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Mapping the customer journey for SEO and marketing success

Monday, September 25th, 2023

Before embarking on a shopping journey, customers often find themselves in a state of awareness where a specific need or desire has sprouted in their minds. 

A growing recognition of a gap characterizes this initial phase – perhaps a missing item in their collection, an upgrade to enhance their lifestyle or a solution to a newly identified problem at their workplace.

During the purchasing decision process, a customer navigates a rich landscape of exploration and contemplation.

Initially, curiosity leads them to sift through various options, scrutinizing features, reviews, and personal recommendations while considering the product’s aesthetic appeal.

As the customer dives deeper, a complex interplay between desire and rationality occurs, with considerations of value, necessity and potential enjoyment balanced against budget constraints.

An emerging emotional connection to the product influences their choice, potentially aligning with their personal narrative or lifestyle.

Ultimately, a fusion of research and emotional resonance guides them to a decision where trust in the brand and perceived value peaks, culminating in a purchase that is both anticipated and satisfying yet open to subsequent evaluation based on the product’s ability to meet cultivated expectations.

In the vibrant canvas of digital marketing and SEO, weaving personal narratives through customer journey maps isn’t just vital – it’s a sophisticated art.

Join me on a journey to understanding the significance of the customer journey map and what role SEO plays, bridging SEO finesse with a nuanced grasp of your audience’s journey and painting not just a plan but a masterpiece of empathy and insight.

Understanding the significance of the customer journey in SEO

By aligning SEO strategies with the customer journey, marketers can craft content that is highly relevant and tailored to resonate with users as they research a product or service. 

This approach enhances the user experience and positively impacts search engine rankings by aligning the two. 

Google, in particular, tends to favor content that embodies the principles of experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness (E-E-A-T). The process in which users begin to research their needs starts on Google and other search engines.

Data-driven insights from understanding and optimizing the customer journey through keyword analysis and proper tagging can inform SEO strategies. This leads to more impressions, traffic and increased brand loyalty.

Users who identify their needs and validate their decision will make a purchase decision quickly and are more likely to engage with the site and convert. 

In the long run, SEO strategies focusing on the customer journey are more sustainable and benefit the user experience, contributing to a positive return on investment (ROI) and a competitive edge in the digital landscape.

The customer journey map: A compass for success

A customer journey map is a visual tool that meticulously charts the various touchpoints and interactions a customer has with a brand, extending from the initial spark of awareness to post-purchase engagements. 

This illustrative map captures transactional phases and intricately explores the underlying emotions and motivations steering the customer’s choices. 

It serves as a comprehensive blueprint, offering a deep dive into each step of the customer’s experience, thus painting a fuller picture of their path and nuanced relationship with your brand and offerings.

Why define your customer journey map?

In the ever-evolving business and marketing landscape, understanding your customer journey map is more of a necessity than a luxury. 

I have entered new roles as an SEO of a company many times, only to find that the marketers I work with haven’t considered where the user is in their decision-making process while developing content. 

As a part of this, it isn’t clear what role SEO should play during attribution. I will utilize a keyword analysis while considering what problems they want to solve. 

I ask myself the right questions, tagging each keyword with where they are in their journey to understand their intent. 

But don’t take my word for it. Here are some compelling reasons why defining your customer journey is crucial for the success and growth of your marketing efforts:

Better understanding your customer

Implementing a customer journey map provides deep insights into your target audience’s goals, pain points, and emotions. With this knowledge, you can tailor your marketing and SEO efforts for maximum impact.

Identification and resolution of service issues

No product or service is flawless, but by viewing the brand from your customer’s perspective, you can identify and address shortcomings to enhance customer satisfaction.

Creation of exceptional experiences

A clear understanding of the customer journey allows you to optimize touchpoints from your various marketing channels, creating exceptional experiences at every stage and fostering trust in your brand.

Discovery of untapped opportunities

By analyzing the journey, you may uncover gaps in your SEO strategy or what your competitors might have missed. These unique nuances can set your brand apart.

Cost reduction and improved results

Aligning your SEO strategy with the customer journey can enhance campaign effectiveness, driving up results while reducing costs.

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SEO’s part in the customer experience journey

For optimal success, it’s vital to harmonize your marketing efforts with the nuanced pathways of the customer experience journey. This holistic approach involves:

Understanding the phases

• Recognizing that marketing communications alone are short-sighted. 
• The entire customer experience should be considered, from awareness to post-purchase, with SEO playing a crucial role.

Data-driven decisions

• Use estimated volume numbers from your keyword analysis to guide marketing decisions at each journey stage.

Industry-specific tailoring

• To stay focused, adapt the customer journey map and where SEO fits within your business model, whether B2B, B2C, or retail.

Optimizing for search throughout the entire customer journey

The customer journey process intricately branches into six well-defined stages, each necessitating a tailored marketing strategy. 

This approach effectively engages and shepherds users through a thoughtful progression culminating in a well-informed purchase decision. 

It is a delicate dance of guidance and persuasion, ensuring potential customers feel supported and enlightened on their path to choosing the perfect product or service at each step.

1. Awareness of need

Initially, customers recognize a pressing issue that necessitates resolution. They gauge the gravity of the dilemma, presenting an opportunity for brands to seize their interest. 

Marketing strategies should encompass problem-related keywords, enlightening blog articles, captivating social media narratives, and instructional videos. 

Additionally, events are a powerful tool to deepen the audience’s understanding of the matter, showcasing the brand’s viable solutions.

2. Investigate options 

During this phase, users initiate broad searches to gather information, read reviews, and align criteria for potential solutions. They start defining outcomes, stakeholders, metrics, budgets and more. 

To assist users in their research, marketers should:

• Optimize blog posts.
• Create informative website pages.
• Share empathetic social media posts addressing pain points.
• Produce videos guiding users in selecting the best product or service.

3. Committing to change 

Users in this stage commit to their goals, narrow choices, and delve deeper into research. 

Sales engagements become more prominent, and stakeholders join the decision-making process. 

Marketing strategies should focus on content that challenges doubts or objections, such as comparison pages that validate the company’s credibility. 

Influencers, email campaigns and retargeting efforts can reinforce the commitment made by users.

4. Solution selection 

As users seek buy-in from decision-makers, they require content that justifies their expenditure, often emphasizing pricing, ROI and overall value. 

B2B marketing should speak the language of the C-suite, highlighting ROI and efficiency improvements. 

For ecommerce, testimonials and reviews play a crucial role in influencing selection.

5. Validate choice

Users validate their choice in this stage by seeking management support and evaluating implementation logistics, costs, and ongoing support. 

Brands should optimize for brand-related searches, leverage testimonials and reviews to showcase successful experiences and highlight exceptional customer service.

6. Purchase 

Following a thorough assessment, customers stand on the cusp of making their ultimate purchasing choice. Discussions surrounding pricing, terms and specifics of implementation might take place. 

To facilitate this phase, brands can employ SEO and email marketing strategies, offering resources like: 

• User guides.
• Setup manuals.
• Answers to frequently asked questions. 

Moreover, leveraging influencers to craft engaging unboxing videos can vividly illustrate the product or service in use, enhancing the customer’s ability to visualize its value in their lives.

Successful campaigns are born from the seamless integration of customer journey mapping, adept SEO and strategic marketing. 

Businesses can cultivate trust, enhance online visibility, and boost customer engagement by deeply understanding the customer’s journey and aligning SEO techniques with marketing efforts. Embrace this powerful synergy, ensuring you confidently navigate the vast SEO terrain. 

In my next Search Engine Land article, I’ll guide you on aligning SEO with your customer journey, diving deep into keyword analysis and content strategy to enrich your company’s digital prowess.

The post Mapping the customer journey for SEO and marketing success appeared first on Search Engine Land.

Courtesy of Search Engine Land: News & Info About SEO, PPC, SEM, Search Engines & Search Marketing

5 outdated marketing KPIs to toss and what to reference instead

Monday, September 25th, 2023

Moving away from conventional KPIs and toward a more advanced understanding of your campaigns gives you real competitive advantages. 

I could have written about this topic years ago, but it’s especially important as engagement costs on major advertising channels continue to increase, and an unpredictable economy puts a premium on efficiency. 

Ready to change the way you measure your campaigns? In this article, I’ll look at five KPIs I still hear clients reference and explain: 

• Why it’s past time to replace them.
• What they should analyze instead.
• Why it matters.

Bad KPI 1: Spend

What to use instead: Profit

I’m not saying the concept of a budget is moot, but spend should not be the starting point or goal for campaigns unless:

• You’re just beginning and have no CRM data to reference.
• You’re going for scale without regard to efficiency. 

That said, we still get companies coming to us frequently and saying, “We’d like to spend this.”

Even more off-base, “We’d like to spend {x} on Google, {y} on Facebook, and {z} on LinkedIn.”

A better approach is to aim for efficiency goals, agnostic of channel. 

If you start with an ROI goal of 3.0, good analytics folks will be able to crunch numbers and tell you how much you can spend and stay within that goal – no matter which channel you spend it on. 

Referencing spend without tracking efficiency is how you hit growth walls (and get on the wrong side of your CFO).

Specifying spend across channels is a good way to doom yourself to the fate of spending too much on certain channels and not enough on other, more incremental sources of revenue. 

If you are going for scale without regard to efficiency, metrics like conversions, spending, revenue, and visitors do become more important, while CPA and ROAS (efficiency metrics) will take a hit. 

A core tenet of digital marketing is that the more conversions you get, the more expensive they are, so you’ll have to decide whether your first goal is improving efficiency or driving scale. 

Bad KPI 2: Platform-provided CPA

What to use instead: CRM-based CPA

Relying solely on CPAs delivered by Google Ads, Facebook and LinkedIn without assessing the quality of those acquisitions (leads in B2B, purchases in ecommerce) makes it likely you’re spending too much on the wrong leads.

(Note: Google Search Partners and display campaigns produce particularly weak lead quality.)

Instead, integrate your CRM data to understand cost per down-funnel metrics (for B2B) or cost per CLTV (B2C and ecommerce). 

This is especially important for B2B, given its long sales cycles and purchase stages.

Knowing what you’d like to pay for opportunities and understanding what you have to pay to acquire them on certain channels is more important than straight-up lead acquisition.

And it’ll make you more likely to swallow high CPCs (hello, LinkedIn) if the resulting leads carry enough value. 

Dig deeper: 3 steps for effective PPC reporting and analysis

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Bad KPI 3: Click-based CPA

What to use instead: Incrementality-based CPA

Click-based CPA (think first-click, last-click, or cookie or UTM-based MTA) ignores the contributions of impressions-based advertising campaigns, whether it’s a YouTube a, a programmatic ad or a billboard you sponsored on a highway near one of your target geos. 

True CPA is based on incrementality, which implements things like the halo effect, brand lift testing, geo lift testing, etc. 

It means being agnostic to clicks vs. impressions and understanding the true effect of any advertising interaction. 

This can be relatively complex to set up. Still, there are native tools, like Facebook lift tests and Google’s CausalImpact R package using Bayesian structural time-series models, that can be a good starting point. 

I recommend figuring out how much data you need to draw a statistically significant conclusion and only running these initiatives in test locations so you’re not curtailing entire campaigns while you assess their effects.

Bad KPI 4: Average CPA/Average ROAS

What to use instead: Marginal CPA/Marginal ROAS

When you’re using Marginal CPA, you’re really trying to figure out what you paid to acquire marginal returns – which means you’re calculating the return on each conversion, not just assuming you pay the same or get the same for all new customers. 

Let’s illustrate this with a simple scenario: say you’re taking an average CPA from Facebook ads, which brought in a mix of expensive and cheaper customers, all worth roughly the same revenue amount. 

If you take the average CPA, you might see that you spent $2 to acquire a new customer, whereas marginal CPA might show that you converted a bunch of new customers at $1.50 and a handful at $8.

Rather than turn up the dial across the board, it’d be smarter to keep finding more cost-effective customers like the first bunch. Don’t spend more to reach more expensive customers who provide no additional value.  

Bad KPI 5: Impression share lost to bidding (search)

What to use instead: Impression share lost to budget (search)

If you are running search campaigns and want to lower spend, there are two main ways to do it.  

• You drop bids or targets to decrease CPCs.
• You lower the campaign’s daily budget, which forces the campaign to turn off for portions of the day. 

When you drop bids or targets and lose impression share, a lower CPC will help produce more clicks and conversion opportunities for the same budget. 

I’ve seen brands use bidding strategies with goals of capturing something like 90% of available impression share (IS), which gives Google the green light to overcharge.

In these scenarios, switching to manual CPC targets and aiming lower (thereby losing some impression share) immediately tunes up performance and efficiency.

When you drop your budget, the campaign will hit the daily budget and turn off. This will lower overall spend and impression share but keep the same efficiency. So keep budgets up and control spend using bids and efficiency targets!

There are far-reaching implications when you embrace this “scale vs. efficiency” mindset.

Let’s say you are a B2B company that always sees poor performance on weekends. Instead of turning the weekends off, lower the bids/targets until the traffic is profitable.  

Next steps

Some of these – especially the first and last – should be easy to implement right away. Others may need you to find a trusted analytics resource to help you sketch out some models and integrate the right data. 

But by reading this far, you’ve already taken the first step: casting a critical eye on boilerplate KPIs that aren’t helping you truly optimize the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns. 

One word to the wise: make sure you’re getting the right people on board before you pull the switch on any of these since people leaning on the old KPIs to gauge your work should be in alignment with what success looks like going forward. 

Dig deeper: Tracking and measurement for PPC campaigns

The post 5 outdated marketing KPIs to toss and what to reference instead appeared first on Search Engine Land.

Courtesy of Search Engine Land: News & Info About SEO, PPC, SEM, Search Engines & Search Marketing

The Magical Black Box

Sunday, September 24th, 2023

Courtesy of SEO Book.com

Bing adds controls for webmasters to disallow their content in Bing Chat

Saturday, September 23rd, 2023

Bing has announced a set of new controls to allow webmasters and site owners to block Bing Chat from using its content for AI training and Microsoft’s generative AI models. “While we are actively collaborating with the industry on establishing future AI standards, we also wanted to provide more immediate support for publishers,” Fabrice Canel from Microsoft told us.

The controls. Here are the options you can implement to control how Bing uses or does not use your content for Bing Chat or other Microsoft generative AI models:

• No action is needed to remain in Bing Chat. Content without NOCACHE tag and without NOARCHIVE tag may be included in Bing Chat answers and will benefit from AI’s ability to generate more helpful answers and to increase your ranking opportunities in Bing Chat; site content may be used in training our generative AI foundation models.
• Content with the NOCACHE tag may be included in Bing Chat answers. Bing will only display URL/Snippet/Title in the answer; Going forward, for content in our Bing Index that is labeled NOCACHE, only URLs, Titles and Snippets may be used in training Microsoft’s generative AI foundation models.
• • Content tagged NOARCHIVE will not be included in Bing Chat answers, not be linked to in the answers. Going forward, for content in our Bing Index that is labeled NOARCHIVE, Bing will not use the content for training Microsoft’s generative AI foundation models.
• If content has both NOCACHE and NOARCHIVE tags, we will treat it as NOCACHE.

Bing added that content with the NOCACHE tag or NOARCHIVE tag will still appear in the Bing search results.

To help Bing Chat users find paywall articles, Bing said it recommends adding the NOCACHE value to the NOARCHIVE value.

Bing has more details on how this works within its meta tags help documentation.

Bigger initiatives. Google announced it was working with the AI community on an alternative to the robots.txt protocol for AI models. But clearly Bing didn’t want this to drag out too long and not give site owners controls now, while AI is growing so fast. So Bing decided to leverage what is there now to give us options on how Bing Chat and Microsoft can use our content for its AI ventures.

The post Bing adds controls for webmasters to disallow their content in Bing Chat appeared first on Search Engine Land.

Courtesy of Search Engine Land: News & Info About SEO, PPC, SEM, Search Engines & Search Marketing

Google denies manipulating ad auctions in resurfaced SMX Advanced clip

Saturday, September 23rd, 2023

Google denied manipulating ad auctions at SMX Advanced 2015 – eight years before admitting it actually does.

During the conference’s keynote speech, Google Ad executive Jerry Dischler told the audience:

• “Full stop, we are not manipulating search results or manipulating the ad auction in order to increase profits. That’s just not what we do.”

Fast-forward to the 2023 federal antitrust trial, Dischler completely backtracked and told Judge Amit Mehta that the search engine “frequently” changes the auctions it uses to sell search ads without telling advertisers, increasing the cost of ads and reserve pricing by as much as 10%.

Why we care. This complete U-turn will likely raise doubts over Google’s reliability at a time when its trustworthiness is already being questioned.

How the tables have turned. The SMX Advanced 2015 clip was resurfaced by Tinuiti’s VP of Research, Andy Taylor, who claims Dischler made the denial in response to a presentation he had just given. Reacting to Google’s U-turn, he told Search Engine Land:

• “It seemed pretty clear back in 2015 that [Google was manipulating ad prices]. The trends we were seeing weren’t just a result of the typical reasons Google might offer up; like shifts in competition or changes in search behavior in particular categories. Even the data points we could find from other sources also seemed to be tracking in the same direction with our own.”
• “Sadly, it wasn’t all that surprising [when Dischler denied my claims], but I knew he wasn’t being transparent. Still, it was really disappointing to have to have client conversations proving out what I saw happening while at the same time acknowledging that Google was publicly contradicting my findings.”
• “I was really glad that someone put [Dischler] under oath [at the antitrust trial], and that this issue was made crystal clear for all of the search marketers out there.”
• “I do believe Google is well within its rights to establish minimum pricing thresholds that advertisers have to pay in order to appear in its search results, but the issue over the years has been the reluctance to be transparent with how those thresholds change over time and how they directly impact advertiser performance. I hope we’ll see greater transparency from Google moving forward.”

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Why has Google been tweaking search ad prices? Dischler claimed that staff were “shaking the cushions” to find ways to ensure his team met revenue targets given to Wall Street by Ruth Porat, Google’s Chief Financial Officer. In an email he sent to his team back in May 2019, he wrote:

• “If we don’t meet quota for the second quarter in a row and we miss the street’s expectations again, which is not what Ruth signalled to the street, so we will get punished pretty bad in the market.”
• “I care more about revenue than the average person but think we can all agree that for our teams trying to live in high cost areas another $100,000 in stock price loss will not be great for morale, not to mention the huge impact on our sales team.”

What has Google said? Following Dischler’s comments, a Google spokesperson told Search Engine Land:

• “Search ads costs are the result of a real-time auction where advertisers never pay more than their maximum bid. We’re constantly launching improvements designed to make ads better for both advertisers and users.”
• “Our quality improvements help eliminate irrelevant ads, improve relevance, drive greater advertiser value, and deliver high quality user experiences.”

Deep dive. Watch the SMX Advanced 2015 keynote speech to hear Dischler’s comments in full, and read our Google antitrust trial updates for all of the latest developments in this case.

The post Google denies manipulating ad auctions in resurfaced SMX Advanced clip appeared first on Search Engine Land.

Courtesy of Search Engine Land: News & Info About SEO, PPC, SEM, Search Engines & Search Marketing

Google accused of downplaying ad price manipulation

Saturday, September 23rd, 2023

Google has been accused of downplaying how much it quietly increases ad auctions.

The search engine admitted at the federal antitrust trial that it “frequently” inflates ad prices by as much as 5% without telling advertisers – sometimes 10%.

But marketers are calling the search engine out for being too “conservative” with these figures as they believe the real number is significantly higher.

Why we care. Advertisers are becoming increasingly frustrated with Google due to long-held suspicions around ad price manipulation and a lack of transparency. Although the industry accepts the search engine has a right to set minimum pricing thresholds, the lack of transparency regarding how those thresholds change over time and can directly impact advertiser performance

Shady business. Christine Yang, vp of media at Iris, told Ad Week that she believes the real range of fluctuation can sometimes be as much as 100%. She said:

• ““[Google] claiming 5% is a more conservative number to make it sound like the natural ebb and flow of a marketplace,” said Christine Yang, vp of media at Iris.”
• “The level to which [price manipulations] happens is what we don’t know. It’s shady business practices because there’s no regulation. They regulate themselves.”

Why quietly inflating ad prices matters. Google’s ability to increase ad prices, especially without facing strong competition, could potentially bolster the Justice Department’s claim that Google maintains an unlawful monopoly. While this argument doesn’t apply to Google’s free search engine, it can be used to address concerns like privacy standards that might have been mitigated in a more competitive search industry.

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What has Google said? Following Dischler’s comments, a Google spokesperson told Search Engine Land:

• “Search ads costs are the result of a real-time auction where advertisers never pay more than their maximum bid. We’re constantly launching improvements designed to make ads better for both advertisers and users.”
• “Our quality improvements help eliminate irrelevant ads, improve relevance, drive greater advertiser value, and deliver high quality user experiences.”

Deep dive. Read our Google search antitrust trial updates article for all the latest news from the courtroom.

The post Google accused of downplaying ad price manipulation appeared first on Search Engine Land.

Courtesy of Search Engine Land: News & Info About SEO, PPC, SEM, Search Engines & Search Marketing

How to increase LTV with PPC

Saturday, September 23rd, 2023

Lifetime value, or LTV, averages the total revenue generated by a customer during the entirety of your relationship.

While the KPI often sounds cool and dandy, it can be difficult to improve. Doing so requires long term thinking, commitment and a deep understanding of your customer database.

This article will dive into concrete ways PPC marketers can improve LTV using four levers. 

Why is LTV important?

Customer lifetime value is an essential metric for businesses across various industries for several reasons,

LTV evaluates your potential

Even before starting any business, LTV has value. It allows you to understand your average customer in greater depth, which can basically be translated into your growth potential.

For example, let’s say you want to start a business. And you hesitate between a real estate agency and selling coffee machines. (It’s quite a split but that’s just to make my point.) 

You could assume that the LTV of a customer for a real estate agency is significantly higher than that of a coffee machine seller. 

But let’s say your average client buys one coffee machine for 50 employees, each taking two coffees a day (at $0.20 per coffee because you price them that low). Say that such clients last for 30 years (with 228 working days per year). That means your LTV is close to $137,000. Not bad right?

Unfortunately, for real estate agencies, clients “only” buy a primary residence once in a lifetime (on average). And since real estate agent commissions are not extravagant enough, you can bet you will not exceed $137,000.

Bottom line: LTV just helped you gauge two different markets’ value.

LTV paves the way for growth

LTV basically helps you steer away from transaction-based thinking to the long-term value of repeat customers.

Higher LTV = higher profits (in the medium and long term). A higher customer value directly impacts the bottom line. 

But it also means peaceful, long-lasting business relationships. And those are less costly for tons of departments (HR, finance, logistics, customer support, etc.).

At an audience level, you can use LTV to identify structural weaknesses.

For example, if customer type A churns faster than customer type B, it’s likely that your service (or product) is not competitive/good enough for type A. Why is that?

Conversely, LTV can also help you find your best customers, which can translate into your best services/products. Is there any best practice to take away from this insight?

Finally, LTV helps determine your target customer acquisition cost (tCAC). If you know how much revenue you will generate with an average client, you can easily derive that into a target CAC. You “only” need to subtract the cost of goods sold (COGS) and so on. 

How to calculate LTV

If you Google “LTV formula”, you’ll probably see something related to customer lifetime. 

This makes sense but is harder to find in a marketer’s usual datasets (analytics, CRM, etc.). 

So let’s start with basic KPIs we all understand:

Lifetime value (LTV) = average order value x total transactions / unique customers

As you can see, it’s fairly simple to start with. (It’s also worth looking up “LTV enhancements” as they provide interesting additional value.)

‘LTB’: Benefits instead of revenue

LTV is interesting. But if you ask CFOs, they will tell you that benefits trump revenue any day. 

With benefits, you can understand the “real” value of each new customer, product line, etc. 

Here is the formula to turn LTV into what I call LTB, or lifetime benefits (not a real KPI name, just my take on it):

Lifetime benefits (LTB) = LTV – CAC – COGS

With CAC being your average cost to acquire one net new customer. And COGS being your cost of goods sold.

Define customer relationship length

You may be asking yourself how to define “lifetime.”

In other words, when do you stop counting “total transactions”? When can you confidently consider a customer churned? 

Just like for churn rate, you have several options:

• If you’ve been around long enough: Use historical data and remove those outliers. That will give you the average lifetime of an average customer.
• If you haven’t been around long enough or you lack the data: Use scenarios based on whatever you have. It’s a bit rough, but at least it’s a starting point.

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4 levers PPC pros can use to improve LTV

You can now use your LTV formula to come up with creative ways PPCs can improve overall business performance. Let’s break those formulas into four elements:

• Average order value (AOV)
• Total transactions per unique customer
• Lifetime
• Costs (CAC and COGS)

By pulling and pushing those levers, you can improve your LTV. So let’s explore them one by one:

1. Improve AOV

Too many marketers want to slash prices, thinking it will improve conversion rates and revenue. 

It can be true in some cases, but often, it simply decreases AOV, which hurts businesses’ bottom line. Remember: benefits trump revenue every single day.

How can you know if you could make improvements here? 

One way to do so is to use your historical data to map sales periods (lower AOV) with conversion rates. 

In some extreme cases, I observed flat conversion rates and lower AOVs, which should make you question sales’ relevance. 

If that’s your case, you have all the data you need to make CMOs and CFOs understand they need to switch strategies.

Reviewing account basics

Another operational alternative is to review media spend with an AOV lens:

• How does performance look for search terms containing “bargain,” “discount,” “cheap” and so on?
• Are low-cost products cannibalizing your Shopping budget?
• Does your copy include pricing terms? If so, how does it perform against other copies?
• Could you AB test landing pages? Single product against bundles, for example.
• Is your purchase value tracking taking into account discounts and taxes? Or are you inflating your results?

About price increases

Another very obvious way to increase AOV is to increase prices. Don’t go all out at once; a 5% increase will probably go unnoticed by your customers. At the very least, you want to align your prices with inflation.

And if you don’t control prices, try removing those Shopping SKUs priced slightly lower than similar products so you can focus your budget only on the slightly more expensive ones.

Ultimately, don’t think that low-priced items don’t have their place in your product mix. But make sure they don’t steal higher-priced items’ thunder.

2. Improve conversion rate

Upselling existing customers

PPC marketers often skim customer retention because their management pushes them to acquire new customers. Forgetting that existing customers are often much easier to sell to.

To fix this, you can target existing customers using a Customer List in Google Ads, Meta Ads, etc. and provide additional value to them:

• A different ad copy that highlights deeper features
• A different landing page that makes them convert faster
• Maybe a different product, one that features extra accessories they haven’t purchased yet

Here, be creative: you have so much more transactional data it simply can be a goldmine for PPC marketers.

Cross-selling to warm prospects

Use similar tactics with cart abandoners. For example, are you using dynamic retargeting campaigns?

You know, those campaigns basically use your shopping feeds to display the exact products people added to cart.

It’s an interesting feature for sure but it provides very little value to your customers other than staying top of mind. 

Instead, try cross-selling and advertise additional products that fit the product category your prospects visited or added to cart.

3. Review your customer journey

Another tactic is to review your purchasing journey and spot if you could shorten it. 

Are you sending your PPC traffic to the best landing pages for example? 

Could you send those same people to a page further down the funnel or more specific to your keywords / audiences / products / etc.?

In the end, there are plenty of ways to improve conversion rate. Here are other Search Engine Land articles to dig deeper:

• 5 tips for creating a high-converting PPC landing page
• 3 crazy PPC CRO hacks to boost conversion rates right now
• 3 powerful micro-conversion strategies for paid social

Make clients come back

I’ve written a short guide on retention so make sure to check it out. In more general terms, retention directly correlates with your product (or service) and its perceived quality.

One very operational thing you can do is to review the churn rate per product line. 

If most of your media spend is directed at high-churn product lines, you might want to adjust your campaign structure or product feed to redirect more of your budget toward higher revenue in the long term.

Another tactic you can use is ensuring that extensive PPC data flows through to your CRM (or your ERP if you can).

That way, you can identify what product, audience, copy or landing page generates repeat customers and fuel those insights into your operational strategies.

Ultimately, this is about identifying your best customers and your worst ones. You want to steer away from the latter and find more people who enjoy doing business with you.

4. Lower your costs

Here, you improve LTV by reducing CAC. There are several options, but the easiest and most impactful is probably to review your media mix.

I have onboarded many clients who used costly channels without measuring incrementality. 

In a nutshell, it means they didn’t “really” measure their marketing’s impact. Since it’s quite a topic, here are additional resources to get you going with incrementality measurement:

• Efficiency vs. volume in PPC: 4 tips to strike a balance in incremental conversions
• Solving an age-old SEO-PPC issue: How to bid on your brand name based on incrementality

Simply put, you want to review acquisition sources and reduce or even cut budgets that have a negative impact and fuel more budget to top-performing channels obviously.

Another straightforward tactic I recommend is to review Quality Score (and its equivalent in Meta Ads: Ad Relevance). The higher those metrics, the lower your CPC (and CAC).

Here are further articles to dig further:

• What is Quality Score and how to use it in PPC
• Quality score in paid search: Vanity or valuable?

I’m not talking about COGS since it’s a much wider topic than just PPC. But it naturally fits in the discussion.

Maximize customer lifetime value and drive profitability with PPC

LTV is a moving target but is critical for any business. If you want to gauge the skill level of a marketing team, ask them about their LTV. 

If they talk to you about OLED displays and 4K screens, you’ll know where you stand!

I strongly recommend setting up a dedicated LTV dashboard with its various factors: average order value, transactions per customer, retention, and CAC. 

This way, you can easily prioritize your efforts and make LTV improvement a recurring theme for your marketing team.

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Microsoft unveils new AI tools as it looks to ‘transform search and advertising’

Thursday, September 21st, 2023

Microsoft Advertising has unveiled a series of new generative AI tools for advertisers.

The new features, Conversational Ad experiences, Ads for Chat API, and Copilot, are part of the tech giant’s mission to transform search and advertising with generative AI.

Here’s a recap of the big announcements to come from Microsoft’s Surface and Copilot event in New York…

1. Compare and Decide Ads

Microsoft is rolling out a series of fresh ad formats tailored specifically to the Bing Chat experience, starting with its newest ad product, Compare and Decide Ads.

The new format will allow online shoppers to compare different products using criteria they find most valuable.

Compare and Decide Ads will run across all verticals that have relevant feed data, including retail, travel and auto.

Microsoft is planning to launch Compare and Decide Ads in close beta in early 2024.

2. Ads for Chat API

Microsoft has announced the first partners fir its new product, Ads for Chat API; Snapchat and Axel Springer.

Snapchat’s My AI chatbot, which has been used by more than 150 million people worldwide, leverages the tech to serve Sponsored Links in relevant content and experiences that “feel natural to the content flow”.

Meanwhile, Axel Springer’s Hey_ product on BILD.de, powered by Microsoft Azure Open AI Services and supported by Microsoft Advertising’s Ads for Chat API, helps advertisers connect with up to 17 million daily BILD.de users.

Microsoft has said it will continue evolving its API offering based on the feedback of its advertisers and partners. Looking to the future, the tech giant is planning to welcome more partners and support their chat experience needs.

3. Copilot for Microsoft Ads

Specifically designed for advertisers and agencies, Copilot is a new tool that leverages AI to generate recommendations for product images, headlines, and descriptions.

To use it, simply describe the content you need, like an image, and Copilot will generate suggestions based on your description.

Microsoft is currently testing the new tool on a handful of advertisers but plans to bring it to open beta in the next few months.

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Why we care. It’s important to keep up-to-date with new ad products and targeting tools to ensure you are delivering the best possible user experience and reaching high-value customers.

What has Microsoft said? Kya Sainsbury-Carter, VP Global Partner & Retail Media, Microsoft Advertising, said in a statement:

• “With Copilot in the Microsoft Advertising Platform, Compare & Decide Ads, and new Chat Ads partners, we are making progress in this new era of generative AI.”
• “Over the coming months we will share more functionality for Copilot in the Microsoft Advertising Platform and new Conversational Ad formats, as well as continuing to identify ways to democratize this incredible technology to transform the advertising industry.”
• “Generative AI represents a massive opportunity for all. It creates new value with real purpose. It creates opportunities for advertisers, drives traffic for publishers, and delights consumers. The era of AI is here, and we’re just getting started.”

Deep dive. Read Microsoft’s Transforming Search and Advertising with Generative AI announcement in full for more information.

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AMA with Google’s Gary Illyes: 15 quick SEO takeaways

Thursday, September 21st, 2023

Google’s Gary Illyes fielded several questions during an AMA at Pubcon Pro in Austin this afternoon from moderator Jennifer Slegg. Here are some of the highlights of the interview.

1. Does Google use user click data in ranking?

“Technically, yes,” Illyes said. This is because historical search data is part of RankBrain. 

2. Unlaunches happen ‘a lot’

Things change a lot (emphasis his) in search ranking at Google, Illyes said. What is true for ranking today could be wrong in two weeks. 

Google is known for experimenting with Search – and noted that it’s very hard to keep track of launches and “unlaunches,” adding that these unlaunches happen “a lot.” 

This makes sense when you consider Google rolled out 5,000 changes to Search in 2021 and ran a total of 800,000 experiments. 

3. Factors vs. signals vs. systems

The main difference between factors and signals is just language, Illyes said. At one point, they wanted people to differentiate between them. 

Ranking systems are more complex – this is when Google takes multiple signals (e.g., from crawling and indexing data) and ranks them. Ranking systems are also more “stable than signals,” Illyes said. 

4. Why Google doesn’t index everything

In short, the Internet is “insanely big,” Illyes said. There are probably hundreds of trillions of webpages that Google has sight of – but there are even more than that Google can’t access (e.g., content behind a login page).

• “There is virtually no storage you can use to index all of them. It’s not possible to index it in a way you can serve it,” Illyes said. 

5. You don’t have to label AI content for Google

Labeling AI content is not necessary for Google search – “I don’t think we care” – Illyes said. But he suggested labeling it if your users would appreciate it. 

Humans can cause more trouble than AI on certain topics, Illyes noted. He reiterated once again that Google doesn’t care how content is created – by AI, human or both.

“As long as I will learn from it, learn correct information, why would it matter?” Illyes said. 

6. AI content = no typos

One thing Illyes noticed while analyzing the output of ChatGPT and generative AI tools is that it doesn’t have typos.

• “Computers don’t make mistakes unless they were instructed to,” he said.

7. Why niche sites were impacted by helpful content update

When it comes to helpful content, niche sites often don’t fall into a category Google is looking to promote. To be clear, here Illyes was not referring to all types of niche sites, he was mostly talking about affiliate-type of niche sites that are heavily money-driven.

8. You can see gains between core updates

If your site is impacted by a Google core update, you should start working on things that could help your site improve and get pushed back up in Search results.

• “Maybe the next core update will help you more. Don’t think of updates in isolation. We’re using hundreds of signals to rank pages,” Illyes said.

He said waiting and holding your breath between core updates would be bad for your website’s health. 

9. Comments could signal that a site has an active community

While many websites removed comment sections and forums in the past 10 years, Illyes said that comments can be good. 

• “Especially if I know the site has a strict rule about how users can behave on the site, then I would trust info from those users more,” Illyes said.

Illyes didn’t say comments are a ranking signal. He was more saying this from his own perspective. And it was an interesting insights, especially considering how moderated user-generated sites like Reddit and Quora have seen gains following recent Google updates.

10. Google will keep launching updates in December

Google will continue to release updates during the holidays – Google used to avoid doing this, but Illyes called that an “old thing.” 

• “The problem is around that time, everyone tries to manipulate search results. With these updates we’re trying to course correct. I don’t think we should stop releasing updates in that period of time. Honestly I would hope that the updates will actually help you rank better if you were not trying do manipulate search results.”

11. Core Web Vitals = low priority

Short but sweet: 

• “If you don’t have anything better to do on your site, go do Core Web Vitals. Most sites won’t see benefit playing around with it,” Illyes said.

12. No voice data in GSC

Illyes said it was too difficult to get voice search data and doesn’t see a reason to add it to Google Search Console. He said it would take a “considerable amount of engineering time” to expose that data. 

13. Expired domain signals are not inherited

If a domain expires, and somebody buys that domain, any signals the site had accumulated will not be transferred to the new domain owner. Google knows when a domain expires. 

So if you bought an expired domain and tried to rebuild it (e.g., by getting all the content from Wayback Machine), you would be building the site from scratch, as if it were a new domain. 

14. Use H tags for accessibility

From Google’s perspective, it would be “pretty stupid” to rely on H1-6 tags for understanding order and hierarchy of content, Illyes said. 

He suggested using a screen reader on your site to make sure the content doesn’t “read wrong.” Use H tags where you need to use them, where it makes sense, Illyes said.

15. Importance of links is ‘overestimated’

Links are not a “top 3” ranking signal and hasn’t been “for some time,” Illyes said, adding that there really isn’t a universal top 3. 

It’s absolutely possible to rank without links, Illyes said, citing an example of a page with zero internal or external links that he knew of that was ranking Position 1 on Porsche cars – and Google had only found the page via a sitemap.

Content continues to be the number one ranking signal.

• “Without content it literally is not possible to rank. If you don’t have words on page you’re not going to rank for it. Every site will have something different as the top 2 or 3 ranking factors,” Illyes said.

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Google is planning to update its Misleading Representation policy

Thursday, September 21st, 2023

Google is going to update its Misleading Representation policy on 21 November 2023.

The search engine is planning to remove non-fulfillment of a product or service due to lack of qualifications under Misrepresentation and file it under the Unacceptable Business Practices policy instead.

Why we care. It’s vital to keep up-to-date with policy changes as violations can result in the suspension of your Google Ads account, meaning you can no longer advertise on Google.

What is the Misleading Representation policy? This policy prohibits ads or websites that mislead users by omitting important product details or presenting false information about products, services, or businesses.

The Misleading Representation policy was created to crackdown on unacceptable business practices, such as tricking users by hiding or distorting information about the advertiser’s business, product, or service. Other violations include:

• Phising techniques.
• Dishonest pricing practices.
• Clickbait tactics.
• Misleading ad designs.
• Making unproven or inaccurate claims.

What is the Unacceptable Business Practices policy? The Google Ads Unacceptable Business Practices policy was created to make online shopping safe. The policy forbids the following:

• Impersonating other brands.
• Enticing users to part with money or information through a fictitious business.
• False advertising of services that could endanger a user’s health, life, or safety.

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What has Google said? A Google spokesperson said in a statement:

• “We take violations of the Unacceptable Business Practices policy very seriously and consider them egregious.”
• “If we find violations of this policy, we will suspend your Google Ads accounts upon detection and without prior warning, and you will not be allowed to advertise with us again.”
• “If you believe there’s been an error, and that you haven’t violated our policy, submit an appeal and explain why.”
• “We only reinstate accounts in compelling circumstances, and when there is good reason so it’s important that you take the time to be thorough, accurate, and honest.”

Deep dive. Read Google’s Misrepresentation policy update in full for more information.

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