PPC Audiences: Audience Segmentation

Back in March, I wrote about defining your PPC audience. It’s the first step in setting up audience targeting for PPC, including search, remarketing, or paid social. Once you’ve defined your audience, it’s time to think about audience segmentation.

Audience segmentation sounds complicated – and it can be, but it doesn’t have to be. In the simplest instance, for a remarketing campaign, you’ll have two audiences: site visitors, and converted visitors. If you want to remarket to those who haven’t purchased yet, you can set up a remarketing audience of site visitors, and exclude converted visitors. This way, only those who didn’t purchase will see your remarketing ads.

But what if you want to get more sophisticated?

Brad Geddes wrote a great article on audience targeting for PPC Hero back in January. Here’s his list of targeting options:

This is a helpful list of thought starters for thinking about audiences. Think about the various types of offers you could show to someone who hasn’t bought in a year, for example. Maybe they’ve run out of whatever it is they bought, and it’s time to reorder. Or maybe you just want to lure them back with a special deal. For users in a free trial, you can show them an ad with a discounted price for the product they’re trialing. The applications are endless.

In B2B, sometimes the use cases for audience segmentation are not so cut and dried. You’re usually not selling anything online, so cart abandoners and purchasers are off the table. It’s not unusual to have a huge audience of people who visited your PPC landing pages, and a very small list of those who filled out a form. What do you do with that audience? If you don’t know anything about them other than the fact that they visited your landing page and didn’t sign up, it’s hard to do much segmenting.

Content marketing is a great way to nurture prospects through remarketing. Think of it as a way to talk to those who haven’t raised their hand yet. It’s also a useful way to start segmenting your audience further. The more times they visit your site, the more you’ll learn about them.

We like to use time-based remarketing with our clients. Time-based remarketing shows different content to users over time, which is especially valuable for long sales cycles. Let’s say your sales cycle is 90 days. You might show one piece of content during the first 13 days, another for days 14-59, and another for days 60-90. Here’s what that can look like:


In this example, the offers start out as informational: white papers with information about access control (which is controlling access to your place of business). Then there’s an offer showing how the product is easy to use. Then it gets more urgent with a mention of workplace violence. Finally, for those who still haven’t converted, there’s a price-point offer.

Depending on which offers users click through, you can start to segment your audience based on what they responded to.

The content and journey will look different for every client. The important thing is to look at your buyer journey to see how long each segment should be targeted. If you don’t know, you can play around with it – test! See how people respond.

Get creative with your audience segmentation. Just make sure to plan it out first. Think about which audiences make the most sense. Think about what content or offers you have available, and which make the most sense for each audience. You may uncover some gaps, meaning you’ll need to create content or offers to fit.

Don’t be afraid to experiment and test! Think of audience segmentation as another PPC test you’re running – just like ad copy testing. If something isn’t working, just shut it down. Test both remarketing and RLSA. With RLSA, you can run “bid only” tests, where you’re simply adjusting bids for the audience. In many cases, this alone can be profitable, or at least informative – again, helping you to create additional audiences. Play around with it.

What are your tips for audience segmentation? Any out-of-the-box segments you’ve tried that work well? Share in the comments!

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PPC Tool Review: AdAlysis

PPC tools are a PPC manager’s best friend. We couldn’t do our jobs without the many free and paid PPC tools we use on a daily basis. Probably my favorite PPC tool is AdAlysis.

AdAlysis, an ad testing and analyzing tool, was created by Brad Geddes about 2 years ago. When it launched, it was a godsend. I’d been spending hours every month trying to manually analyze PPC ad copy data in spreadsheets. It can be done, but it’s so time-consuming that it’s nearly impossible to keep up with for all but the smallest accounts.

That’s where AdAlysis comes in.

AdAlysis uses the search engine APIs to grab data from all your PPC accounts each night. You can use AdAlysis for as many accounts in your MCC as you’d like. When you log in to the tool, you’ll see which accounts have winning ad tests.

There is so much to love about this PPC tool.

Pros of AdAlysis

Analyze PPC ad copy tests for a number of KPIs. The interface will tell you which ads are winning for CTR, conversion rate, conversions per impression, and cost per conversion. It will show you the confidence level of each test, and indicate with red and green the winners.


A note about conversions per impression: Brad has talked in several blog posts about why conversions per impression makes sense. In a nutshell, each time your ad is shown is an opportunity for a conversion. Conversions per impression takes both CTR and conversion rate into account, in essence. And you can see by the screen shot above why I like to use it. In the test above, the top ad is winning for CTR, but the bottom ad is winning for conversion rate and cost per conversion. Conversions per impression is too close to call. We need more data to determine the winner of this test.

Flexible test parameters and confidence levels. You decide, on an account by account basis, how many impressions, clicks, and conversions you need in order to determine a test winner. You also determine the confidence level. I usually stick with 90% – this isn’t brain surgery, it’s just PPC. But if you want a higher level of confidence, you can set it.

Multi ad group tests based on line of text or label. One of the things that’s so hard to do manually is to analyze ad tests across multiple ad groups. If your account is well-structured, chances are you have multiple ad groups for a single product. With AdAlysis, you can group those ad copy tests into a multi-ad group test. AdAlysis will look for ads with the same headline or description; or you can structure your tests by labels. I have run tests across an entire account on calls to action, for example, using labels.

Quality score analysis by multiple metrics. AdAlysis is more than just a PPC tool for ad copy testing. There is also a built-in quality score analysis.

It’ll slice and dice quality score across 12 different metrics! It’s easy to see where quality score issues lie: in expected CTR, ad relevance, or landing page experience.

Dashboard warnings for issues. AdAlysis is more than just an ad copy testing tool. You may have noticed in the screen shot at the beginning of this article that the dashboard shows more than just which accounts have winning ads. It also lists ad groups without tests, broken landing pages, keyword conflicts, and more. If you simply logged in to AdAlysis first thing each morning, you’d know which fires need to be put out first.

Keyword analyses. One of the non-ad testing features I like is the keyword analysis, especially the n-gram analysis. N-grams are single words that appear in search queries, with the data aggregated by the single word across multiple queries.

In this example, there are n-grams that have generated hundreds of clicks without a single conversion. I can review the list and decide if keywords that include this word need to be paused.

They’re always adding new features. Seems like I see new features in AdAlysis every week! That’s probably an exaggeration, but they’re developing new and useful features frequently. A landing page analysis and account level quality score analysis are a couple recent additions.

Excellent documentation and tutorials. One of the things I love about PPC tools developed by people who have run PPC accounts for years is that documentation is usually excellent. There are numerous help articles for AdAlysis, along with video tutorials.

Great, flexible pricing. Pricing is based on the number of ads in the tool, across all your accounts. There is one AdAlysis interface for Google and another for Bing, so if you’re using both engines, you’ll have 2 AdAlysis accounts. Prices start at $25 per month for up to 500 ads. You can upgrade or downgrade as needed, so you’re not locked in. Seriously, it’d be worth paying $25 out of your pocket for this tool!

Cons of AdAlysis

There are a couple of minor cons – nothing to keep me from using the tool, but a review would not be complete without them.

Can’t analyze tests longer than 180 days. Sometimes, for smaller accounts, it takes longer than 180 days to reach significance on a test. My guess is the limit is due to the API, but it’s unfortunate not to be able to test ads for a longer period of time.

N-gram keyword filters are missing ad group and campaign filters. You can view all your keywords and negative keywords in AdAlysis, which is an unexpected benefit. But you can’t drill down for n-grams by campaign and ad group. For example, if I wanted to view n-grams for an individual campaign, I can’t do that. Now, the data is aggregated across the account, but sometimes there are negatives that should be added to one campaign and not another. I’d like to view the data at that level to make the decision. This is minor, but I’d still like the feature.

Recommendation

If you’re not using AdAlysis already, what are you waiting for? It’s a steal for the price, and I use it nearly every day. You can test ads so much faster and more efficiently, leading to better results for your clients.

Have you tried AdAlysis? What do you think?

(By the way, I’m not a paid affiliate or anything, just a happy customer!)

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Paid Social Targeting: Winners and Losers

I’ve been working on a guide for paid social at work the past couple weeks – something we can use to illustrate how it works to achieve client objectives. As I’ve worked through the 3 major paid social channels, I’m realizing that there are winners and losers when it comes to paid social targeting.

Winner: Facebook

At gyro, our clients are all B2B. Many clients initially assume that Facebook won’t work for them, because of its broad appeal. But broad appeal is exactly why Facebook works.

When it comes right down to it, business decision makers are still people – people who probably check Facebook multiple times per day. People who are part of industry-related groups, and who like industry-related Facebook pages. There’s no reason not to use Facebook for B2B.

Facebook’s reach is huge – far bigger than any other social engine. Not only that, but CPCs are relatively low. Their B2B paid social targeting is greatly improved, so we can now target by employer, job title, and other B2B attributes.

When setting up Facebook ads, advertisers choose an objective. Facebook’s options cover every objective we could possibly want:


We don’t use product catalog sales or store visits often in B2B, but the other options are great. I can’t think of a single client whose objectives don’t fit into one of these buckets.

Not only has Facebook thought of every objective, but they optimize by objective. So if you’ve chosen traffic, Facebook will optimize your campaign for traffic. All your reports in the interface will focus on impressions, clicks, and CPC – the exact KPIs you’d want to see. If your objective is conversions, the KPIs will change to conversions, and Facebook will optimize for those. Manually managing bids isn’t necessary anymore – and I’d venture to say it’s counterproductive. I’ve seen better performance when I let Facebook optimize rather than trying to do it myself.

Facebook’s conversion tracking pixel is decent, too. It’s easy to install, and is flexible for different goals. It measures multiple steps in the process, too:


While I know that some advertisers have reported inaccuracies with the Facebook pixel, I’ve found it to be quite accurate for the clients we have using it.

An often-overlooked element of Facebook’s ad platform is their documentation and setup guide. I love this as a quick reference when planning Facebook campaigns, and to give to clients. There is a description of each ad type, along with specs and sample ads – great for taking screen shots! No other social platform comes close to a handy guide like this. Facebook’s other ad documentation is pretty good too, although I admit I’ve had trouble finding answers to my questions now and then.

Facebook ads can also appear on Instagram – another plus. If you have an Instagram page, you can show ads both there and on Facebook, all in one campaign. While Instagram volume is relatively small for B2B advertisers, it’s nice to be able to hit both platforms in the same campaign.

Losers: Twitter and LinkedIn (and everyone else)

Now that I’ve sung the praises of Facebook, it’s easy to conclude that the losers are, pretty much, everyone else. And Facebook is outpacing the other social engines in innovation. We mostly use Twitter and LinkedIn in addition to Facebook, so I’ll focus my “losers” category on them. Pinterest is a loser because the B2B applications are so slim – although Pinterest’s user base is growing, while Facebook’s is holding steady, meaning that Pinterest may become a bigger player at some point.

Thinking about Twitter and LinkedIn, though, they have such a long way to go. Twitter objectives aren’t bad.


If you go to LinkedIn and look for objectives, you’ll be looking for a long time – they don’t have them.

Ad unit options are limited – Twitter has 5 ad units, while LinkedIn only has 3 – and one of those 3 is Sponsored InMail, which really only makes sense for recruiters. And if you’ve ever tried LinkedIn sponsored ads, you know that performance is awful. The only viable option for LinkedIn for B2B is sponsored updates, and even those options are limited – you only get one type of ad unit.

Reach doesn’t come close to Facebook on LinkedIn, either. Most of our clients interested in social PPC come to us asking for LinkedIn, but find that Facebook offers more volume, more frequency, and significantly lower CPCs. I can’t tell you the last time I looked at my LinkedIn feed, but I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve checked Facebook just today.

Twitter has the opposite problem – their reach is too broad. Targeting options are so heavily skewed toward B2C that it’s hard to find good targeting for B2B, unless you’re targeting specific users. Keyword targeting is nearly useless, and will result in an audience of millions of people. And there’s no way to narrow targeting by saying “include these keywords AND these interests,” for example. It’s all “OR” targeting – what a nightmare. And if your Twitter targets use TweetDeck or other third party clients, ads are filtered anyway. I hope no one is trying to use paid social targeting to reach me on Twitter – I rarely see ads!

Twitter and LinkedIn don’t have automatic bid optimization, either. You still need to set bids. And it’s hard to know where to set them, since the ranges they suggest are often crazy – $15+ for LinkedIn, for example. And since few third parties offer bid management tools for paid social, you’re stuck with manual bid management.

Conversion tracking is downright awful. Both engines have a pixel, but I’ve yet to get Twitter’s pixel to work. We’ve actually paused Twitter campaigns because we can’t get conversion tracking to work. And LinkedIn’s pixel isn’t very flexible.

And if you’re looking for ad documentation, forget it. As I was working on my paid social guide, I tried to find examples of the different ad formats that I could take screen shots of. No luck – as far as I can tell, they don’t exist. I had to take screen shots of our client’s ads – which isn’t ideal, if we ever want to share the guide with prospects.

Am I saying that B2B advertisers should stick to Facebook and ignore Twitter and LinkedIn? Not at all. We’ve had great success with both channels for the right clients. But from a management standpoint, an ease-of-use standpoint, and a paid social targeting standpoint, Facebook wins hands down.

What about you? Have you found Facebook to be the big winner for paid social? Or do you prefer LinkedIn, Twitter, or something else? Share in the comments!

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PPC Audiences: Who Is The Audience?

Several weeks ago, I wrote about the importance of audiences in PPC. More than ever, audiences are becoming one of the main way we reach potential customers in PPC – as important as keywords. But who is the audience, exactly?

Audiences, Broadly Speaking

Broadly, your audience is whoever is buying your product. Large B2C retailers like Amazon probably don’t spend much time defining their audience – it’s anyone with a credit card, really.

But for most advertisers, it’s important to drill down a little deeper than that. For many consumer products, the audience is obvious. People buying diapers tend to be parents of babies. People buying guns tend to be male. There are always exceptions, but you can hit 80-90% of your audience by doing some simple targeting.

B2B Audiences Are Challenging

In B2B, audience targeting is a little more challenging. There are multiple stakeholders involved – product users, executive decision-makers, administrative assistants, purchasing departments, and more. How do you figure out who to target?

Verticals Dictate Audiences

In some ways, the audience depends on the vertical. If you’re selling software, the first person to target is the end user. Even if that person doesn’t make the final purchase decision, they’re going to be the one asking for the software. For example, I’d been looking for a solution to help with ad testing for years. When AdAlysis came out, I immediately started begging my boss to buy it. I was relentless – and it paid off. But I didn’t write the check – my boss did. If I were advertising for AdAlysis, I’d go after the PPC practitioners, not the vice presidents of search who likely aren’t actively managing campaigns.

For other verticals, targeting C-level executives makes sense. Let’s say you’re a medical equipment provider who’s developed a new piece of equipment that saves time and makes a more accurate diagnosis.  You could target the end users, but it may make sense to target the hospital CFO or the finance director, who’s looking for ways to make the hospital more efficient. End users may not be aware of the product, and may be happy with the way they’re currently doing things, but if you can convince the CFO, you’re likely to make a sale.

Business Size Does, Too

Business size plays a role, too. The larger the company you’re targeting, the harder it is to get through to C-level folks – they’re inundated with marketing messages already. You may be better off reaching their executive assistant, or going lower down the ladder to mid-level managers.

Understand that when you’re trying to reach large companies, you’ll have to get creative with your audience, and with your messaging as well, to break through the clutter.

And if you’re targeting small businesses, understand that employees wear many hats. The CFO is probably the entire accounting department. The web developer is probably the graphic designer, and maybe the software/tech person too. The owner may be the CMO, CFO, and CEO all at once. These are busy people, so if you can come to them with solutions to make their lives easier, you’ll get through the door more easily.

Personas Help

If you’re working with larger advertisers, they’ll often have a detailed understanding of their prospects, and may have personas. A persona is a representation of your audience segment. (BTW – this link has a great how-to on creating personas).

Here’s an example of a persona that gyro created:


Personas help define not only who your target audience is, but how to reach them. Ideas for paid social targeting practically jump off the page – age, education, gender, and other characteristics are listed right there. Pain points that could be used for search keywords or ad copy are also there: patient care quality, accountable care, etc. Personas give you a great start in identifying your audience.

Determining who is in the audience is the first step to successful audience targeting. What are some ways you define your audience? Share in the comments!

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3 PPC Features That Aren’t Ready For Prime Time – 2017 Edition

Almost exactly 2 years ago, I wrote about 3 PPC features that weren’t ready for prime time – the new (at that time) Adwords Editor, Bing Ads UET, and LinkedIn Ads.

The first two features have come a long way in 2 years. The issues I talked about with Adwords Editor stopped soon after, and I finally got used to it, even though I liked the old Editor better. I’ve gotten used to its quirks, though, and now that the Bing Ads Editor has followed the same format, it’s become my everyday workflow.

The developers and UI engineers at Bing Ads have gone to great lengths to make UET easier to use. The setup is much more intuitive than it was 2 years ago. It’s as easy to use as Google Analytics.

As for LinkedIn Ads? Keep reading. Here are 3 PPC features that aren’t ready for prime time, the 2017 edition.

LinkedIn Ads

LinkedIn Ads should be a no-brainer for B2B advertisers. In fact, it’s the paid social channel that our clients think of first – everyone wants to advertise in LinkedIn.

The problem is, their UI is horrible. Their reporting is horrible. Their CPCs are astronomical compared to other channels like Facebook – and Facebook’s B2B targeting now rivals LinkedIn’s.

I complained about LinkedIn in 2013 and again in 2015. Here it is 2017, and I’m still complaining about them. I had hoped that when Microsoft bought them, things would improve. That’s still possible – the details of the purchase are still being worked through legal. But right now, it’s a mess to use – and has been for 4 years at least.

Twitter Ads

I used to like Twitter Ads. We’ve used them effectively for several clients over the years. But they haven’t kept pace with the times. The ads interface, even the new one, is clunky to use. Reporting is horrible – as bad as LinkedIn’s. Targeting on Twitter Ads is awful. Unless you know the exact Twitter handles you want to target, you’re basically shooting in the dark. Keyword targeting is a joke. There isn’t any real B2B targeting. Behavior targeting is totally B2C focused, and even then is missing key categories.

Check out the business types available:


A whopping 2 types! Are they kidding?

And what about job titles?

If you’re not targeting executives or the C-suite, forget it. And these poor people are bombarded with ad messages as it is.

There is so much potential here, but the limited targeting and broad reach just doesn’t work for most advertisers. On top of that, their conversion tracking tags don’t seem to work – or at least we can never get them to work. You’re relegated to tracking in GA, or not at all.

Bing Ads Remarketing

Sorry, Bing Ads – I love you guys, I really do, but the remarketing program leaves a lot to be desired. At this point, only RLSA is available in Bing – retargeting visitors as they perform searches. RLSA is a high-performing, but very low volume, tactic. With Bing’s smaller audience to begin with, compared to Google, it’s hard to move the needle with RLSA on Bing for all but the largest advertisers.

Also, up until a week ago, Bing Ads didn’t offer exclusions for remarketing. Sorry guys – that’s a huge miss. Just a couple weeks ago, I wrote about how not to do remarketing, and one of the no-no’s was failing to exclude those who already converted. Up until a week ago, this wasn’t possible with Bing remarketing.

As I was thinking about the 2017 culprits, I realized that, in general, the search engines have gotten much better about making sure features work well before releasing them. I struggled to think of the last time an engine released a feature that was a nightmare to use. Sure, there have been boneheaded releases like automatically including phone numbers in ads, whether you want them or not, but this is an opt-out-or-you’re-stuck-with-it thing, not a feature we’re trying to actively use. So either the engines have made it easier on us, or we’re all getting more skilled. Probably a little bit of both.

What PPC features have you noticed that aren’t ready for prime time? Do you agree with my list? Share in the comments!

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PPC Remarketing: What Not To Do, 2017 Edition

More than two years ago, I wrote a post on PPC Remarketing: What Not To Do. It was one of the most-commented posts on this blog, with differing opinions on what makes sense.

Two years later, advertisers are still doing remarketing wrong. Now, I get that it’s still a somewhat new-ish concept, and not everyone is doing advanced remarketing yet. And that’s ok – we all have to start somewhere. But when I see basic mistakes being made by large companies, it makes me cringe.

Here’s the example I saw today that prompted this:

This was at the very top of the page, above a news article I was reading. The good news? It’s a huge banner – you can’t miss it. How did I know it was a remarketing ad?

Because I’ve already booked a stay here.

Next week, I’m speaking at a client convention in Los Angeles. I booked my hotel over a month ago. Earlier this week, I dug out the reservation confirmation email, and clicked through a link to prepare for my stay. And now I’m being bombarded by ads asking me to book this hotel in LA! How many stays do they think I’m going to be booking?

Clearly, this is how not to do PPC remarketing. Don’t target people who clicked through a reservation confirmation email and ask them to book!

Of course, as I’m known to do, I posted a comment on #ppcchat. I loved the responses I got:

I agree with Julie – I’d love to see the stats on how many remarketing ads just run without any parameters or audiences. I can see serving ads for a perk, as Julie suggests, such as a rewards signup. Or a dining offer at one of the hotel restaurants. Or 25% off a massage in the spa. Or whatever – the point is, remarketing would be highly effective to the already-converted audience as an upsell. It’s not at all effective to ask those who’ve already booked a room to book a room.

It’s so simple to set up an exclusion for people who converted. As mentioned earlier, the hotel could set up a PPC remarketing audience of users who visited the site from a confirmation email referral. Failing that, they could exclude everyone who viewed the reservation confirmation page.

There are exceptions, though, as Steve Seeley pointed out:

Fair enough – and I agree, some agencies and/or advertisers don’t link their AdWords and Google Analytics accounts. I get that there are reasons why this happens. But if you can’t do remarketing correctly, you shouldn’t be doing it!

We then got into interesting use cases for PPC:

I’ve seen similar situations to the one Jason describes: getting remarketed with ads for a product I just bought. Again, it’s not hard, as Richard Fergie suggests, to drop a long cookie and delay showing ads until you’re likely to be ready to repurchase. Tires do wear out, as do clothes and shoes; food gets consumed; etc. Learn your buying cycle or buyer journey and show ads at the appropriate time. Yes, it takes some research and some time to set up, but this is really what remarketing is designed for – not harassing people with irrelevant ads, but showing them ads that are useful.

I love the conversations we have on #ppcchat. I always learn something and get great ideas. Just as I was smiling from all the cool interaction, I got this:

Sigh.

Have you seen any what-not-to-do remarketing ads lately? Got any tips for the right way to do PPC remarketing? Share in the comments!

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The Importance of Audiences In PPC

Happy New Year to all my readers! Every year I do a reader poll to see what you want me to write about. This year, the topic with the most votes was audiences in PPC.

It seems like everyone is talking about audiences. In the annual “what’s next for search in 2017” posts, every single one included multiple mentions of audiences and their importance to PPC.

Take this quote from Brad Geddes in the adStage blog:

And this, from Marc Poirier on Search Engine Journal:

These and other predictions posts are worth a read – there’s great content beyond that of audiences. But the point is, audiences are here to stay, and they’re big.

Julie Friedman Bacchini wrote a great post earlier this week about the demise of keywords. While I don’t think keywords are going away any time soon, we are in for a different reality when it comes to search.

For one thing, social PPC is here to stay, and audience targeting is the focal point. It’s true that you can use keywords to target social ads, but keyword targeting alone is insufficient for social PPC success. You must layer audiences onto the mix.

Remarketing is here to stay too, and it’s a great example of using audiences in PPC. In fact, remarketing lists for search ads (RLSA) is a match made in heaven of search intent and audience targeting combined.

Why are audiences so important in PPC? After all, in the early days, we didn’t think about audiences at all.

Audiences bring us back to the basics of marketing. Eons ago, in business school, I learned about the 4 P’s of marketing: people, place, price, and promotion. In search, the “people” piece was historically the least thought-about aspect. Do we really care who’s searching, as long as they click and convert?

Turns out, we do need to care. Search has evolved over the years: it’s become much more competitive and expensive, for one thing. Advertisers who were happy to pay for lots of non-converting traffic at $0.05 per click are probably not real happy about that traffic at $5 per click. Search had to evolve in order for advertisers to maintain profit. And that’s where audiences come in.

Over the next weeks and months, I’ll be writing more about audiences in PPC and the various ways they can be used to take your campaigns to the next level. I’ll talk about audiences in search, in paid social, and in remarketing. I’m hoping to get a few guest bloggers on board to offer their views on audiences in PPC. And of course, as always, I want to hear from you! Have audiences become super important for you in your PPC efforts, or are you just dipping your toes in? Share in the comments!

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Where Facebook Ads Are Beating Google

Now and then, we see talk in the blogosphere about Facebook Ads being the next best thing in online advertising. For years, I viewed that sentiment with skepticism. How could a social network, with no search or intent, ever perform better than Google?

Well, Facebook recently launched a Shop function. And while it hasn’t taken off in a big way yet, it could. Just think about all the data Facebook has that Google doesn’t.

Here’s the kicker, though. As I was setting up a new Facebook Ads campaign this week, it hit me. Facebook makes advertising easy by focusing on advertiser goals: what do you want to accomplish?

facebook ads objectives
Just look at this. Not only are the goals stated in plain English (reach people near your business, collect leads for your business, increase conversions on your website, etc.), but Facebook has grouped the objectives along the buyer journey.

Think about that for a second.

Nearly every advertiser we work with understands at least a little about how users go about deciding to buy from them. Whether their product is an impulse buy or a long-term consideration deal, the advertiser knows where they fall.

And most of the time, the advertiser knows what they want to do, even if it’s in basic terms: “We need to increase sales.” “No one knows about us, so we need to create awareness.” “We want people to attend our event later this month.” Simple.

Not only does Facebook make it easy to choose your objective, they tailor the campaign setup experience to your objective. Different objectives have different ad options. While this may seem confusing or complex to those of us used to setting up Adwords campaigns, for a novice advertiser it’s much more intuitive. There are fewer levers to pull, but also fewer choices to try to understand.

Facebook also optimizes campaigns for your objectives. More often than not these days, I just set my Facebook Ads campaigns to optimize for my objective. Why bother dealing with bid management when you don’t need to? We get great CPCs and reach on Facebook even when we use auto-optimize.

Why is that? Well for one thing, Facebook has frequency – something Google Search doesn’t have. People don’t always search for the same thing over and over, but on Facebook, you can see the same ad multiple times, making it harder to forget. And Facebook knows who we are – which can be a huge hurdle for search, where you have the intent portion, but no idea whether the person searching falls into your target audience.

Let’s contrast the Facebook experience with Adwords. Here’s the first page in Adwords signup:

adwords-signup-1
Yikes, an email opt-in. Not the best start. Before I even know whether I want to do this or not, Google is asking for my email address. Facebook already has it, since you need an email address to sign up. It’s the same thing, but feels different to the user.

And then there’s Adwords Step 2:

adwords-signup-2

Hoo boy. Complicated language about a campaign (what’s that??), a budget (whoa), “choose a target audience,” which doesn’t look like a target audience from the mindset of a novice advertiser, and “set your bid.”

Think about this for a second. Two of the three steps have to do with money – before I even see what I’m getting or who I’m reaching, I have to tell Google how much I’m willing to spend each day and for every click – and “Adwords automatically sets your bids to help you get as many clicks as possible within your budget.” And I pay for every one of those clicks!

Can you see the difference here? Facebook focuses on the experience – they don’t ask for a budget until everything is set up, and if you choose to let them optimize, you never see a bid at all. Instead, Facebook thinks about campaigns the way advertisers do – by objective and audience.

Looking at it another way, let’s say I’m talking to a new prospect who is thinking about doing online advertising. Do I go in and immediately ask them to opt in to our agency emails, and then immediately ask them what their budget is? Or do I ask them what their goals and objectives are, and talk about their target audience? Which of these approaches is going to win me the sale?

Exactly.

Now of course I love Adwords. I wouldn’t be where I am today if it wasn’t for them. And Adwords campaigns are some of the most effective around. We have countless options: text, image, video ads; remarketing, Google Display… the list goes on. In the hands of an experienced professional, Adwords is a beautiful thing indeed.

But to the advertiser, it’s confusing. How many hours do we all spend each week just trying to explain Adwords to clients? Yet everyone understands Facebook, because they use it every day; and because it makes marketing sense to them.

And who knows? We may see Facebook overtake Google at some point.

What do you think? Is Facebook’s approach more logical than Google’s? Will Facebook Ads continue to grow in importance, or will Google remain king? Share in the comments!

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Using Competitive PPC Intelligence Effectively

Earlier this week, an interesting discussion started on the PPCChat hashtag on Twitter regarding the use of competitive PPC intelligence obtained from tools such as SEMrush, SpyFu, and iSpionage, as well as visiting competitor websites. I commented that I was doing competitor research, and wondered how many remarketing ads I’d see as a result.

A few PPCChat’ers suggested some ways to avoid being retargeted. Shashikant Kore recommended using the incognito window of Chrome. Dan Nicholson said he uses a separate Google account or user in Chrome to avoid that problem. These are great suggestions if you don’t want to be followed around by irrelevant remarketing ads.

The discussion then turned to competitor landing page reviews. Julie Bacchini asked:  “Is it one of your standard practices to visit competitor sites too to see their remarketing?” John Ellis replied, “Yes, not only visit the site, but explore different pages to get the most variety possible.”

I do this as well – at a minimum, I’ll visit competitor landing pages and take screen shots to share with our clients. Often, we get ideas from competitor landing pages – or at least we learn what not to do!

But what if you want to see what competitors are doing with remarketing? There are definitely instances where this would be helpful, especially if your clients are asking for this information.

Julie Bacchini said she subscribes to email lists of competitors and follows them on social media. I’ve done this before, or I’ll set up Google Alerts for the competitor name to see what shows up.

Steve Seeley took it a step further: “I do the same, then target Gmail users with their domain and advertise better offers.” Great idea (and very sneaky!)

We then got into a lengthy and detailed conversation about the accuracy of competitor PPC intelligence on traffic volume and spend. Timothy Jensen put the following out there:

General PSA: don’t ever rely on a competitor tool for competitor spend estimates that are anywhere close to accurate.

I agreed, saying we use the data directionally, rather than as the exact amount. For example, if the tool says your client is spending $10,000 per month and Competitor A is spending $50,000 per month, you can assume that Competitor A is outspending your client by a factor of 5 to 1.

But Kirk Williams argued that even directional data can be off the mark: “When I analyzed my clients it ranged from like -200% to +500% in accuracy.” Jason Channell countered by saying he’d tested several of the tools against campaigns where he knew the spend, and the tool was accurate within plus or minus 20%. That’s been my experience as well. I can live with a margin of +/- 20%.

So why is Kirk seeing estimates that are that far off? It could be that some competitors (or his clients) are using dayparting, geotargeting, or even device targeting that’s throwing off the tools. Remember, competitive PPC intelligence tools scrape the SERPs and estimate – they don’t actually KNOW what everyone is spending. They scrape and guess. So things like geotargeting can throw off the accuracy, or even cause the tools to report no spend at all.

If tools are really so inaccurate, should we even use them? The consensus seemed to be that yes, competitor intelligence tools still have value, especially those that show the ads and keywords competitors are using (most tools do this). As far as spend goes, Kirk Williams had a great idea: just say “tool estimates aren’t exact, but it does look like you’re on the low end of spend.” I always include a caveat in any competitor report saying the numbers are estimates only.

Finally, I loved the suggestion from Kevin Cronin: “I try to shift conversation from competitor spend to ‘is this the right channel/targeting for you? If yes, take advantage.’” I’ve written many a post on this blog about PPC strategy, and that’s what Kevin’s point gets to – what is your ultimate goal anyway? Focus on that and not your competitors. One of the great aspects of PPC is that the “little guys” can compete with advertisers with deeper pockets, simply by sticking to their own goals and finding their niche.

How do you use competitive PPC intelligence data? Do you find it to be wildly inaccurate, or is it good enough? Share in the comments!

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Channels Are Not Strategy

Earlier this week, TechCrunch published an article by Samuel Scott called How Google Analytics ruined marketing. It’s a lengthy but important article saying that’s because Google Analytics (and all web analytics packages, for that matter) force marketers into looking at performance by channel, instead of focusing on strategy and objectives.

In the years before web analytics, the article says, no one talked about “television marketing;” yet people today constantly talk about “Facebook marketing,” “content marketing,” and even “social media marketing.” These, the author states, are not strategies.

I couldn’t agree more.

I’ve written about strategy so many times that I created an entire section on this blog for it. And yet, on what feels like a daily basis, I hear marketers talking about “Facebook marketing” and the like as a strategy.

Here’s the thing: a strategy is a means for achieving a business goal. According to Wikipedia, “marketing strategy has the fundamental goal of increasing sales and achieving a sustainable competitive advantage.” If you read the rest of that Wikipedia page, it reads like a college textbook on marketing. It takes me back to my undergrad and master’s degree days.

The point is, we’ve forgotten what we learned in school. Channels aren’t strategy.

Lots of marketers mistake tactics or tools for strategy. Sometimes they get stuck on a particular creative idea, and want that idea to become their “strategy.” But ideas aren’t strategy. They’re ideas, and creative is an important part of any marketing mix. But the strategy should help a business achieve goals – not be an end in itself.

The same thing goes for calling “Facebook marketing” a strategy. It’s not.

That’s not the worst of it. Even the TechCrunch author got it wrong! Here’s his example:

techcrunch strategy
This isn’t strategy either! SEO is a channel, not a strategy. Take a step back: why did the person create informational material in the first place? No one creates information material for the fun of it. They’re doing it to sell stuff! That’s the strategy, not SEO.

When decision-makers think about marketing strategy (and spending their money on any type of marketing efforts), they have questions in their mind. Back in 2014, I wrote about 7 Things About PPC Strategy Your Clients Want to Know. In the post, the first thing mentioned is campaign goals. What are we trying to accomplish? And “be on Facebook” or “get to the top of Google” aren’t goals. You can spend a bunch of money marketing on Facebook or bidding high on Google, only to find it didn’t generate a single sale. This is why channels aren’t strategy. They don’t achieve goals.

Another question in the client’s mind is “how do we know if we’ve succeeded?” Well, if your strategy is “Facebook marketing,” you’ve succeeded the second you put a post on Facebook. And if that’s true, then every crappy company who’s posting to a Facebook page is succeeding. We all know that’s absurd.

Remember, a strategy includes goals and objectives. Sure, your strategy may be to “use Facebook to reach our target audience and generate sales of blue widgets” or “engage in SEO to improve visibility of key product pages to increase sales.” But the strategy isn’t “Facebook marketing” or “SEO.” Those are tactics – means to an end.

To make sure your strategy stands up, check out my Ultimate Cheat Sheet on PPC Strategy.

What do you think? Do you find that marketers understand strategy, or are clients coming to you saying “we want to be on Facebook”? Share in the comments!

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