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Google’s most automated campaign type, Performance Max, is getting a new optimization feature aimed at driving new business. The addition comes in the form of a new customer acquisition goal that will allow advertisers to optimize to those who are not previous customers. Additional changes have also been announced to help advertisers identify high-level insights and make the transition to Performance Max easier. Announced back in 2020, Google’s Performance Max campaigns (nicknamed PMax) have seen intense scrutiny over the lack of control that advertisers have. These campaigns do not contain traditional keywords, audiences, placements or other guardrails for targeting. Instead advertisers input asset groups, location/time of day targeting and audience signals to attempt to drive a qualified click. This new customer acquisition goal is another lever that advertisers can pull to try and drive quality traffic with these campaigns where options and data are at a premium. New customer acquisition goals. The largest change to PMax campaigns is the ability to use your data to help Google identify (and serve to) new customers. Advertisers have a few options to choose from when identifying new customers including:
What does this mean? Google can take 1st party signals, Google Ads conversion data and their internal auto-detection to try to figure out who is not a previous customer and target them. This does not guarantee that you won’t be doing remarketing (you likely will), instead Google will just work to find users that are not customers. Similar to other Performance Max campaigns, Google still recommends “waiting 4-6 weeks after activating a Performance Max campaign to evaluate results”. So it is still imperative to give these new customer acquisition campaigns the time and patience required to succeed. Additional new Performance Max insights. Those advertisers that are looking for more intelligence on campaign performance will be pleased as Google is giving us a little more information. There will be two new additions to the insights page within a PMax campaign:
One-click upgrade tool is rolling out. Smart Shopping and Local campaigns are being sunset and replaced by Performance Max. Google announced that the much awaited one-click upgrade into Performance Max will begin rolling out “over the coming weeks”. When this tool is available in an account a notification will show to advertisers. This can additionally be found in the recommendations page and the campaigns page. When an upgrade has happened with this tool, a new Performance Max campaign will be generated that keeps the learnings from previous campaigns. According to Google, these learnings brought over to the new PMax campaign will “maintain consistent performance”. Why we care. Love it or hate it, Performance Max is here to stay. The ability to target new users may help cut down on errant spend, and let advertisers find a more scalable audience. While this won’t remove previous site visitors or those searching for your brand, it should be more efficient for new customer acquisition than standard PMax campaigns. The additional insights may help troubleshoot setup issues and may help guide advertisers on what creative is resonating with specific customer segments, albeit there is not a way to target that audience within a campaign. Lastly, the new one-click migration should be a big upgrade over a manual rebuild as the learnings will be brought over into the new PMax campaign. The post Performance Max campaigns gain New Customer Acquisition goals appeared first on Search Engine Land. via Search Engine Land https://ift.tt/tiG1KyU You’ve heard about the results companies are getting with account-based marketing (ABM) and you want to know what it will take to make it work for you. In particular, will it fit in your budget? Like any digital marketing campaign, the cost of running ABM campaigns consists of multiple components with multiple line items within each component. ABM components include your tech stack, assets, channels, and the expertise to execute and orchestrate everything. What can you expect to spend on each? What variables come into play? What kind of return can you expect from your investment? Let’s break it all down. How to think about ABM budgetsYou may have seen the Forrester report that found the average annual ABM budget is around $350,000 (excluding headcount costs) and pilot campaigns around $200,000. It found more mature programs with proven value have budgets of around $600,000, and budgets for established programs at large enterprises can run into the millions. While these averages are a good jumping-off point, smaller organizations shouldn’t be put off by the price tag before learning more, and corporations of any size should keep in mind these findings may have already changed. Forrester found that 70 percent of organizations expected the average cost to rise. The best way to think about ABM budgets is to understand its components, your ICP priorities, and the right budgeting methodology. Start by understanding ABM componentsTools, processes, and people — like any digital endeavor, you need all three to run ABM campaigns. ABM components include:
The number of accounts and individuals within those accounts you want to target also drives your budget. Determine the relative importance of insight and engagementAre you primarily looking for insight or engagement from your ideal client persona (ICP)? If you want to better understand your visitors’ intent and pain points, you’ll want to allocate more of your budget for insight. You’ll use this information to create targeted ICP content and give your team the perspective to make informed campaign choices. On the other hand, if your targeted ICP is within the same industry or niche, you’ll want to allocate more of your budget for engagement because the insight provided will be similar for all accounts within your ICP. Use the right budgeting methodologyYou can use the same budgeting approach for an ABM pilot or 1:Many ABM campaign as you would for a traditional digital marketing campaign, but budgeting for 1:Few and 1:1 campaigns is more complicated and fluid. Personalized ABM campaigns focus on targeting individuals within accounts — the cost is determined by account value and not a fixed budget. The more valuable a particular account, the more you’ll want to spend on it. Account values often reveal themselves during the campaign, so you’ll want to use an account-based methodology with more flexible line items. How to price out technology and expertiseWhile the actual dollar costs of targeting specific accounts and individuals are too variable to cover here, we can quantify the cost of technology and expertise. Budget for the tech stack you needYou’ll need to subscribe to a few key platforms to run ABM. The cost of your combined tech stack is based on the size of your organization and the platforms you choose — you can expect to pay $165-$325K in total for the annual licenses needed to run ABM. Budget for the channels you needTargeting accounts with the right messages at the right time means you have to get your assets in the right channels. ABM channels include programmatic, content marketing, paid search, SEO, paid social, email nurture, and online gifting. The total cost for each channel includes creating the assets and running them in the channel. While spending for each channel is highly variable by campaign, determining an overall paid-ad budget is part of your campaign strategy. It’s best to stay flexible with specific allocations so you can spend more on the channels that are proving to be more successful as your campaign progresses and less on the ones that aren’t. Budget for the expertise you needYou can use the right tech stack and channels for your ICP, but it’s tough to get the right ROI without the right team. You need:
Remember to keep turnover in mind. Marketing specialists have a 19.8% annual turnover rate. How omnichannel impacts ABM budgetingMuch more of the buying process and B2B marketing is taking place online now — the pandemic changed how the world does business. B2B marketers who embrace the change are reaching accounts where they’re already hanging out. Omnichannel changes how buying committees make decisionsThe new B2B buying journey doesn’t include a lot of talking with suppliers. Most of it happens online before buyers reach out and includes more people on the buying committee. In 2017, you could engage in buying scenarios by targeting one or two buyers. Now, buying committees with two people represent only 18% of purchases while most have five or more people. These people are looking for solutions online and increasingly find them in social channels — B2B social sellers outperform their peers who don’t leverage social media by 72%. Why omnichannel ABM requires insightTo know which channels will work best, you need to apply ABM insight. For example, if you advertise on LinkedIn but the accounts within your ICP are more active on Facebook, your ads aren’t likely reaching your intended audience. By applying insight using an omnichannel approach, you ensure your ICP will see your ads while enabling you to target specific pain points. This dramatically increases the likelihood your ICP will follow your ad to your website. How to optimize omnichannel ABMMore personalized ABM campaigns work better. The data prove it — 1:Few and 1:1 ABM campaigns deliver much higher ROI because they move accounts further down the funnel faster. As you might guess, personalized ABM campaigns cost more because you need to create and orchestrate personalized assets. But if it’s ROI you’re after, the investment pays off. Make sure to be strategic during account selection and focus your budget on running campaigns that only target high-value, in-market accounts. ABM investment strategiesWhile the bottom-line number for an ABM program deserves thoughtful consideration, keep revenue generation in mind as you deliberate. To realize the promise of ABM, look at all of your options and allow the strategy to play out once you start. Patience is a mustThe B2B buying process takes many months or even a year or more to move a buying committee from awareness through decision. The first ROI benchmark for ABM is usually around month six — by then, if you’ve invested wisely and your sales team is leveraging campaign data correctly, you should be seeing a return of three times your investment. The agency alternativeThe most sophisticated ABM agencies run full-funnel ABM campaigns that include sales enablement as part of their services. These agencies earn their clients up to nine times annual ROI for 1:Few and 1:1 campaigns starting with the first campaign because they already have the teams, technology, and orchestration expertise. Agency results can be replicated in-house over time as you build the right team and a seamless operation. Consider comparing the budget you develop to the cost of partnering with an ABM agency by requesting demos from one of more agencies. Ways to reduce in-house costsThere are a few things you can do to reduce the cost of running AMB in-house. The key is informed decision-making and careful planning:
As you’ve seen, budgeting for ABM is complex but you can get accurate numbers when you understand what’s involved and apply a lot of forethought. Reaching out to peers and experts about their hands-on experiences with ABM budgeting is always a good idea, as is giving equal focus to the other side of your balance sheet as you make your allocation decisions. The post You’re interested in ABM but what will it cost? appeared first on Search Engine Land. via Search Engine Land https://ift.tt/IyCgHhV Google today has turned off support for the URL parameter tool within Google Search Console. Google did notify us just about a month ago that this would be happening and it did – the URL parameter no longer functions today. What happened. If you try to access a specific Search Console profile using the URL parameter tool, Google will tell you “this report is no longer available here.” It will show this warning icon along with it: What is the URL parameter tool. The URL parameter tool launched in 2009 as a parameter handling tool, a way to communicate to Google to ignore specific URLs or combinations of URL parameters. Two years later, in 2011, Google upgraded to tool to handle many more parameter scenarios. The tool essentially let you block Google from indexing URLs on your site. You are currently able to access the tool over here but when you try to use it, that error will show up. Why is it going away. Google said it has become “much better at guessing which parameters are useful on a site and which are —plainly put— useless.” Google added that “only about 1% of the parameter configurations currently specified in the URL Parameters tool are useful for crawling.” “Due to the low value of the tool both for Google and Search Console users, we’re deprecating the URL Parameters tool in 1 month,” Google said. What do I do going forward. Google said there is nothing specific to do. Google said “going forward you don’t need to do anything to specify the function of URL parameters on your site, Google’s crawlers will learn how to deal with URL parameters automatically.” You can always use robots.txt rules, Google said “or use The old rules will no longer function or be considered going forward. Why we care. If you previously used the URL parameter tool, now that the tool is no longer being used by Google, you will want to annotate your reports to document the change. You probably should keep a close eye on your analytics and Search Console reports to see changes, if any, in crawling, indexing and ranking that may be related to this change. This might be a gradual impact, so keep an eye on issues over the next several days to several weeks. The post Google Search Console’s URL parameter tool is officially not working appeared first on Search Engine Land. via Search Engine Land https://ift.tt/aI4UDN8 Tomorrow, April 27, 2022, Google will officially sunset the old Google AdWords API. Google has given us a year lead time with this notice, and the day is coming tomorrow where the AdWords API will stop being fully supported. Instead, use the Google Ads API, which is currently up to version 10 and first went out of beta over two years ago. AdWords API going away. Again, the AdWords API will be going away tomorrow. Google posted about this a year ago saying “if you are a developer currently using the AdWords API, you need to upgrade to the Google Ads API by April 27, 2022. On that date, the AdWords API will sunset and requests to the AdWords API will fail.” Google added that “with Google Ads API v7, we reached feature parity with the AdWords API making it possible for all developers to upgrade with a few exceptions listed at the top of the Migrating Features guide.” Google is now up to version 10 of the Google Ads API. Google Ads API. You can access the Google Ads API over here. The Google Ads API is the modern programmatic interface to Google Ads and the next generation of the AdWords API. It enables developers to interact directly with the Google Ads platform, vastly increasing the efficiency of managing large or complex Google Ads accounts and campaigns. You can learn more about migrating, if you have not done so, over here. Why we care. We hope none of you reading this still use the old Google AdWords API, but if you are, this is a notice that it will no longer be supported tomorrow. Google said that all requests fail at a rate of ~25% until May 31 and you can resubmit failed requests but you should instead upgrade to the Google Ads API. The post Google AdWords API sunsets April 27 appeared first on Search Engine Land. via Search Engine Land https://ift.tt/i9KPcN5 It’s graduation season. For many college students, that means it’s time to get a job. There are plenty of open jobs in digital marketing – more than 20,000 jobs are listed for “digital media, entry-level” on LinkedIn right now. If your agency or brand is hiring, you can expect to get resumes from some of these college graduates. This begs the question: what should you look for when hiring for entry-level digital marketing roles? What soft skills and hard skills matter? What questions should you ask? And are there any red flags should you watch for? Here’s what to look for when hiring junior talent who may have little (if any) hands-on experience in digital marketing. What to look for in a candidateThriving in digital marketing doesn’t require a certain type of work or life experience. Success comes down to the person – their aptitude and desire to show up and do the work. I’ve hired English majors, chemical engineers, and everything in between. I’ve hired people from small universities, top five schools and those who didn’t get a degree. Look for a candidate who demonstrates the ability to solve problems. You want to hire people who have done – and will do – the necessary work to succeed. Ask candidates to share examples of their experience and how they can relate that experience to the daily work your company does. Someone who can show you these elements is a strong candidate. Hard vs. soft skillsHard skills are the easiest to spot. Candidates who have invested time in certification in a tool or technology (e.g., Google, Facebook or Amazon ads) have already built a foundation for success in this space. It is a good signal to me, as a hiring manager, when a candidate knows the language being spoken on a day-to-day basis. It will help get this person up to speed and running more quickly. Soft skills are more valuable over time, but harder to determine from a resume or an interview. When it comes to soft skills, I always tell candidates to think through the story they are trying to convey. Candidates who can boil questions down in the STAR (Situation, Task, Action, Result) framework should be considered seriously. Too many candidates fail to provide enough specifics when demonstrating their grasp of the question or the skills needed. Types of questions to askKeep expectations fairly simple when interviewing for junior positions. Nobody at this level has managed a Fortune 500 company’s ad budget. Experience in any kind of digital marketing work isn’t even necessary. However, you should expect candidates to have a clear point of view and interest in digital marketing. Here are a few go-to questions to ask candidates and what to listen for in their answers:
Watch out for these red flagsYou may have your own dealbreakers. Here are two for me:
The need for digital marketing talent continues to increaseOur industry is growing faster than our talent supply. Hopefully, the advice in this article is helpful if you’re hiring for entry-level positions. Who knows. You might just hire someone who is about to begin an exciting and rewarding career path for the next 20+ years. Let the search begin! The post How to interview and hire for entry-level digital marketing positions appeared first on Search Engine Land. via Search Engine Land https://ift.tt/LzdX2C9 The post 20220426 SEL Brief appeared first on Search Engine Land. via Search Engine Land https://ift.tt/JShDsLx Traditional A/B testing only lets you test messaging, creative and other marketing assets after they have gone live in the market – with no warning of how they will perform. This sometimes leads to falling short on your marketing goals. What if there was a way to test before launching, improve your return and understand why your consumers selected the asset they did? Join experts from Feedback Loop as they provide real-world examples of what you need to exceed goals and advance in your career with agile research. Register today for “Master the Art of Agile Research to Iterate, Innovate and Grow” presented by Feedback Loop. The post Master the art of agile research to iterate, innovate and grow appeared first on Search Engine Land. via Search Engine Land https://ift.tt/aIhcgUF Google has added nine new policies to its three-strikes system that punishes advertisers who don’t follow the rules. The three-strikes system was announced in July. Testing then began in September. When the program was announced, Google said they planned to include more policy types to avoid. Now they have announced nine additional policies. When this change takes effect. It starts June 21. Google said it will then gradually ramp up over a three-month period. The nine new policies. Running advertisements on any of the following could earn your account a strike:
What else to avoid. Google Ads has three main buckets for ads that earn violations, none of which are new. If you need a refresher, you can find them all here: Strikes and punishments. If your account receives a warning or strike, you will be notified via email and in your account. As a reminder, here’s what happens if your ads get flagged. Warning
First Strike
Second strike
If you have received a first or second strike, but don’t violate Google Ads policies for 90 days, the strikes will expire. Third strike
Why we care. Anytime Google updates its Ads policy, it’s important to know what’s changing. Knowing what the Google Ads policies should help keep your account safe and avoid earning any warnings, strikes or an account suspension. The post Google adds nine policies to three-strike Ads system appeared first on Search Engine Land. via Search Engine Land https://ift.tt/fXs68vH Have you recently received a DMCA copyright infringement notice through email from a personal claiming to be a lawyer? Well, that email might be a scam and the lawyer who emailed you might not be a real person, but rather an AI generated persona for a lawyer at a fake law firm. That is what The Next Web uncovered in a recent report about such a DMCA request. What is a DMCA request. A DMCA request is when someone requests the removal of content or a web page due to copyright violations. DMCA stands for Digital Millennium Copyright Act and it is used to have hosting companies, Google and web site owners remove content that infringes on copyright. What is the scam. In this case, the fake machine generated lawyer is emailing sites claiming DMCA copyright infringement and instead of having the site remove the content, they are asking for a link instead. The email says first starts off threatening, as most legal notices sound, but it ends saying “our client is happy for their image to be used and shared across the internet. However, proper image credit is due for the past or ongoing usage.” The proper image credit should be done with “a link to” the site “within 7 days.” “Otherwise, we are required to take legal action,” the email continues. In short, the scam is to threaten copyright legal action for a link to a site. Here is a copy of the email: Fake lawyers. It gets even more creepy, as this reporter dug into this issue, they investigated who Arthur Davidson Legal Services was. The law firms site looked legit but the domain name was only registered this year but the site claims the firm has been around for many years. He then dug into the profile of Nicole Palmer and learned that she never existed, that she was made up by AI, by a generative adversarial network, a deep learning model that can be trained to create faces, art, or anything else. This is her photo, notice how the earrings and other aspects don’t exactly line up: It is just pretty wild how far scammers will go to manipulate the Google search rankings. Why we care. Just beware of such legal threats, do your research to ensure the firm exists, the lawyer who emailed you is real and that this is not a scam. I can see many folks just reading the email, quickly adding the link attribution credit and emailing back saying this was done – without asking for more details or without verifying this is a real issue. Online scams are only going to get more sophisticated and look more real with AI and machine learning at their disposal. So we all need to get more sophisticated in questioning everything we see, every email we receive and every request that is made from us. The post Beware of fake DMCA link requests by AI-generated lawyers appeared first on Search Engine Land. via Search Engine Land https://ift.tt/fPwqRka |
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