Search marketing forms the cornerstone of many digital marketing campaigns, with advertisers spending huge amounts of time and resource to get their campaigns right. As the advertising and marketing landscape gets more and more complicated, however, many of our clients have been looking for ways to make their campaigns more effective.

In our most recent webinar, we spoke to Jamie Grant of Google to understand how advertisers can use SA360 to tackle some of their most common challenges; including automating campaign management, performing advanced bidding, and getting greater reporting insight.

Automating Campaign Management

We often hear that advertisers spend too long managing their keyword coverage and ad copy, and too much budget on out-of-stock inventory. The scale, complexity and frequency of required campaign changes and buildouts can be a huge drain on both time and resource. We know that a search professional will, on average, spend 8 hours a week on these types of tasks; and doing them manually leaves a lot of room for error.

With Inventory Management, SA360 can automate your campaign management; allowing you to spend more time on the bigger strategic decisions on the account. Here, you’re able to dynamically create Campaigns, Ad Groups, Keywords, Ad Copy, Location Extensions and Sitelinks by uploading your feeds; improving the accuracy of account coverage and messaging while also reducing the time to implement. Practically, this helps to build comprehensive coverage of your product set; ensuring that only your relevant and in-stock products are being advertised and that your messaging is always up to date and compliant.

Using Inventory Management brings a whole host of benefits for marketers. By dynamically building your campaigns using your feeds, you can ensure that your ads are more relevant, up-to-date, and product-specific. If there are changes in your inventory, you’re able to adapt quickly and automatically – reducing spend on products that are out of stock for example. Finally, you can expand your keyword coverage to include more niche and long-tail keywords that help you to cover more of the search landscape.

Performing Advanced Bidding

Due to the second price nature of Google ads – and SEM in general – the most effective tactic available to advertisers is to assign an honest and accurate bid. By “honest”, we mean allocating bids based on what a click is worth to you on average; and by “accurate”, we mean having the right data set to determine the value of a click and assigning it at the most granular level.

Unfortunately, keyword bidding is no longer granular enough to succeed in search. Instead, Auction Time bidding, the most advanced smart bidding solution, allows users to leverage bids set at the time of each Google Ads auction. This type of bidding is much more granular, allowing you to assign value in every auction depending on the user, their device, the time of day, the specific search query (which can be very different to keywords), what browser they’re using, what their connection type is and so on. There are over 100 additional signals available for Auction Time Bidding strategies, making it easier to get in front of the right person in every auction.

There are a number of key benefits that Auction-Time Bidding can bring to your campaigns. As it takes insight from a richer set of contextual signals, you know that decisions are being informed by the most comprehensive and in-depth dataset available to you. These insights are then able to optimise bids for every auction – allowing you to make the most of your budget while also putting your message in front of the right people at the right time. There are no delays while the algorithm learns and updates, and the learnings can be applied across the whole account.

Greater Reporting Insight

Getting oversight into your most important metrics is crucial to complete the cycle of a search campaign. Typically, our understanding of the value of digital marketing is tag-based: Floodlight, GMP’s tag solution, is able to capture revenue, order IDs, and up to 1000 custom variables. However, even this solution has gaps as there are limitations to what tags can achieve and what advertisers are comfortable pushing into an on-site tag.

This is where offline data can come in handy.

SA360 has a conversion API that allows users to upload any business performance data that they choose; the only prerequisite being that the data has either a Google Click ID or Match ID. This means you can pass through offline or in-store sales, LTV calculations, cancellations, profit data and custom-attributed conversions, before attributing this against your paid media activity. By integrating this offline data, you’re able to get a better picture of where your meaningful conversions are coming from, which can then be fed back into budget planning and campaign management.

Understanding which activity is driving your most meaningful conversions across multiple paid media channels can completely revolutionise your strategies. Combined with automated bidding and attribution models, this presents a sophisticated and highly data-driven approach to your search campaigns that can deliver boosted efficiency, more traffic, and higher profits.

Unleashing your Search Campaigns

SA360 offers a number of solutions to the most common questions we get asked as a technology and GMP specialist. Whether you’re seeking to take some of the manual lifting out of campaign management, run more advanced bidding, or garner greater insight into your performance, there are plenty of options for you to explore.