The Latest in Paid Search
It’s been a while since I wrote about marketing on my blog. Since my last articles I have moved jobs twice. I went from working at a start up for 5 years where I was the first employee, to a huge marketing agency with 10k employees to finally settling down at a boutique agency. Along the way I learned a lot of things, a lot about culture and environment, but what this post is mainly about is the main trends I’ve seen lately.
The main buzzwords have been SA360 and Data Driven Attribution. Of course enhanced bidding has been on the scene for quite some time now so that’s not too new, as long as you are up to speed with TCPA and TROAS, along with all the other bidding strategies, they translate well to auction time (the name of what Google calls their enhanced bidding within the SA360 platform).
To rewind a bit, SA360 is a new(ish) platform that Google presents as a solution to all the new privacy laws as well as putting all of your marketing dollars easily in one nice dashboard. It comes with a hefty price tag but usually you can get some kind of free trial. SA360 does follow the guidelines for the California Privacy Act as well as some of the large legislation that has come out about keeping users behaviors private. It also does allow you to import Google, Bing, Facebook, and even more into one platform so when you bid your algorithm is bidding on ALL signals across all channels which is awesome. It also helps you get organized with your floodlight tags and conversion actions.
That being said, the technology is still relatively new and constantly being adjusted. I used SA360 on one of my largest clients thus far and it was a little daunting going into cyber week with not full learning periods being done yet. Every time you change what a value is worth (such as an in store purchase) the algorithm goes back into learning. Every time there is a huge spike or downfall because of promotions or seasonality, the algorithm can go back into learning. Because of this Google introduced seasonality adjustments that help set a precedent in the account during times of volatility to exclude that data. It has worked to some extent, but in general there are times where there is no explanation for why the algorithm is not performing as it should.
In conclusion: is it something to test if you have the marketing dollars? Most definitely. Are you falling behind if you’re not using it? Absolutely not. My advice would be to sit back and let Google work out the kinks with existing users and jump on the bandwagon once things have smoothed out a bit. This is similar to what happened with TCPA and TROAS adoption, enhanced bidding has been around for a long time but only did the past 2 years see it really start working.
