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!

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”.

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

(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

I have analyzed 25 of the best entries in the European Search Awards in order to identify the major trends in Paid Search. I will be presenting the results on the European Search Conference in Liverpool next month.

Paid search was such a powerful marketing tool at its inception. In the early 2000s, Search Marketing would be a challenger to all media and communication budgets as it could drive volumes, drive conversions and even prove its value. Since then, Paid Search has become a bit more humble and opened up to the marketing mix and it is fascinating to see how Paid Search integrates with other channels; Social media, of course, but also Shopping engines, email and even offline.

Strategies, tactics, functionalities and hacks

I have structured the analysis around 4 different categories:

Strategies: for many years a Search Strategy would be built on 3 elements: Granularity, Expansion and Optimisation. We still see this approach in entries in 2018 but the more advanced strategies are looking at the wider user journey and are pulling data or inspiration from outside of the Search channel.

Tactics: it is at the tactical level that most of the trends are visible. The spectrum of tactics used seems to be expanding quite a bit. We see several tactics deployed within one entry.

Functionalities: the search engines are adding a lot of functionalities and Paid Search has become a complex beast. It was never really « 15 minutes and a credit card » as Google originally announced on the Adwords entry page. Extensions are some of the most adopted functionalities and we also see mentions of machine learning.

Hacks: some of the entries are using innovative techniques. I am hoping to be able to share some of these hacks in my presentation but can’t reveal anything at this stage.

I have been a Judge on the European Search Awards for the past 4-5 years. That has given me the priviledge to see some of the best work in Search Marketing carried out across Europe. The judging experience is very rich but also time-consuming and I believe these awards are doing a wonderful job of compensating excellent work and also of making a whole industry aim for excellence.

The Awards ceremony is a great celebration but there is no time available for celebrating the content of individual entries. Each year we see new ideas emerge and each year we see quality improve.

This presentation is an aim to share some of that experience so that the industry can build upon an even stronger foundation for coming years.

I hope to see you there.

European Search Conference 2018
27 June, 2018, Liverpool International Business Festival
https://www.europeansearchconference.com/
Discount code: ESC20SP

There are 29 different categories and I am convinced that most agencies, in-house teams and software editors will have at least 1 outstanding client story to submit.

Building and submitting a case study in itself can be an enriching experience and it also allows you to benchmark your organisation against the market. Will you make the shortlist? Could you win one of the trophees?

Shortlists are due to be published on the 23rd or March. And all the excitement will culminate in an amazing Event ceremony which will be held in Prague on 16 May.

You can submit your entry here: European Search Awards

We are launching something new called the Nordics track. This track which is on the second day of the conference will focus on the Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, Finnish and Icelandic markets seen as a whole and from the outside.

There will be a focus on Ranking factors specific for the Nordics. What? Different ranking factors in different countries? Well as keyword morphology and backlink profiles are very different from one market to the next, ranking factors differ. Marcus Tober founder of SearchMetrics is aiming to do dedicated research on this for the conference.

In paid search, there are obvious differences also and I have convinced Sean Malseed from SEMrush to also do some dedicated research for this conference. He will be looking more specifically on the ecommerce sector and compare across the Nordic markets.

We are also planning to address the topic of “the Nordics as ONE market”. Adding the 5 populations together you reach some 25 million inhabitants. From a global marketers perspective that may not seem much but the market has some fascinating characteristics in terms of buying power, internet penetration, standard of living. Remains therefore the challenge of managing Search campaigns across 4-5 languages of which at least 3 are very close but not the same.

There will be plenty of reasons for coming to SMX Stockholm this year and catching the early bird AND an early flight booking can even make it quite affordable. Oh, and we will be aiming to do some SMX After Dark as well…

I will do some more updates on this event as we progress towards the final program and speaker line-up!