With more people working from home, the lines between work and personal time are more blurred than ever. As such, a new report by Forrester, done on behalf of Microsoft, says there is a new persona that brands and marketers need to be aware of: the “workday consumer.”
What is a workday consumer? They are online more often than before the pandemic. They switch between work and personal to-do lists throughout the day. And they use work devices, tools and software for personal purposes.
Why we care. Consumer habits and preferences have shifted. Brands already recognize this and are planning to invest more in search and other types of advertising, according to the report. Search continues to be an important touchpoint during multiple phases of the buying journey – from initial research, to produce exploration, to purchase (and everything in between).
Key search stats.
75%: The number of respondents who said search has become more important to their brand’s online advertising strategies.
70%: The amount of budget going to digital channels within the next 12 months, including search, social, online video and display advertising. (Before the pandemic, 58% of paid media went to digital).
60%: The percentage of companies planning to increase advertising budget for search, online video and display advertising in the next 12 months.
16%: The percentage of brand respondents who said their brand plans to increase its paid search advertising budget by more than 10% over the next 12 months.
88%: The percentage of respondents who said their brand plans to advertise on three or more search engines over the next 12 months. Currently, 92% of brand respondents said their company advertises on two or more search engines.
Key recommendation for search marketers. Workday consumers research products and services in between work tasks. So if you want to attract, convert and retain these people, make sure your messaging, content and ads go beyond simple demographics and past behavior.
What Forrester recommends. “Brands must consider more nuanced cues such as working mode (e.g., desk-based or frontline, office-based or remote), mindset, activity, and emotion to understand and target workday consumers.” Also:
“Use existing demographic and digital-behavior analytics to deduce these cues and employ methods such as self-reported studies, observational studies, location tracking, and time-of-day data.”
“Beyond planning for the workday consumer, develop other nuanced target personas by infusing emotion data into personas. Understand the facets of emotions including feelings, neurophysiology, social-expression, and behaviors along with the observable traits for each and the software that can help measure them.”
It has to be said. This report was shared by an ad network – Microsoft – and says you should spend more on advertising. All ad networks always want you to spend more on their platform. That said, paid search is a proven marketing channel. As with everything: test, analyze, optimize, repeat.
Conversions are the key KPI when defining the success of direct response campaigns for both B2B and B2C.
These days, conversions are so top priority that many companies don’t even spend money on brand awareness campaigns in their paid social strategies.
When marketers get way into the weeds with conversions, they often forget about the benefits, and long-term impact, of micro-conversions.
What are micro-conversions?
Micro-conversions signal high intent and a strong likelihood that someone will convert on our primary conversion goal, resulting in a significant improvement in conversion metrics when put to use.
Think of a micro-conversion as one small task completion, or a secondary action a website visitor takes, that indicates they will convert.
For paid social, we consider any incremental step a user takes when showing initial interest in a brand as a micro-conversion. That could be:
Engagement with ads.
Opening lead gen forms.
Watching videos XX% of the time.
Liking/following your brand pages.
A significant benefit of micro-conversions on social platforms: many are automatically tracked within platforms. All marketers have to do is leverage them.
What can you do with micro-conversions?
I’ve observed the following results using several micro-conversion strategies across social platforms:
60% decrease in cost-per-landing page view
71% decrease in cost-per-lead
65% increase in conversion rate
If you have the potential to significantly decrease costs and improve conversion rates with these micro-conversion strategies, why wouldn’t you test them?
Ready to learn how quick and easy micro-conversion strategies can drive results?
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Here are three micro-conversion strategies to consider to drive impact on your next campaign:
1. Optimize top-of-funnel campaigns for website engagements rather than clicks
Decrease your cost-per-landing page view by optimizing for website engagements. Website engagements signal higher intent compared to link clicks. Optimizing toward users who are likely to take action on your website ultimately brings in better quality users with a higher chance of converting than those who just click. To illustrate this strategy, let’s focus on Facebook.
Here’s how to do it:
Identify landing page actions you want to track
A few actions to consider are social icon button clicks, CTA button clicks and clicks to watch videos on your website. You can also consider visits to resource pages, blog posts and case studies.
Use Facebook’s Event Setup Tool for the easiest and quickest way to set up engagement events
If you’re interested in tracking these events for other social platforms, such as LinkedIn or Twitter, place tracking tags on each action within your tag manager or directly within your website’s developer code.
You can find Facebook’s Event Setup Tool under the Events Manager in the All Tools menu. From here, you will select Add Events and then click From the Pixel.
Note: To use Facebook’s Event Setup Tool, you must have the pixel already placed across your website.
Click Open Event Setup Tool, type your website address in and click Open Website. Once you’ve done this, your landing page will open, and there will be a box to the left of your page that shows the options for using the tool.
Select Track New Button, which will allow you to start tracking those specific actions. In this example, we have selected the Contact Us button and instructed Facebook to track that under an event called “Contact.” You can continue with these steps to track and sort conversions you want to track and optimize.
Once you’ve finished tracking all the actions, just wait for the data to populate within Facebook’s Event Manager, and you’re all set to start optimizing for these events!
2. Build High-Intent Retargeting Audiences
Decrease your cost-per-lead by building high-intent retargeting audiences. You can create audiences based on specific micro-conversion actions to improve bottom-funnel conversion metrics. Instead of retargeting based on just website traffic, try retargeting based on a user’s time on specific landing pages.
Here’s how to do it:
Select Audiences under All Tools in Facebook’s Ad Manager
Create a website audience based on Time Spent
Select Custom Audience under the Create Audience drop-down menu. Next, you will select Website as your source.
Note: Take time exploring the other Customer Audience Sources. This section has tons of hidden gems useful for building high-intent audience segments based on micro-conversion actions. For example, you can implement retargeting based on users who have viewed or added specific products from your product catalog.
Under the Events drop-down menu, select Visitors by Time Spent
This option will give you a secondary choice to pick a select group of users based on the percentile of the average time spent on site. I recommend starting with 25% since that will give you the most sizable audience. If 25% works well, you may consider testing the other options.
Test and optimize your audience
Once your audience has populated, add it to an Ad Set to begin testing against conversion tactics. Test against a lookalike or an interest-based prospecting segment to compare performance.
3. Capture missed leads
Increase conversion rates by capturing missed leads. Using micro-conversions, you can track users who opened a lead gen form ad or began to fill out a form on your website. We can then take them back a step and offer more resources and brand education to help them convert at the bottom of the funnel.
To illustrate this strategy, we’ll focus on LinkedIn and Facebook.
Here’s how to do it:
Find your lead gen micro-conversions within the ad account.
LinkedIn and Facebook both have Lead Gen ad formats that automatically track users who open or submit forms, making it easier to track and retarget them. Navigate to the Audience section within the Ad Manager accounts on both platforms.
On Facebook, you will select Custom Audience and use the Meta Source Lead Form. You will choose Lead Gen Form on LinkedIn under the Create Audience dropdown menu.
Note: You can also use the same method in strategy #2 above to track form actions on your website via Facebook’s Event Setup Tool or by placing tags directly on your website’s forms.
Build your micro-conversion audience segments.
You can choose to create your audience based on users who opened or users who submitted the form. We want to focus on users who opened a form but didn’t submit for this micro-conversion.
On Facebook, we can only target form opens; however, on LinkedIn, you will have to create an audience specific to people who submitted the form and exclude that from your audience of form opens.
Test and learn from your segments
Once you’ve created your form open segments, just wait for them to populate in each platform, and then you can begin testing.
Try serving these segments with educational content, such as case studies, blog posts and other resources from your website that will push them closer to converting.
While they seem like minuscule actions, micro-conversions give us meaningful data to drive better results. Implementing these long-term enables micro-conversions to become more powerful and valuable in your optimization efforts.
Test micro-conversions for yourself
With social advertising becoming increasingly competitive, it’s so important to take advantage of available capabilities and data to maximize performance. Micro-conversions are a small but powerful piece of solving those efficiency gaps.
But don’t take my word for it. Test. Big wins await!
Google Ads custom columns just got a whole lot more customizable. Launched in 2014, a custom column in Google Ads is a nifty feature that allows advertisers to display non-standard data directly within the web interface.
These custom columns have historically allowed advertisers to view column breakouts by conversion, device and network. Now, these columns are becoming even more powerful.
A major visualization improvement within the web editor. The new features within custom columns include:
The ability to calculate and compare across date ranges
Options to reference other custom columns within formulas
Filter ability for custom variables for conversions
Non-metric columns within formulas (e.g., the ability to pull in campaign names, budgets and more)
New column formats such as “Date”, “Text”, and “True/False”
The ability to apply multiple filters to one formula
These additions are a massive win. They bring more critical, customizable data to a location where you can directly edit campaigns. This should save you substantial time. You no longer need to toggle from reporting to editing.
Google announced that new metrics and features for custom columns are rolling out to accounts over the “next few weeks.”
Spreadsheet functions. The most significant change to custom columns is the addition of ‘functions,’ which will produce a return value based mainly on parameter input. These are passed in via parentheses after the function name and act similarly to options available in popular spreadsheet software. From rounding up numbers to combining text strings, these functions allow for curated content directly within Google Ads columns.
Calculating & comparing across date ranges. One of the most helpful new filters allows for custom columns that average or compare over a given timeframe.
An example provided by Google shows the ability to validate click data over a set report day function while returning a variable of true/false using this formula:
Clicks / report_days_count())>=100
This will give you the ability to set up columns to quickly diagnose what campaigns/ad groups are hitting specific metrics and goals for given periods within the web interface.
Referencing other custom columns within a formula. This allows for the referencing of other custom columns to surface more data at once. You can create a unique custom column that could be referenced within a formula to extract even more data without duplicating the process.
Even the minor upgrades are incredibly helpful. Outside of the new formulas and functions the additional upgrades are major time-savers. The ability to sort custom columns will help surface critical elements quicker and pulling non-metric data will help those that like viewing more data.
Custom columns will also have the ability to have multiple filters to a formula for even better segmentation.
Why we care. This is a monumental gift to Google Ads advertisers everywhere. In a time that it feels like ad platforms are getting simpler, this upgrade bucks the trend. The ability to create powerful formula-driven columns within the web editor interface is a zig to the seemingly constant barrage of unwanted zags. If you’ve become accustomed to a back-and-forth between reports and editors, you may see notable time savings with carefully curated columns.
There will be a significant change on June 30. That’s when Responsive Search Ads (RSAs) will become the dominant ad format in Google Ads accounts.
With this, advertisers will no longer be able to add or edit extended text ads (ETAs). Existing account ETAs will continue to serve alongside RSAs, and advertisers will only be able to pause, resume or remove ETAs.
RSAs are a huge shift from the ETA format. Read on to learn how RSAs work and tips for how to get more out of them.
The new RSA ad format
It has 15 headlines (30 characters each) and four descriptions (100 characters each).
With RSAs, Google determines which combination of headlines and descriptions will appear in ads and how often they’ll appear. Advertisers can pin headlines and descriptions, so they appear in positions 1, 2, 3, etc. There’s a limit of three enabled responsive search ads per ad group. At this point, Google is recommending two ETAs and one RSA per ad group.
Be mindful that there is solid logic behind limiting the number of RSAs per ad group. This format doesn’t represent “a single ad” but rather an ad testing environment that could potentially serve upwards of 10,000 combinations to users. Running multiples of these would only muddy the waters.
RSAs are also graded with ad strengths: poor, average and excellent. Here’s an example of an ad with average ad strength:
The RSA ad strength is not related to the ad quality score. Ad strength is based on increasing RSA CTR and providing fruitful information for Google bots to chew on. It’s a guideline and does not relate to actual ad performance.
Conversely, asset combos are based on ad performance and more salient factors to our marketing objectives. It’s wise to rely mainly on the info in asset combos based on your ad performance.
Google provides no conversion or revenue data associated with the different ad combinations. Combinations are listed in order of impressions shown, providing a sense of what ad combinations are winning out, but the reasons for “winning out” are based on Google’s criteria.
As of this writing, there is no Modify Columns capability when viewing RSA combinations. Modify Columns is available when viewing the overall RSA (or other ad formats).
Assets (components like headlines) can also be viewed in order of how many impressions were shown.
RSAs gobble up impressions in the race for ad impressions within an ad group. Once an RSA is added to an ad group, we find it nearly always takes impressions from other ads in the ad group and tends to become the favored ad when in rotation with ETA’s, no matter how well the latter perform. I’ve reviewed data in many accounts, and when in rotation against ETAs, RSAs typically get 85-90% of impressions and clicks.
RSAs ask a lot of account managers, as they provide a lot more scope for various assets (headline and description versions). Here’s how to do better with them.
Give yourself time to write good ads
RSAs are different than ETAs. Roll up your sleeves and expect to spend time generating headlines and descriptions. Take your time brainstorming and focus on compelling features, benefits, USPs, etc., that will ultimately encourage people to buy from you.
I do my brainstorming in “batches” (usually 2-3) and aim to get as many ideas down on paper as possible. I’ll then filter and choose headlines and descriptions that will best resonate with my target audience. This sounds easy, but it takes time to develop compelling ad copy.
Pay attention to headlines
While setting up ads, Google provides a lot of recommendations on headlines. This makes sense, as headlines compel users to click on ads the most.
The interface may encourage you to add headlines that don’t make sense or are much broader than necessary. For example, it may suggest the broader phrase “Tennis gear” for an ad group that contains Dunlop tennis ball keywords. Don’t feel compelled to use RSA headline suggestions from Google if they don’t work for your company or the product/service you’re selling.
Some other pointers:
Ad strength visibly increases when we include keyword terms in our ad groups in our RSA headlines.
6-7 headlines in an RSA will provide a good number of ad impressions.
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Advertisers can pin headlines/descriptions, so specific headlines/descriptions always appear in positions 1, 2, 3, etc. Advertisers can pin multiple headlines/descriptions to the same position.
This can be useful for companies with strict brand guidelines. For example, a business name must appear in the first headline of ad copy. This can also be useful for regulated industries where certain information must appear in the ad copy.
We’ve tested pinned and unpinned ads. Google’s system prefers unpinned ads, and they tend to have higher ad strength. Sometimes, this is the only change we make to ads, and we notice a significant difference in the impressions an ad receives. Naturally, unpinned ads give Google the most leeway to serve ads and flexibility for their machines to learn.
In many cases, we’ve noticed RSAs only serve two headlines. So, pin the most important info to position 1 or 2.
RSAs are a tough pill to swallow
None of this is easy to deal with. We’ll have to deal with the uncomfortable reality that the RSA format is hungry for so much more creative input that it will exact a heavier mental toll on account managers than previous ad formats.
All that in an environment that only provides true performance data in the aggregate, allowing bots to decide which combinations to favor. But what choice do we have?
Google Ads today announced that advertisers can now use dashboards at the manager account level.
What it looks like. The dashboard is broken down in these areas:
Top Level summary
Conversions over time
Top search terms
Campaign Performance Report
Search Auction Insights
Top Locations
Here’s a screenshot from Google:
How to get it. Simple. Go to the Reports menu of your Google Ads manager account and click on Dashboards to get started.
Additional changes to dashboards. Google said they have also made five improvements. You can now:
Change date ranges and filters for the entire dashboard.
Add interactive table cards, rich formatting features and conditional formatting
Download higher-quality reports more quickly.
Resize cards and layouts dynamically based on window size
Create a dashboard card by copying over existing saved reports
Why we care. Until now, these dashboards could only show data from individual accounts. This change should make it easier for you to find potential issues or opportunities at a higher level, across multiple accounts, according to Google. This dashboard should be a welcome feature for some marketers, such as those who manage paid accounts for franchises, because it gives a high-level, aggregate view of Google Ads performance, costs and other key metrics.
Google has confirmed an issue with the Google Ads console where there is “higher than normal latency” during the ad review process for Responsive search ads (RSAs). Google said this is impacting a “significant subset of users.”
If you are noticing slowness in the Google Ads console, do know Google is working on resolving it.
The notice. Google posted “we’re aware of a problem with Google Ads affecting a significant subset of users. We will provide an update by Apr 4, 2022, 7:00 AM UTC detailing when we expect to resolve the problem. Please note that this resolution time is an estimate and may change. The affected users are able to access Google Ads, but are seeing error messages, high latency, and/or other unexpected behavior. Currently, Responsive search ads (RSAs) might experience a higher than normal latency during the ad review process.”
Fix ETA. There is currently no specific estimated time when this issue will be resolved but Google is working on it and promises to give us an update by Monday on this issue. I suspect it will be resolved sooner, but we will keep you posted.
Why we care. If you are experiencing slowness, you should know it is not your fault. Google is having an issue that they are working on resolving. So check back later or put the work off until Monday.
Google has announced that the first round of testing is here for its crucial Privacy Sandbox initiative. In this round of testing developers will gain access to Privacy Sandbox’s newest measurement proposals: Topics, FLEDGE and Attribution Reporting. These ad technologies are the replacement for the beleaguered FLoC initiative that was killed off back in January.
What are these technologies again?
FLEDGE, or First Locally Executed Decision over Groups Experiment, calculates ad auction data in the browser itself instead of at the server to help increase privacy by limiting a user’s data flow.
Topicsis a technology that helps identify interests for advertising while retaining greater user privacy.
Attribution reporting allows for better measurement on the conversion from ad clicks or views.
Together these technologies are aimed at helping limit the use of personal data while ensuring accuracy in reporting.
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Origin trials. Announced back in 2020, origin trials are a way that developers can test experimental features for a limited time before the public. These trials generally occur on a first-party basis only and on one “origin”. As of today, developers will be able to see and test the code for Topics, FLEDGE, and Attribution Reporting in the Canary version of Chrome.
After this is iteration is rolled out, testing will then begin in a limited Chrome beta and then to a stable version of Chrome. The origin trials for the above-mentioned Privacy Sandbox technologies are worldwide.
User controls. A nice new addition announced today are updated settings that allow participants to understand and manage their information usage more clearly. This will allow users to manage their interests or turn off trials altogether.
Why we care. Many of these new privacy technologies have been hypothetical until today. It’s great to see this next phase of Google’s (well needed) new ad technology begin to come to fruition. The feedback and news that will be generated in this stage of testing should help marketers prepare for the realities that we will soon face with Google’s initiative.
Climbing the corporate ladder isn’t always the most straightforward process, especially for paid search marketers. Professionals seeking to grow their careers need to map out a path, accounting for their unique roles within their organizations.
“The most important thing is to look at your current position,” said Pascal Skropke, CMO of Design-Bestseller, at SMX Next. “Not everybody has the opportunity to work at a fast-growing e-commerce company or startup.”
He added, “Look at where you are and find out if it’s possible to take steps within your company — and understand what your company needs to succeed.”
Skropke says marketers seeking to climb this ladder should establish an “anchor point” within their company — the cross-section of their company’s needs and their career goals. One of these points is the issue of campaign advertising measurement — the lack of direction, accurate data models, and resources for many brands in the digital retail space.
Here are some of the key measurement challenges paid search marketers can help their companies with.
Address issues in advertising spend and ROI
“Performance advertising is killing it for most retailers,” said Andreas Reiffen, founder and CEO of Crealytics, in the same presentation. “At the same time, we see legacy retailers falling behind.”
Despite impressive increases in compound annual growth rate for online retailers such as Etsy, Boohoo, and Farfetch (44%, 55%, and 64%, respectively,), more traditional retailers are falling behind, even in the e-commerce sphere. Reiffen noted that although some of these legacy brands are meeting their KPIs, their slow overall growth could be a major issue down the road.
“The question we need to ask ourselves is, ‘Why am I seeing great results when the company isn’t growing?’” said Reiffen. “The issue we are all facing today is that the measurement is broken. The methodology that we use to track conversions and conversion values — one click, last click, or many clicks — is misleading us because people don’t necessarily buy when they click on ads.”
He added, “They might have happened to click on ads when they purchased, but there’s no direct correlation.”
Source: Andreas Reiffen
Inaccurate measurement models can disrupt return on ad spend (ROAS) projections, making it that much harder for legacy brands to stay competitive.
Paid search marketers and managers can help executives of legacy-style brands address these discrepancies by optimizing paid advertising spending — adopting more accurate tracking models and allocating spend more effectively. This can help marketers establish more authority within their brand and encourage executives to lean on them for their expertise in the future.
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“We’re seeing big companies like the Boston Consulting Group and McKinsey building departments for data analytics,” said Skropke. “This is a sign that analytics is not just something that the data nerd is working on, but something that’s now on C-level.”
Source: Pascal Skropke
Data matters, not just to search marketers, but to all those in brand leadership positions. The sooner search marketers can encourage their managers and company executives to consult paid media analytics when making business decisions, the more respect they’ll garner from those same decision-makers.
“If you work in a paid search manager role on an operation level, it’s rare that you would be asked to do these things,” said Reiffen. “But it’s a major problem that is present now on the C-level.”
He added, “Measurement is the most important thing to get right, so that’s where we see a good opportunity to step up and challenge the numbers.”
Create a growth strategy and align target market goals
Inaccurate measurement clearly causes issues in advertising ROI and data analytics. Unfortunately, it can also disrupt brand growth by derailing target market strategies.
“Wrong targeting leads to poor results,” said Skropke. “So, we should always ask what’s driving the value for the business. Is this the top-line revenue or is it the profitable acquisition of new customers?”
Source: Pascal Skropke
Whether it’s targeting a disproportionate amount of existing customers or pushing products that have lower than average profit margins, C-level executives will inevitably get parts of the targeting and growth strategy wrong. This is where paid search managers can share their expertise and help leadership set clear, actionable goals.
“So, where’s the opportunity here?” asked Reiffen. “It’s in taking the time to explain this, giving [leadership] examples.”
He added, “Start stepping up and explaining that it’s the targets themselves that are limiting performance.”
Many brands want to see their ads rank at the top of Google and have a great conversion rate. But this can be a challenge for brands.
Understanding the impact of these two metrics, and how to think about these metrics when optimizing, can improve the overall health of your paid search campaigns.
Vanity vs. performance: I want it all
Are you someone who likes to run search queries periodically to see if your brand or clients’ ads are at the top? It feels good to know that you are number one. I get it. There is no denying the feeling that all is right with the world when your brand’s ad takes pole position.
However, being number one may come with a higher cost per conversion. There is that ongoing struggle to deliver both efficiency and volume. This case study looks at this specific problem.
I pulled in various account data for this article and looked at the relationship of cost-per-conversion between different metrics like absolute top impression share and click-through rate (CTR). The findings probably won’t surprise you, but seeing the data often forces you to think about your account differently.
At the very least, I hope to arm you with some data to finally discuss with the brand manager who insists on seeing their brand be number one.
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Cost per conversion vs. absolute top impression share
When Google decided to remove the average position in 2019, it was a solid move toward focusing on results versus vanity. The metric they provided to take its place was absolute top impression share and top impression share. Giving advertisers what they needed to answer, “Are we number one?” and “Are we above organic rankings?”
The data in the chart below compares the cost per conversion across our accounts (I normalized/indexed them so they could be viewed on a similar scale) versus absolute top impression share over the past year.
The hypothesis was the more frequently brands were in the true number one position, the more expensive those conversions would cost them. Effectively a tradeoff between efficiency and volume.
The data shows a 60% increase in cost per conversion from ads that were <10% absolute top impression share to those that were >80%. There are certainly outliers. But the trendline tells the story.
Cost per conversion vs. click-through rate
I took the same data and wanted to compare CTR vs. cost-per-conversion. This is a little starker of a story.
The cost per conversion is down as the CTR increases by a larger margin (I removed the CTR data scale from high to low, left to right). So having a better CTR provides a better cost per conversion.
Why?
Keywords that have a higher CTR are most likely resonating better with consumers and therefore flow through to having a higher conversion rate/lower cost per conversion.
Branded terms typically have the highest conversion rates and CTRs. This is a debate for another time and article.
The key to this data set is to focus on relevance. If you focus on relevance, branded or otherwise, you will see better conversion rates.
3 ways to use this data to improve your paid search campaigns
Focus on relevance
Google rewards relevance. This comes in the form of higher quality scores by keywords matching ad copy, which also matches landing pages. The more you can create tighter keywords groups based on themes, the better.
The best lens to view this through is the customer experience. Think about what the customer is searching for. What would they expect to experience when reading that ad copy or clicking through to the site? The answer to this question is your true north. It will lead you to a relevant experience and reward you with better performance.
Understand efficiency and volume
This is a constant tradeoff that is made in business all the time. Brands do it with the pricing of products, but we often don’t see it as frequently in marketing.
Take a group of keywords that are performing well and see how far you can push them. Run a test to increase bids by 25-50%, raise the budgets and see what happens.
Do you get any incremental lift?
What was the cost per incremental conversion?
Is that tradeoff better than any other opportunity you to spend on either other keywords or marketing tactics?
The best part about paid search is the real-time feedback you get with data to help make informed decisions. Use that to your advantage.
ABT: Always be testing
This is a combination of the two prior recommendations but keep testing. The algorithms, your competitors, your customers – they are constantly changing.
Ongoing ad copy testing is just one element, but that shouldn’t get you off the hook more broadly.
Create a test and learn strategy. Work through it methodically. Have a hypothesis and prove or disprove it through your testing. Rinse, repeat.
Google has launched a Search Ads 360 integration for Google Analytics 4 (GA4), the company announced Monday.
Why we care. Integrating Search Ads 360 data into GA4 enables advertisers to see sessions, users and conversions within the context of dimensions such as source, campaign, medium and default channel grouping. They’ll also be able to see cross-channel attribution data in their Model comparison and Conversion paths reports.
Contextualizing data can enable better decision-making and more efficient campaigns. This integration may also help advertisers save time that might otherwise be spent flipping between GA4 and Search Ads 360.
Data sharing between Analytics and Search Ads 360. Linking your GA4 property to your Search Ads 360 advertiser allows:
GA4 to export conversions to Search Ads 360.
Search Ads 360 to export campaign and cost data to GA4.
GA4 App- and site-engagement metrics to show in Search Ads 360 reports (only for advertisers using the new Search Ads 360 experience).
How to link GA4 and Search Ads 360. Advertisers using the new Search Ads 360 can follow the procedures below to link GA4.
In Analytics, click Admin.
In the Property column, use the menu to select the property you want to link.
Under Product Links, click Search Ads 360.
In the link table, click Link.
If you have the Admin role for one or more Search Ads 360 manager accounts, in the row for Link to Search Ads 360 manager accounts I manage, click Choose accounts to select the manager accounts you want to link your property to.
Click Confirm.
Click Next.
Configure the following settings: – Enable Personalized Advertising: On by default. This setting allows Analytics data to be used to personalize ads. – Enable Campaign Attribution: On by default. Turn this setting on to import Search Ads 360 campaign data. Note: If you turn this setting off, then no conversions are attributed to Search Ads 360 and no conversions are exported from Analytics. – Enable Cost Data Reporting: On by default. Turn this setting on to import Search Ads 360 cost data.
Note: Those not using the new Search Ads 360 will still have to follow the procedure above, in addition to opening their Search Ads 360 interface and creating a link from their Advertiser to their GA4 property in order to also export conversions.
