In her hit session at today’s SMX Convert, Amy Bishop, Owner and Marketing Consultant and Cultivative, schooled us on multi-channel targeting tactics to turn prospects into paying customers. Her three-step strategy includes ways to better understand your audience, how to determine their varying paths to purchase, and tips to ensure that you’re targeting them at every stage along that path.

Knowing your target audience

Just like on the SEO side, it’s critical to have your personas handy for this exercise. If you don’t have a set group of personas, Bishop included a few questions to ask yourself about your potential target audience (plus some handy sheets for B2B and B2C):

She says the best way to dig into personas is to involve other client-facing teams, as well. This includes getting with customer support, sales, customer success, and more to answer these questions about your target audience.

• What is your target audience solving for?
• Where do they get their information?
• What characteristics make them a good prospect?
• What are indicators that they’re in-market?
• What influences them?

Along with asking these key questions, Bishop also recommends using the data you already have at your fingertips. “If you have a Facebook account, even if you’re not running ads, you have a wealth of information in Facebook audience insights,” she said. It’ll take some sorting through initially, but Bishop recommends identifying top purchaser demographics and zeroing in from there. After that, you can further segment by layering interests and other demographics and then identify specific interests to target. From there, you can monitor performance to flesh out and validate your personas.

Other sources of persona data that Bishop uses include the following:

• Google Ads audience insights,
• Google Analytics demographics insights, and
• Google Analytics conversion data.

Designing your campaigns to support the funnel

Catering to your prospects means supporting their journey toward that final conversion (whatever conversion is for your organization — it isn’t always a purchase!). “A common question that I get,” said Bishop “is which channels belong where [in the funnel]. I would really caution against this line of thinking because most channels have different ways that you can reach prospects. It doesn’t have to be ‘YouTube at the top, then display, and then search.’ You can make any channel work for you depending on who your prospects are and which channels they use and which targeting options are available across all channels.”

Instead, she recommends focusing on targeting options at each stage of the funnel:

In the first stage, work on targeting options that go for potential customers who don’t know all their options yet. After that, seek options that allow you to capture prospects seeking solutions and to re-engage those who have engaged in the past. Finally, at the bottom of the funnel, we want to target options to convert hot traffic to leads or sales.

Bishop maps this out in a spreadsheet asking these questions:

• What stage of the journey is the prospect in?
• What information do they need at that stage to feel comfortable moving to the next stage?
• What action or resource do we have available that is going to meet that information need that they have?
• How are we tracking it and creating an audience off of it?

In order to acquire this data to answer these questions, Bishop recommends looking into the data you DO have to complete this spreadsheet:

• First party data can tell you paths and interactions
• Client-facing resources can give you information on objections and questions
• Publicly available data can serve as market research
• Your market can give you info through customer surveys

Considerations for improving your campaign performance

If you’ve taken all the steps above and in Amy Bishop’s SMX Convert presentation and are still having some hiccups, here are some common mistakes she’s noticed in campaigns before.

Lack of data

“As marketers, we love to have control, so we end up making hyper-specific audience. But what happens is that we over-segment them and, even if [these small audiences have] brought conversions in the past, sometimes CPL and CPA can be pretty volatile,” said Bishop. With automation becoming more of a factor in PPC every day, platforms thrive on data. removing some of the segmentation (device, platform, etc.) can help create a larger audience. This can help give your bidding strategy a boost.

Not optimizing to a higher funnel conversion

“Even if you’re in the bottom of the funnel you can optimize to a higher in the funnel conversion,” she recommends. One of Bishop’s clients was struggling to get out of learning mode, so they tried optimizing to Add to Cart. They saw huge increases in ATC, a 91% increase in purchases, and a 155% increase in purchase value. These are all strategies worth testing for your campaigns if it makes sense.

Not testing better qualifying audiences and look-alikes

“Having any first-party data is good,” said Bishop. “That’ll only become more important as time goes on. Even better than that is putting some qualifications around it.” Analyze the behaviors of SQLs and work to find more of those by feeding those data values back into platforms.

The keys to improving your targeting are threefold, Bishop told us at SMX Convert. Really get to know your audience beyond surface persona data. Work to understand their path to purchase. And, finally, designs your campaigns around that path to purchase.

Want to see the whole session? Sign up to watch the entire SMX Convert learning journey on-demand.

The post Three targeting tactics that power every stage of the funnel appeared first on Search Engine Land.

Having spent the last 11 years surrounded by sales leaders, Amanda Farley Partner and Director of Accounts and Digital Strategy at SSDM, picked up on some of their biggest successes and opportunities. But recently, she had the idea to apply them outside of the sales box and into her digital marketing campaigns. “This is really what sales and marketing integration is all about,” said Farley. “It’s about building the relationships, the trust and guiding [buyers] to impactful solutions that ultimately lead into more sales or leads.

Learning from the sales process: An introduction to buyer influencers

These buyer personas are based on a book called, The New Strategic Selling by Robert B. Miller and Stephen E. Heiman. “Your strategy can only begin when you know who your players are,” added Farley. “The best way to think of it is like a football team: every player must be on the field to close the deal.”

• Economic buyer. Has the ability to commit funds to a purchase
• User buyer. The end-user of your product or service
• Technical buyer. Ensures all the technical specifications are met
• Coach. Really wants your solution to win

When we take this into our marketing efforts, we need to understand what each audience cares about most, what their content preferences are, and what channels they’re most likely to engage in.

Economic buyer

“This person prefers content with data visualizations, photography, and charts because they’re ROI-focused and need the social proof behind any decision that they’re going to make,” said Farley. They’re also high consumers of video content and love to see case studies and financial models.

User buyer

The user buyer is the one responsible for screening out potential solutions and understands all the key factors that go into various options they’re considering. This person is interested more in the details than the high-level overview that the economic buyer might find more interesting. The user buyer engages with charts, infographics, solution comparison guides, or category matrices.

“They’re whole ‘thing’ is being able to pitch [the product/service] to their economic and technical buyers,” added Farley. This user also cares deeply about how the solution will help them: will it make my job easier, better, faster, etc.?

Technical buyers

This buyer’s main role is to run interference for the economic buyer. “At the enterprise level, we see this with purchasing departments or procurement, but it can also be an operations manager. The question this buyer is always asking if the solution has what it takes to make the entire organization successful. The technical buyer is focused on data and leverages the user buyer for expertise.

Coach

This can be any of the other buyers or an outside influencer. They have potential personal gain from you winning. “This is someone who’s going to get something from your solution being the key decision,” said Farley. If you have a key influencer in your audience who is also a coach, that’s how to unlock success from marketing campaigns.

How to leverage these buyer personas in your PPC campaigns

Step 1. Define the buyer influencers. This is the part where you amass as much information as you can. Talk to customer service, sales teams, marketing teams, and more. Determine the person’s role in the buying process, their background and education, the company size, the buyer’s demographics or other defining traits, and their motivations, pain points and entry points.

“If they’re in growth mode, that’s a good foot in the door. But if they’re in trouble, it will always trump growth in sales,” said Farley. “So, from a marketing perspective, if we know trouble pain points, that’s also where we should focus because we know that it will ultimately make the difference.”

Step 2. Perform audience research. Now that you’ve found each buyer type and maybe new ways to think about your audience, you need to deep dive into the data. Figure out what your audience cares about most. What websites are they on? What YouTube channels do they watch the most? What social media preferences do they have? What types of content are they sharing?

From there, Farley recommends noting the differences in this information between influencers. You may find some overlap, but the differences can help inform your strategy even more. In an example with an aerospace client, she found that the economic buyer’s second most-used social media channel was LinkedIn while the user buyer went to Instagram. This can change how you focus your campaign strategies and messaging for each platform.

The last part of the research is keyword and topic analysis. Any of the main keyword tools work for this part. “We look at — what are the key focus points? Is there any overlap? But also can I actually spot the buyer influencer” in what and how they’re searching, Farley said. This can craft how you’re displaying content and creating search ads or messaging landing pages. The key, she says, it tweaking the messaging for each product or service campaign to target those buyer personas.

Step 3. Other ways to use data and audience research. You can look at top channels for sponsorship opportunities like in podcasts or influencer campaigns that each buyer might listen to. You can target your media buys to these channels and even build relationships with hosts and reporters in these areas.

Implementing the research in PPC campaigns

Firstly, Farley recommends paid search advertisers think big and imagine what they would do if budget wasn’t a limiting factor.

Google Ads. “Go into each channel and create, cast, and layer. With Google, I like to use the custom audience or sandbox building of display campaigns. You can upload things like all of the YouTube channels that you found along with those key topic or purchase intents that you found in the keyword research to really get those estimates of: How many people are looking for this? And what could potential costs look like?” she added.

Farley also recommends layering custom with affinity or intent (especially if you have good lookalike or first part data) to see what works. You’ll have to balance what’s too narrow with what’s big enough to be able to serve. The key is understanding what’s possible and testing from there.

Microsoft Advertising. Microsoft’s Audience Network gets kudos from Farley, too. “You can actually target using LinkedIn data into their display network, so things like job function, industry, company, in-market segments… you can build that all and get your estimates and figure out what could a potential budget or strategy look like,” she said.

Facebook and Instagram. While these options are constantly changing and evolving, Facebook and Instagram have allowed us to target by job type and interest, and use our first-party data.

Working within your budgets

Now that we’ve dreamed big and seen what’s possible, we have to work within the frameworks set by clients and stakeholders including budget and regulations, etc. Farley offers a planning framework where she starts off looking at who her primary audience should be. She determines if there are specific focus areas like industry or location. From there she finds the best channel based on the audience insights we gained earlier and keeps her KPIs in mind. Leverage the percent of potential investment based on those set KPIs.

It’s also critical to look at the content or pain point to determine what it means for your ad assets. “We can’t be everything to everyone all the time because we have to work in the budgets,” Farley reminds PPC marketers. She recommends looking at your media map as percent by channel by funnel: “If we can say, if search will need to be 50%, then display is 20% because we can’t be always on for everything.”

Seasonality. Don’t forget seasonal trends, reminds Farley. “It just gives us a high-level look at what the seasonality in each market tells us.” You can know the best times to leverage campaigns, know when competitors will be bumping up costs, and more.

Testing. Make sure your settings are limiting waste before you launch! “Once you launch, test, monitor, optimize, and test again,” she recommends. After that, you can remove low-performers and update creative, ads and messaging to better fit your target audience. And, of course, amplify your best strategies. The cycle is never-ending, though, as she recommends advertisers continue to test, log, optimize, and test again.

Top insights:

• Find your buyer influencers, then leverage into audience targeting for campaigns.
• Determine what’s possible and then laser-focus in, on what matters most with realistic investments.
• Test and optimize audience layering with creative performance. Report, optimize, evaluate for success and repeat.

Watch the full session at SMX Advanced >>

The post A new way to approach your PPC personas: Learning from the sales process to limit waste and accelerate ROI appeared first on Search Engine Land.

Google Ads Editor v1.7 is now available, Google announced Monday. With this update, advertisers can now use the Google Ads Editor to manage their Hotel ads, YouTube audio ads and lead form extensions, and select specific parts of their campaigns to download.

UPDATE: This update is now delayed and will release in a week, on Monday, August 9.

Why we care

For advertisers that use lead forms or run Hotel and/or YouTube audio ads in the web interface, the Google Ads Editor now supports these features so they can be managed offline. The ability to download specific parts of a campaign may also make it easier for advertisers to work on their campaigns while offline.

More about Google Ads Editor

• The complete list of new features in Google Ads Editor v1.7 can be viewed at the Google Ads Help Center.
• Google Ads Editor v1.6 was released in April 2021. Version 1.6 brought support for responsive video ads, asset-based promotion extensions, video lineups and more.
• Google Ads Editor v1.5 was released in November 2020, although it wasn’t announced until mid-December 2020. This version added support for image extensions, dynamic ads feeds, the ability to filter by various criteria and more.

The post Google Ads Editor v1.7 brings support for Hotel ads and lead form extensions appeared first on Search Engine Land.

Now that COVID vaccines are available to everyone 12 years of age and older, children may be more likely to return to school this fall, which means many retailers are preparing for back-to-school shopping. To highlight a few options that can help retailers optimize for both in-store and online back-to-school shoppers, Google has published a list of local ads solutions.

Get your local inventory online. Businesses that don’t yet have a local inventory feed can use Pointy from Google, a hardware device that attaches to a point-of-sale barcode scanner to pull its title, image and description to add it to Surfaces across Google. For eligible retailers in the U.S., Canada, UK and Ireland, Pointy is free until September 30.

Local inventory ads. Retailers can bring their brick-and-mortar store online with local inventory ads. Local inventory ads also enable stores to indicate whether products are available for immediate curbside pickup or pickup later.

Local promotions, which are available in beta to merchants participating in local inventory ads and promotions in Australia, France, Germany, the UK, Canada and the U.S., can also be used to show store-specific offers.

Promote your locations. According to Ipsos data commissioned by Google, 60% of back-to-school shoppers plan to do at least a portion of their shopping at a small business this year. Local campaigns, which measure and optimize specifically for store visits and local actions (calls and clicks to driving directions), can help businesses take advantage of this by enabling them to promote their locations across Google Maps, Search, YouTube, Gmail and the Google Display Network.

Optimize for online and in-store. Advertisers can include store visits in Smart Bidding to help them grow sales both in-store and online. 

Why we care. More than half of North American back-to-school shoppers say they’ll check for in-store inventory online before going into a store and 48% will shop at stores that offer curbside pickup or contactless shipping, according to Ipsos data commissioned by Google. Promoting your in-store inventory, pickup options and locations can help retailers make the most of these consumer preferences and potentially sell more products.

If you’re looking for ways to increase your shop’s visibility for free across Google, check out our resource “FAQ: All about Google Shopping and Surfaces across Google.”

The post Google’s local ads tips for the back-to-school shopping season appeared first on Search Engine Land.

Beginning on October 1, 2021, Google will include a 2% “Regulatory Operating Cost” surcharge to advertisers’ invoices for ads served in India and Italy, according to an email sent to Google advertisers on Tuesday. The surcharge applies to ads purchased through Google Ads and for YouTube placements purchased on a reservation basis.

Why we care

Google was already passing on digital service taxes to advertisers for ads served in Austria, Turkey, the UK, France and Spain. Beginning in October, it will be doing the same for ads served in India and Italy.

Advertisers should be aware that these fees are charged in addition to their account budgets. As such, the surcharges won’t be reflected in the cost per conversion metrics in their campaign reporting. Advertisers should take these factors into account when creating their budgets.

Additionally, as Greg Finn, partner at digital agency Cypress North, advised on Twitter when Google first announced that it was passing on this surcharge last year, applying the “People in or regularly in your targeted locations” setting can result in racking up more surcharges.

More on the news

• Google will add the surcharges to advertisers’ Google Ads costs at the end of each month, to be paid the next time they are charged. The surcharges are subject to any taxes, such as sales tax, VAT, GST or QST that apply in the advertiser’s jurisdiction.
• Google is not the only platform passing off its costs. Amazon has passed on similar fees to third-party sellers and Apple has also implemented a similar policy for developers.
• In March, Maryland became the first state in the U.S. to impose a tax on digital advertising.

The post Google passes on 2% “Regulatory Operating Cost” for ads served in India and Italy appeared first on Search Engine Land.

On Friday, Google published a timeline reflecting the stages of development for various categories of Privacy Sandbox initiatives. 

The timeline (shown above) divides initiatives into four categories (“fight spam and fraud on the web,” “show relevant content and ads,” “measure digital ads,” and “strengthen cross-site privacy boundaries”). The phases indicated on the timeline are as follows:

• Discussion – The technologies and their prototypes are discussed in forums such as GitHub or W3C groups.
• Testing – All technologies for the use case are available for developers to test and may be refined based on results.
• Ready for adoption – Once the development process is complete, the successful technologies are ready to be used at scale. They will be launched in Chrome and ready for scaled use across the web.
• Transition period: Stage 1 – APIs for each use case are available for adoption. Chrome will monitor adoption and feedback carefully before moving to next stage.
• Transition period: Stage 2 – Chrome will phase out support for third-party cookies over a three-month period finishing in late 2023.

Why we care

This timeline provides search marketers with a general idea of when various Privacy Sandbox initiatives should be ready for adoption. That can give marketers some indication as to whether the company will meet its new deadline (late 2023) to deprecate third-party cookies.

Transition period: Stage 1 (in which APIs for each use case are available for adoption) is currently forecasted to begin Q4 2022. Sometime after that, we should have a clearer picture of what advertising with Google looks like as third-party cookies are phased out.

More on the news

• APIs shown on the timeline are based on Google’s current expectations and are subject to change. The timeline will be updated monthly.
• Google expects Stage 1 of the transition period to last nine months. At some point during Stage 1, the company will announce a new timeline that decreases third-party cookies’ “Time to Live.”
• The transition period will begin once APIs for all of the use cases are ready for scaled adoption. Chrome will announce the start of the transition on the timeline page and on the Keyword blog.

The post Google publishes timelines for Privacy Sandbox proposals appeared first on Search Engine Land.

Advertisers will no longer see the Maximize conversions and Maximize conversion value bid strategies for search campaigns, Google announced Thursday. As per the company’s announcement back in April, Maximize conversions will continue to be available with an optional target CPA and Maximize conversion value will be available with an optional target ROAS.

tCPA and tROAS are going away soon. “In the next few weeks, you’ll no longer have the option of using the old Target CPA [tCPA] and Target ROAS [tROAS] bid strategies for standard campaigns,” Google said in the announcement, “Instead, use the updated bid strategies by setting optional targets. This update only applies to campaign-level strategies; portfolio bid strategies will be updated next year.”

This means that, sometime in the next few weeks, advertisers will lose the ability to create new campaigns via the old tCPA and tROAS strategies, but existing tCPA and tROAS campaigns will continue to function as usual — at least until Google migrates the campaigns over to the new format sometime in 2022.

Why we care. This update will not affect bidding behavior: “Using Maximize conversions with a target CPA will have the same bidding behavior as Target CPA,” Google said, “Likewise, using Maximize conversion value with a target ROAS will have the same bidding behavior as Target ROAS.” PPC professionals should be aware of this change so they know how to create the appropriate campaigns moving forward.

For now, existing tCPA and tROAS campaigns will continue to run as usual. “We’ll give advance notice before automatically switching these old bid strategies to the new format in 2022,” Google said, “This switch will not have any impact on bidding behavior.”

The post Google removes standalone Maximize conversions and Maximize conversion value strategies appeared first on Search Engine Land.