The best ways of selling to Millennials has become a major discussion in recent years. They’re not instantly loyal to products or companies they like. They have a significant amount of purchasing power ($200 billion according to U.S. Chamber of Commerce), but they also have a lot of debt and the tendency to eschew traditional purchases or adulthood milestones such as buying a home.
To continue reading, check out the full article on Franchising.com.
As advertisers continue to strategize and optimize to best reach consumers, Google consistently strives to create seamless online experiences that provide value to users and remove conversion friction for advertisers. All while taking mobile into account as the primary channel of consumption.
Traditionally, ad extensions boost click-thru rates as they provide more context about what advertisers have to offer. Clicks are important, but according to Google, calls convert three times better than web clicks. Combine this with consumer mobile usage, and it’s only natural for Google to upgrade call-only ads.
Last week Google, launched three ad extensions for call-only ads on mobile. Advertisers are now able to display more information that is readily accessible to searchers’ fingertips with the goal of convincing consumers to choose their business. Google says these new extensions can improve click-thru rate by 10 percent on average.
Let’s take a look at the extensions available.
Source: Google
Information like distance, city and street so consumers can easily visit a nearby location or simply know where they are calling.
Information to help businesses stand out from the competition. This is a perfect spot for offers or unique benefits.
Additional details about products and services through predefined headers. This is another opportunity to be specific about what consumers can expect.
Last month, Google also rolled out changes to how mobile ads show sitelinks, callouts and structured snippets.
These links take searchers to specific pages on an advertiser’s site and help them find the information they are looking for quickly. The new format translates to a better mobile experience, proven by Google’s early results which indicate people are twice as likely to interact with sitelinks in this new format.
Source: Google
For callouts and structure snippets, they now appear in-line with ad copy in paragraph form instead of in a separate line below an ad. According to Google, people have found this more informative and engaging.
Testing your ads is a key component of optimizations. It’s best practice to have several ad variations to determine which ads are performing and driving the desired results. To help advertisers easily determine the right ad rotation and deliver the best ads, this week, Google is rolling out two new rotation features for both campaign and ad group levels.
Source: Google
This setting looks at ad groups and prioritizes ads that are expected to perform better and optimizes for clicks using keywords, search terms, device, location and more. Including three or more ads per ad group can increase clicks and impressions. The more ads Google can choose from, the better the expected performance.
This setting is available for advertisers who want more control and prefer even rotation for their ads. This option requires constant monitoring and can be very time-consuming for some advertisers.
“Optimize for conversions” and “Rotate evenly” will no longer be available. Any advertisers using smart bidding to prioritize conversions or used previous options like “Optimize for clicks,” “Optimize for conversions,” and “Rotate evenly,” will automatically convert to the “Optimize” setting.
As we learn more about these updates and any other new developments, we will continue to keep you apprised of what you need to know. In the meantime, don’t hesitate to reach out to us if you have any questions.
Whether from Fortune 500 brands, or the franchisees, dealers and agents along Main Street USA, we bump into this question from search advertisers a lot: “Can we prevent competing against ourselves in multi-location markets?”
The answer is an unsatisfying yes and no. Completely avoiding overlapping budgets and dog-eat-dog competition among multiple locations in the same market is complex. Mitigation of brand concerns in a crowded local market is absolutely possible though. So, in under 250 words, here’s how paid search pros put controls in place to reach consumers and manage budgets without turning same-brand locations on each other.
While to some this may be stating the obvious, we run into enough advertisers with substantial inaccuracies in their business listings that it warrants a call out. Enterprises must ensure their locations’ business listings are right. This is crucial for search success across the board and helps distinguish individual locations within the same market.
Customize targeting per location to avoid overlap between budgets and territories. It’s a tactic Mindstream Media Group employs for single franchisees/dealers or for those with multiple locations looking to segment budgets and territories. At the franchisee/dealer level, geo-target by ZIP code, radial targeting, city, etc., and implement targeting exclusions to ensure you’re not overlapping local campaigns.
To manage location budgets and accounts for optimal performance by location, we recommend creating unique Google Ads accounts (CID) per location. Even if a franchise owns multiple locations, we still recommend creating an account per location. This allows flexibility and transparency for better campaign budgeting and performance.
Use location bid adjustments to optimize spend and performance by geo-targets to ensure the best use of advertising funds and optimal performance.
Bonus tactics worth using:
Contact Mindstream Media Group to learn more about managing your search campaigns in markets with multiple locations.
E-commerce continues to grow and with 2017 Holiday Shopping season just around the corner, it’s a great time to find ways to maximize your e-commerce business. In our latest webinar, we examined the biggest opportunities in online retail, and how you can amplify your marketing strategy to open up new acquisition channels online.
Adam de Jong | Mindstream Media Group
Contact us to learn more about how Mindstream Media Group can help manage your online retail strategy.
We have more media options now than ever before for consuming and sharing content. We spend our days bouncing between our smartphones, computers, tablets, TV, etc. often using multiple devices at once. This has created an elastic buying journey that requires marketers to shift from media-focused ad placements to audience-focused targeting based on behavior and location. Which, in turn, has prompted a surplus of marketing buzzwords like “omni-channel,” “micro-moments,” “SoLoMo (social, local, mobile),” etc.
To be clear, I’m not bashing buzzwords. Like any other marketer, I use (overuse) them all the time. My point is in the digital era, consumers interact with media differently and, regardless of what we call it, they expect the path to purchase to also be a path of little resistance – an expectation that differs for each consumer.
In that spirit, I’m not interested in coining a new term for – or prognosticating about – the future of the buying journey. Rather, I want to look at what the biggest retailers are already doing to accommodate consumers in the digital era, what those actions mean for the retail industry and what other brands can start doing today to reach consumers.
Big name retailers have been doing what big name retailers do – developing partnerships, introducing new features and acquiring smaller brands in a quest to dominate market share. Last week, retail giant Walmart and search giant Google announced a partnership to start offering the retailer’s product on Google Express in September.
Until now, Walmart has resisted offering their products online other than on its own site. But with Google Home, Walmart can now offer “hundreds of thousands of items for voice shopping” for consumers to order – or reorder – on Google’s new voice-powered digital assistant.
comScore estimates half of all searches will be voice searches by 2020 and voice-enabled devices are already disrupting digital media buying. Google Home owns a small share of the device market compared to Amazon’s Echo today, but it’s still early.
Google also brings its advanced algorithms and years of experience learning users’ online habits. This should be especially helpful with one feature of the partnership: Walmart customers can link their accounts to Google and get personalized shopping results based on their online and in-store Walmart purchases.
Related: A look at paid search advertising in the Era of Voice Search
This was just the latest in a string of moves by Walmart to strengthen online sales. In the past year, Walmart has started a free two-day shipping feature and introduced an in-store pickup option. The retailer also acquired online retailer Jet.com for a cool $3.3 billion and apparel retailer Bonobos for $310 million.
And the moves are working, second quarter online sales were up 60 percent this year compared to 2016.
To recap: Walmart now offers free two-day shipping, the ability to order items through an AI powered voice search and personalized product recommendations to consumers. It almost sounds like Walmart is trying to compete with someone…
It seems bizarre to compare Walmart and Google to David but in online retail, there is only one Goliath – Amazon. For comparison, Walmart offers roughly 67 million items online, Amazon has almost that many items in its Cell Phones and Accessories department alone.
While Walmart is beefing up its digital presence, Amazon is venturing out into the analog world. In June, Amazon invested more than $13 billion to acquire high-end grocery retailer Whole Foods, giving the online retailer access to 450 physical stores. (The company is also working on opening its 10th physical bookstore this year.)
But Amazon is still making digital technology an integral part of its offline strategy. Amazon Go is a prime example; it’s the company’s solution to traditional grocery stores by skipping the checkout lines.
“(The) shopping experience is made possible by the same types of technologies used in self-driving cars: computer vision, sensor fusion and deep learning. Our Just Walk Out Technology automatically detects when products are taken from or returned to the shelves and keeps track of them in a virtual cart. When you’re done shopping, you can just leave the store. Shortly after, we’ll charge your Amazon account and send you a receipt.”
If there’s an overarching theme to all these moves, it’s that big-name retailers are trying to offer consumers a buying journey that matches their media habits, blending online and offline options to provide each consumer their personal path of least resistance. In buzzword speak, it’s a “SoLoMo” approach to “omni-channel” advertising designed to reach consumers at the right “micro-moments.”
Competing in today’s media landscape requires each brand to develop its own unique approach comprised of many small puzzle pieces that when put together renders a cohesive strategy. However, there are plenty of little things brands can implement to reach consumers across channels to help guide them towards a purchase.
Here are a few tips for retail brands:
For retailers looking to increase sales at brick-and-mortar stores, Google AdWords campaigns offer a variety of strategies:
Consumers frequently go between shopping online and in store, so it’s important to tie online and offline actions. If a consumer spends 95 percent of the purchase process researching online but buys the product in your store, you want to make sure the advertising effort that did the heavy lifting gets the credit.
Attribution is integral to digital marketing, but perfecting it has been the industry’s white whale. However, digital marketers are making huge advances connecting online and offline behaviors and can attribute performance far better than many traditional media placements.
Related: The Latest from Google – June 2017
Online shopping allows consumers to spread out their research into smaller, incremental shopping sessions (hence “micro-moments”), and they tend to start and stop often. But just because someone doesn’t convert immediately doesn’t mean they’re not interested. Retailers can improve the odds of the consumer returning and make it easier for them to do so by retargeting them – meaning showing them related ads (via search, display, email, etc.) to keep the brand top of mind.
Consumers spend a lot of time on social media and many use the platforms during the holidays for gift inspiration. So be where the people are by placing ads on top social sites. Facebook has several ad options that can drive e-commerce sales, increase in-store traffic or do both. For example, offer claim ads allow brands to extend discounts and promotions to targeted Facebook audiences.
Related: GoWireless boosts in-store sales with Facebook Offers
Implementing these four tips won’t bring on massive change like the Google-Walmart partnership, but they represent incremental steps that retail brands can take today. As more media options become available, brands need to implement these types of changes to reach consumers on as many channels as possible.
To learn more about retail marketing, check out our latest guide: Six tips to unwrapping the holiday season consumer buying journey
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