By Catherine Cribbin, Head of Partnerships, IAB UK
In terms of spend share, search advertising leads the digital pack, accounting for 50% of the digital ad market by 2021, according to The latest Digital Adspend report from IAB UK. The report also details search shopping ad spend for the first time, showing advertisers invested £3.5 billion in the booming e-commerce market last year. So what do advertisers starting out in the search shopping space need to consider? And what search innovations are experts excited about? We spoke to Starcom, the7stars, Skai and iCrossing UK to get their views.
What advice do you have for brands who are taking their first steps in search shopping ads?
Eloise Purnell, Associate Director, Performics @ Starcom
Shopping campaigns are only as strong as the feed that drives them. The first thing to consider is how well established and maintained your product feed is, that stock levels are up to date, prices and images are present and correct. Product listing ads won’t appear without a feed with all the requirements in place, and feed status will affect the type of queries you can appear with, so that should be your starting point.
David Sequeira, Managing Director EMEA, Skai
Ultimately, dominating search shopping ads requires a strong technology platform to unlock real value. These ads are published 24/7 and the landscape is constantly changing due to changing variables such as seasonality, competitor activity, macro trends and changes in consumer behavior. Platform automation can periodically adjust bids and move budget to top-performing products in near real-time to increase performance.
Adam Chugg, Head of Large Tech Activations, the7stars
Start by making sure your product landing pages meet all of Google’s requirements. There are many issues that can arise from dynamic product pages, where you can have multiple iterations of products represented on the same URL. This can lead to a lot of feed bounce issues, where Google basically isn’t able to match a single product’s information to what it sees when crawling the landing page. When you are sure of this, nothing is more important than the integrity of the feed. Working with a feed optimization tool is recommended if you have 100 products and don’t have time for manual attribute optimization.
Lottie Namakando, Payment Media and Planning Manager, iCrossing UK
Understanding the interaction between the platform interface and the feed itself is the best place to start. Much of the performance derived from shopping campaigns is optimized through the feed, and this is generally the only practical method to optimize performance. Depending on the size of the brand and feed, this optimization can be done through a third-party provider or, for smaller-scale sources, manually using Google Sheets.
Where do you see the greatest innovation in research coming from?
Adam Chugg, Head of Large Tech Activations, the7stars
We must rely on automated targeting and dynamic creative to maximize the opportunity to serve ads to users where they are ready to act; Google, YouTube, Gmail and the open web. In this ecosystem, of which search is only one part, I see the most important innovations coming from smart uses of rich proprietary data, especially as retailers seek to monetize their proprietary data through partnerships. I also see innovation happening when we effectively flip the script to focus on content and experience as a targeting mechanic, rather than sending the user.
Abbie Dunne, Director of Paid Search, iCrossing UK
With the simplified structure, smart offers and Google offers Max performance automating much of the paid search space in recent years and showing no signs of stopping, the biggest area of innovation in search is how we use and optimize our landing pages. These search and shopping automations are great for finding those important customers, but if your landing pages offer what users want, they won’t eventually convert. If your paid search teams aren’t working with SEO and content teams, as well as CRO services to maximize your website, this will be your biggest chance for success in the coming year.
David Sequeira, Managing Director EMEA, Skai
What we’re hearing from our top search customers is that the next big channel innovation will be more strategic than tactical. While enhanced AI, automation and ROI optimization are always desired platform features, today’s brands are rethinking how their search investment connects to their holistic digital advertising efforts. By keeping efforts siled, individual teams can optimize channel metrics, but can limit overall performance. An omnichannel approach that better understands the role of search in consumer buying behavior allows your existing search engine marketing budget to work smarter alongside other channels to enable more sales and total revenue.
Eloise Purnell, Associate Director, Performics @ Starcom
Performance Max is a really interesting release from Google, as it will allow advertisers to access all of Google’s inventory in one campaign, including Search, Gmail, YouTube, and Maps. This may not be strictly an innovation in search, as we’re looking at broader placements in the Google ecosystem, but it allows us to have more strategic conversations with our search customers about the role of all Google placements in the generation of value. This more holistic view can help us mature our customers relatively quickly, given the level of automation that Performance Max offers. As long as we have strong creative and budget, Google’s world-class automation can be optimized across all locations and accelerate customer maturity.
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