Remarketing and Direct Marketing Direct with Google Adwords and Facebook / Instagram.
Remarketing direct on Google has improved immeasurably since the Autumn of 2016 with new features added and the new reporting interface currently in BETA completes this refresh of Google’s advertising services making many of the 3rd party tool previously used to perform ad placement, remarketing and programmatic marketing quite redundant.
https://support.google.com/adwords/answer/2453998
http://searchengineland.com/adwords-redesign-first-look-246074
Facebook and Instagram have benefitted from similar advances to the Facebook Power Editor (soon to become “Ads Manager”) which offers what many consider the best in class advertising portal with great user visibility of demographics – ideally powerful for B2C marketing.
https://www.facebook.com/business/help/182715205255643
Addroll along with similar services such as AdLatch and UserEngage is one of the historically useful 3rd party SAAS tools that use something called “targeted ad exchanges”.
In other words, the advertising spaces you actually see your Adroll ads on are not actually Adroll’s spaces, they are “sub-let” (in a manner of speaking) primarily from the Google Adwords sites.
Some Background
A bit of background on this – Google Adwords has a partner program called Google AdSense – this is a network of 3rd party sites that reserve specific banner spaces for Google Adwords ads. The owners of these sites have a revenue sharing system with Google. If a site visitor clicks an advert on these sites the site owner gets (typically) 50% of the revenue and Google get the other 50%.
So Adwords users (advertisers) buy banner space on AdSense (3rd party sites with ad space managed by Google)
In other words Adroll it doesn’t have a network of its own places to put your banners. It is a control overlay for Google Adwords it subs the space from Google.
Remarketing within Google and Facebook directly is now more powerful and costs substantially less.
So Why Does Anyone Use Adroll?
When Adroll first came out Facebook and Google did not have in-built remarketing abilities. Adroll was used to create the lists and even after Facebook and Google introduced these features several years ago, they were not particularly full featured.
Over the intervening years they have improved dramatically to offer full featured and reliable platforms that provide a better cost base for advertisers.
Adroll continues to perform the function of amalgamating several lists from different portals. For example, Facebook and Google lists can be managed in the Adroll interface which is of some benefit to users who might advertise on many different portals in terms of ease of use, but not in terms of control or cost.
If you also advertise on MSN (Yahoo or Bing) Adroll can add these into the mix as well. Overall – cost per result
Google have added excellent and powerful remarketing functionality and Facebook’s Power Editor is perhaps the best in class demographic analysis and targeting tool of any platform. Both offer superb control and have been polished and improved to be arguably – substantially better than Adroll.
In effect by using Adroll you are paying a middle-man service provider to provide functionality that is now readily and more easily available within the host advertising portals themselves. There is a monthly fee to use Adroll and a premium for every click (CPA) or impression (CPM) on your monthly ad budget
In other words it’s much more powerful, and a lot cheaper – to set up remarketing with Google directly rather than have Adroll in the middle it also cuts out the need to pay Adroll their commission. As this pressure has built on Adroll their reputation as a service has dropped dramatically. Going from 4.5 stars on TrustPilot in late 2015 to 1.5 stars today as the prices increase and the reliability and reporting accuracy of their service is frequently questioned.
https://uk.trustpilot.com/review/adroll.com
The Importance of Conversion Tracking
Conversion tracking is important to track the effectiveness of advertising and offer the opportunity to improve the ROI in terms of both conversions and cost.
A typical campaign will use many advertising types, perhaps different text options and trigger these adverts to show based on many different factors such as keyword choice, market sector or demographic choices.
Conversion tracking allows us to analyse which of these is more effective and to tie the visitors we send to the site to the appropriate actions they take on the site. It allows us to answer questions such as;
How many visitors are clicking on the desired link on the page we are sending them to. In the case of WCG’s website it would be valuable to know how many of the visitors sent by advertising clicked on the” Fast track an application” button or use the contact form to make a direct approach.
From that we work backwards to see which advertising creative produced the best desired response, which keywords trigger this response and which demographics this might include.
Using this information, the priorities of the campaign can be changed and the budget best used.
Gambit Nash believe in a solid PDCA policy for PPC marketing ensuring constant vigilance to market changes, taking seasonality and trends into account, and continuing to monitor and alter any and all aspects of a campaign to ensure our clients have the best ROI possible at any point in time.
For this to work conversion tracking in the form (In the case of WCG) of the Facebook tracking pixel and Adwords tracking code on landing pages is essential.
Adwords Pay Per Click
Effective Management of PPC
Direct marketing through any network, done without regard to the many factors that influence the results can be a cash drain. Adwords done badly can lead to a high cost per visitor, a low conversion rate and a negative return on investment.
Knowing your audience, your competition and your own success criteria is the first step in effective direct marketing online.
The Main Factors Influencing PPC Profitability
Three differences between successful cost-effective advertising and unsuccessful campaigns which drain time and money from your marketing budget?
Keyword Research.
In PPC you may choose to bid on keywords and key-phrases. This bidding is done in a marketplace against other business and website owners on the network.
To have your advert appear in response to a Google user’s search normally requires that your bid is in the top three or four. This can look like an expensive proposition from the outset. The idea here is to carefully select your bid targets. Choose which keywords to bid for, and how much to set your bids at.
Our analysis, using Gambit Nash’s bespoke tools, looks at which keywords offer the best value for money. Our tools offer the ability to analyse hundreds or even thousands of words and phrases, to cherry pick those that offer a great cost per click and are likely to convert to sales activity on the target website. This initial analysis is a task that uses our custom coded keyword tool.
It’s normally best not to bid for most obvious, short, expensive key phrases. “Plumber in Birmingham” might seem the most obvious choice if you are a plumber in the West Midlands area. However, it is an expensive, rarely used phrase that attracts “window shopper” clicks rather than buying clicks. When choosing keywords It is important to think like a potential customer, not as a business owner. “Urgent boiler repair” would be a far more commercially valuable keyphrase.
Campaign Set-Up
Google offer a great number of options when setting up an Adwords campaign. As well as the choices made with the keyword analysis tools, choices can be made using the stored demographic knowledge that Google hols for its vast number of users. Age, sex, hobbies, occupations, interests, websites visited. Google knows all these things and an astute advertising campaign will leverage readymade markets from within these market sectors.
From there, an advertiser can choose from a wide array of advertising types. Text only, image, video. Each with their own strengths and weaknesses.
Choosing to display on Google alone or take advantage of the Adsense partner network can alter a campaign results dramatically.
The demographic and chronological targeting options all have a role to play. An effective campaign will target many groups of keywords, be specific about the cost, understand the intended audience and have and be laser focussed on achieving the best return on investment (ROI).
The list of activities that should be done before a campaign starts involves comprehensive competition analysis, audience research and in most cases the implementation of results tracking to allow post launch optimisation. A good PPC campaign is never “set and forget”. The marketplace for bids is live and opportunities to improve occur regularly.
Landing Page Quality
Then there is the matter of your landing page. The URL (website page) you intend to send your potential customers to. Ga,bit Nash offer assistance and advice in setting up the most effective landing pages.
While the bidding process starts out as a simple” highest bid wins” system, it is strongly influenced by the quality of the landing page you choose to direct your visitors to.
If Google cannot see that it is relevant they may give it a “Poor” landing page score, and this applies a direct negative weighting to your bid. While you can never bid more than you choose to, you can end up with a much lower exposure rate for your advertising spend.
A quality score system is used by most networks and is designed to favour those pages which offer the best quality of information to the visitor.
Google will measure such elements as how long a typical visitor stays on the page, where they click and if they interact with the page.
A landing page which fails to retain the interest of visitors or has them leaving seemingly unsatisfied with the information offered will soon get a “Poor” landing page score, and this can quadruple the amount each visitor costs. In extreme cases the network can refuse to show your advertisement altogether if it thinks the page you are sending your visitors to is entirely irrelevant.
The Traffic Funnel / Conversion and Conversion tracking.
Gambit Nash strongly believe in tracking conversions as far into the sales or sign up process as possible and prefer to work with this knowledge to provide the best ROI and continuous improvement on PPC campaigns.
Perhaps the most distressing mistake a novice Adwords marketer can make is in the conversion of a website visitor into a buyer or client. The largest single factor here is the layout of the website itself and the journey a visitor needs to make between arriving on the site, and taking the “call to action”.
Thought needs to be given to whatever the goal of your direct marketing efforts may be. It could be as simple as buying a product, or perhaps to sign up to be contacted.
Whatever action the campaign is designed to achieve, the pathway between a paid visitor arriving on your site, and them completing the goal action of your campaign needs to be simple and obvious.
There are a number of site issues that can seriously detract from an otherwise well run direct marketing effort.
The considerations need to include the page navigation, the explanation of the product or service, a clear call to action and the removal of any site elements that might distract the visitor from taking the desired action, while ensuring the right elements are present to encourage the desired action.
Google Adwords encourage users to place a tracking code on their website which shows the activity of a visitor sent via their network. Using this data it is possible to see where any shortcomings may be and improve the conversion of paid traffic, into real customers.
Results Analysis and Reporting
Relying on our Gambit Nash keyword analysis tool initially gets a PPC campaign off to a great start. However, over time, the results of any Adwords spend tells its own story. At that point we use our own analysis tools as well as our years of experience to ensure best value for money over the long term.
As the campaign runs it is important to revisit the initial decisions made and adapt to the changing circumstances of the bidding marketplace.
In almost every market the audience and competition react and behave in subtly different ways over time. A careful analysis of the results will inform the best decisions as time goes on.