How the AdWords Budget Update is Impacting Advertisers

Back in October Google announced they were making some changes, and campaigns would now be eligible to spend up to twice their daily budget. Here we discuss the background on that change, feedback from around the industry, and how it has impacted Synapse clients.

The Update:

Beginning October 4, 2017, Google announced their AdWords budget update, which stated  that campaigns would now be eligible to spend double your set budget. This was a good thing they argued, as some days internet traffic is stronger than others, and Google would proactively adjust for any fluctuations in traffic. Overdelivery – allowing up to 2 times the clicks per day that your budget allows- would result in fewer missed opportunities for leads.

How will Google prevent overspend if as of now campaigns can spend twice your budget? They calculate based on your daily spend times the average number of days in a month (365 days/12 months = 30.417). Google also regularly recalculates, so if you get incremental budget later in the month, they’ll adjust based on the new set daily budgets. “At the end of the month” says Google “despite those unpredictable waves, you’ll find your costs at right where you expected them to be.”

Industry Reaction:

Initial reactions to Google’s update were not seemingly positive. This was a large jump from the previous 20% potential overspend for AdWords campaigns. Many felt that Google was making it more difficult for them to properly budget accounts, and had major concerns over various budgeting scenarios.

More recently, Ginny Marvin posted a 2x budget change article on Search Engine Land which outlined some of the responses she heard from various industry contacts. The more positive responses seemed to stem from advertisers that were using additional 3^rd party tools for bid strategies as well as more robust budget management tools. Negative feedback for the 2x budget AdWords update included advertisers that felt this update caused a need for more time spent on budget monitoring. Spend issues noted were particularly prominent with new campaigns, and any automated campaigns. Some even had their entire budget spent by google in the first few days of launching a new campaign, and exceptionally high CPCs in campaigns such as the Smart Google Display Network campaign.

Additionally, advertisers had concerns in accounts where they saw strong performance on certain days, and proactively pushed or pulled back budgets to reflect those trends. Google might claim their formula would automatically adjust for that, but as SEM experts, should our M.O. really be to let an ad serving platform do the thinking?  Seems like a conflict of interest.

Synapse Reaction:

Similar to Ginny Marvin’s feedback from various advertisers, Synapse has seen mixed results with this Google update. Some accounts have been impacted very little, and for those accounts we’ve barely noticed any shift in spending or traffic with this 2x budget update. Other accounts have been much more difficult to manage in terms of budget, and it has required additional operational hours to continuously check pacing to ensure we aren’t in danger of overspend. Many small-to-mid-sized businesses have strict budget limitations on a monthly basis, shifts in geographical priority, incremental dollars applied during the month, and some have budget reduced mid-month. Some want to pace evenly throughout the course of the month, and some require uncapped campaigns early on, and then get capped later in the month. Add in accounts that have 100+ campaigns, and all of these factors make the Google 2x budget update more difficult to adjust for on a regular basis.

In certain accounts, Synapse has seen exceptionally high spend early in the month. Google would say to this, leave the budgets as-is throughout the course of the month and we’ll charge you for average monthly spend and credit you anything above that. But Synapse typically tries to keep campaigns as uncapped as possible, to control spend at the CPC level. This ensures any impressions you’re losing are due to rank and not to budget. To keep these campaigns uncapped, Synapse often sets daily budgets higher than they should be, and make bid and other optimizations to bring spend down. Google would not be calculating based on CPC adjustments however, they’d be calculating a monthly budget based on what daily budgets we set. To adhere to monthly budget restrictions, Synapse will often start scaling back certain bids and certain campaigns towards the end of the month. With Google’s update, Synapse now often needs to be even more aggressive and proactive in scaling campaigns back towards the end of the month to ensure no overspend.

It is no longer as simple as calculating how much budget is left, and dividing by the number of days left. It’s a guessing game as to how much Google will exceed its budget this time. While we used to adjust throughout the month and scale back very slowly, now campaigns are becoming abruptly capped, and our clients may be missing out on key leads as a result.

In Conclusion:

There have been both positive and negative reactions to this Google update, but ultimately the consensus seems to be that this change has made advertiser budgeting and pacing much more difficult. While we understand Google says they will not charge for any overspend, we cannot rely on a calculation after the month is over to determine whether we overspent our clients’ budgets. We need to instead, proactively ensure there is no possibility of overspending. That, after all, is part of why our clients are trusting us to invest their dollars to begin with. The purpose of a cap is that it should not and can not be exceeded. If Google is willing to spend up to twice that cap, it seems to defeat its own purpose. It may benefit Google in the long run to look into an alternative budgeting solution that will work better for the industry as a whole.

If you’d like to learn more about how Synapse SEM can help you improve your paid search strategy, please complete our contact form or call us at 781-591-0752.

Google Launches Automated Call Extensions on Mobile

One of the more recent updates within Google AdWords is automated call extensions for landing pages that prominently feature phone numbers.  This update was announced in early January, and just rolled out last month.  As many advertisers were notified, the update by Google is intended to make it easier for users to make calls to businesses through their mobile phones, and will allow for more detailed reporting insights on call performance.  Google stated that this year, mobile search engines are expected to drive around 33 billion click-to calls to businesses globally (19% more calls than from mobile landing pages alone).  As Synapse has learned with many of our B2B clients, more and more lead-gen companies are relying on marrying call data with online form data to determine their total number of prospective opportunities.  This update by Google will make it even easier for advertisers to properly set up click-to-call moving forward.

What’s Changing?

First and foremost, if you do not already have call extensions set up within your account, Google will begin automatically creating call extensions based on prominent phone numbers listed on your landing page.  Previously, you would create call extensions manually through the call extensions tab.  You could set up your business phone number, or a dynamic phone number and have Google automatically generate numbers and forward to your business.  Have phone numbers that are dynamically generated?

Not to worry.  Google will only automatically pull in phone numbers that are not dynamic in nature.  If you’re already running call extensions, Google will leave everything as-is.  If for any reason you do not wish to have click-to-call set up within your account, make sure to go to your call extensions tab and remove any that Google may have already created for you (the update was activated on February 6^th).

What else may be impacted?

Along with the automated call extensions, which limits time manually updating ad extensions and minimizes room for error, Google also noted that there would be more robust reporting.  Not only will you see the number of calls per day as you used to, but also call duration as well as start and end times.  Additionally, Google will provide the caller area code for each phone call, and whether the call connected.  Advertisers can also set up call conversion tracking to see which campaigns are driving the most valuable calls.

What other options are there outside of automated call extensions?

Some third-party solutions such as DialogTech and CallRail could be an alternative solution to ensure you’re tracking client leads all the way through to opportunities and sales.  While automated call extensions offer more robust insights than the original call extensions, third party solutions may be a great alternative to ensure you’re able to track all the way through the funnel.  One caveat to these solutions is that you’ll need to be sure you have sufficient volume – without a certain number of clicks in each ad group, some of these solutions won’t work properly.

While there are mixed reviews out there right now on Google’s latest automated call extension update, one thing is for certain: Google’s push for updates specific to mobile-advertising is only getting more aggressive as the months progress.  We fully expect to see additional mobile-focused updates come out from Google in the upcoming months, hopefully allowing for more robust insights in terms of tracking all the way through the funnel.

If you’d like to learn more about how Synapse SEM can help you improve your paid search or organic strategy, please email us at sales@synapsesem.com or call us at 781-591-0752.

Are Slow Site Load Times Crippling Your Digital Marketing Programs?

Sluggish site load times are a core finding on over 50% of the Technical SEO audits we perform for our clients.  When we present our clients the data and show them Google’s Page Speed Insights, we’re often asked, “Is it worth investing to improve these load times?”.

Even in a world with limited budgets and back-logged internal resources, our answer is increasingly becoming, “Yes.”

Improving site load times is an easy task to push off.  Optimized load times are not prerequisites to running search engine marketing programs.  If you want to spend money on search with a slow site, Google or Bing will happily take your money.  On the SEO front, content development initiatives often take priority over the technical work required to fix poor load times. But as the competition has literally ‘quickened,’ the ramifications of a slow site have become more and more pronounced.

Poor site load times have many detrimental effects on website performance, but several stand out as the most problematic:

1. The User Engagement and Revenue Impact – Slow load times are a major driver behind user bounces and exits. “58% of shoppers will leave a website if it takes more than 3 seconds to load.”  For Amazon, for example, “a 100 millisecond improvement in load time [is equivalent to] a 1% revenue increase.” These stats demonstrate a clear connection between page speed and conversions and ultimately ROI.
2. The SEO Impact – Load times are becoming an increasingly important algorithmic signal for Google. Google has been open that page load times are a major signal in their ranking algorithm for computers, but they’ve recently announced that the same signal will soon affect mobile rankings as well.  Furthermore, research has shown that “slow page speed means that search engines can crawl fewer pages using their allocated crawl budget, and this could negatively affect your indexation.”
3. The SEM Impact—As stated above, Google and Bing will let you run search ads despite your site’s load time issues. That doesn’t mean, however, that there are not repercussions to poor load times in an SEM account.  Landing page experience is a factor in determining keyword Quality Score.  A component of Google’s landing page experience assessment is site load times.  Google explains, “If it takes too long for your website to load when someone clicks on your ad, they’re more likely to give up and leave your website. This unwelcome behavior can signal to Google that your landing page experience is poor, which could negatively impact your Ad Rank. That’s why you want to make sure your landing page load time is up to speed.”

From conversion rate, to SEO rankings, to SEM ROI, site load times are having a major impact on the performance of your digital marketing programs.  Have you pushed off improving site speed?  If so, it’s time to get into action and make site speed a priority and a core KPI in your digital strategy.

To learn more about improving your site’s load times and implementing a technically sound SEO strategy, please contact us today!

4 Considerations When Determining Your PPC and SEO Budgets

One of the most common questions that arises in the world of digital marketing is, ‘how do I most effectively allocate my digital marketing budget?’ This question comes up frequently amongst our clients, and unfortunately there is no cut and dry response.  The answer to this question depends upon many factors, but for the purpose of this article (as well as our readers’ sanity) we’ll narrow our thoughts down to 4 important factors to consider when determining how heavily to invest in paid search and SEO.

1) Are you an established site with reasonable domain authority, or are you a completely new business?

If you are a business with a completely new site, chances are there isn’t a ton of awareness out there about your brand.  You also likely don’t have much SEO credibility, which means you’re probably not showing prominently in Google for your key terms.  To start generating leads or sales, the best bet is to begin advertising through paid search, where you can pay for immediate visibility for your most important keywords.   Because SEO improvements take much longer to take effect, paid search is your best option.  If you are a firm that is already established, with strong rankings (which would mean you’re ranking on page 1-2 on critical keywords), a more even investment could be made across paid search and SEO. This will allow you to capture leads quickly through PPC, but also continue expanding upon the organic keyword set you’re currently ranking on.

2) What does your timeline look like?

The next most logical question to consider is your timeline.  How quickly do you need to gain these leads or sales?  Do you have an upcoming deadline and are you behind on your goals for lead volume?  If you have set goals to hit a certain number of leads within the next 6-12 months, invest in paid search.  Ranking organically can take 6-12 months or longer, and by then you’ll just be starting to rank (and definitely won’t be hitting your goals).  If you have more time to spare and are more concerned with longer term lead generation, investing in organic is a safe bet to ensure you build domain authority to get your site to rank.  If you have short-term AND long-term goals you must meet, then investing in both channels is critical.

3) Are you profit or revenue focused?

Is your business more focused on profitability or revenue growth?  This is a tricky one, and timing, as well as how established your site is, definitely come into play here.  SEO and PPC can work with either of these goals, however SEO is a better long-term solution to driving efficient profit (you’re not paying for organic clicks, after all).  With PPC, you have more control over tracking and optimizing based on ROI, but it will be the more expensive option in the long run. If your site is already well-established organically, you may be able to grow your bottom line by investing more aggressively in paid search.  For lead generation, paid search will be the better option if you want a certain number of leads and want them quickly. For longer-term lead-gen, you’ll want to invest more heavily in SEO, since that’s where most of the click traffic goes.  Your KPIs are critical to consider, but timing and current positioning within organic results also play into this decision.

4) How niche is your business?

While paid search is an extremely effective and profitable channel most the time, certain ‘niche’ businesses have markets that are so specific or narrow, they may not fare so well in the world of paid search.  Businesses that require mainly long tail keywords will not generate a substantial amount of search volume.  In many cases, shorter-tail terms aren’t specific enough for these businesses, and will lead to high costs for too many unqualified leads.  In the case of a business with a niche market, SEO may be a better avenue for investment, to ensure you are gaining visibility on these same short-tail terms, without the high costs associated with unqualified traffic.  If these happen to be terms that seem too broad, it’s not as much of a risk because you aren’t paying for the click with SEO.  Relevancy is always important to consider, however it will pay off more in the long run to target broader terms that actually generate volume organically, than to run paid marketing for inefficient short-tail terms or low volume long-tail terms.

Though these are just a handful of considerations for determining your search marketing budget allocation, we hope this helps you get started in thinking about the best avenue for your company to take.

If you’d like to learn more about how Synapse SEM can help you improve your paid search or organic strategy, please complete our contact form or call us at 781-591-0752.

What You Need to Know About Google’s Expanded Text Ads

In our latest blog post regarding expanded text ads (ETAs), we talked about the expected outcomes of running expanded text ads within your campaigns.  Now that we’ve had these ads live for a few months for several of our clients, we found some surprising results and unexpected outcomes.

When first launching this new ad format across our high volume ad groups back in July, we were not seeing the results we expected.  CTR was not significantly improving (and in some cases they were worse), conversion rate was lower, and most curiously – impressions for our expanded text ads were lower than our standard ads (even though we were set on indefinite rotation).  Given all the hype Google had created around this beta, we were understandably disappointed.

Our team spent some time brainstorming different ideas as to why performance was down for our ETA ads.  Were people confused by this new layout and unsure of whether they wanted to engage with these new ad formats?  Did the ETAs look too busy with the extensive text and double headlines?  Perhaps the display URLs that were automatically pulling in were not perfectly optimized in terms of URL structure, and thus looked strange within the ETA ads.  The performance indicator that truly had us baffled, however, was the low impression split for ETAs.  Unable to explain the discrepancy in impressions, our team did what any search team in crisis has learned to do: we called Google.

The Google representatives we spoke to confirmed that prior to July 26, ETAs were not eligible to show 100% of the time.  Up through July 26, Google had gradually increased the percentage of impressions that ETAs were eligible to show for (i.e. 20%, then 50%, etc.).  On July 26, the update was made that allowed ETAs to show up for 100% of impressions, just like standard ads.  This piece of information made a big difference in how we were analyzing our ad performance.  Below, we’ve outlined the differences in ETA versus standard ad performance both before and after the update on July 26, when the ETAs became eligible to show 100% of the time.

Impression volume and CTR

Prior to the update in July, impressions were down for ETAs by 25-30% versus impressions for our standard ads.  CTR for standard ads was also not too far off from the ETA CTR, with less than a 15% difference between the two.  This was not in line with the expectations Google had set, which was an average 20% improvement in CTR for ETAs versus standard ads.  It wasn’t until after the switch on July 26 that impressions evened out for ETA ads (and in some cases even outweighed standard ad impressions).  CTR also improved for ETA ads after the update in July, (21% above the CTR for standard ads) finally meeting the expectations that Google had set.

Conversion Rate

Prior to the update in July which allowed ETAs to be eligible for 100% of auctions, conversion rate was down 5% for ETAs versus standard ads for our higher volume clients and ad groups.  Post-July update, ETA conversion rate actually outperformed standard ads by 10%.  While Google originally had not made any promises regarding shifts in conversion rate, it’s great to see that the longer ads are leading to a stronger rate of conversion.

Cost Per Click

Before the July update, ETAs still had more efficient CPCs, however the margin between ETA CPCs and standard ad CPCs only improved with the July update.  Prior to July, ETA CPCs were 11% more efficient than standard ads for our highest volume clients.  Once the switch was made in July, ETA CPCs were 17% more efficient.  Why could this be happening?  Potentially due to improvements in Quality Score with ETA ads now that more characters are allowed, which allows advertisers to more easily incorporate relevant keywords into their messaging.

There are still some mixed reviews out there on how expanded text ads are performing versus standard ads, but across our clients we have certainly seen improvements now that all ETAs are 100% eligible to show.  With Google permanently rolling out ETAs in October, it’s important for advertisers to begin analyzing performance on their expanded ads as soon as possible.  Synapse clients have certainly seen improvements, but it remains to be seen whether improved ETA performance will be able to stand the test of time.  If you tested ETAs when they first launched and were disappointed by the results, consider retesting.  The initial issues surrounding impression share have been resolved, and we’re seeing in many cases even better impression share for ETAs vs standard ads.

If you’d like to learn more about how Synapse SEM can help you improve your paid search strategy, please complete our contact form or call us at 781-591-0752.

Consider These Three Things To Succeed with Report Automation

Reporting, some folks refer to it as a necessary evil, and others call it a fundamental tool for business. No matter what your thoughts are on the matter, if you are reading this, it is because your reporting efforts are taking too much time, costing too much money, or are getting too complex. Hence, you have decided to look into efficient alternatives to make your organization’s reporting efforts easier. You may not know where to start or what to do, but you are not alone.

Part of my responsibilities in my current role is to help surpass current operational efficiency while contributing to the organization’s overall commitment to our customer needs and goals. Our reporting mission is not to provide a one-size-fits-all type of report but one that is carefully customized to each of our clients. This means that I am responsible for designing, developing, and testing our report automation efforts for every account that we manage.

Since I have already started with this project, I decided to share a some of my experiences in the hopes that they either guide you or help you save time. The main thing you must know is that you do not need a massive budget to make reporting automation work. You can make your automated reports as elaborate or as simple as you wish, and your outcome can be a very cool dashboard or a very insightful Excel file. Therefore, because the possibilities are endless, I decided to make these tips as general as possible while sometimes leveraging two of my daily go-to data sources to illustrate some of my points. Without further ado, these are the three key things you should consider:

1. What are you trying to accomplish?

The design of your automated report is going to be directly proportional to the desired goal you wish to accomplish. There are several approaches to pull data, analyze it, and present it. Thus, an automated report whose goal is to minimize reporting turnaround times could look and interact substantially differently than one that aims to maximize accuracy or that will interact as a dashboard-like output. Therefore, in order to build the solution that fit your needs, you and your team need to ask: “What are we trying to accomplish? How are we measuring success?”

The most common answers to this question fall within the following verticals:

• Turnaround Efficiency
• Accuracy
• Compliance & Monitoring of KPIs
• Data Integration

Moreover, the more granular these answers are, the more effortless it will be to develop an efficient solution. It is important to understand that apart from the goal, a clear understanding of all team members and stakeholders of how the final output should look, feel, display, etc. will also be of tremendous value in the development stage.

2. Have you considered how business requirements may impact your report in the future?

Business is ever changing and, consequently, reporting is as well. When making the design, potential short-term and long-term changes must be considered and consulting with someone who has prior experience with the particular stakeholder or industry may be very helpful to get a sense of how regularly and what type of changes are usually experienced. For instance, in the PPC space, stakeholders often shift their strategies, which entails launching, pausing, and replacing campaigns, ad groups, copy, and search terms – this can happen at any given point, and thus, reports need to be modified to display the active data. Proactively understanding changing business environments and integrating these into the foundational design of an automated report provide you with the flexibility and dynamism to adapt to unforeseen changes.

There is always going to be an unavoidable instance when new development efforts will have to take place to cater to the evolving needs in question. In prior opportunities, even with the most thorough design and use-case scenario preparation, I have witnessed how new business needs and business questions mean almost an entirely new deployment of the reporting infrastructure. Therefore, I always recommend thoroughly documenting the design process, specifically, any unique features or needs that have to be implemented, so that when a request for a major redesign comes in, you and your team will be able to leverage what you or someone else has done in the past. This can contribute to significant time savings and a much more tailored solution.

Keep in mind that with the documentation process, you should be able to respond to these questions for any step of your report:

• Are all steps documented in full detail? If we were to revisit this design in six months, would we be able to remember where we left off?
• Is there any particular step that is particular to this report? If so, have we documented how we overcame this challenge?
• Is there another alternative to get the same result? If there is, have we tested it to determine which one may be better?
• What tests can we carry out to ensure the design works?
• After the data analysis, are there any gaps or questions left unanswered? (If your answer is yes, you should revisit the drawing board and do the necessary to close the gaps.)
• Could you explain your design with a story? (This will help you see if your data relationship makes sense.)

3. Have you looked into the quality, structure, complexities, and limitations of your data source(s)?

According to Google Trends, over the past five years, the number of searches for “Data Quality”, “Big Data”, and “Data Cleansing” have increased by 50% year over year (YoY). We all have heard about the power and uses that data can have in the workplace, social media, sports, human behavior analysis, etc. Most of us have seen some type of dashboard and even heard of visualization tools such as Tableau or Google Data Studio. However, not everyone knows the work that it takes to gather the data to use these tools properly.

One of the reasons for this is that every company has its own strategy and design for their OLAP cubes, databases, overall data sources, etc. Another reason is that none of the processes that happen behind the scenes are as engaging as a dashboard. Nevertheless, if you are looking to eventually have or maximize the power of these tools, you must not ignore your data sources.

To illustrate my point, let’s talk about two data sources that our reports tend to leverage: Google Analytics and Google AdWords. While in essence, these two are complimentary platforms and were built by the same company, they do not operate equally in a number of different scenarios, and each presents its own unique challenges. Thus, if you were asked to build an automated report that used both of these sources to show a client how his or her PPC and SEO efforts were performing, how would you be able to seamlessly integrate both of them for your stakeholder?

You have to create or leverage a data relationship. There are several ways to make this work, but I recommend using the following questions as a general guideline to help you determine your next steps:

• Are the data sources inclusive? If so, how are they linked together?
• What metrics are you trying to report on? Is there a possibility that both sources contain the same metric with similar or different results? If they are different, which one will you choose?
• Are there any primary/unique ids that you could leverage to get more granular attribution? (I highly discourage anyone from using alphabetic fields as IDs to create data relationships.)
• Are there any fields that only one of the sources has that could impact the quality or accuracy of your results?
• How will you test the accuracy of the information? (This is particularly important since tools, like Google Adwords, change throughout the day and can generally present results that differ by up to 5%, depending on when you pull the data.)
• Is there any manual entry involved with the process? What steps can you take to minimize human error?

Once you are able to determine the answers to these questions, you will be able to design an action plan that minimizes the vulnerabilities of each source. Finally, in some instances, you will find no relationships in the data, and you must find a way to create one. For instance, if you added to your report additional information from an organic rankings tool and/or social media performance, there will most likely not be a link between these sources and Google Adwords or Analytics. If you find yourself in this situation, you will then have to build a layer where you integrate these sources as you see fit, keeping in mind that, although there is no nexus amongst themselves, they all still are results that pertain to the same client or stakeholder.

I hope that you are able to leverage this information into your reporting automation efforts. From personal experience, being prepared to address these questions before diving into a report automation project will help you maximize the efforts invested, create a better final product, and facilitate management discussions so that you can move seamlessly with your process. Remember that you should always have a defined goal, be able to document and explain your design considering an ever-changing business environment, and finally understand the peculiarities of the sources you are leveraging for the report.

Happy Reporting!