Wilson is a Product Consultant based in Marin’s Austin, Texas office. With over seven years of agency experience managing digital advertising campaigns, his role is to demonstrate Marin’s search and social management platforms for prospective clients. He holds a BA in English with an emphasis in Professional Writing from Texas State University and spends his spare time as a musician.
As many as 98% of website visitors don’t convert on their first visit. There are many ways that online marketers work to improve these initial conversion rates—employing effective ways to interact with your visitors to eventually convert them into customers is a crucial component of a comprehensive strategy.
One of these ways is to take advantage of remarketing lists for search ads (RLSA), which is a great way to re-engage potential customers with the added benefit of search intent signals. This post highlights some of the best ways to incorporate them into your search strategy.
Before you get started, it’s important to understand the differences and the two basic options for RLSA and how to use them appropriately.
Target and Bid
The first is Target and Bid. This option allows you to set a defined audience that your ads will be delivered to, with the ability to set individual bids on specific keywords with that audience in mind. The main benefit of this approach is that it allows you to spend your budget more efficiently in generic, top-of-funnel campaigns without requiring as much investment as it otherwise would to find success in them.
Suppose you’ve homed in on a specific audience segment that you know has a high propensity to convert. Now, you can bid on that audience for broader keywords without having to rely as much on the level of intent of those terms. This will also serve as a hedge against the fact that these keywords tend to be more competitive to rank for. It also, of course, allows you to tailor your ads more uniquely to that audience.
Bid Only
The other option is Bid Only. Unlike Target and Bid, this setting doesn’t restrict the audience for your ads. Instead, it allows you to use remarketing lists as an additional layer of bidding criteria—making it ideal for advertisers who want to keep their reach wide while being able to vary the degree of aggressiveness with bid modifiers, depending on the audience. This strategy is preferable for campaigns that are still in the process of building those remarketing lists.
Whichever setting makes the most sense depends on the campaign and goal. In general, the Target and Bid setting is the more conservative option when you’re evaluating the performance of generic queries. The Bid Only setting is generally better as an added degree of optimization for campaigns that are already performing well.
If you’re not doing so already, consider this standard practice moving forward, as it’s a powerful way to get previous site visitors into your funnel. If they viewed products and left before purchasing, use product listing ads when they perform a relevant search later on. This serves as a visual reminder that can nudge them toward conversion. (And, make sure your PLAs are optimized for when they do.)
To create a tiered strategy based on likeliness to convert, set up audience lists to correspond to each point in your purchase funnel (e.g., All Visitors, Product Viewers, Cart Abandoners, etc.) and modify bids increasingly towards the bottom of the funnel.
In case you missed it, Google AdWords now supports demographic bidding on the search network as of late 2016 (although Bing beat them to the punch). With the ability to set bid modifiers on gender and age ranges—which can be used to enhance your standard search campaigns—you can now combine the powers of remarketing, search intent, and demographic targeting. This of course allows you to narrow down your best-converting visitor profile even further based on your campaign and site analytics. (Pro tip: You can also use Facebook Insights to help identify demographic segments that perform the best and set bid modifiers accordingly.)
If you’ve stayed up to date with Google Shopping optimization techniques, you may already be doing a stellar job of creating effective and engaging campaigns. But, are you covering all bases to ensure the highest possible yields? Here are three tips and strategies to fine-tune your efforts.
One of the most effective ways to make your product listings stand out is to enrich them with product star ratings. This will add to your brand’s credibility and help attract qualified visitors.
In order for your ads to be eligible to show ratings, you must have a minimum of 50 reviews across all of your products and an individual product must have at least three reviews. You can source these ratings from a number of different review aggregator sites. If your products meet these requirements, you must then send an interest form to Google in order to enable ratings.
The fact is, as survey research indicates, customer reviews factor heavily into consumer buying decisions in this increasingly competitive online shopping landscape. Make sure your products are equipped to keep up.
In 2016, Google instituted the requirement that all Merchant Center products that have a manufacturer-assigned GTIN must have them included in their data feed. According to Google, this decision was made because including GTINs helps them to better identify the product, and therefore to better facilitate the delivery of ads for those products in more relevant ways to users.
While this requirement was only put in place for products with GTINs, the logic still applies for including other types of unique product identifiers that aren’t included under that umbrella term such as MPN (Manufacturer Part Number) and Brand. So, if the products you’re selling use any such identifiers, from a performance standpoint it makes sense to include them in your product feed. In fact, as part of their rationale, Google notes that merchants who added GTINs to their feeds saw conversion rates increase up to 20%.
In a previous post about optimizing shopping campaigns, we emphasized the importance of using negative keywords to filter out unqualified traffic. But you can also use negatives, combined with campaign priority settings, to create intent-targeted campaigns with what is sometimes referred to as a negative keyword “waterfall.”
Here’s the idea:
With our standard search campaigns, we can actively bid on keywords to aid in our Shopping campaign targeting and adjust bids according to each keyword’s level of search intent. Not so with actual Shopping campaigns—but there’s a great workaround. We can instead rely on keyword negatives, and take advantage of the Shopping campaign priority setting to funnel search queries to trigger ads from the campaigns of our choosing. In this way, we can effectively set optimal bids on our products based on search intent.
We start by setting up multiple, identical campaigns in which the only differences will end up being their negative keyword inventory, campaign priority settings, and bids. Since there are three campaign priority settings (High, Medium, and Low) we can break out up to three campaigns, each of which will correspond to different levels of intent.
The campaign priority setting works such that whenever you have products across campaigns that can be triggered by the same search query, the product whose campaign has the higher priority will be shown, regardless of their bids. This is where strategically added negatives come in, as this would otherwise result in only the High Priority campaign delivering ads. These negatives will correspond to different levels of intent and, since we’ve designated three levels of campaign priority, we’ll also need to designate three levels of keyword intent to our negatives. Just like we do when we structure our traditional search campaigns, let’s think of these levels of intent in degrees of specificity—we’ll call them generic (e.g. “shoes”), product (“running shoes”), and brand (“Nike shoes”).
The campaigns should end up looking and functioning like this:
More and more advertisers making use of PLAs in their digital marketing programs with increasingly sophisticated technologies like feed management tools and bidding automation. It’s more important than ever to make sure that yours are able to stand up to the competition.
With Google’s dominance in the search marketplace firmly held since many of us can remember, it’s not surprising that PPC managers often neglect Bing from their digital advertising programs. And while Google’s influence still remains comfortably unchallenged (Google currently accounts for 81% of desktop searches and 96% of searches on mobile devices), there are compelling reasons that digital marketers should also be advertising on Bing.
One of the most important features Bing Ads has implemented in recent years is the ability to import existing campaigns directly from Google AdWords, making the platform’s adoption by new—and returning—advertisers a painless process. And to make cross-publisher management even easier, Bing Ads now offers Automated Imports to enable advertisers to synchronize their Google campaigns with their Bing counterparts on a recurring basis.
Which brings me to my next point....
Search marketers who ended up moving away from Bing in the past may be pleasantly surprised to discover that the platform has aged very well in keeping up with the expectations of AdWords users. The current UI is a lot more seamless and intuitive compared to previous versions, and many important features in AdWords are also found in Bing Ads, including ad extensions and the Expanded Text Ad format. This means that most—though not all—of what you want to import from your AdWords campaigns will translate into your Bing account with little or no issue.
If you’re not already advertising on Bing, chances are your competitors aren’t either. The relatively low competition on Bing offers the opportunity for you to accrue incremental traffic with the same level of search intent as your Google campaigns at a discount.
Given the ease of adoption and campaign migration for current AdWords users and the additional audience there is to be reached, there’s no reason not to explore the opportunities Bing has to offer. It is, after all, the second-most used search engine in the market today (with recent share estimates as high as 33% in the US).
