Video ads and vertical-based product ads are now being piloted on the Microsoft Audience Network, Microsoft announced on Tuesday. In the announcement, the company also revealed disclaimers in ads, new third-party integrations with Universal Event Tracking, flexible insertion orders and inline appeals for rejected offers in Microsoft Merchant Center.
Video ads pilot on Microsoft Audience Network. Video ads are now available on the Microsoft Audience Network as a pilot program in the U.S., Australia, Canada, France, Germany, New Zealand and the U.K.
An example of a video ad placement. Image: Microsoft.
Videos can be between six seconds and two minutes in length, and video ads on publisher partner placements will also be coming soon. To test out this new product, contact your Microsoft Advertising support representative or the Microsoft Advertising support team.
Vertical-based product ads pilot on Microsoft Audience Network. The company is also piloting another Microsoft Audience Network feature — vertical-based product ads, which use an advertiser’s existing feed to generate ads for auto listings, entertainment events, hotels, tours and activities and vacation rentals in native environments.
“Microsoft’s audience intelligence delivers the right message to the right audience and matches the user with the items in the feed where they’ve shown interest, helping you better connect with potential customers who are ready to convert,” Microsoft said in the announcement. The pilot is currently only available to advertisers in the U.S. and UK; to participate, get in touch with your Microsoft Advertising support representative or contact the Microsoft Advertising support team.
Disclaimers for regulated industries. Microsoft Advertising is introducing disclaimers in ads (as shown below). While this feature isn’t specific to regulated industries, it can be particularly useful for advertisers in verticals in which consumers may need to be informed about details related to your business.
Image: Microsoft.
To use disclaimers in ads, advertisers must first create a brand new campaign, as they are only enabled at the campaign level.
Coming soon: Inline appeals in Microsoft Merchant Center. Microsoft will be adding inline appeals for product ads to Microsoft Merchant Center ahead of the holidays (the company did not specify an exact date). This feature is designed to give advertisers an overview of policy violations that may be driving editorial rejections for offers.
Image: Microsoft.
Advertisers will be able to request an appeal/manual review from the interface (shown above) with a single click for all rejections in that particular policy. Note: the maximum number of total requests is 100,000 offers per month per store.
New third-party integrations with Universal Event Tracking. As an attempt to streamline the Universal Event Tracking (UET) setup process, Microsoft is also launching third-party integrations with Google Tag Manager, Shopify, Squarespace and WordPress.
To get started with one of these integrations, select the “Add the tag through a website editing platform” option during setup and instructions for the chosen platform will be provided.
Flexible insertion orders. Flexible insertion orders can now be used to set open-ended and/or unlimited budget insertion orders.
Why we care. Microsoft Advertising’s September announcements offer a variety of quality-of-life improvements for paid search marketers:
Microsoft Audience Network’s new video format may help brands increase awareness as well as engagement with their ads.
Disclaimers in ads may help advertisers in regulated industries stay compliant.
Inline appeals may help decrease the amount of time your team spends reaching out to Microsoft Advertising’s support team. This can be especially useful for resolving rejections during the holiday shopping season, a crucial time of the year for many merchants.
The new UET integrations may mean a simpler setup process for event tracking.
Flexible insertion orders may provide advertisers with a more versatile way to manage their budgets.
When it comes to creating ads that convert searchers into customers, many advertisers dive in to structure, testing, and more, and gloss over one of the most important elements of any campaign: copy. Your ad copy is the very basic building block of your advertising. Getting it right can be the difference between a milquetoast conversion rate and driving huge value for your clients and stakeholders.
In her session at SMX Convert, Alyssa Altman did a deep dive into writing ad copy that actually converts including understanding search engines, funnels, intent and more. Check out our recap of her popular session below:
The evolution of search engines
“Google, Microsoft, and other search engines have reversed engineered their search algorithms over time (and re-engineered them) to make sure that they are giving someone the best answer to their ‘question’ as humanly possible,” started Altman. Many pieces of information that used to exist solely on websites are being pulled directly into the search engine results (things like weather, mortgage rates, math problem answers, etc.). That means there’s a lot of competition for clicks in SERPs as a result.
The key to effective ad copy, said Altman, is to understand what your PPC copy is answering in the first place:
Questions to ask yourself about any given topic include the following: “Is someone looking for general company information? Are they doing company comparisons? Are they doing some window shopping?” said Altman. For micro-moments, “people are telling us exactly what they want, so our copy should match that request.” And, of course, some people are just ready to convert, so the ad’s copy should reflect that intent.
This is all easier said than done, right? This is why she focuses on how marketing funnels actually work and figuring out how to align intent.
The reality of funnels and intent
Ad copy that converts starts with narrowing down the funnel, instructed Altman. The traditional notion of the marketing funnel assumes the user does a search to gain awareness of solutions to a problem. From there they consider a company/solution, and then they convert.
But most paid search marketers know it’s not that simple. The conversion process is not as linear for most customers, especially given how cross-channel marketing works. “Our searches don’t actually connote what we are looking for,” said Altman. “There’s this assumption that Google or Microsoft knows what we’re thinking before we think it… but someone could type in a company name and they could be thinking two completely different things.” One person could be looking for a website while another might be looking for a contact form, for example.
The key to remember is that there are awareness and consideration searches that happen throughout the funnel. Plus, conversion searches might happen on queries that we may not normally consider “bottom-of-the-funnel” type of searches.
”When we’re looking at the reality [of the funnel] it presents the case as to why testing needs to happen or we need to take a deep dive into why a search is happening. Not every search is created equal!” shared Altman in her session. You can have two searchers using the exact same query with completely different intent. That’s where writing PPC copy gets tricky. To determine what people actually mean when they search for something, advertisers have to test.
Testing in action
How to test ambiguous intent. When you’re not sure if your searcher is ready to purchase or just looking, you can test ad copy in a single campaign with dual ad groups and matching keyword terms. Altman also recommends using the same audience for this test. “Starting with a question or a concern that someone may have has the potential to convert at a higher rate,” recommended Altman.
The measure of which ad is doing best for this intent test is click-through rate and conversion rate. “If you’re running this test and noticing that you’re getting more downloads than form submissions than you can estimate that this query might be in the form of more general research,” she instructs. “If you’re getting way more form submissions in this split test, you can shift your messaging to be more primarily geared toward sales.”
How to test obvious intent. When you can tell that the intent is obvious, you can hone in even more and change one variable in an ad. “This testing works well when a user is explicitly telling you what that want to do. ‘I want to purchase this vehicle near me,’” said Altman. The test setup is the same except you’re doing ad variation testing within Google Ads with a 50% split.
This can give us information about a potential customer. In this example, our lead forms can tell us, “if they’re trying to haggle another deal or they don’t understand a pricing” which we can then use as data to inform our copy, said Altman. “Understanding the content of a submission or a lead is just as important as writing the copy itself.”
Copy mistakes to avoid
If you’ve done your research, created tests to determine intent and then narrow down the messaging when you do know the intent — there still may be some hiccups in your ad copy. Here’s how to avoid them:
Mistake 1: Forgetting the power of your headlines
Your headlines are prime real estate! Use them for unique identifiers, not duplicate information. For example, this ad from a university duplicates the URL in the headline. This is a waste of potential ad copy that could catch a searcher’s eye or convince them to click through on your ad versus a competitor.
Mistake 2: Obvious keyword stuffing
It can be tempting to repeat your main keyword(s) multiple times in your headlines, descriptions and extensions. Altman recommends only doing this if it makes sense in the context of the ad. Quality Score takes your keywords into account as a diagnostic tool for recommendations for improvement. Its three main components are:
Expected CTR
Ad Relevance
Landing Page Experience
A headline like this doesn’t make sense for this query and likely won’t lead to a conversion — just a wasted click.
Mistake 3: Inconsistency from search > ad > landing page
Ensure that not only the search term is included in your ad and landing page content, but it addresses the larger picture. If you’re paying for a search term, make sure your process is setup for success. In Altman’s example below, we can see that when people search for “primary care doctor near me” a relevant headline is key, but so is a customized landing page experience.
Taking this searcher to a page that highlights services related to that query will be more likely to lead to a conversion than just taking them to the home page and letting them figure it out on their own.
Next steps
Altman recommended understanding what you are specifically testing before looking to set up an experiment. Testing intent vs. the winning messaging are two very different paths to go down. Clearly identifying what your end goal is will help to drive your upfront testing strategy.
When testing copy, make it worth testing. Use power words like “free, special offer, now available, in stock, etc.” or emotional calls-to-action such as “explore with us, speak to a person, etc.” to really analyze what messaging has a stronger appeal and why.
Finally, Altman said that advertisers should make sure they have enough data to run a proper test when it comes to copy. Timeframes for testing mean nothing if an activity doesn’t occur during that predetermined frame. For example, if a 50% split test is occurring, aim for 100-200 clicks before starting to analyze your data.
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.
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.
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?
Data pulled from Sparktoro
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.
“With this strategy, you set your budget, where you want your ads to appear, and your Target Impression Share, and Microsoft Advertising automatically sets your bids,” wrote Kevin Salat, Product Marketing Manager at Microsoft Advertising.
Source: Microsoft Advertising
When to use this strategy. Microsoft Advertising’s announcement has recommendations for when to use target impression share bidding including finding more visibility and awareness, gaining a competitive advantage, and increasing the likelihood of more click and conversion volume.
Best practices. Salat also included some best practices for those just trying out the target impression share bidding strategy. “Start with low-risk campaigns setting an impression share to target based on historical performance at first,” he said. This gives the AI time to learn and determine performance over the learning period. Salat also recommends using experiments “in A/A mode for 1-2 weeks before testing the strategy.” Salat also does not recommend setting a max CPC cap because it can limit performance.
Why we care. This strategy could be helpful for those who trust AI to drive their bid strategy. Automation has been taking over a lot of paid advertising, so it makes sense if search marketers may be wary of this at first, but Microsoft’s best practices could help ensure that you’re using the right strategy for your campaign goals.
Other news from Microsoft Advertising:
Product conversion goals. In the same announcement blog, Microsoft launched product conversion goals for Shopping Campaigns or other feed-based campaigns. With these “you’ll now be able to get a better understanding of the products your customers are buying after clicking on your ads,” said Salat.
Automated extensions. Beginning in August there will be new automated extensions in Microsoft Advertising:
Dynamic Location enhances ads with location information from your location extensions and Bing Maps
Dynamic Multimedia enhances ads with multimedia assets, such as images and videos (begins flighting in early 2022)
Syndication Decorations enhance ads with additional decorations added by search partners.
Account organization. Advertisers will also be able to organize their accounts with a new labeling system. This will be helpful for advertisers with multiple accounts. “Account-level labels will help you easily tag accounts, campaigns, ads, and keywords in your management scope with labels and also allow you [to] pivot your reports and insights with those labels,” wrote Salat.
Unified account changes. With the latest update, “users of unified campaigns are now able to manage multiple sub-accounts underneath a single parent account,” according to the announcement. Users will be able to do the following:
Create multiple unified campaigns accounts underneath the same manager account.
Create a mix of unified campaigns and expert mode accounts underneath the same manager account.
Link to and from manager accounts that contain a combination of unified campaigns and expert mode accounts.
