Search Engine Land’s daily brief features daily insights, news, tips, and essential bits of wisdom for today’s search marketer. If you would like to read this before the rest of the internet does, sign up here to get it delivered to your inbox daily.

Good morning, Marketers, are we doing the work or going through the motions?

My friend and I were taking a walk around our coworking space just to get some fresh air and reset our brains before afternoon calls. We both park in a deck down the road because the parking lot right outside the office is 3-hours only. However, the handicapped spaces directly outside the space are all-day parking. At first, I thought that was pretty cool. Good for this space for being accessible, I thought, and for not making people who use wheelchairs park in the parking deck far away. 

And then I looked at the entrances right outside these parking spots and noticed the ramp was nowhere close. Then I thought about the actual space and how I think I’ve only ever seen one elevator — which is on the other side of the building to the parking spaces.

Just like in life, accessibility on our sites can’t be an afterthought. We’ve been working on an accessibility audit of Search Engine Land, and we encourage you to think about doing the same as you plan your 2022 goals. It can’t just be an afterthought. We have to do the actual work. With the increased focus on user experience in SEO, we need to make sure our sites have a positive experience for all users.

Carolyn Lyden,
Director of Search Content

3 sessions search marketers will want to see at MarTech

How are we handling the data challenge?
MarTech Editorial Director Kim Davis’s keynote explores the importance of data to modern marketing with experts from major brands like HBO Max and El Camino Health.

Guiding company influencers and evangelists to successfully engage on LinkedIn
Join Darryl Praill, CRO at VanillaSoft, as he explains how he interacts on LinkedIn, who he responds to, who he completely ignores and why.

Is your brand ready for the search-first age?
Deepcrawl shows why CMOs need to shift from being search-shy marketers to become search-first CMOs.

Get your free pass now.

Video and vertical-based product ads pilots arrive on Microsoft Audience Network

Video ads and vertical-based product ads are now being piloted on the Microsoft Audience Network, Microsoft announced yesterday. 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.

Why we care. While unlikely to be game-changing, 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.

Read more here.

81% of B2B tech marketers believe the importance of SEO has increased in the last 12 months

SEO budgets in B2B have reflected this increase in importance as over a quarter of B2B tech companies have increased their investment in SEO in the past year, according to data from FINITE, the global B2B technology marketing community.

However, with the increased emphasis on SEO and budgets related to it, only half of B2B tech has an SEO strategy. The report also found that most of the SEO efforts in this industry are being performed in-house: “Only 28% of B2B tech marketers rely on third parties to help with their SEO strategies.”

Attribution is a challenge even outside this industry, but FINITE’s data found that nearly half of all B2B tech marketers struggle to measure the impact of organic search. What were the other big challenges for the respondents?

• technical SEO (38%),
• link building (21%) and 
• content creation (21%)

Why we care. This information could help agency and in-house marketers looking to make the move to B2B tech/SaaS. Even more companies are seeing the value in organic search optimization, but are missing out on strategy and implementation best practices. Knowing this can help search marketers craft proposals and help these companies hone in on the best ways to improve their SEO.

Search Shorts: End of ETAs #PPCChat, reducing churn, and stats in content

#PPCChat on RSAs and ETAs. Check out the advice, thoughts, and reactions from the experts in yesterday’s #PPCChat about the end of ETAs.

3 ways to reduce customer churn with content marketing. No matter how large they are, even multinational corporations aren’t immune to customer churn. But there’s a way to retain customers – and it all starts with content marketing.

Truth or Dare: How to use statistics in your content. Statistics actually have the power to make your content more engaging and compelling. When you use them the right way, statistics can help you tell an even better story than you could with words alone.

What We’re Reading: The secret to happiness at work

Job satisfaction is up, according to this piece in The Atlantic by Arthur C. Brooks. “In 2020, despite the fact that millions of Americans had shifted to remote work, 89 percent said they were either ‘completely’ or ‘somewhat’ satisfied,” he wrote. Brooks teaches graduate classes and says his students often assume that, in order to love your job, it has to be your “dream” job: “one where your skills meet your passions, you make good money, and you are excited to get to work each day.” 

But, says Brooks, that’s not what drives satisfaction at work. “After all, how many kids say, ‘When I grow up, I’m going to be a quality-assurance analyst’?” And, how many of us knew we wanted to be search marketers when we were asked our future career aspirations as children? I think mine shifted from marine biologist to broadway star to writer as I got older. And here I am in search.

To really be satisfied with work, Brooks says your job needs two things:

1. Earned success. Earned success gives you a sense of accomplishment and professional efficacy. Employers who give clear guidance and feedback, reward merit, and encourage their employees to develop new skills are the most likely to give you those feelings.
2. Service to others. This is the sense that your job is making the world a better place. That doesn’t mean you need to volunteer or work for a charity to be happy, but that you’re helping make the world a better place for someone or making their life easier.

So what’s the secret to happiness at work? “Rather than relentlessly pursuing a ‘perfect match’ career that they’re sure will make them happy, a better approach is to remain flexible on the exact job, while searching for the values and culture that fit with theirs,” said Brooks.

The post New pilots from Microsoft Ads and the secret to happiness at work; Wednesday’s daily brief appeared first on Search Engine Land.

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: 

1. Expected CTR
2. Ad Relevance
3. 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.

Want to see the full session? Check out all of SMX Convert here on demand.

The post How to write ad copy that actually converts (and 3 major mistakes to avoid) appeared first on Search Engine Land.

“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.

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.

The post Target impression share bidding, other August changes now available in Microsoft Ads appeared first on Search Engine Land.