All About Google Ads Bidding Strategies

Google Ads has shifted more toward automated bidding in the past few years and the system has gotten significantly better. While we used to focus more on manual bidding strategies, we almost always recommend automated bidding now.

Google Ads bidding is still confusing on a number of levels, and because bidding has such a huge impact on performance, understanding what the different bidding strategies are, and how to deploy them becomes very important.

In this article we break down each of the different bidding strategies, and share what we’ve found is the best approach for deploying each one.

How Bidding Works

Here’s a quick and dirty explanation of bidding.

Google Ads is an auction, and your bid (in addition to other factors like quality score) determines how competitive you are in that auction, and ultimately where your ads appear on the SERP (search engine results page). Bidding influences if your ad is going to show up when someone searches on a keyword in your account, and where on the page it shows up.

The auction is based on a second-price auction system. Meaning that if you win a click, you only pay $0.01 more than the second-highest bid.

Google Ads uses sophisticated algorithms that take into account many factors when deciding when to show an advertiser’s ads, and where on the page. This includes inputs directly on the Google Ads platform side from any advertiser in the auction (keyword, ad, budget, bid amount, bid type and more.)

Bid Types

Here we’ll go into what each bidding type is, how it works when to use it, and its pros and cons.

Manual CPC bidding

• What is it:

  • The original bidding type where you set the exact maximum amount you want to pay for a click.

  • Bids are set at the keyword level, or the ad group level.

• Pros:

  • High level of control over exactly how much you want to bid at the keyword level.

  • Can make it easier to control individual keywords and ad group CPCs, and prevent you from paying more than you want to for traffic.

• Cons:

  • Can be tedious to manage, especially at scale.

  • May not perform as well when trying to win conversions.

• When to use it:

  • We typically use manual bidding/enhanced CPC bidding when launching new campaigns to test the waters, and control ad costs.

  • After some data has been collected, we’ll often shift to an automated bidding strategy.

Enhanced CPC bidding (AKA ECPC):

• What is it: 

  • The same as manual CPC but also gives Google the ability to adjust bids at the auction based on whether or not they think it will lead to a conversion or not.

  • The increased bid amount used to be capped at 30% but since 2017 the cap has been removed.

• Pros:

  • Can get more conversions than manual CPC, and impact CPA.

• Cons:

  • Google might bid more than you’re wanting to pay for a click.

  • You may pay higher amounts than manual CPC for clicks that do not lead to a conversion.

• When to use it:

  • If you’re running lower daily budget campaigns, and/or don’t have enough conversion volume to justify the use of a fully-automated bidding strategy, this type of bidding can work well.

  • Make sure to keep a close eye on the search terms report to review the quality of keywords and add negatives for anything that is irrelevant.

ECPC bidding example. With manual CPC and ECPC you should see Avg. CPC match closely to the bid you set (shown here in the Max. CPC column).

Maximize Clicks

• What is it:

  • An automated bidding strategy where Google will bid to get as many clicks as possible from within your budget.

• Pros:

  • You can set a maximum CPC bid, and you won’t pay a higher CPC

  • Easy to manage daily budget because this will typically spend whatever daily budget you set.

• Cons:

  • This strategy should be taken very literally.

  • Clicks are just that, clicks, and without any consideration of what happens after someone clicks on the ad, and lands on your website or landing page, that traffic might be a complete waste of ad budget if they don’t take any further action

When to use it:

• If you’re an advertiser who literally only cares about the clicks you are receiving from your ads and are not interested in what happens after they get to your website.

• You need to hit a goal number of clicks, or traffic to the website. 

• You have a brand new campaign, business, or website and just want to run some ad traffic.

Rarely would we ever recommend this bidding strategy as a long-term solution.

Maximize Conversions

• What is it:

  • This bidding strategy will try to get as many conversions for the campaign for the budget as possible, using signals at auction time.

Example of the signals Google is using to adjust bids up and down using the Maximize Conversions bidding strategy.

• Pros:

  • Generally does perform better than manual or enhanced CPC bidding to get conversions.

  • Easy to manage daily budget/ad spend.

• Cons:

  • Can’t set a maximum CPC bid.

  • Typically drives a higher cost-per-click, as Google has the flexibility to bid higher if the system thinks it can gain a conversion.

  • Doesn’t work well with low conversion volume and may either not spend the full budget, or waste the budget by spending too much (sometimes ridiculous amounts) on single clicks.

When to use it:

• When you want to maximize the number of conversions you get from a campaign, and are less budget and/or target CPA-focused.

Maximize Conversions Bidding Example. Notice that CPC (cost-per-click) tends to increase with maximize conversions, but also the conversion rate increased enough to offset this and still lead to a lower cost-per-conversion.

Maximize Conversions with a Target Cost-per-action (tCPA)

• What is it:

  • This bidding strategy is focused on maximizing conversions while achieving the target CPA that you set.

• Pros:

  • With enough budget and conversion volume, tCPA tends to be a reliable way to achieve conversions at a certain CPA or lower.

  • Easy to manage once established.

  • Can test reducing tCPA bids over time as a means of reducing CPA.

• Cons:

  • Needs a consistent level of conversions to maintain.

  • If you have a wide fluctuation in cost-per-conversions, you may find that this strategy doesn’t suit your campaign goals.

  • May be harder to manage with seasonal ups and downs.

When to use it:

• This is a great bidding strategy to use after you have run a campaign for enough time and have a stable number of conversions.

Maximize Conversions with Target CPA Example. Here we set the target CPA at $4, but have been able to achieve a lower CPA at $3.19. The system has enough conversion data, budget and time to reliably deliver conversions at or under the set target.

Target Return-on-ad-spend (ROAS)

• What is it:

  • This is just the same at TCPA but incorporates the ‘value’ of conversion into the equation.

  • For advertisers who sell products with different values (eCommerce for example)

• Pros:

  • Same as tCPA above. Target ROAS can be a reliable way to get conversions that return a certain conversion volume and order value.

• Cons:

  • Not suitable unless you are tracking order value with sales. I.e if you’re not an eCommerce company, and you don’t assign a specific value to each conversion (eg. lead, trial start).

• When to use it:

  • As above, test this bidding strategy once you have a stable amount of conversions with values.

Portfolio Bidding:

• What is it:

  • Allows you to group campaigns, ad groups, and keywords under the same bidding strategy.

  • Works with all of the automated bidding strategies.

• Pros:

  • By grouping multiple campaigns under the same bidding strategy, the system is able to pool data and may be able to improve performance beyond bidding at the individual campaign level.

• Cons:

  • Campaigns need to have similar goals, and performance in order to be grouped together.

BONUS - Using Experiments to Test Bidding Strategies Head-to-head

The only way to really, truly know which bidding strategy will perform the best for you, is to test them head-to-head.

Google Ads Experiments make it easy to run an A/B test where you split traffic between two campaigns, using different bid strategies, and then you can directly compare the performance of each one.

Happy Bidding!

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Google Ads Keyword Match Type Changes

Google Ads Match Type Changes

It’s time to say goodbye to one of my favorite match types, broad match modified. RIP.

In July 2021, Google plans to sunset the broad match modified (BMM) keyword match type and consolidate keywords into three match types: broad, exact, and phrase.

Additionally, as of this month, phrase match has been updated and expanded to include traffic that currently would only be picked up by BMM keywords. The new functionality in phrase match is intended to capture relevant traffic while eliminating the need for the BMM keyword match type. BMM is also undergoing a change to act like phrase match until the July update.

I’ve always found that BMM keywords were a great way to pick up a broad but relevant range of traffic while providing search query data that can be used to organize and optimize campaigns for maximum ROI. However, with the changes to phrase match, managing this change requires a clear understanding of the new functionality.

Why Is Google Making This Change?

Currently, BMM and phrase match are very similar in the way that they work. By making this change, Google is simplifying and streamlining account management.

“We’ve seen that phrase match and broad match modifier often serve the same use cases, and that you can reach more of the right customers through a combination of the two’” - Google.

What Does This Mean for My Campaigns?

Very large accounts (spending in the millions of dollars a year) often optimize at the match type level because the difference in ROI can be impactful. However most smaller accounts, so long as they are organized, won’t notice a change in performance.

Here’s an explanation from Google on the impacts of the change:

“For example, the phrase match keyword ‘moving services NYC to Boston.’ will continue to cover searches like ‘affordable moving services NYC to Boston.’ It will also cover searches that traditionally only matched under broad match modifier, such as ‘NYC corporate moving services to Boston.’ Phrase match won’t show ads for searches where the direction is reversed (for example, people looking to move from “Boston to New York City”).” - Google.

Source: Google

Optimizing based on search intent (i.e looking at search terms actually used to trigger ads and pairing with a negative keyword strategy) remains crucial when trying to maximize ROI.

Looking Forward

Google is continuing to move Google Ads towards automation. It’s hard to know how many accounts running in Google Ads are not being expertly managed, but it’s probably the majority of them.

I’ll admit that Google Ads is far too complex and time-consuming for anyone who doesn’t do this full-time. Google sees the opportunity to simplify management while increasing ad spend which translates to revenue for Google.

For example, traditional broad match keywords now automatically look at “additional signals in the account” which includes the user’s recent search activities, contents of the landing page, and other keywords in the ad group. Google states:

“To start, broad match now looks at additional signals in your account to deliver more relevant searches. When paired with Smart Bidding, these broad match signals–which include landing pages, keywords in your ad group, and more–can help you unlock new opportunities for your business.” - Google.

By doing this, and encouraging the use of broad match, Google is blurring the line between manual and automated account management. They are saying “let us decide when and who to show your ads to, and we’ll help you get the right people.”

The issue with this is that Google’s system is still awful at knowing what a client’s website and business are about. Broad match keywords inevitably lead to higher CPA and less relevant traffic.

One of the first things we do during an audit of a new account is to look at the search terms (what people are actually searching for) that are showing up. Most of the time we find a ton of irrelevant traffic, and it’s a surprise to the client to see it. With some reorganization, tracking, and optimization we’re able to improve their campaign performance and bring it in line with their marketing goals.

As Google moves forward with these and other changes, be certain that you have a clear understanding of how they impact your campaigns. Getting expert help managing your campaigns can deliver better results for your business.

Andrew Hutton

Facebook iOS 14 Changes

With the rollout of Apple’s iOS 14 in spring 2021, Apple will start asking users of apps like Facebook if they would like to opt-in to their tracking, changing what has always been an ‘opt-out of tracking’ to an ‘opt-in to tracking’. This applies to Instagram as well, as it’s part of the Facebook Ads ecosystem.

Users that opt-out of tracking will no longer be able to be tracked by Facebook’s pixel and therefore won’t be part of personalized advertising and conversion tracking. Facebook is unsurprisingly not happy about this, but are being forced to comply as so many of its users are on iOS devices.

However, with Aggregated Event Measurement, Facebook will still be able to track and report on conversions from people that opt-out of tracking.

That makes optimization toward conversions possible, as Facebook is still allowed to track one conversion event under ‘aggregated event measurement’.

How will this affect advertising on Facebook?

Like anything, there are pros and cons to these changes.

Pros:

• Potential lower cost of advertising:

  • Facebook CPMs have been going up consistently over the last 10 years. To the point where it’s too expensive for many advertisers to generate a positive return on investment. We expect that CPM will drop by at least 25% as it becomes less competitive to reach certain audiences. The reality is that most people do accept cookies so the anticipated impact could be as low as a 5% reduction in tracked conversions

• More focus on alternative methods of tracking and less reliance on Facebook Ads manager results

• Innovation from Facebook and other platforms that find alternative ways around relying on other businesses platforms.

  • Facebook is already planning on showing users its own prompt, educating users on how they use their data, presumably to encourage them to opt-in to tracking on iOS14.

Cons:

• A delay in conversion reporting

  • Conversions won’t appear in the Facebook Ads manager for 48-72 hours instead of a few hours. This isn’t changing what is actually happening, but only what you see in FB Ads Manager.

• Less accurate audience targeting

  • With less personalized data to use for targeting, audiences will either become much smaller or just not available for advertising.

• Aggregated Event Measurement will combine different conversion events into one.

  • So instead of having multiple tracking events throughout the funnel (like ‘add to cart’), these will be rolled up into a single event.

• Smaller remarketing and custom audiences

  • Users that opt-out will not be included in these remarketing and custom audiences.

• Less relevant ads

  • Users that decide to opt-out will, without a doubt start to see less targeted and relevant advertisers and probably more ads from the big brand advertisers who are more likely to target broadly.

What you can do about it:

• Facebook is recommending that all advertisers verify their domain via Facebook Business Manager

• Focus on creating strong offers that you can tie back to an ad with UTM tracking, dedicated landing pages, or unique coupon codes.

• Make sure you have reliable tracking in place outside of Facebook Ads Manager. That could include:

  • Your CRM (HubSpot, Pardot etc.)

  • Google Analytics or another analytics platform

  • Custom solutions built on UTM tracking

• Bolster efforts on other advertising channels like Google LinkedIn, Microsoft Ads

• Understand the ‘halo-effect of Facebook Ads

  • Right now tracking from Facebook Ads is not perfect, and ad impressions and traffic from Facebook can be under-counted by the platform. Looking at your Google Analytics data can help better understand the ‘halo-effect’ of advertising on Facebook.

The future is now?

I think this is much less about protecting consumer privacy than it is a power-struggle between Apple and Facebook over tracking control and monetizing user data.

Ultimately, I think this will push Facebook to find a way around its reliance on Google and Apple. In 2019 it was reported that Facebook was already working on building it’s own OS so that it’s AR technology did not have to rely on Google’s Android.

I will say that none of our clients built their businesses entirely on/with Facebook Ads and that any campaigns we’re running there are only one slice of overall marketing efforts. There are, however, many businesses, especially D2C startups that have done just that. These are the companies that are most at risk from the impact of these changes. Facebook Ads is their primary advertising channel and they will suffer the most from not being able to effectively target their audience and track conversions.

It’s still the wild-west out there. Not so long ago we didn’t have social media platforms influencing elections, starting social movements, and upending financial markets. As marketers, we all need to adapt to the changing world of digital marketing.

Further reading:

User Privacy and Data Use (Apple)

Speaking Up for Small Businesses (Facebook)

About Aggregated Event Measurement (Facebook)

Google and Facebook COVID-19 Resources

Google and Facebook have mobilized a few initiatives to help businesses cope with the economic impacts of COVID-19. Read up on the summary below on what they are doing to help businesses out and to see if you are eligible to benefit from the programs:

Google is Making Google Shopping free:

For E-commerce companies, and those who have setup a Google Merchant Center (pro-tip, it isn’t just for retailers) Google is making listings on Google Shopping free.

Things to know:

• If you currently run ads on Google Shopping, you probably don’t need to do anything to have your products show up in the free section but we recommend checking your Google Merchant Center settings.

• For new users of Merchant Center, Google will continue working to streamline the onboarding process over the coming weeks and months.

Google Ads Credits for SMBs:

Google announced an initiative offering $340 million in ad credits to help small and medium-sized businesses. While it’s unclear exactly what types of businesses will receive these ad credits, I think it’s likely that it will go to SMBs that are directly impacted by the lockdowns like restaurants and non-essential retailers. But they could go to other types of businesses as well.

Things to know:

• Advertisers will be eligible if they have spent with a Google Ads account in ten out of twelve months of 2019, and in January and/or February of this year.

• This is an ad credit for future Google Ads spend.

• The ad credits will cover all channels available within a Google Ads account including search, display and YouTube.

• Credits will roll out in phases starting in late May and must be used by the end of 2020.

• Accounts will likely be notified by an ‘in account alert’ only.

Facebook Small Business Grants Program:

Facebook has created a Grant program, offering cash and ad credits to eligible businesses. For this one you’ll actually have to apply for it.

Things to know:

• The fund is $100M in cash grants and ad credits.

• Businesses must have experienced challenges from COVID-19 to apply.

• The size of the business must be between 2 and 50 employees, so the money will be going to those who really need it.

5 Ways to Get More Traffic and Sales From Instagram Ads

Instagram is winning the war for our attention. In recent years, Instagram has become a part of our daily lives, with the average adult user spending nearly 30 minutes a day scrolling the feed, posting photos, stories and viewing content.

Not just a place for influencers and teens, Instagram is being used by everyone from celebrities to businesses. I personally go back and forth on whether our Instagram obsession is net positive or negative for our society, but there’s no arguing the fact that it’s become a central place to reach people with advertising while they are online.

Used correctly, Instagram Ads are a great way to reach new audiences with a consumer product, and can even work for B2B advertisers.

(image source)

We put together 5 ways you can get more traffic and sales from Instagram today:

1. Instagram Stories

Instagram stories are a feature that allows users and brands to post photos and videos from their account, that disappear after 24 hours. Originally invented by Snapchat, Instagram rolled it out their own version in 2016 and it has become incredibly popular since then with over 500 million people using Instagram stories every day.

(image source)

Since that’s where the eyeballs are, it makes sense that you would want to advertise there to reach your audience. Creative format options include image, video and carousel. However, I’m always skeptical of new advertising options and placements when they first roll out. While Instagram stories are a place where people spend a lot of time when they are using the platform, doesn’t necessarily mean it’s the best place to advertise. Because the tendency is for users to view a story for a matter for seconds, the creative needs to be attention-grabbing.

To get conversions, you’re going to want the ad to be as direct-response as possible, so you’ll want to have a strong call-to-action to get the viewer to ‘swipe up’ and visit your landing page or website. A brand type of message may work for brand recall later… but I suspect that most people reading this will want immediate action over brand awareness.

It goes without saying that you need to be in a position to measure the results of your Instagram story ad campaigns. That means tracking micro and macro conversions, checking on your campaign performance data often, and making changes and optimizations as needed.

2. As part of your Facebook Ads campaign

The best way for advertisers to get started advertising on Instagram, is part of a Facebook Ads campaign.

Facebook owns Instagram, and the creation and management of Instagram campaigns is only done via Facebook’s Ads Manager where Facebook gives you the option to choose what platforms to advertise on. Your creative will be mostly the same, and they’ll be automatically formatted to fit each platform’s requirements.

(image source)

When your campaign is live, Facebook’s system will optimize performance across the two platforms based on your chosen performance metric. So if you're trying to get conversions, and Instagram is delivering a CPA (cost-per-action) that’s half of what you’re getting on Facebook, the system will automatically shift to focus on Instagram.

One thing you’ll find out rather quickly is that even though a lot of people are spending time on Instagram, there is less ad inventory so more budget tends to get spent on Facebook. If you’re finding success on Instagram, it’s possible to create an ‘Instagram only’ campaign and hone in on your audience and creative to maximize performance.

3. Remarketing

Remarketing is about advertising to people who have already interacted with your brand in some way.

There are many ways to approach remarketing, but most advertisers do the following:

• Remarketing to people who have visited your website but have not converted

• Remarketing to people who are on an email list

• Remarketing to people who have already brought from you with a loyalty campaign

Remarketing is the best place for B2B marketers to advertise on Instagram. Prospecting (i.e advertising to a new audience) to a B2B audience on Instagram, is difficult if not impossible. Since you need to know what they do professionally to make sure it’s a good fit, and the data available on Facebook/Instagram isn’t as detailed as say, LinkedIn, it will make finding the right people difficult.

They aren’t on Instagram in ‘business mode’ either, so LinkedIn Ads are better suited for reaching new business audiences for the first time.

However, if you already know that someone has visited your businesses website, downloaded one of your E-books or opted in some other way, you can reach them with a business ad effectively during their ‘leisure time’ on Instagram. Ads on Instagram and Facebook can be more viewable and engaging than Google Display Ads, so consider adding this to the strategy as well.

4. E-Commerce

If you’re in E-Commerce, Instagram is a great place to reach your audience and sell your products.

Understanding your audience so that you can combine targeted campaigns to new audiences with a highly relevant message can drive quality traffic and sales to your site.

You should create at least three campaigns:

• Prospecting - Ads targeted to new audiences, telling the story of your brand and your products. A well-produced video is the best creative asset for this audience. The goal is to really get them to understand your brand, and visit your website. Most people won’t purchase on the first visit, and that’s OK because you’ll follow up.

• Remarketing - At this stage, people have visited your site already and have hopefully learned about your brand and products. Now you can help them towards making a purchase by advertising your products to them again and pointing out the best features and benefits that your product offers.

• Loyalty/Upsell - Once you’ve acquired a customer, you’ll have their information so you no longer have to pay the cost of making the acquisition again. Advertising to someone here to buy a different product can be very cost-effective.

(image source)

5. Data Ownership

Make sure that you own or have direct access to your Facebook Ads account so that you have access to the valuable advertising data stored in the account and can audit exactly how much is being spent on ads.

I’ve talked about this before, but want to emphasize how important it is to have this ownership. Some agencies charge massive hidden fees by taking money out of media budget and keeping it for themselves, so you’ll want to be able to see the actual spend. Facebook/Instagram Ads are self-serve platforms, so it’s easy for anyone to share access to the account. And If the relationship with that agency ends, you’ll want to have the marketing data to share with the new agency.

Those are just a handful of ways to get more traffic and sales from Instagram Ads, but there is much more to learn and the platform changes constantly.

Here are a few other interesting resources you’ll want to check out:

• If you’re interested in seeing how much time you spent on Instagram in the past 7-days, you can do so here.

• Buffer put together this great resource on Instagram stories, with information on how often to post, the best times of the day to post and more: - note that this is only applicable to organic Instagram.

• Instagram is testing in-app checkout so that you can buy directly from Instagram without having to leave the app.

Five Things You Must Get Right to Grow Your Business with Inbound Marketing

This is a guest post from Jessica Day - Co-Founder, Chief Marketing Officer at IdeaScale.

The term “inbound marketing” has been around since the 90’s but didn’t really start to get popular until the mid-2000s when all of the major brands started to shift their thinking about how to grow their customer base. Instead of “pushing” messages out to consumers and interrupting them (on billboards, television commercials, podcast ads) they started to “pull” people to them who were already interested in hearing their message by appearing in their path when people were looking for them.

Maybe that new customer had discovered a problem that they wanted to solve or maybe they’d already heard of a company and were looking to find out if that solution was right for them. The point is, companies started to lay the bread crumbs to be FOUND instead of doing the finding themselves and some start-ups built their entire business this way.  After almost a decade in business, IdeaScale is still almost 100% inbound and we’ve grown into a global multi-million dollar business that way. But what did we have to get right to do it?

Odds are you haven’t heard of the term “innovation management software” or maybe even “employee crowdsourcing” but that doesn’t necessarily matter. The point is, once you know what it is, once you know that you need it, when you search for it on Google… IdeaScale will be on the first page of results. So we do some very simple things to make sure that when you’re ready for our message you’ll find us.

Start with Research

No matter what tactic you’re focusing on [search engine optimization (SEO), PPC (pay per click), or social media], you must start by developing prospect and customer empathy. Find out what terms a prospect would use as they started having awareness of a need, develop other terms for when they’re looking to buy. For example, someone who is worried about ideas being transparently shared at their company might search for “ideation transparency” before they learn about and search for “idea management software,” which is why IdeaScale has developed content for both. To do this, you have to develop true customer empathy and let this be the roadmap for your strategy. And then you need to see what other content and messages are out there, what other people enjoy and share (BuzzSumo is great for this) and create your own messages that fit into this universe.

Create Content People Want to Share

Links back to your site are absolutely still the most important way to drive traffic back to your site. Not only are those links messaging outposts that will get people back to your site, but they signal relevance and importance to the search bots so will help you level-up your search results. So take all that research that you used to understand your customers and prospects and create content that they want to engage with. Oftentimes, IdeaScale will take a book that we admire or quote a thought leader that relates to our business and repackage that message in a meme, infographic, or blog post and then share it with that author or thought leader’s audience.

Social Media Marketing

Your approach to social will vary a great deal depending on your business, but don’t ignore social. Not only are social media platforms an environment for links back to your site, but they allow you to develop your brand voice in a different context. And don’t forget to encourage your most passionate employees to participate with and augment that voice.

Develop an Easy-to-Understand, High-Speed, Mobile-Friendly Website

Your website is the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. And, of course, it should be filled with relevant, high quality information. So do all that, but Google’s search algorithm prioritizes sites that function well, as well. That means having a valuable sitemap and good information architecture, it means being able to load fast and if you’re site isn’t optimized for mobile, just forget about it. Think about content when it comes to your website, but also think about function.

Develop and Iterate Your Pay Per Click Strategy

Every time you search for something, not only do you get content results, but you see ads, as well. And these ads are far more likely to convert into a paying customer, because that person was already searching for that term. They want to see your content so take all that research and create a PPC strategy that makes sense with you and test multiple messages and calls to action. We work with Level-Up to do this and it already delivers top-line revenue growth.

This is just the beginning, of course, but when you’re growing an inbound SaaS business, understanding your prospects, developing great ads and content and a social presence that leads to a stellar website are the things that you absolutely MUST get right.

Jessica Day, Co-Founder, CMO, IdeaScale

Jessica Day is Co-Founder and Chief Marketing Officer at IdeaScale, the largest idea management platform in the world with more than 35,000 communities and 4.5 million users. IdeaScale empowers organizations to crowdsource ideas from their employees or customers who then collaborate, evaluate, and further develop those ideas into products, processes, and new initiatives. IdeaScale’s client roster includes industry leaders, such as Citrix, Marriott Vacations Worldwide, NASA, the New York City Police Department, Princess Cruises and many others. As part of her role, Day analyzes and articulates patterns appearing in crowdsourced innovation.

Day volunteers for sustainability organizations and lives in Berkeley, CA. She holds a MFA in English, Creative Writing.

The Ultimate Guide to Account Structures Part 1: Google Ads

How you structure your Google Ads account will have a huge impact on how your campaigns perform.

There are numerous ways to approach this, each with their owns pros and cons. Over time, I’ve managed to hone in on the best account structures that maximize campaign performance, and allow for organized and continual optimization.

To save time, it’s best to plan out your account structure in a spreadsheet before jumping into the platform. If you try to create your account structure in the platform you’re less likely to see the big picture and get distracted. Additionally, keyword and audience target research should be done before you work out your account structure. This way you’ll have a sense of the search volumes, audience sizes, and targeting that you want.

Segmentation is key when it comes to optimizing and analyzing data. You should aim to segment your campaigns, ad groups, audiences, and keywords as much as reasonably possible. By segmenting each of these you can understand how these individual elements perform, and you’ll have clean data to analyze and optimize your account.

Here are a few things to consider when it comes to structuring your account:

• Do you need to control how much budget is spent on certain marketing efforts?

• How do geographic targets differ for your campaigns and audiences?

• How much budget are you working with on a daily basis? And does it fluctuate or stay consistent?

• If you are working with a limited budget, and your daily budget is $5 but an average CPC for your keywords is $10, you won’t see any clicks.

• What products or services are you advertising? Do they need to be separated and managed with their own budgets and strategy?

• Do certain strategies have different timing? I.e will you need to end some campaigns while others are still running?

In this guide, I’ll go into detail on how to best structure your Google Ads account.

Google Ads Account Structure

The account structure for Google Ads is ‘three layered’ as follows:

Account Level: Your individual Google Ads account, associated with a unique email address. Generally, unless you’re a very large advertiser you’ll use one account.

Campaign Level: Where you create campaigns, control each campaign budget and where you want your ads to appear (network, and geographic location).

For network targeting, you can choose between these options:

• Google Search: Your standard Google Ads search campaign. You select the keywords you want to buy (ads show up on the Google search engine results page only. And it’s optional opt into the Google Search Partner Network).

• Google Shopping: Google Shopping Ads show products (image ads) related to keywords. Do a search for a product and you’ll likely see online retailers advertising in this space.

• Google Display Network: Display ads appear across the millions of websites that are part of the Google Network.

• YouTube: Video ads that appear on YouTube.

• Universal App Campaigns: For promoting mobiles app for download and engagement.

Pro-tip: Develop a naming convention for your campaigns. Something like - Brand Name | Campaign Type | Geographic Target. This will make your accounts that much more organized and easy to manage. From there… you can decide how these individual campaigns should be separated.

Options for Segmenting Your Campaigns

Segmentation 1: By Keyword Theme

This is a default for us, we separate keywords at the campaign level by their theme. That might be ‘brand’ (keywords containing your brand name) or non-brand keywords (keywords that are relevant to your business, but aren’t your brand), competitor keywords and so on.

Segmentation 2: By Geographic Target

Needless to say, where you target your ads is going to have a huge impact on how your campaigns perform, making this one a no-brainer. You’ll want to segment here as much as possible as well… otherwise, your larger geographic targets will use up all of your budget.

Segmentation 3: By Keyword Match Type:

Are you familiar with the different keyword match types? Broad, phrase, modified broad, exact. If not, you need to read up and understand the difference, as your choice will have a big impact on your account. Chose the wrong type and you’re spending the budget on irrelevant search queries, too narrow and you’re not getting any traffic.

Pro-tip: You can build a high performing account by using only a modified broad match, and exact match keywords.

Segmentation 4: By Network Targeting:

You have to do this anyway, but this is where you would have different campaigns for things like ‘Display Remarketing’, YouTube advertising, search etc.

There are many other ways to organize your account, but using these 4 types is going to be sufficient for most accounts.

Ad Groups, Keywords and Ads

Within each campaign are your ad groups, and within each ad group is where your keywords and ads are located.

When it comes to ad groups, the most important thing to do is group keywords into ‘themes’. That way, you’ll be able to write custom ads for each keyword theme. An example of this is would be grouping clothing items into men’s and women’s in order to write relevant ads and send them to the correct product page on a website:

Ad group 1 - Men’s Jeans

Keywords - buy men’s jeans, mens jeans sale

Ad - An ad specifically about mens jeans

Landing page - www.shop.com/mens-jeans

Ad group 2 - Women’s Jeans

Keywords - buy womens jeans, womens jeans sale

Ad - An ad specifically about womens jeans

Landing page - www.shop.com/womens-jeans

It’s easy to see why you want to structure your ad groups this way, as it provides maximum relevance for the searcher, and Google will reward you for that with a higher quality score and lower CPC.

This should give you a solid idea of how to structure your Google Ads account, from there, it can get much more complicated.

Advanced Account Structures:

Want to really geek out on this stuff?

Accounts with enough spend and data should look at organizing at a very granular level. To the point where you have a single keyword associated with a set of ads. This allows you to really hone in on ad copy/keyword relevance and improve those metrics over time.

An example of this is called the Alpha/Beta account structure. This is an approach that can work really well, and is what we recommend for many accounts.

You basically set up two types of campaigns (several of these within the account):

‘Beta’ campaigns - used for keyword mining and discovery

‘Alpha’ campaigns - containing winning search queries from your beta campaign.

Using search query data from the beta campaigns, you’ll be able to understand exactly how people search on your chosen keywords. By using this data over time, you feed your top performing keywords into your Alpha campaign.

This is based on using SKAGS (Single Keyword Ad Groups) to control your keyword/ad relevance. More on the technical details of this here. This maximizes relevance, and will drive up CTR’s, drive down CPC’s and CPA’s.

Audience based campaigns:

Did you know that you can target your keywords to specific audiences on Google Ads now? Again this is only relevant for accounts with a decent level of traffic and spend. You can do this by uploading lists, using Google Analytics or Google Ads remarketing audiences. A few examples of this are:

• Promote offers to certain audiences: Say you have promotion or a sale that only pertains to existing customers of yours, you can do this by layering in that audience list to your campaign to write more relevant ads and send to different landing pages.

• Target to audiences already interested: Google has predefined audiences that you can use to narrow the targeting of your campaign. If you’re wanted to reach a certain subset of an audience, you can layer this into your campaign targeting and increase the relevance of your ads.

• Exclude audiences: In the same way that you can target your campaigns to certain audiences, you can also exclude people from seeing your ads. If you have multiple products or services and don’t want to cross-promote, this would come in handy.

This should help you on your way to set up great campaigns on Google that perform well and are easily optimizable. If you have questions about any of this stuff, feel free to reach out to me at andrew@levelup-digital.com.

Thanks for reading!

Level Up Digital Named A Top 2019 San Francisco Agency!

The Bay Area has become the ultimate hub of modern innovation, where the world’s top minds go to change the world. Competition here is fierce, and the market for digital services is no exception. We strive to provide nothing but the best services possible, and although we care about our position in our industry, our whole focus is on how we can drive success for our clients. That said, we are pleased to share that our client-centric approach has set us apart from the competition.

Clutch has named Level Up Digital an industry leader among the top advertising and marketing agencies in San Francisco. Clutch is a ratings and reviews platform for B2B service providers, offering data-driven insights on firms across dozens of industries. Each month, they recognize the top performing firms across various locations and categories. The selection criteria include market presence, quality of work, and most importantly, verified client reviews. Our clients have been incredibly kind in their reviews of our work.

We are pleased to share that we maintain a perfect rating of five out of five stars on Clutch, with our clients noting the quality of our work, our efficient scheduling, and the value of our services. When asked what they thought of Level Up Digital, one of our clients remarked,

“They've been a fantastic partner. The owner understands our business deeply and works closely with us to achieve our goals. He listens to and builds on our suggestions with his expertise and experience. Level Up Digital is committed to our best interests and dedicated to our success.”

Clutch’s sister-site, The Manifest, has also featured us as a top firm, specifically as one of the top social media marketing companies in San Francisco. The Manifest is a business resource that helps small and midsize firms, providing industry insights and how-to guides. We were featured for the quality of our work and our value as a partner. Our inclusion on their platform further speaks to our excellence as a service provider.

Thank you to everyone who has trusted us with the success of your marketing efforts. It means the world to us.

Andrew

Changes coming to Google and Facebook Ads in 2019

Google and Facebook are constantly making updates and changes to their platforms. We’ve summarized a few of the more important one’s in this week’s blog post:

Google

• Google makes it Easier to Opt Out of Ad Personalization

  • As privacy and trust in advertising continue to be in the spotlight, the major players are taking proactive steps to allow people some choice in how they are advertised to on the web.

  • Google is making it easier to change the ad personalization settings for their users via Google My Account.

  • If you’re a Google user and are interested in seeing if ad personalization is turned on for you go to your own ad personalization settings. You can also see who Google thinks you are, based on personal info you've added to your Google Account, data from advertisers that partner with Google, and Google's estimation of your interests. This is the kind of data that advertisers use to target you with Google Ads.

• New metric!

  • Google recently rolled out the click share metric, which tells you an estimate of “the estimated share of all achievable clicks that you have received, and is available only for Search and Shopping campaigns.”

  • In the past, we’ve only had impression share metrics (your share of impressions on the Google search results page).

  • We love competitive metrics like this because they are great for macro account optimization. You can use it to evaluate your share of clicks for your best keywords and increase budget on your most profitable ones. Say that you were tracking a 3:1 ROAS on a keyword, and found that you only have a 10% click share. Why not increase your bid and budget for that keyword?

• AMPHTML Ads

  • Google is going to start serving AMPHTML ads across all websites.

  • AMPHTML ads are a new, better way of building, delivering and measuring ads that are faster, lighter and more secure.

  • Why do you care?

    • Accelerated Mobile Pages (Google’s response to Facebook Instant Articles) are becoming more commonplace on the web. These new ads are well… better. More here if you’re interested.

Facebook

• Campaign budget optimization will be the default

  • Facebook’s campaign budget optimization automatically distributes your budget across your audiences based on performance. So if one audience in a campaign has a higher conversion rate, Facebook will automatically give that audience more budget than other audiences in the campaign.

  • Facebook rolled out campaign budget optimization a while ago, and we have been using it since. It’s much more effective than trying to manually redistribute budgets based on results. An algorithm is able to do this much faster than a human.

  • Now that it’s being rolled out as a default it means potentially better ad performance for all advertisers.

  • The caveat is that without segmenting your audiences appropriately, it can favor the larger audiences and you won’t end up seeing performance improvements.

  • There are a few ways around this:

    • You should make sure to group your audiences based on their stage in the buying funnel.

    • Depending on your budget this could mean a lot more campaigns than you currently have.

    • For example, make sure to keep retargeting and prospecting audiences in completely separate campaigns.

• Facebook will reveal who uploaded your contact info for ad targeting

  • In Q3 of 2018, Facebook added new requirements around using custom audiences. Now Facebook is going to reveal who uploaded your contact information for ad targeting. If you are following the rules and collected your data appropriately, this isn’t going to be an issue. However, if you purchased or collected data like email addresses from a 3rd party and do not have consent from your list - this could potentially backfire as consumers can see how you’ve uploaded your list.

• Square image sizes

  • Facebook changed the image aspect ratio requirements and rolled out square image sizes that can be used instead of landscape images.

  • This change was largely from feedback from advertisers who found the landscape images too restrictive. Facebook said the change is “to help advertisers like yourself have more creative flexibility and drive better performance.”

How To Spy on and Sell to Site Abandoners

Recently, we started working with an advertiser who has a great market-leading software tool, but a ton of competition when it comes to Google Ads.

CPC’s for their top keywords are in the $30 - $50 range. Combine that with lower search volumes, and you’ve got a challenging campaign to run.

One thing that we’ve deployed for this particular campaign is a reverse IP lookup tool called Visitor Queue to track who is visiting our campaign landing pages. The tool tells us exactly who has visited our landing pages, and their contact information.

On average, 98% of website visitors leave without converting… leaving a huge missed opportunity. Even if you’ve got the perfect landing page, you’re still never going to convert everyone who visits.

This is only suited for B2B marketing, and in fact Visitor Queue will only return company/corporate email addresses and ignore personal one’s (like Gmail, Hotmail etc.)

Visitor Queue provides:

• Company Information

• Website Visit Information

• Key Contact Information & Emails

• LinkedIn Contact Information

• Regular Email Notifications

Once you see someone has visited the landing page without converting - you can send them an email, reach out on LinkedIn, or give them a call directly (to really freak them out).

The setup:

Visitor Queue uses Google Analytics to tag your pages or website. So the setup is super quick and easy.

However, if you want to use this tool only on specific pages, what you can do is set up a specific Google Analytics ‘view’ within your Google Analytics account. This is helpful if you want to find the contact information of people that only visit your landing pages, and not everyone who visits your main website.

If you're interested in setting this up - I can help you through the process. Just shoot me an email.

Mobile Advertising Tips for Google and Facebook Ads

When it comes to Google and Facebook Ads, mobile device inventory is a given. You are opted-in automatically when setting up a campaign unless you decide against it. Even turning all mobile delivery off would prove challenging if you don’t know what to look for.

Avinash Kaushik said, 2009 was the year of mobile. It’s 9 years later and everyone is still figuring it out. Advertising on mobile can be more complicated, confusing, and harder to drive ROI than on desktop.

Why?

It’s stating the obvious to say that behavior on a mobile device is inherently different. People search, browse social media and shop differently on mobile.

You’ll often hear statistics like:

“33% of people who showed interest on mobile, convert on a desktop computer later”

“67% of consumers start shopping on one device and continue on another”

To optimize your efforts, you should consider 3 key things:

1. How you will manage your campaigns in the platforms specifically for mobile.

2. How the destination (website) experience will be on the mobile device.

3. How you will optimize your campaigns for mobile.

These are equally important and easy to mess up.

So how can you optimize your campaign strategy for a mobile, multi-device world?

Google Ads

Maximize keyword -> ad -> destination relevance:

Because Google Ads only appear when someone is actively looking for something, here is your opportunity to help them find what they need. The more helpful and relevant you can be to their search query, the more likely you are to succeed.

Make sure you are matching the keyword used to an ad written for that keyword, and a destination curated for that search. Don’t send them to a website’s homepage, and have a responsive landing page or website. This is a must. Sending someone who searches on mobile to a non-responsive or mobile-optimized website is guaranteed to turn them off.

People expect a great experience now and they will immediately bounce if they are met with an unoptimized mobile experience.

Use device bid adjustments:

Within each campaign, it’s possible to adjust your bid depending on the device used. Don’t assume you know how your strategy is going to play out on different devices. Launch your campaign with either no bid adjustments or minor ones.

Then after running the campaign for a while, use data to make adjustments based on your KPI’s. Most of the time that is going to be cost-per-conversion. This can be done at the campaign, or ad group level.

The formula for this is:

Making device level bid adjustments is incredibly tedious so we use Opteo to be more efficient. It alerts us anytime an optimization opportunity arises so we can make the improvement immediately.

Disable Mobile App Inventory:

For Display ad campaigns, this is enabled by default.

Turn it off!

Unless you are actually promoting an app, we recommend always turning mobile app inventory off.

The reality is that this is some of the worst traffic you can buy. The audience is distracted and ‘fat fingers’ notoriously lead to accidental clicks and 100% bounce rates.

Facebook Ads

Facebook mobile strategy is inherently different from Google. When someone is searching on Google they are already looking for something (intent). When someone is on Facebook or Instagram or any social network they are in recreation mode.

People are especially in a different mindset when they are using social platforms on their mobile device.

They might be:
- Commuting
- Watching TV
- Waiting in line at Philz coffee (unlike the pros who use the Philz mobile app and don’t have to wait in line)

Likely what they are doing has nothing to do with commerce or business.

Instagram is predominantly accessed via mobile device, with very few people signing onto Instagram on their desktop computers. Currently there are no ads on the Instagram desktop version.

Consider these when running Facebook Ads on mobile…

Opt-out of the Facebook Audience Network:

Have you heard of the Facebook Audience Network before? Chances are you haven’t. Yet it has been around since late 2014.

It is the equivalent of mobile app inventory on Google. The app owner has joined the Facebook Audience Network to monetize their app, and made it available for advertising.

We recommend opting out of Facebook Audience Network, due to the fact that it is mobile app inventory. Unless you are doing remarketing only. In that case, it may provide another place to reach your highly valuable remarketing audience.

Have a multi-touch marketing strategy:

Smartphone conversion rates are around half of desktop conversion rates.

Luckily, with how Facebook audiences work, it is easy to reach your audience on every device that they use. Since users log into one of their properties (Facebook or Instagram) where they control the ad inventory you are able to serve ads to that audience across all of their devices.

Shopping behavior on mobile often looks like this: user sees an ad on mobile -> clicks -> visits the site but does not purchase due to the fact that they are on a mobile device. They then return later on a desktop to purchase.

It is very important to continue to market to them via remarketing, email etc. as it can take several interactions before someone decides to make a purchase or convert.

Use video if doing branding and awareness:

Video ads are becoming increasingly popular on Facebook and Instagram. They give you an opportunity to tell your brands story without the viewer ever having to leave the platform.

You may, however, see higher cost-per-conversion and lower overall conversion volume with video ads. This is due to people not wanting to leave the social platform.

They still get your message, and you can even retarget people who have watched a certain percentage of your video. This is a great way to drive conversions.

Summing it up

Assume that mobile is going to make up a significant portion of your ad campaign delivery, and have tactics in place to maximize your return.

As always let us know what questions you have by emailing andrew@levelup-digital.com.

When Not to Listen to Google: 3 Reasons to Ignore Your Google Rep

A few things happened recently that renewed our skepticism on working directly with Google Reps (our mostly benevolent overlords) on their own platform.

I’m not saying you should ignore everything they have to say, but their goals for your account and campaigns can often contradict your own.

Here are a few things to watch out for when dealing with Google Reps:

1. They will encourage you to spend more than you need to on their platform:

Google makes most of their billions in revenue from the Google Ads platform. This includes Google Search, Display, and YouTube. Ad revenues are a key-indicator of the health of their parent company Alphabet.

We often work directly with Google Reps to optimize accounts. And many times they recommend new features and strategies that can be very beneficial to campaign performance.

Recently a Google Rep was very helpful in giving some optimization tips on a campaign. However, after a few 1:1 optimization meetings, the Google Rep invited someone from the ‘growth’ team to join the call. Within a short while, this person then made the case for almost tripling the client’s budget over a 90-day period

There were several issues with this massive budget increase:

• A big portion of the new budget would go mostly to ‘prospecting’ targeting - reaching out to new audiences using less targeted techniques like affinity audience targeting via Display ads. This type of higher funnel advertising is much harder to turn into positive campaign ROI.

• The plan didn’t take into account the businesses seasonality. They were actually going into a very different time of the year for their customers, that would have a huge impact on their prospective customer’s behavior.

• They didn’t have any plan for reporting on the increased campaign spend. Getting reports from your campaign, and analyzing the data is critical to the campaign's success.

We got together with our client and agreed that this wasn’t a good idea. Saving them almost $180,000 in the process (how’s that for added value?).

We haven’t heard from the Google Reps since.

2. Automated Recommendations:

In any Google Ads account now, you’ll find Google’s recommendation engine pushing anything from new ads and keywords to automated bidding strategies.

Like any robot or artificial intelligence in 2018, the tech isn’t quite there yet.

Some make sense, but they can also be completely off base.

Google is using algorithms to recommend new keywords (again to increase spend) for the account. You should go through each keyword individually to make sure they are relevant to your business, and setup tests on bid strategies before rolling them out to the entire account.

3. Google Is Surprisingly Bad at Running Their Own Campaigns

Businesses are often pitched Google Ads campaigns directly by Google.

Many think that this is perfect - have Google run your Google Ads campaigns? What could go wrong?

A lot, apparently.

They often have someone very junior run the campaigns. We recently took over campaigns for a client, and in their account were campaigns managed by Google on their behalf. Looking at the search queries, they basically wasted $3K on irrelevant traffic using broad-match keywords. Conversion tracking was not implemented correctly, so it was impossible to tell if the campaigns worked or not.

Again, their goals are around ad spend, not necessarily performance. and they often don’t follow their own best practices. If a Google Rep sets up your account without even bothering to create a custom name for the campaign (i.e the default campaign name is “Campaign 1”), that’s a bad sign. (And if they ever try to set you up with Google Ads Express, run, don’t walk away as fast as you can.)

—————-

Whether you're setting up a new account, or trying to optimize an existing one. Be sure to consult a well educated and experienced third-party (like us!) for a second opinion, and do some research on your own.

How to See Your Competitors Facebook Ads

Facebook recently released a new section on every businesses Facebook page that allows anyone to see the organizations currently active ads, and any boosted posts they are running.

Facebook rolled out the feature in light of the Cambridge Analytica scandal as an effort to provide increased transparency around ads and pages. Before this, the only way to see what ads your competitors are running was to actually get targeted by one of their ads yourself. Now you can see all of their active ads across each of their networks:  Facebook, Instagram, Messenger and Audience Network.

You can access it a couple of different ways.

1) Pull up any Facebook page, and look for the ‘Info and Ads’ link in the left side nav:

2) Or just replace [Page Username] with the Facebook page name and it will take you there directly.

https://www.facebook.com/[Page Username]/ads

Example:

https://www.facebook.com/pg/Google/ads/

https://www.facebook.com/pg/moo.comUS/ads (check these guys out for some Facebook Ad creative inspiration)

Do you know if your competitors are running any Facebook Ad campaigns?

Now you can find out. Not only can you see their ads, you can also click through to see where they are driving traffic. This is helpful to understand and possibly reverse engineer their strategy.

What you may be able to figure out from analyzing your competitors ads:

• Are they using landing pages or are they driving to their main website?

• Are they testing landing pages? (maybe hard to tell unless you know exactly what to look for, but a sub-domain and subtle hints in the URL might indicate that they are. Ask us if you need help identifying this.)

• Are you seeing similar versions of the same ad? They are likely testing their ad creative for better performance over time.

• Are they targeting ads to people in different stages of the buying cycle?

  • While you can’t see the targeting of the ads, you may be able to infer their target from the messaging.

  • Ads should be tailored to each audience and where they are at in the buying cycle. An ad targeting a new audience that has never heard of you before should be very different than an ad used in remarketing.

There is also an ad archive to see ads that ran in the past, although it doesn’t seem to be very up to date.

Give it a try and let us know what you think.

Should You Do Outbound Advertising on Facebook?

‘Outbound advertising’ or ‘prospecting’ is the type of advertising you do when you are trying to reach a new audience with your ads.

This is a crucial thing to do for any company looking to grow, but these days you don’t have many choices for doing this online, it really boils down to two platforms: Google and Facebook.

While Facebook has incredible reach, and audience targeting capabilities, there are a few things to consider before launching a campaign:

1. Can you reach your audience?

Most smaller companies are going to have a very defined customer base. For one of our clients, Quimbee, this is current law students. For Rentec Direct it’s property managers and landlords with 10 or more units under management.

When setting up your Facebook campaign, you need to input all of the targeting parameters telling Facebook which users you want to serve ads to.

There are many ways to do this, including interest targeting (targeting users based on their page likes, profile etc.) lookalike audiences, demographics and more.

While all of these seem to make perfect sense on the surface, there is more to it:

• Interest targeting is not always accurate.

• Lookalike audiences are great, but they still are limited by what information Facebook has on its users.

• Demographic targeting is often too broad for most advertisers and doesn’t lead to any real results.

• Behavioral targeting is better suited for larger advertisers with a product that appeals to a broad audience.

2. Do you have the right creative?

Consider that the people you are reaching have never heard of your brand before. This is your first impression.

Your creative needs to:

• Communicate quickly and effectively what your product is and why someone might need it

• Capture their attention enough to drive them to your site so you can continue marketing to them from there

This is even more challenging given people’s short attention spans these days. On the plus side, it is easy to test creative quickly on Facebook, but you're going to need to spend some budget to do so.

3. Are you set up to continue to marketing to the new audience?

Assume that the audience needs to hear from you again before they convert/register/buy.

You should have methods in place to continue to speak to this audience.

Typically advertisers will follow up via:

• Social platform likes/follows

• Email/newsletters

• Direct outreach from a sales person (if you capture their contact information on the first visit)

• Paid remarketing via Google, Facebook etc.

4. Are there better ways to bring new customers to your website?

Search should be the foundation of any advertiser's digital marketing.

Since people are already searching for something, and are therefore in-market, these are the people you want to reach. Many software and SaaS companies have been built entirely on search traffic.

Solutions:

Anyone with a Facebook account can use the audience insights tool to research their opportunity before launching a single ad.

The tool will allow you to determine if you can reach your target audience, and also understand the size of that audience.

Another way to really narrow down your targeting is by using boolean logic:

By doing this, you will have a much smaller but more relevant audience that is more likely to respond to your message.

If you're interested in learning more about this, feel free to reach out to me at andrew@levelup-digital.com.  

4 Facebook Ad Strategies for Software & SaaS Companies

Facebook is a great place for software and SaaS companies to target their exact audience on a personal level. This level of precise targeting is what is getting Facebook in trouble, but as of right now nothing has changed with the ability to target this way, only with some of the data and insights you have access to.

This level of targeting is available through a free Facebook Ad account to anyone, you just need to know the right way of setting it up.

Here are few ways you can use Facebook ads to bring in new customers and keep the ones you already have:

1. Prospect using 1% lookalike audiences:

Facebook "lookalike audiences" are new audiences that Facebook creates based on a current audience that you have already aggregated.

This could be a list of people that are already customers of your product or if you have the Facebook pixel installed on your website, an audience of your website visitors.

By exporting a list of your current customers from your CRM and loading this to Facebook, you can select the top 1% of users on Facebook that most closely match the users who are on your list.

The tricky thing in marketing to this new audience, is having the right message. The people on the lookalike list are more than likely hearing about your product for the first time, and it’s going to take more than one ad to get them to convert. One highly effective way is to create ads from a popular posts on your website’s blog to bring them to your website for the first time.

The better the quality of the people on the list the more effective your lookalike audience will be. If you have the data, use a source audience of your highest value customers as the seed audience for the lookalike.

2. Retain current customers:

When customers stop using your platform, the more likely they are to churn.

Allocate a small amount of your marketing budget to target current customers to keep them engaged. Provide updates on new features, blog posts, or personality pieces.

Your ads will likely cost less because they will have high engagement. Depending on the size of your audience, a budget of $5-$10 a day might be enough to cover your bases here.

3. Drive traffic to landing pages:

Driving prospects off of Facebook to a landing page is a solid strategy for turning prospects into leads and sending them directly into your CRM.

By using a landing page (not a page on your website) designed entirely around capturing their contact information, you reduce the chance of them losing interest and leaving your site.

Once you have captured their contact information, make sure to follow up with them immediately.

4. Remarket to free trial cancellers:

Not everyone who doesn’t go from free-trial to paid subscriber is a lost opportunity.

They might have gone on vacation or had a busy few weeks at work. If they do lapse and aren’t automatically set up for a paid account you should encourage them to sign up.

Setup a custom audience to reach them again with a specific creative about their free-trial ending.

This might have to be a manual process depending on what CRM you use. Zapier offers the ability to sync  many CRM's with Facebook custom audiences, however some companies will find themselves having to this manually.

Conclusion:

These are just a few ways you can use Facebook to market your software or SaaS company. And there are so many more…

the key to Facebook ads is having the right audience targeting and message match. This way you can speak to your prospects and customers depending on who they are and where they are at.

Good luck and let us know if you have any questions!

Understanding Attribution

Attribution in the digital marketing world is about how you tie results to your digital marketing efforts.

Today’s customer buying journey is complicated “like a sightseeing tour with stops, exploration, and discussion along the way—all moments when you need to convince people to pick your brand and stick with it instead of switching to a competitor.”*

Instead of search, click, browse, buy… the journey of a someone interested in a product might go something like this:

1. Searches on Google for ‘top-rated project management software’

2. Clicks on a paid search ad

3. Browses the website, reading the homepage, features, and pricing pages

4. Opens another browser tab, does another Google search to compare the platform against competitors

5. Ends up on YouTube, watching a video review about the platform

6. Gets distracted by a friend on Instagram, abandons the initial search

7. Several days later is retargeted by the project management software company on Facebook and signs up for a free trial

And while the great thing about digital marketing, is that you can set up conversion tracking and directly measure the results of campaigns… this long and complicated buying process makes the results of a campaign difficult to measure and attribute success accurately.

Advertisers many years ago were not able to do this so simply and directly, and this is part of the appeal of digital marketing. Marketing directors and execs are more than happy to move budget from traditional media like TV and radio, to online channels where the promise of measurable results await.

Sounds awesome, what is the problem then?

Unfortunately, it’s not as simple as you think. There are inherent flaws in the how we measure, and what we are able to measure. And it may be helpful to know that every organization, large and small are dealing with attribution challenges in their marketing.

Here are a few key issues with measurability and attribution:

1. Digital ad platforms don’t communicate with each other

If you are running campaigns on Google, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and LinkedIn at the same time, you will get campaign reporting from each of these platforms. But none of these platforms will communicate with each other so you end up with your data in dreaded ‘silos’.

This means if LinkedIn tells you that you got 50 conversions, and Facebook tells you that you got 50 conversions - you may only have gotten 50 real conversions and not 100. Or you may have gotten 75, 53, or 92...

Without knowing exactly who converted, and what marketing they were exposed to at every step, you can’t truly understand the effectiveness of each channel.

2. Trackability issues

The simple fact is that you won’t be able to track all of the results of your campaigns. There are several reasons for this:

• Private browsing:

  • Private Browsing protects private information and blocks websites from tracking behavior. It also prevents the ability to remarket to someone.

• Cookie deletion:

  • Cookies are a small piece of data sent from a website and stored on the user's computer by the user's web browser while the user is browsing. Cookies often get deleted by users and in some cases don’t get accepted by the browser in the first place.

• Organic search data encryption:

  • Google protects its users by encrypting all of their organic search data and not sharing it with anyone. While this makes it more difficult to track and optimize organic search efforts, you can still get most of this data if you are running paid search campaigns.

• Device and browser switching:

  • People tend to have more than one device that they access the web on (laptop, desktop computer, mobile phone, e-reader etc.)

  • That creates difficulty in measuring the impact of a user seeing an ad on one device and converting on another.

• Conversions that happen outside of the measurement window:

  • Some conversions can happen several months later. This will be especially true for purchases that have a long consideration period.

Solutions:

• Accept that at least for now, you won’t be able to measure everything and that is OK! Focus on running the best campaigns possible, and use what you can measure from the platform data to optimize.

• Deeply understand your target audience, so that you can target them accurately.

• Use AdWords quality score and Facebook relevance score to perfect your target audience/message match.

• Look at your overall results from your sales tracking tool - how are sales performing this year compared to last year?

• If you can afford it, deploy measurement platforms like Attribution App, or Convertro that give you the ability to track and de-duplicate your marketing efforts across channels (note that event these platforms won’t be able to track everything).

*source: https://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/marketing-resources/experience-design/customer-journey-mapping/

3 Things to Test on Your Landing Pages

Landing pages are ideal when running paid marketing campaigns. By sending the traffic to a page that is created specifically for generating leads, you have an advantage over sending this traffic to a website where the user can easily get lost and leave without converting.

Combining the landing page strategy with ongoing A/B testing, allows you to consistently improve the results you get from your campaigns.

In the digital marketing world, the concept of testing is often thrown around but not executed on very well.

We put together 3 things to test with new landing pages. In general it's a good idea to start with larger tests when first launching a campaign, before you start testing small things like button color.

1. Call to Action/Conversion Goal

Start with the CTA as one of the larger things to test. By testing ‘top-down’ and focusing on big picture things first you can start out with a better performing page right out of the gate.

The CTA should relate directy to the conversion objective of the landing page.

Examples of CTA's are:

1. Download a white paper or PDF

2. Request a demonstration of the product

3. Sign up for a free trial

These should line up with how you respond to the action taken as well. If you are going to go with ‘request demo’, you need to make sure you have marketing automation in place to assign the leads to a product specialist or salesperson that can reach out right away.

2. Social Proof:

Testimonials from current clients are a great way to support the conversion goal of your landing page. Visitors to your landing page will love the internal reinforcement they get when reading these.

Badges, awards, and certifications are also great to highlight as well as # of customers and any other stats you might have. The added trust you get from having social proof elements on a landing page are proven to increase conversion rates.

3. Headline:

The H1 headline is one of the most key elements of your landing page. It’s what the visitor reads first, and can often mean the difference between a bounce and a conversion.

The main principle is having the headline sync up to what was clicked on in the ad. 

For example, Bob clicked a Facebook ad offering a 14-day free trial of a subscription coffee service - the headline needs to match that copy as closely as possible.

These are 3 elements that should be tested right out of the gate with your new landing page. Once you find the (statistically valid) champion, put together a new design to test against the current winner.

Happy testing!

The Importance of a Remarketing Strategy

Average conversion rates for websites these days average around 1-2%.

That is, 1-2% of the visitors to your website will actually become a paying customer. That may seem low, but for most, this is enough to sustain their business.

Average ‘abandoned cart’ rates (someone starting but not completing the purchase/checkout process) are closer to 70-80% depending on the business and the product.

This creates a huge opportunity to get more leads and make more sales, without having to bring additional people to your website - a true low hanging fruit in the world of software subscription and eCommerce businesses.

From Baymard.com

“Now in all fairness to the e-commerce industry, a large portion of cart abandonments are simply a natural consequence of how users browse e-commerce sites – many users will be doing window shopping, price comparison, saving items for later, exploring gift options, etc. These are largely unavoidable cart and checkout abandonments.”

It may well not be that these potential customers didn’t like your product, many of these customers may have simply not been ready to buy at that time.

For a highly considered purchase, not only does that person need to think about that purchase, they may need to also involve others in their buying decision. This inevitably increases the time it takes for them to make a decision. And the longer they take… the less likely they are to buy.

From Watertight Marketing:

In a considered purchase both emotional and rational appeals need to be met. This is because the buying decision tends to be more important, for one of the following reasons:

• Expense: there is a high financial outlay involved or an ongoing commitment.

• Other people: the purchase affects more than one person.

• Status: a person’s sense of identity or reputation is affected by the purchase.

When these elements come together, the buyer has a lot to lose if they get their decision wrong. They are taking a risk. The job of your marketing is to reduce that risk.

Where remarketing comes in:

There are entire companies built on abandoned cart and remarketing, but you can do pretty much exactly the same things that these companies do directly through a (free) Google AdWords or Facebook Ads account.

Between Google and Facebook, you can reach almost everyone online. On Google, this could be via text ads, display ads, and YouTube video ads. On Facebook, you can reach people in their Facebook News Feed, on Instagram, and on the Facebook Audience network.

Here are a few ways to increase your conversions with remarketing:

1. Create custom remarketing audiences in Google Analytics:

Google Analytics linked to an AdWords account gives you powerful ways to remarket to your potential customers. The audiences you can create in GA can be customized to almost any behavior. For example:

• Users that visited certain pages on the site

• Users that spend a certain amount of time on the website

• Users that viewed a video on your YouTube channel

These audiences can then be imported into AdWords and used for remarketing campaigns using text, display, and YouTube video ads.

2. Install the Facebook pixel on your website:

If you haven’t done this already… do it now. It’s free and the sooner you set it up, the sooner you be collecting audience data for future campaign efforts.

Facebook gives a full walkthrough of that here.

This will allow you to setup custom audiences that you want to remarket to. Same as with Google Analytics audiences, these can be customized to user behavior on a website.

3. Tailor your message to that person with dynamic remarketing

For eCommerce businesses, and businesses that sell a variety of different products - you may want to tailor the message to the last product or products that they were viewing before they abandoned.

You have more than likely seen ‘dynamic remarketing’ ads before where the ad is customized to show the products you were last viewing or put in your shopping cart before you abandoned.

These ads work extremely well because of the relevancy. And there is a good chance that something caused you to leave that product page and not buy. Maybe you got distracted at home by your dog, or the BART train you were on arrived at your stop.

Once you see one of these ads, you would be highly likely to return.

Bonus - If you are a software product, make the bar as low as possible:

Consider removing a credit card requirement until after you have collected their name and email. This way, if they do abandon the checkout process you can follow up with them via email and remarketing.

Remember that it can take at least 7 interactions with a potential customer before they buy. And if you can do that via email and advertising - you are going to have a better chance of winning that person over.

To sum it up:

Remarketing is seriously powerful and cost-effective. If you want to start selling more products, and increase sign ups, you should take steps to implement a remarketing campaign as soon as possible.

The #1 Reason Paid Ads Fail

We are sharing a video that Moz released a couple of weeks ago titled “The #1 Reason Paid Ads (On Search, Social, and Display) Fail”.

Click the image below to watch the video:

The reason we think it's important is that it touches on something we have personally seen over, and over again.

It’s a cycle that repeats itself, leads to failed campaigns, ruined relationships, and can potentially cost people their jobs.

I would add to the video that the way I have seen this fail the most spectacularly is when people invest heavily in display (banner ads) expecting them to work a certain way.

People tend to think that users will see a banner ad, click on that banner ad, land on a website and make a purchase.

The banner ad reality is:

• The average viewability (an industry term meaning the banner was actually visible on a webpage) is around 50%. Yes, only 50% of the banner ads that are paid for are actually seen by a human being.

• The average CTR on a banner ad is 0.10%. That’s 10 people clicking out of 10,000 ads served.

• Display ads whether purchased programmatically, or directly are heavily affected by bots. Bots effectively eat up the impressions that are being served - using up budget for no real return.

• Display ads can show up on all kinds of low-quality websites unless you are diligent about excluding them.

A few ideas on what to do about it:

• Make paid and organic search your marketing foundation (note that this doesn’t always apply… especially in extremely expensive and competitive areas).

• Think about your marketing as more of of a journey than a single interaction. Setup your marketing efforts to be sustainable over the long-run and don’t ‘hail mary’ your marketing budget on unproven advertising strategies.

• Add value for your audience to get their attention first, sell to them second.

• Start small and test. Scale up on what’s working and stop what’s not working.

• Use tracking and attribution tools as much as possible.

We hope you find this useful, as always please send us any questions or feedback that you have.

Micro-optimization: How to Optimize Your Campaigns Faster and More Effectively

So what is micro-optimizing?

Get ready for some good old fashioned digital marketing nerdsplaining!

Micro-optimizing is using small but statistically significant tests based on micro-conversions to determine what is working best in your campaigns.

It empowers you with the data that you need to optimize your campaigns for better results much faster and more effectively.

What is a micro-conversion?

A micro-conversion is built on Avinash Kaushik’s idea of ‘micro’ and ‘macro’ conversions.

Simply put, a ‘macro’ conversion is going to be whatever is bringing in revenue for your business. Be that software subscriptions, dog training treat sales, or a new client for your agency.

A ‘micro’ conversion is going to be anything that leads up to that macro conversion. I.e someone spending 5 minutes on your site reading your marketing materials. Or someone putting a product in your shopping cart before buying to see what the total cost with tax and shipping would be (tip you should be retargeting these people with abandoned cart ads).

Why do we need it?

Many times, a businesses web analytics measurement model looks something like this:

Image borrowed from Avinash’s blog post - full credit to Avinash.

Most websites are going to a macro-conversion rate around 2%. If you only look at your main conversion that means you are essentially ignoring the 98% of website visitors that did not purchase from you on their visit.

Your measurement should look more like this:

It’s plain to see that filling the measurement model with insightful data is going to give you much more information to use in optimizing your campaign and your businesses performance.

In addition to helping you better understand your website audience, micro-optimizing can be used to optimize your paid marketing campaigns to determine the best:

• Audience
• Ad copy
• Keyword
• Bid strategy
• Landing page

And more....

 How can I start ‘micro-optimizing’ my campaigns? 

The first step is going to be setting up your measurement model to include micro-conversions. You need to do this in your analytics platform (which is going to be Google Analytics for the vast majority of businesses). Facebook is going to be a little different and we’ll get into that below.

There are many different types of micro-conversions but ultimately the ones you choose should do these 2 things:

1. Align with real business goals and objectives
2. Correlate to these business goals and objectives. I.e you should know if someone spends 10 minutes on your site that they are more likely to buy than someone who spends 2 seconds. Or someone who requests a free audit is likely to become a client.

For a small digital marketing and design shop like ours, we would want to data like:

“Users that spend at least 2 minutes on our site” or “Users that viewed at least 2 pages on our site”. These certainly align with our business goals and correlate with potential client behavior.

For a SaaS company that sells to Marketing VP’s at Fortune 500 companies, maybe their micro-conversion is a PDF download, or a request for product demonstration by a salesperson with a cleverly disguised non-salesy sounding title.

AdWords example:
The best way to do this for AdWords campaigns is to set up some sort of goal in Google Analytics and then import it into AdWords. This will give you the data you want down to the campaign, ad group, keyword, ad level.

This is as granular as you can get, but you’ll need to make sure that your AdWords and GA accounts are linked first.

1. Create the goal in Google Analytics. Kissmetrics gives a good walkthrough here.
2. Import the goal(s) into your Google AdWords account.
3. Start optimizing!

Facebook Ads:

Facebook does not play well with Google Analytics at all. There is not a direct integration like there is from AdWords to Google Analytics.

Even when you set up Google Analytics tracking URLS (UTM codes) you will probably only see a fraction of clicks from Facebook actually translate into trackable sessions in Google Analytics.

To ‘micro-optimize’ in Facebook, you will want to set up the relatively new Facebook pixel on all pages of your website or mobile app and then setup event tracking and/or custom conversion tracking.

Your custom conversion or event would align with one of these micro-conversions. I.e if someone downloads one of your PDF’s - track that as an ‘lead’.

How to start micro-optimizing:

Now that you have your micro-conversions setup, and you have campaigns up and running let’s look at an example of how you would micro-optimize.

AdWords Ad Optimization

In AdWords you can ‘segment’ your conversions to see all of the different conversion types that you are tracking and the results tied to your campaign. Note that these are not reported on retroactively so you will only be able to see this data after you complete the steps above.

Here is an example of optimizing ad performance in AdWords using a micro-conversion setup to track users that spend at least 2 minutes on a website.

Ad Testing: Ad “A” Vs Ad “B”

Which ad performs better?

Not using micro-conversion:

Looking at actual purchases of the product there is not enough data to have a statistically significant result. We can either continue to spend budget and wait until there is enough data, or look at another conversion metric with more volume.

Kissmetrics A/B statistical significance calculator.

Using micro-conversion:

Looking at users who spent at least 2 minutes on the website we see that ad “B” is the statistically significant winner of this ad test with a higher conversion rate (73.61% vs 64.93%)

Ad B performs better than ad A by 13% with 98% certainty.

Optimization action - pause ad A and create a new ad based on ad ‘B’. Run another test, rinse and repeat!

Facebook Optimization

In Facebook you will need to customize your reporting columns to pull your micro-conversions into your report. For this test we compared the performance of 2 different retargeting audiences.

Audience Testing: Retargeting audience 1 vs. retarget audience 2

Which retargeting audience performs better?

Not using micro-conversion:

Looking at actual ‘purchases’ of the product.

Not enough data again. Either continue to spend budget until there is a winner, or look at micro-conversion data.

Micro-conversion data - statistically significant results:

Looking at views of the shopping cart page instead of actual purchases.

Audience B converts 61% better than A. Optimzation action - move budget from A to B or shutdown A entirely. Start a new test, rinse and repeat.

As you can see, doing this will get to to statistical relevance faster, without having to spend as much budget. Ultimately this is going to drive much better performance from your digital campaigns and you will need to spend less to get better results. I don’t know what marketer or business owner wouldn’t want that!

Thanks for reading!

If you need help or have questions about how to set any of this up contact us here feel free to shoot me an email at andrew@levelup-digital.com