31.10.17

How to ensure your external PPC account audit isn’t a waste of time

PPC account audit

If you run a PPC agency, you’ll know it’s not that unusual for clients to occasionally bring in an outside auditor to review their PPC accounts.

Sometimes, your client will let you know in advance; sometimes, you’ll find out when you see a request to access the account.

And sometimes, you won’t find out until after the fact, when the final report is forwarded to you for discussion!

I completely understand why some clients like to have an outside audit of their PPC accounts. For some companies, it’s simply part of their due diligence. For others, an executive will come up with the idea and push it through. And for some, it’s impossible to resist the allure of a “free” audit.

I can also understand why clients might hesitate to inform their PPC agency of their decision. They might feel embarrassed or uncomfortable about the situation. Or they may feel ambivalent about the audit itself.

In some cases, it may be that the client doesn’t trust the agency not to do some quick “fixes” in anticipation of the audit. (Although I have to say, if you don’t trust your agency enough to let them know of the audit in advance, you definitely shouldn’t trust them to run your campaigns!)

But whatever the situation, external audits are something that PPC agencies have to expect. But what’s it like to go through one? And how could the process be improved?

[Read the full article on Search Engine Land.]

Some opinions expressed in this article may be those of a guest author and not necessarily Marketing Land. Staff authors are listed here.



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The ROI of recommendation engines for marketing

Netflix’s long list of suggested movies and TV shows is a fantastic example of a personalized user experience. In fact, about 70 percent of everything users watch is a personalized recommendation, according to the company.

Getting to that point hasn’t been easy, and improving on its recommendation system is an ongoing process. Netflix has spent well over a decade developing and refining its recommendations.

In 2006, it launched the Netflix Prize to search for machine learning experts who could improve its previous algorithm. A team of algorithmic scientists bested the company’s algorithm by 10 percent — a small percentage, you may think, but it was convincing enough for the company to expect huge improvements in the future. The team’s efforts earned them a $1 million prize.

Recommendation engines can help marketers and organizations increase the likelihood of arriving at recommendations tailored to a user’s past online activity or behavior using in-depth knowledge based on big data analysis.

In this article, I’ll explore how companies can increase their ROI by fruitfully leveraging personalization and recommendations. I’ll break down the potential business benefits of recommendation engines into three categories based on my company’s analysis of dozens of recommendation engine use cases.

[Read the full article on MarTech Today.]

Some opinions expressed in this article may be those of a guest author and not necessarily Marketing Land. Staff authors are listed here.



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Connect with your audience across multiple channels and at scale

Consumers are bombarded by hundreds of competing messages every day, many of which lack any specific relevance to them. As they become more and more fatigued from this excess noise, consumers are becoming more adept and emboldened to tune out all of a brand’s marketing efforts if they miss the mark.

In fact, a recent study showed 94 percent of consumers have discontinued a relationship with a brand after receiving irrelevant messaging.

Growth marketers must create “omni-channel relevance” by creating one-to-one personalization that is consistent across all channels and at scale. Inside the Growth Marketer’s Playbook from Iterable, we walk through each of these channels — email, direct mail, mobile, web push and social media — and discuss best practices for captivating your audiences, activating your data and automating intelligent campaigns.

Visit Digital Marketing Depot to download “The Growth Marketer’s Playbook to Achieving True Omni-Channel Relevance.”



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Customer Experience in the Age of Social Media

Join our social media and CX experts as they explain how social customer service tools can help brands provide winning digital customer experiences. They’ll discuss how to manage that experience across multiple social touchpoints, leverage evolving social customer service tools and platforms to deliver long-term value, and act on real-time customer insights to drive social ROI.

Attend this webinar and learn:

  • social strategies that drive loyalty and advocacy throughout the customer journey.
  • social customer service response techniques that meet – and exceed – customer expectations.
  • how global brands use social networks and communities to grow their customer bases.

Register today for “CX in the Age of Social Media,” produced by Digital Marketing Depot and sponsored by Lithium.

Some opinions expressed in this article may be those of a guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land. Staff authors are listed here.



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Oh, no! AdWords can now spend double your budget. Or not…

In case you hadn’t already heard, AdWords can now spend up to double your campaign’s daily budget… which is pretty darned irritating!

Fortunately, your favorite PPC superhero is here to save the day.

Yep, here I am! So let’s see if we can’t script our way out of this mess.

For 99 percent of campaigns, I’d normally recommend not using budget caps at all — I like to “tap it not cap it,” which basically means it’s better to control spend by bids (/ROI) rather than closing up shop with budgets.

However, there are certain instances where budgets are not just useful, but essential — for example, if a client has a specific budget attached to a particular campaign. Yes, Google, some people actually have limited marketing budgets!

At the very least, you should know when the overspend is happening, so you can judge for yourself whether said overspend should continue.

If you’d really like to keep a close eye on costs, have a look at our script to track your account’s spend every hour. For those who only want to be alerted when campaigns are over their budgets, this is where the new script comes in!

This latest script from Brainlabs (my employer) checks each campaign’s spend and budget. All you need to do is set a multiplier threshold — if the spend is larger than the budget multiplied by the threshold, then the campaign is labeled. You’ll get an email listing the newly labeled campaigns, along with their spend and budgets. And if you want, you can set another threshold so that if the spend gets too far over your budget, the campaign will be paused.


The script also checks if the campaign’s spend is under your labeling and pausing thresholds, so it can unlabel and unpause them. That means that when it’s a new day and nothing has been spent yet, the labels will be removed, and anything the script has paused will be reactivated. It also means that if a campaign is over budget, but you increase its budget, the labeling and status will reflect the new, increased budget.

To use the script, copy the code below into a new AdWords Script and change the settings at the top:

  • campaignNameContains and campaignNameDoesNotContain filter which campaigns the script will look at. For example, if campaignNameContains is  [“Generic”, “Competitor”] then only campaigns with names containing “generic” or “competitor” will be labeled or paused. If campaignNameDoesNotContain is [“Brand”, “Key Terms”] then any campaigns containing “brand” or “key terms” in the name will be ignored (and can overspend as they like).
    • This is not case-sensitive.
    • Leave blank, [], to include all campaigns.
    • If you need to put a double quote into campaignNameContains or campaignNameDoesNotContain, put a backslash before it.
  • email is a list of addresses that will be emailed when campaigns are labelled or paused.
    • Note that emails will be sent even when the script is being previewed and not making changes.
  • currencySymbol, thousandsSeparator and decimalMark are used to format the budget and spend numbers in the email.
  • labelThreshold determines how much the campaign must spend, compared to its budget, for the script to label it as overspending.
    • For example, if you set labelThreshold to 1, then campaigns will be labeled and you will be emailed if the spend is equal to the budget. If you set it to 1.2, then the campaign is labeled and email sent if spend is 120 percent of the budget.
  • labelName is the name of the label that will be applied to overspending campaigns.
  • Set campaignPauser to true if you want campaigns too far over their budgets to be paused. Set it to false if you do not want the script to pause campaigns, no matter how much they spend (the script will still label and email you according to the labelThreshold).
  • pauseThreshold determines how much the campaign must spend, compared to its budget, for the script to pause it (if campaignPauser is true).
    • This works the same as labelThreshold: If it is 1.2, then campaigns will be paused if their spend is 120 percent of the budget.
    • This must be greater than or equal to the labelThreshold. The script needs the paused campaigns to be labeled so it knows which to reactivate when their spend becomes lower.

Preview the script to make sure it’s working as expected (and check the logs in case there are any warnings). Then set up a schedule so the script runs hourly.

A few things to note:

  • The script only works with search and display campaigns! It can’t help with video, shopping or universal app campaigns.
  • This script can’t completely prevent your going over budget. The script only runs hourly, so the campaign can go over the spend threshold between runs. And there’s a 15- to 20-minute lag in the spend data.
  • Scheduled scripts don’t run on the hour, so campaigns will not be reactivated as soon as a new day begins. Instead, they’ll be reactivated when the script first runs on the new day, sometime between midnight and 1:00 a.m. Most campaigns receive little traffic at this time anyway — but if that’s not the case for you, you might want to set up automated rules to unpause things exactly as midnight strikes.
  • You can set labelThreshold to be less than 1. For example, if you set it as 0.9, you’ll get an email when the campaign reaches 90 percent of its budget.

Some opinions expressed in this article may be those of a guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land. Staff authors are listed here.



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E-commerce brands boost Facebook ad spend as CPMs, CPCs rise but CTRs dip

If the third quarter is a warmup exercise for e-commerce advertisers plotting their fourth-quarter spending spree, then it should be a happy holiday season for Facebook.

E-commerce advertisers, on average, spent 20 percent more money on Facebook ads in the third quarter of 2017 than they did in the same period last year, according to a report published on Tuesday by Nanigans, a company that provides software for brands to automate their Facebook ad buys and that is a part of Facebook’s Marketing Developers program. A Nanigans spokesperson declined to say how many advertisers were included in the study.

While e-commerce brands are pushing more money into the social network in general, they are particularly purchasing more mobile video ads and retargeted ads from Facebook. These marketers spent, on average, 40 percent more money on Facebook’s mobile video ads in Q3 2017 than in Q3 2016. And the share of their ad spend that went to Facebook’s Dynamic Ads — its product catalog-promoting ad format that retargets the people who browsed a brand’s site or app — increased by 284 percent year over year.

While the share of e-commerce brands’ budgets going to Dynamic Ads grew, it’s unclear how big (or small) a piece of those budgets the ad format accounts for. The Nanigans spokesperson declined to say what was the actual share of e-commerce brands’ budgets spent on Dynamic Ads.

Interestingly, e-commerce advertisers increased their spending on Facebook despite an increase in the social network’s ad rates and a decrease in its ads’ performance for these brands.

E-commerce advertisers typically paid $8.40 for every thousand times their ads were served across Facebook and its Audience Network ad network of third-party sites and apps (Nanigans’ study did not include Instagram campaigns). That’s a 69 percent higher CPM than e-commerce brands paid a year ago and corresponds with a 57 percent year-over-year increase among all advertisers to $9.31.

While e-commerce brands paid a premium for impressions, clicks were significantly cheaper at $0.46 on average. That CPC has similarly swelled over the past year, but e-commerce brands also pay less money per click than the average Facebook advertiser that paid $0.55 per click in Q3 2017, a 54 percent increase year over year.

At the same time Facebook’s ad rates have risen, its ads’ performance has dipped. In Q3 2017, people clicked on e-commerce brands’ Facebook ads about 1.84 percent of the time, down 4 percent compared to a year ago. However, that’s still a better click-through rate than the average advertiser saw on Facebook. In Q3, Facebook’s worldwide click-through rate averaged 1.69 percent, up 2 percent compared to a year ago but down 4 percent compared to the previous quarter. That marked the first time Facebook’s average global click-through rate declined from Q2 to Q3, according to Nanigans, though the company’s spokesperson said that shift “is unlikely to be indicative of a larger directional change in the market.”



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Video SEO: Ranking Videos in Google Without Rich Snippets

[This blog post is a summary of the first part of a presentation I gave at SearchLove London. You can find the full presentation here.]

Too often, Video SEO is simplified to a discussion of video rich snippets, which are the visual markup of video results to include thumbnails and timestamps.

Video Rich Snippet

This perspective leads to a predictable narrative  around the SERP feature’s value, as measured by its SERP visibility, which is somewhere between 8% and 18% of search results (SEMRush, Mozcast, STAT).

However, as hopeful as these percentages seem, the opportunity is deflated by YouTube owning nearly 90% of these video results, which hasn’t changed much since mid-2014. For the most part, if you want a video rich snippet, you put your video on YouTube (although sites with dedicated video sections can also fair well).

This leads to a few common conclusions:

  1. Google is prioritizing their own properties (and other tinfoil variants)
  2. YouTube is much more important to Google video search in a post-snippet video world
  3. If you’re not using YouTube, the SEO traffic opportunity is limited
  4. There is not much benefit to traditional video SEO tactics (because you’re not going to get the snippet anyways)

However, these are flawed perspectives on video search, including the how and why of using video in your content marketing mix.

Video Rich Snippets Are Incremental & Optional

Using the video SERP feature to denote a “video result” is logically flawed in the same way that a product URL is not defined by its rating & review product snippet. A result can be a video result without the presence of the thumbnail. Google’s discovery of the thumbnail and their determination to present that thumbnail are independent and secondary steps.

URL With and Without Video Rich Snippet

Above are two example URLs in traditional web results (“All” tab) compared to the same two URLs in video results (“Video” tab). This helps demonstrate that Google can have rich snippet data for a URL but choose to suppress that data. Seen another way, these are examples of “video results” being integrated into universal search results, even though they’re missing the visual designation.

Because of this, there is a flaw in assuming 8%-18% of SERPs include “video results.” (That stat defines the video SERP feature only). To speak to video results more broadly, we would need to take the secondary step of crawling the ranking URLs to check their source code for video embeds and check the URL listings in “Video” results to determine whether Google has snippet data.

So why is this important? If Google is using the “video” determination to influence rankings, even if they don’t display the rich snippet, then we can take advantage of that. In other words, we can rank on queries (and rank higher) with video content better than we can with text. (And, in some instances, it may be nearly impossible to rank on queries without video).

Intent as a Ranking Factor

Searcher intent has become an increasingly important factor in determining the results for a query. How this is being done could be its own blog post, but it’s a combination of natural language processing, machine learning, and usage data that allows Google to “sort” or “blend” initial result sets to optimize for intent completion or query satisfaction.

Said another way, Google knows that different portions of users searching on a given keyword are searching it for specific reasons. On these queries, it can become nearly impossible to rank without ensuring that your target page addresses the determined intent (no matter how technically sound, well-targeted, or linked to that URL is). They’re also using this intent to weight the blending of different result types and verticals into a universal search result.

Local results appearing on general queries are a common example of this. Look at the SERPs for “hiking” (as they appear here in Portland, OR).

SERP with Local Intent

[Red=local results, Blue=general, non-localized results. Numbers=local query position]

This broad keyword has both general, informational intent, as well as a more “do” or “transactional” local intent (i.e. “where can I go hiking near me”). Google takes the general term, fetches the results, which are shown in blue above, then performs a secondary search where they append the searcher’s location to the original query (“hiking Portland”) and takes those results, which are shown in red above, and blends them together in an attempt to address multiple intents. This means, for sites targeting the general, non-localized intent, there are only 5-6 slots of opportunity on page one, not 10.

Apply this same logic to keywords where the “intent” is to discover content that is more visual in nature. In other words, on a given keyword, a certain percentage of searchers may provide usage data, in aggregate, that suggests they prefer a video result or content with a video on it. This is a sliding scale of intent, but those keywords with a high interest in video content can be called “video keywords”.

We can see this intent “blending” in action on a video keyword like “how to paint a room.”

Breakdown of Video Results

Out of the top 10 results, seven URLs have a video on them. Traditional SEO logic suggests that there is only one video result (the YouTube video with the video rich snippet), but there are actually several video results on this SERP. However, Google has decided to suppress the presentation of the rich snippet on most of these.

Similar to how Google integrates results for “Hiking” + “Portland,” Google is integrating results from searching “how to paint a room” within its video index, as seen below.

Video results ranking directly

The first four results in the “Video” tab rank on page one of the “All” results (similar to local blending). Of these, three have the rich snippet in the video tab, even though it’s suppressed on the blended universal results (suggesting the SERP feature is an incremental determination above and beyond the determination of this URL as a video result).

In addition to these results, two of these results don’t rank directly, but are the video pages of videos embedded on a URL within the top 10 “All” results.

Videos embeded in ranking URLs

Looking at how heavily Google is weighting URLs with video (or weighting the blending of video vertical results) on this SERP, it could be very difficult to earn a top ranking without visual content. Looked at another way, this weighting provides a disproportionate advantage to video content when trying to rank on certain query types.

If you want to rank on this keyword, it’s going to be significantly harder to accomplish that with text-only articles and blog posts.

Higher Video Intent on Mobile

In general, mobile searchers have a higher affinity for certain query and content types when compared to desktop searchers, and one of those content types is video. This is reflected in Google’s visual treatment of video on mobile SERPs.

Video carousel in mobile search

If there is a single video SERP feature on a desktop result, it is converted into a video carousel on mobile. This carousel scrolls through the video vertical results (the results in the “Video” tab). This provides a strategic advantage to video content on mobile for the SEO that targets video vertical rankings on queries that have a video rich snippet at positions 1 through 5.

In other words, if you’re struggling to rank well on a keyword with a video snippet in the top 5 and that keyword has a high percentage of mobile searches, a video-based strategy might be a good way to earn yourself top 5 visibility on the mobile SERP.

Growing Trend of Video Intent

I suspect this trend will continue, not only because visual and voice analysis, both as inputs and outputs, are at the core of search technological and algorithmic development, but because Google needs to follow audiences, who are increasingly interested in video content.

At Briggsby, we conducted a survey to explore relative interest in video versus text content by different age ranges. This was driven by observations that some forms of traditional text content consumption (i.e. blogging) are declining while more visual and voice mediums were growing (i.e. YouTube, Instagram, Snapchat, Facebook Video, and podcasts). Here is what we found:

Video vs. Text Preference by Age

(N = 1,000 / Remaining respondents chose “I do not read or watch content online” or “I do not have a preference for text or video content.”)

In general, we’re seeing a higher affinity for video content amongst younger demographics, with 18-24 year olds preferring video over text content by a fair margin. This preference shifts back towards text as age increases, with the oldest demographic having a significantly higher preference for text content.

However, this is not true for all content types. For “review” content, there is a preference for text content across all age groups.

Review Content Type Preference by Age

This trend seems to have the most significant implications on “learn” content, where the desire for video content becomes my pronounced.

Content Preferences for Learning

This important for SEO, because one of the areas that SEO distinguishes itself from SEM is targeting top-of-funnel, informational queries. This strategy is at the core of many SEO program’s blog/article content marketing strategies.

There are a few implications here. First, for those targeting customers/audiences younger than 35, video is very important on informational and educational queries. Second, this trend may shift as those in the younger age groups age over the next 5+ years. Lastly, considering Google’s “intent” determination is, at least in part, determined by usage data, this content type preference could influence the weight assigned to video intent on certain query types.

Future of Video Search

While there are immediate opportunities in video search, it’s important to keep an eye on current advancements in video information retrieval, as they may dramatically impact how we think about video SEO over the next few years.

Suggested Clip

Google tips its hand with their tests of the “Suggested Clip” featured snippet, where they point users to a specific minute mark when the answer to a question is given deep within a video.

Suggested Clip Feature Snippet in Google

This feature has some significant limitations and fails to provide an effective answer frequently, but it does point to a potential future state of video indexation. First, it is pointing to a future of effective automatic transcriptions of video content. Second, it suggests the application of natural language processing on these transcriptions, similar to featured snippet answers within traditional search. Lastly, it may suggest a future shift away from the more exact-match nature of video search to one that is more long-tail in nature, by better understanding the content within a video.

Indexation of Video Content

One of the major limitations of video indexation is speech-to-text or automatic transcriptions. However, during a session I attended at VidCon, the team at YouTube that works on automatic transcriptions talked about the significant improvements they’ve made in the last year.

They shared that YouTube has automatic captions on 1 billion videos. While they were discussing this from the perspective of accessibility, as an SEO, I see this as an improvement in video indexation.

Historically, though, these automatic captions were a bit humorous in their attempt to transcribe audio in a video. However, in the last year, their accuracy has improved by 50%.

These both demonstrate major investments by Google in having machines understand both video and voice.

Entity Detection in Videos

An important part of this improvement, and something the YouTube team seemed very proud about during their presentation, was their ability to identify entities in video content. This is a significant improvement in automatic captions.

Entities in YouTube Automatic Transcription

In this example, you’ll notice the effective detection of named entities, such as the capitalized “Stephen King.” Not only that, but they effectively heard the possessive form of the word and added the possessive apostrophe. YouTube also identified the entities 1990 (a year) and Time Curry (actor). Using entity triples and basic natural language processing, Google may be able to develop a very sophisticated understanding of this video content. This can be done using words like “book” and “miniseries,” which have very specific meanings, and words like “starring,” which help define an entity triple. If you’re interested in natural language processing and entities, I’ve given two presentations on them (here and here).

As this improves, many of the advancements we’ve seen in entities and the natural language processing of text may make its way to video search.

Knowledge Graph in YouTube

Entities are already making their way into video search through basic Knowledge Graph panels in YouTube Search.

Knowledge Graph in YouTube

Here you’ll see a search for “Seahawks,” an American football team, produce a Knowledge Graph style result that includes game highlights, as well as related NFL teams.

Integrating Video into Your Content Strategy

Given the growing interest of audiences in video content and Google’s recent and on-going enhancements, video content production is an area where many SEO programs are under-investing. This underinvestment is due, in part, to a limited perspective on how video SEO works, reducing its value to SERP features, instead of the broader implications of the intent-driven weighting of different content forms.

In some ways, traditional text-based blogging, which is at the core of most SEO programs’ content marketing strategies, is an “old man’s game” (or old woman’s). As Google improves their determination of user intent, it’s important for us to not only think of how we’re meeting a searcher’s intent from a content perspective but also from its form.

If you’re interested in the full presentation from SearchLove London, you can see it here:

The post Video SEO: Ranking Videos in Google Without Rich Snippets appeared first on Briggsby.



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