On Monday, I attended the 2014 Biddable World conference put on by Rough Agenda. A fantastic event ‘Dedicated to PPC, Social Advertising and all things Biddable.’ We know not everyone gets the opportunity to go to events like this, thats why we have sponged up all the talks for you and squeezed out our Top 15 Paid Tips that you missed!
Samantha Noble, Marketing Director at Koozai, opened the speaking and spoke on the subject of Remarketing – something all Adword users should integrate into their account. Here are a few tips for optimising your Remarketing Campaigns from her talk:
- Using Conditional Remarketing allows you to target custom combinations of audiences that you know will produce conversions through single or multiple conditions. If you want to target customers who are women, over the age of 30, for a new class in your yoga studio, Conditional Remarketing allows you to use conditions like AND, OR and EXCLUDE within your variations to target this exact market. Conditions you can include range as wide as your available data from location, membership duration, bounce rate + minimal time and IP’s.
- RLSA Campaigns (Remarketing Lists for Search Ads) allow you to bid aggressively if a list user, that you may have acquired through an email sign up, searches for a targeted search term. You can also tailor your ad text for this past visitor. A great use for RLSA campaigns is to trial new keywords, allowing you to see how your current customer base responds before adding the keywords to your main campaign.
- Find Your Convertible Position, Redefine and Develop. Looking into your account and setting yourself the goal of ‘How can I grow this account?’. This mentality was divided into several steps with the first being: Get data, fast, and make intelligent decisions based on data available to you. Discover where your conversions are being driven and optimise your campaigns to maximise targeting and resources to push these conversions. You can then cut the waste and repeat the cycle.
- The Intent of Social Advertising. The idea that Ads on social and search engine pages are interchangeable couldn’t be further away from the truth. Social Advertising takes much more of a Passive role rather than an Active role that we see from platforms such as Google. The role of social advertising is to change the user’s mindset from passively consuming your content to Actively interacting with it.
- Produce Advertising Content that is Designed to be Shared. Direct Ads, although you may have seen some success, generally have a poor ROI for social. Social Ads perform best when you design them around shareable content strategies. Click bait is the key here. Remember you are advertising to a specific segment with Social and not a search engine.
- You NEED to Plan and be Responsive. Bear in mind that Social can get expensive quickly, ensure your copywriting is top notch and you have an active management on your outreach. There are some great tools out there to help plan your social strategy including Facebook Power Editor and Qwaya for bigger campaigns. Clean your posts! Without an active management of your social presence, you are unable to react to the open nature of social. Respond to comments, positive and negative, and trim that spam. Users do not want to see a social campaign full of negative comments below it!
Quick Tip: Screenshot Ads and Social Campaigns you like, enjoy and save them within a folder to build a resource of social advert inspiration to use alongside your own campaigns.
Stephen’s Presentation can be found here.
Quality Score, a hot topic at the moment with its relevancy coming into question due to the recent White Paper published by Google on the subject. Craig Murphy of Tecmark PPC spoke on ‘Settling the Quality Score’.
- Quality Score – Still Relevant whether as a Tool or a KPI. Quality Score is undeniably a good indicator of performance, whether that is from an agency’s performance or an Ads. The recent Google White paper ‘muddied’ the water for many Paid Advertisers onto the exact relevance of this statistic due to the change in definition. Craig’s advice? Don’t worry and keep going.
- Making your online Advertising world 3 dimensional. Without competitor insight, your biddable world is flat. By only using your set keywords, you are limiting yourself and your campaigns level of engagement with potential customers. Understand the market around you and with competitor awareness, you can be adaptable with your performance even to external considerations. Measure your performance against that of competitors to find your real market value and discover opportunities to further improve an already successful campaign.
- Consider the entire spectrum of the purchase lifecycle. Identify the influencing factors spread across your channels. We are constantly seeing brand images but developing a marketing message across the channels with an adaptable but consistent branding method allows you to grab attention and lead a customer further down the conversion path.
Quick Tip: Your website needs to complete the brand and buying cycle. Ensure you have quick links to promotions and recent content campaigns.
Deepti’s Presentation can be found here.
‘How Playing Both Sides of the Biddable Field Could Fund your next Campaign’, a controversial talk on turning badly converting traffic into conversions by adding display advertising to your website to create a budget for PPC from Mat Bennett of OKO Digital.
- Show Ads on site to badly converting customers and produce a dedicated PPC budget to target top convertible traffic. With only 3% of visitors said to be put off the buying process on a site by paid ads, you can can be confident that your Conversion Rate won’t be under threat by the adverts on your site. You also have the ability to specify sites, industries or business that are prevented from advertising on your site, also the control to review any and all adverts shown on your site. Finally, what about losing customers to other sites? This is where proper ad targeting takes place. You can specify not to show Ads to traffic and customers with a high conversion rate so only that traffic that rarely completes your goals will be shown the Ads. A controversial subject, but even Amazon claims its 9.6% Conversion Rate is thanks to on-site advertising – an interesting thought.
- Twitter – Only pay for the action you want. Advertising with Twitter can be an advertisers dream. By only paying when a user completes a specified set action you can maximise outreach and conversions. These actions can be set from many levels of engagement including clicking through to a link or following your profile.
- Facebook – Using Lookalike Audiences. By using this feature, you can extend the outreach of you social campaigns to audiences that share similar, interests, purchasing patterns or characteristics with your already listed targeted users. This works brilliantly in Power Editor as you can specify your ‘reach’ to ‘Similarity’ ratio to vary the extent and convertibility of your social market.
- LinkedIn – Advertise to your industry, B2B. Target you Adverts to those industry professionals you know are likely to convert. Advertising by Job Title, Industry etc are great ways to only show Ads to the people that matter.
Quick Tip: Pinterest – now testing self-serve ads. A fantastic opportunity to try out this new platform. With its image heavy nature, Pinterest makes the platform perfect for creative display adverts. A very interesting market that I am sure a lot of advertisers eyes are now turning to
Laura’s Presentation can be found here.
The Multi Channel Marketing Moneyball, how you can use analytics data to better understand why your customers come to the website and how you can make more money?, from Russell McAthy at BlueGlass.
- Calculating the value of each attribution to find conversions. Attribution methods range hugely from giving all value to the final convertible channel to spreading the value across the channels evenly. What you need to do is ‘Utilize the Whole Team’ and use data from individual channels to start asking bigger questions such as ‘How do I stop getting low converting customers’, ‘Where do I get more customers that will recommend my product?’ etc.
- Don’t just attribute your channels a monetary value. Conversion rate, acquisition loyalty, are all different KPI’s that you can use to attribute value to your channels along the buying process. Think what KPI’s you need to improve to maximise your top conversions.
Russell’s Presentation can be found here.
The final talk of the day came from Martin Pezet, Search Marketing Manager at World First, and addressed the issue ‘Is there really positive ROI in bidding on brand terms?’. I would encourage you to review the slides from his very enjoyable talk!
- Branded Ads are not a waste of time and money. Studies show that with paid branded advertising you can increase traffic to a site by 50%, however this of course depends on industry and search volumes. It also allows you to mitigate risk from other marketing channels, a branded paid campaign ensures steady traffic.
Martin’s Presentation can be found here.
Biddable World 2014 was a huge success in our eyes with enthusiastic speakers, passionate about paid advertising and related channels. There are also some other great events coming up put on by Rough Agenda. Find their full list here.
Online Advertising presents a new opportunity to online businesses to delve deep into the buying trends and wealth of data that is available through paid channels. To find out how you can develop a successful paid strategy and maximise our ROI, get in touch with us today.
