“OMG, Anders, PPC Performance was awful over the weekend ” 😲😱

“How can we get our paid search and shopping campaigns back on track?” 🙄

The PPC Panic List

Before the weekend, I had been in discussions with Norman (not his real name) and his team about a PPC benchmark of their US, UK and FR operations against the cluster of leading PPC agencies we analyzed for the Search Marketing Trends Report. The benchmark analyzes the 5 dimensions of digital marketing maturity established by Boston Consulting Group in the 5A’s framework: Audiences, Assets, Automation, Attribution and Access.

But the message from Norman this morning called for something else. He was clearly struck by extreme PPC Panic, and the question was no longer whether the agencies and the internal operation were set up for success, it was about correcting campaign flaws that had put the entire operation at risk.

I drafted the following PPC Panic list off the top of my head.  I considered what I would have done if it were me waking up that day and missing performance targets massively on a budget of hundreds of thousands.

PPC Panic checklist (original but numbered)

1. Is your offering competitive?
2. Is your data feed working and updated?
3. Is the user experience consistent?
4. Is the attribution insight useful for understanding the user experience?
5. Is automatic bidding based on sufficient relevant data being used?
6. Is retargeting not being overused?
7. Are audiences being built and applied?
8. Is shopping vs text ads being prioritized?
9. Is impression share sufficient?
10. Is auction insight showing a reasonable competitive positioning?

I realized afterwards, that a few of these may need a bit more explanation to be useful. It is not a yes/no check list, it is a list of items to go through within a context. Additionally, there is no prioritized order in the list.

Is the user experience consistent?

My favourite starting point is point number 3: Is the user experience consistent? I think this is the most important task of any marketer: create consistency in the user journey. Make it clear where you are taking users in every step of the journey. This is about putting yourself in the user’s shoes and going through the marketing steps one by one, imagining use cases, touch points and interactions. It is not an easy exercise because communication channels and advertising have become so fragmented. When advertising was in its infancy, in the days of “Mad Men”, it would be aimed at creating one strong message and repeating it. In today’s digital era, it is about creating a strong and clear direction and weave partial messages into the path in a consistent manner to build a complete understanding and a frictionless interaction towards the end goal.

The Top25 PPC’ers additions

After sharing with Norman, I went on to activate that magical value catalyzer for digital marketing knowledge: the PPC community around the Paid Search Association and #PPCChat on Twitter, many of its participants are on the list of Top 25 most influential PPC Experts in 2021. During the day, the Twitter thread was quite animated and the initial checklist was augmented by a number of PPC specialists that I greatly respect and enjoy exchanging with. The Marketing O’Clock team seems to have picked up the conversation too.

In the PPC community, Navah Hopkins was fastest on the keyword. It may be a time-zone thing or it may just be a personal trait. Thanks Navah for being fast and incisive. She added a few interrogations: is the problem real? Is everything working as it should?

One of her first additons was to check date settings to make sure of the reality of the reason for panic. Are you looking at the right time frame? Could it be that conversions are simply delayed due to a long decision or reporting cycle? Are their multiple and conflicting objectives that draw results in the wrong direction?

From a more technical point of view, she also indicates a couple of check points: location targeting, auto-apply, the landing page. An eye-opener for me was “auto-apply“, a functionality were the ad engine will kindly apply changes to your campaign automatically as it sees fit. Go put your brains in the cupboard, they are no longer needed!

After Navah’s tweet, more recommendations rolled in. Kirk Williams sounds like he has been confronted with this type of situation many times before. The most common reason he encounters is that tracking is down: “Did you check the conversion pixel and check that conversion tracking is still working as it should be?”

Never make changes on a Friday

Kirk and his team have had their share of PPC Panic messages from clients, and after the first check on the reality of the problem, their next checkpoint is the following: “Did your dev/design team make any changes to PDPs or the checkout experience, or anything else that could impact UX?”.

This reminded me of one of the golden rules of digital marketing which I have always tried to live by: “Never make changes to your website on a Friday”. This includes minor tracking, UX or plugin updates that are seemingly harmless. Want to quickly get those changes implemented before you leave on weekend? Don’t do it!

I am thinking this rule actually might apply to other situations in life. Making hurried or not thoroughly tested changes to a system that will keep running while you are away is not something I would recommend. Probably not something they do in nuclear power plants or in payment verification systems, and I am thinking water supply infrastructure and gas pipes maintenance probably have similar golden rules they apply.

Is campaign data flowing as it should?

Mike Ryan provided a quick three-step verification in “feed, budget and changelog“, but also mistakenly called it a “cute over-the-weekend scenario” which it clearly wasn’t 😲. I make tweet typos all the time too. Hate that you can’t correct a tweet once it flies, but I know it is part of the Twitter deal: Fast and as-is. The “feed” that Mike mentions corresponds to the point 2 in the original list: 2. Is your data feed working and updated?

A data feed is typically an ongoing process in which data from a product catalog is being fed into an advertising system. The process can be a manually built system or it can be based on a tool. Once it is up and running, it is part of the magic of real-time advertising, as a products most recent information including, price, stock level and product images is provided into the advertising system. The downside is of course that it is magical when it works but it is a horror story if it stopped working and you’ve ended up offering a Halloween promotion for Easter. By going through some of the user experience testing mentioned earlier, you may be able to pinpoint this type of problem, but another approach is of course to check the data flow to make sure the latest and correct data is in the data feed and received correctly in the advertising systems.

A great additional check from Julie Bacchini is to verify for any outages on the platforms over the weekend. Platforms failing to stay up or provide complete data has become a more frequent problem these past years.

The Ultimate PPC Performance Panic List

Starting with a top of mind list and adding some great input from the PPC community, let us now review and reorder the list so that those in panic can get a structured and well through-through action list to work by. Through the various inputs, it becomes quite clear that the check points can be grouped in specific areas and prioritized to form a step by step list. I therefore dare to call this the Ultimate PPC Performance Panic list and will accept to update with any missing advice that is shared with me over time so this can remain applicable and to the point. I want to assist victims who have been struck by PPC misfortune over the weekend, during the night or perhaps when the manager was off on vacation.

The prioritized 5 steps to go through in case of PPC Panic.

1. Reality check. Is the panic justified? (pixels, dates, reporting updates, data delays)
2. Waterproof check. Is your operation intact or is there a leak (feed, site, certificate, payment process)
3. Environment check. Is there a force majeure (pandemic, climate catastrophe, monetary crash, shitstorm, …)
4. Consistency check. Is what you are advertising consistent
5. Pulse check. Are your campaigns live and in shape?

Let’s go through each of them to see what they are all about.

First step: Reality check

With a little luck you can calm the panic before going much further in the list. You panic because the results you are seeing are way worse than what you expected to see. But are you looking at the right data set?

• Check that you are looking at the right dates and that they are comparable with your baseline.
• Check that your pixels are in place to track the data you are measuring. Check any website updates that were done recently and shouldn’t have been implemented on a Friday.
• Check that the reporting interface you are looking at has been updated. Maybe go back to the source data and check for consistency.
• Check for data delays. Could it be that the results you are expecting to see have not yet produced the desired and measurable outcome.

I am so much hoping that you found the glitch in the above points and that reality is not as bad as you first thought. If that is not the case, move one to a more in-depth check up on your system in the next step.

Second step: Waterproof check

We have concluded that the data we are seeing is not showing the results we hoped to see. In this second step we therefore dive deeper to check whether or not the entire advertising system is watertight, or whether some element of it has stopped functioning. If the results we are seeing are real, we are hoping to find a simple flaw to fix in this step.

• Check that data feeds are updated and arrive in the right location.
• Check that the secure server certificate has not expired and that the site is up and running. Why not check domain name expiry dates at this point.
• Check for any signs that your site has been hacked.
• Check that the payment system is up and running.
• Check that the campaign landing pages are functional.

Although at this point you know you have lost performance, we are hoping that one of the above reasons can explain the drop and that fixing it will get you back on track quickly. If you didn’t find any explanation in the above points, then let’s move on to the third step to check for environmental explanations.

Third step: Environment check

We are now pretty certain that the lost performance is real and that the advertising is technically up and mechanically running the way it is supposed to. No quick fixes seem to present themselves to us and we must look outside the box for reasons for the drop. Here are some of the things to check for.

• Did any pandemic just hit your target audience?
• Any climate situation that could explain a sudden change in user behaviour?
• Is the economic situation stable or are households suddenly scared of a stock exchange crash, is inflation ramping, have there just been austerity announcements from the Prime Minister?
• Closer to your brand, was there a shitstorm on social media or did one of your competitors just get an award for strongest brand or best place to work?

Some changes in the environment can strongly affect a campaign. They may have arrived suddenly but have the potential to change user behaviour in depth either for the short or the long run. They affect strategy and if they are at play, you may be best off reducing spend and reviewing what impact they may have on the way users find, consider, select and buy your products. If you haven’t been able to identify external factors to explain your performance drop, it will be time to look for the worm inside the apple. Let’s get digging.

Fourth step: Consistency check

In many cases, I am the alert and well-organized marketer, so I might jump straight to the consistency check. I would have felt or even avoided that any of the first three steps would affect my campaigns. Consistency is quite subjective and hard to see. Inconsistency, however, stands out quite clearly when you meet it. This consistency check is about putting yourself in the users’ place and experiencing your marketing as the target audience receives it. Here are some of the things you might undertake in that process:

• Go to sites you have targeted for advertising and try to get a glimpse of your own ads. This is not always possible because digital advertising targets users rather than sites today.
• Try to mimick user behaviour and characteristics of your target audience. Search as they do, browse as they do, simulate using the language and location they are in. Are your ads triggered and do they make sense?
• Take screenshots of your own ad occurences, click on them, screenshot your landing page for documentation. Does it all make sense?
• After clicking through on the advertising, go through the user journey towards the purchase. Take screenshots again and anything creating friction or confusion, and obviously anything blocking your path.
• You ran into some competitors along the path. Were they doing promotions like it is the end of the world? Is your offering competitive?
• For each of your advertising channels, go through the above exercise to check and confirm consistency in the user journey.

You may not find one single point blocking your way to fulfill the user journey and purchase your own products, but in many cases you will find a number of points where you can improve the user journey with your messaging or imagery. You may also be able to build a number of hypothesis for what might be wrong with your campaigns. Some of them could lead to resolution and others simply to better performance or new audiences ot reach. Regardless of the level of troubleshooting you have done in this point, you should probably complete your checklist by going through the last step.

Fifth step: Pulse check

I have called the last step in this process the pulse check. In many cases, what we are looking for is whether there are any signs of performance in the campaign. Is there a pulse? The pulse check is in reality a small PPC audit and it has the potential to take your campaign to the next level. I really like the detailed walk-through of an account audit shared in this thread by Amalia Fowler. She divides the audit into seven sections: Objectives, Account structure,  Campaign targeting and Keywords and match types, Ads, Changelog, Display and audiences. Find a run through by Amalia in this thread.

In the following list I have incuded a number of the points uncovered by Amalia and the PPC community on Twitter. If you feel it is incomplete, don’t hesitate to suggest additions:

• Correspondence of tracked goals with objectives
• Account settings: conversion, attribution, account integrations
• Usage of extensions: using what make sense and not what doesn’t?
• Account structure: campaigns, adgroups, keywords.
• Smart bidding and consistency with data volumes and outcome
• Audiences: do they make sense? Do they add value?
• Retargeting (audiences): are you doing it and not overdoing it?
• Geolocation settings
• Auto-apply settings
• Impression shares and auction insights: what is the competitive setting?

At this stage you have hopefully identified what was not working with your campaign in this instance. You have also started undertaking a number of auditing measures which can help you avoid PPC Panic in the future and contribute to your campaign performance overall.

Strategy, governance and a clear process will help you reduce the likeliness of panic coming your way.

PPC performance has been something quite predictable for many years but it is becoming more volatile. This is caused both by more rapid user behaviour changes and by the increased share of machine-learning and AI in media optimization. The more you rely on automation and tools, the less visibility and end-user insight you get. This makes it more difficult to take corrective action once something goes wrong. The more automation, the more opacity. This is where PPC strategy implemented by human pilots and enhanced by automated processes and AI will be the ideal way to manage digital advertising in the future.

Please contact me via Twitter for any additions to this list. I am happy to update it to include all the best tips and tricks for getting through PPC panic and restoring campaign performance.

Stay tuned on the Innovell blog and subscribe to the Innovell newsletter if you want to learn how the landscape evolves and how marketers adapt to this ongoing change 🙂

Google Ads versus Amazon Ads: Who Eats Who?

Some 12 years ago, I was point man for all European Google Ads spend for a large media agency group. At the time, our claim was to be the biggest spender on Google Ads. And whereas it didn’t provide us with any monetary benefit, kickback or commission, it did give us some prestige, some clout, and a few privileges. We were the number one revenue stream, after all.

Fast forward to the 2020’s: Amazon is the biggest advertiser in the Google Ads auction. My good friend Mike Ryan, calls it the “Elephant in the room”. When the elephant makes a turn, the room is shaking, and sometimes things are breaking.

In the midst of the pandemic, we saw signs of Amazon pulling its advertising on Google Ads. Whether all advertising was stopped or this was only partial or local, we do not know. What we do know is that it coincided with the first ever negative growth quarter in the history of Google Ads. There was of course a generalized drop in advertising spend across all media, but Google took the biggest blow. There must have been some painful video conferences taking place in that quarter.

Let’s not be carried away by that fact, however. With its 69% YoY growth in Q2 of 2021, Google Ads has recovered from the blow. It is also still 6-7 times bigger than Amazon Ads and almost double the size of Facebook Ads. It had been a while since Google Ads had experienced higher growth than Facebook which only reached 56% YoY growth this time around. Surely, this must confirm have been overseen by those thinking Facebook advertising has played its role out.

Pandemic turbulence

Are we through with the pandemic yet in Q3 of 2021? It doesn’t quite feel that way, but for sure, digital advertising has surfed the wave for 18 months at this point in time. Growth rates for Gogle Ads, Facebook Ads and Amazon Ads were 69%, 56% and 87% respectively in a year on year perspective for Q2 2021. All-time highs since 2018 for all of them. When we compare the sum of the three ad platforms’ revenue to the worldwide digital advertising spend estimated by Statista, they represent 75%. It is the rise of the triopoly. Digital advertising has indeed survived and recovered from the pandemic.

In my quarterly recap on the Triopoly of digital advertising, Google Ads versus Facebook Ads versus Amazon Ads, I dubbed Q2 of 2020, “Christmas in May”, as the seasonal spikes of Q4 was suddenly equaled by a Q2 spike in ecommerce which was a high as we would expect the end of year season. Would it all come back down? Had everyone now spent all their beer money? Not quite, the Q4 spike was back as well and a new pattern was showing.

Shifting budgets to retail media

We detected anecdotal evidence of a shift of budgets within the Google Ads mix in our research for the 2018 Paid Search Trends report. We believe this trend has existed for the past 10 years. Text ads budgets are shifting to Shopping ads. We could call this the rise of retail media, a term that has become popular alongside the rise of Amazon Ads.

I am tempted to give this a less flattering name, such as the tyranny of last-click attribution. Tracking on the internet becomes harder the further away from the measurable conversion you get. And conversion tracking has been one of the keys to the explosion of digital advertising. Comparatively, advertisers always favour last-click. It is easier to measure conversion on a marketplace than in an influencer campaign, but does that mean the marketplace is more important than the influence generated from reaching out to wider audiences?

A shift from Google Ads to Amazon Ads?

The biggest shifts in advertising budgets we are seeing are two-fold. Google Ads budgets are shifting to shopping internally. And Amazon advertising budgets are draining Google to feed its marketplace and consequently its own advertising offering.

Is this a story pattern that repeats itself? In the 1990’s, Google managed to sign a deal with the market leader for internet search, YAHOO! to provide the backfill for organic search results on the the catalog. This coincided with Google becoming a household name, and as we all know, the leading search engine is now Google and Yahoo! has all but disappeared.

Is Amazon draining Google and winning the battle of product search in the process by being such an omnipresent advertiser on the search engine? Or is it on the contrary Google which benefits from the surge of Amazon to monetize its huge covering?

Viewed from the trenches Google and Amazon are not substitutes

For large online retailers, there may well be a need to aim for native ecommerce in each available online media channel: provide a native ecommerce experience on Facebook and Google, just like the one Amazon provides. But for most merchants, the duality of Amazon and non-Amazon is a really complex setting to be in.

Seen from the trenches, Amazon is fast and dynamic, but merchants would much rather drive traffic via Google to their website where they can generate higher margins and a better client relationship in the long run.

Whenever I am in a discussion where both Amazon Ads and Google Ads are discussed, they are never seen as direct competitors for a budget line. They are separate universes an advertiser will consider strategically and in most cases want to address separately to get the best of both worlds. In some cases, Google Ads can also be an external advertising challenge for Amazon, something the ecommerce platform is incentivizing as of late.

Amazon Ads is booming but it would be wrong to say Google Ads isn’t. The big difference between the two is that retail media is growing at a much higher rate than search. Additionally, Amazon Ads has created an advertising product which merchants can hardly live without. That in itself doesn’t guarantee sustained future growth, but at the moment retial media and Amazon Ads are the winners of the day.

Driving external traffic into Amazon can be a great paid search strategy in 2021 because the conversion rate is so high, but getting there can feel a bit like sailing through the Bermuda triangle. The compass goes berserk.

Apple’s is also messing with our digital compasses with the IOS 14.6 update, killing off cookies. Have you seen the latest Apple advertising campaign about privacy? It is a fun illustration of the privacy challenge. It is clear to everyone that Apple rids us of all that annoying tracking. “Why don’t you mind your own business?”. The AppleID used everywhere to personalize services in the Apple cloud, clearly isn’t tracking anything, is it?

In reality, the battle over cookies is just another battle in the “data wars” between the large American data-driven platforms who represent such a large part of our connected lives. I always have a laugh when I hear conspiracy theories like “they know everything about us“. Sure they do, Apple knows where you are, Facebook knows what you like, Google knows what you are looking for and Amazon knows what you buy. But they just don’t sit and have tea together and discuss how they can control you. They don’t communicate or share any data. At all. That’s why the compass is off.

Walled Gardens

One of the best metaphors for describing this data impermeability is the “Walled Gardens” metaphor. Each of the platforms is raising walls around its users to prevent them from leaving and to avoid any of their data to escape. Apple is just raising a cookie wall in the current battle.

When you have a website, you can install Google Analytics for free. This gives Google all the data from your website. When you set up a Facebook page, it belongs to Facebook who will give you some nice inroads into the data. It is pretty hard though to actually figure out who is in your Facebook audience. That is not where any privacy issue lies. If you want to actually communicate with your community, you pay Facebook through advertising. And you certainly can’t track any user behaviour when someone came from outside of Facebook.

“People! Can you just stay in one garden at a time, so we can count, please!?”

Why drive to Amazon?

Unfortunately, these end-users that marketers are trying to understand are unruly. They like to surf, to browse and to zap, much to the dismay of the platforms they were just on. One click, one touch, one slider and they are gone. Away to another channel. Did you notice that when you publish a post with a link to your website on Facebook or LinkedIn, it rarely performs as well as if you publish a similar post without the link?

“Please have your audience stay on our platform so we can monetize.”

Pay for the click via advertising and the barriers is gone.

Let’s imagine for a moment that you are an online merchant, and that you can choose only one channel to send your users to. Which one will it be? Your app, your site, your profile page on a social network?

No, you want them to be on your product detail page on Amazon, with your seller account in the “buy box” ready for a one-click sale. Simply because that is the best selling page on the internet for your product.

Amazon is a strong component of any ecommerce strategy. It is one of the main forces of ecommerce worldwide, and the marketplace is growing at a pace of 40% per year. Amazon Advertising is growing at an even higher pace suggesting the advertising spend is actually driving value to advertisers.

For an equal amount of visitors, an Amazon page typically converts much higher than a website. Perhaps twice as high. The service is fast and reliable, it is providing you with all the information you could possibly ask for, and it is backed by the promise of the lowest price and the fastest delivery. Ever. Amazon is obsessed with customer experience, so things will most likely work out quite well when a user purchases there. Hence a higher propensity to buy. A higher conversion rate.

Are you trying to kill my Shopify ecommerce?

“Do you wanna just kill the ecommerce business I am running on Shopify, or what? Amazon converts really well but I have a much higher margin on my direct ecommerce.”

Let’s do some calculations. Let’s say your ecommerce generates 10k in sales per month, your Amazon account generates 25k. You are spending 3k on paid search for 6k sales. Why would anybody send that profitable traffic into Amazon where margin is lower due to fees? If the Amazon channel converts at a rate which is double that of one’s website, those 3k could generate 12k of sales. Even at a 20% increase in costs – 15% referral fee and then some – your money is better invested in a higher converting channel. And a 100% higher conversion rate is not at all uncommon.

In this scenario, your sales increase by at least 6k and your costs by maximum 2,4k. A net benefit of 3.6k which is likely to increase further due to the organic boost which is likely to happen on Amazon. The higher the sales velocity, the higher you rank in Amazon search results and the more additional sales you generate. The net win could be 5-6k due to the shift to an Drive-to-Amazon strategy.

Downside of driving traffic to Amazon

Many years ago I remember having a client who only sold on Amazon. Running search and social media campaigns for the client was really frustrating because there was no data feedback. We could only control and optimize the click-through-rate for our campaigns and were dependent on the client to feedback on the effectiveness of a full campaign. As a real-time marketer, having a client sign off budget without proof of conversion was a new experience. We had no control on where we were sending the traffic, but as the client asked for more, the bottom line must have worked out for them.

It is common practice for advertising platforms to rely on conversion pixels. These are composed of a few lines of code which are placed on the pages where your advertising traffic is sent. If you send traffic from Facebook to a Shopify site, you will insert pixels which track key events such as a purchase. This communication feedback, allows the advertising platform to collect data on which ad created an event and at what time. And in turn, it allows the marketer or an algorithm to optimize the advertising campaign towards the desired actions. Amazon, of course, does not allow an advertiser to insert a pixel into it’s site. Neither does Facebook, Instagram or any other online platform for that matter.

On Amazon, a part of the solution to this problem is to use a tool called Amazon Attribution which allows you to tag external traffic when it arrives in the platform. The tool is still in beta and clearly in it’s infancy, difficult to set up and is fairly true to the “last-click” attribution model Amazon mostly uses. If a visitor comes from Google or Facebook into Amazon and click on an ad inside the platform before buying a product, the original source of the traffic will not be counted. If it does attribute it to the external traffic, however, you will be able to know from which ad group or keyword the conversion originated and thereby refine your campaigns.

There are obviously some more reasons for not driving traffic to Amazon: you pay referral fees (although it was actually you just referring that sale), you won’t get your clients email address and thus cannot address them directly for recurring sales. Additionally, you actually risk referring your prospects to competitors inside Amazon if they change their mind after the click. So, perhaps this is not a long-term strategy as you are simply increasing your platform dependency.

How to set up a drive-to-Amazon campaign

If you are used to running Google Ads campaigns, there is nothing new in the setup required for an Amazon campaign, but there is some preparation to do in your Amazon Seller account in order to detect the impact of your campaign. Going through the steps below should put you in a good place.

1. Prepare the set-up on the Amazon side

On the Amazon side, you should open a free Amazon Attribution account for tracking purposes. In order to qualify you must have brand registry. You should also make sure that you have access to the brand analytics report which can provide valuable overall insights for your Amazon account. If you are using a tools such as Helium10 you can track keyword rankings. Any keyword tracker will do, but make sure you have one activated. Also find a sales rank tracker such as Keepa which will allow you to estimate indirect effects of your campaign.

2. Keyword definitions

Now extract keywords from your Amazon Sponsored Product Ads and compare with your existing Google search keywords if you have any. We are assuming you are already using Amazon Sponsored Ads for your account. If not, start there rather than driving external traffic to your products! On the Google Ads side, spend some time charting Amazon’s own activity in your keyword territory by using the Auction Insights reports in Google Ads. Steer clear of keywords Amazon is already bidding on. No reason to bid them up.

3. Specific Google Ads set up

Now set up specific ad groups and keywords for your Drive-to-Amazon campaign. Once they are ready to deliver you will be able to pause the old campaign without ruining its history in case you need to reactivate at some point. The Drive-to-Amazon will be void of any conversion data and can’t be managed with automated bid strategies targeting conversion.

4. Campaign destination within Amazon

Within Amazon, you have various options for sending traffic. For product names and any brand-related terms you should send the traffic directly to product detail pages. For category terms, the brand store can be a better destination. There is also an option to create specific landing pages for your campaign. This could improve your measurability.

5. Measuring and evaluating

Welcome to the Bermuda triangle. Every time you change campaign parameters you need to wait for a while before you can see a consistent pattern of anything. Steer you campaign on the basis of click-through rate at least for a week and check your auction insights for overlap with Amazon every day. After a week (or longer if you have a long sales process), the main metrics to look at are total advertising cost of sales and sales growth. Amazon Attribution won’t show you the full scale of impact you generate. You may see lower attributed sales than expected but higher overall sales. Take the evolution of search rank positions into account to see if you are generating more organic sales.

How about we do that Kessel run in 12 parsecs?

The Millenium Falcon in Star Wars is the fastest ship in the Galaxy, right? But when Han Solo does the run to Kessel in 12 parsecs, it isn’t about speed, it was about taking a short-cut through the deadly fog surrounding the planet. Yeah, love Star Wars.

Driving traffic to Amazon is a short-cut to conversion, and thinking about the strategy holistically, there are many cases in which this is better for the end-user although you generate less margin. If it is right for the user, it must be good strategy.

For merchants building their e-commerce site, it must be terribly frustrating to adopt, and for marketers it can be a challenging path. You will need to prepare your campaign in detail, use manual optimization and find the right direction by monitoring a variety of indicators all the while not trusting everything the data tells you.

And finally, the Drive-to-Amazon is contrary to the overall objective of many marketers in 2021, namely that of building more and higher quality first party data. Nevertheless, the Drive-to-Amazon strategy can be a real kickstarter giving momentum to both you e-commerce and your Amazon activity. It is deeply rooted in an approach of enhancing your best performing channel and your best performing assets, it has the capability of multiplying your sales and at the same time giving users a better experience and provide learnings in the process. We are down to the essence of what Amazon provides: a shaky ride for marketers capable of generating outstanding short term results! You should try it!

Growth of the triopoly

After every end of quarter, we feast on quarterly reports showing just how massive growth these three giants are consistently creating. The illustration below show the quarterly evolution of each of the three players’ advertising revenues. They peak in Q4 as advertising traces the end of year ecommerce peak. Therein lies the explanation for the success of these platforms – they drive sales. And they are able to demonstrate it in their reporting.

The only exception to the Q4 peak happened during the pandemic in 2020 where we had a “christmas in May” effect where consumers were in lockdown, spent hours behind their screens and started on accelerated their online buying.

Amazon Advertising grows faster

Amazon Advertising now represents 9% of the Triopoly and catches up a little more on its’ competitors for every year that passes. From a mere 3% of the triopoly in 2017 to 6% in 2018 and 2019 and now at 9%. Advertising spend picks up in Q4 as it traces the end of year ecommerce peak.

The largest share of Amazon Advertising is shown inside the marketplace itself. When ecommerce peaks, there is more ad inventory, and when ecommerce sales peak, so do advertising investments. Amazon Advertising grew at a staggering 77% in Q1 2021 compared to 2020. The ecommerce platform itself grew at around 40% and the advertising solution has shown its capability for generating a rate of growth well above the platform growth. This is easy to visualize when you look at the correlation between ecommerce and ads sales for Amazon.

Google has restored its health

In Q2 of 2020, Google Ads experienced its only ever negative growth in revenue for a quarter compared to the previous. However, the 32% growth YoY of Q1 of 2021 erases that dip. This growth level is the highest Google has seen since 2017.

Facebook advertising hits a 46% growth YoY in 2021, also much higher in recent years. This level of growth hasn’t been seen in Facebook since Q1 of 2018.

Digital maturity, hope and economic growth

The year of the pandemic was 2020. The world came to a halt. We stopped moving our feet and accelerated our online usage. For better and for worse. During that year, businesses accelerated their digital transformation like never before. Online shopping boomed like never before – it X-mas in May as we were bored, or replacing social interaction with online shopping. I think I ate disproportionately more chocolate than I used too out of self-pity. Or maybe that was when I started exploring exotic cocktails before dinner.

Now that we are expecting the end of the pandemic, businesses are investing, consumers have higer hopes, and we are expecting economic growth to take off and maybe recapture some of the lost growth of 2020. All of these factors are beneficial from an advertising point of view. If this trend confirms itself, we may be in for continued above-normal* advertising growth way further into 2021.

“Above-normal”. What is normal in 2021, anyhow?

Paid search was the advertising solution which made possible the Google we know today. And Amazon has one just like it. An advertising product which is not intrusive, and which consumers, search platforms and marketers all love.

In Amazon, the paid search product is called Sponsored Product Ads, and it is one of the four ad products Amazon advertisers can use. On the Google front, it used to be called AdWords but changed to just Google Ads in a shift to a broader advertising offering focusing less on the keywords and less on search.

What is Amazon search?

We have come to “Google” information, as the brand has become a verb. We haven’t quite come to “Amazon” a product yet, but search behaviour is increasingly seeing a shift in searches for products away from general search engines and into marketplaces, shopping search, and to a very high degree Amazon. People are starting to have a “Prime” reflex, as their membership of the Amazon loyalty program of that name enables them to buy a product fast, seamlessly and at the lowest available price.

Amazon Search is powered by an engine referred to as A9. Some say it has shifted to A10 now, as an update to the algorithm that powers it. It is a search engine which interprets users’ search queries on one hand and indexes product-related information on the other. There is a focus on keywords and product descriptions provided by the merchant, but additional variables affect the search results, including things like reviews and ratings, customer experience and sales velocity. Sales velocity? Yes, the speed at which a product sells – the higher the better.

Similarly to the world of search marketing for Google, Bing and other web search engines, in the case of Amazon, there is also a separation between Amazon SEO and Amazon paid search. Let’s look closer at the latter below.

What advertising solutions exist in Amazon?

Amazon Advertising has two branches: Amazon Sponsored Ads which includes three cost per click (CPC) based solutions, and Amazon DSP, the demand side platform offering programmatic media buying inside and outside of the Amazon marketplace, based on a cost per thousand impressions (CPM) payment model.

It is within Amazon Sponsored Ads, that we find Sponsored Product Ads, Amazon’s paid search solution. Its main targeting mechanism is the keyword just like in other search engine advertising. It also allows for product and brand targeting via Amazon’s product codes, the ASINs. In our survey for the Amazon marketing report, 85% of the participating Amazon marketers’ preferred ad solution was Sponsored products.

The other two CPC advertising products in the Amazon market place  are called Sponsored Brand and Sponsored Display. They are CPC-based like Sponsored Products but have different placements and different targeting mechanisms. Dive deeper look into the topic here: Amazon advertising characteristics.

7 similarities between Amazon Sponsored Products and AdWords

Amazon Sponsored Product ads have been built into the user experience, just like Google’s AdWords, now renamed to just Google Ads,. When a user searches for information or for a product, the ad appears prominently and close to organic search results. It even looks like an organic result. This is the case for both Amazon’s and Google’s search advertising.  Let’s look at the seven dimensions in which the two ad products are similar.

• Pay per click: The orginal search advertising product from GoTo was the first search advertising solution to use the click as its’ main metric. Most search advertising is “pay per click”, or rather “cost per click”, abbreviated as CPC, meaning simply that the advertiser does not pay for exposure or ad impressions, but only pays when a user clicks on the ad.
• Real-time auction: In most digital advertising, the impression of the ad is decided in real-time and on the basis of an auction between advertisers targeting one specific ad placement. The highest ranking bid wins the auction. In Google and Amazon, the rank of the bid is not exclusively based on the price the advertiser is willing to pay. It also carries an element of user experience optimization, such as the Quality Score in Google Ads and available product inventory in Amazon.
• Keyword: The keyword is the basic targeting mechanism for all search advertising. One of the functions of the advertising engine is to match the targeted keyword with the real search terms used by users.
• Match type: In order to match keywords with advertiser targeting, advertising engines use four basic matching mechanisms: Exact match, Phrase match, Broad match and Negative match. These match types are available in Amazon Sponsored Products but have evolved towards less transparent versions in Google Ads and Bing Ads.
• Native ad format: Whereas ads in Amazon search are nowhere similar to ads in other search engine, they carry a ressemblance with organic results. When ads closely integrate with organic results or content, the word “native” is used to characterize them. Search ads were some of the first native ads to be found in digital advertising. Both Amazon sponsored product ads and Google text ads are very similar to the organic search results above and beneath them.
• Ad placement: Just like the native ad formats, the ad placement of search ads is closely integrated with natural results. The key ad placement for search ads is just above the organic search results. To increase visibility, they are often continued at the bottom of the search restults page.
• Automatic targeting: Amazon search ads may ressemble Google AdWords from the way they worked years ago, but in its automatic targeting features it is much close to the Google Ads of today. Google has an automatic targeting function known as Dynamic Search Ads, where the advertiser submits a URL rather than a list of keywords. Amazon Sponsored Products has an automatic targeting function used by marketers to find relevant keywords for their campaigns.

After this list of similarities between Amazon search ads and paid search in Google and Bing, it is fair to mention that there are of course differences too. One of those differences appears in the way marketers work with the ads.

Search marketers fall into two groups, SEO’s aiming to improve organic rankings, and paid search marketers deploying winning strategies to maximize the outcome of search ads. But in Amazon marketing, those two functions are often merged into one, as paid advertising directly impacts organic outcome. In Amazon, effective paid search can have a positive impact on a products organic visibility as “sales velocity” is a ranking signal for the A9 search engine, and marketers naturally work in both dimensions for optimal outcome.

Amazon Sponsored Products is on an AdWords trajectory

AdWords is what made Google rich. Amazon Sponsored Products is only one of the main growth drivers of Amazon, but it is on a trajectory of success. It is likely the most important advertising product for Amazon, although that information is not disclosed. We do know that marketers love it, that it typically generates higher click through rates than the other ad products, and that it is really easy to use. It has practically become a must if you want to sell on Amazon in 2021.

The key for the continued success of this ad product, and possibly for the successful incursion of Amazon Ads into the digital advertising landscape will be to maintain a great user experience in the search interface when the ads are on, maintaining the triple win for the platform, the advertiser and the end user.

If you are interested in search trends and outlooks for digital marketing, you will find more in-depth analysis in our recent reports: “Major Trends in Paid Search“, “Paid Search Strategies“, “Marketing on Amazon” and “Digital Marketing in Uncertain Times“.

Advertising is on a roller-coaster ride in the 2020’es. As one of the first budgets to be affected in times of uncertainty, advertising took a dip at the start of the pandemic. It also picked up for new types of advertisers. Then the entire underlying data set for targeting based on user behaviour changed, as people’s financial situations changed, as their relation to touching products and going to shops degraded, and as ecommerce picked up. And then ecommerce boomed and digital advertising rose to new heights again.

And under the hood, things are changing too. Artificial intelligence is making inroads into advertising management, new privacy legislation changes the use of data. And the disappearance of third-party cookies is promising to send shockwaves through the adtech industry.

All the while, the major platforms, also known as the triopoly of digital advertising, Google, Facebook and Amazon continue to experience double-digit growth at 20-40-60%. Search engine advertising, at the core of the Google offering is still on a positive and growing trend. This is despite saturation of click prices in mature markets. And despite a halted growth in the basic market of search, as the majority of the worldwide population now has access to the internet.

But if the the number of searches performed by users – the search market – is not growing, and if click prices, the basic monetization of searches, can’t rise any higher, where is the search advertising journey going? For Amazon, search is still growing, for Bing, the CPCs may not yet have hit the ceiling, but Google might be close to maxing out on those two growth dimensions.  And so it is time to look inwards.

What Search Engine Advertising is today

Most search marketers who have been brought up with Google and Bing ads today agree that Amazon Sponsored Products should be considered as “paid search” too. But they can also get caught throwing display ads from the Google Display Network into the mix. Perhaps because those are still “pay per click”, or PPC, one of the other names search marketers often give to search engine advertising. Furthermore, the overlay of audience targeting which has arrived in search advertising engines in recent years is taking the focus away from the keyword.

Digital advertising is similar to financial investments today. You choose among a wide range of ad streams for which you try to predict future returns on the basis of past performance. Some are short term bets, others are long term. No outcome is ever guaranteed.

In the range of possible options, Search Engine Advertising represents a wide number of streams. Brand keywords, category keywords, automatic targeting, automated optimization and bidding, maximization of clicks or revenue or return on investment. Reliable and unfied tracking is key to succeeding.

But there are also some huge differences between financial investment and advertising. In finance, there is no hidden outcome, no organic growth, no retargeting pools, no brand effect and no synergy effects either. This is where advertising stops being scientific, it has a vast number of moving pieces which interact with each other.

What are the drivers of change in paid search?

For many years, search advertising was always the same: find the right keywords, write compelling ad copy, adjust bids for optimum visibility, send users to highly converting landing pages. It was spreadsheetable because the number of variables remained low.

Over time, however, more variables entered the equation: users morphed from desktop to smartphones, tablets and became multi-device users. The ads evolved with extensions and contextual elements to become multivariate entities with no fixed form or shape. And the audience targeting overlay made the number of variables explode. We explored all of these variables in our 2018 Search Trends report to conclude that something fundamental had changed.

Advertising engines started building optimization tools for managing this complexity. In Google, these tools are known as Smart Bidding. They take a wide range of variables into account, apply machine learning, and target one specific and measurable outcome. In the 2020ies, Smart bidding has become the norm rather than the exception. Search marketers are no longer testing between keywords, they are testing between algorithms.

Smart bidding is the arrival of artificial intelligence (AI) in ad optimization. But it is not the only thing happening. In our 2020 Digital Marketing Report, set in the context of COVID19, we identified radical changes in user behaviour, and disruption in the data as immediate effects of the sanitary crisis. But overlaying these trends, the penetration of AI, and the data challenges became apparent. Privacy legislation is changeing both user behaviour and tracking methods, and the large platforms are increasingly accumulating data and restricting marketers’ access to it. On top of AI, user behaviour and privacy legislation, we are also entering a user tracking paradigm shift as third-party cookies are being phased out and the concept of “cohorts” taking over.

6 inflexion points for PPC automation

Automation is what drove the industrial revolution, and it is also a major driver of the digital revolution we found ourselves amidst. So whenever a search engine suggests automation tools, does that mean you should use them? Let’s look at some good reasons for automating or not.

• SKAGS: “Single Keyword Ad Groups” were a thing. Some agencies even automated processes to build SKAGs in their client accounts. Where search advertising is going today, there are many cases in which SKAGs risk performing worse. Optimization algorithms pull in the opposite direction of the SKAG, as they take more variables into consideration.
• Smart campaigns: Google Ads has a highly automated campaign type known as the Smart campaign. It simplifies campaign creation down to the basics and requires no keyword research. For small operations with a clear goal and reliable tracking, this type of automation can create great results. Just don’t ask how it did it, as you will get very limited insights.
• Dynamic Search Ads (DSA): Enter a URL and let Google Ads find the keywords to target. Then hope to find some of them in search terms reports.
• Responsive Search Ads (RSA): Enter variations for titles and descptions and let Google Ads find the winning combination.
• Smart bidding: Various types of smart bidding exist with the common feature of using a wide range of variables to optimize a search campaign towards once precise goal. This includes bidding on branded keywords to generate more conversions.
• Google Data Studio, PowerBi: Automate reporting of your digital advertising campaigns into dashboards updated in real time.

For most of the items above, there can be a bit of a trade-off. Only the very last point on the list is a no-brainer: absolutely automate your reporting as much as humanly possible.

The challenge with automation is that it applies fast algorithms to sets of data. You need to be careful to provide the right data via reliable tracking and well-considered limits. If your tracking is not 100% reliable, automating campaigns will not work efficiently. If you leave the advertising engine define what data is included, you may see cannibalisation of other campaigns, of other channels.

Keep your eyes on the data and your foot on the accelerator

Search advertising is looking inward for growth. Its engines are aiming to monetize more of the search by using the data to its advantage.

Search advertising for small campaigns are easier to create than ever before. Search advertising for large campaigns is potentially more complex than before, as data access is becoming increasingly blurred, more algorithms are applied and targeting mechanism change. A good approach is to mix and match the various algorithms, and work actively on delimiting and providing the best data for your campaigns to work with.

Keep your eyes on the data and try to interpret it holistically across all your communication channels. Set your strategic goals and pin them down with the right KPIs, then use as much automation as you can to accelerate outcomes. Not quite the autopilot yet.

If you are interested in search trends and outlooks for digital marketing, you will find more in-depth analysis in our recent reports: “Major Trends in Paid Search”, “Paid Search Strategies”, “Marketing on Amazon” and “Digital Marketing in Uncertain Times”.

I wonder if people today know the film Matrix better than Plato’s allegory of the cave. They illustrate the same concept of a superficial reality projected onto us, from which only the fearless can escape. This is the image that we used to illustrate the state of digital marketing in 2020. Digital marketers staring at a wall onto which digital marketing providers are projecting images of end-users. Those images are not nearly as perfect as in our illustration. They are expressed as data sets, as interest categories, as intent.

For how long will we be calling it digital marketing, I wonder? We could already rebaptise it to Data marketing, for that is all it is about. Using data, to direct and optimize a campaigns executed by algorithms onto digital media. A few months back, Google removed more of the transparency in their data. They are of course far behind Facebook in that game: “No tracking allowed, here is the data you need”.

It made me think about the troubled waters data marketers are navigating in. We know that a lot of the digital activity that goes on behind the scenes is automated bot traffic. We know that we cannot track users from one marketing channel to the other, unless we are inside one of the big media players’s universe. We know that some users have installed ad blockers, that some are using incognito browsing windows, and in the future, third-party cookies will completely disappear. It is a wonder data marketers have any insight into the data at all.

Thinking like Plato and Neo: Does the data really provide insights? 

Nothing like a little philosophical step back to look at the bigger picture. The big worrying characteristic of the big marketing providers is that they are dictating the rules of the game, while they are providing the data on the basis of which you make decisions. By definition, the arbitrage is carried out by algorithms, not engineers fiddling with your data. This provides us with no guarantee whatsoever, that the data is free of bias. A very simple example from my days running a digital media agency: Google Analytics (the abiter) by default attributes conversions to paid search (the commercial offering) more favourably than organic (free) traffic.

Digital marketers are not dealing with raw data most of the time. It is interpreted data, and the interpretation has commercial intent. This is why the most important direction for digital marketers in these challenging times is to build proprietary data. If the entire user journey takes place within Amazon, or within the Google universe, or withing Facebook, you should be aware that you are not seeing raw data, but interpreted data. Building proprietary data means getting users to your own website, it means capturing tangible user data like email addresses, phone numbers and names, rather than relying on retargeting lists and intent audiences.

Read the full article on PPC Hero here:  https://www.ppchero.com/digital-marketing-in-a-vuca-world-is-it-time-to-emerge-from-platos-cave/

In our recent report “Digital Marketing in a VUCA World” we looked at how digital marketing is affected by COVID19, the rise of AI and the end of cookies. The most abrupt changes are of course due to the lockdown and drop in advertising investment. Now, in Q3 we can see how each of the platforms recovered.

Amazon Ads grows 51%, Facebook Ads 22% and Google Ads 9% in Q3 ’20

Every quarter, the three members of the triopoly of digital advertising publish their revenue figures and it used to be almost predictable. An average growth every of around 15% year on year and a peak in Q4. Amazon Ads playing catch-up by steadily eating triopoly share every quarter but still representing only ¼ of Facebook Ads and 1/7 of Google Ads.

In Q2’20 Google Ads saw negative growth YoY

With COVID19, things were shuffled around a bit. Google Ads saw the first ever quarter of negative growth yoy in Q2 (-8%) whereas Amazon Ads and Facebook Ads resisted. But the recovery was so much stronger for Google Ads in Q3 that the lost quarter of COVID19 may be soon forgotten. Facebook didn’t seem to be impacted in Q2, and experiences higher growth than recently in Q3 (22%).

In Amazon, E-commerce exploded in Q2 and ads picked up in Q3

Amazon Ads grows with over 50% in Q3, a level of growth the platform hasn’t seen since 2018. It is probably riding on a delayed impact of the massive Q2 growth in e-commerce on the platform. Amazon Ads spend is strongly tied to the the e-commerce activity. On Amazon the media is the marketplace. When you plot e-commerce revenue against ad revenue over time, the correlation becomes very clear – all but in Q2 and Q3 of 2020 due to COVID19.

Amazon experienced massive growth of e-commerce in Q2 at 49% yoy compared to recent growth around the 20% mark, Q2 was a bit like christmas in May. However, advertising was affected by uncertainty and only picked up in Q3 with over 50% growth where recent quarters showed around 40% growth year on year.

Q4 outlook, anyone?

With a massive Q2 for e-commerce, recession, new lockdowns and an uncertain holiday season, Q4 shouldn’t be expected to be business as usua, should it?. Amazon, of course, pushed its Prime Day private sales event to Q4 and should be expected to benefit from a further surge in e-commerce. Advertising spend usually picks up strongly in Q4 too, so we have two contrary forces at work: high media pressure on one hand and uncertainty on the other. We are likely to see the traditional Q4 spike, but it will probably be composed of a different advertiser mix than we are used to, and there could be some platform shift also. One thing is certain. Q4 in digital advertising will be higher than ever before for the triopoly.

Amazon published its quarterly earnings report last week and I rushed in to discover the massive growth of Amazon Ads, which is the highest growing activity within Amazon. Amazon Ads increased by approximately 44% year on year and thus had slightly higher growth than in the last quarter as compared to the same quarter the year before.

I also made my way by the Google and Facebook quarterly reports to get a feeling for the state of the triopoly of digital advertising. Both are experiencing healthy growth: Google Ads grew 10% and Facebook Ads 17% YoY.

As, in the past, I have strongly insisted on the way Amazon Ads has been catching up on both Google Ads, of which it represented approximately 1/8 in Q4’19, and on Facebook Ads of which it represented almost 1/4 in the same period, I was curious to see whether the trend continued with the increase in growth we noted. To my surprise it was not the case. In Q1 2020, Amazon Ads dropped to a 11,6% of Google Ads and 22,4% of Facebook. A relative decline despite the high growth.

The explanation for this seeming paradox of higher growth but lower proportion, is that Amazon Ads have a higher seasonality than Facebook and Google. All the big internet players have an extremely high seasonality in the last quarter of the year due to the holiday seasons and shopping frenzy. But for Amazon, this is even more pronounced and the relative drop into Q1 is more pronounced as well, as Amazon Ads closely traces the ecommerce activity as shown below:

What this tells us is probably that a large majority of Amazon’s ad revenue is in Amazon Sponsored Ads, the advertising which is displayed inside the marketplace (as opposed to Amazon DSP which is mainly outside).

What does this tell us about the future?

The growth of Amazon Ads is strongly correlated with Amazon ecommerce. If Amazon ecommerce continues to grow by 26%, we can expect Amazon Ads to grow at the same rate or higher. Advertising has grown as a part of Ecommerce for a while, and the question is whether there is an upper limit. Within Amazon Advertising, one of the reporting measures is an internal ratio called ACOS: Advertising Cost of Sale. The higher the ACOS, the less net margin a merchant generates. This is a good illustration of existence of an upper limit to how much advertising the system can support.

With this potential ceiling for advertising on the marketplace, the huge growth opportunity for Amazon obviously resides outside of the marketplace and this is where Amazon DSP comes into play. Amazon DSP leverages user data for advertising outside of Amazon and has an almost unlimited potential for growth.

If the growth for Amazon Advertising beyond the growth of ecommerce, and solely based on the additional growth of the Amazon DSP offering, then we should probably expect to see a slowing of the growth in coming quarters with the floor being the growth rate for ecommerce itself. Currently sitting at 26%.

But with Covid19 predictions are hard to make

However, Q2 results in 2020 will reflect a completely different picture of where both Ecommerce and Ads are going due to the impact of the Corona virus disease which affects both the volume and types of ecommerce and the volume of advertising. In a crisis situation, advertising spend is often cut but in the present situation, there is also an effect of reorientation. There could be shifts from other channels to Amazon and there are definitely shifts between categories of products.

But whatever the Q2 figures will be, they are likely to show a further catch-up of Amazon Ads compared to Google and Facebook whose advertising revenues will likely be more affected in times of crisis. So, despite the crisis situation, Amazon is probably still catching triopoly share at the time of writing.

It used to be quite simple. When taking over a Paid Search campaign you would automatically consider that whoever had managed it before was a jerk so you would rebuild the campaign from scratch: new keywords – or rather more keywords, new account structure, fresh ads and then optimize, optimize, optimize. You would add in a “Bid Strategy” which was never really something well-defined but it let you use the magical word “strategy”.

So many things have changed in the way paid search is structured, in what is possible to do and in the integration with other channels. And with the arrival of retargeting, of audience targeting and of a host of dynamic variables that can be used to model a campaign, we can really talk about search strategy in 2019.

In our research for the Search Trends report, we identified a number of these strategies and in the following we will look at 2 families of strategies that have arisen. Today’s more ambitious strategies are either measurement-driven or insights-driven and require a deep understanding of the user journey, which leading teams consider essential and for which 52% of them now use “personas”, a segmentation technique whereby you can provide actionable input for the more complex types of campaigns.

Measurement-driven strategies

Measurement-driven strategies are based on what represented the original reason for paid-search success: reliable tracking of sales originating from digital advertising. Amazon are now entering the digital ads scene and already represent 10% of Google Ads, expected to double to 20%. Within Google, meanwhile, there has been a gradual budget shift from search ad

s to shopping ads. This gives birth to a winning search and shopping strategy. The other metrics-driven strategy we observe is the drive-to-store strategy, which addresses the complex issue of using digital advertising to drive users to a physical point of sales. The main enabler for this strategy is the store-visits metric, allowing for increasingly reliable measurement of visitor flows in a physical location. Leading paid-search teams selectively embrace offline activity: 32% of our sample systematically use offline tracking, and for 14% offline is part of their offering. We predict that this will rise in the future.

Insights-driven strategies

The other group of successful strategies is insights-driven. They require in-depth user research to understand the user journey, and make use of personas, which they map against it. They then use several campaign steps, often involving different channels. They are heavily reliant on measurement as they target a large span of the user journey and collect more measurement points; they need a model to attribute value correctly to the various channels and providers involved – in other words, a reliable attribution model. The leading teams use advanced attribution models in their projects and have moved away from the much-maligned last-click attribution model.

The audience-led strategy has several phases and uses audience building for later conversion to fit with end-user decision cycles. Retargeting, audience sharing and negative audiences are the mechanisms used to keep the target on the user, improve budget and maintain brand-image consistency. We observed full adoption of simpler audience-targeting mechanisms, and we noted that adoption of the more recent machine-learning-based “in-market audiences” by leading paid search teams, at 77%, is as high as traditional geographic targeting as shown in the illustration.

The data-driven strategy differs from the audience-led in that it focuses more on user context and external factors than on the user state. As such, it injects external data into campaigns in order to improve campaign effectiveness. Data-driven campaigns are technically complex and use a variety of data sources: finance, weather, news, events, etc. The only limit to what data can be actioned is the insight and creativity of those actioning it, and these strategies are almost impossible for competitors to detect and counter.

The common characteristic of the four paid search strategies mentioned above is their potential to drive double-digit performance improvement over existing strategies. They are also emerging strategies that will allow for continued success in 2019 and beyond.

This post is based on an extract from the #searchstrategyreport found on https://www.innovell.com/search-strategies-report/