So that’s why, as part of our SMB Marketing 101 series, we’ve put this flow chart infographic together.

It’ll take you through a number of questions specific to your business, and at the end you’ll reach the destination of the right digital marketing channel suited for you. All you have to do is just answer yes or no.

You’ll also almost always end up with two or three channels to choose from – that’s because there’s rarely one size fits all, while it’s also never a good idea to concentrate on only one channel.

Then for more information on why each channel’s best for you, have a read below the infographic.

(Click to enlarge)

Answer 1: Sponsored Articles, Media Buys

This is a great way of getting your brand in front of the right people. Sponsored articles allow you to broadcast your views to thousands of targeted readers on major publications, adding respectability and credibility to your business and/or profile.

If you’re a digital agency you could publish a thought leadership piece about the changing marketing landscape on AdWeek. If you’re a food supplement business you could do a piece for The Mirror about the importance of magnesium in a healthy diet. The options are endless. 

Answer 2: Podcasts, YouTube

Audio and video have really cemented themselves as the best way to digest information on the internet in recent years, and if you’ve got something to say that you think will resonate with your audience, then look no further than Podcasting and Youtube.

Thousands of businesses are reaping the rewards of both channels. Find your niche and find your voice, then let the thought leader in you come out across the airwaves.

Answer 3: Influencer marketing   

Influencer marketing is all about social persuasion. If you’re looking to build out your brand in the fashion industry for example, getting a social media influencer to start wearing your clothing in their Instagram stories is a great way of doing it. 

Influencer marketing is an age-old tactic that has been successful for decades, maybe centuries. But now with social media, its popularity has exploded and that means it’s now a legitimate possibility for any digital marketer.

Answer 4: SEO

SEO isn’t a quick fix, but for long term, sustainable results, there is nothing better. Getting a solid SEO strategy in place can put you in the eyeline of every search term that relates to your business. And you never have to pay for a click.

Say you sell backpacking holidays, if you get on the first page of Google for “backpacking Thailand”, you could get thousands of clicks to your website every month for zero cost at all. You’ll need to put the hard work in to get there, but the results are enormous. Here’s a great free ebook that’ll get you started on the right foot.

Answer 5: Local Service Ads, Facebook Ads, Google My Business

For those offering a service like plumbing or decorating then Local Service Ads, a form of Google Ads, are the perfect solution to connect you with customers in your area. 

If you’re selling products or food/beverages, then Google My Business is a must to appear in searches such as “burger places near me”. For best results, supplement this with Facebook Ads to target customers in your area.

Answer 6: Snapchat, Instagram, TikTok, Influencer Marketing

Your ideal audience will be all over these apps, and with them being very visual platforms, you can easily wow them with eye-catching imagery and copy.

Influencers play great with these kinds of audiences too. If someone with thousands of active followers is using a certain type of skincare routine, you can guarantee others will want to follow suit.

Answer 7: Google, Microsoft and Facebook Ads

A very traditional form of digital marketing, these pay-per-click (PPC) channels are all super efficient for making sales through your website with an average of $8 being made for every $1 you spend.

Considering user intent, Facebook Ads will be better for smaller purchases, while Google and Microsoft will be more powerful for the higher end of the market.

Answer 8: Email marketing

Email marketing may be overlooked by many, but if you already have a client base in tow, there is nothing more powerful out there.

Email marketing allows you to talk directly to an audience that has already engaged with you, bought from you, or likes you, and this gives you such a huge leg up when it comes to selling them something.

Answer 9: Wix, Facebook, Google Ads

Whether you’re looking to build up a client base or get people to call you, you need to get a website on the go – it’ll make you look credible and make all your other digital marketing efforts so much easier.

Wix is a great place to start, it’s a simple drag and drop website building tool. Then from there, start running some Facebook or Google Ads to get people to your site.

Answer 10: Amazon, Etsy, eBay, Shopify

Amazon, Etsy and eBay are huge marketplaces that are perfect if you don’t want to create your own website. All you need is your product, and in no time at all, you can start selling straight to thousands of eager consumers.

If you fancy getting a website set up, then there’s no better platform to use than Shopify. It’s a place you can start, run and grow your business all from the same place.

Looking for more?

If you’re in the mood for some more learning, check out the rest of our SMB Marketing 101 series.

We’ve spoken to over 100 SMB owners and employees about how they started in digital marketing and what they’ve learnt from their experiences.

We look at the research phase, setting your goals, developing your brand, setting your budgets, building your presence, mastering each digital marketing channel, and much more.

Here’s part one for you to start with.

Enjoy!

So we decided to speak to a number of SMB owners and employees about their biggest timesaps at work and what tools they’re using to streamline the more manual side of their business.

In each section, we’ll give a bit of a rundown of why the software’s so good, how much it costs (almost all of them come with a free trial or free option), how much time it’s likely to save you, and a quote from an SMB owner/employee about why they like it so much.

Quickbooks – Finance & Bookkeeping

“I used Quickbooks when I first started my company on the advice of an accountant friend who said I would be thankful I started tracking all of my finances come tax time, and he was absolutely right. 

“Startup businesses would do well not to neglect accounting software from the get-go, because expenses and revenue can become a nightmare to keep track of once your business really hits its stride.”

Trevor Larson, CEO at Nectar

Quickbooks has rapidly become the go-to place for SMBs and sole traders to manage their finances.

The reason is that it lets you manage pretty much anything from a financial perspective – expenses, payslips and pensions, taxes, while it also integrates with your bank and business apps.

For those who struggle with their bookkeeping or want an easier way to do it, this piece of software is a must.

Price: From $7.50 per month

Estimated Time Saving: 8 hours a month (per website)

HR Locker – Recruitment & HR

“The benefits of this product are amazing for me. I can now run reports at the touch of a button and don’t have to use lots of excel sheets, which I was previously using.  I love the help function. I could go on and on about my plans for the usage.”

Anita Walsh, Head of People at Ward Solutions

There are a lot of HR tools out there (we’ve been through a lot of them at Adzooma!), but from our experience nothing comes close to HR Locker.

From managing staff’s time to getting a handle on recruitment, HR Locker is a great all in one software.

HR fundamentals, recruitment and onboarding, staff development and happiness, performance management, and more, HR Locker has it all in its… locker (sorry).

Price: Free for > 4 employees per month, $3.50 per additional employee

Estimated Time Saving: 90% of your time (per website)

Monday.com – Project Management

“Monday.com is an incredibly effective tool that helps our team to streamline and tackle projects as they come. Their social media managing feature has been a game-changer for us!”

Christian Adams, Co-Founder at Coffee Affection

Whether you’re a plumbing business or a digital marketing business, managing your projects and tasks isn’t easy. 

But that’s where Monday.com comes in, as it allows you to easily build, run and scale your workflows in one beautifully designed platform.

Project management platforms are another thing we’ve been through a lot at Adzooma, but Monday.com is by far our favorite. That’s almost entirely down to the stunningly intuitive interface which almost makes project management seem fun (or at least a lot more fun than it used to be). 

Price: Free for up to 2 users. $8 per user after that

Estimated Time Saving: Not stated

Hubspot – Customer Relationship Management (CRM)

“Among all CRMs I have tried, HubSpot has a friendly user-interface that allows new users to easily navigate the software. 

“What I like most about it is how I can jump from creating a sales funnel to creating email campaigns and landing pages in a short amount of time. It is innovative, and just the right software SMBs need to grow their business.”

Nate Tsang, CEO of WallStreetZen

Hubspot is one of the most respectable software companies out there and for good reason, because the products they offer are nothing short of outstanding.

Live chat integrations, customer service ticketing software, email marketing templates, call recording; if you’re looking for a piece of software that can help with every touch point of your CRM journey then you can’t look beyond Hubspot.

From marketing to sales, operations to customer service, Hubspot has all the tools to help keep your current customers happy and get new ones through the door.

Price: Number of free tools. Bundles start from $45 per month

Estimated Time Saving: 250 hours a year (per case study)

Survey Sparrow – Experience Management 

“We have been very satisfied with SurveySparrow and their customer support. The survey platform has helped us to gather user feedback in a very efficient way and their customer support has been very helpful and fast with any questions or problems.”

Jaako Jalkanen, Business Manager at Brella

Now, compared to some of the others on this list Survey Sparrow may seem a little bit basic, but the word I’d use is specialist.

Because what Survey Sparrow concentrates on is delivering on customer feedback, and the way it does this is by making sure you can be present with your feedback across a whole range of touchpoints – email, QR code, web link, chatbots, embeds, SMS, etc.

We all know how important getting feedback is, whether it’s for your product/service, your website, your marketing, or for something else, Survey Sparrow does this better than anyone whether you’re looking for customer reviews or conducting consumer research.

Price: Free

Estimated Time Saving: Not stated

Shopify – eCommerce

“We’ve been able to build something in 3 years that a lot of brands haven’t actually gotten to in 10 years. 

“You don’t need to go into debt trying to launch your brand.”

Chimo Ngwudo, Owner of Cee Cee’s Closet

If you’re a company that sells products online then Shopify is your Holy Grail.

Why? Because it offers everything you need, from building your website to processing payments, from managing orders to marketing your business. And it makes all of this so easy too.

Shopify is King for eCommerce businesses, it’s used by nearly 2 million businesses worldwide and over $200 billion has been made in sales through the platform. Honestly, it’s just magnificent.  

Price: 14 day free trial, then from $29 per month 

Estimated Time Saving: Not stated

SEMrush – Digital Marketing

“I’m a small business owner, and SEMrush is what helps me compete with larger firms while sticking to my smaller budget. 

“I have a marketing background, so I want to handle as much in-house as I can, and SEMrush makes all of it easy, especially with all of the new features that are constantly being released.”

Bryce Walker, CEO of CPA Exam Guy

So far we’ve concentrated mostly on the day-to-day running of your business, but now I think it’s time to concentrate on the marketing. 

SEMrush is the ultimate platform for SMBs looking to take a data-led approach to their digital marketing because quite simply, it is a treasure trove full of data.

Whether you’re looking for how many people search for the products you sell on Google every month or you want to know how much search engine traffic your competitor is receiving, SEMrush will be on hand to help. Quite simply, it’s the ultimate tool to help you plan and monitor your online marketing strategy.

Price: Free Trial, then from $199.50 per month

Estimated Time Saving: Not stated

Adzooma – Paid Marketing

“Adzooma is a phenomenal platform that can really be able to save you time and resources, evaluate what is performing and what is not performing, giving you the right suggestions. 

“With the help of Adzooma, I feel like I have a team backing me to make educated decisions to build a strong campaign.”

Alejandra Perdomo, Digital Marketing Manager at Flooret

For those managing paid ads on Google, Microsoft, or Facebook, there is no time-saving platform out there like Adzooma.

Adzooma takes all the manual side out of paid ad management and turns all the overwhelming data into bite-size chunks of information – which you can then action with just a single click. Certain ads wasting money? Adzooma will tell you that and you can sort it out right away.

Adzooma has over 50+ single-click optimizations to help you with your day-to-day work, plus there’s in-built reporting, automation, and SEO capabilities built-in on top. Adzooma really is a no-brainer.

Price: Free

Estimated Time Saving: A day a week (per case study)

AWeber – Email Marketing

“I use Aweber for all my email marketing needs and refer it to all my clients and students. I love their customer support, the ease of using their drag and drop campaign builder, the unlimited emails and their deliverability rates.”

Trent Jessee, Founder of Watchman Advisors

Email Marketing is a crucial weapon in an SMB’s armory and is something that needs to be deployed with poise and quality. We’ve been through a lot of different email marketing platforms at Adzooma, and AWeber is definitely something to help you with both.

Drag and drop editor, pre-built templates, automation, sequences, sales tracking; AWeber contains everything you come to expect from an email marketing platform in 2021, but more than that, it also offers great landing page capabilities and a host of opportunities for ecommerce companies too.

For those looking to get into email marketing for the first time, or looking for an upgrade on their current platform, AWeber is the choice for you.

Price: Free for up to 500 subscribers, $26.15 per month up to 2,000

Estimated Time Saving: Not stated

Crowdfire – Social Media Management

“I have used Crowdfire since my initial days as a Digital Marketer. Since it is browser-friendly, it is possible to track all the social media mentions and manage posts from the browser itself. 

“It also offers automatic analytics updates weekly which is useful in understanding the social media audience reach and compare it across the platforms. Crowdfire doesn’t have any content limitations, unlike other social media management tools.”

Nathan Hughes, SEO Manager at Diggity Marketing

In 2021, it’s crucially important to have a presence on social media. Even if you’re not super busy, it does a lot for your credibility just to have a profile to make you look legitimate.

But social media management can be a timesap, so that’s why using something like Crowdfire is great because it allows you to manage your Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Instagram pages all from the same place. 

From there you can also schedule posts, receive recommended content to post, analyze your competitors, and more. It’s a great way to make social media management a breeze.

Price: Free

Estimated Time Saving: 30 minutes a day (per case study)

Why Productivity Tools?

Productivity tools come in all shapes and sizes, and what’s great about most on this list is that they almost always come with a free trial or freemium option.

Now, tech truly is starting to really take over – from the stock market to how we spend our downtime – it means that the tools that are becoming accessible to SMBs are just getting better and better.

The technology is being taken to new heights, and that’s what you see with the tools on this list. From helping your day-to-day project management to helping you manage your paid advertising, every single part of your working life can be transformed by productivity tools.

Try them out, if they’re not for you, they’re not for you. 

But with more tools popping every single day, there’s definitely going to be a tool that will solve a huge problem for you in the future.

But not every PPC metric is important for what you want to achieve and it isn’t as daunting as you may think.

So much of it comes down to intent. For example, you may hear people in the PPC community say, “Impressions don’t matter one jot!” But that’s not the case at all. If you’re running a brand campaign for example, one of the most important metrics you should be looking at is impressions.

So in this article, I’m going to lay out all the PPC metrics you should be keeping an eye on (as you may have guessed from the title), but I’m also going to lay out for what reason you should be keeping an eye on them.

That way, when you next head into your PPC campaigns and you’re looking at the performance of your brand campaigns for example, you can start to prioritise some metrics more than others.

Intent Is Key

Aligning your campaigns with intent is crucial to PPC success. Before you start any campaign you need to ask yourself the question, “What do I want out of this?”

This can be just something as simple as: 

• more customers (sales campaign)
• more eyes on my brand (brand campaign)
• more users on my website (traffic campaign)
• more sign ups for my free webinar (lead campaign)

Those are the campaigns we’re going to concentrate on today. You could go more granular if you wanted, but for the vast majority of PPC users, your campaigns will fit into one of the four buckets above.

Therefore, once you’ve made your decision regarding which campaign you want to proceed with, you then need to ask the question, “What metrics do I need to keep an eye on to measure this campaign’s success?”

That’s what this article is for. Here I’m going to go through each metric you’d see in your Adzooma, Microsoft or Google ads account, then tell you which type of campaign this metric is most useful for.

Cost – Everything

Let’s start with a super easy one, cost: how much your campaign has spent.

Unless you’re Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos, you’re probably going to want to keep an eye on this one so you’re not bankrupting yourself.

Verdict: Keep an eye on it unless you’re a billionaire

Want to save more money on your campaigns? Have a read of our article on 4 simple ways to save money on your PPC campaigns right now

Clicks – Everything

Clicks aren’t the be all and end all, but they’re an important measurement stick for every kind of campaign you’re running.

Every sale and every lead has to start with a click first.

If you want your brand out there, aren’t crucial, but someone just noticing your brand’s name in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) isn’t likely to do that much – even if you’re running a brand campaign you still want someone to click your ads.

Verdict: Always be measuring those clicks no matter what campaign you’re running

Click-Through Rate (CTR) – Everything

Click through rate is the percentage of people who see your ad  and click it. So if 100 people see your ad, but only 5 people click it, your CTR will be 5%. 

Typically, if you’re connected to the Adzooma platform you’ll see a CTR of 6% on Google Ads and 3.7% on Microsoft, which is about 4% and 1% higher than industry average.

You always want to keep an eye on this one, for every kind of campaign you run. If that CTR is dropping to below 2% then you probably need to take action and revise your ad copy or ad relevancy to try and get people clicking on your ads.

This isn’t a cut and dry rule, though. You could have thousands of clicks and hundreds of conversions while your CTR might be at 1%. Then you’d say to me, “Tom, stop telling me I need my CTR above 2% because I’m here raking in the dollar.”

Your own judgement is key afterall. PPC isn’t always a science, sometimes it’s an art.

Verdict: You don’t always have to be concerned if it drops too low, but it’s something to always keep an eye on

Adzooma users see an uptick in CTR rates due to the easy to implement Opportunities that are a part of the free platform.  Learn More

Cost Per Click (CPC) – Everything

Staying on the theme of clicks, staying on the theme of metrics you need to measure for every kind of campaign, we approach the subject of CPC.

Now, whereas the two above you don’t always have to be concerned about, this one you very much do. Because if you’re paying way over the top for your clicks, then something is very wrong, and it’s going to hit you in the place that hurts most – your pocket.

How much you pay for clicks depends on what industry you’re in, but whatever they are, you need to keep an eye on them. Not doing so could destroy your campaigns.

Verdict: Always measure this. No ifs or buts.

Quality Score – Everything

Quality Score is another really important metric because if your Quality Score is low, then you’re going to pay more for your ads no matter what campaign you’re running.

Quality Score is a little bit tougher to understand than the other KPIs because it’s a little bit vaguer – it’s made up of different measurements like ad relevance, landing page experience, ad format, expected CTR etc.

It also has a scoring system out of 10. Anything 5 and below isn’t particularly great and therefore your ads should be revised (unless you’re running competitor campaigns, for example).

You can read our Quality Score explainer article to get more information on what it is, why it’s so important, and how you can improve it.

Verdict: Very important for all campaigns to save on unnecessary wasted spend

Conversions – Sales / Leads

You can discount this if you’re running brand or traffic campaigns, but for those running sales or lead campaigns, then stick around.

Conversions are simply what you define as a user completing an action which becomes a lead or a sale – that could be: 

• Signing up to your email newsletter
• Enquiring about your services
• Making a purchase.
• And so on

As you can imagine, this is something you will want to keep an eye on – especially if you have a target of getting 1,000 people signed up for your newsletter or something.

However, make sure you don’t measure this in isolation. You don’t want to look solely at conversion without cost too (spoiler: that’s what the next one’s about).

Verdict: Important for sales and lead campaigns, but make sure you don’t measure it in isolation

Cost Per Acquisition (CPA) – Sales / Leads

Here comes the context.

CPA is how much you pay per lead or customer (dependent on what you class as a conversion in Google Ads), so say 15 people click your ad for a total cost over £75 and you get two conversions, the CPA will be £37.50. 

You can see why this would be important. If your CPA is at £37.50 , but you’re only making a £20 sale, it’s likely you need to change your strategy up.

When you set up your campaigns in Adzooma, you will be able to set a Target CPA.  Using historical information and contextual signals, Adzooma automatically set your bids to try to get your conversions to remain at that Target CPA. 

This can’t be something you do straight away, though – you need to have had at least 30 conversions in the last 30 days for the algorithm to work.

Verdict: Super important metric to watch if you’re running sales or lead campaigns

Conversion Rate (CVR) – Sales / Leads

Another one that applies to the sales and lead campaigns, CVR is the percentage of people who convert from a click. So say you have 1 conversion and 10 clicks, your CVR will be 10%.

This metric is important to see how well you’re performing after the click, when a user is on your site and looking to make an action. If this metric is super low, maybe the audience you’re attracting isn’t right, maybe your site is too slow, maybe your landing page isn’t the best. 

Those are things you’ll have to dig into yourself, but CVR is a good indicator that either something’s going wrong after the click or something is going pretty darn well.

Verdict: A good indicating metric for sales and lead campaigns to help figure out your success after the click

Impressions – Brand 

Now, a lot of people would say impressions don’t matter at all, but that really isn’t true.

If you’re wanting eyes on your brand, then impressions do matter. For example, imagine if you’re a small cola brand and you’re beside Coca Cola and Pepsi with a quirky ad – that’s automatically going to get people thinking about you. Even if they don’t click on you, being in their mind is good enough.

That’s why impressions are important. Not for every campaign, sure. But don’t rule them out entirely.

Verdict: Important metric for brand campaigns. Not for anything else

Impression Share (CPM) – Everything

Now impression share is a little bit different to impressions. It’s actually the total impressions divided by the total eligible impressions.

Total eligible impressions take into account things like bid budget, targeting settings, quality score and approval statuses.

So if you’re really wanting to get those eyes on your brand, this is a really important metric for you, as if that CPM is low, then you may want to do something about that.

However, this also impacts sales and lead campaigns too, because again if your CPM is low, you could be losing out on clicks to your competitors because more often than not, your ads aren’t being seen.

Plus, on top of CPM, there is also Absolute Top Impression Share and Search Top Impression Share, which gives you a percentage run down of the location of your ads in the SERPs. 

This percentage indicates whether your ads have the possibility of reaching the top or absolute top. This how they’re worked out:

• Search top impression rate = Impressions on top/Impressions
• Search absolute top impression rate = Impressions on the absolute top/Impressions

Verdict: Important for all campaigns.

An Easier Way?

If you’re thinking, “That is a lot to remember, isn’t there an easier way?” 

Well, the answer to that is yes!

With the free Adzooma platform, the software can keep an eye on all these metrics for you and then notify you whenever they turn bad or there’s opportunity for something more.

If you’re starting out in PPC, then it’s the perfect sidekick to help you along in your learning journey.

Then when you’ve navigated your way to an added level of competency, it’ll be your trusty assistant who’ll be there to handle all the manual work so you don’t have to.

All you have to do is connect your Google, Microsoft or Facebook account to the Adzooma platform, then you’ll have access to one-click optimisations, a full reporting suite, extensive automation, and so much more, at no cost at all.

Get started today.

What we had to say

“I’m absolutely delighted. To win Rising Star of the Year at a ceremony run by such an esteemed company is really something. It was just great to be nominated but to win is such an honour.

“The team worked so hard throughout 2020 to create a platform that helped businesses of all sizes thrive throughout such a difficult year and this award win will only embolden us to continue on in that endeavour.”

Thomas Hampson, Trailblazer of the Year nominee

“It was amazing to be nominated for four awards across a spectrum of categories from a business like Microsoft, but to win one is incredible.

“The past year has been tough for all of us, but our customer’s openness in supplying us with feedback and collaborating on feature launches throughout the year helped us to navigate the last 12 months in the way that we did, and we’re entirely grateful.”

Robert Wass, CEO & Co-Founder

“Microsoft Advertising is such an integral part of the paid media landscape and our customers throughout the year have commented as much.

“Throughout 2020 we created a host of new Microsoft Advertising Opportunities, built a dedicated Microsoft Performance Report, and produced in-depth analysis on the efficacy of Microsoft Advertising.

“Everything we introduced across the year received great feedback and that’s in part down to Microsoft’s enthusiasm and openness in collaboration to create a better product for our customers.”

Dave Sharpe, CEO & Co-Founder

Why This Matters To You

Being recognised by Microsoft for such awards like this demonstrates that:

• We are focused on creating a product that will support businesses and the digital marketing community even through the toughest of times
• We continue to be at the forefront of innovation within the digital marketing industry to create a product that is always improving and ever-evolving
• We are committed to undertaking research studies and analysis that helps develop and aid long term Microsoft Advertising strategies for our customers
• We are relentless in our pursuit of creating the best Microsoft Advertising management platform available

Learn more about Microsoft Advertising

• How To Get Set Up on Microsoft Ads
• Our Partnership with Microsoft
• How To Optimise Your Microsoft Ads (Tips & Advice)

No matter how optimised our campaigns are, there’s always room for improvement somewhere, and that’s why we always need to be humble enough to never rest on our laurels and always keep an eye out for improvements.

But there’s only so much time in the day and there’s only so much resource at our disposal.

Of course these days most marketers you speak to will use some kind of software such as an SEO platform like SEO PowerSuite, a visibility platform like SEMrush, or Adzooma’s free PPC management platform, and these platforms will, of course, save you oodles of time.

But that doesn’t mean the time you saved should be spent on yoga (I’m not slagging yoga off, it’s great, but it’s not going to improve your marketing results).

Instead, it gives us more hours in the day to focus on the bigger picture, on our strategy, and that’s where this article I’ve got for you today comes in.

Working in collaboration with the University of Cambridge, our in-house product and data scientist team alongside three Cambridge MBA programme students, took a deep dive into Adzooma’s treasure trove of data with the intention of using that data to make Adzooma better and to answer the question – What makes online marketing work?

This article is one part of a wider series, here are the rest:

• What Makes Online Marketing Work: The Cambridge University & Adzooma Findings
  • A background look into how and why we ended up working with the University of Cambridge
• How To Select The Best Digital Marketing Channel For Your Business
  • We drove into our reams of data to determine whether Microsoft, Google and/or Facebook Ads is the best marketing channel for you
• What Makes A Landing Page Convert: The Cambridge University & Adzooma Findings
  • Using the data, the team took a close look at how to get those extra leads and customers from your landing page

*Disclaimer – All campaign data provided to study participants was selected at random and anonymised.

So why content?

The question on your mind right now is probably an extension of the one above, “Okay, so if you wanted to answer the question, ‘What makes online marketing work?’, why is this article about content?

Well, that’s just how crucial content is. Once the Cambridge Uni students were aboard, each member of the team was tasked with leveraging Adzooma’s data in a way that would help small to medium sized businesses to maximise their ad spend.

One of the things that jumped out at them? Yep, content.

This probably isn’t the biggest surprise for many of you. It’s something that marketing gurus and thought leaders bang on about all the time often using those three immortal words: ‘Content is King’.

I mean, ever since the invention of the printing press we’ve seen how powerful content can be, so this isn’t groundbreaking stuff.

However, it’s fair to say that not everyone treats it with the respect it deserves. Your content strategy is something that needs to be considered at a business level right alongside your sales strategy, accounting and customer personas.

And by content strategy, I don’t mean your content marketing strategy, I’m talking everything from your tone of voice, to your sentimentality, right through to your imagery.

Let’s start with an example. Say you’re an in-house PPC manager for a UK travel company who specialise in gap year holidays. When your company was created, your founder would have had a typical customer in mind:

• Affluent – able to afford an expensive airfare and sustain themselves for a year
• Adventurous – looking to travel to a region of the world dissimilar to their own for an extended period
• Young – the type of person who doesn’t mind the hostel life, constant travelling, and has no family commitments
• Time to spare – students who’ve just finished university/college or millennials on a career break

Of course, there will be so many more considerations, and not every person going on a gap year will fit this mould. Typically, however, they would, and from this persona is where your tone of voice and sentimentality is created.

So how do you speak to them in your PPC ads? Are you upbeat, are you trying to evoke some excitement from their soul? Or do you want to go the other way and play it cool by impressing them with sophisticated diction?

These types of decisions are crucial, and aligning these decisions across your whole marketing strategy is a key to success.

That’s why I say your content strategy needs to be a business level decision. And if isn’t, and you are that PPC manager as highlighted above, put the word in to your boss, maybe ask them to get a marketing strategist on board. Because it’s fine writing evocative ads, but if this doesn’t align with the type of customer who’ll be seeing your ad or interested in your product or services, that disconnect will show up in your results.

How to get it right & the research to back it up

Getting your brand’s sentimentality right is tough and requires work. You need to be agile, you need to always be abreast of the latest trends, you need to be able understand your audience, you need to understand your niche, and your standing in that niche too.

If you’re a big enough brand, you should be social listening, monitoring social media channels for mentions of your brand and analysing the way people talk about you. That’s a crucial way of understanding your audience. Some great tools I’d recommend:

• Awario – The comprehensive way to monitor your brand’s mentions online. Simple as that. Prices start at $29 per month
• Agorapulse – Near perfect tool for managing your brand’s mentions across social media, and searching for keywords on Twitter. Prices start at $79 per month
• Mention – Really basic, but easy way to monitor your brand’s mentions across the internet, though do be careful as it doesn’t spot everything. Starts at $25 per month
• TweetDeck – A free platform which is basically how I imagine the people at Twitter wish they’d designed Twitter. Super easy to use

If you don’t have that following yet, monitor your competitors, industry trends, certain hashtags and keywords related to your business. Sometimes this might have a wider scope than for just your business too.

Back in March at the start of the pandemic, The Edelman Trust found in a report that customers wanted brands to stop marketing that was “humorous or too lighthearted in tone.” I’m sure you wouldn’t have done it, but imagine if you’d carried on running your travel ads not even taking into consideration the pandemic. Wouldn’t have worked would it?

You may think this out of your scope as a PPC manager, but it really isn’t. The key to stepping up from a good PPC manager to a great PPC manager is becoming a more well-rounded marketer.

But it also gets deeper than that, because you also need to understand the network you’re advertising on too. And that’s where our research comes in.

Studying 3,500 phrases across an even split of Microsoft and Google accounts connected to our platform, we were able to deduce some fascinating data.

First, I’ll start with a bit of a boast, but only because it provides you with little bit of context for the stats to follow.

From the analysis we found for both Google Ads and Microsoft Ads the click through rate for the accounts connected to the Adzooma platform was around 6% and 3.7% respectively, which if you’re up on your industry averages, far exceeds the 1.91% and 2.83% you’re expected to see.

This could obviously be for a couple of reasons: the accounts connected to our platform are of a high quality or our platform drives our users’ CTR up (which is probably the case considering it’s one of the many benefits you get from our Opportunities feature).

But this wasn’t the intention behind our research. What we wanted to do was take a real look into the sentimentality of the ads – whether positive or negative sentiment in the ad copy had an affect on the click through rate.

Going back to the travel example, what kind of ad would you opt for? Negative sentiment like, “Get out of dreary old Nottingham today!” Positive sentiment like, “The golden shores of Brazil await!” Or neutral sentiment like, “Book your holiday now!”

Being off brand will still bring customers in, sure, and the example ads will work in their own way, but writing ads specifically to your brand’s guidelines and the advertising channel you’re using is the key to success.

So, knowing the importance of this, when drilling down into the data, we saw quite the discrepancy. For Google Ads, those ads written with a negative sentiment saw a click through rate of 6.5% compared to 5.7% for neutral and positive.

With Microsoft Ads, that completely switched with positive sentiment seeing a 4.2% CTR, neutral 3.6% and negative 3.3%.

The reasoning? Of course it’s hard to be sure, but it’s important to acknowledge that these aren’t like for like comparisons. Indeed, when you compare any sets of data, you need to appreciate the scope for discrepancies – it’s hard to truly create a full proof test.

Yet whilst acknowledging those potential discrepancies, it’s also wise to look at the demographics of both the Google and Microsoft audiences.

We all know Google to be a beast, the first choice search engine of the majority of internet users, but Microsoft still has over 60 million search users in itself, and these users tend to be a little bit older (45 compared to Google’s 38), more affluent (1 in 3 Microsoft searchers have a household income of $100k, with 35% spending more on online shopping than a Google user), and more educated too (50% have a college degree).

These stats may seem abstract with relation to the sentimentality analysis, but if you cross reference them, we find some correlation.

For example, though people say money doesn’t buy happiness, a Harvard Business School Study found out that those with more money were roughly 0.25 points happier on a 10-point scale. A study by the Journal of Clinical Psychiatry discovered that, “Despite the physical ravages of age, older people are actually happier than younger adults.” While work from Blanchflower in 2008 shows that life satisfaction is higher for the more educated.

Does that mean then that Microsoft users are more likely to click positively worded ads because their userbase are likely to be happier than those who use Google? I think the answer is nuanced.

Nuance in research

Really, that’s how we should evaluate every piece of research we read, with nuance. Stats and datasets are hugely important, but you have to add your own context to them, especially in marketing.

The stats we gleaned from our research are really interesting, but taken in isolation, it’s not going to change your business. Using our research alongside your own research, your own content strategy, and your own brand identity, then that might. These were the recommendations made by the University of Cambridge students.

So keep digging into your audience, keep trying to find out who you truly are as a business. Our free PPC platform will help you immensely by easily telling you about the ads that aren’t performing and why, plus there are one-click optimisations for so many of the Opportunities too, which really allows you to focus on the strategy side.

But at the end of the day, no machine will ever be able to write ads or come up with a better marketing strategy than you could (not even GP-2). That’s why our platform is designed to take the manual side of the business away from you, so you can spend time on the work unique to you.

So much of the research and the questions that you ask yourself, your co-workers, your customers, or your employees may be deep, but that’s what you want, philosophical answers.

As the great business academic Gary Hamel said, discovery is the journey, insight is the destination.

Guaranteed. I said it. No huge campaign overhauls, no 70 hour weeks, no hiring more staff. Just four simple tactics you can apply in a morning’s work.

 Let me show you how.

1. Get eyes on all your search terms data

I still find it ridiculous that this is even a thing. 

All of us should have access to all our search terms data anyway, but to huge outrage, in September Google updated their Ads Search Terms Report to only include terms searched for by “a significant number of users”.

This meant that PPCers who followed best practice to filter out costly small volume irrelevant search terms as negative keywords were no longer able to do it. 

Seer Interactive did some research into this and found that “for every $100K you spend on Google search, you get search term data for $71,000 of it.” Before the update, this figure stood at $98,700.

An enormous hit.

But it isn’t all doom and gloom and there are measures you can put in place to combat this problem. One super simple way is to utilise Google Analytics.

First, make sure that you have auto tagging enabled. Then in Google Analytics follow the path:

Acquisition > Google Ads > Search Queries

To see the search terms which were not appearing in Google Ads, add an advanced filter for: Clicks Equal to 0 and Sessions Greater than 0

And voila! You have your workaround. 

You may come across some inspiration for your own keywords here, but if not and what you find is all irrelevant, add them as negative keywords in Google Ads and you’ve solved the problem.

Just make sure to keep checking so you don’t waste any of that spend!

Want more help with negative keywords? Take a look at our negative keywords guide to find out everything you need to know.

2. Get cashback on all your ad spend

This is a no brainer and something you can do in no time at all.

In November 2020, Revolut and Adzooma agreed an exclusive deal to offer money back on every single £ users from the UK and EU spend on managing ads through Facebook, Google and/or Microsoft.

All you have to do is follow these three simple steps:

1. Open a Revolut account: head to the Revolut sign-up page to open a new business account – for free.
2. Connect your ad accounts: then you’ll need to connect your Google, Facebook and/or Microsoft accounts to Adzooma. Again, this is free to do. (Important: you need to link your Revolut business card to your ad accounts to qualify.)
3. Enjoy your cashback: and that’s it! Once you’ve set up both accounts, you’ll get a monthly cashback statement with quarterly payments.

Say you were spending £100 a day on ads, you would receive £91.25 in cashback every year. No catch, it’s just that simple. 

You can see how much money you’d save by using the cashback calculator here. 

This is the only deal of its kind around, an industry first, and it doesn’t cost a penny to get started.

3. Start utilising Automation

Automation is the buzzword of PPC right now. But buzzwords become buzzwords for a reason. Automation is a buzzword (I’ll stop saying buzzword now) because it’s so damn useful.

Automation makes your day to day PPC management so much easier. It’s a fail-safe in case anything goes wrong. It’s a way to automatically carry out the micro-changes you don’t have time for. It’s a custom alarm system letting you know when you need to spring into action.

Automation simply saves you time and money. It helps you to scale, analyse, manage and launch your ads quicker than you ever could before. Plus, with the complexity of PPC having increased considerably over the past decade, if you’re not using automation in 2021 you’re simply going to fall behind.

Let me quickly guide you through 4 automation templates you can use in the Adzooma platform that will save you money today. These automations also run and check your accounts every 30 minutes of every day, something you just couldn’t do manually:High Volume Low Conversion – Available at campaign and ad group level, this template will set up your campaign to pause or notify you if the cost per conversion gets too high for your liking

Ad Pausing on Scale – This allows you to automatically pause a number of ads should the CTR or conversion rate be too low

Pause High CPA Ad Groups – For Ad Group level, if your CPA is above what you’d like it to be, this automation template will stop it right in its tracks.

Pause Underperforming Keywords – A great one for keyword level, this template will pause the keywords that aren’t receiving a good click through rate or conversions.

It’s really simple stuff. Once you’re in your free Adzooma account, just head to Automation, click “New Automation Rule”, “Choose Template” then you can start applying these rules to the campaigns, ad groups, ads and keywords you deem necessary.

Each template also comes with a number of and/or conditions you can adjust and change to whatever suits you best.

And to reiterate, these automations run every half an hour, so if you’re looking for a true way to save money on your PPC campaigns, this is the way to go. 

You just couldn’t be this comprehensive without it.

4. Sign up to Microsoft Ads

Not advertising on Microsoft Advertising yet? Well lucky you, because when you set up a Microsoft Advertising account you get $125 free when you spend your first $25 on ads with our exclusive offer. 

Microsoft has long been overlooked by a lot of PPCers down the years, but just as you wouldn’t neglect radio if you were advertising on TV, you shouldn’t neglect Microsoft just because you’re on Google.

Microsoft is home to:

• 13.7 billion monthly PC searches
• 638 million unique PC users
• 63 million users that Google doesn’t reach

Not only that, but Microsoft’s audience is both more educated and more affluent with a third of Microsoft users in the US having a household income over $100k.

The demand is very much there too, despite the skepticism, as we found out in our recent research piece where we compared like for like Microsoft and Google campaigns.

It’s time for you to stop neglecting Microsoft Ads – especially when you get $125 for free when you give it a go!

Start saving today

There you have it, there are four sure ways to save money on your PPC campaigns today. No if’s, no maybe’s, just four guaranteed money-saving tactics you can implement right now.

Don’t rush the process, especially the first and third tactic should be conducted as thoroughly as you’d conduct any part of your work.

But there’s no huge overhauls, no long working night’s needed. Just follow the outlined steps and your results will change overnight.

From the CEO at La Tienda del Apicultor who saves one day a week managing his ads to the freelancer Phil Bacon who increased his conversions by 200%; people in every role and every industry are seeing the benefit of incorporating automation into their daily paid marketing management.

So where do you start? We at Adzooma understand that getting into something new can always be a little bit difficult. New ways of working and new software can seem a bit abstract at the beginning, a bit weird, a bit overwhelming.

But that’s why we’ve written this article. 

Here I’m going to guide you through the five most popular automation rules that Adzooma users implement on a day to day basis. I’m going to tell you why they’re so useful, show you which features are best to take advantage of and explain just how you can implement them into your PPC strategy.

So without further ado, let’s get started.

How do I set up a rule?

Just so you’re not confused when you enter the Automation tab of your Adzooma account, let me just quickly explain what everything is for you.

When you land on Automation you will be taken to a screen which shows all the Automation rules you’ve implemented (you’re not going to have anything showing here if you’ve just started, of course).

Then to create a rule, hit New Automation Rule in the top right. You will then get a choice: Choose Template and Create Custom Rule. Everything today we’re showing you is a template, so click the Choose Template button.

From there you will be taken to the list of all the templates. Once you’ve clicked Create Rule on one of the templates, you will be met by a template that has already been filled in for you. But if you like, you will also be able to customise it to your preference and you’ll be met with 5 different sections:

• Details
  • This is where you name the rule and give it a description
• Apply To
  • This is where you choose what you want the rule to apply to e.g. All Active Keywords
• Conditions
  • This is the most important bit, this is what makes your rule fire, so for example if you’re wanting to run a High Volume, Low Conversion rule, you would add a condition that has a cost which you think is high and a conversion number you think is low e.g. Over £600 for less than 5 conversions. In this section you can create And/Or rules, so you can customise the rule to fire when both conditions are met or just when one of those two conditions are met. There’s more info on that in this blog post on And/Or conditions should you need it.
  • In this section you also set up what action you want to take place when those conditions have been met e.g. Pause Campaign
  • And finally how many days’ worth of data you want the rule to check e.g. the last 3 days worth of data
• Frequency
  • This is where you specify when/how often you want your rule to run. At the times you specify, Adzooma will check your rule and apply the action you have set if your conditions are met. These can be as often as 30 minutes so your campaigns are being monitored every hour of the day.
• Notifications
  • This is simply where you set up which email accounts you want to be notified when a condition has been met

1. Campaign High Volume Low Conversion (Google & Microsoft ads)

Budget management is super important in any line of business, and in the paid marketing world, there’s no better way of keeping that budget in check than the High Volume Low Conversion rule for Campaign-wide ads.

Whether you want it to pause the campaign automatically when your clicks have skyrocketed or just notify you by email when the cost of your campaign has ballooned and the conversions haven’t, the choice is yours.

Why should you implement this?

I almost want to say this is a must have. Not necessarily to pause your campaigns when a certain monetary figure has been reached, but certainly to notify you when it has.

Of course you can go into your campaigns and check this data yourself, but what Adzooma does is check your accounts every 30 minutes of every day, so if your conditions are met, you’ll immediately be notified so you can take action. This just isn’t something you could do manually. 

And with this being a campaign wide rule, knowing when to spring into action as soon as possible should your spend go too high is vital.

How do you implement this?

This is nice and easy. Head to the Automation tab in your Adzooma account, click New Automation Rule in the top right, then Choose Template, and click High Volume Low Conversion at the top in the Campaign section.

Here you will be able to customise your rule to suit. For example, you may want to do the following:

• If during the last 30 days of data
• The cost is over £600 and conversions are less than 5
• Notify you by email when the conditions have been met
• Check this campaign’s performance every 30 minutes

You can adapt and change this to how you like, but all it takes is just a few clicks and you’re away with a peaceful mind and a whole load of time saved going back and forth into your account.

2. Pause Non-Converting Keywords (Google & Microsoft ads)

This is an easy one, and one that’s a bit more granular than the above. Plus it’s also super effective, that’s why it’s so popular.

This template does exactly what it says on the tin – pauses keywords that are spending budget but not leading to the conversions you expect of them.

Why should you implement this? 

Not every campaign you run necessarily is all about conversions. But when this is your main goal, pausing the ads that aren’t converting is of course a required step to success. 

Implementing this automation will quite simply mean you’re not wasting spend on ads that aren’t performing.

This can be done without automation, but what automation does is speed up the process considerably. No more trawling through the data, instead you have an automated helper who will do that for you giving you time to concentrate on the less manual side of your job.

How do you implement this?

Head to the Automation tab in your Adzooma account, click New Automation Rule in the top right, then Choose Template, scroll down to the Keywords section and click Create Rule under Pause Non-Converting Keywords.

From here you will then be able to customise the rule to your preference. So, for example, you might want a rule to do the following three things:

• If during the last 30 days of data
• Any keyword in your campaign has spent over £100 with no conversion
• Pause all the keywords
• Check these keyword’s performance every 30 minutes

You could set this whole rule up from top to bottom in less than 10 clicks. Plus there are loads of different options to choose from to tailor it to your needs.

Whatever you choose, with automation, you can save yourself the hassle of spending hours every week with your head in the data.

3. Low Quality Score Warning (Google & Microsoft ads)

Quality Score is one of many super important metrics to keep an eye on in your account, potentially the most important. This piece on what Quality Score is, is a good introduction if you’re not up to speed on it’s intricacies and quirks. 

A high Quality Score is based upon three factors: expected clickthrough rate (CTR), ad relevance and landing page experience. 

If you’re nailing these, your Quality Score will be nearing the top of the 1-10 scale and will therefore lead to higher-performing campaigns and ensure your ads get displayed in the right places. 

And because keeping an eye on that Quality Score is so crucial, that’s exactly why this template is so commonly used by Adzooma users.

Why should you implement this? 

Ultimately, the higher the Quality Score, the less you pay for clicks so, in turn, that brings down the cost per conversion (CPC) and increases your return on investment (ROI). Low Quality Scores contribute significantly to wasted ad spend.

So having an automation rule always running that checks when your keywords’ quality score drops below 4 for example is going to help the health of your accounts no end. 

And save you plenty of time and money in the process.

How do you implement this?

Again, head to the Automation tab in your Adzooma account, click New Automation Rule in the top right, Choose Template, scroll down to the Keywords section and click Create Rule under Low Quality Score Warning. 

Here you can customise your rule in whatever way you want, though I’d recommend the following:

• Apply to all active keywords
• Notify you using 7 days worth of data when Quality Score is at 4 or less
• Run this rule every 30 minutes

So with the score being out of 10, 5 is not too bad. Anything lower than average and you really want to be considering the relevancy of the keyword to your landing page/website.

However, if you’re running campaigns where you target your competitors, don’t be concerned if that Quality Score is very low as it’s to be expected (and best to exclude those keywords from this rule too).  

From there, you will have to take the action to improve the Quality Score yourself. You may need to improve your landing page’s loading time, you may need to improve your ad copy, you may need to move the keywords to a more relevant ad group.
If you’re struggling with the implementation of this, it might be worth taking a look at our Marketplace to find someone who can help – that’s what they’re there for!

4. Pause Advert – Low CTR (Google, Microsoft & Facebook ads)

These next two rules are pretty similar. They’re both about automatically pausing an advert when something is not performing in the way that you expect.

For this one, it’s all about low clickthrough rate. 

Why should you implement this? 

Having a low CTR isn’t always the end of the world – it’s better than having a high CTR and a low CPA.

But unless you’re running a brand campaign, it’s pretty pointless running the ads if no one’s clicking them.

Plus, some of these ads you’re running with a low CTR might have a really good CPA. Therefore, if you can generate a load more clicks you could generate a load more conversions too.

That’s the great thing about automation. It doesn’t just help you to do your job faster, it also helps you to scale your business faster too.

How do you implement this?

Head to the Automation tab, New Automation Rule, Choose Template, scroll down to the Advert section, and click Create Rule under Pause Advert.

Here you can customise it how you want, for example you may want to do the following:

• Pause all active adverts that have a CTR of less than 1% using data from the last week
• Check your keyword’s performance every 30 minutes
• Notify you by email when your ads have been paused

There are of course loads of different options here. You could add an And condition too, for example, the adverts will only pause if the CTR is less than 1% and the Conversions are at 0, or add an Or condition that will pause the ads if the CTR is less than 1% or the cost of the campaign has gone above £200. 

You can read more about And/Or conditions in our blog post.

Whatever you go for, the choice is all yours!  

5. Pause Advert – High CPA (Google, Microsoft & Facebook ads)

From the same playbook as above, though this is all about managing your CPA.

Why should you implement this? 

This is a great rule to put in place to make sure you’re not overpaying for conversions, because with this rule, the conversions may be coming in but if they’re coming at a cost to your business, they’re obviously not worth it.

And instead of trawling through the data every hour of the day to find these unhelpful ads, you can just run this rule and it’ll do all the hard work for you checking the status every 30 minutes.

Easy!

How do you implement this?

Very similar to above. Head to the Automation tab, New Automation Rule, Choose Template, scroll down to the Advert section, and click Create Rule under Pause Advert.

You can again customise how you want the rule to look like, for example:

• Pause all active adverts that have a CPA of £100 or more using data from the last week
• Check your keyword’s performance every 30 minutes
• Notify you by email when your ads have been paused

Just like the above, you can also add And/Or conditions if you need to. The choice is all yours!

Start Automating

75% of our users run Adzooma automation rules on a daily basis. They’ve quickly become a part of their PPC routine.

The above rules are great to get started with. They’ll save you so much time and allow you to scale your campaigns faster than ever before.

But these are just five of the 29 templates that we have available and 50% of Adzooma users create their own rules within the platform. Once you get the hang of how Automation works that’ll be you too.

If you’re looking for a bit of inspiration to get you started on something a little more inventive, we wrote a piece in January about 3 creative ways you can implement automation into your strategy, if you’d like to take your campaigns even further.

And if you ever need us any help with your automation, don’t hesitate to ping us a message in the Adzooma Facebook group.

Happy Automating!

• Advertisers using eCPC achieve 5-10% more conversions while maintaining their cost per acquisition (CPA).
• With eCPC, your average cost per click (CPC) won’t exceed the maximum bid you set.
• Some advertisers have used eCPC with technology provider bid strategies to achieve a +20% conversion rate (CVR) and -20% CPA due to the power of auction-time adjustments.
• eCPC benefits search partner performance by optimizing for high-quality clicks.

However, on the other hand, there are again concerns from the PPC community that this is a further step towards a loss of control over our ad campaigns.

So what does this actually mean?

Introduced in 2016, Microsoft’s Enhanced CPC utilises machine learning to analyse whether a searcher is more or less likely to convert based upon past conversions. 

“Enhanced CPC will help your campaign get more conversions, lower your cost per acquisition, and improve your return on investment in Bing Ads,” said the blog post at the time of announcement.

“With manual CPC bidding, the advertiser is completely in control of the maximum bid they set for a keyword,” says our PPC Manager Sophie Logan. 

“With Enhanced CPC, the platform’s algorithms can make adjustments to a bid when a click is more likely to result in a conversion. The algorithm is based on trends and patterns from your previous campaign performance, such as time of day, day of the week, location and browser type.”

For those that are still using Manual CPC, the migration will begin in March. By April 5th there will be no option of choosing Manual CPC for new campaigns. And by April 30th all campaigns not using Enhanced CPC will be automatically migrated.

“Most advertisers are already using some form of smart bidding, so it should not result in too much of a shake up,” says Sophie. “It does however mean that it is more important than ever to ensure that conversion tracking is set correctly. Without accurate data, the algorithm can not perform effectively.”

Have a read of our Conversion Tracking guide to make sure you’re firing on all cylinders.

In their blog post, Microsoft said they “recommend setting up tests to identify and/or validate your optimal automated bidding setup, which may include but is not limited to Enhanced CPC. For search campaigns, we recommend using Campaign Experiments to validate performance.”

And they’ve also laid out this decision tree to help get you started.

The Community’s Reaction

Whereas we saw the community blow up in reaction to Google phasing out the Broad Match Modifier, reactions have been a bit more tempered regarding this announcement (though, a lot of that is probably down to the fact this is Microsoft and not Google).

But that doesn’t mean we haven’t seen any activity. Here are some reactions and previous tweets on Enhanced CPC:

“Micromanaging your bids isn’t always a great idea, but manual CPC offers smaller or niche advertisers with less volume more control.”

Amalia Fowler, Director of Marketing at Snaptec Marketing. 

“This is a good reminder that I need to be constantly testing bid strategies in Google because we are still manual there,” says

Zack Bedingfield, Acquisition Marketing Manager at Coconstruct

“Again, the majority of advertisers are already using smart bidding in their accounts. So whilst on the surface it may sound like a huge change, the reality is that most advertisers won’t be affected. Those who will feel the impact the most are those who are not regularly monitoring and optimising their accounts, and reviewing the quality of their conversion tracking. It will be interesting to see if Google follows suit, but as it stands there are no plans to remove Manual CPC from Google Ads.”

Sophie Logan, PPC Manager at Adzooma

Being forced into automation isn’t necessarily a good thing, though. I’m currently running an A/B test on bid strategies and my manually run eCPC is outperforming Max Conv, replicating the results for the second time running this. #ppcchat

— Eric Heiken (@EricHeiken) February 4, 2021

What’s your take on Microsoft’s latest move? Head over to our Digital Marketing Facebook group to get involved in the conversation.

By July no new BBM’s can be added and according to reports by the end of 2021 BMM will no longer be served in Google Ads.

If you’re a big BMM user, this update is massive. If you’re not, you’re going to be pretty much unaffected.

So what’s actually happening here?

This is the image that Google use to explain it:

And these are the examples that Google have given us:

Google is selling this change as a good one. The headline of the article to explain the move is titled, “Making it easier to reach the right customers on Search” and in the article they state: 

“To give you more control and better reach, we’re bringing the best of broad match modifier into phrase match. As a result, phrase match will expand to cover additional broad match modifier traffic, while continuing to respect word order when it’s important to the meaning. This makes it easier to reach customers and manage keywords in your account.

“With these improvements, you can reach the searches you want just by using phrase match—without worrying about the searches you don’t want. Let’s say you’re a moving company that wants to reach people interested in moving out of New York City. With the updated phrase match, you can reach people looking to move from NYC to Boston, for example, without showing up for people looking to move from Boston to NYC.”

This is our Head of Paid Media Mark Neale’s take on things:

“Whilst looking to simplify management and save time for advertisers, the changes are actually reorganising where advertisers will be spending more time. More time will be spent trying to acquire search query data that is omitted from the search query report to ensure effective negative keywords are in place.”

But is this actually good news? It’s up for debate and depends who you ask.

Sure it can make it simpler to manage your accounts, but that simplicity comes at a cost.

When Google say they are incorporating BMM into Phrase Match keywords, they’re actually doing something kind of in the middle.

Phrase Match keywords are essentially acting as BMM, so your phrase match terms will show for more terms than what is currently there (these being the previous BMM terms), but now an algorithm will effectively determine the intent for the matching instead of yourself. 

On the surface, this could be great and may save you time. However, BMM gave you a broader reach with control, and without that, you’re now relying on Google’s newly built algorithm to be super effective to safeguard you from unnecessary wasted spend.

But it’s hard to have full confidence in the algorithm: one, because it’s difficult for Google to figure out the nuances of every search in the way a human would and two, because we know Google doesn’t have our best interests at heart. 

This is the fifth big change to the keyword match type in the last seven years, and just like when Google changed the Search Terms Report in September, you once again now have less ability to fully optimise your account.

Sure, as Google says, this makes things easier for you in one respect. But if that comes at the cost of actual money, then I’m not sure this is something you can sell as a good thing.

This may not be as seismic and catastrophic as it could appear on the surface. We’ll see how it settles once it roles out. For a lot of people, this won’t rock the boat all that much.

But not everyone feels the same way.

The Community’s Reaction

The reaction has been mixed, to say the least. There have been some signs of resignation, some anger, a whole lot of exasperation, and a little bit of positivity too.

Here are some of the best, angriest and most considered tweets about it: 

worst change ever, it feels like a nightmare

— Deep Technologies (@deepitcom) February 5, 2021

You are looking live at new match types! pic.twitter.com/vlFNtdyInG

— JOSH B. (@jdb426) February 5, 2021

Sorry @GoogleAds, don’t you mean It’s now easier for Google to take all your money? This is a joke, right?

— Regan McGregor (@reganmcgregorau) February 4, 2021

pic.twitter.com/kgf0oSLWLt

— Josh Yates (@Jates) February 4, 2021

At first I was like, what. Why do you like more confusion?

More then I understood they’re planning to remove BMM, and just consolidate BMM into phrase.

That’s nice. Too much confusion about the two, and they’re basically the same today anyway.

— Andrew Lolk (@AndrewLolk) February 4, 2021

Agree, not surprising. With word order treated the same “when deemed important” I don’t see it making a big impact one way or the other given the already existing overlap between the two.

— Ginny Marvin (@GinnyMarvin) February 4, 2021

It’s a bit frustrating considering all the account builds I’ve done using BMM and exact match haven’t been using phrase match very often for a few years since my BMM and Exact builds almost always outperformed when anytime I included phrase match.

— Anthony ???? (@ToeKnee_C) February 5, 2021

Honestly I’m not convinced this will negatively impact things this much (that’s not an argument for or against the concept of close variants, BTW), since July 2019 basically saw BMM and P Match behave the same way with Close Variants: https://t.co/pAF5cSSoyZ

— Kirk Williams ???? (@PPCKirk) February 4, 2021

Sure, I’m not saying exact match close variants are a mess, just that BMM and P (not your example) are basically the same thing now. ????????‍ I could be wrong, and I don’t know if optimistic is the right word… maybe more… resigned? over it? ????

— Kirk Williams ???? (@PPCKirk) February 4, 2021

I mean, it makes sense as match types have been fundamentally broken since close variants & expansion.

If I were GOOG I would still rather fix match types and the horrific close variant matching.

They had moat that no other platform could compete with and are sucking it dry.

— Greg Finn (@gregfinn) February 4, 2021

W G gets it ‘wrong’ and matches you to irrelevant searches that you cannot see due to G hiding queries, what’s your fallback? With the BMM change last year, BMM was getting pretty broad and people ‘fell back’ to phrase. Now do you just put your money on FB instead of @GoogleAds ?

— Brad Geddes (@bgtheory) February 4, 2021

Not surprising but still outraging. In combination with the restricted search term reports, it really has a negative impact on my ability to fully optimize.

— FozzieBaloo (@BalooFozzie) February 4, 2021

Seems like this has been their roadmap since 2011 or earlier. Ah, those were the days for control-freaks. Nostalgia is powerful, and those days are long-gone.

— Jeremy Morgan ; ????‍ (@porpster) February 4, 2021

With some people reporting less and less visibility of terms anyway recently, this change seems to have come at the perfect time…for Google. #ppcchat

— Azeem (@AzeemDigital) February 4, 2021

So what should you do?

Speaking to Mark Neale again he says:

“My initial thoughts are this could be a tough settling in period. For some advertisers this could be heavily disruptive to their existing account structures. There are glimpses of positivity ahead in that some advertisers are seeing increased performance with pairing broad keywords with smart bidding strategies, so there are instances in which the wider approach works. At the end of 2021 will we still see this as a disruption to the way we work, or will this be a step forward towards better keyword matching? I’m optimistic for better keyword matching.”

Google say they’re making things simpler, are they? I’m not sure. 

If you’re a big BMM user, to mitigate this change, you’re going to have to start drilling down and getting rid of as many irrelevant search terms as you can – the safety net of BMM is no more. 

So it’s going to be a matter of getting your head in the audience data then taking your head and dunking it straight into the negatives. That’s where you’re going to have to live for a while. 

Without really getting into the data and spending time researching, you will see money seep out of a lot of your accounts needlessly (again, just like after the change to the search terms report).

This won’t apply to everyone. Some of you may have strategies out there that benefit from taking a little bit broader approach and not all of you will have been using BMM’s all that much either.

But for those of you who work in a niche where it pays to have an account that’s tightly managed, you’re going to have to reign in the spend on non-exact match types, then cross-reference this with as much data you can find through audience analysis tools and the Search Terms Report. 

Drilling down into this will help you get rid of those irrelevant terms and find those leaks in your boat.

It’s not an easy task, but it’s a necessary one. And definitely doesn’t make things simpler, whatever Google says.

What’s your take on Google’s latest move? Head over to our Digital Marketing Facebook group to get involved in the conversation.

Well, not quite. But it doesn’t feel that far off. Bezos’ departure has come as a huge shock to the tech industry. He’s been omnipresent in any tech-head’s life for what seems like forever.

From seeing his smug face pop up for the first time in 1997 when you could almost tell by his smile that he knew he was destined for glory, to being roasted by Chris Rock at the Oscars just last year, we’ve seen Bezos rise from nothing, to one of the most powerful men in the world in less than 25 years.

Bezos has become, without doubt, a tech industry legend. Love him or loathe him, you can’t fail to put him on a pedestal alongside the likes of Steve Jobs, Bill Gates and Larry Page who have changed the world in one way or another.

Jeff Bezos has done that too. Not many Kings have.

End of an era:

–0 to $1.5t (nobody in history);
–Turned biggest cost centers into profit centers (nobody in history);
–Established recurring revenue relationship w/82% of US households (nobody in history); and
–Hired 500k+ people in 12 months (nobody in history)#Bezos

— Scott Galloway (@profgalloway) February 2, 2021

What does this mean for Amazon?

Stock fluctuations are usually a good indicator and at this stage the answer seems to be: not that much.

Stocks closed at 1.11% up for the day, which is pretty standard for Amazon and a good sign for Amazon they’ve made the right decision in choosing their next main man.

The man in question? CEO of Amazon Web Services (AWS) Andy Jassy.

Jassy, a Harvard grad, has been at Amazon in one form or another since 1997, beginning life in the marketing department before moving to found AWS in 2003 where he became CEO in 2014.

“He’s a win-at-all-costs type of person,” said Zoltan Szabadi, a Google Cloud employee who formerly worked alongside Jassy. “This is just one of the many tactics that he thinks will help his business.”

Those tactics seem to be working too. A subsidiary of Amazon.com inc (the mothership), as of 2017 AWS owned a dominant 33% share of the internet’s cloud services and generated $35billion in revenue in 2019.

Its power, though, is bigger than numbers. The tech boom was built on AWS’ infrastructure. It’s pretty much invisible to the general public, yet if it fell, not only would we norms go into post-AWS shock, but so would governments around the world. NASA, the CIA, Spotify and Netflix amongst so many others are powered by AWS.

There’s no doubting Jassy has done an impressive job, but this is quite the step up, and as Tim Cook found taking over from Steve Jobs — handling someone else’s baby isn’t always easy.

While Bezos doesn’t move from the CEO to his new Executive Chairman role until the third quarter of 2021, he has taken a reduced role in the running of the company over the last few years, so the transition is unlikely to cause much of a hiccup.

Amazon dropped an astounding earnings report too yesterday which showed the company nearly doubled its sales and profits last year, so as Bezos said when announcing he was stepping down, “Amazon couldn’t be better positioned for the future.”

What that future looks like is anyone’s guess at the moment. There are so many arms to Amazon – from Prime to Logistics, from Robotics to Publishing – that whatever the strategy is, Andy Jassy will have a lot to juggle.

Not least dealing with the Federal Trade Commission investigation that came to an end yesterday concluding that, “Amazon baited drivers with promised earnings, and then secretly slashed wages by pocketing tips.” A despicable move when you consider Amazon earned $386 billion in 2020 and Amazon drivers earn close to the minimum wage.

So is that the reason Bezos is moving on? To help Amazon turn over a new leaf after years of bad press which ranges from warehouse worker maltreatment to alleged anti competitive practices?

This doesn’t seem to be stopping the company itself, though. We’ve seen clear indicators that Amazon aren’t holding back on the alleged anti competition as they look to cement themselves as the world’s central fulfilment outlet, with the creation of services that will carry out the fulfilment like Amazon Air and Amazon Prime Air, to the expansion into the likes of groceries and Pharmacy that will do the fulfilling.

This will be Jassy’s biggest test. Toeing the line between good and bad.

Maybe Bezos feels it’s time to get out before his legacy is tarnished by the latter?

What does this mean for Jeff Bezos?

Just in the same way Tom Brady insisted he wasn’t retiring when he left the New England Patriots, Bezos has made it clear he’s got plenty more to give.

In a similar mould to when Bill Gates stepped away from Microsoft, Bezos has stated that his ambition is to do good. Two of the major projects he’s talked about working on are of a philanthropic nature: The Day 1 Fund and the Bezos Earth Fund, which are starting with $2 billion and $10 billion to help homeless families and fight climate change, respectively.

Bezos also seems to be inspired by the man who recently took his place as the world’s richest man too, Elon Musk, as he’ll look to continue forward with his work on Blue Origin to “help make space travel mainstream”.

And it’s also very important not to forget that Bezos owns the Washington Post, one of America’s most popular and powerful dailies. Whether Bezos will venture further into media ala Rupert Murdoch is anyone’s guess. This doesn’t seem like a very Bezos thing to do, but it’s something to stay mindful of.

However, will Bezos really step away from Amazon anyway? Not everyone thinks so. Speaking to Reuters, CFRA analyst Tuna Amobi said, “I don’t think he’s going to be completely hands off.”

While Ken Perkins, President of RetailMetrics LLC also told Reuters similar, “Jeff Bezos has held a firm grip on the company for a long time. I have to believe he will have a say in what is going on and have a big hand in big picture decisions.”

Whether that’s in a reduced capacity role like Gates initially went into at Microsoft or as Reuters put it, “step[ping] down without stepping away”, it’s certainly going to be interesting to see what happens.

If this is a move to help Amazon “turn over a new leaf”, it does make sense that stepping down without stepping away may be the action here.

That was Brady’s tactic too, but at least he actually left the building.

What does this mean for marketers?

It’s very hard to say right now. Jassy has proven adept at building the most profitable part of Amazon, but moving into e-commerce is a different ball game.

However, if that success translates easily, then for us as marketers and business owners, we need to be in a position to piggyback off Amazon’s success and that means making yourself an Amazon Ads expert and getting to grips with their whole ecosystem.

I know there will be some of you out there reading this who believe we should fight Amazon’s dominance, and that’s right we should in whatever way we can. We’ve seen the damage that Amazon can do to small businesses and the way it gobbles up the industry. Yet Amazon does offer legitimate ways to improve your business too. There are so many small businesses out there that wouldn’t exist without Amazon.

Some may see this as Amazon swallowing the economy, but to watch idly while Amazon eats you up is only self sabotage.

Bezos or not, Amazon isn’t changing anytime soon. Antitrust isn’t going to change anything either.

What is going to change is every corner of the e-commerce industry and that’s not an overstatement.

We need to be in a position to benefit from that if we want to survive and thrive.

What’s your opinion? Head over to our Digital Marketing Facebook group to get involved in the conversation.