Archive for category: Digital Marketing

Google has unveiled a completely new version of Google Analytics, which it first introduced with a beta version last year. The tech giant has left no feature or methodology untouched, giving marketers even great insights into user behaviours on their site.

“…With major shifts in consumer behavior and privacy-driven changes to longtime industry standards, current approaches to analytics aren’t keeping pace.”

Included in the newest version of the analytics platform we can expect to see new ways of gathering data (Streams), easier integration between Analytics and Google Tag Manager, automatic tracking of features such as Scroll Depth and Clicks and the bringing together of Data Studio elements into existing analysis tools. As with all of Google’s current updates, Machine Learning & AI are at the heart of the new Google Analytics – meaning that we might be able to expect even more exciting features in the future!

On top of this, we have also seen some exciting announcements for PPC marketers this month around Google Ads – including updates to activate real-time alerts, and improvements to streamline the creative process – meaning faster creation of campaigns and ad-copy. Google Shopping also got some nifty new features including price tracking & price comparison tools.

Elsewhere in the paid landscape, Google announced a range of new and improved ways to reach audiences with changes to its Programmatic Guaranteed systems on Display & Video 360. Highlights include integration with Google Audiences, more efficient reach for your budget & expanded access to premium inventory across the platform. All of this means that you can more accurately reach the audience most likely to respond to your ads, increasing your ROAS.

Tracking without the cookies?

As part of Google’s long term objectives for its advertising platforms we’ve also been introduced to the new “Consent Mode”. Simply put, Google has thrown down the gauntlet to data-protection authorities in Europe by introducing two new tag setting for advertisers – allowing automatic customisation of advertising consent based on an individual user’s preferences without the use of cookies!

What does all of this mean? Well, Google’s aim here is clear; to help advertisers effectively measure conversions, while respecting consent choices for ad and analytics cookies.

Ultimately, cookie-less conversion tracking is now theoretically possible with Google Analytics, changing the post-GDPR tracking landscape once again.

More Links than Hyrule

In other news, we learned during October that Google has a “stupidly high” limit on the number of links it can read on your page according to work undertaken by Techmeme. This is a departure from the 2014 party-line, when Google claimed there was no limit at all to the number of links it could handle on a specific page. As if anticipating the question from SEO’s, Google quickly followed this up by saying there is no optimal number of links you should have on your page.

Google’s John Mueller has suggested that just a handful of slow-loading pages on an otherwise speedy website can impact how Google bots interpret your website. Clearly, this sounds worrying – but Google’s reasoning is pretty logical; if Google is unable to accurately measure the speed of your pages, it’ll place greater emphasis on the signals it can measure. In other words, if Google is unable to measure your fastest loading pages, but it HAS measured a slow loading page with a similar URL structure, it’ll assume that the unmeasured URL is slow too, until a second crawl proves otherwise.

A new player has entered the game?

If the rumours are to be believed, Apple might be preparing to launch it’s own rival to Google Search on iOS systems. This would be a massive shake up to online search engines, and could be the first real challenge to Google’s dominance of the space. Those who remember the Apple Maps debacle of 2012 may not be getting too excited just yet though…

Across at Microsoft, there were reports that Bing had suffered from some indexing issues throughout October 2020, but is working quickly wioth CloudFlare to fix the issues that have been reported. Fabrice Canel from Microsoft offered some advice to Microsoft Bing users to ensure they’re being correctly indexed by Bing:

The Bite-Sized News

Chrome is blocking intrusive push notifications -although it remains unclear what impact this might have for users.

Google has been tweaking  dictionary & encyclopedia results in an attempt to increase content quality.

Webmasters shared thier Black Friday best practices for 2020 – including getting your page set up as early as possible!

Finally, happy birthday to Google Ads, which turn 20 years old in October! Where would we be without you?

We’re delighted to reveal our latest work for long-standing client Brightsolid: a brand new web site and digital positioning that supports the company through its strategic move into the managed cloud and AWS space.

The site blends a bespoke theme with the truly legendary content management capabilities of WordPress, augmented by Beaver Builder’s page editor, giving Brightsolid a significant update from the website we produced for them in 2018, which in turn was a significant evolution from the site we created in 2017. Naturally, the site is hosted on the client’s AWS environment, and we’ve enjoyed working with the infrastructure team to learn all about the platform and the incredible capabilities it brings. We’re excited to see how the team at Brightsolid takes the message on AWS and its benefits out to market  which – given current circumstances – seem more relevant than ever.

Linda King, Chief Marketing Officer at Brightsolid said: “We’re delighted with our brand new website – we wanted something new and fresh to reflect our changing business and our credibility as a hybrid cloud managed service provider. We set out to create a site that focused on our business value, keeping it simple and avoiding technical jargon!. The ‘environment’ theme brings the site to life, and the use of video on our key pages is impressive. Also, as an AWS Consulting Partner, we were also pleased to be able to host our site on AWS, using a dynamic compute solution. We’ve already had great feedback on our site, and we’ve all really enjoyed working with the team at Mackerel Media over the last few months to deliver this!”

Have a browse here: https://www.brightsolid.com

Today is our first day back in the Mackerel Media office following the Christmas break. So what better time than now to look back at some of the biggest changes Google brought us in the past 12 months – and what they could mean for 2019?

No More Google AdWords

Ever since its launch in October 2000, Google’s core advertising platform has always been known as Google AdWords. However, in July 2018, we were introduced to the platform’s new moniker – the much more streamlined Google Ads. While a simple change in name may not seem all that impressive in itself, Google also introduced us to a new version of DoubleClick known as Google Marketing Platform and revealed Google Ad Manager, a shiny new programmatic platform for large publishers and businesses.

So why is this so important to advertisers that it is the first item in our 2018 lookback?

Well, the AdWords re-branding symbolises Google’s ambitions to move away from simple text and keyword based responsive advertising and into smart, AI-driven searches which can be triggered by user behaviour, interests and even physical location. Offline, we’re seeing Google strongly push their Smart Speaker and Hey Google technology, giving us some idea of how Google expects us to perform searches in the future.

To put it another way, Google AdWords doesn’t need ‘words’ to advertise anymore. The time of Google Ads is now.

New Google Ads Interface

Along with the Google Ads name change came the introduction of an overhauled Google Ads UI – and boy, did it divide opinions in the digital marketing industry! Now, six months on, I can take a more objective view of the new interface and can report… I really like it!

The new interface isn’t without its flaws – but overall the platform is vastly improved over the old, which had been mostly unchanged for 10 years. From a practical standpoint, the new interface gives equal weighting to all campaigns types which we felt was lacking in the old UI – finding Smart Shopping Campaigns and working on them is as easy now as working on your Search campaigns, which again hints at Google’s advertising ambitions in the future.

Better Reporting

One of the most useful features of the new Ads interface is the ability to quickly find and report on information that is most relevant to your digital marketing campaigns. As well as being able to surface potential optimisation strategies, the new Google Ads interface has introduced a number of easy-to-reach reports, which for the most part have always been beneficial in our day-to-day management of accounts. These new reports include a highly detailed breakdown of Ad Position and Rank, as well as competitor activity comparisons – both of which can provide great in-sight for clients.

On the Google Analytics side, Session Quality and Conversion Probability reports are beginning to apply machine learning to web analytics data, which in turn helps marketers define high quality audiences and include them in Smart Lists and Smart Goals for marketing campaigns. This suggests that in 2019 Google will continue to put greater emphasis on the importance of using Google Ads & Analytics together to optimise your account, as well as a possible hint that one day these may not be seen as separate tools at all…

Intelligent Targeting & Smarter Keywords

By now, it might be obvious, but 2018 was the year that fully Google embraced Artificial Intelligence.

From the introduction of Smart Shopping campaigns (which can intelligently adjust bids and product recommendation in the Google Shopping format based on user history and intent), to the introduction of responsive, dynamic ad-creative formats and automated Impression Share Targeting – Google has spent the past 12 months introducing us to new, intelligent ways of getting our ads in front of the right people at the right time.

For most advertisers, Goal Based Campaigns have been one of the most interesting additions to Google Ads in the past 12 months. Simply by picking the results you want to achieve – such as increased leads, greater brand awareness or higher conversions – Google Ads can now provide you with a greater understanding of which Google Ads campaign types will perform best for you and your budget, while it’s powerful Machine Learning can provide countless automatic bid and placement optimisations.

However, one of the most shocking changes of the past 12 months was Google’s announcement that it has applied its AI technology to one of the core staples of modern PPC marketing – the [Exact Match] keyword. From September, Google’s machine learning has meant that close variants of keywords which show “intent” – such as implied queries and paraphrasing – can trigger the previously fixed [Exact Match] keyword type. According to Google, testing has shown that advertisers see approximately 3% more clicks and conversions using this technology, however many have reported that this has just resulted in less relevant queries triggering keywords.

Updates to Ad Formats

From the roll-out of non-skippable TruView YouTube bumper ads to the introduction of a third text-ad Headline, we have seen some significant changes to the formats advertisers can use in 2018. And, unsurprisingly, Google’s AI algorithms played a huge roll here too during the past 12 months.

The most useful of these updates has undoubtedly been the introduction of Responsive Search Ads – an updated version of Dynamic search ads – which uses machine learning to match user intent to ad-creative from a pool of up to 15 headlines and 4 descriptions, individually tailoring the message a user sees to their initial search query as well as their historical search behaviour and in-market intent to increase ad engagement and CTR%.

What Does 2019 Hold for Google Ads?

I hope by now you’ve noticed a recurring theme in this blog post; Google is pushing AI in a bid to capitalise on non-traditional methods of online advertising. In 2019 expect to see the introduction of tools designed to target people using voice search technology, as well as an increased reliance on Machine Learning and AI to allow you to better target the audience that matters most to you.

What does 2019 hold for your digital marketing? If you want to find out, drop us a quick email to hello@mackerelmedia.co.uk.

In the lead up to GDPR, one of the things that came up most when chatting to our clients was whether or not the Google Display Network – and display marketing in general – was suddenly going to be unusable in their digital marketing strategies.  Amongst the hundreds of articles, blogs and tweets discussing the effects of GDPR on display advertising I came across an article claiming that the era of the Display Ad was at an end.

In a nut-shell, the article suggested that internet-weary consumers are becoming less receptive than they used to be to the so-called “interruption-driven” model of visual-based ad servers. This can lead to an effect known as ad fatigue – the“numbing” of users to your marketing efforts over time.

Ad-fatigue can affect display marketing campaigns, but it can also be seen with search marketing and even traditional platforms like print and television advertising. So why aren’t we reading more articles foreshadowing the death of advertising across all of these mediums?

While I don’t completely disagree with the report’s conclusions, I find it difficult to accept the idea that an entire subsection of digital marketing is dead – especially given that I keep seeing display marketing success stories here at Mackerel Media. I suspect people just don’t realise the huge potential of Display Network advertising has for most businesses when used correctly.

Building Brand Awareness with GDN

For the most part, advertising campaigns which rely on the Google Display Network are used for building Brand Awareness across the internet.

Let’s build a worst case scenario: an e-commerce business using just one piece of ad-creative across the entire Google Display Network in a “scatter-gun” fashion. Whilst the adcopy may be “on-message” for our brand, this method would mean Google could theoretically place our advertising banners or MPU’s wherever there is display inventory available, regardless of the page’s topic or our advertiser’s desired outcomes.

As any digital marketing agency worth their salt will tell you, this is an extremely inefficient use of your campaign budget – supposedly $7.4bn was wasted on Display in 2016 – and one that is unlikely to bring any real success. Plus, even in our hypothetical scenario, we’re still at the mercy of user-apathy and the dreaded Ad-fatigue.

For this all too common situation, the report is correct – this type of “anything & anywhere” display advertising campaign has already come to an end –  today it is more difficult than ever for marketers to create this type of campaign on the GDN, and other display networks are beginning to follow suit.

Opportunities for Brand Activation

The implicit message of the report – which highlights that the average display network CTR is only 0.35% – is that display adverting doesn’t receive enough clicks, and a low CTR means that a campaign is failing.

On the Google Search Network – which determines intent via a user’s search query – such a low CTR would often (but not always) be cause for alarm. Due to the very nature of display campaigns however, impressions are often very high – after all, there are near unlimited websites where an advert may be chosen to appear. With this in mind, I’d argue that 0.35% is a positive performance for any display campaign.

Don’t forget, there is a myriad of targeting options that allow your display campaign to reach a better defined and more effective audience, thus increasing the likelihood of a user clicking your banner advert or MPU. Google AdWords users can target specific page placements (such as ones you know your key audiences frequently visit), topics that relate to your services or even product keywords.

Google’s Display Network targeting options have become more sophisticated than ever.

It’s All About “Where” and “Who”

Let’s use one of Mackerel Media’s own clients as an example: Working in a competitive market space, CTR for our client Display network campaign was 0.21% – lower than the 0.35% identified as being “not enough”. An important factor here however was wherethe adverts appeared on the Google Display network – Placement Targeting had allowed us to identify and target websites which were frequented by internet users who had been identified as “most-likely-to-convert”, whilst Google’s Affinity Placements automatically chose similar websites to further increase our reach whilst still remaining within our target “converting” audience. At the same time, multiple ad-creatives were offered to combat the effects of ad-fatigue on impressions – each with a slightly different USP.

This large-scale, targeted Display Network advertising campaign with multiple pieces of adcopy available across an 18-month period resulted in around 10,000 clicks to our clients landing pages. Our total spend during this campaign was about £8,000, giving an Average £/Click of £0.80. For the same number of clicks on the Search Network, where an extremely competitive market means CPC is higher at around £2.00, 10,000 clicks to site would have cost an eye-watering £20,000 – a massive increase in cost for the same amount of traffic to the same landing pages.

Here we can see that a properly targeted display campaign with engaging creative can allow any company to successfully reach a large number of potential customers with a relatively low CPC. The message here is that getting in front of the right audience will trump large impression numbers any time.

Quality not Quantity

We can see that a properly targeted display campaign with engaging creative can allow any company to successfully reach a large number of potential customers with a relatively low CPC. The message here is that getting in front of the right audience will trump large impression numbers any time.

What the report fails to acknowledge – and something that our clients have been pleased to hear – is the use of audiences, dynamic and remarketing campaigns that take advantage of the Google Display Network’s ability to accurately track users across their web journeys. Even post- GDPR, we can learn a huge amount about a users behaviours, interests and most importantly – their intentions.

With careful analysis of our targeting options and user behaviour, we can make sure that a user – whether they’re brand aware or not – see’s your advert at the right time, and the right place for them to make those key decisions that benefit your business.

Mackerel Media isn’t ready to give up on Display Advertising just yet.