Over the past few months you may have heard some chatter about RSAs, also known as Responsive Search Ads. RSAs leverage Google’s machine learning algorithm, allowing marketers to easily test ad copy messaging.
How Do RSAs make Ad Copy Testing Easier?
The new responsive search ads format will ultimately give you the opportunity to create more ads per ad group, easily and at scale. Doesn’t that sound great? I think so; below are some key benefits of this new ad format:
Efficiency: Now you can save time by creating one ad with multiple headlines and descriptions. Responsive Search Ads can display up to 3 headlines and 2 descriptions at the same time but we can test up to 15 headlines (30-character limit) and 4 descriptions (90-character limit) in one ad. Over time, Google Ads will test for the most effective combinations and learn the combinations that are most relevant for different queries.
Flexibility: RSAs adapt to different device widths. This gives you more room to share your message with potential customers. Remember, Google will build and serve the ad combination based on what it has learned to be the most relevant message to that individual customer and their specific search.
Control: Machine learning is a major factor but you are still in control! Although Google will pick the ad copy and the precise combination to serve, you still provide the content. Be creative but choose your messaging wisely. And remember—if you need more control, you can pin your headline(s) or description(s) to a specific position.
Performance: Google has estimated that ad groups with RSAs have a click uplift of 5-15%. RSA essentially enables you to compete in more auctions and match to more queries, which allows you to reach more potential customers.
Creating Your First Responsive Search Ad
If you’re anything like us, now that you know a little bit more about RSA, you’re eager to give it a test run. One thing to keep in mind: RSA is still in beta as a product, and not all advertisers have access to it. Before getting started make sure you can access the RSA option under the Ads section in your Google Ads interface, or contact your Google representative to request to be whitelisted.
Once you’ve verified that you have access to the feature, follow these simple steps to implement your first RSA ad copy.
Create your content directly in the Google Ads interface, editor or upload in bulk if you are implementing more than one ad at a time. Your content—headlines and descriptions—should be unique, include 1 keyword, and highlight different aspects of your business. Remember—the more headlines and descriptions you provide, the more potential combinations your ad will have, leaving you with more possibilities and deeper insights.
“Pin” a headline or description. Although not necessary, RSAs allow you to pin a headline to 3 positions (position 1-3) and descriptions to 2 positions (position 1-2), which is effective if you have text that must appear in every ad. For instance, if you want to test different calls to action, you can pin all CTAs to headline position 1 or 2. By setting your CTAs to be tested as headlines 1-5, with headlines 6-10 dedicated to unique messaging (like the name of your service or business, promotions, etc.), you will have efficiently created a quick multivariate CTA test.
Test longer and shorter variants of your headlines and descriptions instead of focusing on maximizing character limits. As with all ad copy, think of your business first, the message you want to convey, and the audience you need to reach, and write your ads accordingly.
Incorporating RSAs into your marketing mix might be a great opportunity for your business, but you need to make sure it’s generating positive results. The work only really begins once your ads are live. From there, you will have to track and report on results.
Remember, this is a test against your existing ads. With that said, we recommend ad groups to have at least 2 expanded text ads (ETAs) and 1 RSA. Don’t be afraid of comparing your RSA against your existing ETAs.
Once you have sufficient data to meet your needs, you will be able to decide if RSAs make sense for your business, paid search campaign(s) and/or individual ad group(s). Revise and create more ads as needed, and don’t forget—the most effective paid search campaigns never stop testing.
Do you want to start experimenting with RSAs and other ad formats? Reach out to us today and learn how we can help you grow your business!
Google Marketing Live is one of the biggest days on the marketing calendar. The event recently came and went and, as per usual, Google announced some huge advancements within their suite of marketing products and platforms. And while artificial intelligence might be some years away from ensuring your fridge “magically” remains stocked through the holidays and that no appointment goes missing from your calendar, it is ready to make a real impact on your marketing efforts as soon as today.
Artificial Intelligence: The Future of Marketing Begins Today
Perhaps no unveiling was more seismic to how we do and will work with our clients than Google’s announcement that they have fully embraced artificial intelligence across their marketing platform.
Automation is here and here to stay! But what exactly does that mean?
The algorithms that govern search engines are becoming smarter. The ability to learn user behavior in turn means that paid search strategies need to account for this newfound and expansive ability to speak to and capture specific, valued audiences. Google has launched some new products in order to help marketers develop these strategies including Responsive Search Ads, Advanced Audience Targeting and Automated Shopping Feeds, as well as some new tools to help marketers optimize and understand the user experience, such as Mobile Landing Page Speed and Cross Device Reporting.
Responsive Search Ads
One of the products announced, Responsive Search Ads, promises to make A/B testing on ad copy a whole lot easier. As a Premier Agency Partner with Google, Charles River Interactive has had early access to this tool across several of our clients’ accounts.
The tool, which is powered by Google’s Machine Learning, is able to incorporate up to 15 headlines and 4 descriptions into an ad set, with Google then taking the option to mix and match headlines and descriptions and automatically test for optimal performance. How convenient! Once a combination has been determined to be the most successful, Google then shows that ad the most.
Advanced Audience Targeting
Have you ever taken a survey on YouTube to skip to the video? That’s Google gathering information about you!
Google has leveraged this data in creating their Advanced Audience Targeting. The data comes from YouTube and other channels and Google has compiled multiple audiences to allow more refined targeting.
CRI is already leveraging this tool across several accounts. We are able to observe multiple and diverse audiences and assess the topics and content that best lead to conversions. As data accrues, we also are able to credit a specific audience with a higher conversion rate, and to make bid adjustments accordingly—for instance, by exceeding our maximum bid for a specific audience because we know the audience will convert at a high rate.
Automated Shopping Feeds
Scheduled to launch later this year, Automated Shopping Feeds promises to remove a significant barrier to entry into the ecommerce space. It would be hard to argue that brick-and-mortar retail is thriving and, as more people look to begin and complete their shopping solely online, it is more important than ever to have your products available for purchase online.
Automated shopping feeds will rely on Google’s spiders to crawl your ecommerce website. That crawl will allow Google to generate a shopping feed. That is countless labor hours of data entry and management that can be reallocated across your organization, as you will no longer have to manually create and maintain a shopping feed across inventory hiccups or new product roll-outs.
Why CRI is excited: Less time on management means more time to implement better strategies within campaigns, driving a great ROI for our clients.
Smart Shopping Campaigns
Along with automated shopping feeds, Google also introduced Smart Shopping campaigns. These enable marketers to surface the most relevant product to in-market searchers at the precise right time. The machine learning and artificial intelligence underpinnings also make it straightforward to optimize around specific goals, whether revenue, conversion rate, or something else entirely. Within a Smart Shopping campaign, Google will test different combinations of image and text, in addition to automating ad placement and bidding for maximum conversions.
Mobile Landing Page Speed Score
The already-released Mobile Landing Page Speed Score evaluates a single page on your site according to a 10-point scale. Since half of all web traffic comes from mobile devices, this is already beneficial to our web services clients.
The tool highlights available landing page optimizations that will improve pageload speed on a mobile device; for many clients, we are able to immediately implement these optimizations. Since the tool is updated twice daily, we also receive near-immediate feedback, and can inform our client with little delay if our optimizations are having the expected effect—and not just on pageload speed, but also on KPI’s ranging from engagement metrics to revenue and everything in between.
Cross-Device Reporting
Assessing mobile performance in isolation, and following a user across devices, has been a common issue for many of our clients over the years. That makes the unveiling of cross device reporting through Google Analytics 360 that much more exciting.
Now, it will be that much simpler to follow a user, for instance from their discovery of our site via an organic search on a mobile device to their conversion via a remarketing ad on their desktop. Along with machine-learning driven advancements in attribution modeling, cross-device reporting moves us that much closer to holistically understanding user behavior during the shopping and conversion process.
Google Data Studio: Data Blending
Over the past year and a half, Google has consistently rolled out additional features for its data visualization tool, Google Data Studio. We have already gone over some of the key benefits of this tool and why we believe it is revolutionizing the data visualization game in a previous post.
At the 2018 Marketing Innovations Keynote, however, Google dropped a bomb on us, in the form of Data Studio’s newest feature, called “Data Blending”.
To understand why this update is so important and how to best use this new feature, think back to the difficulties you and your team might have encountered in trying to stack multiple chart elements pulled from different data sources, one on top of another. What once required labor-intensive data pulls and error-prone data manipulation is now accomplished in just a few clicks.
As an example, a client requested Google Search Console impressions, Google Analytics pageviews, and Google Ads clicks in a single chart. Prior to this update, GDS only allowed one data source per visualization, leaving a gap in the story our data was able to tell—or, perhaps an even worse fate, forcing our poor marketing analysts to resort to Excel and other tools to combine data before it could be warehoused in Google Sheets and, from there, brought into a Data Studio visualization.
The only requirement for data blending is that each source have what Google refers to as a “join key”, a term used for dimensions that are shared amongst two or more data sets. In many cases a join key can be a simple dimension—date, channel, user ID, etc. Blending data off of a shared dimension creates the opportunity for more in-depth reporting, including:
Contextualizing online performance using offline metrics such as weather, stock market trends, and unemployment rate
Comparing goals across multiple Google Analytics properties and views
Assessing paid media campaign performance as compared to onsite website performance
One of the most requested features in the brief history of Data Studio just launched and we couldn’t be more excited about the avenues to optimization it will create. This will truly enhance the power of Data Studio, taking the tool to whole new level.
Some closing thoughts
Google AdWords, which is now rebranded as Google Ads, is getting faster, getting smarter, and getting personal. The ability to group users into audiences will provide refined targeting. Digital marketing is shaping the world we live in, and Google’s artificial intelligence is controlling the devices that we use. CRI leverages our team and their deep knowledge of and enthusiasm for the industry to strategize the right mix of digital marketing to make you and your brand successful.
You’re talking to your PPC strategist. They’re explaining why conversions on your site increased 10% this month. They just said a sentence. You’re pretty sure it was in English, but you wouldn’t necessarily bet your life on that fact.
Every profession has its own particular vocabulary. For marketers, acronyms are a necessary evil—if we had to take the time to say “Search Engine Optimization”, and not just “SEO”, we’d never have time to do any actual work!
But that introduces a “Lost in Translation” situation, especially when your industry uses the same acronym for different purposes. At Charles River Interactive, we take our role as valued consultants seriously. To that end, we prepared a quick quiz to help ensure we are always on the same page with our clients.
That’s right, it’s quiz time!
Click below to get started. And remember – knowing the vocabulary is only the first step. For some more context about the metrics that are important to you, reach out to us. Let’s have a conversation!
By now most marketers have realized the reporting advantages of Google Data Studio. It offers advanced reporting visualization and an impressive level of customizability to show data in the best way for your visualization needs. Check out our previous blog to learn more about Data Studio.
What is Supermetrics?
Supermetrics is an Application Programming Interface (API), which is a fancy way of saying it’s a software that allows two applications to talk to each other. In this case, Supermetrics allows marketing platforms, like Facebook, to send data directly into Data Studio. No more exporting and manipulating data in Excel or Sheets for reporting!
In most organizations, and in virtually every marketing agency, reporting requires a significant time investment for data exporting and manipulation, often in either Excel or Google Sheets. At Charles River Interactive, we estimate adopting Google Data Studio with the Supermetrics API has saved us over 150 hours of work. That’s more time we get to spend focusing on driving results for our clients.
Why do you need Supermetrics?
A key selling point for Data Studio is the ease of integration with certain marketing platforms—in particular, with Google’s owned properties, including AdWords and Google Analytics. And, while that might account for a fair amount of many companies’ marketing efforts, there is no shortage of ad networks or marketing tools. The Supermetrics API lets you easily bring even more data sources into Data Studio!
Supermetrics allows you to connect non-Google platforms to Data Studio. It has over 30 connectors, including Bing Ads, Facebook Ads, LinkedIn Ads and more! Within each connector, you are able to blend data from more than one account.
Combine Ad Data and Google Analytics Data
The Ad Data + Google Analytics connector allows you to merge data from different ad networks and Google Analytics. You can combine data from any of the following into one data source; Facebook Ads, Google AdWords, Bing Ads, Twitter Ads, LinkedIn Ads, and Google Analytics. There are many useful arrangements of data now possible with this connector!
Pro Tip 1 – Connect Google Analytics to each of the ad networks to see how users from different ad networks behave on your site.
Pro Tip 2 – Merge Google AdWords and Bing Ads data to get a holistic view of PPC performance.
Pro Tip 3 – Connect all your social networks to see your overall social performance and compare performance across platforms effortlessly.
Improved Google connectors
Google Data Studio has 14 Google Connectors, build and supported by Data Studio, including Google Analytics and Google AdWords. Supermetrics provides improved versions of some of these Google Connectors.
The Supermetrics Google Analytics connector allows you to connect as many Google Analytics views and segments as you want, in an easy to use drop-down menu. Data sampling in Analytics is also a problem when reporting on long date ranges or websites with high traffic volume. The Supermetrics Google Analytics connector allows you to avoid sampling by selecting the “try to avoid sampling” option in the data source menu. The connector will partition the data into smaller queries in order to process the data without sampling. Note that when using this feature it may take several minutes to process the data request, as in most cases this is why Google samples the data.
The Supermetrics AdWords connector also allows you to connect more than one account to a single data source—if, for example, you had three different AdWords accounts but you wanted to display the overall performance across all accounts. Another unique feature of this connector is the historical quality score metric.
Historical quality score is one of AdWords’ newer metrics. It reflects how relevant your ad is to the user-specific search query. This connector also pulls in placement metrics for your Display Network campaigns, including Placement URL, Domain, Placement status, Extension type, and Placement destination URL. These metrics are not available in the stock Google connector.
5 Ways Supermetrics will enhance your Data Studio reporting
In Conclusion
You haven’t even cracked the full potential of using Data Studio if you haven’t integrated it with Supermetrics. If this article gets you interested in trying out Supermetrics with Data Studio for your organization, there is a 14-day free trial! There is also a free “hobby” level of access which only allows you to see the last 10 days of data, but that’s enough for you to see firsthand that you’re missing out on the full potential of Data Studio if you haven’t integrated it with Supermetrics.
These five advantages are just the beginning; you can do so much more with Supermetrics for Data Studio. Move your organization away from manual data reporting. Use your time for more productive things!
Now go and enhance your Data Studio reports with Supermetrics!
Voice search is more and more a part of our everyday lives. As the technology becomes more commonplace, and as developers expand the number and types of actions you can complete using just your voice, the opportunities for businesses grow and change on a seemingly daily basis.
We’ve written about optimizing for voice search before; here is what we have learned since in preparing our clients for a mobile, screen-less future in search.
Who Uses Voice Search?
30% of web browsing sessions will be screen-less by 2020, according to Gartner
Voice search usage skews heavily toward Millennials—more than 1 out of 3 Millennials do or plan to use a voice-search aided virtual assistant, as compared to just 1 out of every 10 members of the Baby Boomer generation, according to eMarketer
Millennials are more likely to use voice search in part because they are the largest group of owners of a smart home device, according to Walker Sands
Younger demographics are more likely to use voice search on a mobile device, according to Global Web Index—25% of users ages 16-24 reported having used a voice search tool on their mobile device in the last month
Why Voice Search?
It is possible to predict why a user might choose to search via voice based on readily available information such as device and location.
Mobile Voice Search is Local SEO
Voice searches originating on a mobile device tend to be location-dependent—that is, users typically search for strings such as, “[service] near me”, or “nearby [product]”.
The optimal strategy for capturing traffic from these voice searches has not changed much since its debut. We know that Google voice search, for instance, relies on structured data of the sort that drives the appearance of featured snippets but which explicitly includes location and other relevant information, such as hours. A thorough local SEO strategy should be sufficient to ensure that your site is positioned to capture such traffic. If you’re not sure if your business or website is already capitalizing on local SEO opportunities, reach out to us!
Smart-home Voice Search is an Ecommerce Opportunity
According to data published via Statista, the general retail ecommerce sector in the US economy is estimated to have totaled over $409 billion in sales in 2017, and is forecast to surpass $638 billion by 2022. Voicebot.ai, meanwhile, pegs the US retail ecommerce voice search market currently as a $1.8 billion segment—a figure expected to rise to $40 billion within the next five years.
Voice search may comprise only a small portion of the retail ecommerce sector at the moment—0.44%, according to the above estimates—but that segment is growing faster than the overall ecommerce sector. Based on the above figures, by 2022, voice search will be component in 6.27% of all ecommerce transactions. The pie is growing, and this slice is growing even faster!
The retail ecommerce pie is growing, and the voice search slice is growing even faster!
The largest share of voice search ecommerce transactions are initiated via a smart-home device. According to GeoMarketing, 82% of Amazon Echo/Dot owners subscribe to Amazon Prime. That fact facilitates roughly two-thirds of purchases, all of which can be categorized as staples—groceries, entertainment, electronics, and clothing.
This represents both an opportunity and an obstacle. Customers are comfortable purchasing staples sight unseen. “Alexa, order Bounty paper towels” is a lot different from “Alexa, order floor mats for my new car.” Shoppers want to discover new products visually; voice search—absent broader integration into a smart home—may not be the right method for that, or one that we would expect users to adopt.
If we are to prepare for a future where shoppers expect to discover and shop for new or novel products via voice search, we likely do not need to significantly alter our strategies. A recent Search Engine Land article laid out what might be over and above what we consider SEO best practices—a list that starts and ends, for most ecommerce retailers, with the suggestion to optimize content for conversational keywords.
Ecommerce and Long-tail Keywords
Conversational keywords can be understood as phrases and complete sentences. Consider the example above—“OK Google, order floor mats for my Honda Pilot.” We would expect a search engine to parse this as “floor mats” + “Honda Pilot”, with search intent clearly aligned around purchasing as opposed to information or research. We would expect a traditional search engine results page to be populated with product pages; we also would expect to see a Google Shopping grid on the right-hand rail. And, what do you know:
An example of a Google SERP for a long-tail, purchase-motivated search query
Our clients’ sites have gained qualified, purchase-ready traffic with holistic content strategies. By aligning the informational blog posts or evergreen articles with custom product descriptions, we have been able both to improve the average position for target keywords and to increase the total number of keywords for which the page ranks (and, over time, ranks well).
A holistic SEO content strategy maximizes content production beyond the initial article
Many sites assume that blog posts and evergreen articles are the extent of their content production. We have found that nothing could be farther from the truth—in fact, the initial blog post really is the point of origin. Like a radio signal, it spreads across your site via the pages to which it links, and in turn the pages to which they link.
By selecting, for instance, to link to a product with several related products displayed beneath, rather than linking to a dead-end product page, we accomplish a primary eCommerce SEO goal, linking to multiple product pages within three clicks of the homepage.
By writing expanded descriptions on those product pages, we are able to more fully educate search engines as to what products we sell, who might be interested in them, and for what they might be used. In a nutshell, this is semantic SEO.
This type of content is fantastic if you are adhering to Google’s stated mandate—that you design your site to satisfy the user’s intent. Through the lens of voice-search optimization, however, there has to be another side to the coin.
Structured Data
The virtual assistants powering voice search—Alexa, Siri, The Google Assistant; pick your poison—are designed to interpret natural speech. It is possible that, over time, they will be able to crawl, read, and understand normal content with the same level of comprehension as a typical internet user. In the interim, however, we can look at what we know about where virtual assistants find the information they repeat back in response to a voice search.
A recent Backlinko study considered 10,000 Google Home search results. The study includes plenty of valuable insight; here are our 3 key takeaways:
41% of voice search answers came from a featured snippet
The average answer came from a page with a word count well over 2,000
Very few results had the exact query in their title tag
Each of the above supports the advice we have given our clients on this topic. Featured snippets are important, and there are steps you can take to encourage Google to display information from your site in the knowledge panel, but Google themselves have shown a clear preference for high domain authority sites in this regard, in particular. The best you can do is prepare and develop your site in such a way that it is possible for Google to build a snippet, should they decide doing so is the best way to address a user’s query.
Of course, a featured snippet is not the only use for structured data on your site. And here, we see some of the greatest potential for growth across the voice search ecommerce landscape. Amazon, Apple, and Google all may want to develop their virtual assistants to the point where they easily can parse relevant text out of long-form content—but, in the interim, and if the goal is to answer a user’s ecommerce-related voice search, we can expect them to use the most accurate information available that their respective spiders can readily digest. And that, for now and the foreseeable future, is structured data.
Articles can be associated with the Question schema. There is a product schema, and there is no shortage of additional structured data types, objects, and properties that can be built out for most pages—images, alternative names, prices, dimensions, many of which also have particular machine-readable formats that improve search engines’ understanding of your site.
Optimizing for voice search is little different from optimizing for organic search. One key to success is understanding how voice search engines consume and synthesize information—and how you can use that knowledge to your advantage. Long-form content that thoroughly addresses a search topic paired with structured data highlighting certain questions-and-answers, and extends across the network of interconnected product pages, has proven to be effective for us in achieving growth for our clients.
With objectives that uncover your target audiences. With insightful, actionable analytics that drive integrated digital marketing solutions. And, with proven tactics, tools, and strategies that achieve measurable results.
We’ll create a comprehensive strategy that will help you harness the potential of digital marketing—built around a solid search engine marketing core—to achieve the business goals you want and need. By creating an integrated digital marketing plan that’s driven by data and delivers optimum results, we’ll become a trusted partner who feels like part of your in-house team.
Pro Tip 1 – Connect Google Analytics to each of the ad networks to see how users from different ad networks behave on your site.
