Over the past few years, complexity of paid search has significantly increase. The massive arrival of audience targeting and machine-learning based functionalities has multiplied the campaign options available to digital marketers.
Where Search Strategy used to be a mere question of expansion and optimisation, this will no longer make your campaigns go above average. Luckily, new breeds of sophisticated search strategies are now emerging. In our top-down research of the leading paid search teams in the world, we have identified a number of these new strategies and will share them with you in this presentation extracted from the Search Trends Report
2. 22
ANDERS HJORTH
WHO AM I?
A Digital Marketer with an
opinion… and some data
First generation SEO (1997)
Native European, entrepreneur,
consultant, speaker, writer
Founder of Innovell – Digital Marketing Insights
One of the first Google
Advertising Professionals (2004)
3. 33
COMPLEXITY OF PAID SEARCH
keyword x ad x landing page
100 x 10 x 5 = 5000
keyword x ad & extensions x
landing page x devices x audiences
100 x 50 x 5 x 4 x 10 = 1 000 000
5. 55
FINAL
REPORT
DEEP
INSIGHTS
SEARCH TRENDS REPORT
METHODOLOGY
Judging sessions
• European Search Awards
27 June 2018
• US Search Awards 17 Oct
• UK Search Awards 29 Nov
Desktop research &
Twitter monitoring
Expert interviews
• Daniel Gilbert
• Larry Kim
• Brad Geddes
• Samantha Noble
• David Szetela
• Jim Banks
• Purna Virji
• Frederick Vallaeys
Survey of shortlisted entries
Invitations to top entry owners
Quantitative insights
Report available for
purchase on Innovell.com
30 Nov 2018
TREND
“EXPANSION”
TREND
DEFINITION
SEARCH
AWARDS
15. Top teams are up to level due to the
knowledge acquisition & sharing mechanisms
they have in place and are applying ML and AI
everywhere they can in 2018
What does this have to do with paid search, you'll say?!
I did my first Google Advertising Professionals exams in 2004. It was on a Friday night, the day it was released and seriously, I was doing this drinking a beer and with the
feet on my table.
At the time, the Adwords equation was something beyond what we had seen
in advertising before.
Still 100 keywords (maybe a little low)
Let’s say the extensions change your number of ad options from 10 to 50
Same number of Landing pages, 5
Add 4 devices: Google Home, Mobile, Tablet, Desktop (didn’t add the Watch)
Audiences, the list could be long, let’s say 10
Complexity has increased 200-fold…
Understanding the user journey is considered by the teams in our survey to be essential in order for them to do their job.
Insights-driven strategies
The other group of successful strategies is insights-driven. They require in-depth user research to understand the user journey, and make use of personas, which they map against it. They then use several campaign steps, often involving different channels. They are heavily reliant on measurement as they target a large span of the user journey and collect more measurement points; they need a model to attribute value correctly to the various channels and providers involved – in other words, a reliable attribution model. The leading teams use advanced attribution models in their projects and have moved away from the much-maligned last-click attribution model.
The data-driven strategy differs from the audience-led in that it focuses more on user context and external factors than on the user state. As such, it injects external data into campaigns in order to improve campaign effectiveness. Data-driven campaigns are technically complex and use a variety of data sources: finance, weather, news, events, etc. The only limit to what data can be actioned is the insight and creativity of those actioning it, and these strategies are almost impossible for competitors to detect and counter.
Measurement-driven strategies
Measurement-driven strategies are based on what represented the original reason for paid-search success: reliable tracking of sales originating from digital advertising. Amazon are now entering the digital ads scene and already represent 10% of Google Ads, expected to double to 20%. Within Google, meanwhile, there has been a gradual budget shift from search ads to shopping ads. This gives birth to a winning search and shopping strategy. The other metrics-driven strategy we observe is the drive-to-store strategy, which addresses the complex issue of using digital advertising to drive users to a physical point of sales. The main enabler for this strategy is the store-visits metric, allowing for increasingly reliable measurement of visitor flows in a physical location. Leading paid-search teams selectively embrace offline activity: 32% of our sample systematically use offline tracking, and for 14% offline is part of their offering. We predict that this will rise in the future.