Being aware of the opportunities and variations across Google’s display offerings will enable you to make an informed decision on the platform in which your display activity is run. The GDN is Google’s ad network accessed via Google Ads, whereas Display & Video 360 (DV360) is Google’s Demand Side Platform (DSP) providing the technology that allows advertisers to bid and buy inventory directly from publishers or from ad exchanges outside of Google’s own network. This blog will outline the key benefits to each platform, then will hone in on a comparison between their audience targeting, ad options, and automation functionalities.

CPC Bidding

With Google Ads, you only pay when a user actually clicks the banner. It’s as simple as that!

New features rolled out to Google Ads first

As Google’s solely owned advertising platform, Google Ads is the ideal proving ground for new features - especially audience products such as the fancy new Consumer Patterns (users who habitually complete certain actions e.g. regular department store shoppers) and Life Stages (such as those who are about to get married or just bought a home).

Smart Display Campaigns

Google Ads is all about automation and ease of set-up; and this is Google’s fully automated Display format. Advertisers simply upload up to five of each image, headline and description assets and set a target CPA. The algorithms then do the rest. Creative is automatically optimised based on click through rate and bids are automatically optimised to reach the target CPA goal. Audience targeting is even set, based on a combination of your pre-existing website audiences and users exhibiting similar behaviour - this targeting is then automatically optimised based on performance.

Gmail Targeting

Another benefit of being Google’s own direct marketing platform - Google Ads gives advertisers access to show users relevant marketing messages directly in their inbox; both on the web and in the Gmail app. More detail on the format can be found by searching Gmail in our blog section. In short, you can see great results by reaching your customers in that consideration mindset.

Efficiently and Safely Reach Users At Scale

One of DV360’s strengths is its large-scale reach across over 80 exchanges. If your display activity is looking to find new users through branding and insights-driven engagement, then DV360 should be your preferred choice. In response to industry-wide needs for greater control over viewability and brand safety, the platform allows for improved granularity of both. Viewability targeting, through Active View measurement, is available as a targeting option to improve efficiencies of ad spend, whilst post-bid blocking provides peace of mind and avoids your brand serving next to inappropriate content. For an additional fee, DV360 can sync all major third party verification tools to further improve brand safety and ad fraud.

Extensive Audience Buying Capabilities

Inventory buying options in DV360 have acknowledged the desire for advertisers to appear against premium content on well-known publisher sites. Private Marketplace (PMP) and Programmatic Guaranteed (PG) deals can be negotiated and setup all within the interface, providing a viable alternative to direct media buying. There’s even a handy troubleshooting feature offering a high degree of flexibility in terms of its targeting capabilities. GDPR compliant third party audience lists are available in the interface, allowing brands to target the right person at the right time based off a variety of online and offline data sources. Similarly, the PMP and PG deals permit publisher’s own data to be overlaid for more accurate audience targeting.

Insights-Based Reporting

There are some fantastic reports available through DV360 if your display activity is all about gaining insights and understanding your target segment. Audience composition and audience performance reports allow you to understand how third-party lists are performing in comparison to current activity, and indexing against your first party data. Reach reports provide additional insights into the number of viewers reached by your display campaigns, and the number of times they have been served an impression.

Consolidated Workflow Across Google’s Marketing Platform

Google’s decision to consolidate the DoubleClick stack products within one unified marketing platform (GMP) best reflects the value of all platforms being used together. For example, there are significant workflow benefits when integrating features from Campaign Manager, Google’s ad-serving technology (formerly DCM), and Studio, Google’s creative workflow tool. Specifics mentioned in the sections below.

Image source: e-dialog

Audiences

When reaching users on the GDN through Google Ads, advertisers can access a range of audience targeting options, including (but not limited to) their website remarketing lists (collected using the Google Ads retargeting pixel) and Analytics remarketing lists - imported through linking your Analytics and Ads accounts. When reaching users on Gmail, Google Ads website remarketing lists can also be used, along with 1st party audience lists comprised of CRM data uploads (known as Customer Match) for targeting purposes. Similar User lists are automatically generated off the back of all these pixel types, prioritising greater similarity.

DV360 relies heavily on floodlight pixels for tracking and remarketing, built in Campaign Manager. There are a great number of opportunities for granular data extraction through u-variable setup. Once platforms are linked, floodlights and audience lists seamlessly push through for conversion tracking and first-party targeting. A particularly exciting feature is the ‘similar audiences’ that Campaign Manager automatically creates when your first-party lists exceeds 500 users. These can be targeted in prospecting activity with an option to prioritise greater similarity or greater reach. GA360 integration allows audience lists to be pushed through to DV360 as well.

Ads

Google Ads gives advertisers access to Image and Expanded Text Ads across the GDN along with the exciting Responsive Ads feature. This provides simple-to-create, easily editable creative requiring only 1 image, logo and up to 140 characters in text. The format automatically resizes depending on placement size and device, making them the quickest route to launching display advertising based off minimal design resource requirement (see this article for more information).

Creative opportunities within DV360 are hugely varied and innovative, allowing you to create engaging, interactive display ads across a variety of sizes. Through streamlined processes with Studio, rich media formats are available to select from templates or build from scratch in the platform. Trafficking processes via Campaign Manager then allow for more advanced creative testing capabilities, and reporting functionality through a long list of metrics available.

Automation

The whole Google Marketing Platform is geared to offer advertisers the ability to review and adjust bidding based on segmentation such as location, device and time of day. Google Ads offers advertisers a number of bid adjustment options for these, allowing for upweighted bids (+900%) and negative bid adjustments (-90%) for any one segment. It is possible to split each day into a maximum of six segments of as little as an hour, giving access to very granular ad scheduling options.

As automation is one of the key features of Google Ads, advertisers can enable Enhanced Cost Per Click bidding which will up/down-weight a manually entered bid based on auction-time signals in order to maximise conversions.

It is also possible to activate full automation of bids in order to target a set CPA (cost per acquisition) or ROAS (return on ad spend) based on Google Ads conversion value tracking. These features are a huge win for eComm brands especially, wanting to drive direct-response display activity with strict ROAS targets. Again, all automated bidding adjustments are made based on a number of different intent signals including location, device and search behaviour on an auction-by-auction basis.

DV360 bidding has come a long way in recent months, offering slightly different automated options to that which is available through the GDN. These especially allow for more of a branding focus and includes meeting or beating a CPC/CPA goal, not exceeding an average CPM, and optimising towards viewable CPM bids. Whilst bid multipliers are an option, they can only be applied when fixed bidding is selected. These allow for upweighting bids between 0.1 and 10 times for six target areas (apps and URLs, audience lists, demographics, geo, data and time, device types). An exciting feature for DV360 allows advertisers the flexibility to opt into (and out of) an enhanced automation pool. This anonymously shares data, allowing advertisers to apply bid automation that leverages huge amounts of historical learnings.

Conclusion 

There are many ways of running display activity, with pros and cons across the GDN and DV360 to take into consideration. Making an informed decision on what is right for your brand’s marketing objectives is no simple feat. When determining the best platform to use, you must consider the wider picture in terms of campaign objectives and your brand’s digital direction; the features alone are just part of the puzzle (summarised in the table below). If you want to chat through the options with one of the team, we’d love to help you to make the best choice.

Feature Summary

For a more detailed comparison of YouTube TrueView activity across DV360 and Google Ads, watch out for Ashley’s blog post to be published soon.

In this blog, we run through the features of Amazon Advertising (formerly Amazon Marketing Services) with some of our best practices including how you can build campaigns; optimize towards your KPIs; and report on campaigns successfully.

Amazon is one of the largest and most dominating e-commerce platforms of our generation and sells everything from vintage vinyls to fresh food. More importantly, you’d be hard pushed nowadays to find someone who hasn’t used it to buy something at some point, let alone someone who hasn’t gone on a payday induced spending spree more than once (I for one, am guilty as charged). On top of this, it’s likely that in 2016 Amazon had somewhere in the region of 65 million registered Prime users worldwide (according to Morgan Stanley).

It therefore only seems natural for Amazon to offer up the opportunity to use Paid Search advertising to help sellers and vendors market their products more specifically to people searching for, or with high intent to buy, certain products. Enter Amazon Advertising. Many sellers are comfortable nowadays with marketing their products on Google Shopping or perhaps Bing, but neglect this key potential area for maximising ROI. Our handy guide below on the three Pillars of Amazon Advertising can help you get set up and give you all the pointers you’ll need!

Pillar 1 - Building

The foundation of every great Amazon Advertising campaign is in its build. Having a pre-planned strategy is integral, and the basis of this can be found in the use of ASINs (or Amazon Standard Identification Numbers) and targeting methods. There are a range of campaign types available to support these including Sponsored Product Ads (SPAs), Sponsored Brand Ads (SBAs) and Product Display Ads (PDAs), for which a handy introduction is available on our website here. 

a) Defensive & Offensive ASINs

ASINs are Amazon’s all-important product ID codes, and it’s best to have a clear idea of which products you want to advertise, and therefore structure your account around, before you start building. ASINs can be used in one of two ways, either ‘defensively’ or ‘offensively’. ‘Defensive’ campaigns are where you choose to promote certain products to make sure you’re sealing in those sales and driving off competitors. These could also be used for cross-selling or upselling to customers who are already interested in your brand. ‘Offensive’ campaigns are used to show your products alongside those that may not be your own. This could be above more generic searches to try and win over customers from competitors, or more specifically picking a competitor’s ASIN and targeting it with your own PDA campaign. Having a mix of both Defensive and Offensive campaigns helps to create a blend of securing customers that are already searching for you, while poaching others who may be about to buy from a competitor.

b) The Power of Targeting

Equally important as ASINs are your targeting options. There are a few different options available here depending on the campaign type you’re building and how granular you’d like to go.

SPAs have a choice of either manual or automatic targeting. Automatic is useful if you want to show your products to searchers based on the product information available on Amazon. Naturally this relies upon having up to date and accurate info, which can be tricky to maintain. It also restricts optimisation; which is where manual keyword targeting comes in. This is done through uploading keywords of varying match types (Broad, Phrase, Exact, Negative Phrase, Negative Exact) to match what your customers are searching for; allowing you to more accurately optimize and measure intent later on. For SBA campaigns Amazon also handily provides example keywords you might want to consider, and how much potential traffic you can capture with your assigned max bid. PDA campaigns are the odd one out as they can’t use keywords. Instead you can choose to target a specific product ASIN to appear under, or alternatively select from a list of interest categories. These categories are much wider as they’re based on shopping behavior so should only be used in campaigns with a broader reach.

While we’re on the subject of keywords it’s worth mentioning some top tips to get the most out of them. Firstly, start off with a range of keywords that are both relevant but wide-reaching. You can always pause keywords that aren’t performing so if a phrase or word is relevant to your product, it’s worth including to measure performance. What’s more, Amazon Advertising allows you to include multiple keywords in an account whilst preventing self-competition. Where on other platforms your identical keywords would both be entered into the ad auction and would try and outdo each other, Amazon only chooses one based off your estimated cost-per-click and in the case of a tie, bid amount. This’ll let you create campaigns featuring your bestsellers for example, without fear of conflicting with your existing activity.

c) Don’t Forget To Name It!

Finally, one of the most important rules of Amazon Advertising campaigns – naming convention. Once you’re up and running you can only change the status, daily budget and end date of a campaign, so you want campaign names that will be useful in the future. It’s best to include any aspect of your campaign that you wish to segregate by, be this campaign type, product category, brand vs. non-brand etc. See the below diagram from our Merkle Amazon Ads Playbook for an example of our best practice naming guide. This is particularly important for reporting purposes as we’ll come onto.

Pillar 2 – Optimisation

While optimisation through Amazon may not be as advanced as other more widely used platforms just yet, there are still a plethora of tools to experiment with to help improve performance. Chief among these are good old-fashioned maximum bid changes. As with all PPC platforms, increasing bids on keywords with a high ROI should help bring in more revenue, and decreasing bids for the poorer performers will work towards maximizing spend efficiency.

Amazon have also launched Search Term Reports for your SPA campaigns, allowing you to see all the terms people have searched that triggered your ads. Using these you can easily include extra keywords that are relevant to your campaigns that you missed out while building or want extra visibility on. Alternatively, you can exclude irrelevant keywords using negative match types to save that budget for more useful searches. For a long while, changes to keyword lists and bid changes had to be done manually, but now the introduction of Bulk Operations has sped up the process; allowing you to make thousands of changes more easily in Excel, to then re-upload in one go later on.

Although bid strategies don’t yet exist in Amazon Advertising, the Bid+ feature is a step in this direction. Working a little like eCPC in Google Ads (as Charlotte describes here), Bid+ allows Amazon to boost your Sponsored Product keyword bids by up to 50% if this would enable you to appear at the top of the pile of search results. This can help give your top performers a little boost whenever a highly relevant search is made and prevents you from having to have a bid applied that’s too much for your budget if it was active all the time.

Amazon are also in the process of rolling out 'Automated Bidding' for SBAs, an opt-in feature allowing Amazon to automatically optimize bids for placements below the top of the page based on their conversion rates. Another new release are 'Custom Manual Bid Adjustments' which allow you to manually increase or decrease bids by a specific percentage for placements below the top, allowing for much greater bidding flexibility.

Pillar 3 – Reporting

Reporting is another area where Amazon has been allocating a lot of recent development time. While the ability to pull reports based on devices, demographics, locations or time of day are still absent for the time being at least, it’s now possible to pull campaign reports from pre-specified or custom date ranges; saving you the trouble of having to make regular manual performance downloads. What’s more, alongside pulling the aforementioned Search Terms report, you’re able to pull top level keyword reports for SBAs and SPAs; Advertised Product reports showing the visibility and sales figures for your SPA products; and SPA Placement Reports, showing performance based on where your ads showed on the results page. 

Despite these additions to reporting, and the insights they bring to the table, reporting is still slightly limited. Firstly, is the issue of how up-to-date the data is. Unfortunately, some of the sales data still takes a while to trickle through – 3 days to be precise; so if you want a report for ALL sales on the 1^st of the month it’s best to wait until the 4^th to pull the report. Secondly is the inability to filter your reports, as they currently give you all the data you might want instead of just the data you need. The best way to work around this is through careful campaign naming conventions as previously described. This will allow you far greater visibility on the performance of particular categories of product, keyword or type of campaign when you download those broader campaign reports.

So there you have it, a brief introduction to the three pillars of Amazon Advertising and everything you should need to get started. While Amazon still has a way to go to catch up with the likes of Google Ads and Bing, it’s rapidly heading in their direction, and with the speedy development time we’ve seen on some of Amazon's newest features it won’t be too far in the future. It also presents another key opportunity to advertise using more targeted and measurable methods on one of the largest e-commerce websites of all time. With ROI’s as strong as we’ve been seeing for some of our clients, it’s not surprising to see that so many are already using the platform. We expect to see even bigger and better things from Amazon in the future, but this isn’t their only advertising offering, check out Abbie’s post on Amazon Advertising Platform for Programmatic (now known as Amazon DSP) activity to read more!

Account managers bear a significant level of responsibility when it comes to explaining changes in performance, particularly where costs are concerned. Ultimately, you are responsible for managing and utilising budgets in the most efficient way possible and as soon as the metrics you hold close and dear start to creep up (be it CPA or ROAS), it can send all sorts of alarm bells ringing. More importantly, you’ll need to provide answers for why the change has occurred. To ease the process, this blog article aims to address various options for presenting competitor insights to your clients, covering the tools available and how to use them. 

Why go to the effort?

Competitor analysis is super handy. At first it can prove to be relatively time consuming and manual, but the result is often enlightening. In most cases you’ll find you are able to easily identify a cause for changes to your KPIs as summarised below:

• A growth in average CPC– Clients will often ask why they are paying more for their clicks, which initially suggests an increasingly competitive auction. By presenting this information to clients in a graphical format that illustrates the trends, not only will you impress them with your creative skills, you’ll be able to show why CPCs have inflated.
• Who’s competing in the auction– A clear competitor graph will allow you to focus attention towards those competitors that are bidding more aggressively and causing you real discomfort. Not only are you able to keep a close eye on the culprits and use their auction behaviour to inform your own strategy, you may also identify where your client’s terms are overlapping with strategic partners.
• Changes over time– You may have a client that is interested in competitor activity over time. Competitor charts are exceptionally useful for illustrating this. They can indicate certain behaviours such as competitors appearing in higher positions or bidding more aggressively at weekends/over holiday periods. Clients are often ecstatic when you are able to share and present these insights.
• Lower CTRs– Fewer people clicking on your ads relative to the number of times your ad appears can raise a number of questions. A simple change in a competitor’s approach to messaging in ad copy, CTAs (calls to action) or ad extensions may lead people away from your content. Having identified who the perpetrators are, the ad preview tool alongside in house tools will allow you to focus on their most influential changes, enabling you to devise an informed plan of action for your clients.

How to create competitor charts

Auction Insights

Auction Insights is a tool that allows us to compare who is appearing in the auction and to what exent at an account, campaign, ad group or keyword level. You’ll first need to select a relevant time period over which you saw a fluctuation or change in CPCs. Next, download this information segmented by day or week and export the data to Excel. By selecting the data and creating a pivot chart, you’ll be able to input the day or week as rows, website domains as columns and impression shares as values. From this table, you are finally able to generate a pivot line graph that highlights the trends and changes in competitor behaviour for the selected time period.

In the example below for one client, we could see an increased level of competitor activity around June that was driven predominantly by competitor X.1. Over this same period, we could see a clear correlation between the increase in avg. CPC against the level of competitor activity by X.1. Despite an overall increase in CPA, the charts presented below meant the client was able to fully appreciate the cause behind the increase.

Impression share 1st June – 26th July 2017:

Average CPC 15th June – 24th July 2017:

However, there are limitations that need to be considered when using auction insights. Firstly, AdWords samples the data. This means that out of all the impression received, the auction insights may pertain to only a certain percentage e.g. 44% of total impressions. Therefore, if the 56% that’s not included shows contrasting trends, it could undermine the data as a whole. Unfortunately there is no quick fix for this issue and so general assumptions must be made. Secondly, you would need to select a time period that includes enough data for Google to generate an adequate sample. In other words, if there isn’t enough data, dinner won’t be served.

Ad Preview Tool & Scripts

Aside from Auction Insights there are other tools available that can reveal how competitors may be gaining an upper hand. Simply searching for terms using the ad preview tool will provide a relative idea as to how often your ads are appearing and against who in real time. The benefits of this method are that it allows you to compare calls to action, ad extensions and general ad appearance against competitors. Here at Merkle, we have our own internal capabilities that allows us to monitor competitor ads. It’s incredibly useful for keeping a close eye on changes to competitor ad copy and messaging to inform our own strategy. It is a tool highly valued by our clients that love staying on top of their competitor activity.

Conclusions

There are various tools within the AdWords interface which provide useful insights relating to CPC/CTR fluctuations, pin pointing encroaching competitors and observing changes in competitor behaviour over time. By exporting to and manipulating the data in Excel, you can create charts to clearly illustrate your findings to clients. In combination with these charts, the ad preview tool and other in house tools result in an ability to closely monitor competitor messaging, CTAs and ad extensions to hone in on any ad changes that may have caused an influence. Moving forward, you’ll be equipped with the tools and knowledge to develop an informed strategy which will keep you ahead of the competition.

In-Banner video creatives are one of the 'go to' formats if you have video assets that you want to serve across the web. They usually consist of a standard size banner (usually a large 970x250) with a video embedded and branding and other support imagery included. Find out in this blog the benefits and what you will need in order to build one.

What are In-Banner Video Ads?

In-banner video creatives, in their simplest form, are a JPEG asset with a video player on top like the above examples (the whole creative is rendered in HTML). However they can be much more than this, and can incorporate animated HTML in the background, interactive elements and be expandable.

In-banner video creatives are great for extending your video reach outside of the in-stream environment.

Where do they appear?

Depending on the size you build the creative in, in-banner video ads can appear across both the open exchange and private marketplace. For more impact think about using a bigger size on a premium site (specific to your target audience of course), for more reach think about using standard sizes across the open exchange.

What do you need to build one?

A video firstly! Either in MP4 format, or present on your YouTube channel. You will also need your usual brand and campaign assets. These can then be inputted into a basic template in DoubleClick or AdWords or they can be used to build a custom format in Google Web Designer or hand built in HTML.

What kind of budget do you need?

In terms of media buying, because in-banner video creatives can take the form of normal size ad units, CPMs can be very low on the open exchange. Large slots on premium sites however can be reserved for Programmatic Guaranteed deals which can be much more expensive. You will also need to take into account the costs for design and build.

Best Practice

• If you are opting to run your creative on a premium site, use a publisher with which you have had historic success.
• Explore designing different creatives (with different videos) for each of your target audiences.
• If you are running pre-roll or in-stream/feed video activity, strongly consider also running in-banner video creatives to ensure you have coverage across the whole web and can utilise sequential messaging.

As anyone who works in digital marketing knows, a key part of continuously improving media performance is to run tests of changes in spend or activity in order to determine the level of influence we can expect on our KPIs.

However, carrying out a test is all well and good, but without a solid methodology for measuring the true impact of these tests, the exercise becomes pointless. In this blog, we will explain two methods for measuring the impact of media tests and also how you can use this information to gain maximum insights from your media experiments.

Intro to the test

In this blog, we will be referring to a test we ran for a telecommunications service provider. This test involved a reduction in spend for two paid search channels, Generics and Shopping; the UK was split into three test regions:

• 25% of the UK would be a control group where no testing would take place.
• 25% of the UK would be given no spend for Shopping.
• The remaining 50% would be given no spend for both Shopping and Generics.

The performance of sales was monitored throughout the test period in order to determine how much value Generics and Shopping were bringing to the business.

There were two stages to this analysis:

• Estimating the effect the cut in spend would have on overall sales before the test started.
• Creating baselines which forecast the sales performance given that no test was run, to be used as a comparison.

Incremental uplift

Using converting and non-converting user journeys that contained Generics and Shopping we could calculate the incremental values for each of these channels by comparing average path conversion rates with and without these channels. Furthermore, we could calculate their incremental uplift on various other channels. Hence, we could estimate not only how many conversions we’d lose from Generic and Shopping directly but what sort of halo effect we can expect on other channels. This allowed us to determine what channels will be the most affected and create a forecast.

On the above chart, we estimated how many conversions we’d lose from each of these channels if we were to cut Generics by 50%, 75% and 100%. The final results of the test confirmed that indeed Organic was the most affected, Brand Paid Search was the second, Display Remarketing was the third, etc. The overall loss volume was within 15% of the forecast.

Baselines

We wished to know, for each of our test regions, how the online and offline sales would have looked given that no cuts to spend were made at all.

In order to do this, we used a forecasting technique to project past behavioural patterns into the future, as displayed below. The dashed lines are 80% confidence intervals, meaning we expected the number of sales to fall within these bounds 80% of the time.

We then monitored the actual sales volumes seen during the test in comparison to this forecasted baseline. The results were conclusive.

As seen in the graph below, we can see that the online sales gradually decrease at the start of the test and then at the end of the test, slowly creep back up to the volumes that they normally would have been.

This allowed us to safely conclude that the effect of Generics and Shopping spend was significant on performance, thus proving the value of this channel.

Summary

Hopefully, the two analysis pieces above have made you question whether your testing procedure is as statistically rigorous as it could be.

• Are you currently launching into tests with no idea of what the predicted impact would be? Maybe you could benefit from incremental uplift analysis so that you know what to expect.
• Do you find that you are struggling to create accurate control groups, that are representative of your customer base? Perhaps having a baseline that you can compare your results to would really help you visualise the true impact of your test. If we can help you make your tests have a higher impact on your media planning (we think we can!), then please do get in touch.

In data collection and analysis, there is a well-known saying: garbage in > garbage out. Read what a recent Google Tag Manager Update brings to the table to improve data quality through normalization.

What is data normalization?

Normalization is typically a process applied in relational database design to organise data, aiming to reduce redundancy and improve consistency and accuracy. Generally, the process takes place after the data has been collected. The main goal is to associate similar forms of the same data items into a single data form and provide a clean data-set which you can query and perform analysis on.

However, normalization does not always have to be performed on data that has already been collected – you can apply it during the collection stage.

Data normalization in Analytics tools

Normalization is equally important in tools such as Google Analytics (which essentially relies on data stored in a database). One example of when normalization is required is for case formatting. In Google Analytics, strings are treated as unique and distinct if they are in lower or upper case. (i.e. "String", "string" and "STRING" are three different unique entries). This is why best practice is to always account for casing and have a tracking setup that does the normalization during data collection.

Think about capturing a custom dimension that takes the value of a user entry. It can be added by the user as UPPERCASE, lowercase or left empty. In that example, you end up having multiple variations of potentially the same entry, which can make analysis harder and data will have to be cleaned each time it is used.

Additionally, in the example above, if the returned value from the custom dimension is null (i.e. it is empty), in order to make sure it's ignored by GA and not set as "null string”, we have to convert it to "undefined".

Historically, in the case of a hard-coded implementation, applying the above would require additional on-page JavaScript to be written to do the checks and transformations. If Google Tag Manager is used for tracking, using Custom JavaScript variables that would return the formatted values is the go-to method (if allowed by the client's policies). There's nothing wrong with these methods, but essentially the only reason for this code to exist is to change the output of other variables to lowercase, or undefined, to prevent them being set in Google Analytics.

Recent GTM update that made the process easy

A recent update of Google Tag Manager added the Format Value option in all of its variables. Format Value, allows you to modify the output of the variable with a number of predefined transformations which are executed by the gtm.js library itself, instead of additional user added code (which can be prone to errors and in some cases not even an option).

The options that are currently available are:

• Change Case to… - Allows you to change the case of the string output of the variable to either lowercase or UPPERCASE.

• Convert null to… - Allows you to convert null values to some other string (i.e. undefined), or set the null output to fall back to another variable.

• Convert undefined to… - Similarly to convert null, you can convert undefined values into strings or the returned value of other variables.

• Convert true to… - Allows you to convert Boolean true value to a string or the returned value of another variable.

• Convert false to… - Same as the above, except now it's for a Boolean false value.

With these new options available, tackling problems such as those mentioned above a lot more streamlined. Hopefully the list of formatting options and flexibility of use will only grow moving forward.

Another example use of Format Value is when it’s applied to URLs:

Being able to format the Full URL like this means that less technical users no longer need to use RegEx to account for case differences when using the Full URL variable as a trigger condition, for example.  

Using contains/equals/startswith has always been a prefered option for non-devs that do not want to mess with RegEx.

Conclusion

By making sure you are using best practices and advanced tools when setting up tracking, you are producing cleaner data which leads to better analysis and fewer nuances. Additionally, taking advantage of feature-rich platforms such as Google Tag Manager removes many complexities and makes configurations easier to understand for less technical users.

If you want to step up your data collection and increase data accuracy, reach out to the Analytics Team at Merkle|Periscopix!

Google Campaign Manager offers some ingenious reports that give search users additional insight that cannot be provided from the Search Ads 360 or engine interfaces. This blog will take you through a few of our favourites; Attribution, Top Stats and Reach reports.

The Google Campaign Manager, previously the ‘DoubleClick Campaign Manager’ or ‘DCM’ for short, is the top of the Google Stack Pyramid. It houses all tracking and interaction data for any activity it is linked to - most often programmatic via Display & Video 360 (previously DoubleClick Bid Manager) and Search via Search Ads 360 (previously DoubleClick Search). 

There are some ingenious reports you can use which offer a Search user additional insight that cannot be provided from the Search Ads 360 or engine interfaces. This blog will take you through a few of our favourites; Attribution, Top Stats and Reach reports.

These reports will allow you to provide a more streamlined, and holistic cross-channel approach to strategy and reporting, integrating multiple challenges while offering up some brand new metrics to boot. What’s not to love!?

The Basics

Before you get ahead of yourself, remember these top tips:

1) Choose the correct floodlight– you don’t want to be half way through analysis before you realise you’re looking at both signups and transaction floodlights.

2) Check Sampling– Sampling is triggered when Campaign Manager processes one million hits or more; try reducing this by using a smaller date range.

3) Set Channel Groupings– Create custom segments to organise your data into more meaningful sets e.g. splitting brand and generic search, compared to remarketing and prospecting in programmatic.

Attribution Report – Answer questions like ‘how does programmatic activity impact my search conversions?’

Understanding the value and impact of upper funnel activity on lower funnel search activity is key. Have you suddenly seen a decrease in profitable brand traffic? Your first thoughts should be towards how your upper funnel may have been compromised. This report is crucial in understanding the relationship between different channels and their appropriate value. 

If you have Google Analytics 360, you can basically give this section a miss. The greatest benefit of viewing this data in Campaign Manager is the availability of impression level data for Programmatic. If you’re using standard GA, Campaign Manager is the only platform that can offer you this information, one of programmatic’s key measurements of success. 

Navigate to the report in the following way: 

1. Navigate to ‘top conversion paths’,
2. Create a new conversion segment,
3. Select to include assisted interactions for ‘dart search’ activity AND include a first interaction from display activity. 

You’ll now be gifted a selection of reports! Top metrics, graphs and paths. 

Top metrics 

Provides an overall numerical value; in our example it will provide a numerical value for all conversions where programmatic appeared to encourage an eventual Search conversion. Being able to quantify and measure this value is key to understanding performance and from this defining future strategy.

Graph

This visualises changes over time. Have we recently invested significantly in programmatic? Can we quickly identify when this began to impact search? 

Paths 

something very familiar to any Google Analytics users is Top Conversion Paths. These show in greater detail the combination of steps taken to reach your chosen goal. Here you can analyse (depending on your structure) the order in which a specific type of creative or targeting group is most effective. 

This is important for any sequential targeting in Programmatic, and also to understand how brand vs. generic keywords may fit into this user journey.  For Search users, this is also key for evaluating attribution models. Visualising and being familiar with this can help you better explain your customer’s path to conversion and how accurate attribution of value is imperative.

Top Metrics Report – Answers questions like ‘what are my top-level Search and Programmatic Stats?’

Typically, you may find yourself wanting to pull data from two separate interfaces to answer this question.  Why is that a problem? 

1. It doubles your workload,
2. You may find one interface has slightly different attribution leading to inconsistencies,
3. This siloed approach does not consider a holistic attribution of value.  

Pulling top stats from Campaign Manager rectifies these issues, as well as allowing you to automate the Excel CSV of this data straight to your inbox.

Create the report in the ‘report builder’ section, following the steps below.

However, we do have some downsides, namely you may need to manually combine some metrics.

Data is limited to engine level - Bing vs. AdWords for example - meaning that you cannot drill into more details at campaign or keyword level from Campaign Manager using this specific report. As the title suggests, this is top level only!

Reach Report – Answer questions like ‘how many unique users have seen my search ad?’ or ‘how many users who saw a Programmatic Ad also clicked on a search ad?’

A common desire is for a client to reach more new users. Historically Search users have relied on impressions or clicks to indicate how we are increasing the number of times our ads are engaged with. But how do we know we’re not connecting with the same user again and again? The solution – measuring Reach.

Campaign Manager's definition of Total Reach as a metric is: ‘the estimated number of unique users who viewed or clicked on an ad.  This estimate is based on unique cookies.’  The key word here being unique!

Follow the process below to set up your first Reach report.

You will now have a CSV which provides data on the volume of unique users you’ve engaged with by channel. Below shows the humble pivot table making this data more user friendly.

You can now compare different date ranges to understand how your reach has changed over time. Make sure to set up a regular report to email you on a weekly/monthly basis, as the reports can only view the last 42 days of data.

Metrics are split between Impression Reach, Click Reach and Total Reach. Note that Programmatic data can be viewed at impression or click level, while Search has only click data. 

Your next level is for Cross-Dimension Reach reporting. These can show how many unique users saw or clicked on ads across BOTH a given pair of advertisers, campaigns or sites. Answering questions like ‘how often do my programmatic creatives overlap with search users?’

Once again you can format in Excel. The below shows that:

1. Of 1,937,057 total unique users, 1,365 have clicked on both a Search ad and seen/clicked on a display ad;
2. 7% of Display users overlap with Search;
3. 0.07% of Search users overlap with Display users.

If our strategy was to increase the overlap rate to prove that Display activity influences Search at a higher rate we may consider the following. Based on our data we may increase bids for users who entered the site through Search in remarketing activity.  We could also seek to tailor prospecting activity to more relevant targeting based on audience signals from Search users.

Crucially we can now use this measure as a benchmark from which to improve.

Note that you can only segment by Advertiser or Campaign. If you manage multiple similar brands which each sit in separate advertisers, this could be key to see where your audiences overlap. Most likely you will be comparing one brand within one advertiser but segmenting by campaign. Search will be shown as ‘dart search’ while the granularity of your programmatic campaign structure will dictate the level of detail you can view e.g. if you have separate campaigns for remarketing and prospecting then these can be viewed separately.

In conclusion, all Search Ads 360 users should understand the reports described above, using them to measure success, attribute accurately and ultimately integrate with cross-channel strategy. Seen as the bottom of the funnel, search users can often forget the importance of understanding the source of traffic and how programmatic (or other linked channels, e.g. social/organic) can influence audiences. By regularly emphasising these insights we can build a 'big picture' strategy with a holistic approach to our goals.

Attribution modelling is a process involving the distribution of conversion credit to various keywords, ad groups and campaigns. To fully understand our users, we need to be able to give credit to these elements as fairly as possible. DDA is a model which allows us to do exactly that - accurately weighting different touchpoints along the conversion journey depending on their incremental impact.

What is it?

Before we dive deep into Data Driven Attribution (DDA), let’s first clarify what attribution actually is. Attribution modelling is a pretty broad topic, but to sum up, it is a process involving the distribution of conversion credit to various keywords, ad groups and campaigns. To fully understand our users, we need to be able to give credit to these elements as fairly as possible.

DDA is a model which allows us to do exactly that - accurately weighting different touchpoints along the conversion journey depending on their incremental impact. To paint the picture, some of the other ways of attributing conversion credit are broken down as follows:

Last Click

Linear

Data-Driven

Using DDA in SA360 therefore, is much more sophisticated, analysing interactions between our campaigns and distributing credit based on the incremental impact an interaction has on the user’s likelihood to convert.

DDA in SA360 also allows us to factor in interactions between Paid Search, GDN, Programmatic Display, Google and Bing, meaning we can gain a much more holistic view on how people are interacting with our brands across the web.

I'm in - how do I set it up?

So, it makes sense why we should use it, but how do you set it up in SA360? The process often looks complicated, but in fact is very simple.

1. Create channel groupings 

SA360 uses these to identify the types of interactions you’re interested in tracking in the model. Here, you will categorise your keywords/ad groups/campaigns, based on their position in the conversion funnel, and this can be done in two ways:

Custom label groupings

Create labels and apply them to campaigns, ad groups or keywords, ideally 24 hours before you create your model. As DDA models work with the previous 24 hours’ worth of data, this ensures that once established, the model can work right away. It also helps SA360 to be certain of the association, and makes sure any changes made do not negatively affect the model.

This allows you to categorise your account in a more complex way, with the possibility of up to 15 different channel groupings. This is useful for when you want to create a unique, tailored model, such as if you want to look at how devices are over or under-attributed, or considering DSA and Shopping activity.

The table below suggests ways to group channels by vertical, however you could also try grouping by:

• Shopping campaigns
• Audience specific keywords
• Device groupings

The more you split your channels, the more credit is segmented between interactions along the path, which could be problematic for the model. For this reason, no more than five channel groupings are recommended. 

Custom grouping labels need to allow for new activity to fit under a label, as once the model is created, new labels cannot be added in. If you are regularly adding new items to the account, you need to make sure they are added to the model, so creating a couple of blank labels is recommended, so that these new items can be added into the model.

Example channel groupings by vertical:

Auto Channel Grouping

A relatively new feature in SA360, allowing keywords to be grouped automatically by brand or generic

Great if:

• You’re new to DDA and want to see how it works before creating custom, more tailored channels
• You are constantly adding new keywords and campaigns to the account, as you need to make sure they are added into a label to include in the model, so using auto-grouping may be the better choice

Not so great if:

• You are running Shopping and DSA activity in the account - this does not factor in any DSA or Shopping activity in an account
• You want to report on each custom label that you created

2. Pick your Floodlights

As many as 50 different Floodlights can have their interactions analysed and reported on by SA360. Google Analytics goals can also be used if synced with SA360.

Pick a floodlight depending on its relation to the conversion funnel you want to look at:

• If you want to look at two different types of conversion funnels, best practice would be to create two separate DDA models, and choose the corresponding Floodlight for that funnel
• Be mindful that SA360 will need conversion volumes to be above a certain threshold for the DDA model to work effectively, therefore it may be worth combining two conversions in one, providing the conversion funnels are similar enough

3. Apply your Channel Groupings

• Using the labels you previously created to form custom channels OR, let SA360 do the work with auto-grouping

That’s it! Click save, and within 24 hours your model will be ready to use in the interface. You will be able to see 60 days’ worth of backdated data once the model is ready, meaning you can start using it straight away. As a point to remember, DDA currently only updates once a day, which means when looking at your data, you should avoid including today’s data.

Now What? Creating columns

Now your model is ready, you can start creating your columns to appear in the SA360 interface, allowing you to view your data. Some good places to start are:

• The Floodlight you’re tracking
• CPA
• Conversion Rate
• Formula columns to track discrepancies between DDA and default attribution models. A handy formula for this is as follows:

This formula can also be replicated for other KPIs you’re interested in, such as CPA or CVR.

Before saving a column, you will see a tick box for including cross environment conversions, the SA360 equivalent of cross-device conversions. If selected, you can report on the model, but not use it in bid strategies. One way to get around this is to create both – one for reporting (including cross-environment) and one for using in bid strategies (not including cross-environment).

Once the columns are set up, you can then create Views in SA360 to look at the DDA and discrepancies between other models.

Data requirements

To let DDA work as effectively as possible, at least 600 conversions of the conversion action you are tracking, and 15,000 clicks are needed over the last 30 days.

If you don’t meet the above requirements we would recommend Linear as the next best model to use!

Why use SA360 DDA over AdWords?

SA360 lets you create custom models with labels, but AdWords does not have this custom functionality.

In SA360, it's possible to view and compare both models in the interface. In AdWords, it's only possible to see one type of conversion at one time, meaning whichever model you choose will be the only one you can view the data in.

SA360 DDA can be included in an SA360 executive report, alongside other models. This gives more visibility on how the models may differ, and makes it much easier to feedback to clients or stakeholders.

Using DDA in Bid Strategies

Once your DDA model is set up, you can start using it in SA360 bid strategies. As mentioned earlier, the column cannot include cross-environment conversions when using in a bid strategy, so keep that in mind! To see some of the great work we’ve done using DDA model in Bid Strategies, click here.

Google Ads are implementing Parallel Tracking on the 30th October. What follows is a walkthrough of the change and what you'll need to do to enable it.

As everyone has heard by now, Google Ads are implementing Parallel Tracking, their landing page loading time improvement, for good on the 30^th October. While this can only be a positive change in terms of customer journey drop-off it has heavy implications for users of SA360 (Search Ads 360). What follows is a little more about what this change is, how it will benefit your accounts, and the changes you need to make to accommodate it on SA360.

What is Parallel Tracking and How Does It Work?

At the moment in most cases, when a user clicks on an ad and there’s a 3rd party tool like SA360, there’s some sort of redirect happening. This is redirecting you through a click server before the user reaches your intended landing page. Essentially the process is:

With these steps happening one after the other, it increases your page loading time and therefore the likelihood that people drop off the user journey.

Parallel Tracking is essentially the solution to this. With Parallel Tracking, the redirects fire simultaneously, rather than one after another. So, the user will be taken directly to the landing page while the tracking happens in the background. The process therefore looks a bit more like this with Parallel Tracking:

At the moment, this is an opt-in process but on 30th October Google is switching it over, at which point Parallel Tracking becomes mandatory for all Google Ads accounts.

Bonus Benefit: Accelerated Mobile Pages

In addition to the benefit of faster loading times, there’s also a benefit regarding AMPs (Accelerated Mobile Pages). This is a project aiming to make the mobile web much faster to improve user experience. One technology this uses is the AMP cache which can only be reached if a user is not redirected on their way to the website. With the old way of doing things this is therefore inaccessible, but if we use Parallel Tracking, the cache can be accessed, and we decrease mobile load time even further.

So How Do I Enable Parallel Tracking on SA360?

This sounds all well and good for user experience, but it has a fairly sizeable impact on SA360 and means that you need to make some changes. There are 4 general steps to this:

1. Use the migration tool
2. Check compatibility in the UI
3. Make manual changes to ensure compatibility
4. Enable Parallel Tracking

Step 1: Use the Migration Tool

In the transition to Parallel Tracking, there are essentially two buckets of changes to make. Bucket 1 can be done using the interface migration tool in SA360, while Bucket 2 must be done manually.

The first step to enabling Parallel Tracking is to use the interface migration tool to take care of Bucket 1, which has been made available across all SA360 advertisers. This will automatically convert those four features into a suitable format. Cross-channel remarketing, Conversion APIs and GA linking will be taken care of by turning on auto-tagging and including other parameters in the final URL Suffix (a new field created for this purpose) in Google Ads. SA360 macros are a little different, but the migration tool still takes care of these as below:

The macro migration changes the macros in URL templates to custom parameters. This will be automatically done using the migration tool, but it’s worth sense checking afterwards. Once these have been translated they’ll still be in your URL template, where you’ll have to establish what is required here and what needs to be moved to the final URL suffix, but we’ll cover this later on. It’s worth bearing in mind though that there are a few unsupported macros including: [*Part_Site*], [*AffiliateID*], [*Part_Comp*], [*KeywordIDNL*] and [*GCLSRC*]. 

To make these migrations, all you need to do is tick the top two tick boxes and hit save at the bottom. This process can take a few hours with very large accounts, so to check on the progress of this there are two columns you can add at Engine Account level called ‘Migrate API, GA, and remarketing’ &‘Migrate macros to custom parameters’. Once these say ‘Completed’ then you know the process is complete.

Step 2: Check Compatibility in the UI

The next step to take is to check your compatibility. This can be done in the same place as you used the migration tool, using the button below:

Simply hit the ‘View Compatibility Issues’ button to see what flags you’ve got. If you’ve still got SA360 macros coming up or GA/Conversion API/Cross-Channel Remarketing, then you haven’t migrated them yet using the tool. Alternatively, the checker may not have updated, as this takes a full 24 hours to do so. Anything left will be a manual change.

Step 3: Make Manual Changes to Ensure Compatibility

After checking your compatibility, you’ll need to action any changes to the flagged items. These could include anything in aforementioned Bucket 2 if your account has those features enabled. Below is how to migrate them:

Active Landing Page Tests

To migrate these, all you need to do is stop them.

Campaign Manager Macros    

Again, a simple one to deal with, just remove these.

SA360 URL Parameters

These were actually deprecated earlier this year, so there really shouldn’t be any useful instances of these. If you do see this compatibility issue and the parameters are still of use, then you need to add them manually to either the final URL or URL suffix.

Natural Search

This issue relates to the exclusion parameter that natural search relies on to distinguish paid search from natural search clicks. In many instances this exclusion parameter is the gclid – in which case no further action is needed due to auto-tagging being enabled automatically earlier on in the process. If it isn’t the gclid, whatever the exclusion parameter is needs to be added to the final URL suffix before enabling Parallel Tracking, otherwise paid search conversions will be attributed to organic.

Tracking Templates  

This is probably the most complicated part of the manual process and will be a bit different in each use case. Firstly, you need to make sure everything starts with HTTPS, then you need to make sure that you’re using all the correct URL fields. Advertisers need to distinguish between a few types of parameters to establish where they need to be placed.

What this table illustrates is that any type of 3^rd party redirect needs to remain in the URL template, just making sure, as above, that it’s HTTPS. If this involves a 3^rd party that isn’t Google, it’s wise to check in with that party to see if any further accommodations need to be made.

Any other parameters should be removed from the URL template and placed in the final URL suffix. This could also include the parameters that you translated from macros earlier in the process.

After these changes have been made, it’s then worth waiting another 24 hours to see if the compatibility checker shows clear. If not then it’s likely to be old items that are causing the error, so you’ll also need to check paused and removed activity wherever you can apply a URL template. This includes ad extension and product group level, which are often neglected.

However, if the checker is clear, then you’re on to the last step!

Step 4: Enable Parallel Tracking

This is the final step in the process and can be done once more at the engine account level, underneath the compatibility checker:

All that’s required here is to tick the last box and hit save at the bottom.

Once you’ve done this, it’s worth making some final checks. These are:

• Add the ‘Parallel Tracking’ column in at Engine Account level and make sure this reads ‘True’
• Take a look for any ad or extension disapprovals
• Check for sync errors with SA360 (after your next sync)
• Try and find an ad on the SERP and click through, you want to make sure the gclid appears in the URL

If all of these are checked, then that’s it, Parallel Tracking has been completed and you can sit back and relax up to the 30^th October!

With average CPCs increasing each year for paid brand terms, businesses and digital marketing agencies alike are looking for new ways to cut the increasing spend and maintain share of voice on the search engine results page. We look into the recent trend of pausing paid search terms and how SEO & PPC can work together more effectively to address this.

Something we get asked a lot about as an agency is our approach to pausing paid search spend on key brand terms, especially if the brand consistently ranks organically in the top position of the SERP (search engine results page) whilst paid spend for top positions is increasingly expensive. 

Why do advertisers want to pause paid brand keywords? 

Many advertisers are seeing large increases in average CPCs and significantly higher costs YoY without the subsequent uplift in performance. In fact, in Merkle’s Q2 Digital Marketing Report, we estimated that average CPCs for brand keywords jumped 30% YoY for Q2. Often this is due to increased bids from competitors in a bid to secure brand prominence on the SERP.

Should I test this out on my brand keywords?

There are a few things you’ll want to consider when deciding whether a paid holdout is suitable for your brand:

1. Seasonality

Depending on your business, you’ll need to think carefully about when the best time would be to test this, as it can have a huge impact on website visitors and conversions. For example, retail clients probably don’t want to pause paid brand terms in Q4 and likewise lead generation clients might not want to pause during their quietest months.

2. Technicalities

There’s little point in going any further if you don’t have a means of monitoring and analysing the results. You need to be able to see all relevant business data e.g. visits, conversions & revenue, and if you’re only pausing certain paid keywords you’ll also want to be able to segment the results to see the impact of this on that area. Yearly and monthly data is also useful as a quick way to measure drastic drops in performance, allowing you to stop the test if necessary.

3. Competitors

Although one of the main reasons many clients want to try a paid search holdout is due to increasing CPCs, this is also a key reason not to do this. If you’re already struggling to maintain a top brand position on the SERP, then pausing search activity might allow competitors to claim their share of voice over your brand.

4. Brand Loyalty

Different industries have varying levels of customer loyalty. For example, where product offerings and price points are similar for some retailers, brand loyalty can be low, with customers looking for the best deal on the day of purchase. Conversely, brand loyalty for automobile, technology and insurance providers can be much higher. If your brand loyalty is very low, you might be more reliant on paid search to maintain dominance on the SERP; or equally, you might consider brand loyalty to be so strong that this paid search dominance for your brand terms is less important.

Luckily, we have a few case studies where we’ve already tested the impact of pausing PPC spend on brand terms. These tests were for clients in various verticals, with their own KPIs to gauge what impact it might have for clients in different industries.

Case Study 1 – Lead Generation Client

One of our insurance clients (in the US) paused their paid brand activity to test the impact of this on SEO. They found that organic brand searches only picked up a small amount of this traffic and there was an overall decrease in CTR as well as a loss of revenue:

• An estimated 92% of the visits driven by brand paid search were NOT picked up by organic
• An estimated 74% of the applications driven by brand paid search were NOT picked up by organic
• CTR suffered – organic CTR did increase 23% MoM, however there was an overall drop in CTR of 14%
• An estimated yearly loss of $590,592 for just one of the client’s service offerings (not accounting for the yearly cost of brand term paid search)

Test results - CTR performance:

A similar client, in the UK also paused their paid brand keywords. The test was narrowed down to ‘brand + login’ keywords to identify returning users who were less valuable than new users. There was no significant drop in traffic to site, or in average CPCs, but the client did notice a decline in completed forms. This meant the test ended early and the keywords were re-enabled.

Case Study 2 – E-commerce/Retail Client

An e-commerce client operating mainly B2B performed a paid holdout test. They paused paid search and consequently saw a 31% drop in sessions on their site and a 25% loss in revenue.

Finally, one of our B2C fashion brands tested this over a six-week period. In this case, the client hadn’t run brand keywords through paid search before, so they wanted to test the impact of this on organic search. They found that paid brand activity did cannibalise organic sales, however there was a 12% drop in transactions when the paid brand terms were paused.

Test results - Organic vs paid transactions:

So, what have we learned?

Well, it seems that more often than not, the traffic is not picked up organically and there is a significant loss of traffic to site and ultimately conversions and revenue, all suggesting the value of running paid search alongside SEO.

Whilst this might not be good news for advertisers looking to reduce spend through SEM, there are alternatives.

Across the agency our PPC and SEO teams have been working together to test out other ways to address these issues:

• The impact of Quick Answers on paid search
• Assimilation of paid and organic search results (modifying paid ad copy and extensions or changing the meta titles and descriptions).
• More extensive keyword cannibalisation analysis (pause certain keywords based on organic position, high spend, low conversions or those with aggressive competitor bidding).

If you’re interested in developing a more integrated SEM approach, please get in touch with the team.

Emerging in America in the 1950s, Black Friday was introduced to mark the beginning of the Christmas shopping season, following the Thanksgiving festivities. It has now grown to become a global phenomenon. Everyone likes a bargain, and brands are increasingly offering discounts that are too good to miss. Mintel estimates that Black Friday sales in the UK hit £4.2 billion in 2017, having grown by 13% year on year (Black Friday - UK - January 2018). So how do consumers in neighbouring countries react to this ever-growing shopping bonanza?

In brief...

Perhaps in continental Europe we have not yet seen stories emerge such as the two Californians who camped for 22 days in front of a Best Buy in 2014 just to be the first ones through the shop’s doors on Black Friday. In reality, most of the limited time offers are available online, as shoppers prefer to avoid the wild experience of long queues and rushing bargain hunters to browse offers from the comfort of their own home.

Retailers in France have been making the most out of this golden opportunity in the last few years, while in Germany and Italy the day has been distinguished for something else – strikes!

Still, the event is starting to gain a considerable foothold across the continent and is expected to continue driving more and more revenue for businesses who always find new clever ways to keep consumers spending every year.

Merkle | Periscopix now have their very own internal International Export Team, ready to give you advice on how to set up, run and optimise your international advertising campaigns, so please do not hesitate to get in touch if you have any questions!

Google Ads vs Display & Video 360 (DV360). A more infamous match than Mayweather vs McGregor. But, when it comes to TrueView campaigns, which one takes the TKO in the 10th round?

Google Ads and DV360 both provide advertisers the ability to access YouTube marketing inventory. However, both platforms have their strengths and weaknesses when it comes to running this format. In this blog, we will provide the details you need to decide which platform is right for you and your campaigns.

Similarities:

Targeting: Both platforms benefit from the wide selection of targeting methods available through Google. These include Affinity Audiences, Categories, Contextual, Placements, and Remarketing.

Reporting: The platforms also have the same reporting offering. Although they come in different formats and have varying on-site dashboards, all your metrics and KPIs will be on hand!

Functionality: When it comes down to building out your campaign, Google Ads & DV360 are both easy to use and have bulk editing functions. However, it is important to note that both platforms vary in their layouts and functionalities, so there is a learning curve if you are moving from one to another. Additionally, certain actions available in one platform might not be available in the other.

• Example: Custom Affinities that have been built out in the same Advertiser can be shared across multiple Campaigns in DV360. However, Custom Affinities cannot be shared across accounts if they are under the same Sub-MCC in Google Ads.

DV360 Pros:

Campaign Management: Using the full DoubleClick stack, including running TrueView in DV360, allows you to plan, buy, and measure all your programmatic media in a single platform. Never underestimate the power of having your data in one place.

Cross-Exchange Brand Lift Studies: Brand Lift Surveys can be run in DV360 across all your video campaigns on the Cross-Exchange, Google Preferred, and TrueView. This allows you to compare results on and off YouTube, providing you more insights into the consumer journey.

Frequency Management: DV360 allows you to manage frequency across multiple Insertion Orders at the campaign level. Great for clients that are focused on reach! In comparison, Google Ads only allows you to set frequency caps at campaign level (the equivalent of line item level in DBM).

Google Ads Pros:

Betas: Between the two platforms, Google Ads generally receives Betas and new features first. These can sometimes take up to a year to finally filter through to DV360. Google is currently working towards trying to standardize the amount of time it takes to roll out these features. However, it is likely that Display & Video 360 will always be behind Google Ads for most updates.

Cost: A platform fee is not incurred when running activity on Google Ads, unlike DV360, meaning it is ultimately cheaper to run TrueView campaigns on Google Ads.

Openslate: If Brand Safety is a concern for your clients, you have probably heard of Openslate; a company that provides industry standard measurement of brand safety across social video. This solution was ultimately built for Google Ads but can also be used on DV360. However, when run on DV360, it dramatically slows down your page load times and can make the smallest of campaign changes into a true test of patience.

When To Use:

If you are looking to run a TrueView-only campaign for a client, Google Ads is the clear winner. You’ll have the latest Betas with the same targeting capabilities as DV360 without having to pay a platform fee. However, if you are already running activity on DV360 and would like to add TrueView activity as a supplement to your current campaigns, DV360 allows you to do so in a cohesive manner which you might not be able to do in Google Ads.

At Merkle|Periscopix, we are lucky to have Account Managers experienced at TrueView campaigns on both Google Ads and DV360. So, if you’re interested in running a TrueView campaign, we can easily work with your pre-existing campaigns and wider business goals to provide you with the best plan of action for you! For more information, please feel free to get in touch!

Combining strategies for Paid and Organic can result in better performance for both, but how? There are a few really easy ways to get synergies started in your campaigns.

Despite often being considered “The Dark Side” by the other, SEO and PPC operate on many of the same premises. For example, the keywords users are searching with and the quality of the landing page can influence the performance of campaigns. It isn’t surprising then that the two can be used in tandem to get some incredible results; conversely, if a line of communication isn’t maintained between the two teams there could be some very confusing conundrums.

Here is a breakdown of the benefits of having PPC and SEO teams work together:

1. SEO can utilise the Paid Search team’s keyword data

The Paid Search team will have a lot of current keyword data. That’s real keyword data, not tool guess-timates. Working with B2B businesses especially, there are often much lower keyword volumes coming up during the keyword research phase, if any at all.  At times like these the SEO team can utilise the keyword data from Paid to make optimisation decisions.

Similarly, optimising on page content with PPC data can lead to a lower cost-per-click. This is because Quality Score, a Google metric for deciding an ad’s rank, can be influenced by the relevance of on-page content to the ad.

If you are running both channels and your SEO team isn’t communicating with the PPC side you could be missing out on some excellent opportunities.

2. Some SEO strategies may reduce the effectiveness of PPC

Some preliminary case studies on the effects of Quick Answer (Featured Snippet) acquisition have shown that Paid CTR may drop for terms where there is a quick answer available. So, whether a specific keyword has a Quick Answer or the SEO team has managed to acquire a few of these, do let Paid know as they may see declines.

3. The Paid Search team should be made aware of the importance of URLs in SEO

If the PPC team decides to implement tracking URLs for certain pages, or desire a new page to be created as a landing page, this could be damaging to SEO efforts for two reasons. First, generating duplicate pages for tracking purposes can cause a decrease in organic rankings for both. Duplication needs to be dealt with appropriately on a case-by-case basis.

Second, new pages for similar topics while not being duplicate may still impede search gains. This is because multiple pages should not rank for the same keyword (this is called cannibalisation), which may occur when creating new pages without consulting the organic team. Both teams should communicate any changes they would like to happen to each other.

4. Significant increases in bids should be reported to the SEO team

It is not unheard of for an increase in Paid activity to cause a drop in organic visits. This could set the organic team into a panic as they attempt to explain their campaign’s dropping performance to a client. Of course, the same can occur vice versa so watch any significant ranking increases or quick answer gains.

5. Teams should share news with each other

This could be a structural change resulting in a new decision-maker being recruited, or plans that might result in site changes such as a re-branding or new services being added. These possibilities allow the search teams to stay ahead of upcoming changes with their optimisations and account management.

6. SEOs should share any inventory management issues with the PPC team

Certain CMS can cause inventory management issues since they are designed to manage stock, and don’t always consider the implications this might have on digital marketing efforts. Having a page disappear from the index, or an ad-group fall off because of a missing landing page, could have a significant impact on both teams’ campaigns.

7. Both channels are needed for a successful online marketing push

SEO and PPC should operate together because they are both necessary parts of an online campaign. There is no situation where organic rankings will eventually make PPC obsolete, saving the brand in question considerable ad spend.

In tests we conducted cutting ad spend on brand terms always results in a slight loss in CTR. This is because other brands will take up that real estate given the opportunity, often prompting users to competitor sites.  

SEO and PPC should share their knowledge, especially since they both share the same advertising space: the SERP. A lack of communication could lead to sub-par results for both channels. There is a bigger picture than paid or organic KPIs, which are the business KPIs the search campaigns are being built to bolster. If a joint strategy can have channels complementing each other, this will always be the best result for spend.

After spending days crafting the perfect Data Studio dashboard, you want to make sure that as many colleagues as possible can see and benefit from it. Thankfully, Data Studio has created a neat solution that allows you to embed your report on any of your website pages.

Step by step guide to embedding 

Embedding your Data Studio dashboard on your site couldn’t be easier. It only takes two steps! The only requirement is that your website or app supports the HTML iframe.

Step 1

First, click on the ‘File’. Then, select ‘Embed report’ from the drop down menu. This will open up an embed report pop up.

Step 2

In the new ‘Embed Report’ pop up check the ‘Enable embedding’ checkbox, then set either the width (px) or height (px) for your dashboard (the other will update automatically). Finally, all you need to do is copy the iframe code and paste it into the appropriate section of your site.

Make your Data Studio dashboard responsive

We all know the importance of making sure your website looks great on every device. As a result, the majority of modern websites have adopted some form of responsive design. This throws up a few potential problems in Google’s default Dashboard embedding code. This is because it has set a fixed width and height. To navigate this problem, we have come up with a simple solution.

Here is our adjusted code to make your Dashboard iframe responsive.

The Code

HTML

<div class="dashboard-container"><iframe allowfullscreen class="dashboard-iframe" 
    frameborder="0"
      src="INSERT YOUR UNIQUE SRC" 
    style="border:0"></iframe></div>

CSS

.dashboard-container {
    position: relative;
    overflow: hidden;
    padding-top:INSERT YOUR RATIO PERCENTAGE;
}
.dashboard-iframe {
    position: absolute;
    top: 0;
    left: 0;
    width: 100%;
    height: 100%;
    border: 0;
}

Managing dashboard permissions

Now that you have got your dashboard appearing perfectly on your webpage, you need to make sure that it is being seen by the right people.

The easiest way to restrict who sees your dashboard is to embed it on one of the internal staff pages of your website. You can then set the sharing settings to “On - Anyone who has the link can access. No sign-in required” to allow the report to appear.

If you require any further assistance with Data Studio, including setting up dashboards and training, please don't hesitate to get in touch with our team.

With £1.4 billion spent online during Black Friday and Cyber Weekend 2017 in the UK, and the event growing in popularity throughout Europe, it's one of the most important periods in the calendar for many e-retailers. Digital media is a core part of the marketing mix in the race to provide your customers with the most relevant experience and ensure they don't miss out on your great offers. We've put our heads together to provide five key tips to make the most of this exciting time of year.

Build Up to Black Friday

With consumers typically holding back on spend in the weeks leading up to Black Friday, use this opportunity for branding. Utilise your digital channels to generate buzz and fuel your remarketing audiences in the days leading to up the weekend. Analyse BAU campaigns to understand which targeting drives the best engagement, and utilise this within your build-up strategy. Look to generate brand recall to spark interest before the big day, and ideally high CTR to increase digital footfall; maybe driving users to add to basket or to their wish list through your prospecting activity and generic search. Then on Black Friday utilise these bigger audiences to target users personally based on previous on-site activity. 

Apply Learnings from Black Friday to Cyber Monday

For some advertisers, Cyber Monday actually proves more fruitful than Black Friday. It is therefore important to adapt your strategic insights from Friday to Monday. Quick analysis of your data is key to make sure you don’t miss out on driving even more conversions. Don’t let one successful Friday prevent you from having an even better Monday! 

Here are a few things to look at:

• Dynamic Creative Reports (DV360), Purchase Detail Reports (SA360) - Which products are driving the highest engagement? Can you up-weight bids here to capitalise?
• Time of Day Reports - When are users engaging/converting with your ads and when should you be up-weighting budget for maximum efficiency?
• Creative Messaging  - Which CTA is driving users to site more effectively? Could you be updating your other ads to capitalise on this?

But remember, although Black Friday’s data will provide insightful feedback, make sure you don’t solely focus on one day’s results when re-strategising for Monday’s campaign. Consider last year's Cyber Monday performance and any macro changes in your competitive landscape. 

Check out this case study around the impact of real time data if you need more convincing.

This figure has been on the up for the last five years at least. It's likely you’re already optimising your digital campaigns towards mobile so inevitably a high proportion of your spend is already going here (this is especially true for Paid Social as the vast majority of social networking is done on phones). For Paid Search, you'll want to be utilising mobile IF functions to customise ads for your handheld shoppers and of course make the most of the various extensions available from calls and messages all the way through to mobile-preference for your site-links. Don't forget location extensions to catch those active shoppers on the move - digital advertising doesn't just fuel your digital revenue.

The challenge, though, is that mobile shoppers have the shortest attention span. Any hiccup and they give up and look elsewhere - with up to 30% increase in bounce rate for every additional second the page takes to load. Customers now expect a good user experience on-site, regardless of whether it's mobile or desktop. It’s vital to have mobile friendly landing pages, storefronts and checkouts. Even if you have the best marketing strategy in the world, if your site isn't up to scratch, your campaign will not live up to it’s potential.

In Summary

Plan ahead, use the highest-impact formats you have available and learn from previous successes. If all of this sounds like way too much to handle, get in touch with one of our team, we can help you out!

Bring your Tag Manager setup to the next level by making use of the Tag Sequencing feature. Make sure your tags always fire in the right order - a must-have in the age of asynchronous tag managers!

What’s this Tag Sequencing feature I’ve heard so much about?

We’ve always let it be known that we’re big fans of Google Tag Manager (GTM) here at Merkle | Periscopix - we shout from the rooftops regularly about GTM's many great features that make life simpler in the world of website tagging. Today is no different - today we’re here to extol the virtues of a GTM feature known as Tag Sequencing.

As you may be aware, the tags that you fire using GTM (as with most tag managers) aren’t necessarily fired in sequence. GTM doesn’t wait for one tag to fully execute before starting to fire the next - instead, it will begin to fire each one as soon as it’s ready, meaning that different tags can overlap in their execution (the technical term for this is that tags fire asynchronously).

This is very useful for preventing delay in individual tag firing - if a key tag is at the very end of a long queue of tags, it will wait a fair amount of time before it fires (and everyone knows the frustration of waiting in a long line!), so asynchronicity in tag firing prevents that. However, it’s more of a pain if you’re firing a tag which depends on another tag having fired first.

So how do I manipulate the order of my tags?

Enter: Tag Sequencing!

The essence of the feature is that, for any tag that has a trigger, you can assign a setup tag and a cleanup tag. These tags will fire in their entirety, before (for the setup) or after (for the cleanup) the main tag. This firing will ignore any triggers on the setup or cleanup tag - all of this will occur as a result of the main tag’s trigger. That’s it! Simple, right?

Of course, there’s a little more to it than that. Come with us on a journey to explore the ins and outs of sequenced tags.

As a side note, there’s another feature that lets you manipulate the order of your tags in a different way - known as tag firing priority - but that’s a blog post for another day.

So how do I use it?

I’m so glad you asked!

Let’s start with a simple example - say you want to keep a record of how many events you’ve sent to Google Analytics (GA) per page. You could create your GA event tag as normal. Then you could add a custom HTML tag as a cleanup tag - here’s how (under ‘Advanced Settings’ in your tag setup):

This custom HTML tag should contain whatever you want to do after your tag fires - in this case, update the count of events by pushing a new object to the dataLayer. And we’re done! Regardless of what triggers you have on your custom HTML tag, with these settings, it will always fire after the GA tag does.

But what if the main tag fails?

Conveniently, GTM has an answer for that too. If you want to only fire the cleanup tag once your main tag has been successful, simply check the “Don’t fire [cleanup tag] if [main tag] fails or is paused” box, like so:

The process is also identical in the opposite direction (using a setup tag instead of a cleanup tag).

Can I see an example?

Of course, it’s all well and good knowing the theory behind a feature, but it’s useless unless there’s a reason to use it. Here’s one common use case that we encounter:

Let’s say that you have a marketing vendor which has one tag that they want on all pages, so that they can just have a blanket remarketing audience for anyone who’s visited your site at all. This tag loads in the vendor’s whole JavaScript library as well, and then fires off a hit to the platform using a function from that library.

Then, say they have more specific tags that they want fired on certain interactions, like an add to basket event. If you’ve already loaded in the vendor’s JS library once (in the all pages tag), you don’t want to do it again as it adds unnecessary load time. So you can just make another tag with just the function call, with the assumption that the library has already loaded.

Usually, the interaction we want to track occurs well after page load and we are all good. However, imagine that one of the interactions that you want to track here is a page view of a product details page (PDP). If you just set your interaction tag to fire on Page View, there’s no guarantee that this will fire before All Pages - they may fire in the opposite order, which will cause your interaction tag to fail.

So you could set up your Interaction Tag (with a trigger that fires on PDPs) to have its own setup tag: the All Pages tag. That way, the interaction tag will always fire after the All Pages tag is completely done, so you know the library has loaded in.

“But wait,” I hear you say, “won’t that mean the All Pages tag will fire twice on these pages?”

We can now go into the All Pages tag, under Advanced Settings > Tag Firing Options, and set it to only fire once per page:

Et voilà! Your All Pages tag will always fire before your interaction tag, but only ever once per page.

This is all well and good for templated tags, where GTM knows when the tag has succeeded and when it’s failed. How about if your setup tag uses custom HTML - how does GTM know whether it’s succeeded or failed?

Success and Failure Listeners

Heads up - it’s going to start to get a bit technical from here onwards!

Handily, the folks at Google seem to think of everything. You can add a line of code in your tag to indicate whether the tag succeeded or failed (technically speaking, it’ll invoke the success or failure callbacks). You’ll first need to enable the “HTML ID” and “Container ID” built-in variables. Here’s what the code looks like:

Successful:

 google_tag_manager[{{Container ID}}].onHtmlSuccess({{HTML ID}});

Failed:

 google_tag_manager[{{Container ID}}].onHtmlFailure({{HTML ID}});

Very simple - add the appropriate line at the appropriate point (for example, add the onHtmlFailure event in a catch block after an error has occurred). This will let your sequenced tags know whether they should fire (callbacks like this are actually the same behind-the-scenes method that GTM uses to know if your templated tags have succeeded or failed, but not-so-behind-the-scenes in this case).

Be careful, though. As soon as you call either onHtmlSuccess or onHtmlFailure, the tag sequence will start to work its magic - even if the tag hasn’t finished running. This means that you might still end up with both tags running at the same time, depending on where you put onHtmlSuccess. Let’s illustrate this with an example.

Say you have two tags: A and B. You set up tag sequencing, so that A is your ‘main tag’, and B is your ‘cleanup tag’. You also check the box that says “Don't fire Tag B if Tag A fails or is paused”.

Now, let’s say that your code for tag A calls the onHtmlSuccess event halfway through, while it’s still not finished running through every line. This will immediately trigger tag B to start, and depending on how quick each one is to run, might actually mean tag B finishes before tag A does. To see this visually:

Of course, part of the whole benefit of tag sequencing is being rid of that asynchronicity that I mentioned at the start - therefore, my recommendation is that unless you have a very good and very deliberate reason for doing so, always put your onHtmlSuccess and onHtmlFailure functions at the end of your tags!

Misusing Success and Failure Callbacks

This section is a very niche use case, so if you don’t think you’ll be writing complex custom HTML tags for use in tag sequencing, feel free to skip this bit!

Bearing in mind what I just said - always have those functions at the end of the tag unless you know what you’re doing - there are a couple of things to be aware of if you do choose to change the order around.

Firstly, related to the fact that calling onHtmlSuccess will immediately start the next tag: in a very similar way, calling onHtmlFailure will immediately prevent the next tag from firing. Admittedly if your tag has already failed, you’re unlikely to want to run much more code afterwards anyway, so it shouldn’t make much difference.

The one thing this does mean, though, is that if you call onHtmlFailure at some point, even if you then call onHtmlSuccess later in the same tag, it’s still considered to have failed, and your sequenced tag won’t fire. The first success/failure callback that is invoked is the one that determines whether the sequence continues. So another guideline: write your code such that you will only ever encounter either onHtmlSuccess or onHtmlFailure in the same block.

That’s all, folks!

And there it is - a quick (ish) rundown of what the Tag Sequencing feature does, a few quirks to be aware of, and a common use case. So, if you’d like one of our GTM wizards, tagging masters, and/or code gurus to help you out with your tag manager setup, please feel free to get in touch. We’d love to talk with you!

Dynamic remarketing display creatives have drummed up somewhat of a bad rep in the past, but a creative of this type doesn’t have to be the annoying product ad following you around that everybody thinks of. This blog is going to evaluate the best solutions available to all advertisers, and how each solution can drive direct response for different verticals whilst maintaining brand continuity and a strong user experience.

Why remarketing ads have gained a bad rep

The day that product feeds for display creative were created, and the subsequent platforms to host them were built too, was an exciting one. Advertisers were finally able to show users who had already been to their website through highly tailored creative with the simple addition of a pixel tag or floodlight to their site. Whilst the excitement was high, the focus on good design and strategy was low, as advertisers thought that the power of the product would always win and templates were knocked up with minimal thought to design or branding. 

This was even a recommended creative design from none other than Google themselves back in the day:

This image unfortunately still tarnishes the market with ideas of what dynamic remarketing really is; it’s portrayed as a tech driven solution rather than a creative one. Whilst it is both, there are many options available to ensure great looking creative can also be linked to sophisticated back end technology.

The two types of dynamic remarketing creative

There are two main types of creative when it comes to dynamic display remarketing; a brand lead creative or a product lead creative.

A product lead creative is most suited to eCommerce clients as it's linked to a product feed, which typically only eCommerce (or job site) clients have as they have multiple products on site. These are some examples of ones we have built for other clients:

Hilton Hotels dynamic product remarketing

Superdrug dynamic product remarketing

These are what most people think of when you mention a dynamic remarketing creative.

The second option if you don’t have access to a product feed is to go down a brand creative route. This would typically look like a more standard ad, but it has been tailored to users who have already been to site, like the below:

Legal and General dynamic brand remarketing

This is a great way of showing users who have been to your site a more personalised message without the use of a product feed. In this case a Google Doc feed is manually built and used to populate the imagery and copy within the creative.

The key focal points of any dynamic remarketing ad

Whether you choose to run with a product or a brand creative there are four key areas that you should focus on to ensure your creative looks and performs its best.

Design

Whilst this should be a predominant focus of any creative it is even more important with product remarketing ads as you need to ensure your template is brand lead, engaging and generally just looks nice (which can be harder than you think!).  Whilst using a pre-made template is quick and easy to set up, it doesn’t always lead to a creative that is consistent with your overall customer experience and branding. Always try and reserve some of your media budget for a custom-made template which will guarantee to be on brand. Pushing budget into good design will boost performance from the beginning.

Pre-set templates for a brand dynamic creative are near impossible to come by as there is no ‘one template fits all’ for brands, so here you need to invest in a template which gives you the opportunity to ensure it’s on brand and flexible enough for you from the start.

Both template types must include the fail-safe components including CTAs, logo, key message and campaign imagery.

Animation

Animation is a great way to engage users and enhance the user experience. With product remarketing ads, animation can sometimes be very simple or non-existent; this doesn’t have to be the case. We always ensure we include a click gallery with auto-play animation so users can see all the products in the gallery without having to engage. An intro frame of some sort can also be effective to showcase the brand and grab user attention. Here is an example:

For a brand lead template, animation can be as advanced or simple as you like as on the face of it these just look like your normal HTML ads.

Frequency

As with all digital activity, you must be careful and ideally data driven with your frequency approach. Showing too few ads may be detrimental to your performance, whilst showing too many can annoy users and lead to you losing their trust. In a remarketing environment, a user is likely to have already seen your upper and mid funnel ads so may have already been exposed to a few dozen of your creative already. In remarketing, whether it is dynamic or not, it is extremely important to pay attention to and implement the ideal equilibrium frequency cap for your brand.

Strategy

On a basic level remarketing is simply showing users an ad who have been to your site – but it can be so much more than that. To ensure a successful remarketing strategy you should have your site thoroughly tagged up to collect granular page data. Below is an example of 'good vs. weak' tagging and how it can affect your creative remarketing strategy, based on what information we as marketers can see:

With scenario (1) we can only remarket to people based on the fact they have been to site, but with scenario (3) we can remarket with a whole host of information, and tailor the creative based on this information collected. For example in the third scenario we can show users specific products they have viewed, or products in the same categories, or cross sell them products. This wouldn’t be possible in scenario (1) as we can’t see what users are doing on site.

The right tagging can make the world of difference to your remarketing strategy.

Conclusion

Dynamic remarketing can be a hugely effective strategy within the display banner space when set up correctly and designed well. There are four main areas to focus on when you are thinking about setting up dynamic display remarketing, these being: design, animation, strategy and frequency.

Ensure you are focusing on these areas to avoid any customer annoyance or loss of brand love.

Way back in 2014, Merkle PPC whiz Anna Shirley provided overseas expansion top tips and advice, covering campaign structure, ad copy, keyword choices and further considerations such as seasonality and localisation of your website. Whilst highly applicable today (great job Anna!) there are a few further considerations before and immediately after your expansion to help ensure success.

1. Sales - Over reliance on first interactions converting and how to build brand awareness

With no historical data to help drive decisions and little brand awareness, you may well see low conversion rates and ROI which can lead to unwelcome pressure internally on your organisation. Within this context you might face an uphill battle as your new competition has access to historical data backed up with a strong brand presence. In this regard, they can use a matured cross channel strategy and be reactive to your promotions. They may even be able to reduce industry margins to drive you out of the market.

Of course, this is an advantage you likely hold in your native market, spending years (even decades for some) communicating with your target audience, driving awareness and creating a reputation within your industry to build strong relationships that drive revenue and growth. When launching new search campaigns in a new international market, it is likely that users will be interacting with your brand and services for the first time. They may well in effect be “window shopping” your website rather than actually in market for services and products to purchase right now. As the incumbent to the market, you need to work harder to build a relationship with your new target audience and introduce them to your brand and USPs. It may take many small interactions over a prolonged period before you’re able to learn enough to be savvy with your search marketing to achieve an acceptable ROI.

Solution one

Layer audiences on top of your keywords to help guide where you allocate your budget and customize your messaging to the stage of the purchase path the user has reached. Examples include previous purchases, website category page views and micro conversions such as account sign ups and email submission forms. Without audiences, all searches will be treated as one audience when in fact users will be at different stages of the purchase funnel. This approach alone may see high costs and low ROI as you struggle to distinguish high value from low value users. The following audiences should be set up asap:

• Converter Lists (utilise customer match)
• Website category page views
• Account sign ups
• Submission form entries (quote requests, call backs etc)
• Previous buyers (customer match)
• Abandoned basket users
• Non Converter Lists (to be used as RSLA)

Once these audiences have been created - and allowed to populate - you can then start to leverage Google tools such as similar audiences, Remarking List for Search Ads and audience IF functions. These tools can help inform account structure, budgets and KPIs by isolating or observing these users, customising messaging and allocating promotions. In addition, consider overlaying on to your campaigns any applicable intent audiences such as “in-market” from Google. These audiences will help you isolate users whose browsing behaviour suggests they are actively searching for products / services within your industry, helping to allocate budget to users more likely to convert, which is especially useful for your generic campaigns.

Solution Two

Use display campaigns to build brand awareness. Introduce users to your brand and services through image and text ads in your new market. You’ll see relatively lower CPCs vs search campaigns and you can start to build audience lists to remarket to on search engines. You can then overlay these audience lists on to your search campaigns and apply bid adjustments to ensure your bids are high enough to achieve a strong ad rank when these users search again.

Solution Three

If you have strict ROI targets, consider restricting your coverage away from very generic terms and instead focusing budget on higher intent reseller + model searches within your Shopping and Search campaigns.

For example – You’re a retailer of sports gear and you want to expand into a new market. Take the following three search terms that will typically occur on a search engine:

Search 1) Generic“football boots”

Search 2) Reseller + Generic“Adidas football boots”

Search 3) Reseller + Model “Adidas predator football boots”

Search one represents targeting those very generic, higher funnel search terms which may see high click volumes and spend but a low conversion rate. These users may be just starting their research into football boots and have not reached a stage where they are ready to purchase: the so called “window shoppers.” In comparison, users searching on reseller + model terms demonstrate greater intent and specificity in their search and are more likely to be price sensitive and ready to purchase. If you’re using custom labels in shopping, look to use a high / medium priority label and ensure your company brand managers can quickly apply high intent labels to products that have seen price reductions. Whilst this approach may reduce transaction volumes, ROI will likely increase from a reduction in spend on non converting keywords helping to control internal expectations as the expansion is proving to be profitable. 

Solution Four

Depending on your business and industry, demonstrate expertise and raise your profile as an “educator” website. Consider showcasing your company’s expertise through blogs and expert insight pages with a view to collecting new audiences from the users who visit these pages. You can even consider using Google Analytics to build audiences based on behavioural data such as number of pages viewed as a means of differentiating highly engaged from less engaged site visitors. You can then overlay these audiences onto your search campaigns with settings set to “observation” with a view to applying bid adjustments when you have collected sufficient data.

2. Competitors - They may have significantly shorter delivery times than you

OK, so your customers live in the UK and your warehouses and logistics are built to support speedy delivery. Will you be shipping products from these existing warehouses overseas or building a new infrastructure in the new market? Can you deliver your products from warehouse to consumer within 3-5 days to France? Germany? Spain? Italy? If not, it is highly likely that your new competitors - through their longevity in the market - will be able to do so as it’s their native market. If you’re bringing a new product to the market, then this might not be a problem as only you can offer this to the marketplace. However, if your product is readily available and you’re looking to compete on price, then your competitors have a conversion driving advantage that may impact the performance of your campaigns.  

Ensure a strong supply and delivery chain prior to launching in the new market and don’t be afraid to use location targeting to isolate areas you can easily serve. For example, if your distribution channel means you can reach New York and the US East Coast much sooner than say the mid-west and west of America... then focus on those Eastern US states first!

3. Market Forces - Your price competitiveness may reduce due to competitors reacting to your market entry… So be reactive & strategic through offers & promotions

In all likelihood, price competitiveness within a target market was a major driving force behind your motivation for an expansion there. However, whilst you have likely undertaken a critical assessment of all your inventory to assess competitiveness, don’t be afraid to ask difficult questions and be honest regarding your products / services. If you’re going to struggle to be competitive on price in some areas of your range, focus purely on the areas where you know you will be strong. There is a good possibility your new competitors may reduce prices and increase promotions to counter your impact on their market. This market reactionary force may see products with small margins becoming non-profitable despite earlier anticipating that they would be. When calculating budgets, account for the nature of an auction time search environment. You may see increased CPCs and costs for your bids as your competitors seek to retain their historical average positions on the search engine results page following your entrance. They may even start bidding on your brand terms which could inflate costs.

Solution

Start pushing products within search and shopping campaigns where your pricing is most competitive. Utilise shopping custom labels for high priority / low priority, and target your new audience by pushing promotions and offers that stand out from the competition. By using a label to identify these products, you can be far more sensitive to price changes and therefore react quicker to change. If you don’t identify which shopping products are the most competitive, you’ll struggle to react in the market to changes in price. Furthermore, utilising audiences will allow you to customise the message and the landing page to that audience and utilise your first party data. Take advantage of automated bidding strategies – including automated budget bidding strategies - to take advantage of machine learning and retain greater control of your budget whilst optimising to your favoured KPI.

4. Localisation - Only using a semi-localised website and relying on your current native market employees to drive oversees expansion

Expanding overseas can bring unwanted pressures internally to your organisation through increased employee workloads with new KPIs. In contrast to marketing in your native market, teams must deliver results often without local market knowledge to aid decisions. In this respect, some of our most successful overseas expansions have been from companies that hired local marketers to oversee the expansion, utilising these new employees’ local social, political, consumer and language knowledge to support their campaigns.

Solution

For account managers, it is critical that we are aware of cultural differences that may impact on seasonality and conversion rates as well as assisting with search query work and ad copy messaging. A client here at Merkle recently expanded into a new European market and discovered through hiring a local marketing executive that a product they wanted to push had branding that translated very poorly. The company rebranded the product for the new market and localised the website accordingly to save any potential wasted search advertising spend. In addition, consider creating regional teams and invite them to sit on quarterly calls with your search account managers so that they can be invested in your search activity and feedback their insights and requirements. Regional teams can provide assistance in the creation of ad copy, but do not assume that they will understand your requirements or understand your best practices and therefore oversight is imperative.

5. Targets - With no historical data, overburdening the expansion with unrealistic KPIs and budgets

As search account managers we absolutely thrive on working to targets! However, they must be reasonable and achievable, influenced by past historical performance and be supported by sensible future initiatives. It takes time to collect sufficient amounts of data to derive the learnings that are going to be key to strategic decision making going forward. Managing expectations internally is therefore critical, meaning that your pre-expansion plans must prepare for the worst-case scenarios. Ensuring sufficient cash flow and technical skills are available before expansion would be a sensible starting point.

Conclusion

There are many factors that influence the failure or success of expanding into a new market for the first time. Whilst we have discussed in earlier blogs how optimisations and elements of localisation are essential components of expansion, there are also organisational, logistical and market competitiveness considerations with their implications for strategy that also require adequate consideration to avoid the common pitfalls discussed in this article.

Get in touch with our export team here at Merkle | Periscopix to discover how we can support your international expansion and take advantage of our agency Google export team partnership across search, programmatic, paid social and analytics.

A new range of exciting features has been launched with the recent revamp of the DoubleClick stack (now known as the Google Marketing Platform). One of the most noticeable changes was the introduction of several new creative features in Display & Video 360 (DV360) - formally DBM (Google’s DSP) - including the launch of dynamic creative. Considering Google’s plans to move the dynamic features of Studio into DV360, this launch didn’t come as a surprise to us. However, it does beg the question: how do the dynamic features in DV360 compare to those of the legacy Studio product? (accurate as of October 2018).

Workflow (ease of use)

The most notable factor when comparing the dynamic creative workflow in DV360 to Studio is how easy the new set up is to use. Dynamic in DV360 is a highly intuitive interface with a live variation preview. Studio, on the other hand, has an interface that is harder to use and navigate without training.

DV360:

Studio:

Features

Feeds

In DV360, you can either build out dynamic rules or build out a sheet style feed. If you decide on the former, then a sheet style feed will automatically build out in the back end. This is the only type of feed you can currently use in DV360, however, if you are wanting to use XML, RSS or GMC feeds then you will have to use Studio.

Templates

DV360 includes a suite of pre-set templates you can use by simply dropping in images and copy and building out a strategy. What’s more, if you prefer to create your own templates, you can also upload custom templates from Google Web Designer. Studio, however is only compatible with custom templates – not a problem if you are an old timer when it comes to dynamic, but if you are new to the format you will need developer help to get started.

Pre-set template options in DV360:

Strategy

The strategies available in DV360 are currently limited; you can only build dynamic creative variations for 1^st party audience lists, and In-Market audiences. If you want to build out variations for the wider targeting options (category & contextual targeting, private deals or 3^rd party audience targeting) then you must use Studio. Similarly, if you would like to create dynamic rules based on custom variable data (1^st party audiences) then you need to use Studio – this feature is not available yet in DV360. The method for building strategies/rules in DV360 is, however, much easier and more visual than Studio.

Rule setting in DV360:

Rule setting in Studio:

Summary

In summary, here is a comparison of the two products’ features:

Final thoughts

Clearly, the new dynamic creative product in DV360 can bring many benefits to creatives: an improved workflow, easy to use visual interface and an awesome strategy builder. Yet, until more strategies can run through the DV360 product, we will be continuing to focus our dynamic builds in Studio. We have no doubt more updates will be released into DV360 dynamic creative over the next year, and we look forward to it becoming a more advanced product that will eventually take over from Studio.

It won’t come as a surprise that the number of us using social media has continued to increase in 2018, reaching 3.2 billion worldwide. That’s a 13% increase year on year - overtaking the growth in internet and mobile phone users (Smart Insights).

Below we take you through the four key events and most exciting changes we saw across social media this year.

Scandals and Data Protection

Facebook continued to overshadow the social market, accounting for approximately 75% of time spend on any social platform. Yet 2018 has been an interesting one for Facebook, spending a lot of their time in the spotlight, following the Cambridge Analytica scandal we all watched unfold in March. The discovery that data was harvested from as many as 87M Facebook profiles (CNBC) and a widely followed public grilling of Zuckerberg, resulted in a lack of trust. Public belief that Facebook is committed to protecting the privacy of user datafell by over 65% (NBC).

Ultimately though, Facebook saw an increase of unique users (up 7% year on year) and got away with a £500k fine – the equivalent of Facebook's revenue every five and a half minutes (The Guardian).

Although Facebook’s usage may not have taken the brunt of the scandal, it has had an impact. Alongside the enforcement of GDPR, the topic of ‘personal data’ has been thrust into the limelight, picking up some serious media coverage. There has been a widespread push for transparency, fuelled by concern about who knows what about who.

Facebook continues to feel pressure to be less intrusive, making the following changes in 2018 to try and combat this:

• The addition of “why am I seeing this?”
• Providing complete visibility over all ads running from any given page
• Exposing media spend and the funding source behind political campaigns

It will be interesting to see how the platform expands these initiatives next year as they try to strike the balance between easing public concern and providing advertisers with the advanced targeting capabilities that differentiate them in the market.

The Continued Rise of Video

This year, we all continued to binge on video and social platforms didn’t hesitate to accommodate. IG TV was launched and is likely to see great success if the performance of Facebook Watch is anything to go by – consumption has increased 14x since the start of this year (Facebook). LinkedIn finally joined the party, and launched their video format for advertisers, which we’ve found to be a very valuable addition to our strategies for clients. We’ve also seen some interesting developments from video-centric Snapchat – with continued innovation in the AR space, adding shoppable capabilities to increase their social commerce offering.

There has also been a huge shift toward live content, where brands are now able to communicate with consumers in a non-edited, authentic manner, and we’re lapping it up. One in five Facebook videos are now a live broadcast, which isn’t surprising given that they’re generating 10x the number of engagements (Facebook). Twitter is also prioritising live video, by surfacing them and placing them at the top of users’ feeds. Whilst the ability to incorporate live content into paid activity is still somewhat limited, it’s one to watch moving into the new year – with increased consideration of how it can be incorporated into marketing efforts. Video consumption is expected to account for 78% of total mobile data consumption by 2021– so not one to miss (Cisco, 2017).

The Power of the Influencer

The popularity of influencer marketing continues to rise, with spend predicted to be between five and ten billion pounds a year by 2022. Whilst it’s seen huge successes before, this year the demand for more transparency and authenticity has definitely been a talking point. Primarily, its ability to generate measurable results and tangible insight to prove its value in a marketing mix as well as a need for more regulation (from both a consumer and brand standpoint) around issues such as clear declaration of paid activity and faux-following. Whilst these questions may not have been fully answered yet, progress is being made in the area and it looks to be a very exciting area, with more potential than ever to be a more considered element of the traditional paid media mix. 

Finally, some Paid Social Attribution

One of the more exciting new features from Facebook was rolled out, after more than a year in Beta - Facebook attribution. Whilst it’s still relatively new, it’s going to hugely impact the insight we have into the relationship between paid social and other media channels. Primarily through finally having full viability over impressions served across Facebook and the Google stack, but also allowing us to delve further into cross-device, data-driven-attribution – an area where Google Analytics has traditionally fallen short for us socialites.

To conclude…

It’s been an interesting year; platforms continue to churn out new features, video consumption sky-rockets further, influencer marketing has infiltrated marketing strategies alongside more traditional paid media and there has never been more of a focus on data privacy. Whilst these trends aren’t showing any signs of slowing down in 2019, we’re excited to see what other developments the coming year has in store for the world of social!