Stories by Odolena Kostova on Medium

TikTok Ads help marketers can benefit from very high levels of engagement and growing young…

Odolena Kostova — Sat, 09 Nov 2019 21:47:28 GMT

TikTok Ads help marketers can benefit from very high levels of engagement and growing young audiences. The app started to get a lot of popularity over the last couple of years. Although exact numbers and stats about the users of the app contradict in a lot of surveys, marketers do report good results from initial tests. According to eMarketer TikTok’s presentation at New York Marketing Week was overbooked, which shows a lot of interest from advertisers.

There are few advertising formats which Tiktok offers and most of them are quite similar to formats we see on Snapchat, Instagram and Youtube.

What exactly is Tiktok?

Tiktok is an app owned by a Chinese company called Bytedance. The Chinese version of TikTok is called Douyin and has over 500 thousand users in China. TikTok has been available outside of China since 2017, but it became vastly popular in 2018. This is highly due to the fact that in 2017 Bytedance acquired the already popular Musical.ly app and relaunched it as TikTok. To illustrate the rapid change — in 2018 TikTok had more installs than Instagram (663 thousand vs 444 thousand).

TitTok is purley short video content platform. You can follow creators, who post short videos with hashtags to music background of famous pop songs and movies. Users recreate the videos again and again in different versions. For an outsider the platform might look a bit repetitive, but it is highly addictive.

Some of the main differences of TikTok vs YouTube and Instagram is the authenticity of creators. Most videos are shot with a mobile phone at the homes of the creators. There is no special lighting, camera sets and polished fake images which is the trademark of Instagram. To some extent YouTube also lost a lot of its authenticity as competition went high and a lot of creators went to ready formulas which bring success. TikTok’s algorithm allows any account to become viral relatively easy which is highly rewarding for young creators.

Getting on TikTok does not require an account — you can consume video content straight from the moment you download the app. The home page is called “For you” and it uses machine learning technology to show the videos most suitable for you based on watching and interaction history. The formats encourage users to interact with the content with comments, likes. It’s much easier to share content across all other social media channels directly form TikTok.

Who is on TikTok?

TikTok is highly popular with teenage audiences and about half of the users are under 35. After China the highest number of users is in India — 120 million. The USA is another growing market with 17% of teenagers using TikTok every week. According to other studies it might be much less than that. In Europe and Latin America TikTok does not have a lot of popularity yet. Germany and France are the countries with the highest number of users — roughly 4 million each.

One interesting statistic shows TikTok has the social media mobile app with second highest time on screen than Facebook amongst UK and Canadian users — 400–500 minutes a month.

TikTok Ads

Ads on TikTok are still in testing and there are few big brands which experiment there. The main format is In feed video — which is quite similar to the Bumper ads on YouTube. Call to action can be leading to a website or downloading an app.

Another interesting format is Hashtag challenge. Brands can give users a hashtag challenge for them to create content around the hashtag. One example is the Burberry challenge where users had to recreate the Burberry Thompson monogram. These challenges result in high visibility amongst young audiences which brands value. TikTok also allows brand page take over — similar to YouTube masthead format. The new Hashtag Challenge Plus format has also an e-commerce element. In the hashtag page users can purchase items from the advertisers without leaving TikTok’s app.

When it comes to getting traffic to an external website TikTok does not seem to be the best place, as it is quite hard to insert links.

Audience targeting is reported to be not so accurate in comparison with Instagram and Google. Some of the targeting options are demographics, interests, price of phone device and connection speed. Similar audiences and remarketing of lists are also available. Advertisers can either upload emails of users they have got offline or remarket users who have interacted with their ad.

When it comes to measurement, conversion tracking is possible with a pixel which advertisers can place on their website.

In a nutshell, TikTok advertising is quite similar to ads on all other social media channels. The only difference is growing audience and new creative type of communication with users.

Concerns about TikTok

Tiktok has privacy issues and was fined 5.7 million dollars by the US Federal trade commission as Musical.ly had collected personal information from children without parental consent.

As a Chinese company there have also been concerns about potential surveillance of TikTok users. Washington Post has suggested the potential of censorship on TikTok as there were rarely posts related to the Hong Kong protests which were widely discussed on Twitter. The official answer was that the audience of TikTok comes to the platform for pure entertainment.

Other concerns were the safety of content distributed on the platform. A lot of the videos a re created by very young people and some are sexually suggestive. BBC news found hundreds of examples of sexually suggestive and explicit comments on videos from children and teens. In October TikTok had to remove videos promoting the Islamic State including beheadings after being notified by Wall Street Journal.

About me: I am an experienced digital marketing professional and a Googler. I have taught over 3000 people in online marketing, sales and PPC. Get my new book. I blog weekly and teach on Udemy with more than 2,700 students enrolled in my online course. Subscribe to my YouTube channel. Follow on Instagram and Twitter @odolena

Gallery ads from Google were announced at the Google Marketing Live in 2019.

Odolena Kostova — Sun, 22 Sep 2019 20:23:36 GMT

Gallery ads from Google were announced at the Google Marketing Live in 2019. Since then only few advertisers have had the chance to use them. As they expand towards a full launch in August 2019, more and more accounts see them as part of the available ad types.

Gallery ads are a format which can be extremely powerful as it combines search and visual format. They combine 8 images and text to create an ad which resembles Facebook’s Carousel format. It takes the top position of the search results above the other text ads. Each of the images can have a unique caption text and a call to action can be added at the end of the ad. A user can swipe on the ad to see the different images or they can click on the ad and expand it into a vertical view with all the images one below the other.

How to implement Gallery ads?

If you are lucky to be on the beta you can create the ad directly from Ads & Extensions in the Google Ads interface. The format will show as an option once you click on the plus sign. For the whitelisted accounts there is a prominent banner in the Google ads interface inviting advertisers to try the new ad.

You can create a gallery ad directly in the same ad group with search ads and they will compete together with the rest of the formats. After the successful launch of Responsive Search ads(RSA) in the fall of 2018, Google recommendation is 2 Extended text ads (ETAs) and 1 RSA per ad group as a minimum set up. If you add a Gallery ad to the combination you will have a powerful set up. The more ads and content you have in your ad groups the better. Combined with smart bidding and the right ad rotation optimisation(optimise for conversions which is now by default) you are in the best position to achieve results.

When are you charged?

You pay once someone clicks on your ad the same way as with text ads. You will also pay if someone swipes at least 3 times your images. Your minimum amount of images is 4 and the maximum is 8. So if you upload more images, you don’t pay extra after the third swipe. As with all new ad types from Google, if you go for the maximum number of assets, you will get the best results.

Google Search on the Road to Full Automation

There has been the talk about Google taking away control from advertisers and pushing automation in their core marketing solutions. And it is happening. The only reason for this is that Google’s automation can bring better results. For a while the belief (not unjustified) was that smart bidding and automation drives higher costs and low performance. However as Google’s, access to a lot of data and advances in machine learning has led to improved solutions.

Now ML is in most of Google Ads. Creatives like Responsive Search Ads and Responsive Display Ads, now adding Gallery Ads use ML to select which combination shows when and to which user. Smart Bidding is entirely powered by machine learning taking the fiddly task of setting a bid by keyword away. Formats like Dynamic Search Ads take the need of keywords completely away.

Apart from the advance of machine learning technology, the need to move to automation is powered by the overly complex user journey. When Google first started ads in October 2000–19 years ago! — users accessed the internet primarily via desktop. With the advance of mobile devices, the increasing accessibility of smartphones and overall of internet, things started getting complex. Now a new wave of devices start getting in our lives — Alexa, Google Home, Google Assistant Mini, wearables and smart watches. It is estimated that 50% of the world’s population has access to the internet. In this context the road to automation in ads starts to make more and more sense. With such high internet connectivity and availability of devices to access the internet manual advertising is getting out of the capabilities of a human. It is not Google taking away control — it is Google making advertising possible in this new world.

Where do Gallery ads come in this context?

For many advertisers Gallery Ads looked like a response to the success of Carousel ads on Facebook. However there is more to add to this. Of course, having a strong visual format on Search is important for Google. The Google Display Network is now very susceptible to browser changes and the decline of cookies. Browsers like Safari introduced the ITP 2.1 (intelligent tracking prevention) which deletes your cookies making tracking of conversions and remarketing hard. Google themselves updated a lot of policies on personalised advertising preventing remarketing in sensitive verticals — health, addictions, alcohol, gambling. These are now excluded not only from Remarketing, but from any Google created audiences.

On the other hand Search has always had better conversion rates and higher quality of traffic due to the high intent. Having a visual ad on Search is making it powerful for the marketer, but also makes it more visually compelling for the user. The internet now is much more visual and entertaining than 20 years ago when search engines started. We still want to find answers and get help, but we also like getting answers fast. Visual is fast! An image can say a thousand words. Essentially you get a visual impactful format and the high intent of Search users.

If you are on the beta, get Gallery ads as fast as you can as it will give you some early adopted advantages. If you are not sure, check the ads section in your accounts — you will see a big banner if your account is part of the gradual whitelisting. Good luck and happy advertising!

Google Ads has traditionally been connected mainly with search.

Odolena Kostova — Mon, 29 Jul 2019 21:25:13 GMT

Google Display 2019: Manual vs Automated ?

Google Ads has traditionally been connected mainly with search. As advertisers reach the limits of search campaigns and competition gets tougher, alternatives like Google display ads become more and more interesting.

Stats show that in 2017 there has been 7 times more global creation and consumption of data compared to 2010. On the other hand people now have multiple devices on which they access the internet. Google Display Network consists of more than 3 million sites and apps, including 6 Google-owned properties with more than a billion users. Some of these are Google Play, Maps and YouTube. As an advertiser this means both access to a lot of inventory, but also the opportunity to target audiences based on multiple signals. It is estimated that Google Display Network reaches 90% of global internet users.

What targeting is available?

When making a display campaign with Google you have access to manual or automated targeting. If you choose automated, your targeting will span across remarketing, similar audiences, keywords, in-market segments, topics and placements. You can choose to target each of these options with manual set up on campaign or ad group level.

Which stage of the funnel?

Thinking of the user journey when creating your campaign is important, so that you can customise the experience at every stage. Contrary to popular beliefs GDN is a source for every stage of the funnel, not only for creating awareness. Targeting by topics or keywords is best for reaching a larger audience with general interest. You can layer this with Demographic filter, if necessary. For example, if you only want to target women or young people.

Consideration

For the next level — consideration, which is targeting users closer to taking action, you can use a bit more restricting audiences like Affinity or Custom Affinity. These are audiences created by Google based on users’ behaviour on all their properties. For example, people who like winter sports. You can create your own version of these to fit a unique product by selecting websites and keywords related to it. For example, websites about skiing, blogs and stores for ski equipment. Still these audiences are not meant to target people who are ready to buy, but they might be researching and having an interest in the subject. The other way to expand is with targeting similar audiences generated from the users which converted on your website recently. These are similar to Facebook’s lookalike audiences. My tip — try to generate audiences based on lists of your most desired customers. Use the audience slider to decide how close you would like a similar list to match your data.

Action and Advocacy

The final stage of the funnel is users who would like to take an action — make a purchase, enrol in a program, sign up, etc. The best audiences for this stage are niche — remarketing to website visitors, Customer match — uploading lists of first party collected data like emails, phones and zip codes. The idea is to fill in these lists with users from the previous stages of the funnel so that you can remind of your product later. Is this intrusive? Well, there are ways for them to stop the ads by clicking on the side “Why this ad?” panel. Since these users have already engaged with your business in some way, they are much more likely to convert, so you must be aggressive with this audience and bid higher. If you are using Smart Bidding, make your CPA higher and your ROAS lower.

You can also use In-Market Segments and Custom Intent audiences for this stage, however these are a bit broader and your conversion rates might not be that great. The difference between these audiences and Affinity and Custom Affinity is that they target users who are likely to take action soon. They expressed clear intent in researching a product to buy. If they don’t take action in a couple of days, Google takes them out of the list, so you have a fresh and high-intent audience.

Creatives

Creative excellence is a must in display advertising. The ads must be visually compelling and catching the users’ attention. If you want more control on your ads you can target each of the stages of the funnel by creating an independent campaign manually. In every campaign you can have sets of ads with a different narrative and call to action. If this sounds like a lot of work, you can easily do all this in one Smart Display Campaign. Smart Display Campaigns automate targeting, bidding and ad creation. They are the perfect solution if you only want to run one display campaign. For more granular and customised targeting, you can run each campaign independently.

In both cases, I recommend you to have at least one Responsive Display ad in every ad group. With Smart Display Campaigns this is the only ad format, but if you work manually you can have static image ads and Responsive Display. Studies show that campaigns with at least one Responsive Display Ad per ad group are performing better. Static images are okay, but there is one major issue with them — you need a lot of different sizes to be able to use all the available placements. Advertisers miss a lot of opportunities because they rarely upload more than 5–6 sizes. Responsive display combines the advertisers’ assets like headline description, logo and image to auto generate combinations. Combined with Smart Bidding these ads adjust to what the user is likely to respond to most.

Where to show your ads?

In the past advertisers used lists of placements to exclude or target. Now with Smart Display Campaigns this can be automated. Google chooses which placement at what time for every ad. The difficulty with lists is that this limits your options for your ad to serve and you must bid higher. The more restrictions you have on your campaigns, the higher the bid you have to place to get your ad to serve. If you give away some of the manual control smart algorithms optimise for you to get your ad in the right place at the right time.

Smart Display campaigns target simultaneously multiple Google properties — YouTube, Google Play and Gmail, besides the partner websites from the GDN network. You can manually create a campaign for each of these properties with its own targeting and ad creatives. The problem is keeping track on performance, budget allocation and the amount of time needed.

Advertising on Google has always been one of the priorities for a business when they start…

Odolena Kostova — Sun, 21 Jul 2019 20:24:51 GMT

Advertising on Google has always been one of the priorities for a business when they start investing in marketing. However often efforts sink in vain after the business does not see results from the investment. Most often the reason for this is simply not using conversion tracking.

The old world of online marketing was focused counting clicks, impressions, pages visited. Now businesses are much more savvy and industry leaders orient their efforts to meaningful and measurable results from their campaigns. In order to be able to track these results you must start by tracking conversions.

Conversion tracking is simple and actually much easier than most people think. Google is capable of tracking many different conversion types depending on the business’ needs. The first step of successful business strategy is to define what actions are valuable enough to track. These might be leads generated through form submissions. In other cases these can be direct sales on an e-commerce website. Other options are phone calls from ads or from the website of the advertiser. Offline conversions are also trackable, if you keep a database on the conversions happening outside the website. In-store conversion tracking is the newest development in this direction helping businesses with sufficient foot traffic to understand how much of this traffic is generated from online ads.

Knowing all these possibilities it makes sense for a business owner to assess all the actions which bring profit to their business and define which ones they would like to focus on. What is great is that in Google ads you can set up upper funnel conversions like page visits or video watches only for tracking purposes to avoid auto optimisation towards them.

Finally having conversion tracking allows advertisers to automate their campaigns. Once they know which actions are valuable to them they can set up smart bidding or even create Smart Campaigns(Smart Display, Smart Shopping or just Smart Campaigns). In this way you can fully automate your efforts and allow Google to optimise for your desired results.

So how to start with conversion tracking…

Setting up conversion tracking in Google Ads

First way is to set it up in Google Ads directly. Go to Tools and Settings, choose Measurement and then Conversions. From Conversion Actions you can select the one which matches your desired action. If you are setting up a website conversion you will be able to choose between lead, online purchase, page view or sign up. You can then name the conversion — for example, “Book sale” or “Newsletter”. You can easily assign a value to it, depending on the cost of your product, the conversion rate of your leads or newsletter subscribers.

Counting Conversions

The next section is very important — do you want to count every conversion or just one? If you are selling a product every conversion is new money in your pocket, whereas if the same person signs up for a newsletter three times, it’s not worth counting this as three conversions.

Conversion Window

Conversion window setting is also crucial as this defines the number of conversions you are going to see in your account. This setting means that you would like to attribute to Google ads a conversion within a certain period after the click. This can be between a week or 90 days. This entirely depends on the time it typically takes for a user to complete the desired action. You can track this in Google Analytics if you already have data from your website. If not you can set up a medium length (30 days) and gradually analyse the user behaviour.

View-through Conversions

Next you have a setting for View-Through Conversions. These are conversions attribute to an ad which the user only saw and then converted by coming directly to your website without interacting with the ad. The default window is 24 hours, but you can increase this if you are running large brand awareness campaigns. In such cases this will help you to understand when users converted just by seeing your display campaigns or YouTube videos.

What is included in the “Conversions” column?

You can then choose whether you want to include this conversion in “Conversions”. This means whether you would like Google to optimise towards this conversions and whether you would like it to be counted in the total number in your reports. You may choose not to include this conversion if it is something just for your reference — like a page view. You might want to know how many people who saw your ad also visited a certain page, but essentially what matters is how many of them signed up. In this case you can have one conversion for a sign up which you will see in your reports and you can optimise towards. You can set up another conversion for people who viewed a certain page and do not include it in the “Conversions” column. You will be able to see the total number if you add the “All conversions” column in your report.

Conversion Sets — New Feature

A new feature in Conversions is the Conversion Sets which is the next tab. You can create a set of conversions which are all counted in your “Conversions” column for every campaign. In this way you can mix and match upper and lower funnel conversions together depending on what you would like to focus on with every campaign. This is a very convenient way to opt in and out of a certain conversion in your reporting depending on your goals.

Attribution Model

Finally you can choose your attribution model. This is something very important, as the customer journey is now more and more complicated — between devices and multiple touch points. The default Last-Click model means that only the ad, keyword, creative which the user clicked before converting gets all the credit. This model does not include all the previous interactions.

For example, a user might have first searched for “yoga outfits”, then found your brand after clicking on an ad. Then they googled just your brand and saw another ad. They clicked on this one and converted. In the old last click model all you would see would be a conversion for your brand campaign. On the other hand your generic “yoga outfit” campaign would show click without a conversion. This is why Google recommends any other model except for last or first-click attribution.

Installing your tag

Once you have selected an Attribution model, you can create your conversion. The final part is to install the conversion tag. You will see a few lines of code which you must add between the tags of every page of your website. One of them is Global Tag — this has to be installed on every page of your website. This code helps you generate remarketing lists by setting new cookies. As some browsers now delete third party cookies immediately, the Global tag is a way of collecting only first party data. You must have a clear message on your website that you collect cookies from users and also get their consent.

The next line of code is the Event Snippet. This tracks the action/event you just set up as a conversion. If you have installed the Global Tag once, then you would only have to add the event snippet only to the pages you would like to track.

Advertising on Google has always been one of the priorities for a business when they start…

Odolena Kostova — Mon, 15 Jul 2019 20:18:34 GMT

So how to start with conversion tracking…

Setting up conversion tracking in Google Ads

Counting Conversions

Conversion Window

View-through Conversions

What is included in the “Conversions” column?

Conversion Sets — New Feature

Attribution Model

Installing your tag

Poor Charlie’s Almanack — Review of a book by Charlie Munger

Odolena Kostova — Sun, 30 Jun 2019 21:29:53 GMT

Poor Charlie’s Almanack — Review of a book by Charlie Munger

https://youtu.be/SXpYW3lucdE

Local Marketing for Small Businesses — Online to Offline

Odolena Kostova — Sun, 09 Jun 2019 20:49:06 GMT

Local Marketing for Small Businesses — Online to Offline

Online to offline (O2O) marketing is becoming hotter and hotter topic in the world of online marketing. Research shows that 90% of people who were looking for a local business on Google Maps visited the location within 48 hours. This is a powerful stat for the meaning of online presence for offline actions. Physical stores are as dependent on mobile as pure e-commerce shops. So here is my list of online channels to promote offline actions.

Google My Business

The first step to getting local awareness for your store is Google My Business profile. Creating an account is easy, the only thing which can take some time is the verification. Some web builders and domain providers like GoDaddy can help you get an immediate verification, so check whether you don’t have this available already. Once your business is verified, you can post pictures, add business information and contact details, so that customers can get in touch with you immediately. Via the Google My Business App you can receive direct messages and get reservations for your service.

Google Local Campaigns

Once you have a Google my business account, you can also create a Local campaign with Google Ads to drive actions valuable for your business: calls and direction requests on Google Maps. The campaign uses machine-learning technology to target, bid and deliver ad. This is based on the location and the business vertical detected from the website of the advertiser. This is a powerful and user-friendly way to get started with Google ads and use it only for local promotions.

Location Extensions

If you are not new to Google Ads location extensions can help your ads become even more prominent and visible on Google. Location extension is your business location showing under your text ad. Location extensions can now appear not only on Search, but also on Display and YouTube driving local awareness and surfacing the closest physical store location to the user who sees the ad.

Local Inventory Ads

To make things even better, you can also include your e-commerce information and show whether an item the user is looking for is in stock at the location close to him. Imagine looking for something specific while you are at a new city shopping high street. How convenient it could be to see an ad showing this product is available in a nearby store and how far you are from it. By clicking on the ad you see Google Maps and the location of the store. Isn’t this a perfect shopping trip? It is possible with Local Inventory Ads. To use this ad format you need to have a Google My Business Account, linked to your Google Ads as well as a shopping feed and updated inventory. This is easy if you are already using Google Shopping and you want to drive offline actions.

Local Catalogue Ads

I know, there are many new ad types, but these are all designed to help businesses with different problems related to local awareness. Local Catalogue Ads are great for businesses which have several locations and want to make users see what items are available in each stores to avoid disappointment. It can help you highlight shop specific products and promotions and also show your ads across Google Display. The information from Local Inventory Ads is used to surface ads on Display — across websites and mobile applications.

Store Visits

Tracking Store visits is one of the most important steps to driving offline conversions with online resources. Google developed a technology which is able to give a statistical model of how many of the people who click on your ads visit your physical location. This happens with the help of several factors.

First, there are over a million users who have voluntarily shared their location with Google when using their Android-powered device. Second, Google went on and measured the floors and borders of millions of stores across the word in an astonishing project. Then algorithms were trained to detect whether any of the devices which had the location sharing setting entered the mapped territories. Eventually a test was sent to two million users to confirm whether they have been in a store or not. 99% of the answers were accurate. This gives certainty that Google can detect store visits using statistical models with a great accuracy, without jeopardising the user’s privacy.

The result is store visits tracking which is highly accurate and still completely anonymous. Advertisers see based on statistics the number of store visits clicks on their ads generated, but there is no way to track the individual user.

Facebook Business Page

A facebook business page is the equivalent of Google My business. They will not place you on Google Maps, but on another map Here WeGo. Reviews which you receive on Facebook will likely be linked to your Google My Business account as legitimate star ratings. The more reviews your business receives, the better for your SEO and credibility. Well rated business are likely to be more often featured in organic results and attract more local actions.

Facebook Local Awareness Ads

Local Awareness campaigns are the tool businesses can use to drive local actions via Facebook and Instagram. This is a campaign setting you can make on your Facebook campaign. It will automatically optimise for actions like requesting directions, calling and of course traditional lead generation. The Local Awareness campaigns are very similar to the Local Campaigns on Google. They will surface on Instagram and Facebook simultaneously as feed or stories.

Working with digital means to gain local awareness and drive offline conversions is one of the key matters for marketers. The O2O, online to offline dynamics will prevail in upcoming solutions from some of the biggest online marketing providers.

All the views in this article are exclusively mine and I am not an official spokesman of Google.

Every year Google organises one of the largest tech marketing conferences: Google Marketing Live.

Odolena Kostova — Tue, 21 May 2019 21:36:11 GMT

Every year Google organises one of the largest tech marketing conferences: Google Marketing Live. Last year the innovations presented were some of the most significant ones: Local Campaigns, Smart Shopping, Local Inventory Ads, Showcase ads, Hotel Ads…This year Google build up some new ad types like Gallery Ads and Discovery Campaigns expanding their marketing product family. Here are my top seven favourites from the GML 2019:

https://medium.com/media/0e64a63d5132d4aceb1d085ca2e117ff/href

Discovery Campaigns

Discovery Campaigns are new campaign type(currently in a open beta)which allows advertisers to create visually compelling campaigns across multiple Google properties. What is included is YouTube homepage, Gmail and the newest add to Google’s inventory — the Discover feed. Discover feed is purely mobile property, part of the Google app and Google mobile homepage with an 800 million users over the past year. This tab contains curated news and updates on topics based on your online behaviour and interests. Now this space will also contain some contextual ads part of Discovery campaigns.

Discovery campaigns use Google audiences: Affinity, In-Market Segment and Custom Audiences(read further down to find out what this is). The ads look different, depending on the placement where they are displayed, i.e. they are native. On Gmail they look like a Gmail ad and appear in Promotions and Social folders. On YouTube they look like the already existing YouTube TrueView Discovery ads, but also contain a call to action button. The ads in the Discover tab, closely recall Facebook Newsfeed ads.

Exciting times! In my humble opinion, Discovery Campaigns might spread to more Google properties if proven to be successful. Right now the format is good for targeting mid-funnel users, even though at Google Marketing Live they were introduced as a performance oriented format.

App Deep Linking

Now this was an interesting update, as well as long needed. With the increase in mobile search and improvement of mobile experience, mobile apps are seeing a renaissance. Google technology like PWA(Progressive Web Apps) is making in app experience better and allowing offline use. Brands respond with new type of apps — pushing loyalty and improving customer experience. One of the examples is Starbucks with their drink pre-order app helping to skip queues. Coupons, online sales, loyalty points — all these enhancements now become available through online apps.

So why when creating ads we weren’t able to smoothly use our apps as landing pages on mobile and track conversions? Well, I have no answer for this, but now with app deep linking this problem is solved. Advertisers can choose a particular page of their app to be used as a landing page on mobile. When the ad is served on desktop, the ad will redirect to the website. In the past conversion tracking in apps was possible only in Engagement App Campaigns. With the announced changes app conversions can be tracked in Google Analytics and Firebase.

Gallery Ads

This was definitely one of the stars of Google Marketing Live 2019. The new ad format is very prominent, keyword based type which takes the top of the page position. You pay per engagement instead of per click. This is something similar to what Yandex had for a while, but with Google the format will be quite prominent. As part of the enhanced search experience which now contains images, maps and common questions, the Gallery Ad will occupy the top of the search results. Images can be swiped or clicked to expand the ad into a vertical view. Similar format was launched earlier just for the auto sector in the USA. The format is remarkably similar to Facebook’s carousel ads in the Newsfeed and it is difficult not to see it as a response to the high variety of creative ad offerings from Facebook’s side.

Audience Expansion

This is a very simple update in the Display targeting of Google which allows advertisers to expand or stretch audience size depending on how close they would like to target. This feature was only available in the Facebook lookalike audiences until now. When uploading a remarketing list, Google automatically creates a similar audience out of it. With this slider you can now control how “similar” you want it to be. The closer to the original list, the smaller the list. The further you expand, the more people you are likely to reach, but also they are probably less similar to the original list.

From my personal experience with Facebook, I would like to warn about audience expansion: Depending on your list it can go wild. What I mean is instead of targeting a small group of luxury shoppers in the top areas of Manilla, you might end up targeting everyone who ever liked a Ferrari page in Asia Pacific. That wild.

I cannot say if this is the case with Google, but with any audience expansion, you have a tradeoff — volume of users vs quality and relevancy. In any case, great solution for someone who has a relatively small audience lists and would like to reach new audiences.

For those of you, video learners, here is me doing a summary of the article published via my YouTube channel. Be sure to subscribe!

Custom Audiences

Google has been launching audiences one after the other: Custom Affinity, Custom Intent, Detailed Demographics, Life events… it starts getting complicated. In attempt to clean up and simplify, they announced merging Custom Intent and Custom Affinity into one audience called Custom Audience. Not to be mistaken with Facebook’s Custom Audience, which corresponds to Google Customer Match(list of offline data: emails, phone numbers or ZIP codes to be targeted online).

All Custom Intent and Custom Affinity audiences will be merged into one audience, making it simpler for advertisers. The difference between the two audiences was so subtle that a lot of advertisers were struggling to understand when to use on or the other.

Bumper Machine

YouTube advertising continues to be a focus area of Google. One of the biggest obstacle for smaller advertisers has been the lack of a suitable creative. Bumper ads are a 6 second non-skippable ads which are served on a cost per thousand impressions(CPM). They are great for creating awareness and building remarketing lists of users who have seen the ad on YouTube.

Bumper Machine is a mini creator studio in Google Ads which automatically transforms long video assets into a 6 second Bumper format. It takes the best practices of Google, slicing the video into its main components, showing the main message in a crisp short format.

Maximise Conversion Value

A new smart bidding solution called Maximise Conversion Value is the equivalent of Maximise Conversions for Shopping campaigns or other value advertisers. You can assign a value to every conversion depending on the projected revenue it makes for you. Until now you could use Target ROAS(return on ad spend). This strategy tries to get as many conversions as possible at a desired return on ad spend, determined by the advertiser. This works well if you know what your return of ad spend should be.

For advertisers with a limited budget, which are looking for ways to get the maximum bang for buck, Maximise Conversion Value is a great solution. It tries to deliver the maximum return on ad spend for the budget provided. This is a great strategy to start with if you are not sure what return on ad spend you should expect. You can then turn to Target ROAS and target a desired return on investment based on the learning with Maximise Conversion value.

Seasonal Adjustments

Another great solution for shopping advertisers and not only, Seasonal Adjustments helps smart bidding strategies cope with anomalies like holiday sales and high seasons. Until now advertisers would switch the smart bidding strategy over such period to make sure they are bidding the highest. The strategies now can take seasonality as an input provided by the advertiser. You can select the dates which you know high conversion volumes should be coming. The smart bidding strategy will adjust to push bidding for this high season. If you don’t know which dates are good for you, check my article on seasonality research for Valentines.

Shopping Actions

Last, but not least this announcement got me really excited. I have been following information about the Google Assistant and shopping actions for a while now. The new announcement comes as a logical step ahead in the e-commerce world. Now as part of the shopping experience in Google Assistant users would be able to add products from different sellers in their cart and go through a Google checkout. This means online shopping without actually visiting the retailer’s website. In this case sellers would be charged by sale, similar to Amazon and Ebay’s model.

For now this would be possible only in the USA. Earlier this year the European Commission fined Google for monopolistic behaviour towards other product comparison tools in Europe. As a result Google had to incorporate ads from these comparison websites in the shopping results on top of the search page. Tougher regulations in Europe slow down the launch of some very interesting solutions.

A lot of the innovations presented on Google Marketing Live were focusing on the e-commerce field, respectively Google Shopping. Even if 90% of sales are still happening offline, online research is playing a crucial role for them to happen. I am expecting even more news from Google around the area of e-commerce in the future years.

All the views in this article are exclusively mine and I am not an official spokesman of Google.

Google Ads have been around for a long period and to many advertisers they meant just Google…

Odolena Kostova — Sun, 28 Apr 2019 20:46:17 GMT

Google Ads have been around for a long period and to many advertisers they meant just Google Search ads. However it is much more than that — Google has been working on ways to make ads relevant for the user and easy to implement for the advertiser. There have been multiple changes in Google Ads since last summer. A lot of new formats and improvements were announced at the last Google Marketing Live in May 2018. There are four main pillars which any advertiser can easily implement to make sure they stay relevant with the way they use Google Ads. To shed some light, in this article I am sharing four steps to make sure you are implementing the most important features.

How are these steps going to help me?

All these innovations are designed to improve performance results — meaning more leads, more sales, more sign ups. On the technical side, implementation becomes much more easy. Tasks like testing ad copy, creating display banners and setting bids get fully automated and tackled by smart algorithms. These changes are all designed to help advertisers and make them successful. On one side you are getting maximum performance in the form of measurable results, on the other hand you save time from tedious task with high error factor.

Step 1 — Sitewide Tagging

Tracking conversions in Google or any platform which helps you drive traffic with paid clicks is absolutely crucial. It doesn’t matter if you are advertising for your own business or for a client, you must understand the results from your campaigns. To “tag” a website means to include piece of code which helps Google detect any time a conversion(a sale, call, sign up has happened).

Sitewide tagging has always been important, but now it is becoming crucial. Apple launched Intelligent Tracking Tracking Prevention (ITV) for Safari browser last September. It automatically deletes 3rd party cookie information in 24 hours. This means that conversions happening on Safari via Google Ads are not going to be recorded and remarketing audiences will not be populated from Safari users. According to the latest version of ITP 2.0 this information will be immediately deleted.

There are few solutions you can use as a Google advertiser to be able to keep getting conversion information from Safari users. The first one is Global Tag or gtag.js which combines both Google Ads tracking and Google Analytics tracking into one tag, and means that Google Ads and Google Marketing Platform advertisers can continue tracking conversions and retargeting previous site visitors. To access your gtag go to Settings > Property > Tracking Info > Tracking Code in Google Analytics and install it on your website template. You must also have auto-tagging enabled in all your Google Ads accounts, to allow the tagging information to show in the landing page URL and be recorded.

Another solution is Google Tag Manager. There you can have tags not only for Google, but all other trackers you are using. The great part is that you do not need to install individual tags to every page of your website. As long as the tag is in Google Tag Manager it will fire and collect information about the use of your properties. To make sure you store information as first party cookies instead of third party, you must now add Conversion Linker.

The third option, which I find easiest is to simply link Google Analytics with Google Ads and import your Google analytics conversions in Google Ads. If you have this in place, there is no need to change anything to save data after the ITP2.0 — you are already done. To link Analytics to Google Ads, simply go to the Tools section in Google Ads, choose Linked Accounts and then select Google Analytics. To finish the linking you must log in Google Analytics to approve your request.

Step 2 — Non-Last Click Attribution

After you have tagged your website is time to set up a conversion. Conversion could be any action which is valuable for you — a sale, a sign up, a phone call. You must set up your conversion in Google Ads. There are very few settings which you must complete one of which is the attribution model. Attribution is the way value is distributed across ad clicks. When users interact with your ad campaigns it is likely that they do not convert from the first one they see. There might be multiple touch points in the customer journey. By default most advertisers use last click attribution which essentially gives all the credit to the last Google Ads click, neglecting all the previous touch points. This is not an effective way to assess performance.

There are several other models you can use like Linear (giving the same value to all touch points), Time Decay ( credit gets stronger the closer it gets to the last interaction), Position Based (80% of credit to first and last touch points and everything else is split equally to the in-between touch points). Selecting a model which allocates value to multiple touch points in the users journey will open to you a fuller picture of how users intearct with your ads.

The best model you could use is Data Driven Attribution which is only available for accounts with significant amount of conversion data. It would automatically attribute various amounts of credit to the different interactions in the journey depending on the context of each conversion.

Step 3 — Smart Bidding

I devoted multiple articles on the subject of Smart Bidding, simply because I strongly believe that it can help you be much more competitive. Smart bidding includes fully automated strategies like Target CPA, Target ROAS, Maximise Conversions and Maximise Conversion Value. These are fully automated strategies which take away the control of manual bidding from the advertiser. Why are they more effective?

Smart bidding uses contextual signals from the search queries of the user or from their online history across Google’s properties — Google Search, maps, YouTube and Play. Having the context of what the user is interested in, what they are trying to get out of a search, Google’s smart machine learning technology matches the most relevant and competitive advertiser to the user who is most likely to be interested in their ad.

To run a smart bidding strategy, you must first have sitewide tagging and attribution model in place. Once a campaign is launched with smart bidding strategy it will be in learning mode.Depending on the amount of conversion history in the campaign before smart bidding was implemented the learning period might be short (high conversion volume) or long (low number of conversions)

Step 4 — Smart Creatives

Smart creatives are group of new ad types from Google which take away one of the toughest part of PPC management — testing new ad copy. Responsive Search, Responsive Display and Dynamic Search ads are examples of ad types in which the advertiser provides assets like logo, headline or image and Google creates ads for them, mixing and matching the provided assets to find the highest converting combination.

These ad formats are designed to work optimum with a smart bidding strategy in place. The more control you give away from the settings of a campaign the better results you are going to get. With machine learning technology your ads adapt to the search query or the interests of the user in the case of display. You gradually find out which messages seem to resonate well with your audience and use the results to drive your other content strategy beyond ads.

I will devote a separate article just on smart creatives, since these are really exciting and can bring fantastic results to early adopters. Watch this space!

All the views in this article are exclusively mine and I am not an official spokesman of Google.

The Differences between Google and Facebook Advertising Which you Should Know

Odolena Kostova — Sun, 24 Mar 2019 20:12:08 GMT

Online advertising has been split between two major options — Facebook or Google Ads. Most advertisers spend money on at least one of these platforms. Success varies and depends on multiple factors. While the two companies offer very similar solutions, there are some core significant differences which advertisers must know about.

I am in no way an advocate of any of the two platforms, I have been using both of them for my own promotions as well as for clients. They are both tremendously powerful tools and we can easily use them together. The following few points will help you understand better how they work and where the catches are.

Targeting

Both Facebook and Google have massive audience of active users which you can target with ads. But remember, they own other platforms, too. Facebook has Instagram and Google has YouTube, Google Maps, Blogger, Google Play, Android, Chrome, Gmail and others. This is where a difference in the targeting approach comes from. Google claims that they have much more rounded view of a user’s genuine interest, because they see how they behave on different platforms. Where Facebook can make targeting based on declared interests — pages and pictures you like or engage with, Google can do this based on your real intent. Audience types like Custom Intent or In-Market Segment are Google’s solutions for advertisers who are targeting lower funnel users ready for action. Facebook also has audiences based on interests, but they tend to be extracted from their activity on Facebook and Instagram.

In the past Facebook was using a lot of partnerships with data companies to extract information for audiences. However after the last year of data and privacy scandals, they stopped many of them. This resulted in the sunset of some audiences like income, political interest and ethnicity segments.

When it comes to targeting Facebook has one very strong advantage — their users are always logged in. This makes it very easy to use solutions like Custom Audiences — uploading lists of third party data(emails, phones, etc.) and targeting them at scale. With Google Display this is not possible, but can be done on Gmail, YouTube and Google Search.

Automation

Both, Google and Facebook are very strong on automation opportunities. With few clicks you can let them auto-target, bid and even make creatives for you. However there is one main difference — Facebook does this by default. When you create a Facebook business page, you are bombarded of notifications and previews trying to get you spend money to advertise. With a few clicks you can easily spend a few dollars and boost a post. Your ad automatically runs on Facebook, Instagram and Messenger. Post boosting is a fully automated campaign in Facebook, where they take control of your bidding trying to get you as many interactions or views as possible.

Google does not auto-enroll you in automated campaigns. On the contrary, when you create a Google campaign, you have the choice to run it manually or select smart bidding, for example. To run an ad on YouTube, Gmail and Google Display, until recently you had to create different formats and launch three different campaigns. With new campaign types like Smart Shopping, Smart Display or Local Campaigns, Google offers more simple, cleaner solution which allows advertisers with no prior experience create fully automated campaigns across all Google’s main platforms. Some small changes in Google’s interface also gradually move it to a more automated platform.

Interface

Which brings me to my next point — Facebook’s interface is really friendly for people who have never done any paid ads before. The smooth transition from a Business Page to boosted post, the easy navigation with sliders — all makes it seem much more simple. This interface is customizable, but you must really dig deeper to find the hidden features. Whereas Google gives the advertiser a sea of options and settings. This makes the interface difficult and confusing for a newbie.

If you start using more advanced features of Facebook, then you will have to use the Ad Manager, which is very similar to the Google Ads website. Last year Google AdWords was rebranded to Google Ads with the launch of a simplified, faster interface. Right now both Facebook Ad Manager and Google Ads look very similar, which makes it easy for a new advertiser.

Conversion Tracking

Conversion tracking is one of the toughest and most important difference between both platforms. By default Google tracks only the conversions which happened after an ad click. To add the conversions which happened after someone viewed an ad and did not click on it, but went to the website later you need a separate column(View-Through Conversions) which is hidden by default. If you want to see all of the conversions, you must add a column called All Conversions.

Facebook includes all conversions in one column by default. You have to really dig deeper to find the separate numbers from click and view conversions. This makes the initial number of conversions higher and therefore the cost per conversion lower. If you compare it to Google most often you will see a big difference in the conversion number and average cost.

To be able to honestly compare Facebook and Google Ads performance, you must exclude the view-through conversions from Facebook and only compare the click-through conversions vs Google’s default conversion column. You might think, this is too complicated. Believe me, it is worth the effort, as you will be able to compare two equal metricks, which by default settings you don’t. What if we compare the view-through conversions? There is another catch…

Measuring views

Google and Facebook measure views in a completely different way, which can be hugely misleading. Google uses the industry standard measurement for viewability. This means that at least 50% of the ad pixels must be displayed to the user on focus for more than one consecutive minute for an image or more than 2 minutes for a video. Facebook measures a view when any number of pixels form the ad (more than zero) is on the screen for any amount of time. This is obviously a big difference and can lead to a lot of misinterpretations. Facebook is working on a new model to measure viewability, but at the moment while I am writing it every scroll by an ad is measured as a view.

Knowing these differences and how to both platforms work is crucial in order to make informed decisions. However more than 90% of advertisers are not aware of these differences. This causes massive confusion and can lead to unnecessary mistakes and bad judgement.