Richard Thurston - Digital Marketing Manager at Macmillan - explains how they will be using RLSA and Audience information from Google to improve paid search advertising effectiveness. A client's view on the implications of implementing RLSA. Presented during the agenda21 "Paid Search Gets Personal" event April 2014 - call 020 7036 7000
Macmillan has loads of audiences. –This is one of our biggest challenges. We did a big piece of research with Public zone to understand who our audience were customers wanted from us. From this we developed our online profiles, and everything we do on site get built with these audience needs in mind.However…This is small scale, survey data. It is frozen in time, which is a big issue if we want to evolve who we target. We also use GA and onsite surveys to understand our audience better. As an organisation, we recognise the need to plan around audiences and over the last few years, the organisation has changed to that our teams are structured around different audiences.
We can use audience to improve the way people get and give support.
We run around 30 marketing campaigns per year, most of which have a PPC element. All of our activity can broadly split between Get and Give We have a core monthly PPC budget which we use to cover mainly cancer information terms and This presents us with some very big challenges…There are a huge number of audiences we need to appeal to. There are over 200 types of cancer and we need to be there for everyone. We are spread too thinly across too many keywordsWe are in desperate need of a way to better prioritise our work.
We have a lot of digital aims and objectives at Macmillan. One of those, and the one my team is tasked with it to be the most recognisable and innovative charity in the digital marketing space. PPC activity to deliver against specific campaign objectives, and to be there for people who need our support. The reason we’re excited about re-marketing for search is it helps us deliver against this goal. Recognisable – because it gives us increased visibility among the audience groups who need our support the most Innovative – because one thing innovation definitely should mean is a willingness to test new opportunities when they present themselves.
We spend a portion of our core PPC budget on donation related terms. This brings in a slow but steady stream of donations. Our donation pathway consists of 4 stages in total, and we see around 19% of initial traffic converting. The biggest drop off of is the first stage as you would expect, but from there, we loose a further 40% of our traffic. These people may have been put off for usability reasons, but they are still in the market to donate to us, and so are extremely valuable. By raising bids for this audience group, we could significantly increase donations.
Re marketing for search could also be very valuable for us when targeting people who need support from us. In general, we avoid other types of re-marketing for this audience, because we need to be sensitive to their situation. However, this allows us to only appear for audiences who have expressed intent. We know from the research that PZ did that people’s information and support needs change significantly during their cancer journey. Often people are not aware what their support needs are. This technology allows us to change our PPC ad copy to reflect the stage they are at in that journey.
We have loads of really cool events. Most of these have PPC campaigns which drive registrations, but they are all treated separately. In some cases the audiences are quite similar, but we are currently not using the audience data we get from one to inform the other. If we created one audience list for “challenge events”, we could increase our bids for audiences who have taken part or shown an interest in our events previously. We can potentially use this as an opportunity to merge budgets and streamline / solidify our activity to promote events. We can also increase bids or change messaging for audiences who got to stage 2 of the registration process for multiple events.
We’re recently moved to A21 We have to appreciate that we are a challenging client – Loads of campaigns, very small budgets. This opportunity adds a layer of complexity to the agency’s work, and we need to understand and respect the fact that if we’re going to make the most of this, they will need to devote time to it, away from BAU. We need to agree priorities We need to keep our other agencies informed of what we’re doing. We are conducting a full review of our PPC activity this month, to make sure we have the most efficient structure in place. The data we have can inform the work our other agencies do (media and creative). We need to make sure there is open and honest communication between them.
The increased level of data and insight available also has implications for us internallyWe need to analyse and communicate this data to internal teams, and make people aware of the benefits.
Smarter and more efficient marketing and better results. Better understanding and insight into our audience.Influences the role we play in the organisation.Ultimately it makes it easier for our audiences to give and get support from us.