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”.

“No, a bid strategy is not a paid search strategy.” Setting bids for paid search is simply optimization. There are so many instances we should be calling tactics or tools, but they are named “strategy”. Maybe to make them seem more important than they are.

On the flip side paid search strategy is often a neglected topic. Sometimes in business and oftentimes on conferences, blogs and in industry publications. Let’s start making up for it below.

In the 2020ies, search engines are boosting their advertising engines with artificial intelligence (AI). We found an increase from 44% to 76% in the adoption of AI-driven “smart bidding” between 2018 and 2020 among leading paid search agencies. This shift to AI is happening across the entire digital advertising space and is making marketers wonder if they will be obsolete in the future. They will not. But their role will continue to change toward less execution and more strategic decision-making and planning.

The 6 main paid search strategies in 2021

What is a paid search strategy and why is it important?

With AI and automation speeding up the engines, it becomes more dangerous to manouver your search campaign. Taking the wrong exit on a Motorway you loose up to 20 minutes, whereas the same mistake on a small road is a matter of a minute or two as you turn your vehicle.

A paid search strategy sets your direction and defines your metrics. Where do you want to go? How do you know if you are getting there? Without a clearly defined paid search strategy, you can easily get lost in conflicting metrics, duplicate conversions and hollow performance. Every vendor, every platform, every analytics tool is making its data scream “SUCCESS”, but those dashboards don’t add up or they don’t combine. Your paid search strategy solves this as it defines your goal, your horizon and your metric.

The 6 winning paid search strategies in 2021

A few years ago, we detailed the four predominant paid search strategies in 2019. Those four strategies were dominating the space in 2020 and we were able to recognize them in about 60% of entries in paid search awards such as the European Search Awards. They belong to a family of performance-driven digital strategies aimed at ultimately driving some kind of conversion.

Each company may of course have its own unique strategy, but we have found that convering technology, tools, metrics and campaign goals make certain generic strategies crystallize out. Let’s look at the ones we often come across.

• Audience-driven paid search strategy
• Data-driven paid search strategy
• Drive-to-store paid search strategy
• Drive-to-Amazon paid search strategy
• Search and shopping strategy
• Holistic Search strategy with PPC and SEO

1) The audience-driven paid search strategy

An audience-led paid search strategy aims to reach target audiences which are not aware of the product or service you are promoting. Taking the duration of a decision-making process into account, it uses two stages for its campaign set ups. A first stage to reach and influence the right audiences and a second stage aimed at conversion.

An audience-led strategy is for sophisticated marketers with advanced set up as it often involves tracking users in different channels and from one media owner to the other. It can be achieved in the Google ecosystem by targeting audiences with video on YouTube and then addressing these audiences via Google Search for conversion.

To succeed in an audience led paid search strategy, the key factors to control are the effectiveness of the initial targeting on one hand, and the effective tracking of influenced audiences for conversion on the other.

2) The data-driven paid search strategy

All digital marketing is of course data-driven, but in the case of the data-driven paid search strategy, campaign optimization is based on external data fetched in real time. This data intake is programmed to create better campaign outcome.

Data-driven campaigns come in many shapes and forms. They automatically act on external data acquired in real time. Some will take weather data to adjust bids, others will analyze fluctuations in stock markets. They can be used by any size of company but require both developer capabilities and a data scientists to work out.

The keys to success are the quality of the data sources, the integration with the ad platforms and the strength of the underlying optimization hypotheses. A data-driven strategy is practically impossible for competitors to detect and can drive real and lasting competitive advantage.

3) The drive-to-store paid search strategy

In a drive-to-store paid search strategy, the end goal is an offline conversion event. As the tracking chain is broken, the event most often used to optimize against is the “store visit” tracked by Google Analytics or Facebook on the basis of GPS data. When you walk into a shop after having been exposed to advertising for it, this will be interpreted as a conversion.

Drive-to-store strategies can work phenomenally well for small businesses with a single point of sale. But it is also viable at the level of large FMCG brands with a large range of sales points when their ecommerce is not the predominant sales channel.

To succeed with a drive-to-store, advertisers need to take a bit of a leap of faith. Store-visit metrics are not reliable and cannot integrate purchase amounts. This requires them to crunch more data and rely on hypotheses which can only be confirmed post-campaign. The success also relies on the quality of the store-visit metric which can vary from one region to another.

4) The drive-to-Amazon paid search strategy

Marketing on Amazon has become a digital marketing discipline of its own. The drive-to-Amazon strategy aims to send traffic into a retail brand’s best converting channel to maximize traffic and conversion there. A higher sales velocity on Amazon gives the brand an organic boost via better visibility of the platform providing a double benefit from the incoming traffic.

A drive-to-Amazon strategy works well for retail brands whose primary online sales channel is Amazon and other marketplaces, or who have a higher potential via Amazon than via their ecommerce website.

The first thing to be careful about is to avoid cannibalisation or bidding against your own interest as Amazon itself is likely to be present in the paid search auction. Avoiding to compete against your own offer promoted by someone else, is becoming more important. In the drive-to-Amazon strategy, it is also crucial to defend one’s brand on the marketplace via Amazon Sponsored Ads. This is why this strategy is only viable for merchants with an establish Amazon presence and profitable ecommerce sales there.

5) The search and shopping strategy

For many years, ecommerce advertisers have progressively shifted their budgets from text search ads to image shopping ads. Shopping ads perform better partly because of the product image in the ad, and also because they are optimized for the ecommerce experience.

A search & shopping stratgy aims to optimize the balance between search ads and shopping ads to generate the highest ROI of the mix. It does this by focusing first on optimizing the shopping feed and then add search ads on top of those to reach further without cannibalizing the same keywords.

Innovative merchants are using Google’s dynamic search ads on a product feed to generate additional visibility without targeting a set range of keywords.

6) The holistic search strategy with PPC and SEO

The holistic search strategy aims to maximize outcome from search marketing overall. This means integrating the process of search engine optimization with paid search. SEO+PPC=3

A holistic approach can be used by any advertiser but is mainly adopted by those optimizing visibility rather than sales. It is a long term approach focusing on maximizing outcome of SEO before investing in paid advertising.

The keys to succeeding a holistic search strategy lie in the real integration of the two approaches at the process level and in reporting and dashboards. It works best when SEO is setting the pace and PPC is maximizing on top of the organic foundation.

Maximize on a narrower scope

The best performing paid sarch strategies are not trying to do everything there is. Digital marketing provides you with almost endless possibilities. Winning strategies reduce their scope and identify the metrics they aim to maximize for. And then they go all the way to perform in those key areas, rather than trying to do everything in parallel.

In 2018, the overwhelming news was the rebranding of the platform to Google Ads. It used to be Google  Adwords because of the origin in Search Marketing and the basic functionality of bidding on keywords. Google Ads includes Adwords but also Display and Youtube ads. It further integrates into a wider Google Marketing platform that ties Ad products together with Analytics products. In the process, the DoubleClick name also disappears.

The dialogue has changed

Sridhar Ramaswamy introduced the conference stating Google’s attachment to some fundamental values: Ads should be Valuable, Transparent and Trustworthy. He also insisted on the changing user behaviour. The dialogue has changed and users are rejecting ads that don’t provide meaningful content and experience. Google therefore focus on speeding up websites and on improving the feedback loop, allowing users to mute ads.

Performance on Youtube, Responsive ads and Cross-device reporting

Google are happily announcing that Youtube can now provide campaigns across the entire user journey. There is Trueview for Reach and now Trueview for Action which is a persistent ad that can sit on a video all the way through – and even beyond. A case study showed great results but I guess you would automatically get some people reacting if the ad sits there permanently while you are watching the video. I can’t really help feeling that Youtube is not for performance and that it would be more clever to thing about a user journey beyond the one channel.

Responsive ads are already in beta and are both different in style and in behaviour from traditional ads which had already been expanded last year.

A responsive ad is composed of 2 headlines of 30 characters and 3 description lines of 90 characters. You can enter a number of variations and Google will automatically optimize the ad to the best combination of headline and description to fit with each ad placement. It sounds like automatic multivariate testing and is again based on machine learning and made in attempt to simplify the work you do. Google staff are recommending that you be “creative” and enter all the headlines you can imagine – you can enter 15 for an ad. It feels black-box’ish and it will be interesting to see how this performs.

On the measurement side of things, Google announced cross-device reporting and also remarketing as a new functionality. It has been a long way coming and will be useful to better understand the user journey and build campaigns accordingly.

When they say “smart” and “maximize” it means Machine Learning

Google have a number of recent products called Smart this and Smart that. It looks like this is the Google jargon for machine learning-based. In the keynote there were some references back to various Smart bidding features that already exist but also the new “Smart shopping campaign” and small-business oriented “Smart campaigns” that supposedly set up in minutes and launch across the “Google Ads” platform: search, display, shopping,

When the word “maximize” is used, it is to describe an optimization algorithm.

Integrate or Simplify 

With the number of channels Google now cover and the amount of new functionality they have added, it is great to see the strong focus on integration from Google. The demo of the Integration Center on the Google Marketing Platform was very compelling. The idea of having designers, marketers and planners on the same collaborative platform with shared resources and the possibility to compose and preview ads and campaigns is very compelling and the right way to go.

Does this not, however, go a bit against the trend for simplification? Digital Marketing is not simple and I think the majority of agencies and advertisers are not convinced that we can just “trust the AI” with the money to get the best results as some of the functionalities suggest (Smart campaigns). But for sure, the role of the Digital Marketer continues to evolve and perhaps the “marketing” aspect of the role is becoming more dominant as the “technical” side of things gets simpler. Marketers will certainly continue to adopt and test useful functionalities that drive better results or create simpler process.

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The keynote can be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MmfaZV96x7A

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To be alerted to my publications, follow me on twitter: @soanders

Liverpool is home to wonderful Beatles statues, to the Ferry cross the Mersey, to seagulls and Liver birds.

Liverpool was also host the the European Search Conference 2018 earlier this week. A one-day conference with a great line-up I was happy to be part of.

Chaired by Jim Banks, the one-day conference had several good friends speaking: Aleyda Solis, Lukasz Zelezny, Pierre Far and Dawn Anderson and then some new friends Zbigniew Nowicki from Bluerank, Matt Vignieri from Kenshoo, Vicke Cheung from Distilled.  I can not do everyone justice in this post. Rob Weatherhead, Michelle Wilding, Dewi Nawasari.

A Jim Banks quote is in place:

“It feels like they have picked all the speakers with names that are impossible to pronounce”.

Aleyda as always impressive with solid advice on web migration, Pierre Far going deep into GDPR and providing a tracking solution, Blockmetry, that supports it, Dawn Anderson showing us where Voice search is going.

Automation

Lukasz Zelezny did a great little presentation on Social Media: “things you can do tonight”. Hey Lukasz, I know you are tracking mentions, so I am sure you will find this post 😉 I love your tools and tricks on Automation, Social Media and brand monitoring. I too have fallen in love with IFTTT (although I later adopted Zapier) and with Sotrender for Social media monitoring.

I really enjoyed the fact that Lukasz was talking so much about Automation because it was one of the major trends I was going to address later on in my own presentation.

Machine Learning and AI

Zbigniew Nowicki from Bluerank presented a case study for their client Rainbow. I didn’t know Zbigniew before the conference but I knew his company Bluerank very well as they were a double winner at this year’s European Search Awards and also one of the companies I referenced in my own presentation. The case study was about the user journey and attribution in the Travel sector where bluerank have applied a machine learning approach to finding the most important step in the user journey. Fascinating research. Machine learning and AI is a major trend in digital marketing and it was great seeing this addressed from someone else than the big masters of AI, the Gafa, Microsoft and IBM who are traditionally dominant in the field.

 The importance of Research

Vicke Cheung from Distilled, presented the 10 Commandments for the Creative process and what I really liked about her presentation was the emphasis she laid on the Research process. There was a nice quote from Ogilvy about how Research can be boring but that it is extremely important. I found another one which I hadn’t heard before:

Advertising people who ignore research are as dangerous as generals who ignore decodes of enemy signals.

David Ogilvy

I was so into the research phase that I didn’t take down her 10 commandments on paper but I clearly remember the most important message about Ideation: “ideas come from dialogue”, confront them, present them, challenge them.

Of course, agencies doing more research for digital marketing is one of the major trends from my own presentation, which I why I find it so important to stress…

Understanding the User journey

Matt Vignieri from Kenshoo told us a story of his own user journey in the last online purchase he made. He clearly illustrated how you are using different moments, different channels and how you state of mind is different from one step to the next in that journey towards a purchase or a conversion.

Kenshoo is a technology provider that allows you to track user exposure and engagement at various stages of the user journey and I was really happy he emphasized this as he was precisely on one of the major trends as well.

What are the best digital marketers doing that maybe you are not?

My own presentation was named Major trends in Paid Search and was based on research I have done into the best “PPC” entries in this years European Search Awards. In the presentation linked to on slideshare, I am providing a good view of just that.

However, the parts of the presentation I have not put on Slideshare were asking a slightly different question. What are the most advanced digital marketers doing? Well, you have some of the answers in the titles used in this post and some of them in the presentation. From the 24 PPC case studies I analyzed, the pattern that I could see was one of digital marketers constantly adapting to change, research for insights, trying to understand the user journey, trying new things, testing, raising the bar on what they already master by introducing processes, automation and machine learning. For the full story, come to my next conference but for a nice take on it, here is a tweet I liked from AgencyPedro summing it up:

My presentation can be found on slideshare here:

The European Search Conference 2018 was a great experience and I was really happy to get the opportunity to speak there and to discover the  great city of Liverpool.

If you like the content, please follow me on twitter for updates @soanders. It is likely that I push further on this research and publish more insights in the future and I will use Twitter to announce and share.

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To do a little more justice, please find below 3 other presentations on Slideshare:

The SEO guide for successful web migrations by Aleyda Solis: https://www.slideshare.net/aleydasolis/the-seo-guide-for-successful-web-migrations-eusearchcon

10 Commandments to demystifying the creative process by Vicke: https://www.slideshare.net/VickeCheung/the-10-commandments-to-demystifying-the-creative-process-103496955

Voice search and conversation – Challenges and opportunities by Dawn Anderson: https://www.slideshare.net/DawnFitton/voice-search-and-conversation-action-assistive-systems-challenges-opportunities

Web analytics and EU regulations by Pierre Far:
https://www.slideshare.net/PierreFar1/european-search-conference-liverpool-2018

Major Trends in Paid Search by Anders Hjorth: https://www.slideshare.net/secret/KnlwWEmoEkyvdI

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Write-up from Kanuka Digital: https://www.kanukadigital.com/2018/07/european-search-conference/

I got there in time for “Recovery” – not from Transportation Weariness – but from something much worse, Google Penalties!! Kaspar and his Search Bro, Fili Wiese, are Xooglers (ex-Googlers) who used to work in the Search Quality teams. They were managing penalties and reinclusion requests at that time and today, this is what they do for a living. Help sites that have been penalised to find their way back into the Google Index.

Doing this is both very easy and very complex. Very easy because all you need to do is to respect all the Google Webmaster guidelines. Work by the book and regularly do audits to make sure nobody has messed up to make your site look bad (Negative SEO is more rare than people think).

Very difficult, on the other hand, because if you do SEO, you are necessarily trying to do things to improve your rankings and therefore possibly moving inside the gray area where you could be penalised if you pushed too far.

Then what do you do? Weeeelll, if you have been penalized, the first thing you have to figure out why (sometimes you haven’t been penalized, you just haven’t been succesful with your SEO ?). Google are not telling you. Then you have to clean up and document what cleaning you do. In this process, make use of some of the many tools available in the market (Kaspar mentioned screamingfrog, ryte, ahrefs, deepcrawl, semrush, majestic, linkresearchtools, botify) and especially the most important one, Google Search Console. And finally, once you have cleaned up – likely using the disavow tool for backlinks you don’t acknowledge if it is a link penalty – you will make your reinclusion request via the Google Search Console. In this phase, avoid annoyance, denial and excuses will not help you. Finally, you will need to wait for Google to react and maybe remove the penalty.

I did a Reinclusion project for a client many years ago and my question to Kaspar today was :

What has changed in the past 10 years on the process for reinclusion into the Google index?

Not much, according to Kaspar, you site still has to abide to the rules. There are more tools available to you, a bit more information in the Google Search Console and Google are dealing with the penalties more efficiently.

Kaspar ended up throwing in a couple of URLs for us. A guide to Google penalties on read.sc/penalties and a tool on disavow.tools.

Let’s Snap over to something else

Bit of a gloomy start of the day but luckily there came this bright moment of the Snapchat session. How to build your brand equity on Snapchat. Quite a challenge for most brands as Snapchat seems such an impenetrable world for many.

Clarisse Gratecap from Snapologie, helps brands work with Snapchat. She explained how the audience you find on Snapchat maybe a little different than what you expect. Of course there are teenagers but in France, the most important user group is 18-24 years old (38% of the population).

More importantly, Snapchat users have a certain level of exclusivity – there is only a 50% overlap with Instragram users. In other words, there are likely audiences on Snapchat you will not be able to address via other channels.

What stands out on Snapchat is the creativity brands are applying to their activities. Clarisse walks us through a number of examples. LACMA using snapchat to make art discovery fun for young people, Stranger Things (Netflix), connecting with fans via immersive experiences inside the TV series settings. A supermarket chain using snapchat stories with snapcodes in the shops to illustrate the story of product freshness. A retailer using a simple game to drive users towards product discovery and of course the great Easter egg search, Snapchat organised via their Maps function.

Clarisse was followed by Margaux Dauce from Michel et Augustin who have been using Snapchat extensively for 2 years. They use snapchat as a conversation channel with their audience and the channel corresponds really well to their values of creativity, authenticity and immersion. They use snapchat actively every day both to an internal and external audience. Their use of Snapchat inspired me to call it #snaplogging.

I learned a number of things in the session. I love snapchat for the face filters and sometimes exchange silly photos or videos with my kids. But practically, today was the first time I scanned a Snapcode. It is a bit like a QR code (which, by the way, I never really believed in).

Clarisse revealed the fact that you can create your own Snapchat Lenses with « Lens Studio » and have snapchat associate a snapcode to go with your Lens. Maybe something to try out as this is a completely free option. Thanks again to Clarisse and Margaux.

As one of the most advanced technologies in Augmented Reality, Snapchat should probably be part of every digital marketer’s roadmap in order to prepare for the future of engagement and of digital immersion.

Dynamic Search Ads (DSA)

It was a day of jumping from track to track. I was particularly interested in the following « SEA » or « Paid Search » track session on Dynamic Search Ads, or DSA as this functionality is something I mention in my “Major trends …” presentation at the European Search Conference a couple of weeks from now. Dynamic Search Ads are present within my « Functionalities » category as a major trend in 2018 and I was eager to see results from how Adquality and their client La Halle using it.

In short, Dynamic Search Ads are a bit of a magic tool in Google Adwords. You put in your URL, you trust Google to match your site with the searches that are relevant for your site and you start getting traffic. Like for many magic tools, it is about taking a Leap of Faith but still not totally trust the algorithm to do a good job.

The motivations for the use of DSA were anchored in the need to expand the reach of La Halle’s @LaHalle search campaigns. And according to Cem Senoz @CemSenoz, Xoogler and now Agency founder shared with us:

15% of search queries every day are new and will never be repeated again

You can hardly guess these search queries in advance and thereby target them once they occur and that is where Dynamic Search Ads come in handy. Google will target for you. Close your eyes, buckle up, and let Google take you on a journey… and you don’t need an agency anymore. Joking aside, when DSA is used intelligently like in this case, you can expand your campaigns profitably. According to Sandrine Ferrari from La Halle this is exactly what her objective with these campaigns was. Increase the proportion of the Web channel in the overall sales of La Halle significantly. Overall, they have seen a growth of almost 20% of sales and reduced the cost of sales at the same time and DSA has been an important contributor to this success.

The use of DSA was first implemented on a part of the catalogue where La Halle wanted to expand their presence. As Adquality explained, it was important to provide the right granularity by providing the URLs corresponding to key pages. While setting up the campaign, the agency would use the existing keywords in other parts of the campaign as negative keywords and thus avoid cannibalizing their existing campaigns. They would also continuously monitor what keywords where driving this new performance and this was used to enrich both the existing campaigns and also inform the content strategy for La Halle.

A great use of a new functionality and even a bit of secret sauce: a Dynamic Search campaign is very compatible with an effective content and SEO strategy. The better the content, the better your SEO results and also the DSA results. We don’t always find this type of virtuous circle in digital marketing.

How about a Privacy detour?

I couldn’t resist it. The Data Performance Summit was just next door and I sneaked in to follow a GDPR session. Privacy regulation and GDPR is still on everybody’s lips – it seems like the passing of the 25th of May 2018 where the regulation came into effect did not actually calm things down. On the contrary, there is a lot of turmoil in Biddable media these days as everyone wants to reduce their risk.

Most of this was not new to me. But just as a summary, here are the points addressed:

• The need to have Consent to use personal data in your marketing – or the reason why you got GDPR spammed on the 25th of May.
• Legitimate interest or the realm where you do not need consent for any treatment of personal data you may have – or the reason why you maybe shouldn’t have received so many GDPR spam emails on the 25th of May
• Login networks – or the concept of centralizing your consent in one place which can then be shared with the various interested parties you are in contact with
• Intra-community differences in the EU: « it’s a mess » according to the speakers
• E-privacy regulation – the next step after GDPR, or the future of EU privacy regulation.

I am really a supporter of privacy regulation as I think we need to defend the degree of freedom we have in our societies and that was not necessarily the case with all the personal data circulating on the internet (a couple of articles I wrote that may be of interest: Start making sense again – How to figure out if you are Human)

Let’s just round this up with a really useful trick. IP addresses are personal data according to GDPR. And IP addresses are used for things like geotargeting and for server logs and more things. But by replacing the last 3 digits in an IP address, it becomes anonymous data although you can still geotarget to some extent. Useful trick in some cases.

IA, Chatbots … Future of Search

Back to our main topics, Search marketing. The last session of the day is about Chatbots. When they first started to appear, I admittedly saw them as a potential future for Search. The new interactive Search interface. Now, a couple of years later, we have come close with the combination of Voice assistants (Google Home, Amazon Alexa, etc) but there are some obvious challenges like the economic model – what happens when you are not looking for a product…

This last session of the day had three speakers presenting different aspects of Chatbots. Not so much about AI and the Future of search but interesting nevertheless.

Javier Gonzalez@javierhelly from botly insisted on the potential for Chatbots as well as the fact that the first generation of bots had not been particularly convincing. They were too linear and inflexible. The second generation of bots are both flexible and conversational. They are also connected with company data bases and can therefore provide more than a superficial exchange with the user.

Javier showed a few client examples of 2^nd generation bots for clients like La Poste, Blablacar and FDJ.

The following presentation by Caroline Chupin @CarolineChupin ‏ from SNCF was also a good illustration of the evolution. She presented the Ouibot, a proprietary bot development deployed across the various platforms. They started out with a Facebook messenger bot, later built a bot for the Google platform and then for the website and now recently joined the bot on Amazon Alexa. At this point in time, the Ouibot can be used to search, book and alert but not yet to buy tickets. Several people in the audience asked whether the bot was able to inform about strikes and Caroline told us that this was a project they had now started working on so people could interrogate the bot about strike times and availability of the trips you planned.

Seems like the start and the end of this post  is talking about SNCF and the Parisian Transportation Gods… and may they be with us in the Future!

This was the write-up for Day 2 on SMX Paris 2018. The write-up for Day 1 can be found here: AI as a service, AI for SEO, Vectors, Clusters and Audiences
I live-tweeted a lot of this on my Twitter account @soanders in French/English. Please follow me on Twitter to keep up to date on my activity.

(Day 2 is here: Penalty recovery, snaploggin, e-privay, chatbos and DSA)

This year’s SMX Paris is in a new venue but some things do follow traditions : they start with a railway strike so that everyone is late, just like the past 3 or 4 editions. We are at Marriot Rive Gauche close to Denfert Rochereau in a very nice set up with a central area and access to three different tracks on the side.

BADams 

My first stop is on the SEO track as I finally get to meet Barry Adams face to face. I do love your twitter handle, Barry – @badams. A bit of a legend and his first time on SMX Paris, although he has actually lived and worked here many years ago. Barry is here to tell us about SEO and Javascript rendering. As he starts out telling us how Search Engines work, I get worried for a moment – is he process of Crawl, Indexation and Ranking because the Indexation step actually splits in several phases with an initial HTML crawls like always and then the second crawl with a Chrome 41 user agent rending the Javascript version of the page.

Barry makes an excellent case for Server-side rending of Javascript through solutions like Angular or React (preferred) and we get to understand why Client-side Javascript for anything else than stylesheets is bad news for SEO. As the initial crawl sees no data and only schedules a second crawl – which can take 1-3 weeks to arrive and which is more demanding on resources (hence more costly and less attractive to Google) – there are very clear down-sides to using client-side javascript rendering for a website.

My question to Barry was:

How does this type of javascript rendering work out for tools like Webshed who allow you to externalize the management of your SEO optimisation?

Barry talks about SEO split testing tools and the fact that they can be slow because they need to wait for the 2^nd crawl and it’s rendering of the changed code. Thanks Barry 😊

Online marketing and the AI perspective

I change tracks for the 2^nd sessions and go to the BingAds track. They have teamed up with some people from WPP – disclaimer: I used to work there – to build this session. It is a half French, half English session. We get insights into some of the things that Microsoft are doing from Alex Sinson. Very impressive indeed. Richard George @richgeorge from Wavemaker steps in to give insights into AI and Big Data. Admittedly, a lot of the content presented is not reeeaaaaaly about Artificial Intelligence and more about Automation and the overall technology changes we are facing – but it is a great way to make the topic concrete. I absolutely love the case study on breastfeeding in the UK where Wavemaker worked with the British Government to create a Skill on Alexa (Amazon) – it is like a voice chat bot that works around the clock and especially between 2 and 5 in the morning when breastfeeding mothers need advice and comfort the most. Great use of technology for a noble cause.

My question to Alex Sinson of Bing @BingAdsFR:

what are your thoughts on Quantum computing. Recently, I heard people from Google talk about Quantum computing becoming a reality within 12 months ?

No official announcement from Bing here but an acknowledgement of some major shifts coming up. Richard George adds in to confirm the importance of Quantum computing to solve some of our upcoming challenges in terms of data handling.

Thanks for a great session from Alex Sinson and Richard George.

The new challenges for Paid Search (Expert panel)

I am staying on the BingAds track as they have set up a panel discussion on a subject I really care about : major trends in Paid Search. This is the topic I will be presenting on the European Search Conference in Liverpool so of course I will be listening very attentively to the panel discussion.

Some extracts from the panel inputs:

Oui.sncf : Damien Boistuaud explains how their main challenge is to qualify audiences and target the younger generation. Automation is a big thing for them this year as they are running Dynamic campaigns and Dynamic ads.

SFR : Benito Donison is not convinced by the concept of User journey as he feels the tracking tools do not perform well enough to support that approach. He is more focused on integration Drive to store into marketing mix.

The Experts panel – best photo I could get…

The founder of Resoneo, Richard Strul @RichardSTRUL, gives us the best input (disclaimer: we are good friends and have known each other for 10+ years) : Main challenges are related to Audience qualification and segmentation. In the case of their client Allopneus, they aimed to push the qualification of 23% up and managed to reach 60-70% by integrated data from all the ad platforms. This created a new challenge of work load and forced them to do intensive Automation in the set-up. Richard also stressed the rise of Shopping representing sometimes up to 60% of the full ad budget for some clients

I liked the session and was happy to see a lot of the themes I will be presenting in Liverpool mentioned:

• User journey
• AI
• Audience segmentation
• Automation

Keynote with Andrey Lipattsev @andrey_l1nd3n, Google

How can you not love what this man tells us :

« We love the Web because it is the biggest collaborative project in Human history. ».

Where we do diverge in bit in our opinons, Andrey and I, is that he believes AMP (Accelerated Mobile pages) and PWA (Progressive Web Apps) are major improvements to the web experience, where I see them as temporary patches to something we haven’t quite been able to fix : the free and open internet.

IA tools for SEO

I was curious about this session. On one hand because of the title which didn’t quite make sense to me; I was really not expecting SEOs to be thinking about AI tools at this stage – generally speaking, I find the subject of IA hyped and exaggerated. But on the other hand, I was curious due to fact that the speakers are two very clever and very respected Search Professionals, Sylvain @speyronnet ‏and Guillaume Peyronnet @GPeyronnet. The original Search Bros 😉

This ended up being one of my absolute highlights of the day as the guys explained who Search Engines convert phrases into vectors and how these mathematical objects are being manipulated and handled to create search results. And in consequence, how the only way to create semantic clusters are by ways of using similarly machine-learning driven approaches to generate the keywords you want to use to create the perfect cluster enabling you to hit the algorithm.

The Peyronnet brothers explained the algorithm of Rocchio and the importance of user rating feedback into the ranking system. They also demonstrated how you could use machine learning techniques, decision treees, « R » and « Random Forest » techniques to do your own ranking factors study. As always, the data input makes all the difference and is the biggest challenge for any research you do. You need high quality, homogene data in decent volumes to be able to make any real findings.

I am surely not doing full justice to this session by means of these explanations but I was truly inspired by this very technical and in-depth presentation that pretty much explained how Rankbrain probably works.

This was the session where I didn’t ask any questions. Thanks guys !

Microsoft Bing outlook

For the last session, I went back to the Bing Ads track. I was interested in understanding where Microsoft are going and this session was giving a full perspective of the state of the art at Microsoft. Microsoft presented the « Microsoft Graph » – the mapping of the various data points they can use for their various Advertising solutions. Worth noting that LinkedIn is now part of that mix allowing you to target Companies, Professions, Job titles in your digital marketing.

During the day the concept of AI As a Service (AIAS), had really dawned on my. IBM Watson is a remote service and Google’s ML services are tools you can plug into. Microsoft explains this as their « Cognitive Services » and these are also tools that you can access via APIs

Microsoft demonstrated a number of application based on face recognition and sentiment but my preferred case was the video depicting a blind Microsoft engineer who has developed a tool by which he uses Microsoft AI to inform him about his surrounding by the use of photos, image recognition and sound restitution.

My question to Bing :

I am really impressed with your use of AI for image processing and voice. Are you using any of these tools to identify things like Propaganda, Fake news and Fake profiles?

The answer : all of our AI tools in Microsoft originated from Bing which is where we have had the most use for these tools. They are applied to things we see on the web and remove before we show them to users. We can not reveal how we do this.

I had hoped they would make some tools available to the wider public and maybe use human input so we can all Fight the Fake together…

SEMY Awards

The day ended with the SEMY Awards ceremony celebrating the best French case studies in various categories. This is a great addition to the SMX conference and I have great respect for the various winners of the Awards. We had an odd moment of power outing but got safely through to the networking cocktail at the end.

Want to follow?

A long day at SMX full of inspiration and great discussions. I have been tweeting a lot of this during the day on @soanders. Some in English some in French. Please follow me on Twitter if you find this useful.

Or read on. Day 2 is here: Penalty recovery, snaploggin, e-privay, chatbos and DSA

The main topics were of course Privacy and GDPR on one hand and then Automation and Artificial Intelligence on the other. In the conference programme, various topics touched on AI: Automation for PPC and Voice Search being the most prominent ones. But GDPR was discussed in every break, over every drink and in most of the questions asked during the individual sessions.

The conference addressed some really interesting questions this year:

• Should you use Ranking factor studies to guide the way you do SEO or simply use for inspiration?
• What are your options when organic reach in Facebook and other social media is dropping?
• Is AMP for mobile rendering or or just a temporary patch to a problem of speed?
• Should we be worried as marketers with the arrival of AI in the optimization interfaces?

Overall, there was a lot of discussion of Speed. Speed as a ranking factor – not time to first byte but time to full page render as Marcela de Vivo from Semrush stressed. There were session on AMP which are in essence a way to speed up pages.

At the beginning of the year, my prediction was that AI would be big but that it would be more of a hype effect than a reality for the Digital Marketer this year. Well, it looks like AI is more prominent than that. Frederick Valleys from Optymzr reminded us that the Quality score was the first Machine learning functionality in Adwords and has been around since the beginning of Paid Search. And we have seen new ML driven functionalities enter the scene little by little. The Smart bidding options (Target PPC, Target ROAS, Maximize Clicks and Maximise conversions) are all part of this, as Brad Geddes reminded us. And in a separate session, Ann Stanley showed an example of smart bidding for shopping campaigns involving remarketing: Optimize by Goals which you can find here.

What we won’t see is perhaps the shift from Machine Learning (ML) into Artificial Intelligence (AI) for these functionalities.

Voice search is another area where Artificial Intelligence has a big role to play. It was covered in the keynote by Beshad Bezhadi but also at a more concete level in a very popular session by Pete Campbell:

As is often the case, I met some wonderful people in the networking around the event – and also had some of the more interesting discussions off the record.

• Changes in the Google algorithm favouring niche approaches
• The need to constantly renew ourselves in this industry of constant change
• The need of business in other industries to learn from our experience as they will soon be facing the same challenges of constant change that we have for 20 years due to major technological, organisation and behavioural disruption across all business sectors.

Soon it will be time for SMX Paris – the programme is very different and there is no real speaker overlap so it will be another exciting conference on Search, Social, Analytics and Digital marketing overall.

“A Web presence may only be a part of your communication strategy, but for some (bright) companies, it has become a part of their marketing strategy, and for other (brilliant) companies it has become a part of their global strategy.”

In 1997 the word on the street was already “Content is King” but most companies would not have understood that a real revolution was under way. Building a web site was a must – nobody questioned it and therefore didn’t really know what to do with it once they had it. When you had a web site, you were on the internet and anyone in the world could find you.

The main themes in Internet marketing in 1997 were clearly focused on the strategic position of this media. Web sites were built on the basis of a printed Graphic Design as if they were brochures and budgets were established for the creation of a Web site only. Once it is launched you will have visibility for ever.

At the time there was little thinking beyond the Website. Few companies would have an Internet Strategy with defined landmarks and objectives.So what did Internet Marketing look like back then? The below model was my view of the matter at the time:

• Entry Marketing: getting the visitors to your website
• Exit Marketing: optimising the outcome of the visit

All of this still exists today although the names are different. Instead of Entry Marketing we talk about Acquisition or about Inbound Marketing and instead of Exit Marketing we talk about Engagement or Conversion Optimisation. This same chart would look something like this today:

2 big things have changed in 2012. 1) Big Data. The amount of data available for marketers has exploded and 2) Interweaving channels. Communication channels are interweaving and the Zap generation of “fragmented consumers” are constantly changing their behaviour within Digital Media.

Digital Marketing is no longer about optimising a structured path of Economic Man through an Internet Funnel – it is about wiring contents for maximum distribution and it is about constantly tweaking multiple levers on the basis of thousands of data points to maximise the value users take from content and bring back to brands, rock-stars and products.