-Market Audiences based on chosen search terms and even create audiences of users who browse competitor websites. These can then be applied to campaigns to create highly relevant audiences and drive better performance across an account.

To find the Custom Segments tab, select Tools and Settings in the top menu in the Google Ads interface, followed by Audience Manager and Custom Segments.

So how does it work?

Search Term Audiences

Custom Segments allow marketers to build their own audiences based off specific search terms they select. Whatever the industry, building an audience around customised search terms will help place ads in front of the most relevant users possible and drive more conversions. What’s more effective for a high end casual clothing brand - Google’s default Men’s Clothing Interest audience, or a custom segment built using search terms specific to the style, type and material of clothes on offer?

Even better, you only need to add a single search term to get started before Google will provide additional suggestions based off related searches for that term. While your own audience research is always useful, Google’s suggestions help to fill any potential gaps in coverage based off other searches they know users are likely to make.

Website Audiences

Along with search term audiences, Custom Segments also give the option of entering URLs potential customers might be browsing. Building this audience allows campaigns to be restricted to users who have visited those, or similar, URLs. As always, the definition of “similar” is slightly vague but 10-15 URLs will provide a strong base for Google to build a user profile from and will essentially allow marketers run a remarketing campaign for their product to users who have visited competitor’s sites.

Competitor analysis is a routine part of any account, so there should already be a list of competitor URLs available to add into this field. However, if that data is missing, the Auction Insights report is a great tool to identify competitors URLs for upload into a custom segment. Splitting the Auction Insights report by product type is an even better idea as it will allow you to build Custom Segments with competitors specific to each area, further increasing the relevance of targeting and increasing the likelihood of success.

Custom Segments are an incredibly useful tool and their effectiveness, coupled with their simplicity of setup, makes including them in any account a simple decision. Whether it’s highly specific In-Market audiences or a special offer running to potential customers who’ve visited competitor’s sites, there’s always a place for this targeting option in a well run account.

For more information and to learn how to reach high quality customers, get in touch.

Setting Priorities: Optimising A Low Budget Account

Over the course of a career, you’ll be fortunate enough to work on accounts across a variety of industries, platforms and regions. Each presents their own challenges and opportunities but one thing that stands out is the complexity of an account doesn’t necessarily scale with spend. In fact, accounts with smaller budgets can sometimes present the biggest challenge as there isn’t scope to run all the tests and campaigns you’d be able to with a larger spend.

This week, we’ll be taking a look at the optimisation of low budget accounts and how to set priorities effectively to drive the best results possible with a limited overall spend.

1) Identify Your Core Conversion Metric

Most accounts will have a number of conversion points they’re working towards with some, like sales, leads & revenue, focused on direct performance while other conversions are focused on brand goals like overall visibility. On a larger account, this isn’t a problem as there’s scope to optimise towards many different goals simultaneously. For smaller accounts this presents much more of a challenge as optimising towards many different conversions will spread budget too thin and lead to poor performance across all metrics.

Luckily, there’s a simple solution. When taking on a new account with a limited spend, identify the primary conversion and build the account around that metric. If it’s an ecommerce account, visibility isn’t as important as sales & revenue while an event promotion account should entirely focus on registrations & bookings. That’s not to say that the secondary goals aren’t important and they should be factored into overall performance but with a limited budget it’s crucial to gear all activity around the most important metric.

2) Focus On A Single Key Area

Whatever the industry, most businesses have a number of different products or services to promote via paid ads. In an account with a large budget, marketers have the freedom to build out many different campaigns for each business area with distinct strategies and goals for each. With a lower budget, marketers don’t have the same freedom and need to be smart when allocating spend.

After identifying your core conversion metric, identify the business area that’s likely to help you reach that goal. For an ecommerce business, this might be a particular product line that consistently generates sales. For an event promotion, focus your efforts on driving registrations for the next event rather than trying to spread budget across many different events in the future.

Focusing on a single area will allow you to narrow down your attention and optimisation efforts for the best results. This attention will lead to increased performance resulting in more conversions and is a surefire way to increase the available budget as the account sees success.

3) Be Ruthless With Low Performers

On a large account, time is your friend. With monthly budgets in the tens or hundreds of thousands, you have time to let low performing campaigns and focus areas respond to optimisation. When you only have a few hundred for a particular area in a given month, you don’t have the same freedom.

Optimisation should always focus on low performing areas first with a mixture of tactical and strategic changes made to boost account performance. However, if you’re not seeing any uplift after a month, take the decision to pause that activity and reinvest into areas that are working. This allows you to double down on what’s working while making space to build a new plan for activity that hasn’t worked as expected.

4) Test, Learn, Repeat

With a limited budget, the importance of every click is magnified. Every piece of activity should have a structured testing and optimisation plan in place to quickly identify successful tactics which can then be implemented elsewhere in the account. While larger, more mature accounts can get away with month on month optimisation, small budget accounts should be optimised daily to ensure that all spend is actively being used to push the account towards the primary conversion goal.

Long term optimisation and planning is important too. Along with the daily optimisation to maximise performance against spend, ensure there’s a monthly and annual roadmap focused on account growth. As you narrow down the account to what works, you don’t want to left without a plan for how to continue pushing the account forward in the future.

Small budget accounts are challenging, but not impossible. In order to achieve the best results, marketers need to be skilled at tactical & strategic thinking while also having the courage to quickly make decisions when things aren’t going to plan. Speed is essential for account performance as one quiet week can disrupt an entire quarter’s results and any optimisation should be focused around this way of thinking.

Whatever your budget, Scope Digital can assist with driving the best results possible. For more information, get in touch.

Balancing Visibility & Spend: Why 100% Coverage Isn't Always The Goal

In theory, having your ads appearing 100% the time and being the most prominent brand in the space sounds great. You’re visible to everyone who wants your services, competitors are being pushed down the search results page and you’re getting more conversions every week.

The question is, can you have too much of a good thing?

While there are major benefits to such comprehensive coverage there are also significant drawbacks and challenges that come with it. For every percentage point of visibility gained, CPC & spend dramatically increases as your campaigns work harder to dominate the market. There are a few global brands that can absorb this as just another line on the budget sheet but for everyday advertisers those costs can become unmanageable.

In this week’s post, we’ll look at some situations where 100% coverage is appropriate along with strategies to more efficiently work towards visibility when budgets are limited.

1) Branded Campaigns

For most advertisers, it makes sense to target 100% Impression Share on their own branded keywords. Unless your business name is a common word or shares a name with a much larger brand, working towards 100% Impression Share is usually the best approach. With CPCs so low for branded terms & high expected CTRs & conversion rates, even a large volume of branded traffic can make up a small fraction of total marketing spend.

Despite the relevance of brand campaigns working in your favour, there are still tactics that can be employed to reduce costs. Smart use of Exact Match & negative keywords will ensure that branded traffic is as relevant as possible while optimising towards Google’s recommendations will drive down CPC even further.

2) High Intent, Low Volume Keywords

Maximising visibility on generic keywords can quickly become expensive, even with the best optimisation possible happening within the campaigns. For many generic terms search volume is simply too high for advertisers to comfortably appear for all searches without quickly blowing through their budget.

Rather than competing for space on these terms, a visibility strategy focused on very specific high intent keywords can ensure that visibility is maximised along with the chances of a successful conversion. Sure, CPC will be higher for more specific keywords, but this is easily balanced out by the much lower search volume, leading to strong visibility on the most effective keywords for your goals.

3) Identifying The Point Of Efficiency

As with all marketing challenges, a test and learn strategy is your best friend when understanding how far to push visibility before it pushes back. Often, the increase in spend will outpace any increase in performance above 90% Impression Share and the smartest move is to pull back to the last point where the campaigns were performing to an acceptable level.

Taking a phased approach is the simplest path to success with steady, measured increases to visibility each week while keeping a close eye on your key performance metrics. Change won’t happen overnight and there will be a noticeable downward trend in efficiency as Impression Share and spend rises. By plotting this data over time, you’ll be able to identify the tipping point between visibility and performance and set targets to ensure campaigns are operating at peak efficiency.

4) Assign Audiences

Sometimes 100% visibility doesn’t mean reaching absolutely everyone. Effective use of remarketing and interest audiences can decrease the total pool of available impressions while also increasing relevance, leading to reduced costs and higher quality traffic through to your site.

This is particularly true for generic keywords that may have multiple meanings and intentions for any given search. Assigning audiences to your campaigns will ensure that keywords are only showing to users who have a demonstrated interest in your service, allowing you to narrow down your focus to a pool of users a fraction of the original size while driving better results for your campaigns. The most important thing here is remembering to set those audiences to targeting rather than observation to ensure you get the most out of this strategy.

For an ambitious business, more visibility is always a positive. The goal is to get that visibility in a way that’s efficient, cost effective and moves the business towards their goals. Whether it’s adjusting keyword types, doing data analysis to understand efficiency points or focusing in on audience targeting, thinking about maximum visibility in a different way is sure to lead to better results.

For effective & efficient digital marketing advice, get in touch.

Why Can't I See My Ad? Bridging the Knowledge Gap Between Agency & Client

Why can’t I see my ad when I search for it?

Why aren’t my ads always at the top of the results page?

What is a good CPC?

Over the course of a digital marketing career, we’ve all seen these questions and others like them. Seemingly simple requests for information with complex answers that require information from multiple sources to answer correctly and with full detail.

What’s interesting about these questions is they’re the most visible layer of a wider problem that, if not addressed correctly, can lead to challenges and friction down the line. That problem - the knowledge gap between a client and the agency or freelancer that they’ve hired to run their activity. How can someone with years of experience and a deep understanding of their marketing platform communicate complex, technical information to a contact who only has surface level knowledge?

1) Give Clear, Concise Definitions

Like any industry, digital marketing has its own language that takes years to become fluent in. Without even realising it, every day marketers hold conversations with acronyms, abbreviations and technical terms that are unintelligible to someone outside the industry. Without understanding the language being used, how can two people with vastly different knowledge levels effectively communicate and work together?

Luckily, every platform provides resources that give clear, easy to understand definitions of commonly used terms. Meta & Google have comprehensive glossaries that are useful to refer to & ensure that everyone in the conversation understands what’s being discussed and how it relates to the point at hand.

2) Keep It Personal

Along with working on these platforms, we all use them in our day to day lives. Linking the conversation topic to a user’s personal experience helps create a level of understanding not possible from purely theoretical discussion.

Take remarketing for example. Someone with a basic knowledge of digital marketing may not understand cookies, audience creation and a purchase funnel, but everyone understands what you mean when you refer to “those ads that follow you around the internet”. Linking a tactic or strategy to your client’s own experience will help bridge the knowledge gap and get to the core of the conversation.

Similarly, when you’re discussing technical conversion tracking and lookback windows, the details can get lost in translation. Instead of going into specifics, ask your client about the last purchase they made online and the journey they took to get there. Reflecting on their personal experience of researching a product, returning to the site at different times and on different devices before finally completing the purchase will help them conceptualise the conversation in a way that technical detail can’t.

3) Ask Your Own Questions

For someone with a basic knowledge of digital marketing, sometimes even knowing what question to ask is a challenge in itself. Taking a step back and asking for more detail can ensure that you give the most useful answer possible.

If a client isn’t seeing their ad when they search, you need more detail on how they were looking for it. Maybe there’s campaign scheduling in place that meant it wasn’t live at the time of the search. Their office IP Address could have been excluded to ensure that budget wasn’t spent on accidental impressions and clicks. They could even have made a search on a keyword that you’ve decided not to use in the account.

Whatever the question, getting more detail will allow you to get down to the root of the issue and help your client deepen their digital knowledge. The role of the account manager is increasingly focused on strategy & education so having a client who understands the input that goes into a successful strategy will help set any account up for success.

Like any relationship, communication is key to a strong & successful marketing partnership. Recognising the knowledge gap and actively working to reduce it through smart, simple communication helps to give your account the edge over your competitors by ensuring marketing expertise and business knowledge is shared as effectively as possible.

For clear, transparent marketing guidance, get in touch.

Garbage In, Garbage Out: Working With AI To Write Effective Ad Copy

At this stage, nearly everyone has heard of OpenAI’s ChatGPT platform. Thousands of articles have been written on the topic, predicting everything from mass layoffs as AI makes human creativity obsolete through to ChatGPT and other tools like it being nothing more than a brief flash in the pan.

While I don’t think millions of people will be out of a job next week, the emergence of readily accessible & high quality AI generated creative is likely to have a huge impact on society and working culture moving forward. These tools are here to stay, but for now there’s still a major role for humans to play in guiding and overseeing the automation process to ensure the output is as effective as possible, whatever the end goal is.

So how can digital marketers use ChatGPT and tools like it to take their work to the next level? By remembering that output can only be as good as the input and if you put garbage in, you get garbage out.

Let’s look at an example.

Here, we’ve asked ChatGPT to write us an ad on the Google Ads platform. The input is very top level, all we’ve told the tool is the character limits for the ad, that it’s a retail business and their main product is athletic shoes. So what did we get?

As ads go, it’s OK. We’re within the character limits (assuming two description lines for 180 characters total), it’s calling out athletic shoes and has a decent CTA. I think we can do better though.

What if we gave more information about our target audience? How would it change if we let ChatGPT know that these shoes are made for men in their 30’s who have a goal of running their first marathon?

Now we’re getting somewhere. We’ve identified our target customer’s main goal and are calling that out both in the headline & in the description line. There’s still some improvements that we can make, for example mentioning that they’re men’s shoes, but a shopper seeing this ad will feel that it’s much more tailored to their specific goals.

We’re still not done though, at any given time there’s plenty of people training for a marathon. What other information can we give to create an automated ad that will set us apart from the other competitors in the search results?

After talking to customers, we know that a lot of new runners struggle with injuries as they build up to the marathon distance and it’s a major concern for them. What if we include that in the input?

Compared to the first ad, the difference is night and day. With just a few additional pieces of information we’ve gone from simply saying that we have athletic shoes for sale all the way to calling out how these shoes will solve a specific problem for a customer looking to reach a specific goal. The system itself didn’t change, the only difference was the quantity and quality of the input that we gave in order to create the ad.

ChatGPT has done 90% of the work here and now a human can step in to provide the final touches. We’ve already discussed making tweaks to specify that they’re men’s shoes and we can also use our own contextual knowledge to choose the best URL to send the page to along with the most relevant related products to associate with the ad.

Even with something as basic as athletic shoes, the difference in quality between a low input & high input automated ad is huge. As product complexity grows along with the value of a successful sale, ensuring input is of the highest quality possible becomes absolutely crucial to success. Without a human working to guide the process, any automatically generated ad will be lost among dozens of others in the search results.

Understanding this helps us understand the future of digital marketing and the ongoing shift from tactical to strategic thinking. Why spend time manually writing ads, when you can spend time building out the best customer profiles possible? Leave the tedious work to the machines and use human intelligence & creativity to design the process.

For automated creative, there’s ChatGPT, for everything else there’s Scope Digital. Get in touch.

Long Term Management Or Short Term Projects? Picking Your Freelance Style

Moving away from permanent roles into freelance digital marketing is an exciting time. You’ve spent years at agencies or in-house learning the ropes and understanding what goes into making an account successful. With those skills, you’re ready to branch out with your own business, taking on your own clients and working in the way that you want to.

Of course, it’s never as easy as it sounds. Shifting to a freelance working style brings up all sorts of new challenges to navigate and obstacles to overcome. One of these is defining your working style and whether you want to focus on taking long term clients where you’re responsible for ongoing optimisation and management, or if you’d prefer to base your business around short term projects where you audit, set up and troubleshoot existing accounts.

Below, we’ll take a look the pros and cons of each approach.

Short Term Projects

Project work is a great way to build up a reputation as a solid, dependable freelancer. Taking on projects exposes you to a variety of different industries & challenges while also introducing you to new contacts with every piece of work. Reputation is everything and building up a strong contact list will help to bring in future projects as the clients you’ve helped refer you to other business owners inside or outside their industry.

For many marketers, a new challenge is one of the most exciting parts of the industry. By its nature, project work will always present you with a new challenge and an opportunity to test new tactics or apply lessons from previous work. There’s nothing better than seeing your recommendations driving a huge performance uplift and each new project gives you the chance to do this.

Of course, it’s not all upsides with project work. The most obvious challenge freelancers face here is creating a pipeline of leads large enough to sustain their income. A lack of projects for even a month or two is enough to create cashflow issues so freelancers need to allocate time to marketing their own business & ensuring that leads continue to come in.

Another problem you can face with project work is pricing & the perception of value. As marketers, we understand that a few smart decisions can have an outsize impact on performance, but a business owner who’s not as familiar with digital marketing may struggle to see this potential from a proposal alone. With sites like Upwork & Fiverr allowing business owners to hire skilled marketers for low rates, it’s crucial to spend time working out how to define & communicate the value that only you can provide.

Long Term Management

On the other side of the coin, there’s the option to build your business around long term account management where you’ll be responsible for setting up, running and reporting on your client’s digital activity.

A key benefit to this style of work is the increased security it gives you. Long term account management means that you’ll be able to plan how much revenue you’ll have coming in each month and identify when it’s time to scale up. In the event a client gives notice, you’ll have at least a month to generate new leads or upsell existing clients to maintain revenue, compared to project work which is over very quickly.

Along with the increased security, long term management gives you the satisfaction of seeing your recommendations in action and the performance uplift they can achieve. Project work is often focused around auditing and troubleshooting, so it’s easy to miss the chance to see your hard work in action.

However, with the positives come the downsides of this style of work. While you have increased security in terms of monthly revenue, a client leaving at the wrong time can change the short term outlook of your business very quickly. Lead generation & conversion can be more difficult for long term projects so you’ll have to quickly find the time to move back into marketing mode for your own business in order to secure new work.

Long term management can also create challenges as your clients succeed and grow their activity. More activity requires more management time and with multiple long term clients, you’ll have to prioritise to fit everything into your day. As your business grows, your focus may shift to higher priority clients requiring you to restructure contracts with, or even let go of, smaller clients who aren’t generating enough revenue.

For most freelancers, you’ll start out with a mix of work types and naturally gravitate towards one. Whatever style you pick, the key is to identify your niche and your main selling points so you can effectively and efficiently win new business. With so many businesses out there looking for digital guidance, becoming an expert in your field is the best path to success.

For long term management or short term project assistance, get in touch.

What's The Problem? Troubleshooting A Common PPC Issue

It’s happened to all of us - you log into your account to find that a campaign has stopped serving. Yesterday it was ticking along nicely and now, for some reason, it’s no longer working and you’re missing out on traffic and revenue. It’s a common problem faced by account managers and an equally common problem posed in job interviews. So what are your next steps?

1) Make Sure Everything Is Turned On

I know, you’ve been doing this job for years and managing millions of pounds in spend. I get it.

Even so, take five minutes to look through the account and make sure that all your campaigns, ad groups, keywords and ads are actually enabled. Things can slip through the cracks and every now and then a campaign that shouldn’t have been paused is switched off.

2) Check Your Bids & Budget

We’re all working towards a set budget and towards the end of the month things can become tight. Look at the account budget to make sure you haven’t exhausted the total monthly spend and your campaigns still have money available. In an ideal world, you’d be on top of your budgeting and would have flagged that you’re close to 100%, but the next best thing is to come to your client with a solution and a recommended amount to get things moving again.

Similarly, take a look at your bids. When you’re managing multiple campaigns on a tight budget sometimes bids can be lowered beneath the point where ads are actually able to serve. If things don’t look right, push up your bids or bid strategy targets to ensure they’re set at a level where your campaign can work effectively.

3) Ad & Keyword Disapprovals

Even on an account that’s been running for years, ads and keywords can occasionally be disapproved out of the blue for reasons that don’t make sense to anyone but the bot who automatically flagged them. Filter your keywords and ads by status to check for any disapprovals and send them through for manual review. If you have a dedicated account rep, even better! Send them an email asking for a priority review to ensure any impact is minimised.

4) Look At Your Automated Rules & Scheduling

Automated rules make account management much easier, but they can cause problems if they run when they shouldn’t. Take a look at the rules set up in your account to make sure nothing has been triggered incorrectly & remove or adjust them as needed to fix the problem.

Similarly, ad scheduling can cause problems if it’s applied incorrectly. Check the scheduling in the campaign settings to make sure that your campaign is running when it should be.

5) Check The Change History

Keeping track of all the changes made in an account is tough. The Change History is your friend here with a detailed list of every single change made in the account, when it was made and who made it. If you’ve looked through the options above and are still stuck, filter the change history to the specific campaign and see if you can identify anything in the past few days that might have led to the campaign stopping serving.

If you’re working as part of a team this is particularly helpful as you’ll be able to see any changes your colleagues might have made that you weren’t aware of.

6) Look Outside The Account

If you’ve looked through your account and nothing stands out to you, the problem might lie somewhere else. The best step here is to go to your client’s website and make sure that it’s active and hasn’t had any downtime overnight. A website going down will stop traffic from any campaigns pointed towards it and, while this should be flagged when you check ad disapprovals, you can never be too careful.

To make life easier, Google has created a 404 Checker Script that can automatically email you when any destination URLs lead to a 404 error, making it much easier to diagnose any problems.

7) Ask For Help

Run through all the steps above and still no closer to finding an answer? Ad revenue is the engine that drives all the major platforms and they have a vested interest in getting your campaign live again. Contact platform support with a detailed explanation of the problem, when it occurred and the steps you’ve taken to troubleshoot it and let them do the work for you. Often you’ll get a response within an hour outlining exactly what’s causing the problem and how to fix it.

With how complex digital campaigns can be, troubleshooting is just as much a part of campaign management as optimisation. When you spot a problem in your account, take a breath and then methodically work through any potential issues. Often it’s a quick fix to get your campaign performing like it should and there are plenty of support options available to you.

Need help with your ad account? Get in touch.

Specialist or Generalist? Building A Marketable Skillset

Would you rather know a lot about a little, or a little about a lot?

Why not both?

A career in digital marketing can be overwhelming with an increasing number of platforms available, all of which contain their own niche subjects that need to be understood in detail. To complicate things further, digital marketers are also expected to have a working knowledge of SEO, website optimisation and attribution in order to fully understand the impact of their role.

With so many options to choose from, is it a smarter career strategy to focus on building a broad knowledge base, or to become the expert in one specific area?

What if there was a way to get the best of both options? Let’s think long term to understand how that can work.

Think back to the first day of your digital marketing career. After meeting your team and getting set up, you started to learn about the different platforms that were being used. The following weeks and months were a blur of certifications, training and learning about the ways in which each platform was utilised. It’s easy to miss in the moment, but those early years are crucial for career development as exposure to different areas builds a strong knowledge base and the ability to apply information and lessons from a previous situation to new challenges.

Fast-forward a few years and you’re confidently managing smaller accounts across a variety of industries. Your time is split between Google Ads, Meta & a rotating cast of smaller platforms with quality results and strategies for each. The problem is, you’re ready to take the next step in your career but you don’t have the deep understanding of one platform required to manage accounts with spend in the hundreds of thousands or even millions per year.

So what do you do?

Over time, there will be one platform that stands out to you. It might align with your way of thinking, you might enjoy the specific challenges or you might even like a platform because you disagree with the way another one operates (Meta). Once you’ve identified that platform, you can dedicate more time to becoming a true expert with a deep understanding of every aspect that drives success.

As your expertise grows, you’ll be able to apply that deep knowledge to new clients and industries while marketing yourself as a platform specialist. Moving a level deeper, you can even market yourself as an expert within a particular niche on that platform. This deep knowledge allows you to work on larger accounts and build your own client base, using case studies as you go to prove your knowledge. At the same time, you’ll be able to draw on your early experience with other platforms to give good wider marketing advice and understand how your work complements other digital strategies within the same business.

Whatever platform you end up specialising in, don’t forget the lessons those early years will teach you. A lesson from a Google Display campaign five years ago might hold the key to driving performance for a TikTok campaign in 2023. Without broad experience early on, your deep knowledge of one niche isn’t as useful as it could be and as time goes on you’ll see the benefits of both general & specialist knowledge and how they work together to create well rounded marketers.

For specialist Google Search knowledge, or general digital marketing advice, get in touch.

What's Your Budget? How Spend Levels Change Your Approach To Marketing

One of the best things about a career in digital marketing is the range of clients you’re exposed to. Taking on a new client means getting up to speed with an unfamiliar industry, understanding business specific challenges and adjusting approach based on the available budget. In this week’s post, we’ll discuss different annual budgets and the challenges and opportunities that come with each.

£10,000 - £100,000 Annual Budget

In the earlier stages of a marketer’s career, a significant percentage of time will be spent on accounts with annual budgets up to £100,000. Working on these accounts is a great way to learn the fundamentals and marketers will often be working directly with senior decision makers in the business to drive the company forward.

One of the most exciting parts of working on accounts like these is the unlimited upwards potential. Most industries have a spend ceiling well in excess of £100,000, so there’s scale to continually grow an account and expand the digital strategy as results improve over time. Within this spend bracket, there’s a large number of businesses who are just beginning their digital marketing journey which presents an amazing opportunity to build from basic beginnings to a complex, mature digital strategy.

While the growth potential of this bracket is a major positive, the main challenge here comes in the form of prioritisation. With so many potential avenues to explore, marketers need to quickly identify the areas of opportunity with the best possible chance of success and focus on those to ensure that spend is being directed to the right areas. When a £1000 test equals 1% of the annual budget, the margin for error is much smaller!

Competition is also a major challenge here, particularly when a smaller business is competing against larger and more established brands. High competition levels can quickly eat up available spend so smart marketers will take this into account and adjust their approach to focus spend on niche areas with reduced competition to stretch budget further.

£100,000 - £1,000,000 Annual Budget

With more experience, marketers begin to be exposed to accounts within the second tier of annual spend. Peak monthly budgets of £50k - £100k are common here and the businesses spending this amount are often established brands in their industry. Higher spend levels increase the complexity of the account and while these can be managed by a single person, often there will be a small team working together to ensure both long term strategy and short term tactics are running smoothly.

This spend tier presents an exciting opportunity for a digital marketer as at this stage the account should be well built with consistent, strong performance. Having the fundamentals already in place means more time can be spent on experiments and testing that may not have been possible at a lower annual budget. While any proposed test should be well planned out with defined indicators of success, the increased available spend means there is a higher tolerance for risk than might have been previously possible at a lower spend level.

However, with this opportunity comes specific challenges, particularly in the form of further growth. The quick wins to move from Tier One to Tier Two have already been implemented, so marketers need to be more creative when identifying opportunities and proposing tests to push the account even further. At this spend level, businesses are often competing against the leading names in their industry who have strong brand recognition and high annual budgets so having the willingness and the ability to move quickly and decisively is crucial for success.

£1,000,000 - £5,000,000 Annual Budget

At this spend level, businesses tend to be industry leaders with a well established national presence. On both the marketing and the business side, there will be a team of people collaborating across a variety of channels to ensure a consistent, high performing marketing presence.

For many experienced digital marketers, this bracket is the sweet spot. An account is likely to be well built out with several years of data to draw learnings from, the brand is established to the point where distinct strategies can be created for new and existing customers while the higher budget level gives room for ambitious, well structured tests that may be too risky when spend is tighter.

Despite the opportunities, this bracket isn’t without challenges. Running activity for a well established brand can lead to complacency and it’s easy to fall into a habit of continuing to run what’s worked in the past rather than continually testing. When you’re competing against the other major brands in your space, continually optimising and trying fresh ideas is crucial to maintaining a competitive edge.

£5,000,000+ Annual Budget

At this level, brands are household names with continental or even global targeting. All the quick wins have been exhausted and account optimisation here is focused on long term, strategic gains with all digital activity closely aligned with global marketing objectives. Single day spends of £100,000+ aren’t uncommon during peak periods and there’s ample budget for any tests with a strong business case.

Accounts at this level often have multiple, distinct goals. Maintaining visibility as an industry leader is a primary concern with overall Impression Share a constant focus alongside the specific conversion goals for the account. ROI is closely monitored, backed by years of historical data from the account and detailed internal data from the business itself.

With such a high annual spend, working on a global account is an exciting opportunity for any digital marketer and an excellent career opportunity. However, accounts of this scale often come with a level of internal politics and processes you won’t see on smaller, more agile accounts. As these tend to be global brands, any activity often needs to implemented simultaneously across all global markets rather than at a local level. This can increase the turnaround time for any optimisation or tests, but you’ll also see a larger uplift once the change has been introduced.

Marketers will also need to adjust their thinking here, with a mindset of delayed gratification rather than looking for instant wins. Optimisation on smaller accounts can lead to significant uplift on a timeframe of a few months or even weeks, but for accounts of this size any uplift is likely to be incremental and it’s generally through YoY comparison that the impact of your work starts to become evident.

Whatever the budget, every account represents a learning opportunity for an ambitious marketer and an opportunity to help drive a business forward. Whether you’re spending £10,000 a month or £10,000 a day, best practices still apply and rewards will come with time.

To learn more about scaling accounts and how to effectively drive results, get in touch.

Where To Begin: Your First Day On A New Account

It’s a common scenario for any digital marketer. You’ve just stepped into a new role or have won a new freelance client and after logging in you’re greeted with your first look at an account that you’ll be responsible for managing.

As we all know, every account is unique in its own way. Budget levels can vary dramatically, each industry has a different set of metrics to work towards and many accounts have specific rules and processes that need to be followed to ensure everyone is on the same page about performance. While every account is different, the question marketers ask themselves on the first day is always the same; where do I start?

Luckily, there are a few actions to take which can help speed up the process of understanding a new account and identifying areas of opportunity to get the ball rolling as quickly as possible.

1) Look At The Big Picture

Whenever I’m faced with a new account my first action is always to look at top level performance over as long as a time period as possible. Zooming out and viewing trends over a long timeframe gives a good basic understanding of what to expect in terms of total spend & traffic, peak & quiet periods along with any anomalous data to dive deeper into. Understanding what to expect and when means you can quickly identify the most relevant areas for optimisation based on what’s likely to happen next.

2) Identify Your Main Goal

As spend increases, account complexity also tends to increase. A high budget account is likely to have several conversion goals depending on the business and the industry they operate in. However, more often than not, there’s one key conversion action that’s prioritised above the rest. Understanding the core goal of the account early on allows you to focus your efforts in one place and ensure that any initial optimisation is moving the account in the correct direction. Once this is taken care of, come back to the smaller goals which will support account performance.

3) Talk To The Experts

Just because you’re an expert marketer doesn’t mean you’re an expert in your client’s specific industry. Successful marketing is a team effort and who better to be part of that team than someone who works in that industry day in & day out? Asking your client for industry knowledge and context can seem daunting, but these conversations invariably lead to useful insights and open the door for optimisation opportunities that might have otherwise been missed. The marketer’s role is to translate business context into actionable strategy & tactics so the more context you have, the better your early optimisations will be.

4) Learn From Other’s Mistakes

Digital marketing is getting more competitive by the day. This presents a challenge for marketers, but it also provides a wealth of data to mine for optimisation. Every platform has specific tools you can use to view competitor keywords and ad copy or understand budget & bid strategies. Effective use of these tools allows you to quickly identify strategies that are working for competitors which you can then adapt and modify to suit your own activity. After all, why waste your own budget learning from mistakes when you can let your competitors do that instead?

The first day on a new account is always daunting but having a clear path towards understanding an account makes life much easier. Optimisation becomes more granular over time but the early priority should always be gathering context and understanding the general direction to move towards. With an understanding of overall trends, goals, business context and the competitive landscape, your first day should do a great job of setting you up for success.

To learn more about Scope Digital’s process for understanding new accounts, get in touch.

Smart Campaigns: Filling The Gaps In Your Paid Search Strategy

As you develop your Paid Search strategy, your account will almost always become more complex. New campaign builds, extra keywords, updates to targeting and the introduction of new audiences all contribute to increasingly granular and focused search activity.

However, no matter the complexity of an account, there will always be gaps that aren’t covered by your existing keyword list and new targeting opportunities that can be exploited for incremental performance gains. The question is - with the limited time that digital marketers have to manage accounts, how can you best use the time you do have to take advantage of these opportunities?

In the world of Paid Search, there’s one campaign type which is consistently overlooked as a useful addition to any account, even those being run by professional marketers with strategies that are far more complex than your typical activity.

That campaign type? Google Smart Campaigns.

Smart campaigns were originally created as a way for business owners to run their own Google Ads activity without requiring the time and knowledge investment that it would take to run typical search campaigns. Targeting is largely automated based on a user’s location and interest and instead of specific keywords, advertisers choose keyword themes to bid on which function similarly to Broad Match keywords in a traditional search campaign. Negative keyword themes function similarly to negative keyword lists, ensuring traffic remains relevant even while matching to broad terms.

Along with keyword themes, advertisers also have the ability to upload ad copy, images & a logo, any combination of which can appear across Search, Display, Youtube & Google Maps.

Because this campaign type is meant for novice marketers, reporting is slightly restricted compared to traditional search campaigns with a basic search term report showing searches that have matched to keyword themes along with standard traffic & conversion metrics. This is great for business owners who want to run simple activity without paying an agency, but the increased reach and flexibility of this campaign type opens up opportunities for professional marketers to run these alongside their more strategic campaign activity.

One one account working in a highly specific data focused niche, our keyword list was very restrictive with a combination of low search volume and high CPC’s making traditional search campaigns very difficult. Introducing a Smart Campaign to the mix immediately increased visibility resulting in thousands of additional impressions per week and several leads which converted to paying customers. As an added benefit, CPCs were just 10% of the equivalent cost from our traditional search campaigns, resulting in a much more efficient account.

Similarly, Smart Campaigns were used for a tourism client in order to expand visibility of a new ecommerce offering over the busy Black Friday and Sales period. From launch through to the end of the sales period, the Smart campaign achieved a ROAS in excess of 400% equating to over $50,000 in additional revenue from a total spend of just over $10,000.

While I wouldn’t recommend shifting an entire account over to Smart Campaigns, introducing them to an account in a supporting role is a simple, cost effective way to drive traffic and results. With a professional marketer managing these campaigns, traffic relevance can be tightly controlled and the restricted reporting data can still be used for actionable insights across the entirety of an account.

Want to learn more about Smart Campaigns and how they might work for your account? Get in touch.

"It Depends": The Only Digital Marketing Answer You'll Ever Need

We’ve all been there, you’re onboarding a new client or planning a new piece of activity when questions start coming in.

Should we be on TikTok?

What is a good CPC?

Should we prioritise brand or conversion campaigns first?

They’re all good questions and they all need a response, but when asked like this it’s easy to fall into the trap of viewing digital marketing as an isolated system that isn’t influenced by anything but campaign performance.

That’s where the “it depends” answer comes in.

Take CPC for example. In a recent study, Wordstream found that the most expensive Google Ads keywords were found in the legal industry on US targeted activity. CPC for keywords like personal injury lawyer & personal injury attorney sat around the $100 mark while location specific keywords topped out at just under $500 for a single click. Given how competitive the space is and the potential rewards for winning a personal injury suit, $100+ would be considered a “good” CPC for these firms. On the other hand, if you’re a business selling shoes online for $50 a pair, maintaining a $100 CPC is a questionable marketing strategy and the definition of a “good” CPC will be very different.

It’s the same situation when looking at new platforms and where efforts should be prioritised. Just because other businesses are doing well on TikTok doesn’t necessarily mean it’s the right platform for everyone. A business model might not suit a platform, or they may not have the appropriate content to run effective ads. Similarly, if a business is focused on online revenue but is just getting started with marketing, branding campaigns might be a better choice in the short term even though the long term focus is revenue.

The benefit of an “it depends” answer is that it opens up space for you to step back and ask probing questions about long term, strategic goals while building a deep understanding of a specific business. This leads to better marketing outcomes and a strong working relationship as everyone is communicating transparently and working towards the same targets. When you try to define individual metrics in isolation, there’s no wider context and any insight will lack a relationship with wider goals and strategy.

Every question is valuable and having the confidence to step back and explain the factors that go into each decision is crucial for the best chance of success. Some questions are easier to answer than others, but the goal should always be to relate questions to business goals and explain what “good” means relative to the person asking the question.

Want to learn more about the factors that go into a good marketing answer? Get in touch.

Why The Rush? The Value Of Time In Driving Performance

It’s no secret the world of digital marketing moves quickly. In the space between starting work on Monday morning and packing up on Friday afternoon, any number of curveballs can be thrown your way that you need to quickly adapt to and work out how to implement as part of your digital strategy. Whether it’s an update to a platform’s interface, a new automation feature or a new ad policy issue to get to the bottom of, every week throws up a new challenge for even the most experienced digital marketers.

Along with new challenges, the relentless pace of BAU activity means that time is becoming an increasingly precious commodity. Campaign launches, reporting requirements & daily optimisation tasks can leave marketers wondering where the week has gone and where they’ll find time to look at the bigger picture - particularly in the agency world.

At a more junior level, this pace can be beneficial. In last week’s post we discussed the importance of fundamentals & giving juniors the opportunity to repeatedly practice the basics can be a great way to quickly build up their skills and receive immediate feedback. When you’re setting up new campaigns every week and doing the repetitive but crucial daily optimisation tasks, your skill level rapidly increases.

However, at a senior level, this pace can lead to effort being applied in the wrong areas. When your digital marketing role evolves into truly understanding a business & applying strategic thinking to an account, you need the space & time to properly do this. Without the necessary amount of time being dedicated to these tasks, everyone gets short changed. The business isn’t getting the results they deserve from their advertising while the agency and their staff aren’t doing the standard of work that they’re truly capable of.

So what’s the solution?

It’s easy to fall into the trap of project style work where effort is solely applied to responding to briefs, creating the relevant campaigns and analysing results as quickly as possible. Unfortunately, there’s no additional value added here. Digital marketers are everywhere and there will always be someone who can push out campaigns faster and for lower cost. The end result? Clients move on and skilled digital marketers get burned out as they don’t have the ability to use the higher level knowledge they’ve built over their careers.

Instead, the conversation around digital marketing needs to change so that the importance of appropriate thinking & planning time is emphasised just as much as speed and accuracy of execution when pitching for new business. This might lead to a reduction in total client volume, but the clients who understand the importance of both elements are likely to stay longer, increase their retainers and enjoy a better working relationship with marketers who truly understand their business and what will work for them.

With digital spend increasing every year, the value of a strategic marketer will only increase. Businesses that understand this and are willing to look further than the next campaign are setting themselves up for long term success. After all, if your competitors are running campaigns that have been planned and set up in just a few days, why would you want to do that too?

To learn more about strategic digital marketing, get in touch.

Back To Basics: The Importance Of Fundamentals In Digital Marketing

“Get the fundamentals down and the level of everything you do will rise.” - Michael Jordan

High performance in any field relies on a relentless focus towards the mastery of basic skills. Without truly understanding the fundamentals and how to implement them, any success is likely to be short lived and difficult to consistently replicate.

Digital marketing is no different. Picture an account as a house of cards with advanced tactics and long term strategies building on each other. Without the support of a solid base, there’s no way they can be as effective as possible and, over time, performance will decrease as cracks begin to appear. Below, we’ve listed some of the most important tasks to get right early on so that your accounts have the best chance of success.

Traffic Relevance - You can build the best strategy in the world but with the wrong people coming through to your site you’ll never get the results that strategy deserves. Ensuring your traffic is as relevant as possible is the most important thing to get right for any account. For Paid Search, having a detailed, regularly updated negative keyword list is the easiest way to ensure the right people are seeing your ads. On Social, ensure that your targeting is set up correctly so you’re not using Job Titles when you should be using Interest audiences or vice versa. On Display & Youtube, regularly review the sites & channels that your ads are appearing on to make sure they’re as closely related to your product or service as possible.

Location Targeting - How often have you duplicated a campaign for a new area, only to realise that the location targeting hasn’t been updated? Ensuring your campaigns are targeted to people in the right locations is a simple task but one that often slips through the gaps. Similarly, ensuring your location targeting is updated to show to people actually in the targeted location, as opposed to the default of just having an interest in that location, is crucial. The more cynical marketers among us (me) would suggest this is an easy way for the platforms to inflate spend but it’s a quick fix and an important one to get right for campaign success.

Keyword Match Types - Another one that can be easily overlooked, but has a major impact on account performance. Despite Google’s ongoing attempts to change the definition of match types, these are still a crucial part of any account. Ensuring your match type is correct for your campaign goals and avoiding Broad Match at all costs is a simple way to boost performance across all parts of your campaign.

Naming Conventions - Whether it’s a new account or an existing one, having a strong naming convention in place makes life easier for any marketer and reduces the possibility of mistakes. On accounts with hundreds or thousands of campaigns, taking the time to create a logical and scalable naming convention across the account means it’s easier to diagnose problems, report on performance and understand areas of opportunity.

Digital Marketers have never been busier and their time is increasingly limited as accounts get more complex. Getting the basics right takes some time at the beginning, but the gains you’ll make as a result means you get that time back with interest. Ensuring your account has a strong foundation in place gives you the confidence to build on that foundation knowing that the basics are covered and any advanced tactics have the highest possible chance of success.

To learn more about how Scope Digital uses the fundamentals to build world class digital strategies, get in touch.

Are Machines Taking Our Jobs?

If there’s one word to sum up the direction that digital marketing is taking, it would be automation.

Across every platform, the rapid growth of AI and automation tools has meant that campaign creation, targeting and optimisation have all become tasks which can be handled with minimal input from the humans running the accounts.

Automation isn’t going anywhere, so does this mean that marketers should start updating their CV and thinking about a career change? Luckily, we don’t think that’s the case. Instead, human marketers can use automation to their advantage to save time on the basics while applying their skills to what humans do best - creative thinking and communication.

With that in mind, here’s how we see the role of the digital marketer evolving to work alongside automation instead of competing with it.

Digital Strategists - Any automation tool is only as good as the information it has to work with. A human with a deep understanding of the business they’re working with and the wider digital landscape will be able to input the best possible images, messaging and targeting information to ensure any automated campaigns have the highest chance of success. Quality in equals quality out and an experienced marketer knows what’s likely to work in any given scenario.

Digital Communicators - Automated tools can set up a campaign and optimise it, but they can’t tell you why they’re making those optimisation decisions. Skilled digital marketers will be able to interpret live data to explain exactly what’s been happening in an account, what’s likely to happen next & how this will impact the business they’re working with. When your marketing budget is being spent, you should know exactly how & why it’s being prioritised in different places.

Digital Interpreters - Your automated campaign is over and you’ve seen some great results, so what next? Running the same campaign twice leads to diminishing returns, so having a human marketer reviewing campaign data for what has & hasn’t worked means that every automated campaign will build on the one prior. Automation is great for producing data, but we still need humans to analyse & interpret that into actionable insights.

Digital Leaders - Whether it’s a human team, or a single person supported by automation, digital marketing is a group effort. While day to day campaign management and optimisation can be automated, a skilled marketer is crucial as a safe pair of hands to monitor campaigns and make adjustments as needed to keep performance strong throughout the entire process.

In short, digital marketers don’t need to worry about being out of a job yet. Instead, we need to look at how we can embrace automation to free up time for the tasks which will really drive results. Get in touch to learn more about how Scope Digital can help your business by mixing human skills with automation tools.

How Do You Market Travel During A Lockdown?

In 2021, Australia and New Zealand were put into repeated, long term lockdowns. At any given point, both countries were under some form of restriction with Trans-Tasman international travel a distant memory.

This led to a challenge and a new marketing opportunity - with restrictions in place and a culture of nervousness and uncertainty around travel in both countries, how could we effectively run digital marketing for a travel & tourism business? As always, the first step was to look at the data.

Social listening tools were a great place to start. Analysing posts & comments on social media, we found that even though people in both countries were nervous about travelling, the actual desire to travel hadn’t diminished. If anything, being stuck at home led to an increase in posts about the trips & holidays travellers has planned once restrictions were eased.

Along with social commentary, we also looked at our previous marketing data. We’d already been through a number of lockdowns so we were able to build a strong understanding of how travel intent changed based on length and the specific restrictions in place. As expected, searches and bookings plummeted as soon as a lockdown was announced. However, in the two weeks prior to restrictions being eased, search volume and bookings steadily increased as potential travellers began to confirm those plans they’d been dreaming about while at home. The week after a lockdown ended was even stronger as people got back out into the world and felt more confident about travelling.

Understanding the psychology of these lockdowns was crucial to our digital planning. Based on what we’d learned, we built a phased strategy where we maintained a low level of visibility during the first two thirds of the lockdown period. This visibility kept the brand top of mind for potential travellers with messaging centred around post-lockdown travel inspiration and what the business was doing to keep travellers safe.

As we entered the final third of the lockdown, we increased visibility and changed our ads to feature a more direct sales message. We knew that this period coincided with higher booking volume & we were rewarded with increased bookings & ROI as those travellers we’d been visible to throughout the lockdown came back and completed their bookings. Meanwhile, our competitors had paused their marketing completely meaning it took them much longer to bounce back from each lockdown.

We can’t guarantee that lockdowns won’t happen again, but with a strong understanding of our data and the psychology around a lockdown, there’s always a way to ensure your digital strategy remains effective, whatever life throws at you. For more information or to learn how Scope Digital can help your business, get in touch.