Holisitic Optimization of Digital Marketing for Ecommerce

If you are spending less than 8% of your sales on advertising, you may be underspending! Digital Advertising is driven by Ecommerce. And perhaps a little by branding, which is financed by commerce  too. Global Ecommerce was over 4 trillion dollars in 2020 (statista). Comparatively speaking, digital advertising is a midget, at 330 billion. So, global digital advertising as a proportion of global ecommerce is 8%. There is your benchmark, but how should you spend your advertising budget?

Spending where it works

Wanamaker famously said that one half of advertising spend is wasted, the trouble being that you don’t know which half. Fortunately, we are now in the world of digital advertising where everything is measurable, right? If only it were that easy. As we have undercovered in the Digital Marketing Report, all marketing decisions are taken on the basis of partial data: incomplete, unreliable, unshared, adblocked, webproxied, wrongly attributed. All digital marketers know this, most advertisers too, the majority of end-users don’t. “When I enter information into a website, why should it be shared with all those other sites?” – well it isn’t. Apple’s current advertising is about removing all the other platforms’ partial data collection so that only Apple can monetize that data. Logical movement of troops in the what we call the Data Wars, but not motivated by Apple wanting to protect it’s users, in my opinion.

When marketers look at data from the big marketing platforms, there can be biais in the interfaces too. Did you know that Google analytics shows “sampled results” over a certain threshold of data volume: you see a simulation of what data trend is in your activity, not real data. Explain that to your CFO, will you? Newer concepts such as “data-driven attribution” and “modeled conversions” are pushing in the same direction of predicted data rather than real data.

And most platforms are excellent at pushing their collection of packaged data to marketers. The big platforms are marketing data to their clients, the marketers, using great packaging, promotional outreach, gamification.  Dear marketer, did you not know realize that it is you the target audience?

Digital media spend is biaised to promotion

The most reliable data, is found when a marketing operation is carried out exclusively on one platform, and when the path between product discovery and the final purchase is short and uncomplicated. The longer the path gets and the more complex the decision-taking, the less reliable the data tends to be.

Unsurprisingly therefore, Amazon is booming. It is concentrated on the final path to purchase. Also unsurprising, retargeting works really well. Both are close to the measurement point for your sales KPI. And a well-known observation from search marketers, “brand keywords convert”: first users search for category words and when they have found the brand they want to buy from, they search for the brand name. For this reasons, brand keywords are more often attributed the sale.

This challenge of “attribution” has a huge impact on the way budgets are engaged. The data is biased, and subsequently, so are budgets.

In many cases, the data doesn’t tell the story of what happened before the final conclusive action that made a user purchase. Whether this was other keywords that were searched for, or how the person you retarget was identified in the first place. If you really want to optimize your marketing investment, you must look at your entire marketing and communications operation holistically from end-to-end.

Understanding the user journey

Heard of the “funnel” for digital advertising? It was invented in 1898 so predates most digital marketing by a century. Kind of old and outdated, right? Or maybe it isn’t.

The reference concept behind the funnel is the AIDA model. It is a “hierarchy of effects” model in which users are described as moving through stages before buying a product. Awareness, Interest, Desire, Action. The funnel model is for digital marketers, what the “economic man” model is for economists.  The economic man model explains that people make rational purchase decisions and will be more likely to buy a cheaper product than a higher priced similar product.

The funnel model, explains how a user goes through various stages before coming to a decision to buy a product, including becoming aware of the products’ existence, understanding it’s characteristics and finally acting on an impulse to buy it.

Marketers instrumentalize the funnel model to create “awareness” around a product to target audiences, then provide them all the product information they need in order to appreciate and consider buying it. This drive through the funnel is designed to persuade and eventually incite users to buy the product. Here is a more detailed walk-through of digital marketing mechanisms and the stages of the user journey.

Opportunistic marketing

In the TV age, there were few but powerful marketing channels and few but powerful distribution systems. Optimization cycles were long. Study the market, build a creative concept, produce assets, run the campaign flight, stock up in distribution channels, analyse communication and sales results post-campaign. Marketing was a high budget, high risk and high returns business.

In the digital age, marketing channels are fragmented and fast. So are distribution channels. And user behaviour can be erratic too. It has become less risky but more confusing to be a marketer. You can trial and error, you can seize opportunities as they arise. If you are doing no marketing whatsoever, your first action can drive amazing results, and subsequent additional actions can have seemingly no effect. Worse, you can run a number of parallel marketing activities and find conflicting conclusions in the data sets.

What happens when you optimize holistically?

Because of this opportunistic marketing behaviour, the bigger picture is often lost of sight. Applying a funnel view of marketing activities can help identify bottle necks or explain why performance diminishes over time. The key to holistic optimization is to keep an eye on your total investment and your total outcome. It doesn’t have to be 8%, it really depends on what is profitable for your business. It also depends on your goals: if you want to win more marketshare, you should probably spend more than your competitors. If you have a strong brand, perhaps you can get away with spending less to maintain your market share.

With your eyes fixed on that overall performance, you can now look into individual channels and opportunities. It is quite common to see advertisers spend a lot of their budget at the bottom of the funnel, because it is measurable and gives the illusion of high performance. But in some cases, bottom of funnel budgets are cannibalising what we call “organic” performance. You put an ad up and it drove the sales, but the user was going to buy the product anyway. And sometimes you can end up bidding up your own marketing in other channels or perhaps your distributors’ marketing costs for selling your products.

If you think this may be the case in your marketing set-up, try moving some of your budget up the funnel. Reach your target audiences on facebook, target category keywords in search and promote your brand on Amazon. This can stimulate overall performance and allow you to generate better results holistically.

Don’t trust channel-specific performance

One of my favourite films is Minority Report. It depicits a society where truth is established in a closed room where three extraordinary beings can see what will happen in the future. Except, sometimes they don’t agree, and one of them will disagree to generate a minority report.

This can be compared to marketing reports emanating from one marketing channel. All the data isn’t there, but the truth that emerges seems compelling, whereas in reality it is incomplete and sometimes even false.

Everything is measurable in digital marketing, except for all the incomplete data, the biaised data, and the fact that advertising platforms are marketing their product to the advertiser without disclosing their minority reports.

Only a holistic view of all marketing activities can help you learn what balance of media spend and channels works for your brand, so check with your CFO before signing off on the next advertising opportunity you are presented with, and take a chance on channels that make sens from a funnel perspective. They may be more inclined to drives results in the long run.

Searching for Purpose? Here comes Marketing with Purpose, starring Responsibility, Values and Inclusion

“It starts with Why“, doesn’t it? It explains why Apple and Nike are so successful because they have such a strong mission statement at the core of their business. Simon Sinek explains this brilliantly in his presentations and his books. He presents us with the golden circle, an illustration of concentric circles of What and How surrounding the core purpose in the central Why.

But it is harder when you are just a local accounting firm or an undertaker, isn’t it? “Some guys just wanna drive a forklift”, as Colm Regan puts it in the Late Late Show. They don’t need a vision or to be passionate about a cause, or innovation, do they? (Good laugh for you in that short video, and more about passionate tax optimizers, passionate sofa retailers and accountants from David Mitchell’s Soapbox here).

What is purpose?

Where Simon Sinek explains the purpose of a business as “The Why”, Microsoft Advertising makes it more concret and tangible in their “Marketing with Purpose” framework which was kicked off at the Elevate event these last few days.

The Marketing with Purpose framework breaks the Why down into values, responsibilities and inclusion. The effect these factors jointly create on users is to make a brand more authentic. Perhaps authenticity is what Simon Sinek calls “consumers don’t buy your products’ functionality, they buy your reason for producing it”.

In one of Microsoft Advertising’s research studies, it was found that 72% of consumers were more likely to support brands that are authentic in their advertising.

Towards a more ethical marketing

The rise of this trend comes at a time where users have become distrustful of digital marketing and perhaps somewhat tired of the shear number of ads they see every day. The Cambridge Analytica scandal was the symbol for misuse of user data. The interests, affinities and behaviours of millions of users were logged and cross-referenced in a giant database that was used to exerce influence believed to have affected elections across the world, including the US Presidential election. The one that surprisingly instated Donald Trump as what was once called “the leader of the free world”. Fake news proliferated out of control.

The Cambridge Analytica scandal was about uncontrolled use of covertly obtained user data. This was based on the same priniciples on which brands have been retrieving data via digital marketing channels over the past years.

In the world of marketing, users turned to ad blocking and anonymous browsing as the only means they had to fight back. As one would expect, users also began to lose trust in brands that were felt to misuse their data or disrespect their privacy. A Microsoft research study focused on Generation Z showed that 48% of users stopped purchasing from a brand because it didn’t represent their values. (“The Psychology of Inclusion and the Effects in Advertising: Gen Z“)

In 2021 a number of things are happening. GDPR, the European privacy legislation and CCPA, California’s privacy regulation, are leading regulatory frameworks starting to set a standard for what user data can be collected and how. Whereas they are far from perfect from a functionality standpoint, they are setting a standard for what is acceptable and what is overstepping, and thus are helping end users know where to put their own limits. And from the end-user perspective, the pandemic has caused a great disruption in both end-user behaviour and marketing techniques, as we described recently in our article about user unpredictability and marketing in the 20’ies.

Within the big online platforms, Apple is on a crusade to kill third party cookies in the name of privacy. And Google is following in their footsteps for this noble cause, and with a much higher impact on marketers. For outsiders, it frankly does look a bit like internal fighting between GAFAMs (the data driven companies Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft). Apple is in a dogfight with Facebook, Google is fighting Amazon. They do this to regain user trust while providing a sizable blow to their competitors. This will have great impact on the way marketers work in the future as they are directly affected by these impacts. This is addressed more in detail in Innovell’s digital marketing report: “Digital Marketing in Volatile, Uncertain, Complex and Ambiguous Times” (commercial report not freely available).

Oh, and Microsoft? Well, here is an interesting initiative where Microsoft Advertising is taking an altruistic and entirely positive approach to the topic by publishing a playbook and setting up a course with accompanying certification: “Marketing with Purpose” which we are looking closer at in this article.

An authentic brand uses responsibility, values and inclusion principles

In the Marketing with Purpose framework set forth by Microsoft Advertising, the core building blocks are responsibility, values and inclusion. And meeting best practices and enhancing these factors leads to higher brand loyalty.

The brand loyalty curve from the Marketing with Purpose framework

The three components of marketing with purpose help to build an authentic brand which in turn translates into consumer trust trigger a higher propensity to purchase that brand’s products. Supporting the entire framework is a number of Microsoft Advertising research studies.

Let’s have a look at the three big components one by one:

Responsibility: Brand’s need to both be and communicate responsibility to their audiences:

• Respect user data and privacy
• Be transparent in their communication
• Apply brand safety control to their advertising
• Make their communication media accessible to all categories of users

Values: A brand is built on a mission statement carrying it’s values. When these values overlap and resonate with users’ values, brand trust and loyalty increases.

• Establishing a brands ethical foundation
• Knowing and communicating a brands’ values
• Understanding consumers’ values
• Removing or reducing data bias from the equation

Inclusion: The openness and inclusivity a brand exercices in its’ practice and its’ communication.

• Knowing the 9 feelings of inclusion: celebration, zest, hope, relaxation, relief, safety, confidence, acceptance and clarity
• Using inclusive keywords in search campaigns
• Aplying proximity, empahty, insights and innovation to communication

Better and more responsible marketing drives better performance

Many advertisers care more for marketing with performance than marketing with purpose, maybe because goodwill is harder to measure than sales. After all, any business is by definition geared towards generating profits. That is the purpose of a business.

Advertising has long been aiming to be on wavelength with the values of its audiences, but in the past not many studies or metrics pointed to the importance of advertiser responsibility or inclusivity. Those have become building bricks for authentic marketing which is in user demand.

Perhaps this is a wakeup call for those who have had a too narrow focus on short term business metrics and who have neglected the greater good and the image of their brands in the long run.

If you want to dig deeper into the Marketing with Purpose framework, you can download the Marketing with Purpose playbook here and you can access the course and the (rather fun) certification. The course is a 2-3 hour investment well worth your time.

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“.

“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.

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

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

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

Measurement-driven strategies

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

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

Insights-driven strategies

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

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

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

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

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

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 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