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5 Steps For Remarketing With Dynamic Search Ads

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Google’s Dynamic Search Ads are  best for advertising a select range of products. With Dynamic search ads brands are not required to further zero in on  Keywords, rather the search ads are automatically generated based on the product pages, that are updated.

Remarketing with Dynamic Search Ads can help you target the best-selling products to your key target audience who may have already visited your site. Google AdWords recommends maintaining a high quality feed for your best sellers.

Google Dynamic Remarketing Features
  • Google Auto Optimized Layout Feature: Merchants can choose from a pre-made list of ad templates and A/B test based on ad performance.
  • Google Product Recommendation Engine: Chooses ads for product ads based on what shoppers have viewed.
  • Google Real Time Bidding Algorithm: Determines bids for each impression.

With Dynamic Search Ads you can choose to go with Marketing objectives, that can be combined with remarketing campaigns.  You can choose the Marketing objective from sub-campaign types.

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Choose campaigns for Search Network only under the Campaigns tab.

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Within Search Network Tab Choose Dynamic Search Ads and enter Campaign Name.

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In the Dynamic Search Ads section, enter your domain and the language corresponding to the pages you want your ads to target.

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You can add an Ad group that allows you to spell out the lines you would like to use in the Search Ads, thereafter DSA’s automatically regenerates the Ad copy. You will be required to populate the URL where the product feed is hosted and the URL that you are going to use to track the campaign.

You can also choose to add different variations of ads to decide on the most effective creative.

If you would like to add more Dynamic Search Ads to the ad group of the campaign or to change rules, created:

  • Click the Ads tab from the ad group you created for your Dynamic Search Ads campaign.
  • Click the +Ad button (as seen below)

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There are recommended categories that you  may wish to opt for.  To add more categories, select the categories that you wish to add. By hovering over the dialog icon to the right of category name, You can see sample pages and ads for each category.

To target only certain webpages, select Use specific webpages (advanced). You can target the webpage URL that contains the page content for the products by including the page URL in the rules.

 Dynamic search Ads allow you to choose Marketing objectives, that can be combined with remarketing campaigns.  You can choose the Marketing objective from sub-campaign types.

 

Key Insights From Holiday Season Campaigns

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The traffic for Retail eCommerce sales during holiday season is nearly 50 percent mobile. Getting your campaign ready for mobile users, you cannot ignore the Top 25 properties that mobile users flock to during the holiday season. Here is a snapshot of top sites that users access by Mobile vis-a-vis, computers as well as the time spent, as per the Digital Usage Trend report for the month of December by IAB.

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Facebook is the leading web property as per the comScore US Media Metrix Multi-platform research for December 2015. Google sites are the leading Go-to sites for Internet users on Computers. Nearly 70 percent of the time spent on Facebook is on Mobile.

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Here are the key insights from note-worthy social media campaigns for Holiday Season.

Target Launches The Holiday Odyssey

Target followed a Storytelling approach engaging audiences with a brand experience titled Adventure, where three kids and Bullseye set on a  quest to light up a Giant tree, set in a magical forest. In another video, Target introduced Free shipping and returns with a   story where the adventure is Set on the Whipped Cream Sea, with LEGO pirate ships carrying precious holiday cargo. Target  boosted the viewer engagement with Free Digital Storybook spot “The Holiday Odyssey” featuring the epic adventure. In the  spot titled Undercover, the gang went past the Stormtroopers, through a maze of giant presents as the  quest to light the ridiculously giant tree continued. Target began the Holiday marketing effort,   with first Chapter titled “The Journey Begins”.

Key Takeaway: Engaging experiences targeted at an audience with storytelling approach requires more than a single post or video for audiences to discover the content. Creating an experience that helps audiences discover about your offers and products with a video makes for more interactions, repeat visits and conversions.

 

Febreze Lightens Up The Mood 

With the holiday season advertising being all about miracles, wishlists and Stocking Stuffers, Febreze  created a humorous campaign that is likely to be noticed, much like the Ugly Sweaters for its unmarketing.

Febreze, a Proctor and Gamble brand took 12 Days of Christmas to the level of a parody by introducing 12 Stinks of Christmas.  Lynch and Morrison premiered their music video during the Febreze #12Stinks of Christmas Party – ugly Christmas sweaters all – at LightBox. Attendees could sing along to the kitschy tune and learn that they can be guest-ready all season long with Febreze through interactive product demos.

Febreze  reinvented the classic holiday tune, “The 12 Days of Christmas,” to showcase the stinks of the season and how to stay guest ready, with the debut of “The #12Stinks of Christmas” starring the hilarious duo, Jane Lynch and Matthew Morrison.

 

Febreze boasts a line of products with freshness capabilities that range from ridding of pet odors and tackling sweat stink to decorating the home with scent and freshening on the go and introduced a limited edition holiday line. Febreze continues to be one of the fastest growing brands in P&G’s portfolio of household brands and bring innovative products to market. Fresh air is an essential and basic human right, and that the air we breathe can give us “fresh starts.”

Key Takeaway: When you need your advertising to break through the clutter, unmarketing may get your brand noticed with a campaign that brings out the unusual.
Macy’s Make-A-Wish

Macy’s Make-A-Wish Campaign wove Christmas Magic with a Wish-writer pen that brings magic to unusual situations that makes Christmas look magical. “The star of the commercial is the magic pen, and we were trying to find another way to get engagement — this idea of gamification is the way to do it,” said Martine Reardon, CMO of Macy’s. “It’s our twist of bringing something traditional and nostalgic to the modern way the generations of today work, which is on mobile devices and through apps.”

Key Takeaway: Making Audiences nostalgic is a way of capturing audience interest and launching your campaign when audiences start looking for gift ideas can help you strike the right chord.
Walmart’s Retailtainment

Walmart  followed a retailtainment strategy  introducing Musical scores for Christmas by Craig Robinson that features number of videos  with gifts targeted at different audience segments.

Key Takeaway: As important as it is to have gifting ideas for a valued shopper, it is equally important to present the ideas in a context audiences find engaging and relatable.

 

Kohl’s All Together Now

Kohl’s All Together Now campaign featured gifts  for the whole family, with exclusive deals featured on Social Media Channels.

Key Takeaway: Kohl’s All Together Now Campaign set the tone for entertaining during Holiday Season where the positioning of “Everything for Entertaining Everyone” made holiday season gift shopping and entertaining seem stress-free. Kohl’s  successfully used All Together Now to position the discounts it has on offer for the season.

10 Steps For Planning Your Holiday Campaign 2016

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Holiday 2015 non-store retail sales grew 9 percent to a total of over USD 105 billion. Cyber Monday was the leading Sales day, the sixth year in a row, with more than USD 2.2 Billion spent on Desktop Computers alone. According to NRF, “Holiday sales in 2015 increased 3 percent to USD 626.1 billion — solid growth considering the unforeseen weather events across the country and an extreme deflationary retail environment.” NRF forecasted total growth, including online sales, of 3.7 percent.

Adobe reported mobile devices accounted for about 25 percent of sales and 45 percent of visits to retail websites from Nov. 1-Dec. 22. According to MarketWatch, Adobe said online sales in 2015 holiday season were up 12.7% to $83 billion. More than 31 days during the period between Nov. 1 and Dec. 31 surpassed the $1 billion mark in sales, a record that exceeds 25 days in 2014. Online sales grew 56% year-over-year on Dec. 23, up to $920 million from $590 million in 2014. “It wasn’t until the very end of the season that we saw a significant surge in sales, which drove the 12.7% year-over-year growth,” said Tyler White, an analyst with the Adobe Digital Index. “Phone traffic exceeding desktop traffic some days was one of the drivers of that growth.” The buy-online-pick-up-in-store option was a growth driver in the week before Christmas. Adobe had forecast 11% overall growth for the season, White said.

According to Marin, for the days between Black Friday and Cyber Monday, smartphone clicks grew by 87 percent YOY almost equaling desktop clicks. This reflects a dramatic increase compared to 2014 when smartphone clicks accounted for only 28 percent of all clicks.

Clicks grew across smartphones, tablets, and desktops, with the large increase in smartphone click share being attributed to growing smartphone adoption. The increase in tablet and desktop clicks YoY shows that people are using their smartphones in addition to desktop and tablet devices, not instead of them.

Marin saw similar trends across spend, with the ad spend share for mobile growing by 66 percent YoY.
Overall ad spend for mobile was up 101 percent with spend doubling on both Google and Bing YoY.

Cyber Monday beat Black Friday in terms of clicks and ad spends for both 2014 and 2015 with cost per click (CPC) prices markedly higher than any other day over the weekend.

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Top Ten Tips for Planning Your Holiday Campaign 2016

Decide on your campaign theme and core campaign idea.

Start with analyzing the holiday data that is available to you from last year as well as Back To School campaign data. Highest priority is to make sure all budgets and metrics are aligned to factor in any changes in consumer behavior.

Allocate budgets to optimize your campaigns across channels and devices with a single customer view. Key days are Thanksgiving, Cyber Monday, Black Friday and Christmas.

According to an SEO firm,WPromote the best practice is to begin setting up heavily targeted paid ads, display (video/image ads) product listing ads, and remarketing ads in Google AdWords and Bing Ads at the earliest to coincide with seasonal days.

Plan your Mobile engagement strategy. Optimize your every campaign for mobile, with mobile PLAs, a mobile website, and accurate device tracking set up in your analytics. In case you have an app then planning an app engagement campaign within your brand campaign can increase your conversions. Native Social Media Ads are important for Targeting Mobile users. Mobile App Promotion Ads can get your app installed and downloaded before the start of the holiday season.

Develop content marketing and promotion initiatives as early as mid-October and launch content systematically during the downtime between holidays, instead of only in limited windows around the holidays themselves. Follow up your content marketing with Remarketing and Retargeting campaigns.

Create holiday-optimized content, including an infographic or holiday gift guide, hosted on a website page instead of a blog, and leave it on the main site navigation until launch in order to get indexed in Google and start building equity as early as possible. This could improve CTR for holiday related terms.

Embark on a campaign of social network posting about holiday gift guides, sales, wish lists, and other promotions as early as October but no later than the beginning of November; budget for paid/promoted social posts to increase visibility and audience reach, especially in the run-up to Thanksgiving.

Set up a new email promotion workflow specifically for the holiday season based on what holiday products, promotions, or categories a user visits on your site.

Personalize your promotions, in particular, mobile, social and email promotions; tailor specific offers to customers’ needs to increase CTRs and conversions and turn mobile, email and social channels into huge revenue generators. Look for the mobile moments that are right for promoting your offers with push messaging campaigns. Create a Follow through marketing plan to optimize ROI from your campaigns, by analyzing reasons for cart abandons and setting a remarketing or an email marketing campaign.

Brands And The Rio Rush

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Google Launches Doodle Fruit Themed App For The Rio 2016

For the opening of the 2016 Olympic Games at Rio, Google Doodle is customized with Fruit animation and athletic events, and to add to the opening ceremony, Google has unveiled an all new Fruit Themed Mobile app. The Mobile Gaming app has an all new take with updates available for Android and iOS . Calling it the Doodle Fruit Games, the post on Google doodles page posts “Today marks the season opener of the 2016 Doodle Fruit Games! For the next couple of weeks, we’ll journey to an otherwise unassuming fruit stand in Rio, where produce from all over the market competes for the title of freshest fruit. To play along, get the latest Google app on Android or iOS, and tap the Doodle. Learn more at g.co/fruit and let the games begin!”

 

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Brands Conversation Surrounding the Olympics

The 12 official sponsors for the Olympic games are  going with a video focused strategy making fan engagement a priority with brand messaging that build on team spirit and enthusiasm for the sport.

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As the conversation for brands spirals on social media channels, here are some of the videos that are making news on social media channels. The Top viewed brand videos are  Samsung Mobile at 54 Million, Visa at 44.6 Million, Nissan 27.5 Million and Gillette 27.4 Million.

 

Apple Debuts Human Family Themed Commercial

Apple in line with Shot on iPhone series debuted the Human Family commercial a day before the start of the games celebrating connections and friends prior to the start of the games.

Brands that are creating the highest number of social media mentions have leverage the theme of finding something special in yourself that inspires greatness.

Nike’s Unlimited campaign with a series of testimonials from athletes based on an insight that success is often achieved by challenging ones own limits.

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Hershey’s post with a #HellofromHome inspires soul-searching for the athletes at #Rio2016.

For Brand Marketers here’s an Infographic that can help you identify audience segments.

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