Walmart made headlines last week by announcing that it would fold Jet.com into its Walmart ecommerce operations, less than three years after the $3.3 billion acquisition.

But, in fact, a closer look at the performance of both sites’ leads reveals:

1. This shouldn’t be a surprise, because this has been Walmart’s plan all along, and
2. Despite what the headlines say, this is primarily a win for Walmart despite the large acquisition price.

We’ll tell this story with two simple charts. Apologies in advance for over-doing the aviation metaphors. I couldn’t help myself. As the kids say, “Sorry. Not sorry.”

1. Jet’s transactions are way down

The number of transactions on Jet.com rose to more than 600,000 a month in early 2017 but has been on a precipitous decline since then, shrinking to less than 100,000 a month. They don’t even exhibit the holiday-shopping spikes nearly every other retailer exhibits.

A drop like this doesn’t happen by accident, not in a world where Walmart reports that its ecommerce sales were up 37 percent in Q1. Or, after the ecommerce marketplace as a whole has grown steadily since, well, the start of ecommerce. Or, where spending power among affluent urbanites (Jet.com’s supposed strength) continues to rise as economic bifurcation enters its fourth decade. There is a long list of contextual reasons why a rising tide (tailwinds?) should be lifting Jet.com. Because of this, its loss of altitude is even more surprising and stark.

Source: Jumpshot

2. Jet.com’s ecommerce fuel, paid search, is also way down

Jet.com is one a handful of ecommerce sites, along with Chewy.com and Wayfair.com, to have successfully bought their growth. Largely this means paying for placement on Google’s search engine results pages, and it’s an increasingly effective strategy. Paid click-through rates on Google are up, particularly for companies willing to spend on expensive awareness-building campaigns across media channels. Consumers simply feel more comfortable clicking on those paid links when they recognize the brand.

Paid search kept Jet.com’s internet traffic aloft. And it has tumbled almost in lockstep with Jet.com’s sales. You could argue that Jet.com’s sales may have fallen for any number of reasons. But there’s only one reason why their paid search traffic went from eight million visitors a month to less than one million: Walmart was reallocating its budget elsewhere. Growing sales on Jet.com simply wasn’t a priority for the retail giant.

Source: Jumpshot

The Jet brand and the Jet/Walmart fit remain indistinct

Walmart has pulled back on making Jet a public-facing brand in part because of an ill-defined fit between the two brands. Jet was initially created to reach consumers who cared more about value than convenience. It was designed to be sort of an online Costco, offering very low prices to those willing to pay a membership fee. This would seemingly be a good fit for Walmart, whose growth has come via an unwavering commitment to its brand promise (everyday low prices) and core target (value-oriented non-urban consumers). But over time, Jet morphed into a brand with a reputation of reaching younger, more affluent urbanites – not an existing fit with Walmart, but a potentially complementary one that could help Walmart grow beyond its core.

While either strategy can be reasonable, the Walmart/Jet fit seemed to vacillate between the two, and never really settled on either. Jet has upscale ambitions, but its appeal to affluent consumers may be overstated. In Q1 2019, the top three keyword searches on Jet.com were decidedly mainstream “toilet paper”, “paper towels”, and “Frito-Lay”. It’s not until the fourth keyword search term, “mid-century modern furniture”, that the searches take a more upscale vibe.

Walmart has been toning down its positioning of Jet.com as an urban growth engine, and its discussion of Jet’s role has become increasingly circumscribed. As Walmart put it,

“Last year, we repositioned the Jet site itself. Across most of the country, we saw we could get a much higher return on our marketing investments with Walmart.com, so we’ve dialed up our marketing spend there… However, in specific large cities where Walmart has few or no stores, Jet has become hyper-focused on those urban customers…. The focus has largely been on New York so far, and we’re looking at other cities.”

Walmart’s real motivation in buying Jet.com 

The fact is that this acquisition was never about adding new customers or reaching complementary markets. Instead, it was part tech-buy, part acqui-hire. Walmart wanted technology innovations like Jet.com’s real-time pricing algorithm, which helps increase revenue per customer. And while Walmart announced that Simon Belsham, Jet.com’s current president, will leave later this summer, it still has the person they really wanted: Jet.com’s founder Marc Lore, who will continue to run Walmart’s ecommerce business. Lore is widely considered to have led Walmart’s recent overall ecommerce growth, including improvements in operations, infrastructure, and supply chain.

The Jet.com acquisition remains a win for Walmart

Ultimately it’s hard to argue with results. Walmart’s ecommerce sales are up significantly. Its extensive network of stores bodes well in the omnichannel future. Amazon has extended beyond its affluent base to build extensive middle-class appeal but hasn’t penetrated strongly into Walmart’s base. And while Walmart is a distant second to Amazon online, Walmart is far ahead of the other retailers behind it.

Many headlines will try to position Jet.com’s incorporation into the Walmart mothership as a failure. But a deeper analysis reveals that the acquisition continues to go as Walmart planned, and is largely a win for the Arkansas-based retailer.

Stephen Kraus is the head of digital insights for Jumpshot. Kraus is an expert in consumer insights and digital trends, the author of three books and holds a Ph.D. from Harvard University.

Related reading

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Five major ways blockchain will impact search marketing, and how advertising professionals are already beginning to master this disruptive technology.

Shopping on social media channels is spreading quickly as the next big thing. The rise of visual search is powered by people’s desire to discover brands.

The search industry’s interest goes beyond Google, Apple Search Ads’ on the rise. Kenshoo reveals insights and key stats on social and search advertising.

Instagram announced Wednesday that it is introducing ads in its Explore tab, the section where users can browse content and discover new accounts based on their interests.

The company said it will be rolling out the ads “slowly and thoughtfully” over the coming months. Instagram’s Business Product Marketing Director Susan Bucker Rose told TechCrunch Instagram will first test the ads to promote IGTV (Instagram’s long-form video platform) before offering the ad unit to a “handful of brands” over the upcoming weeks.

Why we should care

Instagram’s advertising business is growing faster than Facebook, and the site is experiencing more user engagement growth than it’s parent platform, too. It’s no surprise the company is looking to take advantage of that growth by finding new ways to generate ad revenue. Putting ads in the Explore tab will give Instagram advertisers a new inventory area to reach users beyond their feeds.

In the initial roll out, Instagram will only show ads to users after they’ve engaged with Explore content. Ads will be eligible to show to users once they have tapped on a photo or video within Explore. Then, Instagram said, the user, “May begin to see ads as part of their browsing experience just like in the main feed.”

More on the news

• Brands will be able to place ads in Explore via the Facebook Ads Manager — just as they can for Instagram Feed and Stories ads: “Advertisers can easily extend their campaigns using automatic placements with a simple opt-in to reach audiences in Explore.”
• According to Instagram, more than 50% of its billion users visit the Explore tab every month and 80% of its users follow a business account on the platform.
• Earlier this month, Instagram made it possible for advertisers to turn organic posts from influencers into ads.

Advertising is the big gun of paid efforts brands put in to increase awareness and revenue. Be it small businesses or large enterprises, everyone has a shot at advertising.  

With global ad spend reaching an estimated $579 billion at the end of 2018 and online advertising leading the charts, we need to pay attention to advertising.

Source: Vox

Leading social media networks like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Quora. all are open to advertising on. While social media advertising has its own impact, there is no denying the fact that search engine ads are efficient too.

Google Ads and Bing Ads lead the charge in search engine advertising. There are a lot of reasons why advertisers prefer Google Ads to any other form of online advertising:

• A person who is actively searching for products on Google is more inclined to buy than one who is scrolling social media
• With the lion’s share in the global search market, Google is undoubtedly the leading and most used search engine in the world
• The scalability and flexibility of Google Ads
• Regular updates, tons of features, and great support

The benefits of using Google Ads are many

But the point I want to stress is – Are we using it to its full potential? Are we optimizing our Google Ads? Are they driving in conversions or results?

If you thought twice before answering the above questions, you are probably in the right place. Flushing money into advertising without understanding its workflow is not cool.

Throughout this article, we will discuss the top hacks which every advertiser should use to improve their Google Ads performance. Irrespective of your business niche, you will gain great insights and probably become better at Google advertising in 2019.

Nine Google Ads hacks that will make your paid advertising efforts worth it

1. Pay attention to mobile

From 6.1% in 2011 to 52.2% in 2018, the percentage of mobile phone traffic is growing exponentially.

You can note how the percentage of all global web pages served to mobile phones from 2009 to 2018 in the graph given below.

Source: Statista

This number is definitely gonna increase. With so many people using their phones to access the web, advertisers need to stay one step ahead.

Be it any type of ad, Google is intelligent enough to format your ads for mobile, meaning they will automatically show up on mobile devices when someone searches for related keywords.

But there are some ads such as “Call-only” ads and “App Promotion” ads” which are specifically designed for mobile.

Call-only ads are different from call extensions. These ads allow people to call your business directly and help in engagement.

App promotion ads focus on getting more app installs, more in-app actions and in-app action value. These are shown across the Google network to help you promote your application.

Some tips for optimizing your ads for mobile

1. Your ad’s landing page must be mobile-friendly allowing users to easily access the webpage on their mobile devices
2. As you have less space to display ads on mobile, make sure you have the most important information in the first line
3. Use call bid adjustments to drive more calls to your business
4. Keep track of both online and offline mobile conversions because mobile engagement results in offline actions. Using lead ads and call-only ads to gather customer data and importing this data into your offline database allows better conversion tracking.

With more and more mobile shoppers, it is important for advertisers to leverage Google Ads Mobile.

2. Write compelling ad copy

This may be the most fundamental advertising learning but people still are not good at it. I want to stress the fact that your ads must be appealing.

The majority of Google Ads are just posted for the sake of advertising. We need to understand our customers’ emotions and step in their shoes. Most of the time, we come across such boring ads that we may want to report them for lack of luster.

To stand out from your competition, you need to excel at creating special ads. This can be achieved through:

Emotional touch: This might be your best shot at engaging your audience. Everyone is affected by emotions. When we add emotions to our advertisements, it forces people to notice and connect.

Show statistics: Including number and stats in your headlines and copy is highly recommended. This builds trust and makes your ads more appealing to the searchers.

Use Display URLs to good effect: I hope every one of us is aware that our landing page URL and display URL need not be the same and can be different. This may seem to have a trivial impact but that isn’t the case.

Using keywords in your display URL ensures the searchers that they will be taken to a relevant landing page.

Ad extensions and reviews: The more detailed your ad, the more chances of it being clicked. Ad extensions serve a great purpose by listing all the details about a business. When people compare any two ads, they definitely click the one with more extensions.

Reviews about businesses build trust and people can clearly see what others have to say about your work.

Offer a Solution- People click on ads when they see a solution to their problems. You need to step into your customer’s shoes and ponder while writing your ad copy:

• What keywords are being searched by my target audience?
• What information do I expect to see if I am searching for something?
• Does my product solve the customer’s problem?

After assessing the answers to the above questions, you will surely write better ad copy which will engage your audience.

3. Competitor analysis

This is one of my favorite hacks that advertisers can use on Google Ads. Bidding on competitor keywords cuts down your research work and is highly efficient. Having a look at how others are running ads on the same products simplifies things a lot.

Consider this example

You have an online clothing store with a large inventory. You are about to enter the world of online advertising for your store. But then, you decide to have a look at how others are performing.

This helps you to start afresh and now you already have a strategic blueprint in your mind. This allows you to perform better as you already have access to your competitor’s hard work and research. You can simply use their tactics or add something extra from your side.

The best thing of them all: Google allows us to bid on competitor’s keywords but limits the use of trademarks. 

We have a lot of tools for competitor analysis but I recommend SemRush. It’s easy to use and I have been using it for some time now.

1. There is a separate tab for “Advertising Research” under Domain Analytics in the tool. You need to enter the website URL of your competitor here.

2.  After you feed in the URL, you will see an overview of all the ads being run by your competitor with important metrics to check.

3.  You are even able to see the exact ad copies of your competitor, keywords being bid on, the CPC map, and other such valuable details.

Now, you will have a complete idea of what keywords are performing best for your competitor. You can also check the exact ad copy they are using.

For display ads, I will recommend Moat. It is a digital marketing intelligence tool which allows you to have a look at several display creatives from different brands.

One more thing that can be implied is the use of VPNs (Virtual Private Networks). If you want to check your competitor’s ads in some other countries, then you can simply use a VPN and perform a Google search with related keywords.

4. Use exclusions and negative keywords

This is a pro tip and must surely be executed. During my time of advertising on Google, I noticed a very odd trend and functionality of the Google Ads platform.

When we talk about ad optimization, Google gives you full freedom and features to run your ads as you wish.

For display ads, whenever you click on an ad campaign, you have the“Placements” tab in the left-hand sidebar. This tab shows three options:

Placements: Here, you may enter multiple website URLs on which you want your display ad to appear.

Where Ads Showed: This is a list of the web pages and mobile applications where your display ad was shown.

Exclusions: Exclusions include all those websites and mobile apps where you do not want your ad to appear. This generally includes all business niches which are irrelevant to your business.

Most advertisers run their ad campaigns for a while. Then, they check where their ads were shown and further, they optimize their ads to exclude some websites and apps.

My point is we should exclude business categories(especially mobile apps) as soon as our ad is live.

Why?

Because, from personal experience, when you haven’t given Google any information about where to run your ads and where not, it will show your ads amongst all the categories irrespective of your business niche and you will lose money.

It doesn’t make any sense when we wait for the calamity to occur and then take preventive measures. We should simply be cautious from the beginning.

You could either exclude placements manually or use a placement exclusion list.

What happened with me was that my ad campaigns got a lot of irrelevant clicks majorly because my ad was shown on a lot of mobile applications. I started excluding the whole app categories which saved me money and improved my ads.

I would advise fellow advertisers to use placements and exclusions wisely to see your ad performance grow.

The same applies for using negative keywords.

We all are aware of the importance of negative keywords for search campaigns. Just like keywords which we decide for our ads to appear on, there are certain keywords which we do not want our ads to appear on. These are called negative keywords.

Search terms are keywords or phrases which someone searched for and then clicked your ad. We need to include unrelated search terms as negative keywords so that our ad does not show up for those phrases.

Tip: Whenever you create a search campaign, add some general negative keywords wherever applicable.

Source

If you sell women’s handbags and purses online, keywords like men’s purses, wallets, etc. must be included as negative keywords in your ad campaign beforehand.

5. Smart remarketing

The reason I am writing this under “smart remarketing” is that we as advertisers are not using the powerful weapon of remarketing to its full potential. Here, I will share the pro tips of remarketing which I’ve learned over the years.

We all understand that to remarket is to re-engage users who once visited your website but didn’t complete some action which you consider a conversion. It can be a product purchase, ebook download, and lead sign-up.

Remarketing allows you to retarget customers who have already shown interest in your business and hence it gives huge returns and conversions.

Some points of interest

1. Membership duration

This is an arguable one but the appropriate membership duration for your remarketing audience should be 60 days.

The maximum limit is 540 days and most advertisers choose this. My point of view is that allowing people to stay in your remarketing audiences for more than 60 days doesn’t make sense.

The reason being people complete any desired action/purchase within 60 days on an average and allowing 540 days renders the remarketing audience ineffective.

Just so you know, this is no hard and fast rule. You may well keep the limit to 540 days or any time duration. Just consider your campaign objectives and previous conversion data before deciding.

2. Targeting abandoned carts

Abandoned shopping carts are a big pain point for online sellers and the issue is they are inevitable. With remarketing though, you can target abandoned carts easily.

While creating your remarketing audience, you have the option of panning out rules. The rules can contain, “start with”, “end with” some particular URL that you feed into the system.

To target users who abandoned your shopping cart, you should feed the “add to cart” URL in the contain part and input the “order received” URL in the does not contain part.

Using the above tip, you can target people who have abandoned the shopping cart for any particular product.

3. Complimentary items

Every business has products which they want to cross-sell. This means there are always some items which are related to each other and go in hand in hand. Businesses love to target customers who have purchased either of the items so that they can show ads of the other item to the concerned audience.

Remarketing allows us to do this efficiently. We need to create a rule which contains the “order received” URL for a particular product. It means that our ad will only be shown to people who have purchased some specific item.

We just need to create an ad for the complimentary item and show it to the buyers of the original item.

This is a great cross-selling strategy which helps our ads to be shown to the right audience improving the performance and conversions of our ads.

Advertisers need to remarket effectively. Best practices like dynamic remarketing have a lot of potentials and can be the game changer for your paid advertising efforts.

6. Make the best use of In-Market Audiences

In-Market Audiences are a boon to small businesses advertising online. They can be defined as groups or segments of shoppers for different categories who are actively searching for some product “in the market”.

We all know remarketing can work wonders for us but the only prerequisite is audience size.

This is where in-market segments step in. An in-market audience is a readymade consumer data list which gives us an idea of what people are actively searching or looking for online.

This data is gold for advertisers given that we already know which consumers are interested in which type of products.

I used both Google Analytics and Google Ads to take full advantage of in-market segments.

Step one

Go to Google Analytics (hope you have set it up for your business) and check the “Product Performance” tab under “Ecommerce”.

Step two

Here, you will see all your product purchases. You need to select “In-Market Segment” as the secondary dimension.

Step three

Note down all in-market segments for your top selling products.

Step four

While creating the audience for your Google Ads campaign, be sure to include the same segments to show your ad to the desired audience.

This will ensure your ad (for a specific product) to be presented to the same category of people who purchased same or related products (same in-market segment) from you previously.

Sounds good, right? Then it is time to implement the same.

7. Optimize your “Quality Score”

According to Google, “Quality Score” is an estimate of the quality of your ads, keywords, and landing pages. Higher quality ads can lead to lower prices and better ad positions.

This is not just a hack but the most important metric relative to Google Ads.

Understanding and improving your site’s quality score can take you places. It is a rating between one to ten which depicts how well are your ads fairing in the online market. It has three components which are expected clickthrough rate, ad relevance, and landing page experience.

All of these components point towards one direction

• Are your ads fit for the audience you have targeted?
• How well is your audience engaging with your ad?
• Do your ads achieve campaign objectives like conversions, traffic, sales, etc?

A good quality score helps your ads to rank well. How?

Ad Rank is an estimate which determines the position of your ad in Google SERPs. The Quality Score of your keywords multiplied by the bid on your keywords determine your Ad Rank.

Source: Wordstream

As depicted above, a high “Quality Score” improves your Ad Rank and lowers your CPC, which means even if you are bidding less than your competitors for the same keywords, your ad will rank higher than the rest because your Quality Score is better.

In the new Google Ads interface, you need to navigate to the “Keyword” level and then check the Quality Score column for respective keywords.

After analyzing your “Quality Score”, you need to improve it.

Check out these tips

• Use multiple ad groups with specific targeted keywords. Don’t add irrelevant keywords just for the sake of using.
• Improve your landing page experience. Clear, correct, and related data will compel your customers to stay on your webpage and engage.
• Improve your ad copy. Good, catchy headlines with to the point descriptions always make a good ad. Emphasize on features which you are providing exclusively. Sales and discounts must be highlighted.
• Use smaller ad groups with less number of keywords. Using 15-20 keywords in a single ad group will complicate things a lot and hence it is not recommended. Use around nine to ten keywords per ad group.

With time, advertisers realize the importance of the “Quality Score” and start optimizing it. I would advise to aim for a healthy Quality Score from the start and see how it impacts your overall ads performance.

8. Google Ads scripts

Using Google Ads scripts will save you a lot of effort and time. Some consider this best fit for advanced advertisers but I have a different point of view.

What is a Google Ads Script?

A script is a pre-defined JavaScipt code which allows you to modify your ad campaigns and automate advertising tasks.

Scripts can be used to automate repetitive tasks and control your Google Ads campaigns with the help of JavaScript. Though scripts are most appropriate where you have to manage multiple Google Ads accounts, they can also ease out daily manual work.

How to use Google Ads Scripts

To use scripts, click on “Tools & Settings”. Then click “Scripts” under Bulk Actions.

Here, you can simply add a pre-written script or write your own. Writing your own script is not as hard as it seems because it is based on JavaScipt. You don’t need to be a champion coder and a basic understanding of JavaScript is sufficient to write your own script.

Some helpful information about writing a custom Google Ads Script can be found here.

Your script will perform some specific task for you in your ad campaigns.

You need to preview your script before running it to avoid mistakes.

Some of the common repetitive tasks which you can automate using scripts

• Using bid modifiers and adjusting your advertisement bids according to your needs
• Pausing and deleting ads with low performance(pause some ads with low “Quality Score”, CTR, and conversions
• Ad performance and reporting

There is a lot of work which you can automate using Google Ads Scripts. You just need to check the resources to filter out which one works best for you.

Here is an example of Google Ads Script to automatically pause ads with low CTR

Source: Wordstream

Scripts are there to lessen the advertising workload and believe me, it works. We just need to explore it a bit more.

9. Effective use of bidding strategies

With Google introducing three new bidding strategies for Google Ads advertisers recently, we all know that leveraging Google Ads bidding strategies is the way forward.

What is a bidding strategy?

In simple terms, a bidding strategy is a way you would want Google to exhaust your budget on course to accomplish your campaign objectives or goals. You have different options you would like to choose to bid for your ads.

Currently, we have these bidding strategies available to us in Google Ads:

Target CPA (Cost Per Acquisition): If driving conversions is your main objective, then this is the strategy for you. CPA is the maximum amount which you are willing to pay for one conversion. You feed your target CPA and Google will optimize your campaign to get the maximum conversions within your budget.

Target ROAS (Return On Ad Spend): Return on Ad Spend is the number of product sales divided by your ad spend. You set a specific target ROAS and Google will set your bids to maximize conversions according to your ROAS.

Maximize Conversions: This is pretty much straightforward. You assign a daily budget amount and Google will try to get you the maximum conversions within that amount.

Enhanced Cost Per Click (ECPC): This is where Google predicts the likelihood of a conversion and adjusts your bids accordingly. If the likelihood is high, your bids will be increased and vice-versa. Note: All the above strategies fall underSmart Bidding which is a subset of automated bidding strategies

Maximize Clicks: As the name suggests, Google will try to get as many clicks as possible within your daily budget.

Manual CPC Bidding: Here, you will have to adjust your bids manually for all your ad groups and placements. Though you have much more control, this strategy requires proper monitoring of your ads which takes some time.

Target Search Page Location: This is when you ask Google to adjust your bids so that your ad always appears on the first page results of Google (or at the top of the results 1-4). No guaranteed placements because your quality score will always be taken into account.

Target Outranking Share: This is the best strategy for you when you want your ads to appear above your competitor’s ads. When both your and your competitor’s ad are shown, Google will automatically adjust to place your ads above your competitor’s.

CPM Bidding (Cost Per Thousand Impressions): This will optimize your bids according to the impressions of your ads and is only available for Display and YouTube campaigns.

vCPM Bidding (Cost Per Viewable Thousand Impressions): According to Google, an ad is viewable when at least 50% of its area is visible for 1 second for Display Network ads or two seconds for video ads.

This bidding strategy adjusts your bids according to the viewable impressions your ad gets. Only for Display and YouTube campaigns.

CPV Bidding (Cost Per View): CPV bidding is for video ad campaigns, and here you bid for a maximum number of views for your video.

Target Impression Share Bidding: Focused on brand awareness, this bidding strategy helps you to dominate ad impressions for specific keywords. You decide an impression share (like 50, 80%) for a specific keyword and your ad will be according to your desired impression share.

Google is planning to take down some of these existing bidding strategies in the near future but we need to wait and see.

Newly added bidding strategies

Campaign-level conversion setting: Earlier, all conversion goals were set at the account level leaving all campaigns under that account bound to follow the same goals. Now, different campaigns can have different conversion goals.

Seasonality adjustments: This has been specifically added keeping promotions, holidays in mind where advertisers are sure that their conversions will increase over those periods. Your bids will be adjusted accordingly.

Maximize Conversion Value: This is quite similar to the Maximize Conversions bidding strategy but here we consider conversion value as the building block.

We decide a particular conversion value and Google will try to get the maximum conversion value from your daily budget.

Value Rules: All conversions do not have the same value and keeping this in mind, Google will be introducing Value Rules which will help advertisers differentiate conversion values.

Woof, that was some list! Hope it helped you understand the basics right.

The point is with so many bidding strategies to choose from, businesses surely have one which is the best fit for them. Dive into the details, do your research and understand the logic.

A bidding strategy is Google’s effort to make things easy and automated for you. Choose your pick and start testing.

Key takeaways

Yes, you can master Google advertising by implementing the above hacks. The key is constant testing and gathering new insights. The more you test and learn, the better you become at advertising. One best practice is not repeating or making rookie mistakes which can affect your advertising strategy adversely.

• Please don’t spend too much on ad testing. Try to control your budget while you implement new strategies and ideas.
• Providing a great landing page experience must be your priority because your ads are of no use without an optimized landing page.
• Do a lot of research. Dig in for keywords, study your competitors, learn the market trends and then move forward. Jumping straight into the mainstream without any homework can be wasteful.

Moreover, adapting to new changes and updates can be beneficial. Google recently introduced three new ad types and advertisers need to pay heed. Online advertising is experiencing a significant shift and advertisers should be up for it.

Which of the above hacks do you find most useful for your business? How do you plan to implement it? Are there any other hacks that should be on the list?

Share your thoughts in the comments.

Himanshu Rauthan is an entrepreneur, Co-Founder at MakeWebBetter, BotMyWork, and the Director of CEDCOSS Technologies. He can be found on Twitter .

You read that right: Rand Fishkin returns to the SMX stage in New York City this November! Don’t miss your chance to see the consummate advocate for search marketers deliver his opening keynote, Google: From Everyone’s Search Engine to Everyone’s Competitor.

Here’s your exclusive sneak peek, straight from Rand himself…

In years past, Google has been the largest driver of traffic to almost every web-based business in existence. Today, that’s still true, but a strange new trend is rearing its head — Google’s becoming your primary competitor. From travel to sports, reference to news, and answers on every topic, the search giant is working harder than ever to keep searchers on Google rather than sending them to your sites. In this presentation, I’ll show, via clickstream data from 10s of millions of devices, how the landscape of the web is shifting, and how to compete against Google in a game they control.

Rand’s keynote will tackle important topics, like:

• Where search opportunity broadly sits for paid and organic
• How to benefit from zero-click searches and Google’s bias to instant answers
• Where and how influence and traffic can be garnered from other sources, including social networks, podcasts, video, apps, and the still-powerful long tail of the web
• Whether, how, and how much voice search (and voice answers) are cannibalizing opportunity
• What other trends are on the rise in search and search marketing
• Tactics for on-SERP SEO and branded search creation

This is just one of more than 70 sessions coming to SMX East November 13-14 in NYC, covering all aspects of a comprehensive search marketing program: SEO, SEM, CRO, analytics, social, local, tools, and beyond. Saddle up for an educational journey that will help you connect what you learn to how you execute back at the office — expanding your knowledge in a deeper, more meaningful way.

Sound like your cup of tea? Secure your spot now to take advantage of Super Early Bird rates! Pick your ideal pass:

• All Access Pass: The complete experience — all sessions, keynotes, clinics, networking events, and amenities. Book now and save $450 off on-site rates!
• All Access + Workshop Combo (best value!): Maximize your learning by adding a full-day pre-conference workshop to your itinerary. Book now and save $900 off on-site rates!

You’ll walk away with at least one actionable tactic that will elevate your search marketing campaigns in 2019 and beyond.

See you in NYC!

According to Forrester, digital spend is set to top $150 billion by 2023 and account for 35 percent of total ad spend.

And this means CMOs will spend more than ever before on paid search, banner and outstream video ads, instream video ads, and email marketing to attract those buyers who start their journey online.

However, adopting a “more is more” attitude toward digital ad spend isn’t always necessarily a good thing. Spending wisely means spending less to generate more, and keyword traffic forecasting is one of a CMO’s best resources to allocate marketing spend across the most useful tactics. Here’s how traffic forecasting could mean smarter ad spend.

Content produced in collaboration with Investis Digital.

What is traffic forecasting?

Traffic forecasting is the implementation of automated tools to help a brand predict which content will resonate with target audiences at a given time by aligning content with user intent. Traffic forecasting can help brands predict how keywords will perform, which can help marketers gauge competitor performance, intelligently allocate budgets, and identify the best opportunities to generate results across marketing channels.

Accurate traffic forecasting can also make search a more powerful channel to support multiple functions in an organization.

Here are three examples of traffic forecasting in action:

• CMOs can understand how much time and effort they will need to increase awareness for new products, services, and campaigns.
• CROs can plan future revenue models around search, comparing it with other digital channels to determine which tactics they need to drive short-term and long-term growth.
• Product marketers can use traffic forecasting to see market share and demand insights when planning new brand or product launches.

Using traffic forecasting in order to understand the ways in which keywords and search volume directly affect awareness and demand can help entire organizations better plan content around the words and phrases audiences are actually using to search for their products and services.

Traffic forecasting in the context of the customer journey

As noted, traffic forecasting can help businesses plan everything from marketing campaigns to product launches. Forecasting is also essential for aligning your brand with your customer’s online journey. It’s important to note that 87% of shoppers now begin their searches online, whether they plan to purchase online or in store, according to an August 2018 study by Salesforce and Publicis.Sapient.

The days when a sale began with a call to a salesperson may be numbered as all buyers — and especially B2B buyers — begin researching products long before they ever make real-world contact with a brand. As customers increasingly rely on research they find online, search ads have become the first salesperson a potential customer generally reaches out to.

As more customers move online to conduct research in those critical first stages of the buyer journey, it stands to reason that marketers would allocate more of their ad spend to digital channels, such as search marketing.

However, many brands are investing in the wrong keywords — meaning that buyers are reaching out, but marketers aren’t answering their queries in a way that will effectively move them down the path to purchase.  

How traffic forecasting uses data to make a brand relevant along the customer journey

Traffic forecasting utilizes all your data.

By incorporating both first and third-party data sources, a good traffic forecasting tool calculates the traffic and revenue possible from SEO and content marketing with these components:

First-party data (your data)

First-party data is what makes forecasting results custom in every case. Traffic forecasting tools require basic company and competitor information to tailor results with domain or page-level data, region, and other data points that can make a forecast as detailed or broad as you need. The more detailed the data, the more accurate the forecast.

Third-party authority data

Analyzing third-party data sources with a traffic forecasting tool can help validate search volume and rank on a real-time basis, which ensures forecasts are as accurate as possible. The best forecasting tools incorporate APIs from industry-leading brands such as Authority Labs, Google Ads, Advanced Web Ranking, and SEMRush.

Authority Labs and SEMRush both provide keyword ranking data in real-time to generate projections for companies and competitors. The Google Ads API shows the popularity of keywords to define search volume, competition, and cost-per-click rates over time. Advanced Web Ranking provides insights into keyword clicks by examining clickthrough rates by industry segmentation and Google positions.

A traffic forecasting tool combines all these insights in or to examines trends in historical data, algorithm changes, and industry data. By using both first- and third-party data sources, traffic forecasting tools can provide insight that helps move customers down the path to purchase. This information also allows results to be tailored for individual brands and offers more personalized, accurate projections.

Domain or page-level forecast

By utilizing both first- and third-party data, traffic forecasting tools can instantly produce reports providing monthly traffic and revenue forecasts for up to 24 months of a typical SEO engagement – at the domain or page level.

Forecasts are designed to show a conservative outlook incremental to data currently available and are on average 20 to 30 percent more conservative than actual results.

What are key features of an automated traffic forecasting tool?

Traffic forecasting is a complex process that requires ongoing management, multiple and shifting data sources, and complex calculations. Therefore, it generally requires an automated tool specifically designed to calculate the benefits of individual keywords. Many automated tools on the market offer limited solutions and are costly to maintain.

A truly worthwhile automated tool for traffic forecasting provides the following insights:

• Monthly traffic and revenue projections
• Insights into the impact of specific keywords on customized initiatives and goals
• Project engagement and ROI for defined keywords in both search and social
• Identification of gaps in competitors’ strategies
• Identification of weaknesses in your own strategy

For more information on how to get the most from your search spend using automated tools for traffic forecasting, check out Investis Digital’s whitepaper, “Forecasting for Traffic and Revenue Potential .”

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Your search engine marketing success hinges upon your site’s UX. Two elements of UX that are particularly relevant to SEO.

Local SEO tactics that can help you generate high-quality traffic and drive conversions. It can also help you compete with big brands and stay relevant.

Tools that can help benchmark your clients’ link quality against competitors, monitor backlinks, and discover partnership opportunities with other websites.

I’ll walk you through a few important tactics like retargeting site visitors and purchasers, mid-funnel remarketing, and more of these tips to utilize.

I know it sounds banal, but I’d like to revisit the question: “What is conversion rate optimization.”

If you search Google, the answer seems obvious enough. The first result, from Moz, defines it as, “the systematic process of increasing the percentage of website visitors who take a desired action — be that filling out a form, becoming customers, or otherwise.”

That seems right to me.

Then why do so many articles, courses, lectures and talks focus on conversion rate optimization tactics?

These articles – some of which include hundreds of tips and tactics – include advice like “use high-quality images” and “offer free shipping.”

These are assuredly good pieces of advice.

One would assume high–quality images would perform better than low-quality images (subjectiveness aside), and I’m sure customers delight in not having to pay for free shipping (though operationally, this adds some complexity).

Any single tactic or tip on this list is not in itself conversion optimization (or growth or growth hacking or experimentation or whatever word you’re using for the practice of evidence-based decision making).

For the sake of this article, I’m going to say conversion optimization and growth, by and large, are pretty much the same thing.

Growth usually encompasses product and marketing, whereas conversion optimization usually just looks at the website experience, though that seems to be a pretty minor distinguishment in the grand scheme of things. Both of these things encourage experimentation, data-driven decision making, and fast learning and iteration.

And people have a ton of “growth hacking tips” and tactics:

However, without context none of this is helpful. Would the aspiring growth hacker or conversion optimizer just run down each list and implement each thing? Test each thing individually?

CRO tactics vs. strategy (and operating systems)

The first learning from these searches is that people misunderstand tactics and strategies and use the words interchangeably.

Strategy is the “overarching plan or set of goals.” Tactics “are the specific actions or steps you undertake to accomplish your strategy.”

For instance, if it were my strategy to appear as a growth thought leader (whatever that means), one tactic in my toolbelt may be writing articles like this. Another may be doing webinars hosted on my personal website. Another might be doing local meetups.

For my role at HubSpot, I could carve out a strategy to appear at every possible organic location for bottom funnel search results. Tactically, this could mean writing listicles like our “best help desk software” article. It could also mean getting more customer reviews to lift our prominence on review sites that already appear near the top of Google for these terms.

Now, I think that CRO or growth should neither be looked at as a strategy nor as a tactic. It should be viewed as an operating system.

An operating system, removed slightly from its technical origins, defines the rules, functions, heuristics and mannerisms that control a system. In short, it’s a code (both implicit and explicit) that defines how decisions are made.

What this means practically is that a conversion optimizer or growth hacker should look much less like a vigilante ninja, complete with both a broad and simultaneously specialized skill set, who can come in and optimize a landing page or fix a referral loop.

Instead, the practice should look much more like building and maintaining infrastructure.

This is an idea inspired in part by Ed Fry (from this blog post and from several conversations). In his article, he distinguishes marketing (those who write the copy, launch the campaigns, define the brand) from growth (the scientific method, which has come a long way in marketing due to technological enablement like front-end testing tools).

He writes:

“Our observation is growth enables marketing, product, sales and other teams across the organization. It sits at an operational role, supporting multiple teams across the company, and rolls up to Operations or the CEO. This is not about managing marketing activities that have to happen every day. Growth is far more concerned about moving levers behind the sales & marketing activity instead of the functional practices of campaigns, brand, and so on.”

This is where I think CRO (or growth) thrives, particularly as a company expands in size and sophistication.

No matter how you cut it, the process usually looks something like this:

We collect data and information, put it through our proprietary growth or CRO process (made up of a unique blend of technology, processes and humans), and our output is better decisions and experiences for our users.

But why should that live within the purview of one person or even one team? What if we could enable everyone in the company to make better decisions, systematically?

Where does CRO fit into the company structure?

CRO teams tend to be either centralized or decentralized (or in growth parlance, independent or function-led).

Image Source

In a centralized model, everything flows through that team, resulting in a more structured and predictable system, but can perhaps become bottlenecked if other teams want to join in. Here’s an article about the relative pros and cons of each model.

Image source

There’s a third model as well that I see more often now, particularly in large organizations with sophisticated experimentation programs: the center of excellence model.

Ronny Kohavi talked about this in an HBR article and explains it like this:

“A center of excellence focuses mostly on the design, execution, and analysis of controlled experiments. It significantly lowers the time and resources those tasks require by building a companywide experimentation platform and related tools. It can also spread best testing practices throughout the organization by hosting classes, labs, and conferences.”

In other words, if we move to a center of excellence model, CRO or growth teams can focus on building up three components of company infrastructure:

• Technical ability (tools)
• Education and best practices
• Attitudes/beliefs (culture)

CRO should support technical enablement and tooling

First and foremost, to build a company where everyone can run experiments and make better decisions, it’s important to give people the tools and technology needed to do that. I think that falls under three areas:

• Data
• Experimentation capabilities
• Knowledge sharing

To make better decisions, we need better data. A growth or CRO team can help implement, orchestrate and access the data each team needs to make better decisions.

Of course, there are a million tools on the market, ranging from the free and ubiquitous (Google Analytics) to the enterprise (Adobe Analytics) to the custom setups loved in technical organizations.

There’s no right choice for every organization, but it’s an important decision to discuss.

The second point is to decide on an experimentation framework or platform. Again, there are tons of tools available, ranging from free (Google Optimize) to enterprise to custom built.

How you set this up should have a lot to do with your organization’s technical capabilities, culture and functional needs. Echoing the above, there’s no easy answer here – but here’s a really interesting paper on how Microsoft has built their experimentation platform.

Finally, knowledge sharing is probably the most underrated. Assuming you have several teams running trustworthy experiments, delivering better experiences and getting results – the next logical piece in the puzzle is to allow archiving and communicating these results.

Education, training and best practices

The second component of infrastructure is education. If you’re going to democratize experiments, then you’ll want to make sure everyone knows how to run them.

Personally, I love the Airbnb model – they send employees through Data University to train everyone in the fundamentals.

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I realize this is a heavy up-front and top-down effort, so it doesn’t need to be as robust right off the bat. Your team could simply act as an internal consultancy, holding office hours and supporting interested teams when they run experiments. Normally it takes a small ramp up period before the team or the analyst/marketer is off and running by themselves.

At the very least, documenting how to set up and analyze experiments is something that should be done. Having a resource center, or at the very least a checklist or list of guidelines like I’ve tried to put together in this article, helps people feel more comfortable running their own tests properly.

Empowering a culture of experimentation

Finally, the last component of infrastructure is the subtle and the emotional. CRO and growth teams should be cheerleaders for evidence-based decision making, experimentation and the judicious use of data in campaigns.

I’ve written a lot about building a culture of experimentation in the past and can’t say there’s any one tip or tactic or magic bullet to do it.

Often, the best way is to have a powerful and influential evangelist at the top leading the way.

Sometimes it’s built up through the bottom through consistently showing results and disseminating them through the company via Wiki posts, newsletters, and weekly experiment readouts.

This may be the most important job of the CRO or growth team, as it builds a sort of “flywheel” effect. The more excited others are about growth and experimentation, the more they’re willing to learn and improve their own skill sets, and the more evangelists you’ll have for the program – a perpetual motion device of data-driven decision making that will surely help you edge out past the competition in the long run.

Opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Marketing Land. Staff authors are listed here.

Marketing automation platforms form the backbone of marketing operations, increasingly serving as sophisticated marketing orchestration platforms. A range of platforms is available to marketers depending on their firm’s size, budget and level of digital marketing sophistication.

The more basic functions of marketing automation have become somewhat commoditized, so platform vendors mostly look to differentiate their platforms based on the ability to scale, as well as usability, ease of implementation and customer experience.

MarTech Today’s “B2B Marketing Automation Platforms: A Marketer’s Guide” examines the market for B2B marketing automation platforms and the considerations involved in implementing this software in your business.

This 48-page report includes profiles of 14 leading B2B marketing automation vendors, capabilities comparisons and recommended steps for evaluating and purchasing. If you are a marketer looking to adopt a marketing automation software platform, you need to read this report. Visit Digital Marketing Depot to download your copy.

New data from famed internet analyst Mary Meeker suggests online advertising and e-commerce growth may be slowing, but that doesn’t make these channels any less important for marketers to maximize.

Online Advertising

Although digital ad spend increased 1% over last year, the revenues are slowing down – dropping by 9% between the end of 2018 and the first quarter of 2019, according to the report.

Mary Meeker Internet Trends Report | Source: Company public releases & Morgan Stanley estimates

Google still reigns supreme in terms of ad platform revenue, with Facebook following behind it. However, platforms like Amazon, Twitter, Snap and Pinterest are gaining share, showing an average ad revenue growth rate of 2.6% over the last three years (compared to Google’s 1.4% increase and Facebook’s 1.9% increase).

Programmatic ad buying has seen a 42% increase from 2012, which Meeker says is having a negative impact on ad inventory pricing across the board.

But despite the relative slowdown, Meeker pointed to key factors that will continue propelling ad share forward, including improved targeting capabilities, better creative and machine learning technology.

E-Commerce

Although e-commerce sales now account for 15% of all retail purchases, Meeker reported that the growth rate is slowing down when stacked against previous years. E-commerce as a whole saw revenue growth barely inching up year-over-year, with the first quarter of 2019 showing a 12.4% growth rate – as opposed to the 12.1% growth rate of last year.

Even with the slowdown, e-commerce revenues still exceed brick-and-mortar revenues, which grew only 2% in the first quarter.

Direct -to-consumer brands are capitalizing on rich consumer data with deeper personalization, resulting in more innovative strategies and a higher consumer satisfaction than ever before. But even so, the cost of customer acquisition is climbing to unsustainable levels.

Still crucial, despite slowing down

Despite flattening trends in ad spend and revenue growth, make no mistake: e-commerce (and digital advertising, by extension) will still remain a crucial factor in the marketing mix for online brands. In our connected digital ecosystem, new technologies, innovative media, and the rise in global internet adoption means more fragmentation across the consumer spectrum, which ultimately amounts to less concentrated growth.

Audiences and business goals vary from brand to brand, but e-commerce marketers and advertisers should still be looking at long-term strategies through the lens of the online trends as a whole.

When you’ve worked in paid search for as long as I have, you’ve undoubtedly received emails from your clients that all go a little something like the one given below.

Hi [insert your name here],

Revenue is looking a little lighter than usual this month versus last year. What can we do to close the gap? Please let me know by EOD today.

Thanks,

[insert client name here]

Short, sweet, and oh-so-stressful, or at least it used to be. But now? Well, this isn’t your first rodeo, my fellow PPC partner, you’re prepared. Placed firmly in your holster is a solution that’s fully loaded. Ok, enough with the quick draw metaphors, let’s dig into how to respond, assuming the following criteria are being met:

• You can confirm the trends your client is seeing.
• Brand checks out (since it accounts for the majority of your revenue at any given moment):
  1. Brand terms are maxed out aka meeting or exceeding a certain impression share threshold.
  2. You are serving against the same brand terms as last year, but if not they are at least being caught by BMM.
  3. No new competitors have entered the auction or suddenly become more aggressive, causing CPCs to rise and in turn, cause traffic and revenue to fall behind.
• The right ads are active and all available real estate is being utilized.

Find yourself checking all the boxes? This is usually indicative of brand demand decline, a trend that is all too common among online retailers due primarily to the rise of Amazon. Yo, Bezos! What gives? As a secondary check, we use Google Trends to confirm brand demand decline. But if all the boxes above are checked, odds are the plague is real. Fortunately, you’ve got the silver bullet (metaphor alert). Unfortunately, your client may shoot you down before you’re able to use it. Why? Because that silver bullet is non-brand.

I’m serious, and I’d be happy to explain

All too often we neglect non-brand CPC advertising because, in the client’s eyes, it’s seen as one or all of the following:

• Too expensive
• Too competitive
• A lot of work for a little payoff
• Not beneficial to the bottom line

And most of the time, they’re completely right. Hard to argue with that, right? Wrong. Focusing purely on search text, non-brand has the power to close the gap widened over time by brand demand decline. However, there are stipulations. Most importantly, we’ve got to stop measuring the success, or validity, of non-brand based on last-click attribution. If we stay this course, the tactic will continue to be deprioritized and defunded and basically never given a chance.

Think of non-brand collectively as those keywords in your account that ads rarely get a chance to serve against because bids aren’t competitive enough. Instead, Non-Brand success should be measured based on its multi-touch influence. There are several apt attribution models out there, the trick is honing in on one that both you and your client can agree on. This usually requires both parties to do a bit of extra digging up front.

For example, one of my clients made the decision to increase its non-brand investment after (a) being plagued by brand demand decline and (b) learning that each time our non-brand investment increased, omnichannel sales — both grew online and offline. This happened outside of peak online retail season, too, so it wasn’t just an anomaly. From that moment on, we stopped viewing non-brand as a last-click attribution tactic and started assigning a certain multiplier to the last-click revenue it generated to better defend our investment. Positive by-products of this change included:

• Increased brand awareness, resulting in more Brand searches which helped to reverse the downward trend caused by brand demand decline.
• New customer acquisition, resulting in larger audience pools and more efficient spend, particularly in Non-Brand where audiences are often applied (why inflate brand CPCs by bidding up on audiences there?)
• Greater SERP ownership by serving non-brand and PLAs simultaneously for certain products, resulting in higher visibility and CTR.

If you’re like me, even overwhelmingly positive change can be scary, so during this time, I kept my eyes peeled for the first hint of danger. Surprisingly, negative by-products of this change were sparse and totally manageable:

1. Higher CPCs, resulting in a lower last-click ROAS, pre-multiplier
   • Solution: Created alerts using proprietary tech that pinged us on Slack when CPCs rose considerably (also set max bid rules)
2. Larger potential for keyword and ad copy/extension misalignment
   • Solution: Created an Excel macros doc for fast-n-easy creation of new campaign/ad group/keyword structures, including a tab for ad group-to-ad copy concatenation + rigorous QA process (Manager > Senior Manager > Lead = Live)

Still not convinced?

One of our wiser presidents, FDR, once said,

“It is common sense to take a method and try it. If it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try something.”

That’s really all your client is asking of you. If it fails, it fails, then you move on to the next thing. In the meantime, however, here are some thoughts to get you started:

• Consider investing as much as you did last year in non-brand, at a minimum.
• Investment level could also be just enough to maintain a certain impression share threshold on various high-visibility products, especially if your competitors are less visible or non-existent in those spaces.
• Try to maintain a steady investment level — even if it’s on the lower end, so as not to inflate CPCs by erratically pausing/enabling, as we undeniably tend to do with non-brand.
• Running display? At least with non-brand search, people are actively looking for products associated with those terms (pull media) versus being served an ad for certain products regardless of search intent (push media)

What are your thoughts on non-brand CPC advertising? Share them in the comments.

Katy Winans is a Senior SEM Manager at PMG.

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The long-term benefits can help advertisers gain up to 40% cost savings, have a significant impact on profitability, and free up budget for new customers.

For search marketers, YouTube offers access to 1.9 billion logged-in global users per month, making it the second largest search engine. And, Google reports that advertisers buying YouTube video ads in addition to search ads see, on average, 8% higher search conversion volume, 3% higher search conversion rates and 4% lower search CPAs (compared to advertisers who only run search ads).

However, YouTube’s automated bidding algorithm isn’t right for everyone. At SMX Advanced, Ashley Mo, regional director for 3Q Digital, discussed a few intelligent tactics that can improve your video campaign performance. Listen to her full Insights session below and head to the bottom for the full transcript.

Mo also provided Search Engine Land readers with some additional tips on automated bidding:

• If you don’t have any conversion history for YouTube campaigns in your account, start with Max Conversions bidding and switch to Target CPA after the account has generated at least 30 conversions.
• Wait at least 7-10 days prior to making bid changes. It is normal for performance to fluctuate, but over a 30 day period following an initial learning period, performance should be more stable. Use volume as an indicator of whether to change bids.
• Campaign structure – separate different targeting types at the campaign level. As much as you may be tempted to, don’t change ad group level bids when making optimizations, always change at the campaign level.
• Don’t overlay targeting on top of Custom Intent. This will reduce reach for users who have already expressed intent through their search behavior.
• Consider testing micro-conversions like pageviews or an intermediate conversion if volume is limited.
• Use different call-to-actions (with the same video creative) to see if you can improve CTR.

Transcript

GN:

This is the Search Engine Land podcast and I am your host George Nguyen. What you’re about to listen to, in particular, is an edition of SMXcast — content that comes straight from our SMX conference speakers and attendees.

You’re about to hear from Ashley Mo, a regional director at 3Q Digital. At SMX Advanced in Seattle, she delivered an Insights session on outsmarting YouTube’s automated bidding to drive more conversions. Enjoy and happy advertising.

AM:

Hi everyone. My name is Ashley. I have a lot of experience working with clients across verticals and specifically in YouTube. We’ve been working on trying to make it work for direct response, not just awareness and have managed to do that successfully with over $5 million in YouTube investment and hopefully a lot more. And, last year we took home Google’s premiere partner award in video innovation and, lucky for you all today, I’m going to share all of my secrets.

So to start off, the biggest news to YouTube is really that Google released TrueView for action into public beta this year. Some of you may have tested it last year, but now anyone can test it. So, by quick show of hands, who here has already run YouTube TrueView for action campaigns? Okay, it looks like maybe 5%, which is great that you’re here because I’m about to talk to you about why you should be testing it.

So, first, what is TrueView for action? So, if you are watching videos on YouTube, you’ve probably already been seeing these videos. This is an example of an ad and notably there’s this call to action overlay, which is designed to take someone outside of YouTube. So, that’s really the biggest difference here is before YouTube was focused on having branding campaigns and they wanted people to stay engaged and stay within the platform. And now they’re trying to monetize it and they realize that for advertisers to be successful, they need to be able to drive people to their landing page or to their app, because then they have a chance to take action. Whereas if they’re watching a video, maybe they’ll convert later. It’ll be a view through conversion. It’s hard to measure. So, by creating TrueView for action with a call to action overlay and the companion banner on the side, it’s making it easier for people on desktop, on mobile, on tablet to click on the ad and to engage and potentially convert.

So, why as search marketers, should we care about YouTube? It is a different platform even though it’s still available in the same Google Ads UI. So, a couple of statistics, there’s a ton of people on YouTube watching videos. I mean who here watches videos on YouTube? Probably everyone, right? So 1.9 billion people, 1 billion hours is a completely difficult to fathom and you might not think of YouTube as a search engine, but it is, and it’s actually the second largest search engine right after Google, so a great place to expand from search. And then based on some research that Google has done, they’ve seen that advertisers who run YouTube in addition to search ended up seeing an 8% higher search conversion volume and 3% higher search conversion rate. So there is actual incrementality by running both campaigns. And I can say anecdotally, we worked with a video streaming client and we used to run keywords on videos in their library. No one was searching for those, period. Sometimes those keywords wouldn’t even serve. And then when we started to promote them heavily on YouTube, we started to see searches for those and conversions. So it definitely does drive impact and with TrueView for action, it’s going to be easier to measure what happens after someone sees your ad. So that’s why you should care about YouTube.

And then the next question is, well, how exactly do I make it work for me? How do I drive conversions? This is really the tough part. So I have three tips for you today, but please come talk to me after if you want to learn more. I could talk for hours about YouTube. So my first tip is that contrary to what Google tells you, I think you should actually limit your reach when you first launch a campaign. Especially nowadays you have to use target CPA, which is automated bidding, with a TrueView for action campaign. It’s machine learning, so it takes time to learn. And if you allow it to target anyone across YouTube.com or the video partner network on desktop or mobile, it could very easily spend hundreds of dollars, not drive many conversions and you’ve already used up a large portion of your budget before you even gotten meaningful results. So I would say that you should always start conservatively. Think about what works for you on search. I think, for the most part, desktop-only targeting is going to work better than mobile as well as opting out of video partners. I can say that from experience, the YouTube.com traffic is premium. We see people click at a much higher rate and convert at a much higher rate. So just make sure you go through all of your campaign settings when you set up your campaign to make sure that you’re not — uncheck a lot of the things that Google defaults to, to make sure you’re kind of limiting the scope of it. That’s not to say that you shouldn’t ever run on mobile, because that is where over half of the YouTube views are. But, once you see that performance is consistent and that the target CPA stabilizes, then you can use that as an option to expand for scale.

So next tip is — this is pretty exciting for anyone who’s new to running on YouTube — you can actually use some of your insights from your search campaigns on YouTube with the new custom intent targeting, which is only available with TrueView for action. So you can actually target people who are actively researching your brand or your competitors or even non-brand keywords with video ads. You just pump in all the keywords and it creates an audience and then you can target that group. And some of the best practices here are going to be the same as search: You wouldn’t put all your different keyword types into one campaign. You’d want to separate them out so you can more easily measure performance. So I’d recommend setting up different buckets based on different categories like your search campaigns: so brand, competitor prospecting, etc. And that way, after you launch, you can kind of see how the audiences perform relative to each other.

So final tip is about creative. So anyone who’s run any type of video campaign knows that created is the most important thing and that’s what’s going to be key to success. And I know a lot of times it can be hard when you don’t have a lot of bandwidth or creative resources. I can’t tell you how many times clients say, “Oh, we just have this one video. Just go and run with it.” And the problem with that is that if that video doesn’t work well, then well then what do you do, right? You can have the best targeting and the wrong video and you’re not going to hit achieve any success on YouTube. So you should at least have multiple creatives. And that way you can compare performance. And then when your campaign, if it doesn’t do well, then you can see, well, did the view rate vary between the videos? Did the click through rate vary? You have something to compare. Another point about creative is that you don’t necessarily need a high-production video. I’ve seen clients have success with kind of low production where they take still images and kind of create this slide show. There are a lot of great tools out there, like Shakr is one of them, where they have pre-built templates and you can plug in existing images and assets and create a video. So definitely look into those options if you are having trouble coming up with multiple videos.

It is important that you’re captivating your audience very early on. Even though your goal with this campaign is not going to be — your number one goal is going to be at least click through rate; maybe conversion rate. But, if you have a low view rate on your video, then it’s not engaging, so make sure that you’re getting their attention right away.

So, just to recap this very short presentation: number one, limit your traffic to desktop traffic only on YouTube.com, and then make sure that you are using existing knowledge you have from search, testing that in YouTube, and make sure you have more than one creative. Thank you.