Thursday, August 31, 2017

SearchCap: Google local pack mentions, Google Shopping reports & PPC evals

Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web.

From Search Engine Land:

Recent Headlines From Marketing Land, Our Sister Site Dedicated To Internet Marketing:

Search News From Around The Web:

Industry

Local & Maps

Link Building

Searching

SEO

SEM / Paid Search

The post SearchCap: Google local pack mentions, Google Shopping reports & PPC evals appeared first on Search Engine Land.



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Wednesday, August 30, 2017

Google local pack tests displaying website mentions matching your query

Google is testing displaying in the local pack results if the local website returns the keywords you searched for on their website. For example, if you search for [climate control] in a specific region, the local pack might add an additional line to the search snippet, mentioning if the website in the local listing actually has those words on their web pages.

Here is a screen shot from Matt Schexnayder of Sparefoot, who sent this tip to us:

It is unclear if this means that the local results use the local listing’s website content for ranking purposes or not. All this is telling us is that Google local is indeed aware if the local business website has the query’s content on their website.

We have emailed Google for a comment, but at this point, it seems like a limited test.

The post Google local pack tests displaying website mentions matching your query appeared first on Search Engine Land.



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SearchCap: Alexa & Cortana, Google Assistant speakers & Google Maps parking

Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web.

From Search Engine Land:

Recent Headlines From Marketing Land, Our Sister Site Dedicated To Internet Marketing:

Search News From Around The Web:

Industry

Local & Maps

Link Building

SEO

SEM / Paid Search

Search Marketing

The post SearchCap: Alexa & Cortana, Google Assistant speakers & Google Maps parking appeared first on Search Engine Land.



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Safeguard your Google Analytics data

The digital space has given marketers massive reach and capability. But with that power comes responsibility, along with an obligation to protect data that can be recognized as personally identifiable information (PII). Recurring audits and safeguards built into your technical layer are critical to ensuring that PII doesn’t pass into your Google Analytics.

Read Cardinal Path’s guide to data security and privacy for:

  • best practices for mitigating risks of PII and limiting chances of common occurrences.
  • tips on assessing whether you have PII present within your GA account.
  • approaches to auditing and solutions for resolving the issues of PII.

Visit Digital Marketing Depot to download ” Personally Identifiable Information: Responsible Practices to Safeguard your Google Analytics Data”

The post Safeguard your Google Analytics data appeared first on Search Engine Land.



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Your account structure might be hurting performance. Here’s why (and how to fix it)

When it comes to managing AdWords, something I’ve come across time and again is that lots of accounts are oversegmented. I’ve seen AdWords accounts with almost awe-inspiring intricacy. No dimension unsegmented; no campaign setting untweaked; no minute negative keyword unadded. I think we’ve officially reached the point at which some of you are too good at your jobs.

Automation is better than it’s ever been. It’s so good, in fact, that it often beats oversegmented, even overengineered accounts. Campaigns can be segmented by devices, match types, audiences, geographies and more. Campaigns shouldn’t be segmented by all of those.

AdWords Smart Bidding looks at specific queries (and the context of those queries)

Overly segmented account structures are attempting to approximate something that Smart Bidding already does: bid to a user’s specific search query and adjust bids for devices, time of day and audiences to control the impact on the advertiser’s objective. AdWords Smart Bidding considers dozens of additional signals and the combinations of them, like mobile devices at nighttime in a specific area.

You don’t need to manually define each segment’s value if you’re accurately tracking your conversions in AdWords. Tell Smart Bidding what your end goal is, then track performance. You can stop using CPC bidding as a proxy for value; Smart Bidding can boil everything down to what really matters for you, whether that’s a CPA or ROAS goal.

A simpler proposal

Your default campaign structure should be a lot more straightforward. This may sound insane, but here’s how I think campaigns should be organized:

  • Organize your ad groups around what ads you want to serve to groups of users.
  • Organize your campaigns around your objective and KPI.

Some aspects of campaign setup warrant separate campaigns — such as budgetary control and the countries/territories where you can actually sell your goods and services. There is no longer a need for additional campaigns to work around long-gone AdWords limitations surrounding bidding and messaging. Bidding has Smart Bidding. Ad text has ad customizers. Audience targeting benefits from both Smart Bidding and ad customizers.

One thing in particular that I want to highlight is separate campaigns or ad groups by match type. The AdWords system is set up to prefer the more specific keyword, and in those rare cases when it doesn’t, it’s to your benefit. A less specific keyword will trigger only if you’re projected to have a higher Ad Rank and a lower CPC. (You might even consider de-duplicating your match types of the same keyword in your account. That’s too big a topic to cover here.) Ultimately, what may seem like sloppy structure is actually saving you money.

If you have a set of high-performing keywords that deserve their own budget, you should break those out. That’s a case where it makes sense to make such a management decision. But that should be for your best stuff. Let performance dictate what gets priority.

The benefits of aggregated campaigns

An overly segmented AdWords campaign structure can actually be a serious barrier to performance.

1. Automation works better on large sets of information.

AdWords’ Smart Bidding can work on pretty paltry data. But it works even better when it has large amounts of insight to feed into its machine learning. Larger campaigns, including data across all different types of cross-device, cross-user-list, cross-time insights, tend to perform better. A bigger campaign is actually more likely to perform better when you fully embrace automation.

2. There are fewer ads to maintain.

Keeping up with your ads is a lot of work. The smarter you are about the amount of work you create for yourself, the more your work time is spent on finding and deploying great messaging. And the less time you have to spend making sure that you’ve copied/pasted your ads across all nine device-specific campaigns that advertise women’s tankinis to previous customers who reside in New England.

There are ways to customize ads geographically without a duplicate campaign. If you find yourself copying/pasting tons of ads, while only changing the tracking parameters to capture the name of your highly specific ad groups and campaigns, you might not need that additional campaign.

3. There are fewer ad extensions to maintain.

Ad extensions are fantastic. They’re a universally good thing, and it’s important to enable everything that makes sense for your business. As your campaigns multiply, so does your need to monitor all of those extensions. You’ll have to start by ensuring that they’re implemented, then you’ll have to ensure that they don’t overlap with your ad text.

4. It’s easier to manage negative keywords.

I totally get the impulse to use negative keywords to shape traffic, but the obsession with seeing that every query matched to the intended ad group is misguided. As I mentioned earlier, the system is set up to save you money when serving less specific keywords. You should instead investigate why a less specific keyword/ad group is that much better than what you intended.

And once you let go of using negatives as traffic cops, they can return to their original usage: eliminating queries that aren’t a match for what you’re selling online.

5. It’s easier to identify insights.

Instead of looking through 9+ campaigns, you can look at one campaign and see how things are trending. And you’ll always have the ability to segment for deeper insights down the road.

The current status quo of pivoting a bunch of campaigns into one high-level output can be turned on its head. You’ll instead start with aggregated insights, then segment data as needed. I think it’s a much more useful way to keep an eye on trends.

6. It’s easier to make decisions.

When you’re doing a better job identifying insights, you make it easier on yourself to make decisions that improve your account. Once your structure allows you to spot trends, you can adapt to those trends more quickly.

Conclusion

I know moving away from oversegmentation is a big change, but I think it’s an important one. If you want to dip your toe in the waters to start, consider consolidating some ad groups together and see how performance trends.

You could even use campaign drafts and experiments to run a split test of consolidated ad groups against segmented ad groups. (As you’re evaluating performance on that campaign, remember to factor in management time.) If performance is roughly even, that’s a big win for consolidated campaigns/ad groups. You’re saving time, which frees you up to do bigger and better things for your account.

The post Your account structure might be hurting performance. Here’s why (and how to fix it) appeared first on Search Engine Land.



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How to Leverage Behavioral Analytics In Your Growth Strategy

If you’re obsessed with growth, you know how important it is to have a super detailed growth strategy. You and data are BFFs, right? Great, but you also need to understand the context that surrounds that data.

I know that sounds a little dense, but bear with me. What I mean is that information alone isn’t enough. Yes, in data we trust. Sure, lots of metrics are all well and good, but if you can’t leverage that data, there’s no point to it. Think about it. Who makes the growth happen? You might think it’s you, but in the end, it’s actually your audience.

How your users respond to your tactics will decide how successful your growth strategy is. So take a step back and look at your audience. Do you really understand them? Be honest with yourself. Most growth hackers think they understand their customer base, but they only know raw data. Knowing demographics doesn’t mean you understand your audience.

This is where I drop my bomb of a topic. Behavioral analytics, folks.

Understanding and applying behavioral analytics can be incredibly useful for growth strategies. In fact, it could be the energy and edge that your brand has been missing.

Want viral growth? Say hello to behavioral analytics. These analytics give you a look into the minds of your users so you can put yourself in their shoes. You’ll be able to build targeted campaigns that better suit your audience, create messages that reach the right users at the right time, and attract entirely new user bases.

I realize that “behavioral analytics” doesn’t sound all that sexy, but you’re going to discover just how powerful it is. Let’s take a look at some fundamental concepts of behavioral analytics that you absolutely need to know and then explore some actionable strategies you can use.

If you’ve been sleeping on behavioral analytics, it’s not too late. Read this article. Do what it says, and your brand will grow.

What Psychographics Are (and how you get them)

When it comes to behavioral analytics, psychographics are vital.

Psychographics provide a foundational understanding of why your customers behave the way they do.

Demographics are the who. Psychographics are the why.

Each psychographic is a data point that tells you something about your users’ behavior.

Here’s a more comprehensive list of psychographics:

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These go way above and beyond demographics to give you a fuller picture of your audience.

Psychographics clue you in to your users’ behaviors. For example, if you know that most of your audience is composed of parents of 5-11 year olds, you’ll understand why those kid-sized T-shirts are flying off the shelves.

Although you can’t get any super specific data like number of clicks, you still need psychographics to get a general idea of how your audience acts and why they do what they do.

Psychographics will often reveal what’s important to your users.

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Do you understand now why psychographics are so important? They help you see your customers as people and not just information from your analytics software.

Speaking of analytics software, you can find some basic psychographic information in GA by heading over to Audience > Interests > Overview.

You’ll see three categories: Affinity Category, In-Market Segment, and Other Category.

The Affinity Category shows you different lifestyle categories. Google compares these groups to TV audiences.

This category points to specific interests that your users have. Even if you just look at this section of GA, you can get a pretty good understanding of what your audience likes.

The In-Market Segment shows you what types of products your users have shown interest in.

Basically, your customers are looking to buy products or services within these categories.

The Other Category offers a narrower view of your audience.

demographics category google analytics

If you want to go even deeper, Google has a handy guide on using this psychographic info in conjunction with other analytics.

There are many other ways to grab psychographics, from surveys to focus groups. Use as many of these methods as you want. Too much psychographic data is never a bad thing.

Still, psychographics are just that––data. You need to use them in a creative way.

With that in mind, let’s look at some growth techniques that depend on psychographics and other behavioral data.

Data-Driven Customer Personas

Creating an imaginary friend might sound a little childish to you, but that’s essentially what you need to do with psychographics.

Right, I know, it’s not exactly an “imaginary friend.”

I’m talking about creating a fictional person who is a representative of your audience base and not just some creature you made up. These representatives are otherwise known as customer personas.

You’re probably familiar with the idea of the customer persona, but if you’re not, don’t worry. Here’s a brief rundown.

A customer persona (also called user or buyer persona) takes aggregate data and uses it to create a fake person. This person is your average customer.

His or her demographic and psychographic information is representative or your audience (or a segment of your audience).

Here’s what an example customer persona might look like:

customer persona

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As you can see, you can get really detailed with personas. The more detailed they are, the better you’ll understand your users.

By definition, a customer persona is chock full of behavioral analytics. They help you describe the persona in detail.

Once you have all of your behavioral analytics together, you can take a couple of different approaches to creating a persona.

The approach you take will depend on what you want to accomplish with your personas.

Do you want to create better email sequences? Do you want to improve your Facebook ads? Think about your objectives as you create your personas.

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Specifically, you can use certain analytics based on the results you’re after. Let’s look at some examples of this idea in action.

Let’s say you want to redesign your CRM software to attract more leads. In terms of analytics, you’d want to look for business-related psychographics.

These might include the user’s role at work, how much time they spend at their job, or even the search terms they use to get to your site.

So an example persona for that would look like this one (the one on the right side):

This persona is great for SaaS because it uses analytics that relate to work. There’s little personal information here, but there’s enough to give you an idea of who the persona is.

But that type of persona isn’t ideal for every sort of situation.

Another example: Say you’re the head of growth at an ecommerce apparel startup.

You’d be more concerned with personal behavioral analytics and not so many work-related data. So a persona for you might look something like this:

Image Source

The types of analytics you use should all depend on your goals and the kind of product or service you’re selling.

It doesn’t hurt to get as many data points as possible, but you’ll want to refine them to zoom in on your average customer.

Creating a persona doesn’t take much time, but it can change how you see growth. That said, you have to make sure your personas are as accurate as possible.

If you get the wrong analytics, well, your entire customer journey might just go down the drain.

But if you get it right, your customers will feel like you really know them.

This is a perfect example of how behavioral analytics can make all the difference in your growth strategy.

Remember, you’re not simply looking at a bunch of random numbers. This information has real uses that you can take advantage of starting today.

Let’s take a look at another one of those advantages.

Customer Segmentation

You’re segmenting your users…right?

Okay, maybe you’re not. That’s okay. But you totally need to be.

Some marketers and growth hackers see their audience as one big mass, so every campaign gets sent out to everyone.

But not everyone has the same needs and wants. Your customers are all different.

So if you group people into similar segments, you can deliver more accurate, targeted messages and have better results.

That’s why segmentation is part of every good marketer’s (and growth hacker’s) playbook.

And––you guessed it––behavioral analytics can help you segment better.

The basic idea is to create segments using one or more behavioral attributes.

If you group generally according to behavior, you’ll get an inside look into what different types of customers are looking for.

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Just this basic behavioral segmentation already gives you a much better understanding of the different kinds of users you have.

All you need to do is a little behavioral research to get started with this. In GA, you can go to Behavior > Behavior Flow to see an overview of the average user path on your site.

While this isn’t incredibly comprehensive, it can prep you for actual segmentation later on. Odds are the trends you see on Behavior Flow will reflect your audience as a whole.

This type of segmentation is flexible and can be used in a variety of ways.

Take email marketing. You can see what emails people open, which people almost never open your emails, and maybe even how long a user spends reading your email.

You probably look at data like this all the time:

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But have you considered that you can use this information to tap into your subscribers’ brains?

All of those are behavioral analytics in their own right, and they’re great for segmentation.

There’s a lot you can do with these analytics. You can send a special discount email to the loyal subscribers who regularly open your emails, or you can send more targeted emails to people who tend to open one type of email.

And your results are almost guaranteed to improve.

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The possibilities are endless.

And if you’re using Kissmetrics, you don’t have to worry about any of this because the behavior-based delivery feature does it for you.

 

Still in doubt? I know it sounds like a lot of work, but it really isn’t, and it can pay off big time.

MailChimp found that segmenting subscribers by interest made every metric soar:

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If you’re willing to get even more crazy with segmentation, get ready.

You can also use behavioral analytics to group your customers by their place in the customer journey.

This concept is a little more advanced than the techniques we’ve gone over, but it packs a serious punch.

The typical customer journey is more or less like this:

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By using behavioral analytics, you can find out what stage of the customer journey a user is going through.

Behavior Flow can often show this. If someone has checked out lots of your product pages but hasn’t made it to the checkout, he or she is in the consideration stage.

Once you’ve found out where someone is in the customer journey, you can place them into an appropriate segment.

Image Source

This approach is a growth hacker’s dream. Not only can you segment your customers, but you can also get a better grip on the customer lifecycle.

It’s awesome, isn’t it?

If you’re serious about converting and growth, you should strongly consider this advanced tactic. It’s one of the best ways to hyper-focus your messages, and you’ll reach the right users at the right time.

Conclusion

Growth is all about people.

And by people, I mean your users.

A good growth strategy has to be centered around your customers. Otherwise, your strategy will fall flat on its face.

If you’re focused on sheer volume and ignore your customers in the process, you’re going to get nowhere fast.

Analyzing and leveraging your users’ behavior is one way to enhance your current strategy.

If you understand your users’ behavior, you can more easily determine what kind of content they want and what kind of messages are best to send to them.

Like I said, it’s all about people. We want to be understood, and we want our needs to be taken care of.

As a growth nut, it’s your job to make sure that happens.

So if you need to step up your game, behavioral analytics can give you a fresh perspective and boost your results.

About the Author: Daniel Threlfall is an Internet entrepreneur and content marketing strategist. As a writer and marketing strategist, Daniel has helped brands including Merck, Fiji Water, Little Tikes, and MGA Entertainment. Daniel is co-founding Your Success Rocket, a resource for Internet entrepreneurs. He and his wife Keren have four children, and occasionally enjoy adventures in remote corners of the globe (kids included). You can follow Daniel on Twitter or see pictures of his adventures on Instagram.

Alexa and Cortana will soon work together, allowing each to access the other

Earlier this morning Amazon and Microsoft announced that their virtual assistants will soon work together. Alexa devices will be able to access Cortana, and Cortana will be able to open Alexa:

Alexa customers will be able to access Cortana’s unique features like booking a meeting or accessing work calendars, reminding you to pick up flowers on your way home, or reading your work email – all using just your voice. Similarly, Cortana customers can ask Alexa to control their smart home devices, shop on Amazon.com, interact with many of the more than 20,000 skills built by third-party developers, and much more.

It’s an enlightened approach on the part of both companies. Alexa will benefit from Cortana’s general knowledge and web-search capabilities, as well as Office integration. Cortana gains distribution via Amazon hardware devices.

It’s also consistent with Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella’s vision to make Microsoft software tools available on rival platforms, such as iOS and Android. “Later this year” is the stated time frame for the availability of the integration.

At least on the Amazon side, you’ll have to use the awkward multistep language now familiar to Alexa users (“Alexa ask  . . . “). Third-party content integrations — let’s call them “voice apps” and not “skills” — are keys to the long-term success of these assistant platforms. The more difficult it is to access that third-party content, the less likely it will be used.

The New York Times has an interesting story on the genesis of the Microsoft-Amazon partnership and the thinking behind it. The article quotes Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos extensively. He says he has not reached out to Google or Apple but would welcome similar arrangements with those companies.

Both are unlikely to make their assistants available through Alexa devices. However, it’s not entirely out of the question. Apple made a version of Safari and iTunes for Windows, and Google apps are obviously available on iOS.

Some analysts have predicted as many as 30 million virtual assistant devices in US homes by the end of the year. Given how rapidly the market is developing, that number may turn out to be conservative.

The post Alexa and Cortana will soon work together, allowing each to access the other appeared first on Search Engine Land.



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Advanced budget management made easy with scripts

It’s the end of the month, so chances are you’re spending a lot of time thinking about PPC budgets. Will you spend the full amount you allocated for the month and do so without going over budget?

It’s pretty amazing that simple questions like this have to take so much thought from account managers. There’s gotta be an automation for this, right? Once again, AdWords Scripts to the rescue!

So read on, and I’ll point you to some useful ones that have been around awhile and share a brand-new script for allocating budgets equitably among multiple locations in hard-to-target cities.

Translating PPC budgets to business budgets

Part of the reason budgets are such a pain is that the engines think about them differently from the average company. A company sets monthly, quarterly or annual budgets. AdWords, on the other hand, relies on daily budgets.

Ad Budgets

Companies tend to think about budgets pretty broadly; for example, they might have a marketing budget with a subset of that allocated for AdWords. But AdWords works primarily with campaign budgets. Facebook gets even more granular with Ad Set budgets.

Because of the way advertisers have to set up budgets in the engines, even a simple business requirement like spending $10,000 on AdWords this month can get pretty tricky.

Solution #1: Spend your whole budget for the month

Let’s tackle the first common budget problem: how to make sure that every campaign or shared budget spends the full amount, even when there are a few days in which traffic may have been unexpectedly weak.

Google automatically handles this to some degree with overdelivery. But overdelivery is limited to 20 percent of the budget per day, so it won’t always be able to make up the difference.

It’s also a challenge for advertisers because they will often set a daily budget they think will help them achieve a goal, but they’ll have a monthly budget amount in the back of their mind. There’s no way to communicate the true budget goal to Google. Google simply assumes that the real goal is to spend 30.4 times the daily budget in any month.

Luckily, Google has written a great AdWords script to help reach budgets, wherein you set a monthly target, and the script updates the daily budget based on how much is left to be spent and how many days are left.

At Optmyzr, we made this script available in our patent-pending Enhanced Scripts library, and we even gave it the ability to use historical day-of-week patterns to allocate more budget to higher-potential days of the week — a feature that’s particularly useful in the last few days of the month, when Google may miss out on the fact that you typically spend relatively little on the weekend.

Reach Target Monthly Spend Script

This preview from AdWords scripts shows how the script is able to detect historical day-of-week delivery patterns and use this to set an appropriate daily budget to ensure the full budget will be spent by the end of the month. Screen shot courtesy Google, August 2017.

While these tools help ensure you’re not underspending, we’re still left with the problem over overspending.

Solution #2: Don’t exceed your budgets

If you don’t make many changes in AdWords, you could use the daily budget to make sure you’re never spending too much for a campaign for the month. Remember, they will not bill you more than 30.4 times the daily budget amount for any month; they call this the monthly charging limit.

But advertisers reading posts on Search Engine Land are probably not content to use a set-it-and-forget-it approach. The moment you shift budgets between campaigns in an attempt to optimize, or the moment you use a script like the one above, the calculation of the monthly charging limit no longer matches your true monthly budget goal.

Furthermore, a well-managed account uses as much granularity as possible because it provides more control. So advanced advertisers likely use campaign-level budgets rather than one shared budget for the whole account. This means that the company goal of a certain monthly AdWords budget still has to be translated into separate campaign budgets.

Now, you could use Automated Rules to turn off campaigns when they spend too much, but these rules can only run once per day, so your ads could continue to accrue additional cost for 23 hours and 59 minutes after they hit their limit.

Budget Forecast Tool from Optmyzr

Account managers usually want to stay within a total monthly budget across their entire AdWords account, so they may build spreadsheets or tools to track how they are doing against their targets. Screen shot courtesy of Optmyzr, August 2017.

To address this, we created a free script that can pause all campaigns in an account when the monthly target budget for the account is reached. It’ll even re-enable all the campaigns it paused when the next month starts. When I created this script, I thought it’d also be useful to give advertisers the ability to set budgets at a lower level than the campaign. So I added budgets for ad groups, keywords and ads.

The use case this solves is when advertisers add new keywords to experimental campaigns because they fear these new keywords could take away too much budget from keywords that have been in the account awhile and whose performance is already well understood.

When these keywords eventually prove themselves, they have to be moved into the non-experimental campaign, and they lose history. With this script, an advertiser can simply add a new keyword or ad into the place it should eventually be and use a script to limit its budget until it has proven itself.

Solution #3: Maximize traffic and split budgets fairly for franchises

But could we use a script like the one mentioned above to enforce budgets at another level, like by location? At first that may seem like a bit of a stupid suggestion, because after all, campaigns have location targeting and a campaign budget, so aren’t budgets in AdWords today effectively location budgets? While that’s true, there is a scenario in which I believe this can still be useful.

Ad Budget By ZIP Code

Say you’re running ads for a franchise. Typically, you’ll set up separate campaigns for each location, each with its own budget. But in densely populated areas, you might have multiple franchises in the same city.

For example, in Mountain View alone, there are eight Subway sandwich shops. If each of those locations needs to get their fair share of PPC advertising dollars, you could use separate campaigns with ZIP code targeting.

But the problem is that as you get more granular with targeting, Google is not always able to know where a user is, and you end up losing traffic. In one of my own campaigns, I looked at postal code data for our ads when they show in Australia. There were 18 clicks with a postal code associated. But in that same day, there were 30 clicks from Australia.

So Google didn’t know enough about the location for these 12 clicks to associate them with a postal code. These 12 clicks would have been lost if I were targeting only postal codes, rather than broader entities like cities or regions. So, to get more volume and to reduce the number of campaigns you need to maintain, it’s often desirable to target broader locations, like cities or regions.

But as a franchise, if I run a campaign for all of Mountain View, it’s possible that one of the locations eats up 70 percent of the budget, leaving just a small amount for the remaining six locations. While it may make sense from a business perspective to spend more where there are more people, in a franchise model, there is often a contract that says every location will get its fair share of the ad spend.

So here’s a script that looks at location data for a campaign and lets you disable specific granular locations when they exceed a certain level of spend for the month.

Conclusion

Budgets are not hard to understand, but they can be time-consuming and tedious to manage manually. Looking at whether daily budgets are dialed in to fully spend the target; ensuring an account hasn’t spent too much; and analyzing budget usage for granular locations are all well-defined tasks — all of this makes these tasks ideal for automation with AdWords scripts.

 

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Google Assistant coming to more speakers and home appliances from LG

Earlier today at German consumer electronics and appliances show IFA (Internationale Funkausstellung) in Berlin, Google announced that the Google Assistant will be coming to new smart speakers and home appliances. With the move Google is more aggressively competing with Amazon’s Alexa and Microsoft’s Cortana for third party hardware and software integration.

The company said that a range of new speakers will get the Assistant:

  • Zolo Mojo by Anker
  • TicHome Mini by Mobvoi
  • GA10 by Panasonic

These devices will be able to deliver the capabilities and functionality of Google Home and will be available in the US and Canada, Australia, Germany and France. On a smaller scale (right now) this is analogous to Google’s Android OS strategy, with the Assistant powering third party hardware. Alexa and Cortana are also pursuing a similar strategy.

Perhaps more interesting than the extension of the Google Assistant to more smart speakers is its integration with a range of home appliances. This is what I had originally envisioned for Samsung when it announced the acquisition of Viv (founded by the former CEO of Siri).

In its blog post Google announced South Korean manufacturer LG as its first major appliances partner:

[W]ith manufacturers like LG, you’ll be able control your appliances, including washers, dryers, vacuums and more from your Assistant on your smart speaker, Android phone or iPhone (any device with the Google Assistant built in!). Need to clean up? It’s as easy as “Ok Google, start vacuuming.” Want to know if your favorite jeans are clean?? “Ok Google, are my clothes clean?” or “is the laundry done?” Getting help around the house will be easier than ever.

Participating appliances will be controllable from the Google Assistant and any Assistant-enabled device (e.g., third party speakers). It doesn’t appear from the material I’ve seen that the Assistant will be directly integrated into the appliance (e.g., the dishwasher). In other words you talk to Google Home or your smartphone or an equivalent device, rather than directly to the dishwasher. However that could quickly change.

Google also said in its post that there are “more than 70 home automation manufacturers” (e.g., Honeywell), currently compatible with Google Assistant. And the company indicated in an email that more brands will be announced over the course of the week at IFA.

There are several noteworthy things here:

  • Integration of Google Assistant into third party hardware, which will quickly expand both in terms of partners and device categories
  • The corresponding acceleration of the “smart home”
  • The intensification of competition in the virtual assistant space, with Google and Amazon as market leaders, followed by Cortana, Siri and Samsung in the second tier

We’re going to have to wait to see how well and smoothly these devices work with Google Assistant. Simplicity and usability will be key to adoption and success. But make no mistake we are now in an episode of The Jetsons.

The post Google Assistant coming to more speakers and home appliances from LG appeared first on Search Engine Land.



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Google says we don’t need no stinking location modifiers… or do we?

Last week, Google declared that the “near me” search query and other “geo-modifiers” (e.g., ZIP code, city name) were, if not dead, then certainly not worth spending your valuable SEO time worrying too much about:

In September 2015, we shared that “near me” or “nearby” searches on Google had grown 2X in the previous year. Now, just two years later, we see that behavior has continued to change. Make no mistake, people still use ”near me” to discover places of interest around them. But we’re now seeing a shift toward dropping location qualifiers (like zip [sic] codes, neighborhoods, and “near me” phrasing) in local searches, because people know that the results will automatically be relevant to their location — thanks to their phone. It’s kind of magical. In fact, this year, search volume for local places without the qualifier “near me” has actually outgrown comparable searches that do include ”near me.” [see data] Over the last two years, comparable searches without “near me” have grown by 150% [see data].

But, as you can see through Google Trends, it’s not just that “implicit” local search queries (searches for local places without the local qualifier) are growing rapidly — it’s that they have always had a much higher base volume as well.

Google Trends Near Me

Source: Google Trends

So, we get it — the search term “tacos” is a better term to target than “tacos costa mesa.” However, Google treats implicit/explicit/”near me” searches differently. Just look at these different results (searches were all done from the same location with an incognito browser):

Tacos (located in Costa Mesa, CA)

Tacos

Tacos Costa Mesa

Tacos Costa Mesa

Costa Mesa Tacos

Costa Mesa Tacos

Tacos Near Me (located in Costa Mesa)

Tacos Near Me

While there’s overlap, literally none of the results above are the same. That tells us that Google evaluates all of these queries differently. Not only that, but according to our 2016 Local SEO Ranking Factors study (2017 version coming soon), it looks like Google is looking at different ranking factors as well.

Here’s how various factors correlated with high rankings in the Local Pack for implicit and explicit local search queries:

Explicit v Implicit Local SEO Ranking Factors

So, this requires a more holistic approach to location-based SEO. Local SEO isn’t just about fixing data accuracy problems, it’s about making sure that clients are effectively optimized for the myriad terms and paths that will generate them business.

That means implicit geo-location queries like “tacos” may have the highest search volume and best growth opportunity, but if you’re skipping other term variations, you are leaving money on the table.

For example, here is the monthly search volume for these searches in Pleasanton, Calif.:

Tacos — 210
Tacos Near Me — 140
Tacos Costa Mesa — 50
Costa Mesa Tacos — 10

If you are only focusing on “tacos,” that’s 210 monthly searches, or 51 percent of the potential traffic out there for core taco-related terms (and there are likely hundreds of long-tail “taco” queries for a city, each with their own unique results). Now, start applying that to, say, a 100-location business, and that’s 21,000 potential customers you are trusting Google to send to the right place.

This is part of the reason why we treat ALL these terms as a “taco” search. Because given the particular searcher, their search behavior, and proximity to your location, they could theoretically be engaging in any of these searches.

By the way, the #1 tacos-related search term?

Tacos Nearby — 590

So I wouldn’t abandon “near me” optimizations just yet.

The post Google says we don’t need no stinking location modifiers… or do we? appeared first on Search Engine Land.



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Google Home partnership with Condé Nast’s Vogue offers new model for publishers

In what is sure to be a model for other publishers, last week Google and Vogue magazine announced a partnership that offers “behind the scenes” audio content from selected Vogue magazine interviews. Most of these are monologues from the writers about their subjects.

By asking Google Home to “talk to Vogue” (one of several ways to invoke the content), users hear a brief introduction and then a menu of choices, which in this case includes five articles from the September issue on Jennifer Lawrence, Oprah Winfrey, Nicole Kidman, Serena Williams and Megyn Kelly.

There’s a corresponding indicator in the print magazine about which articles offer Google Home companion “behind the scenes” audio content. Each piece is split into shorter and longer segments. The speaker in each case is the author of the article initially answering the question, “What is [interviewee] like?” Then there’s an option to hear more in-depth information.

Julia Chen Davidson (Partner Marketing Lead, Google Home) told me that it was Google’s idea to approach Condé Nast but that the company was already in the process of exploring other content expansion and distribution options. When I suggested the experience was analogous to podcasting, she pointed out that the content from Vogue is more interactive, with the opportunity to select specific pieces in a non-linear order. “It’s more conversational,” she explained.

While this is the first such partnership for Google, the company is already talking to other publishers and partners. “There’s lots of curiosity,” Chen said. Indeed, this is something that many more publishers should explore sooner rather than later.

Google’s Chen wouldn’t discuss specifics but said that she and Google were “really pleased with the response” to the launch. To promote it, Google did a social/influencer campaign, and Vogue offered pages in the magazine (image above). The still photograph at the top of this page comes from a video, which shows a variety of women listening to the content as some browse the magazine.

This dual-media opportunity is very interesting because it could make some print content interactive and “trackable” in new ways (e.g., articles that drive Home engagement). It very quickly opens the door to voice-based commerce as well. One can imagine a partnership between Google (Express), a retailer or brand and a publisher to enable selected items in print ads to be easily ordered and delivered.

This is my speculation, however. Google didn’t talk specifically about monetization. As always with a new product, Google is focused on the consumer experience and “voice UI optimization,” as Chen described it.

Magazines have suffered significant subscriber and ad-revenue declines in the past decade. Publishers might be able to use Home (and other smart speakers) to extend their brands and content into this new medium and, in some cases, connect print and audio — to “digitize” the traditional print medium. (This is not unlike what out-of-home advertising has done with mobile-location data.)

But the model isn’t limited to traditional publishers. One can imagine brands and retailers creating entertaining or instructive audio content for smart speakers that is exposed or marketed via other channels: print, outdoor, TV, and even radio.

The Google-Vogue partnership points the way to a great many provocative scenarios ahead.

The post Google Home partnership with Condé Nast’s Vogue offers new model for publishers appeared first on Search Engine Land.



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Tuesday, August 29, 2017

Google Maps Android app adds ‘find parking’ feature to show you nearest parking garage

Google Maps is making it easy for Android users to find parking options.

The Android app now has a “find parking” button on the direction card that is displayed once you search for your location. The button leads to a list of parking garages and lots near the intended location.

Users can select their preferred parking option, and the app will automatically add it to their trip, along with walking directions from the parking spot to their destination.

The “find parking” feature was rolled out in 25 US cities, including Atlanta, Chicago, DC, Detroit, Portland, Orlando and St. Louis.

In addition to its latest feature, the app has expanded its “parking difficulty” feature for Android and iOS apps to 25 international cities, including Amsterdam, Dusseldorf, London, Milan, Rio de Janeiro and Vancouver.

When available, the parking difficulty icon appears in the bottom of a direction card screen, and it ranks parking availability as “limited,” “medium” or “easy” based on historical parking data.

The post Google Maps Android app adds ‘find parking’ feature to show you nearest parking garage appeared first on Search Engine Land.



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SearchCap: Google AdWords ad rotation, local panel ads & trip search

Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web.

From Search Engine Land:

Recent Headlines From Marketing Land, Our Sister Site Dedicated To Internet Marketing:

Search News From Around The Web:

Industry

Local & Maps

Searching

SEO

SEM / Paid Search

The post SearchCap: Google AdWords ad rotation, local panel ads & trip search appeared first on Search Engine Land.



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Google upgrades flight and hotel search to provide price grid views & more

Google announced several upgrades to both their flight search and hotel search features to aid searchers in finding the most economical options for their trips.

Rolling out on Google Flights is the ability to ability to click on “Dates” to see the calendar view of date combinations with the cheapest prices highlighted in green and the most expensive in red. You can also see price graphs over time if you have a certain length of trip in mind. This feature is available on mobile and rolling out to desktop later this year. Here is a GIF of these flight search features in action:

Often, flying to different nearby cities’ airports can save you on flight costs. Google also added the ability to see all nearby airports on an interactive map, view the distance between each one and your final destination and select the most convenient airports to include in your results. Here is a screen shot of this feature:

Google Hotel search added a nightly rate in the calendar view that shows you a similar grid of prices for the hotel you selected. You can also check out price trends for a hotel to see how rates change over time. Here is a GIF of that in action:

Also, Google formally announced the hotel price labels on the interactive maps in this blog post. This is something we covered a month ago:

The post Google upgrades flight and hotel search to provide price grid views & more appeared first on Search Engine Land.



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Setting Your Customer Engagement Emails on Automation Using Kissmetrics

Human attention spans are embarrassingly bad.

I’d have to be lucky to get just 5% of people to read this entire post. Most probably won’t get past the intro, so I’ll get to the point:

In this age of infinite distraction, brands that can keep their customers engaged with the product are bound to be the winners.

Fads come and go (by definition) and companies have short lifespans. Here one day, closed (or acquired) the next.

Brands that will succeed are the ones that keep customers engaged and re-purchasing.

Brands like Netflix, Facebook, and Amazon are the masters at keeping users engaged. Netflix keeps producing great content, which keeps people coming back. Facebook has a great, addictive product that billions of people use everyday, and Amazon has made billions off keeping customers to come back and make more (and more) purchases.

To keep customers engaged, they’ll need to be informed on what they’re missing without you. To do that, you can send behaviorally-targeted emails towards the relevant group of users.

Here’s how to spot your unengaged users, and get them re-engaged. And this is all done with Kissmetrics.

Just What the Heck is an Unengaged User?

Before we dive into the hows, we’ll first need to know what an unengaged user looks like.

There are active users and there are engaged users.

Active means they have logged in. Even if they login, stare the screen for a few minutes, and leave they can be considered active.

An engaged user is one who uses the product in a meaningful way. They use features, comment on statuses, send messages, and share photos.

Each product will have different conditions of what makes an engaged user, but one thing is for sure – they need to be using the product and interacting with it, not just logging in.

We’ll use a SaaS company as an example in this post. And we’ll set our definitions of unengaged and engaged customers:

  • Engaged – Has used at least 3 features 4 different times in the last 7 days.
  • Unengaged – Has not used any feature the past 14 days.

Now that we have our definitions, we’ll monitor our unengaged users using Kissmetrics Populations and then target them using Kissmetrics Campaigns.

Monitoring With Populations

Populations was created for growth/marketing and product teams to help them keep track of their growth cycle. With just a few clicks you’ll be able to monitor the KPIs that matter to your company.

For this post, we have to goal of shrinking our unengaged user base. So we’ll create Population that tracks the users that have not used any feature in the last 14 days.

Let’s see how many users are in this Population:

So we have our Population in place. Since these are our unengaged users, we’ll want to reduce the number of people in this Population. Let’s take our first step by creating a Campaign.

Send Behavior-Based Email Messages Using Campaigns

Campaigns is one of my favorite features in Kissmetrics. Once you find a segment of users that need to be nudged – whether it’s toward conversion, using features, logging in, etc. – you pull up Campaigns and create the perfect email to nudge them.

There are a number of things you can use Campaigns for. In this case, we’re using it to get our unengaged users in the product and using the features.

In Campaigns, we’ll create a new email message:

And we’ll target the people in the Population we previously created:

We’ll then set our conversion goal. This means that we determine if the Campaign is successful if the users do a specified event. For us, that event will be Used Feature.

We’ll then track the results in Campaigns, where it’ll say how effective the Campaign has been. Here are the results from a different Campaign:

And we can’t forget about Populations. Once we have our Campaign running, we’ll check the Population to see if it’s growing (bad) or shrinking (good).

Minor Interruption

Prefer to just watch our promo videos for Campaigns and Populations? Just hit play below – let’s start with Populations:

 

And Campaigns:

 

Conclusion

No matter how sticky your product, there will always be a group of unengaged users.

Even the ultra-addicting Facebook gets unengaged users.

And how do they bring them back?

Through emails.

Don’t believe me? Just get off Facebook for a few days (if you can) and you’ll eventually receive the barrage of emails that come like clockwork.

New friend suggestions, did you see person’s comment person’s status, person added a new photo, and you have 99 notifications, 5 pokes, and 3 new friend requests.

All designed to get you sucked into back and using Facebook once again.

Facebook (and countless other companies) send these emails because they work. Everyone has email, no one ignores their inbox, and well-written emails convert.

About the Author: Zach Bulygo (Twitter) is the Blog Manager for Kissmetrics.