Back in the days when I was learning PPC, one of the two biggest growing pains I had were:

1. Learning the difference between segmenting campaigns out to maximize efficiency
2. Reaching the point where the juice is no longer worth the squeeze

Rather than creating clutter and a burdensome account to manage, I’ve since learned to make use of everything I can to speed up my workflow and free up bandwidth to focus on things that actually make a difference.

IF functions are a versatile means to tailor your ads to users in real time, using either the type of device they’re browsing on or the audience segment they belong to as signals to serve up specialized ad copy. The right message at the right time can make all the difference between a conversion or another bounced visitor. Search marketing is rapidly moving towards heavy automation and personalization, so IF functions are helpful because they’re a simple way to keep your seat at the table.

Setting up IF functions

The process of setting up IF Functions is painless. You could easily set one up in the time it will take to finish this article, regardless of your comfort level with Excel formulas. And if doing it on Excel is too daunting, you can set them up directly in the Google Ads UI under the Ads tab.

The basic logic is as follows

{=IF(condition is met, show this text):If not, show this text}.

So, if you wanted specific messaging for users on mobile, the logic runs something like this:

IF the user is ON a mobile device, show mobile-friendly CTA. If not, show the general CTA.

To put that in the basic formula

{=IF(device=mobile, Call Now!):Get a Quote.}

Another common usage of IF statements is serving specific offers to specific audience segments.

The basic formula for audience-based IF functions is

{=IF(Audience IN(audience name), Audience-specific copy.):General copy}

To put the above into a sentence: “If a user is IN this specific audience segment, serve them this specific copy. Otherwise, serve this more general copy.”

Suppose you were running a tiered promotion, where Club Members were eligible for an additional 15% discount on top of a 30% off sale, that text would look something like this:

Shop Now for{=IF(Audience IN(ClubList),45%):30%} Off!

Or, if your nurture campaigns weren’t entirely broken out and you wanted to move recent visitors into booking a consultation, you might have something like:

{=IF(Audience IN(Returning Visitor 7 Days), Book Your Consultation Today!):Download Our Free Guide.

Take note that you can target multiple audience segments in the same IF function. However, you are still limited to two copy options. The syntax is the same, just with your audiences separated by commas in the Audience IN section –

{=IF(Audience IN(Segment1,Segment2,Segment3)Learn More!):Get a Quote.}

If you’re feeling overwhelmed by keeping track of all of those brackets, commas, and colons, you can also build IF functions directly in the Google Ads UI. Simply add an open bracket in an ad field, anywhere from the headline one to URL paths one or two (note that ad customizers in Final URLs are not supported) and let the system walk you through putting it together.

Things to note while using IF functions

• The character limits for each field still apply (but only for the ad text defined in your functions).
• Symbols in the function’s ad text options like quote marks (both single and double), commas, and colons will need to be preceded by backslashes () for the function to work properly. For example, rather than “SearchEngineWatch’s” your function copy would read “SearchEngineWatch/’s.”

Using IF functions for fun and profit

Although IF functions don’t offer as many options to customize ads as using a business data feed, the options they do provide are staggering.

Shaping expectations based on device type is a must. While mobile browsers have come a long way in recent years, filling out long forms on a small screen with no keyboard is a slog, and desktop users might not have the same propensity to turn into brick and mortar visitors.

Tailoring your copy for devices isn’t a replacement for setting realistic device bid modifiers and taking cross-device/cross-channel conversions into account. But it is another way to squeeze more efficiency out of your ad budget.

Beyond device-type, the real power of IF functions come from the ease with which you can target specific audience segments. If you have a large enough CRM list to make customer match audiences viable for search, great. If your lists aren’t quite big enough, have no fear, you can create details of the possible audiences in Google Analytics and import it to Google Ads, the options are endless.

Bonus: Countdown ads

Countdown ads are yet another feature that is effective and easy to use but tend to fly under the radar. Beyond highlighting promotions, I’ve seen success in highlighting shipping windows (keep that in mind for the holiday shopping season), special events (for example, store openings), and more. Just like the other customizers available, countdowns can be put anywhere in an ad except for the URL.

The syntax is pretty straightforward

• Specify a date in Year/Month/Day, pick a time in Hour:Minute:Second
• Specify the language you’re targeting, and how many days you’d like the countdown to run

In the below example, the countdown will end at midnight on June 7, 2019, after starting seven days prior

{=COUNTDOWN(“2019/7/7 12:00:00″,”en-US”,7)}

The future is now

Running a successful paid search campaign has always required knowing who your customers are. Ad customizers make reaching the right user with the right messaging easier, and at scale. IF functions are easy inroads towards better tailoring of your users‘ experiences towards their needs. It gives you more control over your ad copy than dynamic keyword insertion or responsive search ads, with a lower likelihood of matching to undesirable search queries than dynamic search ads. And with less setup needed than the Ad Customizer feeds, IF functions ultimately give savvy search marketers a powerful tool to boost performance.

Have any queries or interesting functions you know? Share them in the comments.

Clay Schulenburg is Director of SEM at PMG.

The post Using IF functions on Google Ads to improve productivity appeared first on Search Engine Watch.

Source:: searchenginewatch.com

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There’s a science behind what engages shoppers and gets them to purchase and new visual search tech implementations promise to exploit that and reinvent ecommerce as we know it.

A shopper’s decision to buy products is more influenced by the primal brain areas and less from the analytical side. Us humans are hard-wired to our emotions which spring from the same areas of the brain, the right side, that processes and reacts to visual stimulation. In the early days of mankind, it’s largely how our ancient ancestors survived in the wild.

Similar to Facebook’s emoticons it rolled out as “reactions” in 2016, our modern emotions emerge from four core feelings, happy, sad, afraid/surprised (“wow”), and angry/disgusted, based on research conducted by the Institute of Neuroscience and Psychology at the University of Glasgow.

Smart marketers can appeal to our right brains that communicate in feelings and respond to images that increase conversions and sales because people tend to act based on emotions. Most of the purchase decisions people make are emotional, not practical. Retail shopping therapy is, perhaps, an offshoot of this science-based truth.

When it comes to shopping, decision-making, and conversions, another experiment conducted by the George Washington University and UCLA, found that playing to the emotional side of our brains is a far better strategy than using too many facts and figures that appeal to the decision-making areas of the brain.

The researchers found that ads that use logical persuasion (for example, “this car gets 42 miles to the gallon”) scored lower for conversions than those that “seduced” people by circumventing “consumers‘ conscious awareness by depicting a fun, vague or sexy scene”.

Visual search will revolutionize ecommerce and SEO

The rise of visual search is powered, in part, by people’s desire to discover products and brands, and it’s playing out now in the new trend of shopping on social media channels such as Instagram and Pinterest that’s spreading most quickly amongst millennials as the next big thing.

Yet, “creating technology that can understand images as quickly and effectively as the human mind is a huge undertaking”, wrote Adam Stetzer in a trend piece on visual search last year. “Visual identification is a natural ability made possible through a wonder of nerves, neurons and synapses. We can look at a picture, and in 13 milliseconds or less, know exactly what we’re seeing”.

Google is making rapid advancements tied to the increasingly visual nature of the search for ecommerce. For example, in early March it rolled out a new pilot program to digitally connect retailers and consumers, who can now make purchases from results of Google Image searches.

For the pilot’s launch, Google cited a figure that 50 percent of online shoppers said images of the product inspired them to purchase. Google is currently testing its “Showcase Shopping” ads on what it calls “a small percentage” of traffic with select retailers, surfacing on broad queries such as “home office ideas”, “shower tile designs”, and “abstract art”.

Certainly, the visual search trend will impact the programmatic ad industry’s innovations for future offerings. Advanced AI and computer imaging will be two core technologies that power dynamic personalization and highly customized ads that boost campaign performance tied to consumer’s visual search behaviors. For instance, it enables offering up winter jackets in the shopper’s favorite colors as fall approaches, or quickly serves up visually or stylistically complementary dining sets to match a new dining table or tablecloth search or purchase.

Adtech leaders‘ R&D programs have already begun to focus on new AI-powered marketing innovations, including research and development from Facebook, Google, and Pinterest, and new strategic partnerships such as the one announced by Amazon and Snap last year.

Shoppable visual ads take off on social media platforms

The powerful combination of influencer marketing, using emotional buying triggers we’re hard-wired to respond to, and the highly visual nature of popular social channels such as Instagram and Pinterest have sparked the fast growth of shoppable ads on social media platforms.

Many industry watchers are betting that Instagram and Facebook will lead the pack here. Late last year, Salesforce predicted that Instagram will grow 3X faster than overall social-traffic boosts, citing data from Cowen & Company that 30 percent of internet users reported purchasing a product they discovered on Facebook or Instagram.

The overall trend of social media’s impact on purchase behavior is well-documented. As many as 76 percents of consumers have purchased a product they’ve seen in a brand’s social media post, per data from Curalate.

Influencer marketing and consumers‘ purchase of products, as a result, is nothing new. For example, many kids who grew up in the 1970s and their parents bought Wheaties back then based on the cereal’s “Breakfast of Champions” campaign because they were inspired to be like Bruce Jenner after his decathlon triumph at the 1976 Montreal Olympics.

While the mediums have changed, and we can now click on ads and have products delivered within the same day, and be much more granular in terms of micro-influencers‘ campaigns that pinpoint targets and conserve campaign budgets, the psychology of why it works is the same.

New platforms such as Shopify make it easy for brands and merchants of all kinds to create engaging, highly connected sites that are helping to energize the social aspects of the web.

Large companies such as Amazon, Pinterest, and Instagram have done an excellent job of figuring out consumer sentiment, emotions, and online behaviors. We’re getting much closer to narrowing down to a “segment of one“, a trend that many retailers today are focused on in order to increase the personalization of advertising and improve the experience for consumers so that promotional offers to purchase products become more like a personal shopper catering to them instead of a pushy salesperson who annoys them to the point of departing the store.

And if Pinterest is any indication with more than 600 million visual searches each month, and fact that image-based Pinterest ads have an 8.5 percent conversion rate, the role of visual search in helping to capture our attention, personalize the advertising experience, and seduce us to buy is here to stay as ecommerce and SEO evolve around it.

Gary Burtka is Vice President of U.S. operations at RTB House, a global company that provides retargeting technology for global brands worldwide. He can be found on Twitter @gary_burtka.

The post New visual search innovations tap human emotions and biological buying triggers appeared first on Search Engine Watch.

Source:: searchenginewatch.com