Marketing in the Age of Automation | Google Ads

Key Takeaways

[Music] hi everyone thank you for joining us on the virtual google marketing live stream my name is jason spiro and i lead global commercialization efforts for google's performance advertising products things like search display and measurement automation continues to be a big area of focus for our industry and i'd assume is why you showed up for this session today i'll be sharing a few stories from brands and agencies who continue to push the envelope of what's possible using automation to frame this take a moment to think about some of your recent purchases how much did you research before you move to action some purchases are straightforward and you buy based on brand loyalty or convenience or shipping timing and cost others are more complicated i surprised myself last week when i went to purchase running socks i've been running more during the pandemic and it was starting to take a toll a friend told me that maybe i needed different socks so i started to do some research and it turns out there's a lot to know about socks i learned about cushioning durability blister prevention and so much more i had turned socks into a research heavy purchase and i'm not alone in this as consumers explore their options even for purchases that sound simple they're continuously expanding and narrowing their consideration sets as they process new information and the channels available to discover research and purchase and to pick up products all keep growing we believe that the consumer journey has reached a point of complexity that requires automation to effectively engage people at scale even the best marketers the people in this virtual room will struggle to anticipate and keep up with all the gyrations and consumer interests and needs now i want to be precise in what i mean by automation automation is often associated with bidding and that's not surprising given the growth and effectiveness of smart bidding but today i want to offer you a broader definition of automation one that goes beyond bidding to include budget allocation audiences creatives attribution and more we have an ambitious roadmap ahead and we're continuing to learn from you to understand how we can make automated solutions better for the future there are a few key areas we're thinking about that i wanted to share one is building new ways for you to steer automation and share what you uniquely know about your business like when you have a last minute sale or when you have specific roi targets by product line the learning period is another area of focus we recognize that a two-week ramp up after you first activate automated solutions can be frustrating and unpredictable and we're exploring ways to make this period shorter and to minimize performance fluctuations we're also investing in transparency we've heard automated solutions can feel like a black box that's why we're working on providing new insights and testing features some of which you're already using like geo experiments we want you to have the proof points you need to demonstrate the incremental value of your automated campaigns today i want to highlight some of your wins as i've met virtually with many of you over the past year three things stood out to me about how you're thinking about automation now versus a few years ago first i'm seeing more brands lean in to real-time responses to shifts in demand next a lot is being done to break down silos teams are increasingly bringing their search display video and other digital practices together and they're optimizing their media buys holistically to achieve real business outcomes third leading marketers are breaking away from a set it and forget it mentality instead they're actively engaging with automation and recognizing that these solutions need inputs and fine-tuning like any campaign and most importantly these changes are driving results for agencies and for brands let's start with the first mindset shift using automation to harness all the signals we can to dynamically respond to consumer needs in real time consider this 15 of search queries every day are brand new searches we've never seen before even with the most diligent and frequent manual optimizations it would be impossible to catch all the possible query variations but using automation you can rapidly detect and adjust your campaigns to take action on new demand opportunities as they arise and yes broad match also uses automation machine learning works to understand how words and phrases are semantically related in meaning so you can capture all the new and different ways consumers are looking for your products or your services and by pairing broad match with smart bidding you can optimize to the goals that matter to your business i want to share a story from tales.com a subscription company from the uk offering customized dog food tales.com recently expanded to a new market in germany where they had limited brand awareness the team had to find cost-efficient ways to scale subscription signups they wanted to show up on generic searches and dynamically reach customers researching dog food options across a wide range of queries but they were cautious about expanding from broad match modified to broad match they solve this with testing using drafts and experiments in google ads to prove the value of automation first they combine broad match keywords with smart bidding to expand reach while maintaining relevance they also expanded their definition of automation beyond smart bidding to drive greater impact they added responsive search ads to create more tailored ad messaging then they layered on data driven attribution to optimize for the most incremental touch points that lead to convergence finally they use dynamic search ads as another way to capture new query opportunities the result conversions from generic search campaigns nearly tripled leading to an all-time high in trial signups since the brands launched in germany all while maintaining a stable cost per acquisition tales.com has now rolled out this full automation package across its search campaigns and across other european markets the consumer journey can rarely be captured on a single channel when i was digging in on running socks i started with search but i found myself reading reviews and watching videos throughout which brings me to the second mindset shift to get the most out of automation which is to value real business outcomes rather than proxy metrics from individual channels so i'd ask what does your cmo or your cfo care about what does the business care about and what's their objective my guess is that it's revenue growth or profit or acquiring new customers in a particular segment marketing only delivers its full potential when you understand and optimize to these real business outcomes this requires setting campaign goals that ladder up to both your marketing objectives and higher order business objectives take this example from money me and their agency sparrow money me is a digital first lending company from australia providing consumers with fast and easy online personal loans and virtual credit cards their key business objective is to grow profitable loan origination and to maximize the value of fully funded loan scale growth more quickly they turn to automation using performance max campaigns money was able to dynamically distribute and optimize their budget across all of google's channel including youtube display search discover and more they also integrated data from offline conversion imports to be able to measure and optimize not only to completed online applications but for applications that actually resulted in fully funded loans this allowed them to ensure lead quality irrespective of channeling this cross-channel strategy helped money me deliver a 22 increase in conversions at a 20 lower cpa money me has shown the growth you can achieve when you align your campaigns to real business outcomes but what also strikes me about their journey is their investment in offline conversion measurement their cross-channel media was optimized for customer acquisition with accurate data about what conversions were really worth to their business that brings me to the third critical mindset shift successful automation requires ongoing management not just during setup but throughout the life cycle of a campaign and that's why i love this story from bose and mediacom their agency it combines all the important mindset shifts i've talked about today a few years ago bose had an efficiency first strategy and used automation only in about 10 of their digital campaigns last year they were facing three material headwinds first increased competition they also faced heavy reliance on third-party retail partners and they were facing brick-and-mortar store closures to tackle this they expanded their digital goals to not only maintain cost efficiency but to also accelerate direct to consumer revenue on bose.com the team turned to automation as a way to get more revenue at the same spend levels but what's critical is they didn't just turn to automation overnight bose and mediacom made sure they laid the strong foundation to give automation the best chance to succeed first they broke down silos in order to fully allocate spend where the demand was for example they unified efforts across local markets and product categories next they conducted a total account restructure they consolidated campaigns and ad groups to give machine learning more data to work with to improve its predictive accuracy and finally they're regularly improving the quality of the inputs they feed into the automation they've filled gaps in their product feeds and implemented a global site tag to future proof their conversion measurement and they're constantly qa'ing and refreshing their creatives to make sure they follow best practices over time bose has integrated more automation throughout their digital marketing they've combined data-driven attribution with target row as automated bidding and have applied this across 90 percent of their account and this is what matters last holiday this led to huge results both saw an 81 increase in e-commerce sales and a 35 increase in revenue it's clear that the role of marketers and agencies is evolving automation is delivering precision and new performance gains automation is also replacing the repetitive and to be honest the most monotonous parts of your team's jobs think of tasks like implementing extensions across hundreds of campaigns and across those accounts in your mcc building thousands of keyword variations or managing day parting changes across all your campaigns so i want to address an elephant in the room automation is changing your jobs but it will also give you leverage by freeing your teams to create new and more thoughtful value i want to close by sharing areas where marketers are uniquely positioned to deliver a bigger impact in this age of automation first driving deep consumer understanding customer insights will shape your company's core strategies around product mix segmentation messaging and more first party data will also be key in training the machine learning for your digital marketing and beyond marketers will play a critical role in capturing that data structuring it and identifying where gaps still exist second what does success look like you need a strong measurement foundation an experimentation framework in place to fully understand what's working and what's not privacy-centric measurement should be at the heart of your 2021 strategy and beyond as user expectations industry and regulatory shifts continue to change the way that we do business lastly armed with customer insights and robust measurement you can focus your optimizations on what you're feeding into automation to help it work to its max potential this includes the first party data i just mentioned about customer behavior and value and making sure it's up to date it also means refreshing your ads with new creative and offers to reach those customers with more meaningful messages so things are changing and we all must develop but the role of the marketer is more important than ever in this new chapter you know my introduction to google came at the moment of the shift to mobile i spent three years working with all of you to build products and help your organizations adapt i believe that we're at another moment of macro change automation is bringing massive change to digital marketing we know that this requires a shift in mindsets and change management within your company at this moment of disruption we see opportunity everywhere our belief is that businesses who embrace automation now will win the future we're so excited to partner with you on that journey to build the products and to figure all of this out thank you very much [Music] mission levine is to inspire and enable people to enjoy the restorative power of the outdoors and in this difficult last year the outdoors is one of the safest places that you could be so we were happy to be able to provide relevant product and and gear for people to enjoy that having a fairly broad assortment and we want to make sure that we are elevating all of those different products based on what consumers need and create relevant experiences for our customers but there's only so many things that we can do there's only so many things we can compute in our heads and so that's when the assistance of automation is going to help to be able to ingest more signals than we could possibly imagine to understand that there's opportunity there and then to be able to pivot quickly into those areas outdoor furniture outdoor sporting outdoor gear certainly the work from home cozy category was taking off the performance it skyrocketed we saw a 72 percent increase over our row as targets in the fall versus budget while also driving a 200 plus percent increase in overall demand volume so there's even still more room to grow there upon adopting more automated strategies we're able to focus on things like overall account health really what it allowed us to do is to increase our bandwidth that's unlocked a lot of power for us and and it's not only our ability of using that data to optimize our own campaigns but it's also using that data to share with cross-functional partners across the organization it's the combination of all those things that have really led to a powerful partnership