March 2021 Product Updates

SA360

Responsive Search Ads

Amidst the many privacy related articles that Google has been releasing, you may have missed the announcement about Responsive Search Ads. These are now the default ad types in Google Ads.
This doesn’t mean that Expanded Text Ads cannot be created anymore, but with all things shifting to a more dynamic nature in Search, it shouldn’t be a surprise if there were another announcement that removed control over ETA

RSA formats allow advertisers to create one ad with multiple headlines and descriptions. Google Ads test different combinations and learn which combinations perform best. This approach allows ads to closely match potential customer’s search, thereby driving relevance to those searches, and naturally seeing an uplift in campaign performance.

If you are an advertiser with hundreds of ad groups, then utilising SA360’s Ad Builder feature will assist with automating this at scale across your account. For more info, do get in touch with a member on the team. 

Auction Time Bidding
Onto the next topic, following the ‘Auction Time Bidding series’ from the last newsletter, we will be discussing sanity checks for ATB, post implementation in bid strategies.

Aim: Keep track of progress, and react as needed

-          Learning : 7+ days:  Do not make manual changes. The learning period will take 7 days + conversion delay length. Check the “Auction

Time Status” column to understand when auction time is fully enabled, and avoid making manual changes during the learning phase.

-          Be prepared for performance changes.

Auction time bidding aims to maximise your conversions or revenue against your target (CPA or ROAS). This means that spend and CPC will increase as conversion rates and volumes improve, as long as the system hits your target.

-          Automatic campaign level bid targets

Auction time bidding will automatically create campaign level bid targets and portfolios in Google Ads. The system will make regular changes to these as part of optimisation.

-          Create labels and rules to monitor performance

Campaign / biddable item level - what rules will help you? E.g. alerts for cost or performance big changes.

-          Check bid strategy overview columns to monitor health

Add columns like Conversions Due/Conversions Total, Bid strategy CPA/ROAS, Avg. Target CPA to monitor bid strategy performance, and understand changes in your account.

-          Review click-aligned stats Bid strategy overview displays click-aligned stats.

DV360

Line Item Troubleshooter now available for YouTube & partners line items.

You can now use line item troubleshooter to diagnose spend issues with YouTube & partners line items. The tool allows you to see filtered impressions for bids, budget, frequency, and creative rejection reasons. For more detail, see this part of the Help Centre.

 Check on creative approval and eligibility in the new Creative status tab

To make it easier to troubleshoot creative issues, all creative details related to creative review, feedback, line item eligibility, and policy information have been moved to the new Creative status tab. This should help reduce the clutter on the creative details page and give you one place to go to for creative troubleshooting. For a summary of the changes made - click here.

 Geo location targets deprecation

On February 1, 2021 Display & Video 360’s targetable geo locations received an update. With this update some geo locations were deprecated since they are no longer commonly used to refer to a geographic area. Line items that are exclusively targeting these locations will be paused. For more detail, including a link to the full list of deprecated locations, click here.

Campaign Manager 360

Campaign Manager 360 now supports direct upload of rich media banners, historically these forms of creative had to come from a Studio link.

Now Campaign Manager 360 can detect rich media events within banner creatives that have been uploaded, when this occurs the asset will be categorized as “Rich Media” and will begin to incur the advanced display serving fee to support the serving of its Rich Media elements.

Users attempting to upload a rich media asset to a standard display creative type will now receive an error, instructing them to instead select a rich media creative type.

Event Tag assignment coming to the Campaign Spreadsheet in Campaign Manager 360

Campaign Manager 360 Campaign Spreadsheets are receiving some new columns! As of the 2nd March, you will now find the following columns added to your campaign spreadsheets allowing support for event tag assignment:

• Applied Impression Event Tag IDs

• Applied Click Event Tag ID

• Creative Assignment Event Tags Enabled

It’s now easier than ever for users to apply and edit their event tags in bulk! If you already have a templated sheet you use for this process, don’t panic, the campaign spreadsheet uploads will still function correctly without these columns included, but Google does advise that any processes are updated to try and include these moving forward.

February 2021 Product Updates

SA360

Let’s talk about Google’s update to Match Types announced on the 4th of this month.

With this new update, BMM usage is being sunset, with Phrase match type being upgraded to behave similarly to BMMs, as they currently do.
Exact match keywords will become more predictable in terms of keyword to search query mapping.
Broad match keywords will drive fewer irrelevant impressions by incorporating incremental signals such as landing page, and other keywords in the ad group to determine if a query is irrelevant.

What would the timeline for changes be?

§  From mid February to April:  BMM and phrase match types will start functioning similarly. Both will have the reach of BMM, but the control of phrase Match. During this three month period, only eight languages will be affected English, German, Spanish, French, Italian, Dutch, Portuguese, and Russian

§  June to July: The process is repeated for all remaining languages

§  July onwards: Marketers will no longer be able to create new BMM keywords. Existing keywords will remain in the account but will function in the way described above, unlike how BMM functions now The only remaining match types available will be exact, phrase, and broad.

How should you prepare for these changes?

§  Take time to analyse your keywords by match type over the next few months. Monitor & adapt if you start to see gaps in query matching & performance.

§  Continue to use Negatives. None of these changes affect negative keywords. Negative keywords will continue to work as they currently do.

§  If you are thinking of uploading new keywords, consider Exact & Phrase match coverage. Continue to be wary of Broad match, particularly if you haven’t tested them with Smart bidding.

The next topic I’d like to revisit in a ‘Series’ format is Auction Time Bidding in SA360.
Over the course of this series, I’ll break down what ATB is, the pre-requisites for setting it up, how it integrates with Google Ads, Best Practices, where ATB can be applied, and more.

So what is Auction Time Bidding?

Auction-Time Bidding is a Google Ads Smart Bidding feature that analyses several contextual signals (such as device, browser type, location, time of day, remarketing list and more) in real time, in an auction by auction basis, to set each keyword bid to display your ad in the best position and maximise performance.

According to this source, 89.5k Google searches occur in a second. Which just means, ATB carries out an intense decision making process utilising every signal available to the keyword, in a fraction of a second, to make it eligible to enter the auction.

How does Google Ads and SA360 work together?

An SA360 bid strategy analyses the campaigns in its portfolio, every 6 hours, to set keyword bid or and set or recommend bid adjustments.

This bid is passed back to Google Ads, to combine with contextual signals to enter the auction in real time.

The SA360 bid strategy includes auction-time bid in its analysis to set each campaign’s ROI targets to achieve the bid strategy goal.

As ATB is available in Google Ads, in order to optimise to true Floodlight conversions performance, the bid strategy’s Floodlight Conversions are shared with Google Ads. This enables both bidding systems to use the same conversion data.
The shared Floodlight conversions are referred to as ‘Conversions Actions’ in Google Ads.

Next: Best Practice for ATB Pre-warm up of Advertiser

§  Week 0:  Once Floodlight conversions have been pushed through to Google Ads, you are sort of kickstarting that exchange of data flow between Google Ads and SA360.
Create 1 ATB strategy with 1 paused Campaign (or a live Campaign with no keywords)
ATB will be activated to initiate the data flow process

§  Week 3-4: Check ‘Auction-Time Status’ in the ATB bid strategy.
Apply full campaign set that are to be managed by that ATB strategy, and correct targets where necessary.

For clarifications on any of the processes up to this stage, please reach out to a member of the team.
More on ATB in the next newsletter.

DV360

Enhance your TrueView for Action line items with Sitelinks. Sitelink extensions take people to specific pages on your site (for example a product, or store hours). When someone clicks or taps your links, they go directly to what they want to know or buy. Sitelink extensions give you the flexibility to change link text and URLs to keep them up to date for sales and special offers, without the need to create a new ad. There is a scheduling option also, giving you control to specify the dates, days of week, or times of day your sitelinks are eligible to show.

Sitelink extensions appear below eligible ads that play before, during, or after another video on YouTube. Note that you'll need at least two set up for them to appear. You can set them up within the Resources section of your Advertiser, in the same area as Location & Affiliate Extensions.

For more information on setting these up, click here.

Campaign Manager

Privacy is the word on everyone’s lips here at the Tech Partnerships team. With the updates regarding third party cookies looming large on the horizon, we’re ensuring all of our clients have done everything they can to prepare.

In regards to Campaign Manager, this particular futureproofing comes in the form of Floodlights, and more specifically, updating the rules and triggers around floodlights by onboarding and implementing Google’s new Consent Mode. This new feature (in beta) is an intricately designed set of scripts that allow your Google Tag Manager, Analytics & Google Ads to manage tag behaviour based on user’s consent. When your users affirm their consent by interacting with a consent banner or something similar, this sends a signal to your tags to continue firing as normal. On the flipside of that interaction, should the user not give consent, this would send a message to your tags to stop collecting data. You can even build this as region specific, depending on where your users are in the world. Taking this step will enable you to not only be on the front foot with the ongoing changes, but also gives you a chance to audit your Tag setup. 

Another fantastic way to easily upgrade your digital marketing strategy considering these changes is to look at Data Driven Attribution. Attribution usually works by stitching together ad exposures, clicks (or sessions), and conversion events. On websites, this usually leverages a mix of third party and first party cookies. Third party cookies are particularly helpful for tracking ad exposures, while first party cookies can be leveraged for clicks, sessions and conversion events.

However, as we are all now fully aware, full cookie-based attribution is not a sustainable strategy, as browsers have either announced or already implemented features to block third party cookies. In response, Google has been working to add a conversion modelling layer to attribution in Campaign Manager and Display & Video 360, including DDA.

Conversion modelling uses machine learning techniques to quantify the impact of marketing efforts when conversion paths cannot be fully observed (ie: when cookies are not being stored in the browser). Machine learning can analyse observable signals in robust datasets and fill the gaps when cookies are not available. The result is an accurate, aggregated, privacy-safe view of the total marketing impact on conversions. For more information on steps to navigate evolving privacy requirements, please read Google’s Privacy Playbook.

Modelled conversions can now be selected when creating a Data Driven Attribution model in Campaign Manager. The only requirement is the establishment of a strong, observable dataset. This can be accomplished by opting-in to enhanced attribution and leveraging sitewide tagging solutions like the global site tag or Google Tag Manager.

January 2021 Product Updates

SA360

1.Account Health Improvements

Need a head start planning for 2021? Do not worry we have a checklist to mitigate any common account set up issues to ensure better management of your SA360 campaigns. For information and to download the checklist your file here.

2. Cross-Environment Bid Strategy Activation

Earlier this year, Search Ads 360 announced bid strategies will soon be required to include modelled  cross-environment conversions. This change gives you the most complete view of performance, and allows you to optimize most effectively towards the full value across all devices. Beginning January 25, 2021 Search Ads 360 engineering will begin updating portfolio bid strategies in Search Ads 360 to target cross-environment conversions.

This change only affects bidding conversion sources. You can still report on conversions without the cross-environment conversions included.

The following Actions need to be considered and implemented:

Intraday Bidding

Portfolios: for your intraday bid strategy portfolio, advertisers are encouraged to manually migrate their intraday bid strategies to include cross-environment conversions before January 25, 2021. If no action is taken, the SA360 Engineering team will automigrate advertisers after this date. This includes advertisers using offline conversions.
Whilst manually migrating intraday bis strategies, consider best practice for migration outlined in this article.

Tip: Use the past ~30 days (accounting for conversion delay) to set an appropriate bid strategy target accounting for cross-environment conversions. The bid strategy may have a brief learning period as per normal conversion goal changes.

Auction Time Bidding

Portfolios: it is HIGHLY recommended that the Search Ads 360 Engineering team executes the migration on behalf of advertisers to minimize impact to performance due to the learning period associated with changing the conversion goal. Once migrated, advertisers are encouraged to monitor performance and adjust targets to meet your business needs.

 For more information on Floodlight Cross Environment conversions, click here.

For any further queries with regards to the above, please get in touch.

  DV360

YouTube Audio Ads on Display & Video 360 

YouTube Audio Ads is a new format option in Display & Video 360 that enables advertisers to extend their reach into new audio inventory. Over half of all on-demand music streaming is through YouTube, the most popular destination for streaming music. These audio ads will run on YouTube during users' long listening sessions and background moments. The goal is to deliver reach and lift in brand awareness; and over 75% of measured alpha campaigns drove lift in brand awareness. Music lineups and audio ads make it possible to be there, at scale, whether YouTube is being watched front and centre or playing as the backdrop to daily life.

 Combined Audiences for YouTube ad groups

 Combined audiences, which allow you to create custom combinations of audiences and audience attributes, is now available for YouTube & partners line items. You’re able to select a combined audience in ad-group level audience targeting. When you're building a combined audience, the Audience Summary data will reflect eligibility for display, video, and YouTube.

 See the Help Centre for more details including audience type compatibility.

 Campaign Manager 360

Safari have continued pushing their Intelligent Tracking Prevention updates. An update occurred on the 16th September whereby their new feature blocks cross-site tracking within Safari, this by default will be activated in settings for users browsing across Safari. As a method of combating these changes, Google introduced conversion modelling, which helps plug the gap that Safari and other browsers now create in your tracking using machine learning. For this to work at its optimal, a couple of features need to be in place to ensure conversion data is as complete as it can possibly be. I’ll be outlining these 2 features below for you to check on and action should it be required.

1. All Site Tag, when setting up your floodlight tags for your site, we recommend creating a universal tag that fires on each page of your website, this acts like a container and allows your tags to follow a user’s path throughout a site. To create this, build a new “Counter” floodlight tag, with “Standard” counting, apply this on site and instruct it to fire on each page land.

2. Enhanced Attribution, within Campaign Manager, under your “Floodlight Configuration” there is an area for “Enhanced Attribution”, the box in this area just needs to be ticked for it to be enabled. This will apply an additional code to your Campaign Manager URL’s, a DCLID which can also be used to help retain conversion data.

November 2020 - Product Updates

SA360

Big Query with SA360

 We know that storing and querying massive datasets can be expensive without the right hardware, infrastructure, and resource. BigQuery is Google’s own enterprise data warehouse solution, that deploys super-fast SQL queries using Google’s processing power and infrastructure.

It is a fully-managed platform/service. It allows the advertiser to input data sets from cross-partners, cross-channel,  cross - marketing platforms (SA360, DV360, Campaign Manager,  Google Analytics, Facebook, Adobe to name a few )

Let’s focus on SA360 and Big Query;

Once data sets are imported into BigQuery,  you can pivot or filter for analysis, or transform data into the format you need. You can even use analytical functions to calculate complex metrics that formula columns cannot do. Once data is transformed, it can be exported to a data visualisation platform such as Datastudio to create dashboards. Insights from these dashboard can be used to make optimisation changes manually, or via an SFTP/ Conversion API.

Some other use cases can include:

1. Utilise data imported from various sources, such as Google Analytics, Custom floodlight variables from SA360, to create bespoke, dynamic dashboards in Datastudio, and to optimise toward

2. Use BigQuery to optimise to Profitability/ LTV Objectives by importing in CRM data

3. Leverage BigQuery with public datasets that are freely available, like weather data, financial data, or census data, to match with your own, and leverage toward bespoke strategies.

4. For those of you who aren’t too familiar with SQL, leverage BigQuery capabilities using Google Connected Sheets.

5. Create and execute machine learning models in BigQuery using standard SQL.

For any more questions around this topic, and its many capabilities, do get in touch.

DV360

New Targeting Expansion Tool

You may have noticed a new option in your Line Item settings labelled 'Targeting expansion'. This is a simple yet powerful tool that utilizes Google intelligence to help you reach individuals who share interest profiles with your existing customers. By expanding your targeting, you can reach more potential customers (even in cookieless environments) who are likely to engage, click, or convert with your ads. This option is available if targeting first party or Google audiences on audio, video or display line items. If using a first-party list, the similar audience mechanism that you may be familiar with is used here, with the option to exclude the first-party list.

There are a total of 5 segments you can adjust the targeting expansion slider to (set to the first segment by default for Google audiences). This ranges from no expansion on the left, increasing to conservative and aggressive expansion on the right.

This can be applied and modified in bulk within the platform, and can be enabled/disabled via SDF. For more information, see this help centre article: https://support.google.com/displayvideo/answer/10191558?hl=en&visit_id=637400741353814105-1075608446&rd=1

Campaign Manager 360

Campaign Manager has now been rebranded to Campaign Manager 360 and with this re-brand come several new features:

Automated 3rd Party Verification with IAS, no need to continue manually exporting and wrapping tags, this can now be automated through Campaign Managers API connection with IAS by linking your advertiser to your IAS platform Advertiser. Looking to get started? You’ll need to check in with your IAS rep first to ensure preparations for your account are ready on their side.

We also have new “Bulk Edit” functions directly in the UI, aiming to provide users extra time savings and to also better align its parity with the Trafficking API. Some of these new options allow you to adjust components such as: Key Values, Ad Blocking, Creative Fields, Video Skippability and OBA Application.

Our final updates this month is “Viewable VTC”, you can now model your attribution to only attribute View-Through Conversions when ads are in view, using Active View to measure. This is handled from your Floodlight Configuration under “Attribution” where you can build a model that includes only viewable conversions measured by active view as “viewable impressions”. Please note this will NOT work with previously built attribution models and will only work with newly built models.

October 2020 - Product Updates

SA360

Be prepared this holiday season with top tips for SA360!

Search Ads 360 provides all of the tools and automation necessary to navigate the holiday period, driving success, while minimising time spent on inefficient tasks. We recommend that Smart bidding is enabled throughout the entire holiday season to maximise your performance and capture opportunity that aligns to your business goals.  Smart bidding can do the following:

1. Faster Reactions via Auction-Time Bidding in SA360:

·       Unparalleled optimisation frequency and precision that adjusts bids for every auction in Google Ads, not just a few times a day

·       Ensures that the bidding decisions can rapidly respond to sudden changes in performance both within your bid strategies and within the wider search marketplace

2. Better Informed Predictions via Seasonality Adjustments for CPA & ROAS Bid Strategies:

·       Input your expected change in conversion rates to help inform the bids at the start and end of a sale, giving you greater control to hit your goals

·       Optionally, inform the algorithm of the sale’s average discount rate to take this into account as well

3. Precise Targeting via Ad Group Targets in SA360 Bid Strategies:

·       Optionally set Ad Group level targets to let Search Ads 360 know if any ad groups within a portfolio are valued differently.

·       Allows for the system to increase or decrease bids accordingly based on the set ad group target.

DV360

 Native Placement Targeting has now launched

This is now widely available for all Display & Video 360 clients. Not only does this launch align Native creative targeting with the targeting UI refresh in DV360, but it makes DV360 the first and only DSP to allow clients to specify which types of Native placements you’d like to target. If you were previously hesitant to test Native due to concerns about specific placements, this might be the perfect opportunity to test.

 Learn More ->

 Google Audience with Programmatic Guaranteed now in general availability

Building on Programmatic Guaranteed (PG) with 1st and 3rd party audiences we have now launched support for PG with Google audience. This provides large scale trusted audiences and gives buyers and planners the confidence they are able to reach their intended audience. Now combined with the confidence of programmatic guarantees this is a fantastic way to guarantee to reach your intended audiences to achieve your campaign goals.

 Learn More ->

 CM

Automated third-party verification in Campaign Manager

You can now seamlessly add third-party brand verification measurement to the ads you serve with Campaign Manager.

Previously, the process required multiple teams working in spreadsheets to add third-party verification to each placement on your media plan, often requiring lots of resources usually resulted in reporting discrepancies. Automated third-party verification is now faster and less error-prone because it uses system-to-system API calls between Google and the third-party vendor.

This new feature also allows you to see a new metric in reporting called “Vendor Blocked Ads”. Automated third-party verification also provides centralized tag management within Campaign Manager and streamlines your workflow across all your digital campaigns. For those of your working on Display & Video, creatives will now pull through already wrapped with your Campaign Manager assigned third-party verification!

Google are launching with Integral Ad Science (IAS) as their first partner for this new capability and are actively working to bring other partners onboard. Now you can finally enjoy a centralized view of verification alongside all of your media and creative performance.

September 2020 - Product Updates

SA360

Search Ads 360 now supports Microsoft Advertising parallel tracking

Microsoft Advertising parallel tracking improves your landing page speed by directly directing customers from your ad to your final URL, while the ad click measurement happens in the background.

There are a couple of key migration steps to bear in mind before enabling parallel tracking. Read all details here. Google recommends that this process be completed before 15th October, 2020, after which, Google will begin to partially migrate your Microsoft Advertising accounts on your behalf. The partial migration will require you to manually enable parallel tracking.

For any further information on the migration process, and queries around parallel tracking, please get in touch.

Sync and report on your Yahoo! Japan dynamic ads for search (DAS)

Seamlessly, sync your Yahoo! Japan dynamic ads for search campaigns, ad groups, dynamic targets, and dynamic ads into Search Ads 360/
Also available as reports on

-        Engine metrics, such as clicks and impressions

-        Conversions recorded by Floodlights or Google Analytics.

More details here!

Default Conversion Goals

 As auction time bidding adoption has become the machine led way of testing performance for your brand, it’s worth recollecting what a default conversion goal is, where it’s applicable, and current limitations.

The ‘Default Conversion Goal’ is the primary conversion goal applied at advertiser level in SA360; the first time you enable auction time bidding in a SA360 bid strategy.
Future auction time based bid strategies will automatically utilise the default conversion goal, unless a different conversion goal is chosen as source for those new bid strategies created.

Why use Default Conversion Goal?
Some of the key benefits of this feature in Auction time bidding include:

-         Performance is better when more campaigns share the same conversion source as that of the bid strategy

-         By building the history of conversion data for all campaigns, any future bid strategy additions to the bid portfolio will see faster performance gains.

-         Future additions to a strategy (including moving campaigns currently in a Google Ads conversion based bid strategy) will also not have to go through a ‘warm up’ period.

A default conversion goal won’t be set at the advertiser level if auction-time bidding strategy is optimising to one of the following:

-        Device-weighted formula columns
e.g. 1.2* Trans(for_device_type(“mobile”)) + Trans(for_device_type(“desktop”))

-        Weighted Google Ads Conversion Tracking
e.g. 1.2* Store_Visits + Trans

-        Google Analytics goals

 More details about this feature here!

DV360

Conversion Modeling Update

From week commencing 28th September, all attribution models will be automatically opted into conversion modeling as a default setting. From this point forward, Conversion metrics would include modeled conversions.

As of now, the settings to create a new attribution model in Campaign Manager and Display & Video 360 will allow you to choose which attribution models should include modeled conversions in the future. There will be a notification alongside these settings asking you to review your attribution models and to opt-out of modeling if you wish. During the next few weeks, we suggest that you review your current attribution models and be sure to update your preferred settings regarding conversion modeling. Any attribution models that haven't opted out will start reporting modeled conversions after September 28th. The result will see a low double-digit increase in conversions in most cases. Any changes made in the mean-time will have no impact to conversion data between now and the week commencing 28th September.

Click here for more info, or reach out to your rep for further detail

CM

Campaign Manager Reporting for DV360-hosted creatives (Ad Canvas)

Ad Canvas is a visual editor tool that allows one to build and edit creatives in real time.

This update launch is intended to help streamline reporting for hybrid CM-DV360 advertisers who want to utilize DV360-hosted creatives. If you had previously attempted to build one of our new formats (Flipbook, Parallax, Swirl, for instance) you would not have been able to use the CM tracking tags of their choice. This launch resolves this blocker and gives you the freedom to test creatives across all of our platforms.

 Learn More ->

August 2020 - Product Updates

SA360

Let’s talk about Lifetime Value.

Calculating, and effectively predicting lifetime value is not necessarily an easy feat. Here’s a BCG study on responsible marketing using first party data. Let’s move on to understanding what Lifetime Value (LTV) is, and how to get thinking about it.

Lifetime value can be described as the overall value generated from a single user, by understanding and evaluating how he interacts with the brand, within a certain timeline.. Quote me on this.

Let break that description down into sections;

How do you determine interaction with the brand?
-        Calculation metrics: Determine what type of customers are most valuable to you. (Profit, Repeat orders, offline purchases etc)

What is overall value, and How can overall value be generated?
Overall value can be a single or combination of various factors such as average order value, profit margin, demographics, items in basket, product satisfaction, churn rate, products bought, frequency of purchase and more.

Capturing information to calculate LTV can be as simple, or as complex as you can think of it to be. Common methods include using:

1.      Formula Columns: Use multiple data points to create a unified data to optimise toward

2.      Custom Floodlight Variables : Utilise extra information within ‘u variables’ to capture varying audience segments

3.      API Offline Uploads : Offline data points incorporation, where LTV model is calculated in another platform, and then its linked back into SA360 to the original purchase.

4.      Tensor Flow/ Auto ML/ Machine Learning : Utilising Cloud features to integrate lots of different products to calculate value.

What timeline should be included?
Simply put, are you looking at short/ medium/ long term solutions?

So why would you want to use LTV data?
Alongside capturing the monetary value of a conversion, if we are also able to insert Lifetime value associated with that conversion, it acts as a truer data point for bidding algorithms.
This allows you to use that data point to optimise toward conversions (i.e users) that would generate more value/revenue for the brand. 

In a gist, better data helps both short, and long-term goals by:

-        Driving Growth: Optimise toward long term growth, and not just short-term revenue

-        Improved Budget Planning: Plan budgets more effectively to drive performance against key revenue driving segments

-        Channel selection & Forecasting: Identify which channels drive the most valuable customers.

Agency Within Uses LTV Bidding in SA360 to Increase PetFlow’s Paid Conversion Value 3x

Pivoting to a LTV driven marketing strategy allowed PetFlow to focus on its highest value customers and that improved business results. This enabled PetFlow to promote repeat purchases, and helped make them the sole source of pet food for many new customers.

Read about the case study here

 DV360

Custom Bidding in DV360

Automated bidding in DV360 has been around for a while, but now Google are making automated bidding more powerful via Custom Bidding, a new way to incorporate your unique insights about what drives your business into your bidding strategies.

With Custom Bidding, your ability to optimise is opened up and can be tailored more towards your specific goals. If it's measurable within a Floodlight Activity or a goal in Analytics 360, you can choose it as a signal for your bidding algorithm to optimise towards. Essentially, you build a script that uses these signals to assign scores to ad impressions in order to define how much each impression is worth to you, based on its expected ability to drive your chosen KPI.  Once the campaign starts, Display & Video 360 will use the scoring model built on your script to predict the value of each impression and adjust each bid accordingly.

While Custom Bidding is now available to all DV360 accounts, Analytics 360 goals as signals will be supported in the coming months. See this link for more information on automated & custom bidding: https://blog.google/products/marketingplatform/360/new-automated-bidding-solutions-display-video-360/.

Campaign Manager

Marketing Retention

You may already use Campaign Manager to capture audience lists based on people who have bought or even triggered soft conversions through your activity, we use these for remarketing to typically identify users who have been to our site or interacted with you activity, but have not converted, which is a viable strategy but, do you remarket to those who have already converted?

Whilst keeping new users coming to site is vitally important, so is taking care of those who have already affiliated themselves with your brand, as such, how do you remarket via display to users who have already purchase from you, without becoming overbearing?

Option 1 would be to capture 2 user lists, one based on the last 540 days, with the other capturing users in your lookback window (e.g. if you typically see a journey last 60 days, then have your second list capturing users in the last 60 days). You will target the users you have captured in the last 540 days, whilst negating the users captured in the last 60, in essence remarketing to users that have converted, but once again have not done so for some time. This strategy may not be as effective for the likes of selling vacuums or holidays but may be a strategy if your items are bought on an on-going basis (like make-up or clothing). Naturally, with one list of users being captured over 540 days, this can be a slow grower, but can be maintained quite easily once up and running.

Option 2 would look deeper into using Custom Variables, though depending on your product inventory may not be required. Try capturing users that convert and dissect this using the u-variables you are picking up on site, for example capturing someone who converts on “product A”, instead of capturing users that convert across all products. In doing this you can build bespoke audience lists based on users that have converted on particular products, which you can then use in your remarketing efforts so that users converting on “product A” can now be targeted with ads for “product A accessories”, whilst users converting on “product B” can now be targeted with ads for “product B accessories”. This could be used for adding “extras” to a booking if you’re a travel client, marketing clothes that go perfect with those Shoes your client just bought and many more.

If you want to look further into retention, but would like to talk this through prior to understand the pro’s and con’s, get in touch with one of our team members at tp@iprospect.com

July 2020 - Product Updates

SA360

With industry conversations centred around first party data, and how it can be effectively used in omni-channel marketing; these two SA360 capabilities should be at the front of mind, for automation and strategy:

Ad Builders
Simplfy ad copy creation & maintenance using Ad Builder templates. Ad Builder can be used across multiple Search Engines including Google Ads, Bing, Yahoo! Gemini, Yahoo! Japan, Baidu.

We know that Google’s creative excellence now includes using at least 2 ETAs, and 1 RSA per ad group. So if you’ve been waiting to build out Responsive Search Ads, or multiple Expanded Text Ads per ad group, Ad Builders provide an effective solution to build this out at scale.

·        Ad builder supports the use of Business Data tables for including dynamic information in ad copies. ·        Can work together with Ad Customizers in Google Ads.

To read more about Ad Builders, here

Search to Display Remarketing

The SA360/DV360 integration allows SA360 to send lists of cookies from users who have clicked on search ads to DV360 as a first party audience list. DV360 line items can then be targeted to users on this list. Cookie lists are easily created in SA360 by labelling, keywords, product groups, or Google Ads dynamic ad targets.

Note: Search to Display Remarketing is not Remarketing Lists to Search Ads (RLSA), which is a Google Ads-only feature that requires a new tag on the advertiser’s page. The SA360/DV360 integration is tagless and applies across all search engines supported by Search Ads 360. 

Read up more about cross-channel remarketing in SA360, here.

How to set up remarketing lists for display ads, here.

 DV360

Navigate the TV streaming boom with DV360's new tools. 

As people have been adapting to life under lockdown, unsurprisingly the level of TV consumption has greatly increased. When April is compared to the previous year, the amount of inventory available for Connected TVs has increased by 75%. To help you make more use of the connected TV options, Google has created a section in the marketplace dedicated to TV, specifically for inventory and publishers that enable you to reach TV audiences across devices. This new interface has started rolling out over the past few weeks. This will also see national linear TV broadcast & cable networks as well as local TV stations in the future. 

In the Marketplace you can see deals known as 'auction packages' which are pre-built bundles of inventory, put together by Google from a selection of top publishers by working closely with exchange partners such as Google Ad Manager, FreeWheel and SpotX. 

To help streamline the buying experience, Google has added an 'OTT line item' (Over The Top streaming) tailored for buying TV ads across screens. It only features options relevant for connected TV ads, with the appropriate selections made by default in order to minimise configuration errors. Check it out by selecting the TV option when creating a new Insertion Order. 

Read more about this here: https://blog.google/products/marketingplatform/360/display-video-360-tools-navigate-tv-streaming-boom/

Campaign Manager

Viewable View-Through Conversions

Currently in Beta, viewable view-through conversions allow users to customize their attribution models to only incorporate view-through conversions that come from viewable impressions, this helps to improve accuracy ensuring that when a view-through conversion is attributed, you know that the ad was in view of the person making the purchase. This feature is expected to launch in Q3. 

Report Builder to Big Query

Current in progress and pending Beta, this will allow Campaign Manager users to export ad hoc and scheduled reports directly into BigQuery. Entities that use BigQuery to support analysis and visualization of their data sets will now be able to benefit from streamlined workflows post launch, expected Q3.

Need to know more? Get in touch with your TP team!