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Pinterest has released its second earnings report since going public in April, generating $261 million in revenue during the second quarter of this year — up 62% year-over-year, and nearly $60 million more than it earned during the first quarter of 2019. Of the $261 million it earned, $238 million came from the U.S.

The site’s monthly active users (MAUs) were also up, seeing a 30% increase year-over-year.

Despite the revenue gains, Pinterest reported a net loss of $1.16 billion for the quarter, which it says was impacted by, “RSU [restricted stock unit] expense recorded in connection with our initial public offering.” The company expects to surpass $1 billion in revenue, according to its full-year outlook for 2019, reaching between $1.095 billion and $1.115 billion.

Pinterest’s international reach. Pinterest’s global MAUs reached 300 million during the second quarter of the year, nine million more than it reported during the first quarter of the year. The bulk of Pinterest’s MAUs are international users: 215 million global MAUs compared to 85 million in the U.S.

Pinterest CFO Todd Morgenfeld said the company remains encouraged by the growth it is seeing in international markets. According to Pinterest’s second quarter earnings release, it is continuing to focus on improving user experiences to drive more growth and engagement: “During the quarter, we made Pinterest more personal by improving search recommendations, and we also made Pinterest more useful by adding more video content and shoppable products.”

More opportunities for advertisers. Pinterest CEO Ben Silbermann said said the company is continuing to “grow and diversify” its advertiser base and improve ad measurement capabilities for brands on the platform.

“This is part of our larger and ongoing effort to create value for businesses on Pinterest,” said Silbermann. During the second quarter of 2019, Pinterest introduced mobile ad tools that let advertisers create and manage campaigns from their phone, and launched new video capabilities for brands, including an updated video uploader, scheduling capabilities and a dedicated video tab within business profiles.

Pinterest is also focusing its efforts on e-commerce initiatives. Shortly before going public, the company recruited the head of Walmart’s e-commerce tech team, Jeremy King, to lead engineering. It has since launched the “Complete the Look” visual search tool — a feature that recommends relevant products based on the context of a scene.

Why we should care. As a discovery platform, Pinterest provides a wide range of opportunities to showcase products. Now that it is fine-tuning its e-commerce capabilities, the image-heavy social network is aiming to attract more retail brands and pull more ad dollars.

To be honest, paid search marketing is not a child’s play. Although its compelling benefits cannot be overemphasized, just like SEO, it has its own portion of disadvantages.

With no shortage of traffic, Amazon is no doubt a sure place to invest in paid search marketing. According to the research on the “most popular ecommerce websites in the U.S. as of December 2017”, Amazon ranked first with the average monthly users of about 197 million.

Source: Statista

Technically, you can still cut your own share of the cake even with a limited budget, provided you’re working with the right blueprint.

Of course, there are several methods of optimizing Amazon PPC, but here are blueprints on how to get the most out of it with a limited budget.

1. Focus on searchers’ intent and relevance

Source: Amazon

Focusing on your searchers intent and keywords that are relevant to the ad copy you serve is not just a strategy that will help you get the most out of Amazon PPC, but also a tactic to save more. As a result-driven seller with a limited budget, it’s crucial to have a rough idea of what your potential customers think. With this knowledge, you will be able to model the right keyword within the relevancy of what you sell on the Amazon platform.

Do you know that every visitor that visits Amazon’s ecommerce site is ready to buy one or more pieces of stuff from there? In fact, a new Survata study commissioned by BloomReach affirmed that about 50 percent of consumers kick-start their search on Amazon when they are looking to make a purchase.

That being the case, implementing this strategy will not only minimize the rate of irrelevant clicks, it will also boost your ROI by increasing positive CTR and landing more potential customers to your platform — since your keywords are pretty much in line with the searcher’s intent.

So, how do you figure out what keyword your potential customers use on Amazon search box to search for your product? The answer is — by using effective keyword tools.

As a matter of fact, getting the right keywords whether short or long-tailed is not impossible. Here are two tools that can help you find the most important keywords for your products on Amazon.

Keyword Tool

Source: Keyword Tool

As a result-driven Amazon seller with a limited budget, Keyword Tool is a great tool to work with. It will help you discover what searchers search for, and also reveal the long-tail and relevant keywords they use on Amazon.

Keyword Tool presents Amazon keywords in the exact same order as they were from the Amazon autocomplete. It also pulls estimated search volume data for the generated keywords. While you can get keyword suggestions for free even without creating an account here, you can also enjoy more additional data and functionality by subscribing to any custom plan that is within your budget range.

Google’s Keyword Planner

Source: Google Ads

Is it possible to know what keywords searchers use on Amazon with Google Keyword Planner? The answer is yes.

Actually, Google has a storehouse of collected data and with this tool — you can deduce how many searches a given phrase receives and also find other related phrases as well.

Here, you can also segment the collected data by any geographical location of choice which is very helpful for Amazon sellers selling on any Amazon site like Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.ca, and the others.

For the time being, it costs zero dollars to get a Google Keyword Planner. In fact, you do not have to create an active campaign. All you have to do is to create a free Google AdWords account. After that, you can find the Tools tab and click on the Keyword Planner.

2. Optimize your ad text or continually test and tweak your ad copy

This is one of the core parts sellers shy away from. Do you know that you can hit slacks if you’re not tweaking and continuously testing the effectiveness of your ad texts?

Clearly, your primary aim as a seller is to — boost sales, and leads. Whichever you’re paying for on Amazon, you need to constantly test the effectiveness of your ad text. As a matter of fact, If your ad text is not attention-grabbing and relevant to your listings, have it in mind that searchers won’t be clicking on it as expected.

Note: Breathtaking results don’t solely depend on how big your budget is, but on how wise you apportion your dollars.

3. Add negative keywords to prevent spending money on irrelevant keywords

Adding and monitoring your negative keyword list will help you save more money, especially when you’re building broader match types. Just like it sounds — pay-per-click, it’s very easy to throw away $$$ if you don’t perfectly understand the technical know-how.

When running on a limited budget, it is wise to take some necessary measures by adding the probable negative keywords. This prevents your Ads from being clicked by unbeneficial potential customers. More importantly, be very smart and cautious, so that you don’t block terms that are beneficial to your account.

How to identify the right negative words?

Negative keywords are just like any other search words. It could be a long-tailed, short, phrase, or even exact match. And yes, when it comes to this, marketers — big or small budget, loses tons of money when searchers click on their product list without purchasing anything from their page. But the negative keywords setups are a practical shield primarily designed to minimize irrelevant clicks. Hence, it requires absolute wisdom to know which or which not to set up as negative keywords.

While the negative words help you to notify Adwords when to show up your ads, it is important that you know how to identify the right negative keywords to add to the list. Here are two ways to achieve this:

A. Using Google to manually search

To begin with, create about eight to ten keywords that you’re advertising on, then go to Google and start searching them — one after the other. More importantly, when searching, look out for the following:

(i) Look out for what your competitors are advertising.

(ii) See if the results are related to what you search for.

(iii) If they are not, see “why” from the displayed result.

Let’s take, for instance, you searched for “AC repairer” and the following result came out:

Source: Google SERP

Say you’re an AC repairer contractor and you’re advertising your service on Amazon, you’ll observe from the result showing in the image above that one of the results isn’t related to your search term:

The second ad isn’t related because it’s about an expert who trains people on A/C installation online. An AC repairer contractor, in this case, doesn’t train a student on A/C installation. So, therefore, “Lesson on air conditioning product installation,” and its related terms are your sure negative keywords.

The first ad and the third ad informs us more about your service. So, adding the keywords you see like “Best Air Condition Repairers”, “Window Unit AC Repair”, “AC Servicing”, “Residential AC Repair”, and other like terms provides your ad with a better chance of being clicked by your target customers.

B. Using Google suggest terms

Source: Google

Here, every letter you add to the search box will technically change the auto-fill suggestions — simultaneously generating tons of possible ideas.

On the screenshot above, our “phone windshield mount seller” could also add  “Windows 10 app” and “windows 10” to his negative keywords list.

Note: In the Amazon PPC campaign, you don’t have to spend, spend, and spend before you get a tangible ROI. In fact, all you need is to apportion your dollars rightly.

Francis Ejiofor is the Founder and CEO at EffectiveMarketingIdeas, a professional content marketing agency for startups and mid-sized businesses. He can be found on Twitter @anthony_ejiofor.

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CPG-focused ad metrics agency NCSolutions (NCS) announced on Thursday the launch of Sales Lift Metrics, a new in-flight campaign optimization service.

Driven by AI and machine learning technology, Sales Lift Metrics aims to deliver weekly incremental sales metrics that advertisers can use to inform and enhance campaign outcomes while they’re still active.

For programmatic campaigns, NCS said the service can help buyers optimize ad spend by tapping into real-time incremental sales metrics, allowing advertisers to dial-up or dial-down spend accordingly.  

“CPG advertisers face urgent demands to reduce budget waste and optimize for sales outcomes,” said NCS EVP of strategy, Carl Spaulding. “Until now, their only options to improve results were to make changes post-campaign or rely on in-flight media performance metrics not directly related to offline sales. But with this innovative solution, advertisers can tap into near real-time insights and refine campaigns in-flight to improve outcomes.”

The Sales Lift Metrics service is designed to provide in-flight data on key campaign tactics, such as audience targets, media placements, creative messaging and ad formats.

Earlier this year, Adobe signed on as a pilot partner for Sales Lift Metrics to test its CPG campaign optimization methodology. According to a representative from Adobe, NCS’ in-flight solution has been able to deliver lucrative insights around the campaign tactics that drive incremental sales “on a much shorter latency than with existing industry solutions.” Adobe added, “With this knowledge, our CPG advertisers can make campaign decisions to gain and maximize incremental sales.”

Why we should care

“Near real-time visibility into the effectiveness of campaign tactics that are the primary drivers of incremental sales has long been a desired ideal for advertisers,” says Leslie Wood, chief research officer at NCS.

The ability to interpret real-time metrics on a tactical level means that advertisers can modify campaigns in-flight to produce more efficient and accurate outcomes. This could help cut down on ad spend while also presenting an opportunity to course-correct during the campaign’s lifetime.

For CPG marketers, in particular, understanding the immediate sales lift on a campaign-by-campaign basis can help build a more complete picture of the immediate market and inform future campaign strategies.

More on the news

• Sales Lift Metrics is part of NCS’ Optimize Solutions Suite, which also includes NCS Purchase Data Metrics – an automated API tool designed for publishers.
• Earlier this year, NCS announced its adoption of machine learning technology aimed at building audience segments and driving sales lift metrics.
• Causal sales metrics are available to all NCS clients to allow them to test, learn and optimize campaigns in near real-time.

The payday loans industry continues to be a lucrative and popular sector in the UK.

With Google’s SERPs overwhelmed with black hat SEO and hacked sites, the search engine giant responded with a unique payday loans algorithm, which they have continued to develop and refine since 2013, as touched upon in the payday loans algorithm review from last year.

Never before had Google dedicated an entire algorithm to one particular product so openly, and at the time it was considered ground-breaking.

However, since my last piece, the industry has seen further challenges and changes and this has had a profound impact on the companies that rank and the type of search terms that we see.

Notably, the rise in compensation claims has seen the casualty of four of the UK’s largest lenders and this has opened up the market for other lenders and brokers to capture up to one million more leads that were previously unattainable. So getting to page one for “payday loans” is still very hot on the agenda for a lot of companies and new entrants.

How to rank for payday loans in 2019

Content

The use of fresh content is important, as it is for most industries and services. Specifically, for payday loans, the use of quality landing pages (rather than a homepage) is more effective to rank for key terms. Across the top 20 search positions, only three are using their homepage to rank, with 17 using devoted landing pages which either use /payday-loans/, /payday-loans-uk/ or /payday-loans-alternative/.

Whilst mentioning the use of alternatives was very popular last year, this is now only mentioned in two meta-titles across the top 20 positions.

No comparison tables

Similar to last year, there are still no comparison tables that are in the top search results, with the closest one on page three (all the lenders) and not even the dominant Money.co.uk featured anywhere in the top four pages. When compared to other products such as credit cards and car insurance, comparison tables are used in the majority of page one listings.

The lack of comparison tables is surprising, given the regulator’s encouragement for consumers to use more comparison sites in this space and for each lender, by law, to list at least one price comparison website (PCW) on their homepage.

Direct lenders still rule

With no comparison websites, the sites classed as ‘direct lenders’ continue to be the strongest ranking websites, hence many lenders are using this terminology in their meta-data, internal links, and content.

Google has clearly favored those sites with clear user intent and ability to find the product and apply for it in the same place, without having to leave. Direct lenders have used multiple calls-to-action on their landing pages and this is proving fruitful.

Links, links, and more links

The payday loans algorithm continues to be heavily influenced by the use of links and link manipulation. Many sites ranking in the top five and top 10 for payday loans continue to use PBN networks and buying links with a mix of the brand match and exact match to multiple landing pages. Topped off with a regular monthly disavow file, this seems to be working well and consistently for various lenders who continue to stay on page one for more than two years.

Elsewhere, some new entries have come into the market by taking older domains with strong backlinks and not necessarily ones that are loans or finance related. The likes of Omacl, New Horizons, and CUJ have made huge strides in the last 12 months, from being virtually unknown and leveraging strong links in education, science, and technology – suggesting that Google also rewards links from different industries.

Elsewhere, for many direct lenders, they have benefitted by buying and selling leads from lead generation brokers such as Quint and have subsequently gained links in privacy policies and terms and conditions (even though no link is necessarily required) from numerous sites. This has given several lenders a huge boost in rankings and a much stronger trust score than other types of links.

Is the market shifting towards bad credit terms?

The stricter requirements from the FCA has unsurprisingly led to fewer loans being funded and tougher circumstances for those with bad credit. This has increased the number of search volumes for bad credit terms, including bad credit loans (145,000 monthly searches) and other variations such as ‘payday loans for bad credit’ (40,500 monthly searches) and ‘payday loans no credit check’ (27,100 monthly searches) – in fact, some sites have been optimized specifically to target these terms such as bad credit site and payday bad credit.

Trust signals and user engagement

Whilst trust signals such as about us pages, FAQs, and contact pages will always be useful across SEO, Google may be giving weight to other features such as calculators, forms and basic information.

Referring to Wonga.com, the former market leader, they had been dominating the top three positions for payday loans for over five years, but since going into administration in November and removing its calculator and basic loan information, today it is not even only the first 10 pages of Google.

Manual changes by Google

Whilst only an urban myth, many SEO professionals will hint at the idea that Google is making manual changes and choosing to upgrade and demote various sites in the payday loans algorithm.

Following an algorithm change in March and June, we have seen some select sites gain huge improvements and some fall massively. This could just be the cyclical nature of algorithms and Google updates, or genuine attempts by Google to improve the quality of search results for potential payday loan customers.

Concluding points to rank for payday loans in 2019

• Landing pages more successful than homepages
• Comparison tables less successful than direct lenders
• Links are hugely important. PBNs are successful and strong links from other industries, although they may be unrelated to loans and finance.
• Bad credit terms are showing an increase in search volumes
• Trust signals such as calculators and loan information are vital

Search results are cyclical and subject to algorithm updates.

Daniel Tannenbaum is the CEO of Guarantor Loan Comparison.

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Global ad tech provider Centro announced Tuesday that it will be enforcing app-ads.txt in its DSP, Basis. As part of an industry-wide effort to mitigate fraudulent ad selling, Basis will now default to targeting app ads from authorized and validated sellers.

The app-ads.txt specification, launched earlier this year by the IAB Tech Lab, allows app publishers to take advantage of the ads.txt protocol by linking their app store listings to their websites and uploading a text file listing authorized sellers to their back end. It’s also designed for connected TV (CTV) inventory sellers, but CTV app stores don’t yet support it.

“Authorization and validation of sellers is an important step in creating brand-safe environments for marketers,” said Ian Trider, director of RTB platform operations at Centro. “As app-ads.txt gains wider adoption and as other DSPs follow our lead, there will be fewer and fewer opportunities for fraudulent entities in the digital media ecosystem.”

Why we should care

Centro joins Google, which said DV360 will stop buying unauthorized app inventory as identified by app-ads.txt files. As more DSPs start enforcing it, app publishers will be under more pressure to implement it so as not to miss out on revenue as the industry pushes for wider adoption.

More on the news

• Agencies using Basis will no longer be able to submit open market bids on mobile app inventory from unauthorized suppliers when app developers have implemented the app-ads.txt file.
• Now, bidding only occurs on supply paths explicitly authorized by app publishers.
• Enforcement is automatic, meaning there are no additional fees needed from agencies and media teams in order to bid on authorized inventory.

As regular users of the Internet, we all want what we’re searching for to appear instantly. Therefore, in 2010, Google released the PageRank algorithm, which made website and page speed a high ranking factor for crawlers to assess and rank in search engine results pages.

53% of mobile site visits leave a page that takes longer than three seconds to load.

Throughout the digital years, a distinct correlation has become evident between page speed and visitor retention and bounce rate. And with visitor retention becoming increasingly important in terms of meeting revenue goals and other annual targets, page speed is one of the most vital focus areas for customer experience today.

Performing page speed tests should be a high priority (if it isn’t already) for your website. Looking at it from Google’s perspective, if your pages take an age to load, the search engine is not able to crawl as many pages, which results in Google using its crawl budget ineffectively, potentially negatively impacting your site’s organic performance.

The many benefits of boosting page speed

The benefits of improving your site’s page load speed are myriad and fall into three key areas.

1. Improved user experience

• Google reported that just a one-second delay in load time will decrease visitors’ satisfaction by 16%, and 79% of those users will not buy your product or service if they aren’t satisfied by your overall website performance.
• Many users nowadays will abandon a website if it performs poorly, particularly if a page takes a substantial amount of time to load. By having quick loading pages, you can resonate more with users by leaving them free to navigate and explore your site’s content.

2. Better overall marketing performance

• Whether your goal is to improve your overall conversion rate for a “consideration” page or to reduce your bounce rate on a particular page to below 30%, there is plenty of evidence to suggest that a speedy website greatly contributes towards achieving these goals.
• In the UK, studies have shown that 67% of online shoppers will abandon their shopping basket on a slow website. However, if you improve a page’s load time by just one second, this can result in an uplift in the conversion rate of between 10 – 20%.
• If you’re aiming to achieve higher website traffic to a certain page, such as your “best sellers” or possibly a new blog post you’ve just published, page speed is one of the many factors you should take into consideration when trying to achieve this type of goal. Google studies have in fact shown that by having a delay of half a second can cause a 20% loss in traffic.

3. Enhanced SERP positioning

• Back to Google’s PageRank algorithm update – as mentioned this took into account page loading time and overall website speed, amongst other measures such as page views, so a focus on page speed is vital if you want to rank in the SERPs.
• What’s more, if your web pages load quickly, Google crawlers are able to search through your website at a faster rate. This means that more individual pages stand a chance at ranking in a SERP.

Eight steps to speed up your site

Page speed can be improved through a variety of different methods that will allow you to quickly see the true potential of your business’ website.

1. Compress files

For compressing files, a highly recommended tool to use is Gzip. Gzip allows you to reduce the size of HTML or CSS files among others, reducing overall HTTP response time. However, do not use Gzip on image files, as this may affect image quality.

2. Reduce redirects

Having a lot of redirects on your site results in more HTTP requests, which can translate into a reduction in page speed. Additionally, don’t neglect to fix broken links which can massively impact the user experience.

3. Remove render-blocking JavaScript

In terms of your website structure, try to refrain from the use of render-blocking JavaScript, including external scripts which are fetched before they can be executed. When scripts are inputted for rendering page content, they can be used to avoid extra network requests.

For faster page speed, the content needs to be smaller in terms of quantity and must execute at a fast rate to deliver a good performance. Also, if certain scripts are not critical to render straight away, they should be made to be asynchronous or deferred until the first render has completed.

4. Leverage browser caching

Each time a user visits a website, it collects a cache which involves information about the stylesheets, images, JavaScript and more. This is so when a visitor visits this website again, it doesn’t have to reload the entire page.

This benefits page speed, as this saves on time spent sending multiple HTTP requests to the server. An additional benefit is the reduction of bandwidth and therefore the overall cost of hosting your site.

5. Improve server response time

When reviewing your server response time, many factors can affect its rate, including everything from the amount of traffic your website receives, to the type of software your server uses and the hosting solution you require.

As a ballpark figure, you should be aiming towards a time of under 200ms. This can be done by reviewing different performance metrics and looking out for things like slow routing, lack of memory or slow database requests.

6. Make the most of content distribution networks (CDNs)

One of the main benefits of using CDNs is that they consist of multiple networks, which each make a copy of the website. This is then stored into multiple geographical data centers that provide users with faster and more reliable access to your site.

7. Ensure all images are optimized

When importing images into your website, be sure to use the correct size and file format (PNGs for graphics which are less than 16 colors and JPEGs for photographs), as well as ensuring they are compressed for web purposes. The volume of images used across your website can also affect page load time.

If your website is image-heavy, one solution is to combine the images together into fewer output files by using CSS Sprites. This will reduce latency and result in improvements to your page speed because it reduces any possibility of a delay or the number of round trips produced.

8. Minimize wasted white spaces

If you have white space, line returns or even comment tags, HTML and text can accumulate and increase your page size by 10 – 20%, negatively impacting page load time. It’s therefore worth reviewing your pages and examining each line of code to make the suitable amendments required to maximize performance.

Reviewing success and continually improving

Once you’ve taken some of the measures outlined above, it’s important to keep a close eye on your website’s performance, in order to identify any areas that require further improvement. Here are just some of the tools at your disposal.

Pingdom Speed Test

Pingdom’s Website Speed Test provides reports that are categorized into four areas: Waterfall breakdown, performance grade, page analysis, and history. By having such a comprehensive breakdown of your website’s performance, this allows you to not only complete a simple speed check but also see a useful overview with additional metrics, such as size analysis, size per domain or what type of content has the most requests.

Furthermore, you are able to narrow down your results by content type, page size by domain, requests by content type and requests by domain – therefore, you are able to identify exactly which pages are performing best – and worst.

Google PageSpeed Insights

The PageSpeed Insights tool by Google provides you with page insights into how well your website is performing in terms of speed, with a grade given on a scale of 1 to 100. This completes a review on both desktop and mobile versions of your website, by completing a page speed test. Anything above 85 indicates that your website is performing well.

The insights measure your page in two parts: Time to above-the-fold content to load and time to full page load.

GTmetrix

Another free tool, GTmetrix goes into great detail about both page speed and YSlow metrics by dividing reports into five sections: Page speed, YSlow, waterfall breakdown, video, and history.

The difference between this tool and other tools available like Google PageSpeed Insights is that you can test and compare your performance against different connection set-ups like cable or dial-up to see how it affects your page load time.

Optimizing page speed is crucial in today’s digital environment when users expect what they’re searching for to appear straight away. Therefore businesses of all sizes need to take advantage of the available SEO tools and tactics in order to adapt and compete with their peers on the search engine results pages.

Mae-Lei King is an SEO Account Executive at global digital agency Croud, based in their Shrewsbury office.

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Facebook announced Tuesday that it will be removing thousands of outdated and infrequently used interest targets such as old movie and band names and other older cultural references.

The vast majority of advertisers won’t notice the removals, said Graham Mudd, VP of product marketing for ads at Facebook, in an interview Monday.

The interest targets will be deprecated across all Facebook Ads interfaces, including APIs.

Timing of the removals. The interest targets will no longer be available for new campaigns. For those advertisers who are using any of the targets that are being removed in their existing ad sets will be notified starting in August that the targets can no longer be used. The interest targets will be allowed to run for a few months or so (a specific date hasn’t been determined) before advertisers will be prompted to change their targets.

Why we should care. There may be some edge cases that this will affect (specific memorabilia, perhaps?) if these are rarely used targets, but as Mudd said, most advertisers likely won’t notice the removals. Clearing out the clutter of older interest targets makes sense from a maintenance perspective for Facebook. For advertisers, it could also make interest selection easier without having to wade through so many options.

Mudd said this is part of an effort — such as the new Business Manager redesign and News Feed ad aspect ratio changes — to make the platform easier and more consistent to use and that advertisers should expect to see continued focus on streamlining processes and features.

Google is synonymous with search, but there are many different ad types available to Google advertisers that don’t require keyword targeting at all.

In fact, Google Ads can be a particularly powerful tool for marketers who want to test different digital ad types without the complexity of managing multiple publishers. While Google isn’t quite a one-stop-shop for all digital advertising, it comes close.

So, if you want to expand your digital advertising strategy beyond keyword targeting, but aren’t ready to venture beyond Google, here are some tactics you can test from within your Google Ads account.

Display ads

Google’s display network (GDN) is comprised of over two million websites and reaches 90% of global internet users. Display ads come in a variety of flavors, but for the purpose of categorization, when I refer to display ads, I mean banners and text ads (as opposed to video ads) which run on websites such as blogs, YouTube and within apps.

Display ad placement examples—source: Google Ads

Google’s display network is vast and gives advertisers a lot of options when it comes to ad formats. These include:

• Animated and nonanimated image ads
• AMP HTML (mobile-optimized) ads
• HTML5 ads
• Responsive image ads
• Text ads
• Video ads (I’ll address these separately)

You can find a complete list of ad specifications here.

Display ads can be targeted in a variety of ways including (but not limited to) keywords. However, keep in mind that keyword targeting on display isn’t the same as keyword targeting on search.

Display advertising is based on context, so ads don’t appear based on a user’s search query, but show up passively beside content that is contextually relevant to an advertiser’s specified keywords. That’s why it’s helpful to use targeting criteria that focus on topics, interests, and demographics (in addition to or instead of keywords).

Image Source: Google Ads

Display ads can also be targeted by interest or affiliation targeting or by selecting specific websites (placements). Advertisers can select multiple targeting criteria to narrow down the volume of impressions and clicks or cherry-pick one or two types of targeting for broader reach campaigns more suitable for branding than response.

Example of topics available for Google Display targeting—Image source: Google Ads

Google’s display network offers the same basic versatility as a third-party programmatic display vendor such as Adroll or Sitescout. Since there’s no minimum spend requirement, advertisers can experiment with ad formats, different targeting criteria, and creative while reaching a large audience.

Video ads

Video ads are shown on YouTube and the GDN. Advertisers can choose from a variety of different ad types and formats when promoting videos on YouTube. These include the display, overlay, skippable video, non-skippable video, and bumper ads.

Image Source: Google Ads

YouTube reaches an astounding one billion users and ads can be targeted in a variety of ways from within the Google Ads platform. These include broader targeting criteria such as basic demographics and more detailed demographics (For example college students, homeowners, and others).

YouTube also supports interest targeting, affinity audiences (people who have a strong interest in related topics), life events, remarketing audiences, placements/channels, topics, keywords, and devices.

While keywords-targeting is available on YouTube, it’s not essential. Adding keywords to your YouTube targeting can reduce the volume of impressions, so it’s a tactic that should be monitored closely as it can often hobble a campaign (in terms of reach).

Shopping ads

Shopping campaigns rely on merchant product feeds rather than keywords for targeting. They’re currently the only ad type that incorporates images on Google’s search results pages.

Retailers can showcase key aspects of a given product in a shopping ad including a product photo, title, price, store name, product review, and more.

Shopping ads rely on Merchant Center product data to display in the search results. They’re dynamic, in that Google will show the ads most relevant to a user’s query based on details in the merchant feed (rather than keywords the merchant bids on). The three types of shopping ads available include:

• Product shopping ads—Created using the data in your merchant center feed. These ads appear at the top of Google’s search results or on the Shopping search results page on Google.

Example of Product Shopping Ads—Image source: Google Ads

• Local catalog ads—These ads use the feed data from local inventory ads on the GDN and drive traffic to local stores.
• Showcase shopping ads—These shopping ads allow merchants to group related products together and view them side by side in the search results (see the example below).

Example of a Showcase Shopping Ad—Image Source: Google Ads

Google Shopping campaigns are created within the Google Ads interface, but an important first step is for retailers to create a Google Merchant Center account then set up a product feed.

App promotion

Google has a specific campaign type for advertisers that want to promote app downloads and in-app purchases. App campaigns on use text assets from an app’s Google Play store listing, although some text is required to set up the ad.

App ads are eligible to run on Google Search, Google Play, YouTube, GDN, AdMob, and other publishers that host app ads. App ads feature an “Install” button that, when clicked, links to the store page for the given app.

Remarketing and audience targeting (Personalized advertising)

Remarketing and audience targeting aren’t isolated to a specific campaign type but can be applied across most campaigns. Note that some categories such as gambling and healthcare are prohibited from using Google’s personalized advertising features. Personalized advertising is worth mentioning as a separate targeting criterion (above and beyond keyword targeting) because it’s a powerful way for advertisers to connect with interested prospects.

Remarketing, in its simplest form, is a way to show ads on external websites or apps to people who have visited your website in the past. Advanced remarketing is more dynamic and personalized. It enables advertisers to show specific products or services in ads based on what users viewed on their website. Video remarketing shows ads on Google and the GDN to people who have interacted with videos on an advertiser’s YouTube channel.

Google also allows advertisers to upload customer data (e.g., customer list remarketing) taken from their internal customer contact information. These ads will only show when the user is logged into their Google account and can be a very effective way to reach interested consumers.

Audience targeting is a form of personalized advertising that allows advertisers to create audience lists that serve custom ads. Audience lists are set up in Google Ads as remarketing lists and assigned at the campaign level. Advertisers can also expand their reach with affinity targeting, which targets display, search, or video ads based on user interests, habits or intent (for example, what they’re actively searching for).

Details on different audience list types and setup information can be found here.

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Google revealed a number of Pixel 4 features Monday, including facial recognition and hands-free controls thanks to Google’s Soli project. In a blog post, Google detailed how Pixel 4 owners will be able to use Motion Sense to execute commands like skipping songs and snoozing alarms by waving their hand. The post implied that this is only the beginning of Motion Sense, and that we can expect to see updates to new Pixel releases in the future. It also described its new approach to facial recognition technology, data privacy and security.

Why we should care

We’ve all witnessed and experienced how new and emerging technologies influence consumer behavior; from liking posts on social networks to how we interact with brands across digital properties, the past decade has seen a tremendous shift in how technology drives consumers.

The Pixel 4’s Motion Sense feature uses a miniature radar located on the phone that will sense when its owner is nearby and be able to recognize hand gestures. If our customers are no longer touching their phones, how will they engage with our brands? We may be looking into a future where we’ll be optimizing mobile campaigns for hands-free touchpoints. 

As future versions of the Pixel are developed, Motion Sense evolves and other smartphone makers experiment with hands-free gestures, we can expect that the features will evolve to ensure digital advertisers’ and marketers’ messages will reach consumers in interactive ways that are beyond today’s functionalities.

More on the news

Google also shared updates on the Pixel 4’s face unlock and privacy and security features:

• Face unlock uses algorithms and sensors to recognize the phone’s owner, unlock and open it while the individual picks up their phone.
• Face unlock can also be used to transact secure payments and app authentication.
• The facial recognition technology is processed on the device using Pixel’s Titan M security chip and never leaves the phone to ensure it remains secure. It will never be saved or shared with other Google services.
• The Soli sensor data is also stored on the phone and never shared or saved with other Google services.