The first sign that you shouldn’t use Alexa Rank as an SEO measuring stick comes from Alexa’s frequently asked questions.

“How are Alexa’s Traffic Ranks determined? Traffic estimates and ranks are based on the browsing behavior of people in our global data panel by default. The rank is calculated using a proprietary methodology that combines a site’s average of daily unique visitors and its number of pageviews over the past 3 months. The site with the highest combination of unique visitors and pageviews is ranked #1.”

— Alexa.com

Alexa Rank is based on traffic from all digital channels — direct, email, search, social, etc. So using it to judge SEO performance (or that of any other digital channel) is inherently flawed. 

For example, two sites could have nearly identical Alexa Ranks: One site you’re tracking could get 900 visits from organic search and 100 visits from direct traffic. Another could get 100 from organic search and 900 from direct traffic. The two sites would look like their SEO programs were equally successful with 1,000 visits each, even though the data in that site’s analytics software would show that their organic search performance was radically different.

Alexa Rank is based on a panel of users — which means that the behavior of a fraction of worldwide users determines the Alexa Rank for each site. Relying on that for your search marketing performance is like relying on 1% of your sales data to determine your business’s profitability.

Since Google controls the search marketing world, only data from Google can accurately tell you how you’re performing relative to other domains on Google. 

The metrics from tools like SEMrush or seoClarity are more valid measures of SEO performance across many domains because they get their data from two pieces of the Google Ads API:

1. Google Ads Keyword Planner data, which shows how many people search for individual keyword themes in a given month and how much advertisers paid for ads on those keywords
2. Google search results, also from the Google Ads API

In addition, those tools and the others like them enable you to plug in your analytics data and data from your Google Search Console account, making them even more informative and accurate.

When it comes to judging your organic search performance, the best data source will always be your own Google Analytics in conjunction with the data from the platform you’re advertising on. All other tools are estimates of performance. Only Google Analytics and Google Search Console can accurately portray organic search performance for your site. 

So, to any question about how Alexa Rank impacts or measures SEO performance, the answer is that it doesn’t.

As the number of users increases, so does advertising competition. With the average user projected to see between 6,000 to 10,000 ads per day, your brand must make a real impact within the few seconds you have. Make the most of your limited-window with impactful and memorable creatives in your Facebook ads.

The most commonly used design tool for creating Facebook ads, Photoshop, was created with professional designers in mind — making it difficult to use for some of those with less design experience. 

The good news? Engaging and creative ads don’t always require years of experience or difficult-to-use programs. One solution, particularly Canva, has been helping millions of people of all experience levels master their design skills.

What is Canva?

Canva is a graphic design platform created with intuition in mind. It offers easy-to-use editing tools and encourages learning new design skills with their Design School, a hub for inexperienced designers and professionals alike to come for design tips and inspiration. 

The site has grown in popularity quickly, with over 30 million active users creating stunning projects monthly. Learn more about the different subscription options below.

Subscriptions

Canva offers three levels of subscriptions; Free, Pro, and Enterprise. While Pro is the most common choice for advertisers due to the additional paid features, the Free subscription is excellent for those new to Canva who want to test the platform. And Enterprise takes the Pro subscription a step further by focusing on brand identity and the team workflow process.

According to Canva, the Pro subscription currently runs at $119.99/year or $12.99 if you choose monthly billing. The Pro subscription offers more advanced features such as; one-click design magic resize, additional templates available to you, the ability to save designs as templates for your team to use, and more.

Strike Inspiration with Canva’s Templates

Canva offers a variety of preset templates to choose from and the ability to begin designing with a custom size if preferred. Browse thousands of Facebook templates to help get you started here!

Get Creative with Canva’s Intuitive Design Tools

Browse millions of easy-to-use design tools, such as Canva’s extensive library of designer-made icons, stickers, and more. Play around with text and font to create impactful first impressions in your creative. 

If you want to learn more about how you can upgrade your ads with text and font on Canva:

1. Click here.
2. Easily optimize for multiple placements with Canva’s one-click design magic resize tool allowing you to change your ad’s size within seconds, with just one click, saving you time and effort.
3. Learn more about the different design tools available to you here.

Layer in Animations to Make Your Ad Pop

Some of the most memorable ads on Facebook contain an eye-catching video, which not only captures but holds the attention of users as they naturally scroll through Facebook. Canva offers a wide range of options for creating and editing videos for your next Facebook Ad. 

Take a look at some of them below and see more from Canva here.

1. Add Animation to Your Design

Animate your Facebook Ad within seconds with Canva’s quick and easy animation tool. Upgrading your ad is as simple as:

1. Click “Animate” at the top toolbar.
2. Choose between 14 different animation styles (only available with a Pro subscription).
3. Click once to animate; Canva will do the rest.
4. Download your newly animated creative as a GIF or other video format.
5. Start capturing your audience’s attention with new, improved ads!

2. Design Videos That Make a Splash Both With and Without Sound

Take advantage of Canva’s extensive library of stock, high-quality audio tracks that bring your ads to the next level. Since Canva makes duplicating designs so simple, optimize for sound on and off with only a few clicks!

The benefits and features of Canva for your Facebook Ads go on and on. Created with intuition in mind, Canva is a design tool that makes it easy to create stunning designs and encourages you to learn new skills along the way. If you’re new to Canva, try a free subscription and see the possibilities that await your ads.

You can find these in the Google Ads user interface (UI) under Tools & Settings 🡪 Shared library 🡪 Bid strategies 🡪 Advanced controls.

What Are Data Exclusions?

Data exclusions help keep Smart Bidding from using the wrong conversion data.

For example, if your website conversion tracking pixel was temporarily removed for a few days, those days should be excluded so Smart Bidding strategies don’t learn from skewed conversion data.

Let’s face it — accidents happen when dealing with data. Maybe you’re upgrading your website to a newer version, and the conversion tracking code gets lost in the process and doesn’t get placed on the upgraded website. Or you have a developer trying to clean up some code, and the revenue tracking snippet inadvertently gets “cleaned up” and removed from the order confirmation page. Perhaps your website goes down for a day or two. I’ve seen all the above happen more than once. 

In these situations, the data exclusions advanced bid control can save you some grief by excluding data from those days when the conversion tracking was broken or missing.

Once you decide to enter an exclusion, you will be asked for a name and description to fill in for your issue. Then you select a start date/time and an end date/time. 

An important note here is to consider the typical conversion delay that your account has. Some accounts may have only a 1-day conversion delay. However, another account may have a 7-day conversion delay. The good news is that Google will prompt you as to what a proper conversion delay time frame is for your account. I checked this on multiple accounts and the Google Ads recommendation was indeed different for each. 

You can also select individual campaigns if need be, as well as separate campaign types and particular device types to be included or not included in your data exclusions rule.

Keep these best practices and key points in mind when using data exclusions:

• Applies to clicks: Your data exclusions will exclude clicks that would have had the broken conversions attributed to them. When these clicks are excluded, the associated conversions are also excluded.
• Applies to all campaign types: Applying an exclusion for the entire account will exclude conversions for Search, Display, and Shopping Network campaigns.
• It doesn’t impact conversion reporting: Data exclusions only affect the data that Smart Bidding uses; you’ll still see these excluded conversions in your reporting.
• Exclude dates before conversions occur: If there is typically a delay between when your customers click on an ad and convert, exclude additional dates before the conversion tracking issue occurred. If your Average days to conversion number is 2.7 days, then you’ll want to exclude the data for several days to cover that span. 

So, for example, if you realized the conversion tracking was broken on Monday and you were able to fix it on Tuesday, you’ll most likely want to exclude data from the prior Saturday and Sunday as well, and perhaps even Friday. Customers could have clicked your Ad on Saturday, then purchased on Monday when the conversion tracking was broken. 

You would want to exclude that Saturday traffic because several conversions may have been missed from click traffic that happened on that day. When in doubt about how far to go back with the exclusion, check your actual conversion stats, see if the days prior conversions are way off from average, and adjust your exclusion time frame accordingly. (If you don’t know your Average days to conversion number, you can find it under Tools & Settings –> Measurement –> Attribution –> Path Metrics –> Then choose the appropriate Conversion action.)

Once the data exclusion rule is live, you’ll see the status as “Active.” Even after you have set up a data exclusion, you can still remove it to incorporate the conversion data into Smart Bidding. 

For example, suppose you experience occasional problems like tagging issues or website outages, you can still create that conversion data offline and successfully upload those conversions. The data exclusions rule you set up can be removed.

Important note from Google Ads: “Data exclusions are meant to account for outages or major issues related to conversion tracking. Using them often or for long periods could negatively impact Smart Bidding performance.” 

Use this bid control option wisely and sparingly for severe issues.

Let’s look at the second Google Ads advanced bid control: seasonality adjustments.

This advanced bidding control tool helps you optimize bids during upcoming events such as sales or promotions.

When you create a seasonality adjustment, you’re scheduling a conversion rate adjustment (an increase or a decrease), which accounts for estimated changes due to an upcoming event. 

For example, if you’re expecting conversion rates to increase by 35% during a five-day sale, you can create a seasonality adjustment that increases the conversion rate by up to 35% for those five days. At the end of the sale, Smart Bidding can instantly go back to pre-sales behavior without the need for a ramp down. 

Seasonality adjustments are currently available collectively for Search, Shopping, and Display campaigns and individually by campaign type. 

Perhaps you plan to have a big weekend blowout sale specifically on your Shopping ads products. You can then set up the seasonality adjustment and reduce the adjustment scope by just selecting Shopping campaigns when you are setting up the rule. Once set up, it’s easy to widen or narrow the scope of the adjustment at the device level and include or exclude computers, mobile devices, or tablets as needed.

Important to note: Use seasonality adjustments only if you expect significant changes to conversion rates because Smart Bidding already manages seasonal events. Seasonality adjustments are ideal for short events of one to seven days. They may not work as well if you use them for extended periods (more than 14 days at a time). 

Again, you can find both of these Google Ads advanced bid controls under Tools & Settings 🡪Shared library 🡪 Bid strategies 🡪 Advanced controls. 

Smart Bidding is a dynamic tool in the Google Ads arsenal, and these exclusions are just as powerful. Use them wisely. With great power comes great responsibility.

I researched this quite a bit and was unable to find any evidence that having a GMB account provides any quantified uplift to an advertiser’s PPC account. There is no Quality Score boost for simply having a GMB listing. But that’s not the whole story.

Having a GMB account linked to a Google Ads account does, in fact, allow the advertiser to utilize five features they otherwise would not have access to.

1. Location Extensions

Having a GMB listing allows advertisers to use location extensions, those addresses that appear in text ads:

Not only does the address allow the user to determine the business location, but it also gives the ad an extra line of space on the search engine results page (SERP). And the only way to set up a location extension is to link a GMB account to the Google Ads account.

2. Local Pack

Another benefit to having a GMB account when running a PPC campaign is that ads are eligible to run in the Local Pack. On the SERP, Google includes up to three listings below the map, in between the paid and organic results. When running a paid campaign with a GMB account linked, a paid listing is eligible to run above the other three organic listings:

This provides a second paid opportunity on the SERP as the text ad is eligible to run on the same results page as the GMB information, increasing your advertising presence.

3. Local Campaigns

The third benefit of GMB listings to advertisers is the ability to use local campaigns in Google Ads. Local campaigns utilize machine learning to promote offline business goals and maximize in-store value by measuring store visits, call clicks, and direction clicks. With only a few lines of text, some images, and a budget, Google serves these ads across Search, Google Maps, the Google Display Network, and YouTube.

4. Customer Reviews

Another important GMB perk is the ability to collect online customer reviews that can be added as an extension and shown alongside your ad.

It’s important to keep an eye on GMB reviews and make sure customer satisfaction remains high. One study found that PPC conversion rates can be impacted by GMB ratings. Accounts with ratings below 3.5 stars had average conversion rates of around 3% while accounts with ratings around 4.5 stars enjoyed conversion rates that were over 4%.

This same study also found businesses that replied frequently to their reviews saw a 30% higher conversion rate than businesses that replied less frequently.

5. Keyword Mining

The final benefit of having a GMB account is the fact that it can be used to mine for new paid search keywords.

Under Insights, which is currently transitioning to Profile Performance, is a list of search terms that triggered the GMB listing to appear in the results. Not many of these keywords will be appropriate for adding to a PPC campaign, but there may be some gems that can be added to your marketing mix.

A Google My Business listing can take a PPC account to the next level. In order to capitalize on the power of GMB, make sure the listing is created, linked, and optimized. Remember to ask for GMB reviews often and reply to those reviews just as often. Your next big sale could be peeking right around the GMB corner.

Extensions come in a variety of forms, but all have the same objective in mind: make sure the right people click your ads in order to ultimately meet your business goals. 

Ad extensions can help you get more calls, drive people further into your website, highlight important parts of your business, offer a promotion, showcase positive ratings, and more. There is no cost to add these dynamic ad enhancers and the clicks cost as much as a normal ad headline click, or they are free.

Since there are so many ad extension types available, we wanted to consolidate the information on each into an easy-to-digest summary. Here is a roundup of all extension types currently available in Google Ads and Microsoft Advertising.

1. Sitelinks (Google and Microsoft)

Sitelinks help a user navigate to a specific page deeper on your site than just the landing page of the ad. A sitelink consists of one 25-character link text, two 30-character description lines, and a final URL. 

You can have a sitelink for any page on your site that you want to drive traffic to. Examples include: contact us page, specific product page, sales and promotions page, or your about us page.

Google will show a maximum of four sitelinks with your ad and Microsoft will show up to six. How much of your sitelink the end-user sees depends on multiple factors including the type of device they are using when they see your ad.

2. Callouts (Google and Microsoft)

Callout extensions are short, non-clickable, snippets of text — just 25 characters long — that highlight your business features and unique selling propositions. Callouts should be specific and give users more information such as “Free Delivery” or “24/7 Support.” Google may show up to ten callouts with your ad and Microsoft shows a maximum of four.

3. Structured Snippets (Google and Microsoft)

Structured snippets list extra information about a specific part of your business. You choose from a dropdown list of available headers and include a minimum of three to a maximum of ten related values. 

The list of headers includes Amenities, Brands, Courses, Styles, Types, Destinations, and a handful more. For example, you might use the header “Types” and the values “Red Oak, Hard Maple, and White Pine” to let customers know about the types of wood you have available. 

It is important to note that, unlike most ad extensions, structured snippets are not clickable. They are only used to provide visible information about the kinds of goods or services you are offering.

4. Call Extensions (Google and Microsoft)

Call extensions make it easy for searchers to call your business. Users simply click your phone number or a phone icon shown under your ad to be directly connected to your business. This is the only place a phone number can be displayed in your ad, so if you want to drive calls to your business it’s imperative that you include a call extension.

5. Location Extensions (Google and Microsoft)

Location extensions show the physical address of your business. Users can click to get further information such as a map to your location or the distance to your business. 

This extension encourages in-store visits while making it easy to find your brick-and-mortar business. Location extensions on Google require a Google My Business (GMB) account; on Microsoft, they can be added manually.

6. Affiliate Location Extensions (Google)

Affiliate location extensions promote the business locations selling your product. Ads that show this extension help customers find nearby stores selling the searched product. These are only available on Google Ads and only to retail chains and auto dealers in select countries.

7. Price Extensions (Google and Microsoft)

Price extensions show searchers the price of your products or services alongside your ad. They consist of a header and short description (25 characters for each), price, and a final URL. 

One of the neat features of this type of extension is that users can click on products and services directly from the price extension shown in your ad.

8. App Extensions (Google and Microsoft)

An app extension allows users to easily access and download your app. It consists of a 25-character clickable link text, a final URL, and is accompanied by your icon. When clicked, an app extension will take the user directly to the app download page in the app store for the device that they are using.

9. Promotion Extensions (Google and Microsoft)

Promotion extensions are used to highlight current sales and special offers that your business is running. These extensions are ideal for customers searching for the best price or a hot deal. 

Promotion extensions can include a promo code, valid dates, and the occasion the sale is running for such as Easter, Halloween, Christmas, and others. This type of extension also features either a percent or monetary discount as well as a final URL to the page on your site that highlights the promotion.

10. Image and Multi-Image Extensions (Google and Microsoft)

Image extensions allow you to include visually-appealing pictures underneath your ad. Image extensions are currently a beta in Google Ads and are only available to select advertisers.

In Microsoft, image extensions display a single image and multi-image extensions can display up to five images with your ad. It’s important to mention that multi-image extensions are only available in the U.S. and are in beta everywhere else.

11. Seller Rating Extensions (Google)

Seller rating extensions show your GMB review rating out of five stars, the number of ratings the business has, and a qualifier such as price range or average delivery time if that data is available. Available only to advertisers who have their GMB linked to their Google Ads account, seller rating extensions are a great way to showcase positive reviews. These are only available in Google and there is no charge when clicked.

12. Review Extensions (Microsoft)

Review extensions display positive reviews, awards, or rankings from a reputable, third-party source. Clicking sends the user to the third-party review site, and not to a final URL of your choice. Similar to seller ratings, there’s no charge when clicked. Review extensions are only available in Microsoft and are served everywhere except in China.

13. Lead Form Extensions (Google)

Lead form extensions allow users to fill out and submit a form directly from your ad. Customers can engage and submit information such as their name, contact number, and email without ever leaving the search engine result page (SERP) or visiting your site. Lead forms are only available in select countries in Google but have proven to be powerful tools for gathering leads.

14. Action Extensions (Microsoft)

Action extensions are a list of preset call-to-action buttons that can be included with your ad copy. You choose from a list of 62 actions including “Shop Now,” “Download,” “Apply Now,” “Register,” “Learn More,” “Free Quote,” and many more. Action extensions are only available in Microsoft.

15. Filter Link Extensions (Microsoft)

Filter link extensions list additional information about your products or services. They look like structured snippets; you choose from a list of predefined headers and include 3-10 related values. The main difference is that these values are clickable and allow you to send users to specific pages. Filter link extensions are on Microsoft only and are new as of January 2021.

As a best practice, Google and Microsoft both recommend adding all the extensions that make sense for your business. Their sophisticated algorithms will use machine learning to select and show the extension that they feel will resonate with the searcher at that time.

Adding extensions into your marketing mix is an excellent way to add more value to your ads, take up SERP real estate, and increase your clickthrough rate. Make the most of your paid search efforts with ad extensions.

Perhaps problem is not the correct choice of words here, but “modern opportunities require modern solutions” just doesn’t sound as flashy. 

The opportunity that bred these new types of ads stems from more people staying put for this past year than ever before. People are adapting to a new lifestyle. We are working from home, socializing over a webcam, and, if my dietary habits are any indication, ordering an unprecedented amount of takeout. 

This new way of life is birthing noticeable trends in culture and our daily lives. One of these trends is that people are, unsurprisingly,  spending more time-consuming music and music-adjacent media via YouTube. Of the top 100 global YouTube searches, over half of them were music-related. Searches for artists, songs, ASMR, podcasts, meditations, at-home workouts, and other similar topics comprise 58% of the top 100 YouTube searches worldwide.

People are turning to YouTube to be the background of their lives and YouTube is hoping to capitalize on this newly emerged market. Their newly introduced audio ads are similar to ads heard when listening to the free versions of streaming services like Pandora or Spotify. 

These exciting new ads offer a unique way for advertisers to reach different audiences and raise their brand awareness — and therein lies the opportunity. According to Google, more than 50% of logged-in viewers who consume music content in a day consume more than ten minutes of music content. And it’s during these extended listening sessions where these new audio ads will be heard.

YouTube audio ads are currently available in beta on Google Ads and Display & Video 360 on a CPM basis. Since this ad type is still in beta you can expect some changes to be made as Google tweaks and fine-tunes it. It’s also important to note that these ads are not available to advertisers who are marketing sensitive products or content like healthcare, gambling, alcohol, etc. 

The ad itself is an audio file, up to a maximum of 15 seconds long, played over a still image or simple animation. Below is an example of each type of audio ad provided by Google.

Similar to how placements are used to pick and choose which websites you want display ads to be shown on, United States advertisers using this new ad format are able to target specific genres of music listeners to show their ads. This YouTube placement option gives advertisers the opportunity to refine their ad targeting to certain genres of music as well as podcasts.

After a few months of alpha testing this snazzy new ad type, Google found that more than 75% of measured audio ad campaigns drove a significant lift in brand awareness. If you are looking to grow your brand awareness among avid music listeners the new YouTube audio ad might be the perfect ad type to bring into your marketing strategy.

Let’s say you sell hats. In the last week, Google Ads reports that you sold 4.33 hats. Did you really sell one-third of a hat? No, that’s fractional conversions at work in Google Ads telling you that more than one of your PPC ads contributed to selling your hats. 

In order to understand how this happens, you first need to understand that a customer’s path to a conversion frequently involves multiple clicks occurring over a period of time. Not everyone is going to search for your product, click through to your website, and then convert on the spot — although that would be awesome. A single conversion can often take two, three, four, or more clicks on an ad (or other touchpoints) before leading to an actual conversion.

Google Ads, and other analytics software similar to Google ads, use attribution models to determine which channel should get credit for each conversion. Some attribution models credit the first or last click in the journey with the entire conversion, ignoring every other click along that visitor’s path. Other attribution models credit a portion of a conversion to each click along the journey, which is why you may end up with fractional conversions because of multiple ad clicks. 

There are currently six attribution models to choose from in Google Ads. Some will report conversions as fractions, and others will not. 

The default attribution model is the “Last-click” model. Conversions will not be fractional under last-click because all credit will go to the last click that occurred prior to the conversion. The other model that will not report fractionally is “First-click,” which is the exact opposite of last-click in that it credits the first ad clicked on with the whole conversion.

If you are a visual learner, the included charts might help you understand how each attribution model works differently, and why some report as fractions while others do not. In each example, we used a scenario where a searcher clicked on four different ads before converting. 

The non-fractional attribution models — last-click and first-click — shown above can be damaging to the way you view your performance. In these examples, the three other ad clicks that helped lead to the conversion get no credit at all.

Imagine if the Olympics only awarded the runner in the last (or first) leg of a relay race with a medal and a spot at the podium. Similarly, rewarding all of the credit to a single ad leads you to make decisions about the efficacy of that ad that may not be accurate. 

The first ad clicked on could get all the credit, but never lead to a conversion without the help of other ads. Conversely, using a fractional attribution model ensures that you don’t end up discrediting the importance of all those other clicks along the way. 

Under first-click and last-click, you might end up pausing ads for keywords that were vital to leading to a conversion, but never contributed to a conversion via first or last click. 

For that reason, there are four different fractional attribution models that split credit between contributing ads in different ways. 

The most common fractional attribution method used today is “Position-based.” Under this method, 40% of the credit will go to both the first click and last click, and the remaining 20% will be split evenly between all clicks that occurred in between, as shown below. 

Under the “Linear” attribution model, shown below, all credit is distributed evenly across all clicks in a conversion path, no matter when they occurred. In a scenario where a searcher converts after four ad clicks, each ad would receive one fourth of the credit.

The “Time decay” model, shown below, is a bit more complex than the previous two because it factors in the time it takes for a conversion to complete. Clicks that occur earlier on will receive less credit than the ones that occur closer to the conversion.

Finally, “Data-driven” attribution — shown below — is the most complex form of attribution. It is only available if your account has generated at least 300 conversions in the last 30 days. The data-driven attribution model leverages the available conversion data to assign fractional importance to the clicks that have the greatest impact on your business goals. The credit given to each click might be different for each conversion that comes through.

To find your current attribution model settings in Google Ads, navigate to “Tools,” then click on “Conversions,” click into a single “Conversion Action,” and click “Attribution.” Any changes you make will modify your reporting going forward, but will not retroactively affect your historical data. You will need to note the date you changed your attribution model, since it can make your performance look dramatically different in some cases.

Which attribution model is right for your business? There is no single correct answer. In most cases, I recommend switching from the default last-click model and instead using position-based attribution. This will ensure all clicks along the path to a conversion receive credit so that you have a better picture of what is helping you drive conversions.

But, to be honest, they have so completely changed their match types’ intent over the last couple of years that none of them really have any meaning anymore. Exact Match hasn’t been exact, in fact, for years. 

And that upsets me. Because while Google says it’s in the best interest of their advertisers, that’s not what I’m seeing. Clients who we’ve spent a lot of time and effort on optimizing the keywords that produced the results they needed — based on cost per acquisition or return on ad spend — are seeing those efforts slide away as unprofitable keywords leach back into their accounts.

If you manage ad campaigns, you know that sometimes plurals of terms don’t perform as well as the singular (or vice versa). The same can be true with word order variations of keywords. As a result, you include those keywords in your account with lower bids that reflect the decreased performance. But Google doesn’t follow those bidding signals — they can, and will, match to whatever keyword they want, even within the same ad group. 

And please don’t tell me that Smart Bidding solves this problem. I’m not a Smart Bidding hater — I do use it, where it makes sense. But Smart Bidding doesn’t solve the issue of the match type blurring — not when you see a click costing $60 or $100 because the algorithm is so convinced that the searcher will convert.

But back to the change Google just announced. BMM is going away but will live on, in a modified form, within Phrase Match.

Of all the match type changes they’ve made, this one is probably the one that I’m most okay with (at least right now, without seeing the results of the change). Why?

I don’t rely on BMM terms, anyway. I may use them when an account is new to me, or for clients who continually bring in new search terms. But I feel very strongly that part of a well set up account is doing extensive keyword research before building any new campaigns, by using the existing account search queries, Google’s Keyword Planner, and Microsoft Advertising Intelligence tool. In other words, I generate a comprehensive list of keywords for each campaign rather than relying on BMM.

And within those keyword lists, I use BMM judiciously — for instance, when an ad group is predominately made up of Exact and Phrase Match terms. I also run BMM to mine search term data for keywords (as we do with Dynamic Search Ads campaigns), but when the efficiency is gone or we see Google getting a bit wild with their mapping, I pause them or reduce the bid so that it’s in line with account goals.

Folding BMM into Phrase Match just simplifies things a bit. 

We may lose a bit of volume because Phrase Match will continue to respect word order –when it’s “important to the meaning” — while BMM shows words in any order. But the tradeoff of not having to maintain another match type — especially one that tends to step all over existing keywords that already live within the same ad group, campaign, or account — is well worth it, in my opinion.

This leads me to one other reason why I’m slightly hopeful about the change. The Exact Match changes that we’ve dealt with so far have had profound effects on my clients. Google has changed word order or dropped critical words from the keyword, such as:

• Dropping the term “light” from the keyword [light pole banner];
• Replacing “school” with “student” in the keyword [school discounts];
• Dropping “equipment” from [school equipment supplies];
• Dropping “pond” from the term [pond water pump].

I am hopeful based on this line at the bottom of the announcement: “In addition, keyword matching is now more predictable: an exact match keyword that is identical to a query is now always preferred as long as it’s eligible to match.” 

How does that relate to the examples I gave above? I am already advertising on [pole banner] and [school supplies], yet I see those terms pop up in a number of my ad groups due to Google’s habit of dropping keywords. I’m hoping that this will help prevent that issue. The challenge with modifying keywords — such as mapping [student discounts] to [school discounts] — that will still be a problem, as will dropping the word “pond” so that they show on [water pump]. 

However, it could mean that my team and I can spend less time chasing negatives and more time on other improvements.

Now, if they would only make Exact Match exact again, I’d be really happy.

Facebook IQ has taken a look into the upcoming trends of 2021 in its “2021 Topics and Trends Report,” with activism, community, and adaptations of new technology among the top trends.

Education Leading to Awareness & Action

There has been a clear shift in education, particularly in the way individuals seek out information. People are beginning to acquire new knowledge that helps them make better connections with the world around them and transform awareness into action. 

Voices are now being heard and listened to for a variety of issues from climate change to inequality. Right here in the United States, Generation Z and Millenials led the charge in taking a stand against racial inequality. The movement continues to prevail as younger generations use social media to educate themselves and others on prominent issues. Ultimately, this influx of education has stretched advocacy beyond the boundaries that held it back in the past.

Furthermore, literature and learning have found new and exciting ways to enter the lives of Americans young and old. There has been a surge in the number of individuals who are downloading eBooks, streaming videos, and listening to podcasts. The trend expands beyond digital media as well, with printed books and local bookstores regaining popularity. 

Microlearning is also becoming a new norm for corporate educators looking to capture the attention of Gen Z audiences. By refining once lengthy content into short-form bites of digital information, educators are able to refine their teaching methods to better suit the engagement practices of younger generations. 

How We Spend Our Time At Home

Lockdowns have kept billions around the globe away from public, indoor spaces, which has led to a shift in the way individuals spend their time. Whether it be developing new hobbies, exercising more, or home improvement, finding new ways to spend time indoors and outside is definitely trending. 

For example, gardening has become increasingly popular in homes around the world. In the United Kingdom, the government even set aside 1.7 million Victory Garden allotments to allow gardeners to take their pent up energy to the soil. This has led thousands of Britons to become more sustainably resourceful. The British aren’t alone, however. This increase in planting has been surging through dozens of other countries. 

Lockdowns have also led to what Facebook has coined as the “Casual Culture.” More and more people are learning to do the things they would normally head out for, such as grooming and exercising. While 46% of United States consumers stated that they have recently participated in some form of at-home grooming, such as cutting their own hair, others are foregoing grooming in ways that lead them to embrace a more authentic self, such as letting hair go grey or growing beards. These shifts are helping consumers procure more empathy for those around them and develop stronger senses of self-compassion. 

What’s New With Technology?

The increase in remote learning and working from home in 2020 forced those who did not previously have internet access to find ways to acquire it in order to be successful. This has ultimately produced a boom in e-commerce and digital streaming. With this massive shift to digital, people in all career paths and walks of life are expanding their connections online.

Hybrid shopping is also capturing the attention of a new wave of buyers online, leading brands big and small to make the jump to ecommerce or upgrade their existing ecommerce capabilities. 

Consumer spending increased a whopping 29% just between March and April of 2020, according to Facebook IQ’s report. Among these trends, subscription services have boomed. Services like Ipsy and Hello Fresh have capitalized on the pent-up demand caused by the stay-at-home orders issued around the world and delivered people a sense of serendipity with exciting unboxing processes. 

The Way We Kick Our Feet Up

With more time on their hands and time at home, leisure activities have enjoyed a renaissance in 2020. More people are being creative in more ways than ever before. Museums and other attractions rushed to convert their collections to digital, stream exciting events for interested spectators, and even develop forums to allow creatives to share and discuss their own work. For example, The Met connected people worldwide with the amazing art that lines their walls by adapting their exhibits for digital consumption. 

Creatives are also turning to upcycling, personalizing their own fashion with trends by bleach or tie-dying, hand-making jewelry, and stitching patchwork. Almost 24% of UK consumers say they completed a craft or do-it-yourself (DIY) project in 2020, according to a Facebook IQ poll. DIY activities have become new hobbies and passions for those who may not have had the time or need to engage previously. 

What Does This All Mean For Marketers? 

Now you’re probably wondering, what does this mean for the way we market to consumers? It is becoming increasingly important to understand the niches your audience fits into. Your brand story is more influential now than ever before. With new and emerging trends and technologies, you have the ability to represent and reinvent your brand. Capture a trend that works in your favor and use it to craft the best strategy to help you excel in 2021 and beyond. 

To see all of Facebook IQ’s predictions and insight, download the PDF version of the “Facebook IQ 2021 Topics and Trends Report.” You can also compare 2021’s trends to Facebook IQ’s 2020 midyear topics and trends analysis in our post on the “Top 5 Trending Social Media Topics of 2020.”

Understanding the differences between each of these actions will help you manage your SEO channel more effectively.

What Does Crawling Mean in SEO?

Everything SEO starts with the crawl — the process by which search engines discover the content on a site. Search engines send armies of bots — also known as crawlers or spiders — to every known website on the internet. When a bot reaches an active web page, it records the content and sends it home to one of the search engine’s many data centers for analysis. Then it uses one of the links on the page to access another page either on the same site or on another site altogether. 

By crawling links in this manner, search engines have recorded trillions of pages of content, and located many trillions more. 

Because the web changes ceaselessly, the cycle of crawling links and sending data home never ends. Over time, bots recrawl pages so that the most recent copy can be sent to replace the data center’s existing information. Many sites — such as large ecommerce and news sites — are crawled multiple times each day to ensure that the data center holds the most current content possible.

Not all sites are fully crawlable, depending on the decisions made in the site’s design and development. For instance, coding a link using a span tag as opposed to an anchor tag will render it uncrawlable for the bots. That link is essentially a locked door, hiding all of the content being linked to behind it. If there’s not another path to that content, it will never be eligible to rank in search results — it simply doesn’t exist in the eyes of the search engine. 

What Does Indexing Mean in SEO?

When the data center receives a page of content from a bot, it analyzes the contextual relevance and stores it accordingly in its database. Thanks to this index of content, the search engine can instantly serve up results relevant to a search for a bass fish vs a bass musical clef or the Bass clothing brand.

However, indexation cannot occur without the crawl, which feeds the database the content to index. 

What Does Ranking Mean in SEO?

The concept of SEO ranking seems self-explanatory, but it involves an unbelievably vast amount of data whizzing through a remarkably complex algorithm. 

Search engines are essentially computer software that utilize sophisticated mathematical equations called algorithms to determine which content in the index is uniquely relevant to every single search query entered by each individual searcher. Rankings vary from second to second based on the information that the search engine has indexed about the person executing the search.

Ranking elements — the pieces that make up the algorithms — include information such as the context of the words on the page, the design of the page itself, and the speed with which the page loaded. In addition, information about the searcher — where they are, what they’ve searched for in the past, what they’ve clicked on in the past, and how engaging they found that content to be — is fed into the algorithms and affects the search results as well.

All pieces of the SEO puzzle must be in place to manage your optimization efforts effectively. The all-important rankings that most businesses desire cannot occur without the crawl and indexation pieces of the process. Without them, there would be nothing to return in the search results — which would make for a very sparse internet landscape.

This post takes you under the hood of some strategies that businesses with smaller budgets (some as low as $3,000 per month) can use to reach their goals.

1. Set Realistic and Definable Benchmarks

Decide what you need to achieve with Amazon Advertising. Setting goals provides a roadmap to guide your strategy. Without goals, you’re driving blind. 

For example, the strategy for growing brand awareness and market share is completely different than for minimizing cost-per-sale. Based on those goals, go through your Amazon Advertising account history, compare the historical data to your goals, and set attainable checkpoints. 

2. Set Your Budget Based on Your Category & Keywords

Every product category is different on Amazon. Competition in the water bottle category is going to look different than the bicycle category. Depending on your product category and what your goals are within that category, your budgets should vary as well. A good way to set a preliminary budget is to look at the top keywords for your category. 

For our water bottle example, registered brand sellers and vendors can look at the Brand Analytics Report, enter the keyword “water bottle,” and get an idea of how often people search that term on Amazon. By entering keywords, as shown below, you’ll be creating a seed list that you can use for Sponsored Product or Sponsored Brand campaigns. 

When creating the campaign, Amazon data shows the suggested bid and the bid range for each keyword match type, as shown below. This information helps you establish your budget by seeing which high-level keywords are cost-efficient, and which ones you may want to avoid.

Bidding top dollar for an exact match “water bottle” keyword, for example, will quickly gobble up a small advertising budget, so it’s more effective to budget around lower-volume, longer-tail keywords that better fit the target spend.

3. Break out Top-Performing Products

When you begin advertising on Amazon, look at your product catalog and determine which products are your best sellers. As you will quickly see, all products are not created equal. 

Beginning your advertising journey on Amazon by highlighting your top-performing products to allow your ads to gain traction early on. This momentum can then be used to boost sales of those best sellers further, or even some of your other products as well. 

Amazon wants to know that the ads that it places in front of shoppers are valuable to them. By advertising a product that sells well, your ads have a better chance to be shown than featuring a slower-moving product with less sales velocity to support it.

4. Structure Campaigns Based on Similar Products and Goals

Whether you are working with a small or large ad budget, it’s important to know that each dollar spent is being maximized to the fullest. It’s also imperative that the product mix you’re advertising does not work against those goals. Structure your campaigns in a manner that best reflects the goals you’re trying to achieve. 

For example, if you sell water bottles and staplers, a single campaign should contain one or the other, not both. Co-mingling products can blur the campaign results and create extra work, since you will have to filter the water bottle data from the stapler data in order to see how each is performing.

Create campaigns by grouping products together that have similar goals. If your water bottles have a sales goal of $10,000 with a 15% ACoS, then be sure to craft campaigns around those goals. Keywords should be a good match, have affordable bids, and the appropriate negative keywords ready to go. You can even create portfolios that can quickly show how your campaigns are performing for specific goals. 

5. Optimize, Optimize, Optimize

Amazon Advertising should never be used as a “set it and forget it” platform. There’s always something to do in your campaigns. Don’t make changes daily — quite the opposite in fact — but do set a cadence to update bids, add in new keywords or product targets, test different product mixes, and add in negative keywords. 

By regularly optimizing a campaign, you narrow down its targets and refine the audiences to which the ads serve. As long as this is done according to your goals, you can create highly efficient campaigns that convert well over time. 

Amazon Advertising is constantly changing, with continuous changes to the platform. There are always new campaign types, targeting methods, and creative opportunities to test. 

It takes time to gather the data and analyze which types of campaigns will work best for your products. To get a full understanding of what Amazon Advertising can do for your brand, new advertisers should be prepared to test advertising on Amazon for at least six months before determining its effectiveness. This will give you time to see the emerging effects in both your paid and organic placements on Amazon.

Ever since Google Ads launched as AdWords on October 23, 2000, digital marketers have speculated that there must be a connection between dollars spent on pay-per-click (PPC) ads and performance in the free organic search results. Twenty-one years later, it’s still a common question that clients ask: “Can I buy better organic search performance by increasing my ad spend?”

The answer is, unequivocally: “No.”

Google Ads spend does not affect organic search performance in any way. Nor does participation in or purchase of any Google product from GSuite to the $150,000-per-year Google Analytics 360.

In Google’s words:

“While advertisers can pay more to be displayed higher in the advertising area, no one can buy better placement in the search results themselves.”– Google

“Search listings are free, and no one can pay for a better ranking, because Google is committed to keeping our search content useful and trustworthy. … Running a Google Ads campaign does not help your SEO rankings, despite some myths and claims.”– Google

To many, it seems like a logical connection: Giving Google more money should come with fringe benefits. But Google’s product isn’t search results, it’s the attention of human searchers. The search results are just bait to lure the searchers to Google so their attention can be sold to the highest Google Ads bidders. 

Searchers will only continue to give their attention to Google freely if Google’s search results are relevant and unbiased. Therefore, it’s in Google’s best interest to keep a distinct separation between church (organic results) and state (paid results).

It’s such an important aspect of Google’s business model that Googlers in all roles are educated about that separation when they’re hired — including, in theory, the errant sales rep.

“If any of our ad reps are saying that, I would expect they’ll get a very firm reminder they should never say that. I also expect they’ve already been told to never say something like that, as all Googlers are told.”– Danny Sullivan, Google Search Liaison

That said, there is a correlation between participation in Google Ads and stronger organic search performance, which only stokes the notion that there must be a monetary connection between organic and paid performance.

Always remember that correlation is not the same as causation. Two things can coexist without one causing the other, as is the case when organic performance improves with investment in paid advertising.

Businesses that run higher-spend or more effective PPC advertising programs are also increasing their brand awareness, and exposing potential customers to their unique selling propositions or promotions. There’s a symbiotic relationship between SEO and PPC that improves performance for both channels.

For instance, After repeated exposure to a brand and messaging, searchers are more likely to search for that brand again. And since 55% of the actions taken on Google’s search results page result in an organic click, searchers are likely to click on an organic result after their exposure to PPC ads.

Running paid ads is also a marker of higher digital marketing sophistication, which means that the business is probably also participating in and managing other digital channels better. When searchers see a brand in multiple channels as they traverse their digital universe — search, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, TikTok, Twitter, email blasts, and more — the likelihood that that searcher will click on an organic search result for that business increases exponentially. 

However, before the searcher can click on your search result, your pages must rank in organic search. You have to show up before you can go up.

Only an actively managed search engine optimization (SEO) program will improve your organic search performance. To learn more about SEO, start with our quick-read SEO 101 series:

• SEO 101: How Does SEO Work?
• SEO 101: What Is Technical SEO?
• SEO 101: How to Optimize Your Content.

Back to the Google sales representative that allegedly claimed — in writing in an email — that there was a causal link between ad spend and organic performance: Google’s organic search liaison, Danny Sullivan, has set the wheels in motion to resolve the issue, once again contradicting the claim.

“It will be addressed. I’ve already [sent] some emails about it now. I’m guessing that maybe the rep was referencing some studies I recall that sometimes, users might click more on either ads or unpaid search results when both are present. Which is NOT a way to boost SEO ranking…”– Danny Sullivan

Facebook’s original response to the new iOS 14 policy was resistance, but it ultimately decided the best course of action was to oblige in order to provide stability for its businesses and partners. 

In this post, we will go over Apple’s new iOS 14 policy, discuss the changes for both web and app advertisers, and review the required next steps to be prepared for these changes.

Apple’s New iOS 14 Policy

What Does the New iOS 14 Policy Entail?

To understand how Facebook advertising will be affected, you need to understand exactly what will be changed with the iOS 14 update. The full brief is available from Apple if you’d like to dig into the nitty-gritty details, but for those short on time, we’ve summarized the three main changes that are coming.

Data Nutrition Label

• The Data Nutrition Label will require all apps to submit how their application collects and utilizes data from its users. App owners and developers must upload this informational clause to the Apple App Store Connect. 

Tracking Transparency Prompts

• All applications utilizing the Apple App store are required by the new policy to ask users for permission to track their data across third-party apps and websites. The tracking transparency prompt will appear to the user and give them the ability to accept or decline the tracking of their data, as shown below.

Tracking via App/Browser APIs

• Facebook and other platforms will now be required to utilize a new framework that places restrictions and could delay event reporting. The previously instantaneous reporting for App Conversion Campaigns could now be delayed up to three days with the newly adopted SKAdNetwork API (SKAN API).

What is Facebook Currently Doing to Mitigate These Changes?

While Facebook is against these changes due to the far-reaching effects they can have on small to medium-sized businesses, the technology behemoth will be adhering to the new iOS 14 policy guidelines listed above. Although these guidelines will lead to changes in the way businesses advertise, the threat of losing their relationship with Apple would ultimately be more detrimental to Facebook. 

Here’s a summary of how Facebook is handling the upcoming changes:

Adhering to New Prompt Guidelines

• Previously, the Facebook platform was utilizing transparency features for ads such as the “Why am I seeing this?” button, an option to hide the ad, and an off-Facebook activity toggle switch. Users will now be prompted to decide whether they agree to allow their data to be collected or not. 

Continuing to Collect Device Identifiers 

• For those users who opt-in to Apple’s transparency prompt, device identifiers will be collected. Before the update, all users’ device identifiers were collected. 

App-Based Business Tools

• Facebook will continue to support app-based business tools for Apple’s limited measurement solution, SKAN API, for mobile apps.

Aggregated Event Management (AEM)

• For advertisers utilizing web-based business tools, Facebook will limit the measurement of some events for iOS 14 users through the new data-sharing protocol. This new AEM system will change the way that advertisers track conversions; to learn more read Apple’s blog post. 

Changes Advertisers Can Expect

The ramifications of these changes will be felt by both web and app advertisers. We’ll go over each of those changes separately, but first, let’s cover some general limitations to be aware of if you’re a Facebook or Instagram advertiser.

Ad Creation

• In terms of ad creation limitations, there are a few key changes that businesses should be aware of. For starters, Auction bidding is now the only available buying option when creating ads for devices on iOS14. Therefore, reach and frequency bidding is no longer available. For more limitations on ad creation, read Facebook’s blog post. 

Reporting 

• The new iOS 14 update will limit advertisers’ ability to measure the performance of campaigns on Facebook. The previous real-time reporting will no longer be supported and businesses could see a data delay of up to three days. Statistical modeling may be used to account for conversions from iOS 14 users.
• Delivery and action breakdowns including age, gender, region, and placement will not be supported.
• Attribution windows will be set at the ad set level, rather than the account level, and will be limited to a seven-day click and one-day view window.

Targeting 

• The size of app connections and Custom Audiences for both app and web activity will decrease as more people opt-out of tracking on iOS 14 devices. This means that audiences may need to be broadened to capture the attention of potential customers.

Changes and Next Steps for Web Advertisers

Now, let’s go over what you can expect to change as an advertiser. If you’re an app advertiser, you can skip ahead to the next section. Web advertisers, read on

Facebook Aggregated Event Management (AEM)

Facebook will be implementing AEM to comply with Apple’s prompt. This will not solve all impacts of Apple’s protocol and advertisers will still lose functionality with these changes, but it’s their best option given the circumstances. AEM limits the transmission of user data while still supporting critical advertiser use-cases. Facebook hasn’t provided many details on AEM quite yet, but we’ll keep you posted as information continues to roll out.

8-Event Limitation

Your pixel may only track and optimize for a maximum of eight conversion events for each domain. Facebook will initially configure the conversion events they believe to be the most relevant to your business. All other events will be made inactive for campaign optimization and reporting. You will be able to manage your event priority preferences in Events Manager.

Any ad sets that are optimizing for a pixel conversion event that is no longer active due to this eight-event limitation will be paused. Those who opt-out of the data tracking will only be logged for one event completed after the ad click. This means that only customers that make it to one of your predetermined conversion events on the first ad click will be logged.

To cater to this new system, Facebook recommends setting up your eight conversion events to track the potential customer at key points of their purchase journey. For example, if a customer visits your website, adds items to their cart, but does not go through with the purchase, you will want a conversion event for both the Add to Cart event and the Purchase event. Without the Add to Cart event, the data from that customer will not be tracked unless they complete a purchase on the first ad click. 

You may need to consider changes to your campaign measurement strategy. Upper-funnel event optimization (landing page views, link clicks, etc.) may be required.

Attribution and Conversion Windows 

Due to limitations of the view-through signal, the default attribution setting for new campaigns after the prompt is enforced will be set to seven-day click and one-day view. Facebook will no longer be able to support 28-day click, 28-day view, and seven-day view conversion windows. In situations when there is limited data available from iOS 14 users, statistical modeling will be used for certain attribution windows. There will be in-product annotation to communicate when a metric is modeled.

Conversion Event Breakdowns

Advertisers have previously been able to break down conversion actions for more insight into consumer behavior. By accepting Apple’s prompt, Facebook will no longer be able to show breakdowns for reported conversions. This includes delivery and action breakdowns, such as age, gender, religion, and placement.

Dynamic Ads

For dynamic ads, it is important to ensure that your catalog is only utilizing one tracking pixel. The pixel will also only be able to report and optimize for a maximum of eight conversions. All other conversions will be made inactive for optimization and reporting.  

Next Steps for Web Advertisers (infographic)

Now that we’ve summarized the changes, let’s go over what you can do now to prepare. In summary, you’ll need to make sure your web domain is verified in Business Manager, start preparing your list of eight priority pixel events, and prepare for the changes to attribution windows and campaign strategies. 

For future preparation, campaign optimization will change as potential customers start to opt-out of data sharing. Niche-targeted campaigns could be affected by a lack of consumer data, therefore campaigns may need to be adjusted to suit broader audiences.

Overall, you will want to ensure that your campaigns are prepared for the changes coming to the Facebook advertising platform. Your agency team will help you plan for these changes and make sure your campaigns are built to any new best practices. As Facebook continues to release information, we will continue to update you on how that impacts your advertising efforts. 

Changes and Next Steps for App Advertisers

Finally, let’s go over the changes and next steps as they relate to app advertisers.

Attribution – Restricted

Conversion data shared via app business tools may be restricted, aggregated, and delayed by the SKAN API. As for attribution windows for app install campaigns, Apple’s SKAN API will be determining those windows. This change is projected to occur in mid-to-late January 2021. Facebook will initially be defaulting to a seven-day click and one-day view attribution setting. The new default attribution setting may result in a decrease in the number of reported conversions.

Campaign Management – Restricted

If you plan to run app install campaigns, you will need to ensure that your app is associated with only one ad account. An ad account may house multiple apps, however. With the new iOS 14 update, you will only be allowed to run a maximum of nine campaigns at one time. Each of these campaigns must contain no more than five ad sets per campaign and auction will be the only buying type available. Once your campaign is published, you can’t turn on or turn off the iOS 14 campaign toggle. You’ll have to turn off or delete your campaign.

Breakdowns – Aggregated

Demographic breakdowns of conversion events will no longer be available.

Lift Measurement – Aggregated

This will be unavailable for iOS14 App Install and App Event campaigns.

Reporting – Delayed

Real-time reporting will not be supported and data may be delayed up to three days. For iOS 14 app install campaigns, conversion events will be reported based on the time they are reported to Facebook by the SKAN API. Results will be aggregated at the campaign level and statistical modeling may be used to account for results at the ad set and ad levels.

Next Steps For App Advertisers (infographic)

Now that we’ve summarized the changes, let’s go over what you can do now to prepare. In summary, you’ll need to make sure to review Apple’s new privacy details and if you’re using Facebook SDK, make sure you update to version 8.1 or up. Looking ahead, you’ll also want to prepare to use an “advertiser tracking enabled” flag, configure your conversions schema for app events, plan to integrate with SKAN API, and plan to consolidate your app campaigns to one ad per account. 

Moving Forward

The Apple iOS 14 update undoubtedly brings considerable change for all Facebook advertisers. Whether you are a web or app advertiser, this update is one that will not go unnoticed. Use the best practices set forth in this post to ensure your Facebook and Instagram ads can survive the iOS 14 update from Apple.

This post was co-authored with significant contributions from Lex Olson, Marisa Giacalone, and Erin Patten.

Ask yourself these simple questions to determine if you should be tracking conversions: 

• Do you have an e-commerce site that sells products or services online? 
• Do you collect business leads online?
• Can visitors get a demo or download a file after filling out a form?
• Can customers request quotes online?
• Can visitors sign up for email newsletters?
• Do you post coupons for visitors to redeem either online or at a brick-and-mortar location?

If you answered “yes” to any of those questions, then you should immediately implement conversion tracking for at least your PPC advertising.

(If you answered no to all of the questions and the only call to action on your website is to make a phone call, then you should have call tracking set up for your PPC campaigns.) 

What is Conversion Tracking

Conversion tracking maps an action that a visitor takes on a website back to other data for that visit, allowing deeper analysis in web analytics programs.

It enables you to monitor the success of your PPC campaigns down to the individual keyword level. 

Setting up conversion tracking requires placing small snippets of code on your website. Google, Microsoft, Verizon, Facebook and TikTok all provide the needed conversion tracking codes free of charge. You only need to copy the codes provided by the platforms, then paste them into the HTML of the web page that indicates that an action took place. 

For example, if an order confirmation page loads, an order likely took place that triggered that order confirmation page. Inserting the tracking code on the order confirmation page would therefore enable you to track the data for all of your orders. 

Minor changes can be made to also track revenue value of orders, form completion, and other actions that result in a specific page load.

Using Google’s free Tag Manager makes implementing conversion tracking even easier, allowing you to set up multiple third-party tracking codes in one place with only two snippets of code added to your website.

Conversion Tracking for PPC

As mentioned earlier, you can track conversions and revenue from successfully complete orders. Since you can trace that data to a specific PPC keyword, you can see the actual sales that were generated by that keyword and calculate its return on ad spend (ROAS). In this way, you can determine your profitability, and decide how to allocate your spend.

If your primary action on your website is a lead, you’ll be able to see what your cost per acquisition (CPA) is. Once you have a baseline CPA, you can start to figure out what your goal needs to be for your campaigns to be profitable.

Conversion tracking gives you the ability to determine the value of your ad campaigns. You’ll know if the money you are spending is bringing you business. You’ll be able to make better decisions about where to spend your marketing dollars based on hard data. 

Don’t throw your advertising dollars away on a wish and a prayer. Make your budget work harder and smarter by putting conversion tracking in place today.

Note: This post was originally written June 18, 2008, and was substantially updated on January 26, 2021.

MSAN has become an integral part of my advertising strategy on Microsoft. Still, I’d been having two polar opposite problems: I either couldn’t get any volume for new MSAN campaigns, or I was getting too much volume with no results. And without many obvious levers to pull — like keywords or audiences — it was hard to know what to do to fix the issues.

After trying to troubleshoot on my own, I reached out to our account executive who connected me with one of the solutions account managers responsible for developing the MSAN product. Based on what he told me and my subsequent testing, I’ve compiled five tips for setting up new campaigns and five for troubleshooting existing ones. These tips apply to both MSAN Shopping and Image campaigns.

Tips for Setting Up New MSAN Campaigns

1. Set a large enough audience size. If your audience size is small — fewer than 10,000 site visitors a month — you may not get enough volume. This is not to say it’s not worth trying; I have several clients with small audience sizes who still see decent returns on MSAN. So test it, but don’t be surprised if the volume is extremely low or non-existent.

2. Start your bidding at $1.50. When Microsoft first launched its MSAN program, they recommended that bidding should start at $2.00. However, the recommendation has been decreased to $1.50, which seems sufficient based on my testing, to get traffic without going crazy. 

3. Exclude the usual Microsoft Ads syndicated partner lists. If you have a list of syndicated partners that you routinely exclude from your Search and Shopping campaigns, exclude them here too. (And if you don’t have a syndicated partner exclusion list that you routinely use, you should!)

4. Hands off for at least the first seven days. Once you’ve launched your MSAN campaign, let it run for seven to 14 days without making changes to give the algorithm the time and data it needs to learn and optimize results. Making adjustments can interfere in this process. The only exceptions to this rule are tips number six and seven below.

5. Start with a budget of at least $100 per day. In order to give the algorithm enough data to learn from, you need to budget enough to drive the traffic to teach it. With that said, especially because you aren’t supposed to touch it for seven to 14 days, I have started clients with lower budgets and seen decent results.

Tips for Troubleshooting Existing MSAN Campaigns

6. Try dayparting. If you have a high-volume campaign spending its budget without any results, check the time of day the campaign runs out of budget. I’ve found examples of clients spending their entire budget by 3 a.m. That spend pattern wasn’t efficient, but setting up dayparting so that the campaigns didn’t come on until 7 a.m. returned much better results. Note: This is something you can do without waiting seven to 14 days on new campaigns.

7. Check your device spend. Your MSAN campaigns will drive mobile traffic, and potentially a lot of it. If most of your budget is spent on mobile devices and your site doesn’t historically convert well there, try adding a bid adjustment for mobile devices. Note: This is something you can do without waiting seven to 14 days on new campaigns, but make sure you’ve got enough data for it to be statistically significant.

8. Check specific publishers: Run a publishers report to determine whether any outlier search partners could be driving up spend without a high enough return on investment. (This is good practice for any campaign you run that opts into running on search partners.)

9. Run at least three image ads. For MSAN Image campaigns, create at least three ads per ad group, just like you would for regular search campaign best practices. Important note: even though you can import your Display campaigns from Google, you’ll only get one version of the Responsive Display ad running on Google, so you’ll need to create more versions of the ad for Microsoft. 

Test lifestyle and product ads to see which works best, Typically, I find that lifestyle imagery tends to perform more strongly, but not always.

10. Ask for help. If you still can’t get any volume despite your audience size and spend, reach out to your Microsoft Ads representative or to support. Don’t just accept that there’s no volume to be had; there might be something going on behind the scenes that you can’t see. 

For example, I’ve had two instances in which something was blocking the ads from showing. For one of them, I had to create a separate account because the editorial policies for Search/Shopping are different than for the Audience Network, and for the other, engineering was able to unblock it. 

MSAN is a valuable and viable addition to paid search, and it pays to test it using the five setup tips I’ve shared. And if it doesn’t perform as intended, make sure to check out the five troubleshooting tips. They could mean the difference between success and failure for a potentially valuable campaign.

Those who have been advertising on Amazon for five years or more may recall that display campaigns are not exactly new as vendors previously had access to this type of campaign. However, the previous iteration had very minimal options — no keywords and no options for refinement beyond adjusting bids and budgets — and was phased out in 2017. These prior display campaigns only allowed advertisers to set a bid, budget, a maximum of one advertised product, and targeting — nothing more.

Now, Sponsored Display has been relaunched and is a completely different campaign type with more versatility and refinement options available. As with Sponsored Product campaigns, Sponsored Display campaigns are dependent on the buy box for the ads to be delivered. The buy box will look a little different based on your selling method on Amazon: Seller or Vendor. 

To be the featured offer for the buy box, the Amazon algorithm evaluates different metrics including your price, fulfillment method, shipping speed, customer feedback rating, and other factors. If your listing is the best out of all the listings for a particular product, you win the buy box. This will then allow your Sponsored Display ads to be served. 

For sellers, Sponsored Display ads will only serve when their seller offer is in the buy box. Vendor ads, on the other hand, will only serve if Amazon.com is the featured offer in the buy box for any of the Amazon Standard Identification Numbers (ASINs) in the display campaigns.

For example, in the image above on the left, you can see highlighted in red that seller Pulp Story Juice has won the buy box. As a result, if Pulp Story Juice was running Sponsored Display campaigns for this product, they would be allowed to display. If another seller had won the buy box, Pulp Story Juice’s ads would not be allowed to display.

In the vendor example on the right, however, Amazon has won the buy box. As a result, that vendor’s Sponsored Display ads would be allowed to show for every product ASIN in the display campaign that is currently winning the buy box. 

Sponsored Display campaigns do not use keywords for targeting, the way Sponsored Product or Sponsored Brand campaigns do. Instead, audiences are used for targeting, more in line with how Facebook or Google Display does targeting. 

As is the Amazon way, the options differ a bit whether you are a seller or a vendor. 

Sponsored Display Ads for Sellers

Sellers that are the registered brand owners on Amazon can target Amazon audiences based on views or products. 

View Targeting

• Allows your remarketing campaign to target shoppers who have viewed the product detail pages that match the selected criteria. This criterion can include Amazon users who have visited your product but did not purchase or shoppers who viewed a similar product to yours. 
• These audience groups have a lookback time frame of 30 days. This means that if a shopper visited your product within the last 30 days, they are eligible to be served a Sponsored Display campaign remarketing ad. 
• Other criteria you can target with views are shoppers who have browsed specific product categories, similar brands, and even specific product features like price, review star ratings, and shipping options.
• Ads are placed on the Amazon.com site as well as offsite through the DSP network. 

Product Targeting

• Allows your remarketing ads to show on specific products or categories within Amazon. For example, if you’re selling a stapler on Amazon, you can target ads at shoppers who have frequented the Manual Office Staplers category on Amazon, or target your competitor products for an opportunity to gain new customers and market share. 
• As with view targeting, this method allows you to target products or categories and refine by brand, price range, star rating, or shipping method. 
• Product targeted ads cannot target shoppers who have viewed your product or similar products.
• Different from view targeting, product targeted Sponsored Display campaigns do not appear off Amazon in the DSP network and are only shown on the Amazon.com website.

For sellers using Sponsored Display campaigns, multiple products can be added to a campaign; previously this campaign type could only feature one product. We recommend grouping similar products together in one campaign and creating a new campaign for different product groupings. 

For example, group staplers together as the targeting options are likely to be the same, and group printer ink in a different Sponsored Display campaign. This division gives you more precise control over where your ads show and how shoppers are targeted.

Sponsored Display for Vendors

Along with view and product targeting, Amazon has included interest targeting — an additional level to view targeting — for vendors using Sponsored Display campaigns. 

Interest Targeting

• Only one product can be featured in the campaign. Although you can only select a single product, you can choose to target as many of the product-specific interest groups as you would like.
• Only available to be shown on Amazon.com. Interested targeted ads are not served off-site though the Amazon DSP placement market.
• Allows vendors to advertise to Amazon shoppers who fall into broad categories of interests compiled by Amazon using shopper behaviors to determine shoppers who are actively browsing for products that meet those interests.  

For example, if you’re a bookseller and want to advertise to true crime readers, you can target shoppers who have shown an interest in Mystery and Thrillers or Nonfiction books. Or, if you’re selling computer keyboards, you can target shoppers who fall into the interest groups of Computer Mavens in the Lifestyle, Hobby and Professional section.

All Amazon Sponsored Display ad targeting methods allow you to customize your ad by offering the option to include a brand logo and a 50 character headline to appear with the auto-generated product image and title from the product detail page. Keep in mind that Amazon reviews these customized ads and it could take up to 24 hours before the campaign is approved and live. Campaigns without customization typically go live within 1-2 hours of creation.

With the rebirth and growth of the Sponsored Display campaign type, we are seeing Amazon focus more resources on its success. New features are regularly being rolled out and we expect to see previous purchase and search targeting roll out soon. Amazon’s goal is to make this an integral ad type, so start making these part of your campaign strategy now.

While Facebook and Instagram are used for communication and sharing life updates, Pinterest is primarily used for planning. Whether it’s decorating a room in their house, finding the perfect birthday gift for an anniversary, or collecting recipes and crafts to refer back to when needed – Pinterest is the platform people use to plan. And it’s now offering an easy way for users to click and buy with collections ads. 

What is a Collections Ad?

Pinterest’s new taggable collections Pins give users an easy and direct way to buy what they want from the promoted Pin they see. With just a click, users can see the name of the item, the price, and have the option to go directly to the website to make their purchase. 

Much like taggable posts on platforms like Instagram, Pinterest’s collections ads now allow brands to link products displayed in their Pins directly to their site. This form of shopping is becoming exponentially more popular amongst younger generations. In today’s age of technology, many consumers expect products to fall into their laps, and with collections Pins, your brand can deliver exactly that. 

How Do They Work?

Collections Pins are simple to create:

• Go through your Pin creation process as you normally would, but be sure to click the “tag” icon and “+” icon on the displayed products.
• Add an existing Pin, a product ID from your catalog, or a website URL for each product.
• Tag at least three products.
• Select “save products.”
• Publish the Pin to one of your Pinterest boards. 

Once you are ready to build or edit your Pinterest advertising campaigns, you will have the option to select the collections Pins from the board on which it was saved. This nifty new offering from Pinterest is perfect for the instant gratification world in which we live.

What Should My Audience Look Like?

Since Pinterest is for planners, it is important to make sure you are targeting the perfect demographic for your Pin. Your goal is to find potential consumers who are planning for life changes that match your product or service. 

For instance, if you own a home goods store are advertising a collection of cookware, consider targeting those who are recently engaged or new home buyers since both may be planning to purchase new kitchen essentials. Your product needs to catch their eye before they will buy. 

How Can I Make Sure My Collections Ad Stands Out?

The creative assets for collections ads should be eye-catching like any other platform, but you should consider how your product or service could be implemented for the planners of Pinterest.

Utilizing lifestyle photos of individuals interacting with your brand in a real-life setting will help the user envision your product or service in their own lives. Additionally, bright and clean product shots in aesthetically pleasing settings will make more Pinterest users want to buy your product or Pin your ad for future reference. 

Since Pinterest organic Pins have an aesthetic edge, your post needs to appear native to the content surrounding it. Potential buyers should view your product seamlessly integrated with other related organic Pins that pique their interest. 

Ensure your collections ad fits cohesively into the organic landscape by searching relevant terms to your brand and looking at the organic Pins that appear. If your offering fits with what actual Pinterest users would see, that’s a win! 

One Last Tip 

To best capture Pinterest users with your ads, it is crucial to create curated collections of your products for each audience you are targeting. 

For instance, advertising all of your product offerings in one collections ad may hinder your success if a user is primarily interested in the product set featured in your creative. Thinking back to the cookware example — even though your home goods store may sell pillowcases, you probably shouldn’t advertise them to those interested in kitchen essentials. Try to keep the collection catered to the creative shown. 

Ensuring you select products and audiences that suit your primary goal will ultimately lead to further purchases down the customer journey funnel. This sets your Pinterest collections ads up for success now as well as in the future.

For the purpose of illustration, let’s use the following scenario to understand the different ways in which these two platforms track conversions: 

1. On Monday, Jane clicks on an ad and reviews information but does not complete a transaction or other conversion action. 
2. On Tuesday, Jane gets an email that says, “You left items in your cart; don’t forget to checkout!” She clicks the email link but does not complete her order. 
3. On Saturday, Jane goes directly to the website and finally finishes her order. 

The path that Jane used to convert from visitor to customer for this example was Google Ads > Email > Direct. 

Now for the difference in conversion attribution between the two platforms, Google Ads and Google Analytics.

Google Analytics: Jane’s purchase will be tracked based on the last click action and the date of the conversion. In this case, the last action was a direct visit to the website. Since Google Analytics leverages the last-click attribution model, the conversion action would be registered to the source “Direct” on Wednesday, the date the transaction occurred. 

As you can see, the last-click attribution model does not always paint a complete picture, since Google Ads would receive no credit for assisting in the customer decision process. You would not know Google Ads played any role in the customer journey unless you went to the “Top Conversions Paths” tab by clicking on “Conversions” and then “Multi-Channel Funnels.” 

Google Ads: On the other hand, Google Ads will attribute conversions based on the date the ad (or ads) were clicked. In Jane’s case, Google Ads would attribute a conversion action to a campaign, ad group, keyword, and ad on Monday, the day the ad was clicked. Google Ads would be given credit for the conversion so you would know that paid advertising did assist in the decision process.

To restate the core difference between the two:

• Google Analytics uses the last-click attribution model, which assigns all attribution for the conversion to the final channel on the day that the conversion took place;
• Google Ads counts every conversion that an ad played a role in, on the day of the ad click, regardless of which channel drove the final conversion.

Google Ads gives you the option to select from different attribution models to best fit your business goals. We typically leverage position-based or data-driven attribution, but the attribution model should be based on business requirements. To learn more about all six of the Google Ads Attribution models, read “6 Google Ads PPC Attribution Models, One to Rule Them All.”

Google Ads vs. Google Analytics Conversion Tracking Chart

The two platforms, Google Ads and Google Analytics, differ in other ways as well. The following chart will help you understand the finer points.

As with any endeavor, understanding what the metrics you’re measuring truly mean is critical to using them effectively to improve your business performance. And while having a conversion register with Google Ads is important for properly understanding the effectiveness of your PPC advertising, it is also a key component in Google Ads algorithms. 

In general, the more data you provide Google, the better it is at understanding and serving ads to the right people. The trend is towards more automation so the more and better inputs that are provided, the better the chance for success. Google Ads conversion tracking provides those “better inputs.” 

Google Analytics is a powerful measurement platform that should absolutely be leveraged and will provide significant insights into PPC performance. However, it’s best used to look at your site performance holistically as opposed to analyzing and optimizing the performance of your Google Ads campaigns. Seeing how your ads meet your business goals is what Google Ads data is best used for. When the data from both are used in conjunction, you are able to see a full picture and optimize performance synergistically.

Since its inception in 2011, Snapchat has not only grasped the millennial audience in their younger years but also, more recently, attracted Generation Z (Gen Z). As the millennials began to cycle out of utilizing the platform, Gen Z claimed it for themselves.

According to Snapchat, the platform currently reaches 90% of 13- to 24-year-olds in the United States. If you are in the market to capture Gen Z eyeballs, Snapchat should definitely be part of your media plan. 

3 Do’s for Snapchat Advertising

As you develop your campaigns, though, make sure to do these three things.

1. Do Design Creative Based on Objective

When designing creative for the Snapchat interface make sure to design it with your specific goal in mind. Your ad assets should pull a user in and make them want to see more. 

For example, adding additional imagery that guides the user to the swipe up feature at the bottom of your snap encourages snapchatters to head to your web page, app download, or lead generation form to take the next step. 

Snapchat even has unique features such as filters and augmented reality experiences that allow users to interact directly with your product. Your ultimate goal is to incentivize your users to take action through your creative design. 

2. Do Optimize for Mobile Consumption

It is extremely important to ensure that your creative is best optimized for the vertical format of Snapchat ads. You should also be able to tell your story in six seconds or less to grasp the attention of the user early on. 

With so many products cluttering the digital space, your ad needs to stand out from the rest. For Snapchat, the traditional narrative that is told in other ad formats is replaced by getting straight to the point. You can accomplish this by placing your brand messaging as soon as the first two seconds of your ad. 

3. Do Style as Authentic Native Content

The advertising world is changing and audiences are demanding more authenticity and truth from the brands they love most. Snapchat has the advantage of delivering brands with a platform designed to attract consumers based on authentic advertisements. 

Create videos that have a homemade feel to entice a user to learn more. Using real people to connect with potential customers creates that native feel that increases trust and develops a stronger sense of relationship between brand and consumer.

3 Don’ts For Snapchat Advertising

But there are also some things not to do when it comes to Snapchat advertising. 

1. Don’t Get too Crazy with Creative

Be colorful and engaging, but don’t overdo it. You want your audience to be enticed but not distracted. It is important to understand your audience and their behaviors. Analyze your results to learn how to cater your ad formats to what performs best for your brand. 

2. Don’t Overextend Your Primary Messaging

Since the Snapchat interface is built around short, bite-sized video clips, you will need to get directly to the point. Ideally, reveal your selling point within the first two seconds of the ad. Lengthy, drawn-out content is not suitable for the Snapchat interface.

3. Don’t Stick too Closely to Traditional Advertising 

While traditional advertising principles are still important, they should not be the overarching guide for your Snap ads. The Snapchat audience is looking for refreshing content with a homemade feel. Don’t be afraid to get creative with Snapchat. There is little need to create cinematic ad content for this interface. 

All in all, Snapchat has become a wave of the future for brands and advertisers. Both its ability to capture Gen-Z, and the uniqueness of the platform enable brands to utilize Snapchat to showcase their message in a new light. 

Every year, Clutch recognizes its Leader Award winners across a variety of service lines and locations. At the end of the year, they catalog the 1,000 top-performing B2B companies into the Clutch 1000, the firm’s most exclusive award representing only the top 1% of companies listed on the site. 

“We are thankful for each and every one of our wonderful clients, especially those who took the time to leave us a review on Clutch and make this recognition possible,” said JumpFly president Michael Marchese. “This award and JumpFly’s 4.9-star rating on Clutch are all thanks to our amazing long-term partnerships.”

About JumpFly

JumpFly professionally develops, implements, and manages Google Ads, Microsoft Ads, Verizon Media Ads, Amazon Ads, and Facebook advertising accounts, enabling clients to maximize internet advertising results while saving time and money. Proper setup and management of these powerful programs will likely make the difference between an advertiser’s success or failure. In order to drive optimal performance across both paid and organic search, JumpFly also offers search engine optimization (SEO) management. JumpFly’s full-service smart digital marketing solution enables clients to focus on their core business while achieving the best possible results from their marketing efforts. JumpFly is a Premier Google Partner, Facebook Marketing Partner, Microsoft Select Partner Agency, Snapchat Certified, a TikTok Partner, and has an A+ rating from the BBB.

About Clutch

Clutch is a market research firm based in the heart of Washington, DC that features leading companies in the B2B space. Their team interviews the customers of these service providers and formats their comments into verified reviews. This direct feedback ensures that all of their ratings, rankings, and awards are fair and transparent. 

To learn more about JumpFly and its past work, visit the JumpFly profile on Clutch. Ready to start your next project? Get in touch.

Creating a site full of compelling, well-optimized content is not a luxury, it’s a requirement in today’s search-driven world. In order to compete in organic search, your site needs to be optimized better than your competitors’ sites. 

Every searcher that clicks on a Google organic listing to one of your competitors’ sites is potentially enriching them instead of you. That click should be yours. That lead, that sale — those should be yours. But first, your content needs to be so relevant to searchers’ queries that Google chooses to rank your pages ahead of your competitors’ pages. That’s where content optimization comes into play. 

Optimizing great content takes time. Even though they take time to complete, these six steps are required for every page of content you optimize.

1. Read the page: You have to know what you’ve got to start with — positive and negative — before you can optimize it. Read it first without trying to optimize it as you go.

2. Research the page topic: What’s on the page may or may not be thorough or descriptive enough to give you what you need to know to optimize it. Many higher-level pages are entirely devoid of content. If that’s the case, you’re starting from scratch and need to research the products or topic very carefully to make sure you hit the mark.

3. Research relevant keyword themes: Depending on how focused the page topic is, this could be a small handful of precise keywords or a broad set of loosely related keywords. You may need to hunt for relevant keywords based on questions your audience might have or use cases for a product you offer. Each idea you input into the keyword tool takes time for the system to process, and also for you to analyze the results.

4. Choose the keyword theme: Each page needs a unique keyword focus. That means that the keywords you’re choosing to optimize the page for shouldn’t be the focus of any other page on your site. You’ll need to spend a little time making sure that these keywords belong to this page more than any other on your site.

Sometimes you find too many relevant keywords. If that happens, you have to take time to decide whether they can all be used on one page, or whether you need to also create supporting content on other pages for the related keywords. You may even need to generate entirely new pages.

5. Write something good: Writing copy “for SEO” is no different than writing unique, interesting copy for any page on your website. Your customers will see this content and judge your brand based on it. 

You need a wordsmith to produce the copy — one who will also stay true to the keyword theme as they’re writing it. If you have an internal copywriting team, they can handle this step, but it needs to be done by someone with creative and business writing skills. 

6. Optimize the content for SEO in four places: This is the step everyone thinks of. Just sprinkle in a couple of keywords and call it done, right? But how many keywords, used in what ways, and where? How do you know when there are too many or too few?

There are four areas on the page that need to be modified to fully optimize it — the title tag, meta description, primary heading, and body copy. Different SEO rules apply to each of these four areas. Optimizing incorrectly makes your copy repellent to customers and search engines alike. It can even lower your rankings, rather than improving them.

Going through the optimization process takes time, but it’s necessary. Shortcutting the content optimization process optimizes more pages more quickly, but results in slower organic search growth.

Remember, increasing your organic search leads and revenue is your end goal. Taking content optimization shortcuts will only result in shortchanging yourself.

Are you getting what you pay for? 

Every SEO agency — and I’ve managed SEO in five of them over the last 15 years — determines their fees using the same criteria, listed below.

• How quickly you want results: Lower fees typically mean that the agency is doing less work, which in turn means that your organic search results will improve more slowly — or not at all. If the number of things a low-cost SEO agency produces is high, the effort required to produce each thing will be low. For example, a low-cost agency usually delivers 20 or so optimized title tags in a month. That sounds like you’re paying for a lot, but you’re paying for work that doesn’t completely optimize those 20 pages. It’s much faster to optimize 20 title tags than it is to fully optimize the pages, and it looks like you’re making quick progress if you’re not well versed in SEO. As a result, they can afford to charge less for their services.

• The type of work you need: SEO is based on three pillars — content, technical, and authority. Each pillar focuses on a different skill set, from creative writing to technical code- and server-based knowledge, to data analysis or networking skills. Sites that require work across all three pillars can expect to pay more because they require more advanced skill sets. Low-priced SEO agencies typically focus solely on content optimization. While this is a critical area, issues in the other two pillars can actually prevent you from ranking, even if you have the strongest content out there. When this happens, you’re essentially pouring your SEO fees down the drain.

• The results you need: Discount SEO agencies love to talk about rankings. And they can produce great rankings results — for keywords that have no competition and no value. If you’re already using a low-cost SEO agency, examine the keywords they’re optimizing your pages for closely. Your monthly report is probably filled with rankings for long, obscure phrases with incredible rankings. That feels like value, but it’s worthless. The only metrics that matter to your business at the end of the day as key performance indicators are the traffic, leads, and revenue driven by your organic search channel.

• The level of expertise you need: It’s as true in SEO as it is in your own business: Talent costs more. Low-cost agencies typically rely on cheap labor and have high turn-over rates in their staff. Everyone starts somewhere, and today’s low-cost newbie could be a superstar after several years of training and experience. However, they’re not going to get that mentoring and expertise at a low-cost agency. It’s not in their business model. Rather, newbies in every type of agency — not just SEO agencies — use low-cost agencies as stepping stones to bigger agencies after they’ve gotten a little experience. Do you really want them cutting their teeth on your site, or do you want someone with experience who has helped other sites through similar challenges? 

In the end, you get the SEO that you pay for. It’s important to examine the value you’re receiving for the fees you’re paying. There’s no value in paying for low-cost SEO because it almost always delivers poor results where they matter: the sessions, leads, and revenue your organic search efforts generate.

That return on investment will also multiply over time as the SEO work begins to see results across many pages on the site. The page you optimize on day one will typically still be returning increased traffic, leads, and revenue on day 199. Because of this, you can’t judge the value of your spend based on a single month’s performance — you pay for it once and receive benefits over and over again.

It’s true that you can’t ignore the total sticker price when you’re choosing an SEO agency. But make sure to weigh that cost against the true value you’re getting for your dollar.

The Generation Z (Gen Z) portion of our population, those who were born between 1996 and 2010, has grown up in an era with technology and innovation at the forefront. They continue to take hold of the newest platforms and are beginning to shape the way our digital world will look in the future. Understanding this youthful generation is key to amplifying your digital presence online. 

Constant Learning & Evolution

According to a global poll done by Facebook IQ, 79% of Gen Zers believe that the development of new skills is important throughout life. They are living in an era of change and have made it a priority to learn and adapt to put those skills into practice. 

Acknowledging that they have a world of information at their fingertips has enabled Gen Z to focus on overcoming challenges that other generations may have never been able to take on. 

Activism is in their Nature 

Whether it be taking on issues of social justice or spear-heading ventures of sustainability, Gen Z has been on the frontlines of change since they can remember. On a global scale, 71% say that they would like to see more diversity in advertisements and 79% say the pandemic has made it even more important for companies to behave sustainably, according to Facebook’s poll. 

This generation wants change and they have made big steps to make their voices heard. TikTok has become a prime example of an interface that fuels the motivation behind many of Gen Z’s movements towards a more socially-conscious world. This generation has taken full advantage of the virality on social platforms, like TikTok and Instagram, to change the perspective of not only brands but also much of the general public.

They Have Restructured the Commerce Landscape

As targeting becomes more and more detailed with digital advertising, Gen Zers expect brands and products to find them. Therefore, understanding what they want most is important to consider when creating a product to last for years to come. 67% of this demographic noted that there are too many options, and too much choice online. They anticipate direct targeting to tell them what they want most, based on their interests (Facebook IQ). 

According to the same poll mentioned above, in the UK and U.S., Gen Z shoppers are 1.4 times more likely than other generations to pay a premium for an eco-friendly product. Sustainability and environmentally conscious brands are more appealing to these young consumers. Brands must keep this perspective in mind when evolving to fit the new commerce landscape. 

Community is Key

Connection and authenticity are becoming increasingly important. Brands are required, now more than ever, to foster meaningful relationships with their customers and create authentic content. The hard-sell technique is quickly becoming a thing of the past as Gen Z looks to find brands that want to genuinely relate to the consumer they are selling to. 

This deep desire for Gen Z consumers to connect is what has made influencer marketing a wave of the future. Enabling consumers to interact with a brand through an influencer they trust makes them more likely to purchase the product. According to Mobile Marketer, 44% of Gen Z has purchased a product after seeing it promoted by their favorite social media celebrities. 

What Does That Mean For Marketers? 

Ultimately, marketers have to be aware and create content that connects. For Gen Z, the purchase decision comes down to more than just price and convenience. Targeting this demographic requires brands to convey a message that they are authentic and that they care about current social issues. 

Marketing has become storytelling and must evolve to best capture the audiences of the future.

The answer is simple: reach and engagement.

Instagram recently hit 1 billion active monthly users including over 25 million business accounts, and a projected 14 billion USD in revenue since its humble launch back in 2010. With audience numbers like that, brands can’t afford to not be on Instagram if they want to capture a large percentage of the consumer population.

Compared to Facebook, with over twice the amount of active daily users, an average image on Instagram gets 23% more engagement. Audiences on Instagram are more likely to share, comment and interact with a brand versus other social platforms, but that doesn’t only apply to the app.

In an Instagram survey, about 80% of shoppers said that Instagram helps them decide whether they should buy a product or service. Of those surveyed, about 87% would take action after seeing a product on Instagram: such as following a brand, visiting their website, or making a purchase online.

When it comes to site traffic, Instagram users stay, on average, over 3 minutes after landing on a webpage. That’s a 45% longer site average than Facebook traffic and 40% longer than Twitter, making Instagram a more effective use of advertising efforts than other leading social platforms.

Creating a strong brand presence is crucial to a successful Instagram marketing strategy. Part of what makes the platform so appealing is the sense of community. Instagrammers want to hear from their favorite brands and interact through direct messages, comments, and sharing their personal experiences with products or services.

Plan Instagram campaigns beyond awareness to drive action at every step of the consumer journey by:

• Delivering targeted ads to reach key audiences.
• Using relevant hashtags to help users discover your brand.
• Interacting with your community to enforce brand loyalty.
• Reinforcing your brand authenticity with user-generated content and product reviews.
• Boosting shoppable content and products to re-engage users with your brand.
• Promoting limited-time offers your followers can take advantage of.

If your brand isn’t already advertising on Instagram — what’s stopping you? With Instagram’s large and highly-engaged user-base, there’s no denying the impact it can have on your business. Now is the time to harness the power of Instagram and see how it can benefit your online sales.

Sitelinks

Just like search campaigns, you can now add sitelinks to go along with your video ads. Capitalize on the holiday season by adding relevant links to current promotions, hot products, and more. Your goal is to make it easy and enticing for a user to click through.

During Google’s testing phase, advertisers saw a 23% increase in conversions when they included sitelinks.

This is a very simple and easy win for your TV4A campaigns. You can easily use your existing account sitelinks, or you can create specific sitelinks to use just for this new campaign.

Call-to-Action Extensions

If you are not using a call-to-action (CTA) when advertising, you should. CTAs prompt users towards the end goal action you want them to take by encouraging the user viewing the ad to take that specific action. 

Whether you want a potential customer to “Shop Now,” “Get a Quote,” or “Save Now,” be sure to add this powerful extension to the mix.

Lead Forms (beta)

The lead form extension has rolled out to search campaigns and is currently in beta for TV4A campaigns. What’s great about this extension is that you are able to embed a lead form within your ad; the user actually does not have to click through the ad and then fill out your form. 

Why is this great? You are getting more user information upfront and giving them more reason to act right away. Additionally, this is another way to add more elements to your ad and make it feel more complete. 

TV4A campaigns are a great way to add a new element to your paid digital marketing mix. With a more complete campaign featuring these added extensions, you are setting yourself up for more opportunities to convert.  

According to eMarketer, retail sales are expected to decline significantly for the first time since 2009 — they project a 10.5% decrease in U.S. retail sales, to the tune of roughly 571 billion USD. The bright side is that there’s an 18% projected increase in U.S. ecommerce sales. That’s going to make this holiday online shopping season even more important, and busy, than ever before.

A Google-commissioned study with Ipsos found that the vast majority of US shoppers, 69% to be exact, plan to shop online more for the holidays this year. 

4 Strategic Marketing Planning Steps

Before we get to paid search planning, it’s important to think about your overall marketing plan, because the decisions you make here will help you plan for your pay-per-click (PPC) efforts.

1. Determine Your Shipping Cut-off Date

If you have a date when you stop guaranteeing arrival by Christmas, make sure you highlight it on your website. With concern about the increased demand for shipping fulfillment and shipping companies not guaranteeing arrival by certain dates, making your shipping cut-off date prominently visible is even more important this year than ever before.

2. Plan Your Promotions and Sales

If you have any holiday offers, the sooner you plan for them, the better. Come up with a calendar now based on key shopping dates, your shipping cutoffs, and insights from your own data over the past years. Share the calendar with key stakeholders in your company, as well as any vendors outside your company that need to know your important dates.

3. Update Your Website to Be Holiday First

• “Holiday-ify” Your Website: Change your website to have a winter or holiday theme. It could be a thematic background, a holiday banner, or anything festive that gets people into the holiday shopping spirit. 
• Highlight Important Dates: Make sure your website highlights your shipping cutoff dates and encourages people to order early to help avoid shipping delays outside of your control.
• Emphasize Your Unique Selling Proposition (USP): Every page of your site should highlight your USP. Do you offer free shipping on all orders or free shipping on orders over a certain size? Are you extending your return policy into January? Do you offer a free warranty? Whatever it is, make sure what sets you apart from your competitors is visible on every page.

4. Consider Free Shipping

In an Amazon Prime-conditioned world, people do not want to pay for shipping. According to the National Retail Federation’s Annual Holiday Survey, 91% of those surveyed plan to take advantage of free shipping. If you aren’t offering free shipping, and your competitors are, you are at a distinct disadvantage.  

A few years ago, a client and I conducted an experiment to test free shipping versus a percentage off. Buyers actually saved more if they used the percentage off and paid for shipping, yet free shipping was the clear winner. 

6 Paid Search Planning Steps

Now that you’ve thought through your promotions, important dates, and your website is ready — it’s time to tackle your paid search.

1. Update Ad Language

When it comes to PPC, if your promotion runs for less than five to seven days I don’t suggest running ads for it. The nature of PPC means that, with a short promotion, the ads never get a chance to fully get up to speed before the promotion ends and they get shut off. 

I highly suggest creating promotion extensions that can be shown on your existing ads. 

If your promotion is longer than five to seven days, you should create new ads that highlight your offers. Make sure your new ad copy includes when your offer ends to create a sense of urgency.

In addition, if you have Shopping ads, you can set up promotions in Google Merchant Center and Microsoft Merchant Center. Anything you can do to highlight your sale or promotion will help make your ad stand out to potential customers.

2. Create New Image Ads

Build new holiday-themed ads that highlight your promotions and USPs for any display campaigns, especially for remarketing campaigns. Consider scheduling a series of ads leading up to your shipping cut-off date to promote urgency, and continuing through the post-holiday shopping period. This plan has been successful for my clients in the past and I have seen it in action boosting sales numbers.

3. Add Seasonal Shopping Audiences to Campaigns

Both Google Ads and Microsoft Advertising have created audience lists for Black Friday and Christmas shoppers. 

Google’s Audiences

Microsoft’s Audiences

Layer some or all of the audiences into your existing search and shopping campaigns — either with a 0% bid adjustment if you just want to observe or with a positive bid adjustment if you want to be more aggressive.

4. Test New Campaign Types

• TrueView for Action (TV4A) Campaigns on YouTube: We’re seeing very strong ecommerce results for those clients who are doing TV4A campaigns on YouTube through Google Ads. These campaigns are goal-focused — whether for leads or sales — and use a call-to-action in the ad.
• Discovery Campaigns: Google’s answer to social media, Discovery campaigns have shown interesting results for clients, even ecommerce clients, especially when coupled with remarketing lists.
• Microsoft Audience Network (MSAN) Image Campaigns: Microsoft’s answer to Google’s display network, MSAN is a great way to expand your reach on the Microsoft platform. Microsoft makes it easy by importing your Google display campaigns into Microsoft. Keep in mind that since Microsoft doesn’t have responsive display ads, you’ll want to add more ads to make up for the difference.
• MSAN Shopping Campaigns: If you have a shopping feed, MSAN shopping is one of the easiest campaign setups you’ll ever do. You don’t even add an audience or need any ad assets, all of the information is pulled directly from your shopping feed.

5. Plan to Increase Your Spend

Think about what kind of increased budgets you want — but since this isn’t a typical year, be flexible with your budgets and prepare to increase them even more if necessary to accommodate the extra traffic. You should start to increase your ad spend now if you haven’t already. 

According to the Google study referenced earlier, 62% of U.S. shoppers will plan their holiday shopping earlier to avoid items being out of stock.” In a typical year, searches on Black Friday terms start weeks before the actual date, so most likely we will see this trend accelerate when studies are done on the 2020 holiday shopping season.

In addition to budget increases you make now, I highly recommend boosting budgets — and even doubling, in some cases — starting on Thanksgiving. Make sure you watch the ad spend closely through the rest of December, revisiting the calendar with peak search days above.

6. Think Post-Holiday Sales

The National Retail Federation’s survey further found that 68% of shoppers are planning on continuing their buying after December 25th, and 51% say that sales and promotions will get them to actually pull the trigger and buy.

After the holiday rush is over, shoppers begin buying for themselves. Some will have gift cards to spend that are burning holes in their pockets while others will be returning things and want to purchase something else. Since we normally see sales numbers remain high through the second or third week of January, keep your budget elevated to support the post-holiday volume.

Key categories from Microsoft’s internal data from 2019 showed increases in search volume for skincare, haircare, makeup, clothing, home theater audio, and major appliances after December 25th, 2019. It will be interesting to see which categories show volume increases after this unprecedented year.

We can read all of the predictions available, but the truth is that no one really knows exactly how the 2020 holiday shopping season will go. We do know that coming up with a plan using the steps listed above will give you the best chance to take advantage of the large number of online shoppers coming your way.

“Pay-per-click advertising is an effective way to reach ideal customers and convert browsers into buyers,” says Josephine Miller, PR Manager of Digital.com. “However, it is a very specialized area of marketing, and this guide will help businesses understand how to select the right agency for their needs and budget.”

In order to prepare the guide, Digital.com evaluated agencies based on services offered, agency size, and industry focus. Agencies were evaluated during a 40-hour assessment of over 130 firms from across the internet, and the top results were included in the guide for 2020. 

“We are honored to be recognized as one of Digital.com’s best PPC agencies of 2020,” said JumpFly president Michael Marchese. “Even during these uncertain times, our team has shown exceptional care to ensure that our clients get the most from their online marketing budget.” 

About JumpFly

JumpFly professionally develops, implements, and manages Google Ads, Microsoft Ads, Verizon Media Ads, Amazon Ads, and Facebook advertising accounts, enabling clients to maximize internet advertising results while saving time and money. Proper setup and management of these powerful programs will likely make the difference between an advertiser’s success or failure. In order to drive optimal performance across both paid and organic search, JumpFly also offers search engine optimization (SEO) management. JumpFly’s full-service smart digital marketing solution enables clients to focus on their core business while achieving the best possible results from their marketing efforts. JumpFly is a Premier Google Partner, Facebook Marketing Partner, Microsoft Select Partner Agency, Snapchat Certified, a TikTok Partner, and has an A+ rating from the BBB.

ABOUT DIGITAL.COM

Digital.com reviews and compares the best products, services, and software for running or growing a small business website or online shop. The platform collects twitter comments and uses sentiment analysis to score companies and their products. Digital.com was founded in 2015 and formerly known as Review Squirrel. To learn more, visit https://digital.com/. 

These nine tips will change the way you produce and optimize content for SEO benefit, ensuring that every shred of text on your site extends the value of the page.

1. Create Quality Content

From a purely SEO traffic-centric perspective, search engines are working more and more customer experience metrics into their ranking algorithms. If your content isn’t engaging or if customers hit your page and pogo-stick back to the search results to choose another page, your ability to rank will degrade.

From a purely SEO revenue-centric perspective, any visitor you bring to your site with misleading or generally crummy content is less likely to convert to a lead or sale. Poor quality provides nothing of value and wastes your resources creating it.

From a brand-centric perspective, your goal should be to produce the best content you possibly can so that you’re projecting a professional, consistent, trustworthy brand image that meets your marketing goals and brand guidelines.

2. Make It Unique

To be very clear, all of the content on every page must be unique — not repeated on every page of your site, not lifted from other sites on the web. 

Search engines devalue duplicated areas of text because it doesn’t speak to the unique reason for the existence of each individual page. If the content is repeated frequently enough on a page or a site, it can even start to send over-optimization signals.

A small section with a few bullet points on the core company benefits, used as a boilerplate on every page, is fine. But a highly-optimized paragraph containing the same juicy keywords over and over is a no-no.

Search engines map the content on every known page on the web. They can easily detect how many of the words on those pages match or closely match the words you use on your pages. 

Don’t fill your pages with regurgitations of what you find on Wikipedia and other top-ranking sites. Set the stage with your own version of the accepted facts that are found everywhere, but use that as a way to introduce what you bring to the table that has value.

Do you have a unique perspective, a contrary view, a little-known fact, data from the research you’ve collected, or statistics based on anonymized sales data? Those elements add unique value to your content that no other site can offer, and it communicates leadership to your customers.

3. Write for Customers, Edit for SEO

Since your primary goal is to create great, unique content, start there. Appeal to the needs of your potential customers with the content you provide. Giving your visitors what they desire will help your page convert visitors into leads and sales. 

Edit the content only after it’s been written to grab the attention of your visitors. Your editing efforts should focus on making sure that the keywords and their contextual themes are communicated clearly enough to send strong relevance signals to search engines.  

4. Use the Keywords

Optimization requires using keywords in the content. That means literally writing the words that people search for into the rest of the words you have on your page. 

While search engines can understand contextual relevance — an article about pets that mentions “cats” is highly unlikely to be referring to Caterpillar earthmovers — they cannot detect relevance from references to vague concepts or visuals that communicate ideas without textual help. 

The trick is to work the keywords in naturally while retaining the creativity, engagement, and uniqueness of the content. It’s absolutely possible, but it takes a concerted effort to edit the keywords in skillfully after writing great content. 

On the other hand, you don’t need to get minutely specific in your keyword use. Pluralized versions like “cat” vs. “cats” are presumed to be synonymous. Conjugated verbs like “run” and “running” or verbs of different tense like “run” vs. “ran” are generally also synonymous. Even the order of the words in the keyword phrase can be rearranged to meet grammatical needs.

5. Forget Keyword Density

There is no magical number of times to use the keywords in the content on your website. In general, you should use the higher-demand keywords at least once. Working in the biggest keyword(s) twice or more is ideal, but only if you can do so without ruining the flow of the text.

6. Look for Easy Targets

Pronouns and vague references are easy targets for keyword replacement. Look for ways to use actual keywords instead of pronouns like “it” or “they.” For example, an RV rental company could convert the following sentence: 

“It can be such a relaxing way to travel…” 

to a more optimal version: 

“Renting an RV can be such a relaxing way to travel….”

7. Make One Phrase Do Double Duty

Work in concurrent keywords to get more bang for your buck. A single phrase can hold two or three overlapping keywords because they count as longer single keywords as well as the two separate keywords. 

For example, consider the sentence:

“If you’re on the fence about buying business class tickets to Paris, consider these benefits…..” 

This example hits on two keywords — “business class tickets” and “tickets to Paris” — at the same time. 

Using this trick reduces the number of unique times you need to work specific keywords into the text. 

8. Optimize across Punctuation

Search engines ignore punctuation. That means you can end a sentence with one part of a keyword phrase and start the next sentence with the end of the keyword phrase. 

Use that concept with any punctuation: colons, commas, dashes, etc. For example:

“I went on a trip to France — flights to Paris on Air France were so expensive!” 

That sentence hits two keywords at once — “flights to Paris” and “France flights” — without sounding over-optimized. 

This tactic also enables you to create grammatically incorrect keyword phrases like “France flights” in ways that are grammatically correct and read well.

9. Make Every Sentence Work Hard

If you write a new sentence, it needs to bring value to the page. A sentence that restates something that’s already been said in a different way typically doesn’t add any value — it merely takes the visitor more time to process the information before they can take the next action. Placing enough valueless sentences into a page raises your exit rate, as visitors get fed up with the fluff. 

Do not create longer content simply because you think using more words is better for SEO. The relevance and value of a page for SEO are based on whether it meets your customers’ needs, not whether you said the same thing 10 times vs nine.

Have something to say. Say it. Stop.

Insight #1: Generation Xers and Baby Boomers Dominate Global Mobile and Ecommerce Growth

Of those surveyed, 44% of Generation Xers and 30% of Baby Boomers said they are spending more time shopping online. This trend will continue, with 43% of people saying they plan to continue shopping online more frequently even after the pandemic is contained.

Recommended actions: 

• Reduce friction across the digital and physical path to purchase: Give people what they want — a seamless shopping experience. Preventing hiccups is crucial to keeping shoppers on your page.
• Lay the foundation for simple shopping: Encourage and allow shoppers to purchase what they want, where they want, and when they want. Experiment with other shopping channels such as Instagram, Facebook Marketplace, and Facebook Shops.
• Make communication quick and easy: Enable messaging for convenient and in-the-moment contact with your customers.

Insight #2: Self-Gifting and Seasonal Shopping Can Be Positive Outlets in Difficult Times

An astonishing 74% of the global shoppers surveyed are researching gifts for themselves and 78% are researching gifts for others. Affordable luxuries and rewards can help people stay positive in trying times. It’s your job to answer the question: What can they afford right now?

Recommended actions:

• Help people discover things they’ll love: Use Facebook Dynamic Ads to reach people who have expressed interest in your products.
• Help people “try” before they buy: Experiment with Facebook Augmented Reality (AR) Ads to help people interact with your products virtually.

Insight #3: Imposed Disruption Fuels Receptiveness to New Products and Services

In this new normal, people are more amenable to trying new products and services. The holidays have always been a time where people are open to trying new things, but this year the willingness to step outside of their comfort zone is even more prominent.

Recommended actions:

• Take the opportunity to spark new connections: Attract new audiences with Facebook Stories Ads. 50% of people who use Facebook stories have said that they have motivated them through the buying process.
• Reach new audiences with branded content: Broaden your audience with the help of creators people love.
• Grow your business with cross-border solutions: Expand your targeting to find potential customers in other countries.

Insight #4: The Economic Downturn Will Expedite the Rise of Mega Sales

With COVID-19 impacting the finances of many, people will be waiting for big sale days to purchase products. Mega sale days like Black Friday and Cyber Monday will be incredibly important days to take advantage of this year.

Recommended Actions:

• Appeal to shopping preferences and accelerate buying: Getting closer to mega sale days, use liquidity to connect with the shoppers most likely to purchase from you. Allowing the campaign budget to flow along the most efficient route to fulfill your objective is a great way to capitalize and make the most impact on mega sale days.
• Channel the energy of mega sale days in new ways: Get creative to capture the attention of your potential customers. Try engaging with people using Facebook or Instagram Live.

Insight #5: The New Value Equation — Affordability, Authenticity, and Action

Social responsibility and brand authenticity are more influential than ever. People want to support the businesses they care about. How well a brand responds to the pandemic will make a huge impact on shopping decisions from consumers.

Recommended actions:

• Share your values and take action: Help your audience understand your values and show what you have done to support the community through this difficult time.
• Show support with brand partnerships: Use Facebook Collaborative Ads to showcase a single brand’s products.

Just because we can’t be physically together with our extended families, doesn’t mean the holiday season isn’t a magical time. Use these insights to create ads that help spread the magic and grow your sales at the same time. By doing both, you double your chances for the happiest of holidays!

This means that, when reviewing search term reports beginning with September 2020, you’re seeing less useful data with decreased visibility into the actual search queries driving clicks, cost, and yes, even conversions!

Unfortunately, this diminishing transparency is not good news from a Google Ads optimization standpoint. Google is now providing advertisers with less access to the critical information used to help improve performance through either negative keyword management or data mining for additional high-performance keyword expansion.

Impact on Negative Keyword Management

With less comprehensive access to the volume of search queries triggering ads, there is greater potential for less relevant traffic coming through on terms. This means that certain traffic volume which would historically be considered wasteful spend will now remain undetectable.

As a result of Google’s previous expansion of “close variants” triggering exact match keywords, advertisers already have much less control over the queries that trigger their ads. This has required an increased focus on negative keyword management. 

However, the negative keyword management approach is now also being limited by Google’s diminishing advertiser access to search term report data. This can be especially detrimental for industries that carry high costs-per-click (CPCs), as they will now be stuck footing the bill for search queries that may be lacking the desired level of relevance.

Impact on Positive Keyword Management

Adding high-performing search terms to your ad groups as keywords has long been a successful practice for productive keyword expansion. Now, with Google’s change, there is simply less data available for mining. 

This search term reporting change is especially impactful for any dynamic search ads (DSAs). In this specific ad type, there are no corresponding keywords to reference, so all of the analysis and optimization is reliant upon the data from search terms themselves — which is no longer completely available.

This situation is very alarming as we have seen some instances where the missing search queries have accounted for as much as 25% to 40% of the monthly spend. 

One example of this is a JumpFly client that focuses on lead generation. In September, the missing search query data accounted for 23% of the clicks and cost, as well as 22% of the conversions.

In another case, we found that an ecommerce advertiser running a DSA campaign had missing search query data representing 40% of conversions, and $37,000 in revenue.

The initial reaction by many experts in the paid search industry has been one of deep frustration along with much skepticism. This latest development represents another “update” further limiting transparency within Google Ads and binding the hands of paid search professionals.