Getting more out of every dollar
Some of the questions we’re continually asked are, “How do we get more sales or leads for every dollar spent on performance marketing for our clients?” “How do we find more reach, more audience?” and “How do you find more share of voice when you’re continually running and optimising campaigns?”
It’s a constant balancing act of focusing on driving and optimising campaign strategies through engaging execution, enabling technologies and a focus on maximising every dollar spent with goliath search, social and native ecosystems – Google, Facebook, and Oath (previously Yahoo), to name just a few.
Terms like Programmatic, Artificial Intelligence, and Machine Learning are appearing more and more. Some marketers use these terms flippantly to refer to the automated buying, scaling and optimisation challenges of managing many clients with varying budgets and needs – machine resourcing as opposed to manually buying, bidding and optimising for conversions.
Programmatic marketing is about driving intelligence and efficiencies in spend, but more importantly, resources. Typically, programmatic has been all about Display and Native, but we now see it creeping more and more into search. This makes the buying, placement and optimisation process easier as it is handled by ad platforms and associated algorithms, thus removing some of the mundane aspects of dealing with multiple platforms, creative deployment, and bidding. Dealing with one platform, and one set of preferences to distribute ads to many other platforms makes a lot more sense.
In recent times, we’re hearing more and more about programmatic search. Traditional SEM gurus will be split on this. Some prefer the old school manual optimisation and measured approach, but others prefer the promise of machine learning and evolved tagging measures.
Luckily for us, Google Ads has introduced new Machine Learning Bidding Strategies. These take into account millions of signal points such as user location, time of the day, device, long-tail search terms, the type of ad creative, etc. – much more than is humanly possible to track, particularly over multiple campaigns.
From our recent performance campaigns, we know this kind of search optimization is generating results. Campaigns geared to gain more reach have seen 15% more clicks on average. The longer these campaigns run, the more time the campaigns can learn from the signals, to adapt and optimise performance. Cynics will say this makes budgets stretch and drive waste. And in the end the question is, are you and the machine learning generating more reach or more conversion? What does success look like to your client?
There should always be a place for manual input and management. Alternatively, when deployed with the right strategy for the right outcomes, programmatic search and display can benefit both business and consumers. The opportunity for sellers to target and engage with those more likely to receive the most benefit? That’s advertising 101.
Get in touch to discuss how we can maximise your performance marketing strategy.