On the 25th June 2015, Google finally allowed us to use audiences created in Google Analytics to reach our customers on Google Search. This has been a game changer. Brendan & his colleague Ciaran will discuss 5 ways you can leverage these audiences within your Google AdWords campaign to drive conversion and maximise account efficiency. All insights will be supported by actual Client case studies and real world results. If you are struggling to find value in RLSAs this talk will arm you with the practical skills you need to target your customers throughout the purchase funnel using custom audience lists.
78. 7 Key Takeaways
1. Collect Audiences within Google Analytics
2. Leverage targeting on social to build granular lists of your target
persona
3. If your budget is restricted, do not lose impression share across
your customer base
4. Set different KPIs for retention and acquisition and optimise
accordingly
5. Turn Facebook into a conversion machine via RLSA & GA
audiences
6. HACK Customer Match to target small discrete email lists on
search
7. Download our audience builder!
As you can probably tell from my accent, this isn’t our home town. We’re from Ireland and we’re based in Dublin.
Ciaran’s accent
Despite what you might have heard, this man is not the leader of Ireland
We were delighted this year to bring two europena search awards to Ireland, including the gran prix.
It’s actually the first time an Irish Agency has won.
What we’re going to talk to you about today is a solution to some of the paid search challenges we’ve been discussing in Wolfgang Digital for years.
Every Tuesday, the AdWords teams sits down for an hour to discuss the latest innovations in paid search and how they can help us solve some of the problems we encounter in AdWords.
Up until recently, there have been lots of innovations, but the problems have remained the same.
These include
What AdWords problems am I referring to.
Well, there are 3 big problems that we we encounter on an ongoing basis.
The first is the leaky bucket
This is really a problem of loss of impression share which stems from not having a budget sufficient enough to cover the market.
Now, the ideal Client’s budget will be large enough to cover all relevant searches within their industry, but not every Client is the ideal Client unfortunately.
This means in some cases you might loose impression share to budget.
This, believe it or not, is a pretty typical example of the paths to purchase for a retain Client. To sell this one dress there were 90 touch points in total with 30 coming from page search.
If your budget can’t cover all these searches, the journey for your Client could end
The second problem follows a similar theme, but focusing on generic keywords.
It’s a problem that we have come to call the generic keyword conumdrum.
Let me demonstrate what I mean with example –
It’s keywords like this ‘clothes online’. IF you’re a retailer, this is absolutely an important keyword for you, but it’s top of funnel.
These keywords, carry a lot of search volume but typically have low conversion rates – ie a higher cost per aqcuisition.
Again, if your budget or your Client’s budget is restricted it might not be possible to target these keywords.
Lastly. Is a big one and it’s the fact that we bid on keywords.
On the one hand it’s what’s so amazing about Google AdWords. We show ads to users seraching keywords relevant to your business
….but on the other hand, we all search differently and there can be varying degrees of intent behind the same keyword.
Pizza for example – If I’m dominos pizza it might make sense for me to bid on it, but my add could be displaying for users
Looking for directions
Or looking for a recipe
So. We got really excited when RLSAs first hit the scene, because it looked like it could solve some of these problems.
Add to that the fact that people seemed to be falling out of love with traditional (or display) remearketing
and remarketing was almost a victim of it’s own success
When it was introduced back in 2010 it performed phonemically well. It was new.
But years of bad targeting and creepy ads have started to negatively impact remarketing campaign performance
I knew it was the end of remarketing
It looked like RLSAs were going to see a rebirth of remarketing, but on the search network.
Google spent a lot of time championing it
But the focus of Google’s advice seemed a little bit unsophisticated.
Taking the same campaigns and bid more based on a user visiting your site, a product etc.
Basically Google were recommended that we spend more money
RLSAs were also slightly restricted by the fact it was based on a tag,
which meant that you’d build audiences based on the fact that they’d visited a certain page
Lump everyone together
So we were underwhelmed by the hype surround RLSAs at this stage and honestly, we didn’t see great results.
It felt like we were just paying more for traffic we were going to get via our standard campaigns.
But then everyhitng changes on the 25th June
On June 25th Google allowed us to start sharing audiences from Google Analytics with Google AdWords.
This meant that we could new look
So what – why is this important or what’s the big deal?
It allows us to remarket to users across the funnel
Previously we were remarketing to users based on the page that they had visited.
We madde assumptions about the stage they were at in the purchase funnel based on whether they viewed a category page or a prodcut page
But by applying segments in GA, we can now remarekt to users based on the channel they came from or the ttype of interaction
We can speak differently to users that came from Twitter, or facebook, or Google or even email
But that’s only the start, because if we integrate our social targeting with our Google Analytics Audiences – we start to learn an awful lot about who we are targeting.
Custom audience, location, age, gender, interests, income in the US
I can target men aged between 35-45 living in New York and earning over 100k
I can then collect this campaign as an audience in GA and call it – rich dudes in New York and sell them expensive shit on search.
I can overlay this targeting in FB – UTM the campaign and capture them as a list in GA for remarketing on search
Using UTMs I can call users that click on this facebook ads ‘Parents interesting in education’, collect them as an audience
And sell them a college savings plan on search for example
We’re now longer just bidding on keywords, we’re bidding on people who are searching specific keywords.
And this approach has completely changed we at Wolfgang Digital now approach the set up, opt of our paid search accounts.
So, I’m going to invite my colleague Ciaran up on the stage to show us some of the ways we’re using audiences in GA to drive results for our Clients.
Monetate
Add some research on FB conversions rates
Interrupting their experience
Facebook audience on Facebook
Analytics Audience
AdWords audience
Separate slides
Facebook audience on Facebook
Analytics Audience
AdWords audience
Separate slides
Facebook audience on Facebook
Analytics Audience
AdWords audience
Separate slides
Facebook audience on Facebook
Analytics Audience
AdWords audience
Separate slides
Jen some images
Customer insights – there is a study
Customer insights – there is a study
Customer insights – there is a study
New v Returning is meaningless
Spending 2.5x
AOV nearly Double
Screen grab from adWords
Screen grab from adWords
Jen
Focus on - Repeat customers
€52 all visitors
€112
€52 all visitors
€111 for RLSA
AOV: 151Conv rate: 1.84 v. 11.24%
Cost Per conv: 7.79 v 2.60
ROAS: 18.68 v 42.85
AdWords Problems – Darrel Slide
AdWords Problems – Darrel Slide
AdWords Problems – Darrel Slide
Thanks Ciaran, some great practical applications of using audiences in GA.
So, I just want to delve into why these tactics work
why does this strategy work so well?
It works because it solves the three problems we discussed earlier.
Firstly, in instances where our budget isn't sufficiently large enough to cover the market
We can be even more strategic about how we assign our budget across campaigns
For example, here we’ve split our campaigns and seperated customers (ie converters) into one campaign.
In tis case, we’ve defined an audience in GA for users that have previously bought for us
We assing budget across these users to get 100% IS – No IS to budget
We then accept some budget loss for non-customers.
we want our communications with customers and potential customers to be as elegant as possible.
Not everyone we’re remarkeitng to should see the same comminication
For example, for user that arrive to our site via our FB campaign,
We’re collecting these users as an audience and tailoring our message to them
Having one KPI applied globally to an account doesn’t make sense anymore. Whenter it’s ROAS, cost/conv. CPA or whatever
Applying a global kpi to your adwords account ignores the fundamental difference between Customer retention and acquisition.
In this example we split our account and KPIS between customers
The reality is the Client is willing to spend more acquiring a customer, so by using GA lists and segmenting our campaigns in AdWords
Our optimisation strategy can reflect this.
ipsos
Lastly, the targeting we have allows us to refine targeting.
IF you know your customer as well as you should, you can build that persona in facebook, collect them as an audience in GA and target them on search
So RLSA and GA audience integration has fundamentally changed how we approach adwords camapigns,
But there was a recent equally important story that makes audience targeting even more exciting
But before I jump into to that, I have to credit another marty
September 27th
This is Marty Waintuarp and I was lucky enough to see him speak at MOZCon this year.
Marty is half raving lunatic and half digital prophet
He said something that stuck with me.
When I think of assetets, I think of something you own like a tangible asset….such as a building
But even with intagable assets, you still own them.
I was uncomfortable with the thought of audiences in GA as brand assets,
Because their existence is still based on cookies.
But these can be cleared or deleted…and their goes your audience
For reasons I don’t want to get into right now, I regularly delete my cookies
Also, tracking across devices with cookies is impossible, so you loose some really valuallbe information
….but you own an email list…that’s actually a tangible asset.
So on Sept 27th Google joined the first party data party …with customer match.
Google have never been great at naming products, that peaked at Google.
I don’t mind that hover boards haven’t replaced sakte boards in 2015, I’m more excteid about been
Able to user first party data in Google AdWords
With Customer match your list size needs to be greater than 1,000
But what if you don’t have the list you target isn’t that size?
There is a hack
We have an email newsletter list mainly Clients, but the match was initally 300 – 400
So we went through a process of adding fake email addresses until we got reached > 1000
You can see here, it only took 2 itterations
And sure enough on the third try Google accepted the list
We had a very specific reason for wanting to tarhet this list.
You see it’s mainly comprised on Clients,