On a recent call with our account manager at Google, I was advised that Google has told their AdWords support staff to focus on 3 key key areas this year. These are: Attribution, Search Re-marketing and Export. So in this post, I want to look briefly at each and what they mean for your business. After all, if these areas are priorities for Google, they must be important!
Attribution:
I have been saying for a long time in our blog that the difference between success and failure in online marketing is attribution. By attribution, we mean at the end of a day, week or month, sitting down and attributing your sales or leads among the channels on which you advertise. If you don’t do this, you are wasting money on ineffective channels / keywords and so can’t scale up as the more you do, the more you waste. If you do it well however, you can confidently scale up the channels and keywords that are working and eliminate the waste. However, anyone who has tried to implement attribution knows only too well the challenges associated with it! For example, if you are tracking online inquiries using an inquiry form on your website linked to Analytics and it gets spam’d to hell by companies trying to sell you stuff, all of a sudden your data is useless. We get around this by having a warning on our inquiry form to ward off spam and do not show the inquiry form in spam originating countries. Also, to do this right, you really need to remove any email address from your site as it’s not possible to track email inquiries in Analytics. If you receive inquiries or sales over the phone, then you need telephone tracking linked to your Analytics account and it needs to be able to filter out the telesales and internal calls. Even when you have clean data, you need to be able to manipulate the data to take account of the fact that most online conversions are now multi-touch ie a conversion where several channels combined to create the conversion eg a user that clicks on an AdWords advert, then a re-marketing one on Facebook before finally Googling your company name, clicking on your organic rank and then converting! Depending on what attribution model you use, you will assign this conversion to only organic, only Adwords or a percentage of the conversion to all three channels. Relying on last click data (which is what is populated by default in AdWords and Analytics) can lead to seriously bad decisions. So clean data carefully analyzed is what is needed! I am delighted that Google are putting this on the agenda now as I have been pushing this for quite some time!
Search Re-marketing:
Whoever came up with this is a pretty creative person! While most companies now rely heavily on display remarketing (on the Google Display network, Facebook, Youtube), very few have even heard of search remarketing. It works in a very similar manner to display remarketing in that a cookie is put on any user’s system who visits your website. However, you can now create a search campaign tailored to such people. So, you may decide to duplicate your existing campaigns but bid more or perhaps add in some generic keywords that usually you would be frightened to include. The thinking is that if they have previously been on your website, you want to get as much exposure as you can to them while they continue their buying cycle and so loosen your search terms and bid more. Pretty clever! We have yet to implement this for a client or for ourselves but we will be doing very soon; it’s one of those techniques that you know will work great before you even try it.
Export:
If the person who came up with search remarketing is creative, the guy/gal who came up with this is cynical! What they mean here is that they will encourage people to target countries outside their own. So Irish companies will target the UK, UK companies will target the Netherlands, Canadian companies will target the US and so on. This makes a lot of sense…………if things are going really well in your home country! If not, you will just be creating a bigger mess. My account manager spoke as if selling abroad was as easy as creating a new ad’ campaign in AdWords! Alas, things aren’t that simple. Currencies must be localized, support must be available in local time-zones, shipping issues and a lot more need to be considered. So those businesses that are sophisticated, experienced and well-resourced should take this on. However, my fear is that Google will push it to the SME sector and waste vast sums of their money by encouraging them to spend more on AdWords when their business isn’t ready to export! When people get advice from someone who works in Google, they tend to follow obediently forgetting that their adviser has sales targets and getting you to advertise in another country helps that. So beware friendly, polished exec’s from Google who say things like “touch base”, “send you a deck (PowerPoint is not cool so we now should say “deck”), “let’s catch up for a hangout” etc If they advise you to start exporting, be damn sure your website is localized and you have the infrastructure in place. Otherwise all you will do is help the friendly sales exec’ to hit his monthly sales targets but you won’t hit your own!
A lot of food for thought as always…..and that’s just from Google. With developments happening apace on Twitter, Facebook, Amazon, Pinterest, LinkedIn etc etc, no rest for online marketers in 2014!
