Customers know what brands have the capabilities to do, and they want brands to speak to them on a more personal level in their marketing messages. Now, people don’t just like seeing tailored emails – they’re beginning to expect it. That’s why personalization is one of the most effective ways to improve email conversions, but only if executed properly.

So how do you leverage customer data in your emails beyond just including their name in the subject line or sending them a product they’ve already looked at on your site? I spoke with Sterling Crain, Art Director at Yes Marketing, to learn how marketers should get more creative with the use of customer data in their email creative.

The easiest way to impress subscribers with personalization techniques is by using first-party data you already have, like loyalty program information, location and name. Here are three creative ways to use customer data to personalize email messages.

Display loyalty progress with status bars

Your loyalty program should always inform your email marketing strategy, especially since it’s an efficient way to continue gaining information about your customers. One way to excite customers about your loyalty program is to highlight their progress toward new rewards or loyalty tiers with status bar visuals.

Status bars display each member’s current activity and history along with a clear call to action for how to earn more points or rewards. Mixing in the different earning opportunities is a good way to create a rotation and add a little bit of variety. Additionally, make the path to access account information or purchase from email as seamless as possible so customers can easily accrue more points. For the biggest impact, make this the second or third module of each email.

Progress status bars also present opportunities to use data to promote personalized rewards for each customer. Rather than providing generic offers (e.g., a discount or free shipping) for everyone, spice up it up for your most loyal customers and tailor your offerings based on each shopper’s loyalty status. For example, if a customer needs to spend a certain amount to reach the next level, suggest items you know she’ll like (based on her purchase history) within the price range needed.

Integrate location-based data

If you have a brick-and-mortar store, use customer location data to strengthen shoppers’ connections with their local stores. Display the nearest location and hours to each customer based on email open time.

Beyond that, highlight events at your customers’ local stores (like Lululemon’s free yoga classes) to encourage customers actually to walk into your location. Local staff stories, brand partnerships and more can create a better sense of community and encourage purchases – both in stores and online. Sweeten the deal with local offers they can redeem in stores.

Not a brick and mortar? Use the local data to ingest fun or pertinent information in your email. Display brand relevant news, location facts, upcoming events, or weather as a way to speak to the subscriber’s surroundings.

Go beyond basic name personalization

Dale Carnegie once wrote, “A person’s name is to him or her the sweetest and most important sound in any language,” and this still rings true today. However, using name personalization in headlines and body copy is table stakes. Use subscribers’ first names within imagery to create a deeper connection to your products.

For example, a brand that offers the ability to monogram or personalize items might include the subscribers’ name within the image of the item promoted in the email. Consider a shoe company like Nike or Allbirds. A shopper who sees an image of shoes embroidered with her name might be more inclined to click through to browse or purchase the product than if she received images that included generic names. Or, a travel or entertainment company could show the subscriber’s name on an image of a ticket.

Looking to add more to your personalization repertoire? Consider new ways to collect data

If you’re in a slump with using basic customer data like name and location, consider going above and beyond to collect even more information about your subscribers. Use preference centers or gamification to get your customers to open up.

Preference centers

Everyone loves to talk about themselves – especially customers. Rather than guess at what your customers want based on activity alone, ask what they are interested in, what they love about your brand and what they want to hear from you. This is especially beneficial at the beginning of the customer relationship since you might know little about the customer other than his or her most recent browse behavior. For example, if a customer bought baby clothes as a gift, he or she probably doesn’t want to be targeted with children’s items all year long, but you might not know that unless you ask.

By driving customers to a preference center early in the relationship, you can provide an opportunity to show you’re listening to fine tune your data points and glean valuable zero-party insights so that you’re targeting them with the most effective content moving forward. Ask them about style preferences, hobbies, relevant product categories and more. The most effective preference centers even ask customers if they have children, spouses or other people they typically shop for.

Incentives and gamification

For inactive subscribers or those who are not as willing to share their interests and other information, encourage them to open up by interacting with them in fun ways. Some brands are finding success with incentives and gamification.

For example, a hospitality brand could incentivize subscribers to take a survey about their next vacation by offering a price for a free flight. Or a clothing retailer could ask subscribers to take a Buzzfeed-like survey about current trends in exchange for a percent off their next purchase. Going above and beyond, an athletic brand could allow customers to track miles ran against others and collect and redeem points. Or maybe a retailer could develop exclusive horoscopes for customers after collecting birthday information (that could be used to personalize email messages later on).

There’s no excuse in 2019 to send generic emails to all of your customers. Your subscriber’s lifestyle, interests and preferences are diverse, and they deserve to be treated as such. Continue to think creatively and use customer data to strengthen your emails and maximize engagement.

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

Few technologies promise to have an impact on the marketplace as tremendous as the blockchain technology. Though many professionals in the search marketing industry are still entirely unfamiliar with it. Blockchain’s disruptive nature is changing the nature of digital advertising regardless of whether some professionals hear about it or not, however, meaning it’s imperative to catch up on how this technology is changing the industry if you want to remain competitive.

Here are five of the major ways that blockchain will impact search marketing, and how advertising professionals are already beginning to master this interesting technology as it takes over.

1. Blockchain will make ads trustworthy

Consumers hate advertisements for a number of reasons, but by and large the most common is that they simply think advertising technology is untrustworthy. Nobody likes feeling as if they are being surveilled 24/7, and few people trust digital advertisements that appear on their screen enough to click on them, even if its contents are interesting. Blockchain technology promises to help this problem by securing the ad supply chain and making the marketing process more trustworthy to consumers everywhere.

Soon, thanks to blockchain services, ad tech vendors, buyers, and publishers will be more connected than ever before. Transparency, that is sorely needed in the ad supply chain can be brought about by the application of blockchain services, which thanks to their nature as ledgers are accessible to every party involved in a financial transaction. Website owners and ad vendors of the future will thus be able to operate with one another much more securely when making marketing arrangements.

2. Blockchain is delivering ad transparency

Elsewhere, blockchain services will be applied to make ads more transparent in an effort to win over the trust of skeptical consumers. Companies like Unilever are now teaming up with the likes of IBM on blockchain projects that they hope will disclose information about their business footprint and the way they collect and utilize information on customers. As these endeavors become more successful, others will be convinced to enlist the help of blockchain technology when it comes to ensuring a transparent advertising industry.

3. Blockchain is changing ad payments

Blockchain technology will also impact search marketing by disrupting the way that advertisement payments are facilitated. Companies like Amino Payments will soon be springing up left and right as the market for blockchain services grows larger and larger. These businesses will help mainstream blockchain-powered ad buys that make use of interesting smart contracts. While smart contracts are only just beginning to become an accepted part of the business world, they’ll be a mainstream facet of doing business sooner than we think, all thanks to the wonderful power of blockchain.

4. New advertising ecosystems are springing up

Some of the ways that blockchain is impacting search marketing are truly monumental. Blockchain technology is helping new advertising ecosystems get on their feet, for instance, with nascent companies like Adshares that are working hard to create a blockchain-based advertising ecosystem. As cryptocurrencies and other blockchain-powered technologies become more mainstream, we’ll see an increased need for blockchain-friendly payment systems.

Search marketing professionals in the future may have to rely on specialized expertise when navigating these new blockchain-powered advertising ecosystems that use a standard bitcoin wallet, which will become dominated by the IT-savvy. Programmatic advertising has already been upended time and again in recent years as the digital revolution brought about better computers, and the rise of blockchain could very well be the next stage in that cycle of disruption.

5. New blockchain browsers will reshape user experiences

Finally, the digital experience of the average consumer will be fundamentally changed by the introduction of blockchain browsers. Browser options like Brave are becoming more popular and grabbing headlines as they promise a privacy-respecting internet experience that features more honest and safer ad tech. Our current understandings of the marketing world may be entirely useless a few years from now when blockchain powered browsers off secure, personalized search options to users who are sick and tired of modern advertising gurus.

Search marketing is in for more than its fair share of disruptive changes in the forthcoming years, largely because of the advent of blockchain technology. Like any other technological innovation, blockchain will take time and investment to grow into its full potential, but it’s already quite clear that its development is jarring advertising professionals.

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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.

In Nov 2017, Venngage enjoyed 275,000 visitors a month from organic search traffic. Today (16 months later) it’s 900,000. Details of how they did it.

MoPub, the Twitter-owned mobile ad exchange, announced Tuesday it is making impression-level revenue data available to publishers and has partnered with seven third-party attribution platforms to deliver the data. The platforms include Adjust, Appsflyer, Branch, Kochava, Singular, SOOMLA and Tenjin.

The impression-level revenue data will be delivered in real-time once an ad impression is triggered and will include a variety of data fields, such as the demand source, ad placement, currency and country information.

Why we should care

This granular data will give mobile app publishers deeper insight into user acquisition campaign performance. MoPub said publishers will have the flexibility to process the data themselves, or send it through one of the seven third-party platform  partners that has access to the data via an integration with MoPub (versus having to create a new API).

“We are extremely excited about the level of granularity and precision the impression-level revenue data from MoPub provides,” said Scott Koenigsberg, SVP of product for the social game development company Zynga, “With a more accurate and precise view of the ad revenue across each user and campaigns, we are able to spend more effectively and efficiently across different marketing channels and double down on what works.”

MoPub’s impression-level revenue data benefits any app developer aiming to monetize their app with ads and in-app purchases. The added value of the third-party integrations will make it easier for publishers who are already using those platforms to analyze the data — giving them granular details on the campaigns that generate the highest return on in app ads and purchases.

“Publishers could use the data to identify users who are valued higher by advertisers, and could potentially generate higher earnings by more strategically offering ad opportunities,” writes MoPub, “The publisher might also decide not to funnel these users into an IAP model unless the potential for revenue is higher.”

More on the news

• In February, MoPub launched a beta of its analytics solution, MoPub Analytics, and said it plans on leveraging its analytics engine and machine learning algorithms to surface new insights.
• MoPub also recently partnered with Pixalate and DoubleVerify to help fight in-app ad fraud.

• ---

  About The Author

  

  Amy Gesenhues is Third Door Media’s General Assignment Reporter, covering the latest news and updates for Marketing Land and Search Engine Land. From 2009 to 2012, she was an award-winning syndicated columnist for a number of daily newspapers from New York to Texas. With more than ten years of marketing management experience, she has contributed to a variety of traditional and online publications, including MarketingProfs, SoftwareCEO, and Sales and Marketing Management Magazine. Read more of Amy’s articles.

Do you know the triumph when your content finally hits the first page of Google and attracts significant traffic? Unfortunately, nobody is safe from a sudden drop in rankings. The thing is that the reasons for it may be different and not obvious at all.

In this post, you’ll discover what could cause a sudden drop in traffic and how to fix the issue.

The tip of an iceberg

Unfortunately, there’s no one size fits all decision, when it comes to SEO. When you face the drop in your rankings or traffic, it’s just the tip of an iceberg. So, get ready to check lots of issues, before you identify the problem.

Note: Percentages assigned in the above graph are derived from personal observation.

I’ve illustrated the most common reasons for a plummet. Start from checking these parameters to find out how you can recover your rankings and drive traffic to your website.

Algorithms test

First of all, check the SERP. What if it’s not only your website that changed its positions in search results? These sharp shifts may happen when Google tests its algorithms. In this case, you don’t even have to take any further steps, as the rankings will be restored soon.

If you track your rankings with Serpstat, you can analyze your competitors’ positions as well. It’ll help you understand whether the SERP was changing a lot lately. From the moment you create a new project, the tool starts tracking the history of top-100 search rankings’ changes for the selected keywords. The “Storm” graph illustrates the effect of the changes that have occurred in the search results.

On this chart, you see that for the “cakes for dads” keyword the storm score was pretty high on 21st March. Now, let’s look at how the top-10 positions that were changing on this date.

The graph shows a sharp drop and rise that occurred in most of the positions. In a few days, all the rankings were back to normal again.

This example tells us that whenever you witness a significant drop in your search rankings, you should start with analyzing the whole SERP. If there’s a high storm score, all you need to do is to wait a bit.

In case you checked your competitors’ positions and didn’t see any movements, here’s the next step for you.

Technical issues

Technical SEO affects how search robots crawl and index your site’s content. Even though you have optimized your website technically, every time you add or remove some files or pages, the troubles may occur. So, make sure you’re aware of technical SEO issues on your site. With Google’s URL Inspection tool, you can check the way search engines see your website.

These are the main factors crucial for your rankings:

1. Server overload

If your server isn’t prepared for traffic surges, it can take your site down any minute. To fix this problem, you can add a CDN on your website or cache your content, set up a load balancer, or set up a cloud hosting,

2. Page speed

The more the images, files, and pop-ups you add to your content, the more time it takes for your pages to get loaded. Mind that page speed isn’t only a ranking factor, but it also influences user experience. To quickly check the issue, you can go with Google’s PageSpeed Insights. And to speed up your website, you can:

• Minimize HTTP requests or minify and combine files
• Use asynchronous loading for CSS and JavaScript files
• Defer JavaScript loading
• Minimize time to first byte
• Reduce server response time
• Enable browser caching
• Reduce image sizes
• Use CDN again
• Optimize CSS delivery
• Prioritize above-the-fold content (lazy loading)
• Reduce the number of plugins you use on your site
• Reduce redirects and external scripts
• Monitor mobile page speed

3. Redirections

It’s the most common cause of lost rankings. When you migrate to a new server or change the structure of your site, never forget to set up 301 redirects. Otherwise, search engines will either fail to index your new pages or even penalize your site for duplicate content.

Detecting site errors can be quite difficult especially if it’s located solely on one page. Inspecting every page would be time-consuming. Also, it’d be very costly if you’re running a business. To speed up the process of identifying such errors you can use different SEO tools and site audit tools, like Serpstat, OnCrawl, and other such ones.

Wrong keywords

Are you using the right keywords? If you hadn’t considered user intent when collecting the keywords, it might have caused some problems. Even if your site was ranking high for these queries for some time, Google could have changed the way it understands your site’s intent.

I’ll provide two examples to illustrate the issue.

Case one

There’s a website of an Oxford Summer School named “oxford-royale.co.uk”. The site didn’t contain any long-form descriptions but services pages. Once Google began to rank the website for queries with informational intent, SEO experts noticed the traffic dropped. After they added more texts to the service pages, they succeeded in fixing the problem.

Case two

This case occurred to a flower delivery agency. While the website was ranking for transactional queries, everything was alright. Then Google decided the site better suits informational intent. To restore the site’s rankings, SEOs had to add keywords with high transactional intent, such as “order”, “buy”, and many such keywords.

To collect the keywords that are right for your business goals, you can use KWFinder. With the tool, you can identify relevant keywords that you can easily rank for.

Outdated content

This paragraph doesn’t require long introductions. If your content isn’t fresh and up-to-date anymore, people won’t stay long on your site. Moreover, outdated content doesn’t attract shares and links. All these aspects may become good reasons for search engines to reduce your positions.

There’s an easy way to fix it. Update your content regularly and promote it not to lose traffic. The trends keep changing, and if you provided a comprehensive guide on the specific topic, you don’t want it to become outdated. Instead of creating a new guide every time, update the old one with new data.

Lost links

Everybody knows your link profile is a crucial part of your site’s SEO. Website owners take efforts to build quality links to the new pieces of content. However, when you managed to earn a large number of backlinks, you shouldn’t stop monitoring your link profile.

To discover whether your link profile has undergone any changes for the last weeks, go with Moz or Majestic. The tools will provide you with data on your lost and discovered links for the selected period.

If you find out you’ve lost the links from trustworthy sources, try to identify the reasons why these links were removed. In case they’re broken, you can always fix them. If website owners removed your links by chance (for example, when updating their websites), then ask them to restore links. If they did it intentionally, no one can stop you from building new ones.

Poor user experience

User experience is one more thing crucial for your site’s rankings. If it had started ranking your page high on search results and then noticed it didn’t meet users’ expectations, your rankings could have suffered a lot.

Search engines usually rely on metrics such as the click-through rate, time spent on your page, bounce rate, the number of visits, and more. That’s why you should remember the following rules when optimizing your site:

1. Provide relevant metadata

As metadata is used to form snippets, it should contain relevant descriptions of your content. First of all, if they aren’t engaging enough, users won’t click-through them and land on your site. On the other hand, if your snippets provide false promises, the bounce rate will increase.

2. Create an effective content structure

It should be easy for users to extract the necessary information. Most of your visitors pay attention to your content structure when deciding whether they’ll read the post.

Break the texts into paragraphs and denote the main ideas in the subheadings. This step will help you engage visitors looking for the answer to their very specific questions.

3. Avoid complicated design and pop-ups

The content isn’t the only thing your audience looks at. People may also decide to leave your website because of irritating colors, fonts, or pop-up ads. Provide simple design and minimize the number of annoying windows.

Competition from other websites

What if none of the steps worked? It might mean that your rankings dropped because your competitors were performing better. Monitor changes in their positions and identify the SERP leaders.

You can analyze your competitors’ strategies with Serpstat or Moz. With these tools, you can discover their backlink sources, keywords they rank for, top content, and more. This step will help you come up with ideas of how you could improve your own strategy.

Never stop tracking

You can’t predict whether your rankings will drop one day. It’s much better to notice the problem before you’ve already lost traffic and conversions. So, always keep tracking your positions and be ready to react to any changes quickly.

Inna Yatsyna is a Brand and Community Development Specialist at Serpstat. She can be found on Twitter .

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SEMrush is a popular competitive intelligence platform used by search marketers. The company, recently infused with $40 million in funding to expand beyond Google, Bing and Yahoo insights, has launched a new product called Sellerly specifically for Amazon sellers.

What is Sellerly? Announced Monday, Sellerly designed to give Amazon sellers the ability to split test product detail pages.

“By introducing Sellerly as a seller’s buddy in Amazon marketing, we hope to improve hundreds of existing Amazon sellers’ strategies,” said SEMrush Chief Strategy Officer Eugene Levin in a statement. “Sellerly split testing is only the first step here. We’ve already started to build a community around the new product, which is very important to us. We believe that by combining feedback from users with our leading technology and 10 years of SEO software experience, we will be able to build something truly exceptional for Amazon sellers.”

How does it work? Sellerly is currently free to use. Amazon sellers connect their Amazon accounts to the tool in order to manage their product pages. Sellers can make changes to product detail pages to test against the controls. Sellerly collects data in real time and sellers can then choose winners based on views and conversions.

Sellers can run an unlimited number of tests.

Why we should care. Optimized product detail pages on Amazon is a critical aspect of success on the platform. As Amazon continues to generate an increasing share of e-commerce sales for merchants big and small, and competition only increases, product page optimization becomes even more critical. Amazon does not support AB testing natively. Sellerly is not the first split test product for Amazon product pages to market. Splitly (paid), Listing Dojo (free) are two others that offer similar split testing services.

This story first appeared on Search Engine Land. For more on search marketing and SEO, click here.

The debate around federal privacy laws and regulations has reached a fever pitch as consumers grow increasingly concerned about their privacy. States such as California are enacting strict and robust privacy laws on a local level.

As such, more thought is being placed into what a federal privacy law would look like and just how (and how much) it would protect consumers. A good source of inspiration for determining the appropriate approach to protecting your brand and your customers could be complying with the strictest policies. Not only is this a preemptive means of avoiding trouble but, more importantly, it will create the best and most trusted experience for your customers.

The top-down approach

It should come as no surprise that the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is the strictest privacy regulation in force across the European Union. The fact that it covers such massive markets like the UK, Germany, France and the rest of the EU means that you can’t ignore it. The who in “who is covered” by the law is based on physical location: a French citizen residing in Los Angeles is not covered under GDPR; however, a Mexican expat living in Germany would be covered because they are a data subject in the EU.

That all sounds pretty straight forward, right? Not so fast. Imagine that both of these individuals have an @gmail.com address. How would you know where they are located or their national origin simply based on an email address with no geographical designation, as in an @Yahoo.fr top-level domain (TLD)?

Instead of focusing on playing a game of “Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego,” companies should focus on establishing policies that comply with the strictest privacy laws. Not out of fear of the heavy monetary burdens of non-compliance, but because it’s simply good for business. This is the new standard for how brands must handle and care for customer data. It also happens to be the law in a growing number of places around the world.

Let’s briefly review what consent means under GDPR: consent under GDPR has to be freely given, specific, informed and unambiguous. However, predating the GDPR, Europe had the 2002 e-Privacy Directive, which more directly dealt with electronic marketing and set the standard around consent. Double opt-in is a solid means of complying with the requirements of adequate consent and control for GDPR and the e-Privacy Directive. It’s important to note that a Directive does not apply directly to member states in Europe. Rather, an EU Directive is a requirement that every EU country enact laws at the member state level that implement the EU Directive. As a result, there are variations between member states, with some being stricter than others in how they implement the Directive. In the case of consent rules for electronic marketing, Germany tends to be the strictest by generally requiring a double opt-in. However, double opt-in is not the only requirement—things like pre-ticked boxes are anathema under GDPR — so you have to think through all of the ways that you are currently obtaining consent and if that consent passes muster with the various consent frameworks?

If this sounds like it’s too far afield for businesses outside of Europe, think again. Companies are willingly establishing double opt-in mechanisms for new subscribers. This approach ensures that wherever a customer resides, the consent is being obtained in a manner that is commensurate with global privacy laws.

But there’s another reason for this: uninformed consent is likely to breed higher complaint rates and certainly lower engagement. Recipients that don’t realize they have opted in to receive communications from a company that either purposefully or unwittingly obfuscates consent are far more likely to mark messages as spam. With inbox placement being such a user-driven, engagement-centric exercise, consent is at the heart of establishing and maintaining your email program.

Tangential to consent frameworks and privacy regulation, many companies are choosing to cull the oldest and lowest performing segments of their lists. This approach is a direct manifestation of the “less is more” approach to data management and email marketing. Being present in every inbox is not a recipe for success. Quite the opposite, actually — it creates risk that can affect your entire program.

The winds are shifting

States such as California are not waiting on the federal government to enact stricter privacy regulation. The FTC recently concluded its review of the 2003 CAN-SPAM law that controls the assault of non-solicited marketing. The conclusion of the 10-year review was that no changes were needed despite the massive evolution of the digital marketing space and the adoption of policies such as Canada’s Anti-Spam Law (CASL) and the GDPR in Europe. Essentially, the FTC concluded that the United States can remain an opt-out framework for email rather than moving toward an opt-in best practice.

During the 2018 election, Californians passed the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) which brings California closer to a European framework than the FTC’s policies. The law is more focused on what happens to consumer data by controlling the sale of that data and giving consumers the option to prevent its sale and use.

Under CCPA, the responsibility of properly collecting, storing and handling consumer data now shifts to businesses that have significant data as part of or as a focus of their business. It allows Californians to determine what kind of data about them a business may possess, giving them access to that data and enabling them to opt-out of having their data sold. Businesses with revenues of $25 million or more will be forced to comply with CCPA, annually buy or receive for commercial purposes the PII of 50,000 or more persons or derive 50% or more of their annual revenue from selling consumer personal information. The law as it’s currently written is targeted at larger businesses where consumer PII is central to these businesses or represents a sizeable quantity of data.

But consent is only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to GDPR. How data is stored, handled, transferred and minimized are all major facets of GDPR. CCPA is similarly focused on the sharing and selling—and in some cases collection—of data of California residents, while broadly expanding consumer rights and access to their data. The short answer is that personal data and our ability to keep our data private are becoming increasingly more important. The right to privacy is a basic human right according to European law, which ideologically is different than how we think about privacy in the United States—but the world is changing, and that change is being driven in part by the seemingly unfettered collection of PII and the outcries against it.

Data has enabled the success of a myriad of businesses and spawned a vast array of technologies that inform us about everything from how our cars perform to how we sleep. However, it’s impossible to discuss the benefits of big data without mentioning data breaches, scandals and the vast ocean of personal data that are all driving significant changes in not only our marketplaces but in legislative houses around the world. Both India and Brazil recently created privacy frameworks of their own. These changes outside of first world countries are foretelling important milestones to take into account when considering the kind of compliance framework that will guide your opt-in practices, data handling and user access methods.

A prudent approach is to ask your legal counsel and seek specific privacy counsel and support to determine how your business might be affected by the coming changes. One thing is certain: this is not the world wide web of the 90s. We are in a new age, and the world is creating new laws to tackle challenging problems that have risen through the storing and analysis of huge data sets. The only question is: how will your business follow suit?

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

In 2017, Google agreed to provide refunds to selected advertisers using DoubleClick Bid Manager (now called Display & Video 360) where ads were served on sites that had fraudulent or invalid traffic. Reportedly, hundreds of marketers were eligible, but a class-action lawsuit by AdTrader asserts that Google improperly withheld those refund payments, according to the Wall Street Journal (WSJ)

Prior agreement to refund ‘platform fee.’ When the fraud was initially discovered, Google said it would repay its “platform fee,” which typically represents between 7% to 10% of the total value of the ad spend. Some marketers expressed dissatisfaction with the refund scheme. However, according to the WSJ, “Google said it wasn’t in a position to return money that had already flowed from its buying tool to third-party online ad marketplaces where publishers were selling ad space.”

AdTrader initiated the class action suit against Google in California federal court, arguing that Google had “illegally appropriated” promised advertiser refunds. The lawsuit alleges that Google never actually issued any refunds, after reclaiming money from publishers accused of having inflated or fraudulent traffic.

Alleged failure to pay $75 million. Unsealed court documents reviewed by the WSJ apparently reflected that Google had not paid as much as $75 million in potential refunds tied to “ad marketplaces that Google itself owns and fully controls: AdX and AdSense.”

Various third analyst and monitoring firms have estimated ad fraud amounts to more than $16 billion globally. Other reports have different figures. A range of U.S. estimates, including from the Association of National Advertisers, assert that brands will lose between $6 and $7 billion this year on fraudulent (non-human) traffic.

Why you should care. The AdTrader lawsuit is still in process and seeks class certification for agencies and advertisers that used DoubleClick Ad Exchange (AdX) and AdSense during the relevant time frame. It also seeks triple damages and punitive damages as well as injunctive relief against Google. AdTrader accuses Google of being a monopolist and positions itself as a champion of advertiser interests. You can read more detail on the legal and factual claims in AdTrader’s blog post and court complaint (.pdf).

Back in the days when I was learning PPC, one of the two biggest growing pains I had were:

1. Learning the difference between segmenting campaigns out to maximize efficiency
2. Reaching the point where the juice is no longer worth the squeeze

Rather than creating clutter and a burdensome account to manage, I’ve since learned to make use of everything I can to speed up my workflow and free up bandwidth to focus on things that actually make a difference.

IF functions are a versatile means to tailor your ads to users in real time, using either the type of device they’re browsing on or the audience segment they belong to as signals to serve up specialized ad copy. The right message at the right time can make all the difference between a conversion or another bounced visitor. Search marketing is rapidly moving towards heavy automation and personalization, so IF functions are helpful because they’re a simple way to keep your seat at the table.

Setting up IF functions

The process of setting up IF Functions is painless. You could easily set one up in the time it will take to finish this article, regardless of your comfort level with Excel formulas. And if doing it on Excel is too daunting, you can set them up directly in the Google Ads UI under the Ads tab.

The basic logic is as follows

{=IF(condition is met, show this text):If not, show this text}.

So, if you wanted specific messaging for users on mobile, the logic runs something like this:

IF the user is ON a mobile device, show mobile-friendly CTA. If not, show the general CTA.

To put that in the basic formula

{=IF(device=mobile, Call Now!):Get a Quote.}

Another common usage of IF statements is serving specific offers to specific audience segments.

The basic formula for audience-based IF functions is

{=IF(Audience IN(audience name), Audience-specific copy.):General copy}

To put the above into a sentence: “If a user is IN this specific audience segment, serve them this specific copy. Otherwise, serve this more general copy.”

Suppose you were running a tiered promotion, where Club Members were eligible for an additional 15% discount on top of a 30% off sale, that text would look something like this:

Shop Now for{=IF(Audience IN(ClubList),45%):30%} Off!

Or, if your nurture campaigns weren’t entirely broken out and you wanted to move recent visitors into booking a consultation, you might have something like:

{=IF(Audience IN(Returning Visitor 7 Days), Book Your Consultation Today!):Download Our Free Guide.

Take note that you can target multiple audience segments in the same IF function. However, you are still limited to two copy options. The syntax is the same, just with your audiences separated by commas in the Audience IN section –

{=IF(Audience IN(Segment1,Segment2,Segment3)Learn More!):Get a Quote.}

If you’re feeling overwhelmed by keeping track of all of those brackets, commas, and colons, you can also build IF functions directly in the Google Ads UI. Simply add an open bracket in an ad field, anywhere from the headline one to URL paths one or two (note that ad customizers in Final URLs are not supported) and let the system walk you through putting it together.

Things to note while using IF functions

• The character limits for each field still apply (but only for the ad text defined in your functions).
• Symbols in the function’s ad text options like quote marks (both single and double), commas, and colons will need to be preceded by backslashes (\) for the function to work properly. For example, rather than “SearchEngineWatch’s” your function copy would read “SearchEngineWatch/’s.”

Using IF functions for fun and profit

Although IF functions don’t offer as many options to customize ads as using a business data feed, the options they do provide are staggering.

Shaping expectations based on device type is a must. While mobile browsers have come a long way in recent years, filling out long forms on a small screen with no keyboard is a slog, and desktop users might not have the same propensity to turn into brick and mortar visitors.

Tailoring your copy for devices isn’t a replacement for setting realistic device bid modifiers and taking cross-device/cross-channel conversions into account. But it is another way to squeeze more efficiency out of your ad budget.

Beyond device-type, the real power of IF functions come from the ease with which you can target specific audience segments. If you have a large enough CRM list to make customer match audiences viable for search, great. If your lists aren’t quite big enough, have no fear, you can create details of the possible audiences in Google Analytics and import it to Google Ads, the options are endless.

Bonus: Countdown ads

Countdown ads are yet another feature that is effective and easy to use but tend to fly under the radar. Beyond highlighting promotions, I’ve seen success in highlighting shipping windows (keep that in mind for the holiday shopping season), special events (for example, store openings), and more. Just like the other customizers available, countdowns can be put anywhere in an ad except for the URL.

The syntax is pretty straightforward

• Specify a date in Year/Month/Day, pick a time in Hour:Minute:Second
• Specify the language you’re targeting, and how many days you’d like the countdown to run

In the below example, the countdown will end at midnight on June 7, 2019, after starting seven days prior

{=COUNTDOWN(“2019/7/7 12:00:00″,”en-US”,7)}

The future is now

Running a successful paid search campaign has always required knowing who your customers are. Ad customizers make reaching the right user with the right messaging easier, and at scale. IF functions are easy inroads towards better tailoring of your users’ experiences towards their needs. It gives you more control over your ad copy than dynamic keyword insertion or responsive search ads, with a lower likelihood of matching to undesirable search queries than dynamic search ads. And with less setup needed than the Ad Customizer feeds, IF functions ultimately give savvy search marketers a powerful tool to boost performance.

Have any queries or interesting functions you know? Share them in the comments.

Clay Schulenburg is Director of SEM at PMG.

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A Reddit thread on Wednesday called attention to many Facebook Groups’ privacy settings being changed to “secret.” The post generated more than 450 comments, with rumors that many Groups had been attacked by a spammer posting violating content that resulted in the Groups being removed by Facebook. Group admins were doing their best to avoid the issue to by switching their Group’s privacy settings to “secret.”

A Facebook spokesperson confirmed to Marketing Land that it had, in fact, mistakenly taken down a number of Facebook Groups, but was working to resolve the issue.

“We removed several Groups from Facebook after detecting content that violated our policies. We since discovered that this content was posted to sabotage legitimate, non-violating Groups. We’re working to restore any Groups affected and to prevent this from happening again,” said a Facebook spokesperson.

Why we should care

Any marketers who are managing a Group as part of their Facebook strategy need to review content within the Group to make sure it is clear of abusive or extremist content that violates Facebook’s community standards. This issue should also serve as a warning that Groups are just as susceptible to being hacked as any other owned platform and must be monitored accordingly.

With Facebook making Groups the “center” of its app, the platform offers marketers a powerful tool for organic engagement with their followers. But building membership numbers and a loyal following via a Group can take time and effort, and the last thing a brand wants to see happen is their Group removed by no fault of their own.

Even worse, a hacked Group that posts spammy, offensive content can do major damage to a brand’s reputation when Group members are served extremist or abusive content. Just like with any other aspect of managing your brand’s social channels, its crucial Group admins stay on top of the conversations happening within their Group.

More on the news

• Facebook currently has tens of millions of active Groups on Facebook and more than 400 million uses that belong to a Group.
• During this month’s F8 Developers Conference, Facebook introduced a new personalized activity feed within the Groups tab, along with a redesign of the tab to make it easier to find within the app. Facebook also launched a new discovery tool that recommended Groups based on a user’s interest.
• Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg told the F8, “Groups are at the heart of the experience,” and Facebook later confirmed users may start seeing more content from the Groups they belong to in their News Feed.

There’s a science behind what engages shoppers and gets them to purchase and new visual search tech implementations promise to exploit that and reinvent ecommerce as we know it.

A shopper’s decision to buy products is more influenced by the primal brain areas and less from the analytical side. Us humans are hard-wired to our emotions which spring from the same areas of the brain, the right side, that processes and reacts to visual stimulation. In the early days of mankind, it’s largely how our ancient ancestors survived in the wild.

Similar to Facebook’s emoticons it rolled out as “reactions” in 2016, our modern emotions emerge from four core feelings, happy, sad, afraid/surprised (“wow”), and angry/disgusted, based on research conducted by the Institute of Neuroscience and Psychology at the University of Glasgow.

Smart marketers can appeal to our right brains that communicate in feelings and respond to images that increase conversions and sales because people tend to act based on emotions. Most of the purchase decisions people make are emotional, not practical. Retail shopping therapy is, perhaps, an offshoot of this science-based truth.

When it comes to shopping, decision-making, and conversions, another experiment conducted by the George Washington University and UCLA, found that playing to the emotional side of our brains is a far better strategy than using too many facts and figures that appeal to the decision-making areas of the brain.

The researchers found that ads that use logical persuasion (for example, “this car gets 42 miles to the gallon”) scored lower for conversions than those that “seduced” people by circumventing “consumers’ conscious awareness by depicting a fun, vague or sexy scene”.

Visual search will revolutionize ecommerce and SEO

The rise of visual search is powered, in part, by people’s desire to discover products and brands, and it’s playing out now in the new trend of shopping on social media channels such as Instagram and Pinterest that’s spreading most quickly amongst millennials as the next big thing.

Yet, “creating technology that can understand images as quickly and effectively as the human mind is a huge undertaking”, wrote Adam Stetzer in a trend piece on visual search last year. “Visual identification is a natural ability made possible through a wonder of nerves, neurons and synapses. We can look at a picture, and in 13 milliseconds or less, know exactly what we’re seeing”.

Google is making rapid advancements tied to the increasingly visual nature of the search for ecommerce. For example, in early March it rolled out a new pilot program to digitally connect retailers and consumers, who can now make purchases from results of Google Image searches.

For the pilot’s launch, Google cited a figure that 50 percent of online shoppers said images of the product inspired them to purchase. Google is currently testing its “Showcase Shopping” ads on what it calls “a small percentage” of traffic with select retailers, surfacing on broad queries such as “home office ideas”, “shower tile designs”, and “abstract art”.

Certainly, the visual search trend will impact the programmatic ad industry’s innovations for future offerings. Advanced AI and computer imaging will be two core technologies that power dynamic personalization and highly customized ads that boost campaign performance tied to consumer’s visual search behaviors. For instance, it enables offering up winter jackets in the shopper’s favorite colors as fall approaches, or quickly serves up visually or stylistically complementary dining sets to match a new dining table or tablecloth search or purchase.

Adtech leaders’ R&D programs have already begun to focus on new AI-powered marketing innovations, including research and development from Facebook, Google, and Pinterest, and new strategic partnerships such as the one announced by Amazon and Snap last year.

Shoppable visual ads take off on social media platforms

The powerful combination of influencer marketing, using emotional buying triggers we’re hard-wired to respond to, and the highly visual nature of popular social channels such as Instagram and Pinterest have sparked the fast growth of shoppable ads on social media platforms.

Many industry watchers are betting that Instagram and Facebook will lead the pack here. Late last year, Salesforce predicted that Instagram will grow 3X faster than overall social-traffic boosts, citing data from Cowen & Company that 30 percent of internet users reported purchasing a product they discovered on Facebook or Instagram.

The overall trend of social media’s impact on purchase behavior is well-documented. As many as 76 percents of consumers have purchased a product they’ve seen in a brand’s social media post, per data from Curalate.

Influencer marketing and consumers’ purchase of products, as a result, is nothing new. For example, many kids who grew up in the 1970s and their parents bought Wheaties back then based on the cereal’s “Breakfast of Champions” campaign because they were inspired to be like Bruce Jenner after his decathlon triumph at the 1976 Montreal Olympics.

While the mediums have changed, and we can now click on ads and have products delivered within the same day, and be much more granular in terms of micro-influencers’ campaigns that pinpoint targets and conserve campaign budgets, the psychology of why it works is the same.

New platforms such as Shopify make it easy for brands and merchants of all kinds to create engaging, highly connected sites that are helping to energize the social aspects of the web.

Large companies such as Amazon, Pinterest, and Instagram have done an excellent job of figuring out consumer sentiment, emotions, and online behaviors. We’re getting much closer to narrowing down to a “segment of one“, a trend that many retailers today are focused on in order to increase the personalization of advertising and improve the experience for consumers so that promotional offers to purchase products become more like a personal shopper catering to them instead of a pushy salesperson who annoys them to the point of departing the store.

And if Pinterest is any indication with more than 600 million visual searches each month, and fact that image-based Pinterest ads have an 8.5 percent conversion rate, the role of visual search in helping to capture our attention, personalize the advertising experience, and seduce us to buy is here to stay as ecommerce and SEO evolve around it.

Gary Burtka is Vice President of U.S. operations at RTB House, a global company that provides retargeting technology for global brands worldwide. He can be found on Twitter .

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