Alongside a number of other changes made this year, Google continues to revise and rebrand its toolkit for online businesses and internet retailers by changing Google My Business into the Google Business Profile.

While little more than a name change on the surface, a deeper dive into the announcement reveals Google’s long-term plans for Google Business Profile, and how the product can benefit small businesses, customers, and advertisers alike.

Why the Change?

The name change might be an attempt by Google to help clear up what Google My Business is designed to do, and make it clear to businesses with multiple branches and locations that Google is providing them with a means to better analyze and control their web presence on the search engine giant.

Additionally, the name change is coming with a few additional features. While Google Business Profile is functionally the same thing as Google My Business, a few things are being expanded upon.

Most notably, Google is including greater customer communication tools, an easier way to respond to and manage reviews and questions, as well as streamlining the onboarding and management process for newcomers to Google Business Profile, so you can claim and begin improving on your business’ web presence right away.

What Is Google Business Profile?

Google Business Profile is, ultimately, the latest in a long line of names for the same or similar products aimed at helping local businesses establish and curate profiles that Google can use to improve search results. Previously, Google My Business was effectively Google Places, Google+ Local, and Google Local, among a few other iterative name changes.

Aside from the rebrand, Google Business Profile is a web-based platform business owners will have access to, in order to claim and verify their businesses, manage their business profiles on Google Maps and Google Search, interact with customer reviews, answer customer questions, receive and send messages as a business via Google, and even monitor and analyze performance metrics for inbound customer calls (such as call length, caller information, missed calls, and much more.

Managing Your Online Presence

The principles of how best to represent your business on Google via Google My Business haven’t changed. Google Business Profile still relies on unseen metrics to rank you against the competition.

It’s important to remember the basics of how search engine ranking works, and why SEO is becoming ever more complicated and involved.

There are thousands of factors that go into ranking any given site on any given search query, nearly all of which play a role in Google’s secret sauce in-house algorithms. Things like how quickly your website loads, your company’s location relative to the location of the user who initiated the search, your bounce rate (or how long people stay on your page), the readability of your website, the quality of your content, and the consistency with which you can gather and retain an audience and loyal following are just a handful of examples.

Coming out on top when ranked as a business in Search or Maps is much the same way, albeit with a few metrics skewed to adjust for relevance. For example, it’s safe to presume that Google places even greater importance on location when ranking different small businesses.

Making Use of Google

Online retailers and other small businesses with eCommerce capabilities can further leverage Google’s new tools to drive up sales during the holiday season, and beyond. Google wisely rolled these changes out just weeks prior to Black Friday, although it’s likely expected that the full impact of the rebrand will take shape in 2022, as Google slowly sunsets Google My Business and makes way for Google Business Profile to replace it entirely.

If you don’t already have your own Google Business Profile set up and ready to go, it’s worth noting that it likely exists anyway. That’s not always a good thing.

You Probably Already Have a Web Presence

The thing about the internet is that if you run a business, you’re on it. The question isn’t whether you have a web presence, to begin with, but whether you are in control of it.

Google Business Profile seems to be a more manageable and deliberate attempt at getting users to customize and curate their business profiles, both for their benefit, and to improve Google Search by bringing more accurate data to customers and advertisers.

How This Might Affect You

The biggest question to ask yourself in all of this is: why should I bother? And thankfully, the answer is quite straightforward. The more you control how your business is represented on Google, the better your chances of ranking above the competition, getting local traffic, and having new loyal customers make their way into your office.

Additionally, Google Business Profile is a direct pipeline for businesses with or without websites and social network profiles to benefit from the ubiquitous nature of Google on today’s Internet.

What’s the first thing you do when you need a recommendation for a service or product a friend can’t advise you on? Chances are that you look it up online. Or, you ask someone who did. This means that if someone in your vicinity looks for a service that you provide, there’s a good chance they’ll see the name of your business – alongside every other similar company and service provider in the area.

The better your business ranks via reviews, curated answers, response times, customer interactions and impressions, the more likely you are to be Google’s top recommended pick for that search.

On the other hand, the opposite can be just as easily true for businesses that rank poorly, with bad or few reviews, little to no interaction with customers, and no pictures or additional information to help a potential customer make an informed decision. Don’t let Google describe your company for you. Take charge of how you’re represented online and take full advantage of the new Google Business Profile.

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Google is updating some of its ecommerce features through a new feature: the Deals feed.

The Deals feed is a new feed added to the Shopping tab on Google search results, categorizing items related to the search query with promotions, sales, price drops, and other running promos.

Finding the Right Deal

As part of a range of changes and fixes planned for the holiday season, Google’s new Deals section will function by way of a “deals badge” applied to any items that are on sale, or part of a promotion.

Deals will be shown automatically when a search query specifies sales, promotions, deals, or related search terms (such as Black Friday). Alternatively, shoppers can select to filter results based on deals in the Shopping tab, from a drop-down menu in the search result (next to Shopping home, Stores, Saved items, Tracked products, and so on).

Performance Metrics Over the Holidays

Another change coming to Google Shopping and its list of ecommerce functions will be in the form of new trackable performance metrics in the Google Merchant Center. You can access the Google Merchant Center via Google for Retail, and begin managing how in-store items and other aspects of your ecommerce offering are showing up in Google’s search results under the Shopping tab.

The new performance metrics in question are largely going to help people separate traffic, clicks, click-through-rates, and impressions for all products, and products with promotions, sales, or price drop badges (i.e. products eligible for the Deals feature).

This will help webmasters and shop managers better gauge how effective a given promotion or sales drop has been. Managers can further segment their impressions and clicks by promotion type, product, brand, or product type.

Other Features of the Merchant Center

If you haven’t gone through the trouble of setting up with Google’s Merchant Center for your ecommerce platform, you may want to know how it works.

The Merchant Center effectively functions as a hub for you to go over the metrics on your products as they appear on search results, and it allows you to purchase and schedule advertising services and campaigns with Google directly, as well as manage and review the improvement any given sale or marketing campaign has had on your product’s sales and impressions.

To utilize Google’s Merchant Center, you will need a Google account through which you want to manage your products and sales data and follow Google’s beginner guide to adding and measuring products.

Google’s Merchant Center isn’t exclusively for ecommerce platforms – you can integrate your brick-and-mortar products as well, in which case advertising on Google will simply give customers the opportunity to find out more about how and where to buy from you. Note that for brick-and-mortar stores, these are local listings.

What this means is that anyone on Google making a rudimentary search for a product may have your listed product recommended to them if they’re from the same region. Alternatively, including the region in the search term (i.e. “cheese-making kits los angeles”) will likely help you and other local listings gain prioritized visibility.

Other information Google will require from you includes the basics, like your business’ address, a verified phone number (they will call you), the website you use to list your products, and any third-party platforms you work with to promote products on Google.

Note that Google offers different options and opportunities for free and paid listings, or “enhanced” listings. The difference between free and enhanced listings is that the latter requires more product information (as Google will display more of it to customers).

Integration with Shopify and WooCommerce

We’ve mentioned earlier this year that Google Shopping is also integrating Shopify and WooCommerce globally, which meant that you could manage your Google merchant settings and review performance metrics for your Google product search results through WooCommerce and Shopify.

A previous statement from WooCommerce explains that their users can “upload their products to Google, create free listings and ad campaigns, and review performance metrics — all without leaving their WooCommerce dashboard.”

This integration now extends into the new deals feature, as well. In other words, if you’re a retailer, or are implementing ecommerce through WooCommerce or Shopify, you can take advantage of the new deals feature by showing your existing deals on Google.

Starting December, Shopify users and WooCommerce users will also be able to show their deals in the Search and Shopping tabs.

How This Might Affect You

If you sell anything tangible and aren’t utilizing the Internet to send it halfway across the world – or even just one or two towns over – then you’re missing out on the biggest commerce shift of the century.

Online shopping was up a stratospheric 44 percent during the onset of the pandemic, after having already achieved pretty significant popularity over the last two decades. This is far from a new thing, after all. But it’s never been as ubiquitous or easy as today.

And the profits have never been greater. While it’s true that a vast majority of the growth in the industry has likely been soaked up by online retail giant Amazon, there is a bit of general tide raising going on for all boats in the industry.

These new tools by Google will further help you boost visibility for your listings and drive traffic to your products or net you holiday sales directly through the search engine. Now, products offered on sale or via promotion will be featured in the related search items, the new Deals feed, and the deals carousel. Once your product is eligible to appear on the new feed, you may be seeing increased traffic as people gear up to snag sales items before they’re sold out during the big holiday rush. And the best news? Google doesn’t take a cut from the sale, unlike eBay or Amazon.

Of course, there’s more to leveraging this feature than a simple plug-and-play with your product information.

Managing your ad budget for Google product listings, carefully monitoring and comparing results from different sales and promotions, tracking your campaigns – whether through Shopify or Google’s Merchant Center – can help you greatly improve the efficiency of this feature.

The post Google Introduces New Deals Feed appeared first on Sachs Marketing Group.

Email marketing It’s been over 50 years since the beginning of what would become the digital mail, or email, and it’s probably not going anywhere anytime soon.

One of the oldest pieces of digital infrastructure on the Internet, the email remains the tried-and-true way of sending and receiving both personal and commercial information. With that undying relevance comes the similarly immortal relevance of email marketing.

That’s right, email marketing still matters in 2021. And it probably matters more than ever, as digital marketing techniques took center stage for many industries surviving the pandemic and using emails as one of multiple ways to advertise products and services online amid an e- commerce boom.

But just because email is near ancient (in Internet terms) doesn’t mean you can rely on the same old techniques that might have worked with commercial emails in the 90s and 00s.

Major email providers, including Google, Yahoo, and AOL, have gotten much better at recognizing and flagging spam over the years, protecting consumers from trillions of unwanted messages year after year. Here’s how you set yourself apart from the bots and make the most out of your campaign.

Focus On Quality, Not Quantity

This goes for emails and subscribers alike, but it’s arguably even MORE important for subscribers.

There’s going to be a threshold for how often you can send your subscribers something before they start to get fed up with the rate at which you’re pushing content, sales, or other marketing media, and following your metrics closely to observe jumps and drops in click-through and opening rates can help you figure that out for your audience. But cultivating a quality audience is even more important.

One way of making sure that you’re getting subscribers who are actually likely to care about the content you put out (or the product you sell, or the services you provide) is to make it even more of a privilege to follow your newsletter and receive promos and updates. You can do this via a double opt-in function.

Instead of just typing their email into an annoying pop-up window, and getting a piece of unread mail every day of the week until it eventually lands in spam automatically, giving readers of a post or potential buyers the option to provide their email during checkout for new updates or products, or new blog posts, gives you the ability to send them a confirmation email that requires them to click a link or tick another checkbox on your website to make sure that they’re interested in your marketing campaign.

Remember, you’re not trying to trick people here. Email marketing has legitimate value as one of the easiest ways to update and notify subscribers about new products and content they genuinely care about. But if you try to just get your emails out to as many people as possible, regardless of what they really want, you will eventually end up in the spam folder.

A double opt-in function makes sure that most of the people who sign up for your emails end up opening them, and even clicking through to your website again.

Sanitize Your Database

It’s not enough to cultivate an email list or database of emails that want to read your content or receive your news and marketing. You need to make sure you’re keeping that list updated. Various email marketing tools help you ensure that your emails aren’t being sent out to dead emails anymore, but beyond that, give subscribers the option to opt out of your content (or stop sending it after a certain point) to avoid ending up on a deny list.

Furthermore, it’s really important that this is YOUR email list. What this means is that probably the easiest way to get flagged as spam is to buy email lists or use shared lists. Even worse would be scraping for emails using automated tools. These types of bots and third-party email list sellers are often going to be a sure-fire ticket to the spam folder.

Why bother throwing money out the window? You might not have as big of an email list if you grow it organically, but let’s remember that it’s more important to prioritize quality over quantity, even when working through your list of recipients.

Authenticate Your Sender

What this means is to ensure that the IP sending your email is authenticated via a list of IP addresses allowed to send mail from your website domain, via your DNS records.

Most email marketing tools help you do this and will walk you through the setup (and remind you if you haven’t done it yet). This is important. It’s a clear red flag and a sign of phishing if an email is sending mail from your domain but hasn’t been authenticated through your DNS.

Aside from authenticating your sender, remember to check for real-time address validation (to avoid sending mail to dead emails, which can be a red flag for a lot of email providers).

Obey the Law

The best way to prevent emails from going to spam is to obey the laws in place relating to email communications. Did you know that there are more than a few pieces of user privacy legislation that govern commercial emails targeted towards some of the biggest markets on the planet, including the United States, Canada, and the EU? CAN-SPAM, the GDPR, the CCPA, and the CASL all have clauses dictating what does and doesn’t count as spam, and privacy laws around the globe are booming in general.

While following their guidelines isn’t guaranteed to keep your emails from landing in the spam folder, they can be an additional hurdle to worry about. These are hefty pieces of legislature, but thankfully, there are plenty of articles online giving the quick gist of them, as well as more lengthy breakdowns that avoid pouring over every last detail.

A few tips you can gleam from each of these laws are as follows:

• Make it easy to unsubscribe from your promotional mail.
• Authorize your senders.
• Be transparent about your sending practices.
• Give users control over how their personal data is stored and used by you (and, in turn, by your email marketing). More importantly, give them the clear option to opt out of any user data being stored.

Provide Options and Control

If your website already provides login functionality and allows users to create and adjust their profile, even if it’s just to keep track of their orders, browse personalized suggestions, and cash in promo codes, you can take things a step further by providing mailing preferences in the user settings page.

These could be anything from letting users control how often they receive mail from you, to controlling what kind of mail they want to receive (just product info, general sales, specific discounts, other newsletters and content), and so on.

If you want to make the most out of this feature, be sure to tell your users about it when they’re signing up for your newsletter. Remember, one of the most important factors behind whether or not your content ends up in a spam folder is whether people are bothering to open it. Giving them the option to opt out of mail that doesn’t interest them reduces the likelihood of your sender ending up in a deny list.

Email marketing is a world in and of itself, and these are just a few simple tips. But it’s often the fundamentals that count the most.

There’s a lot more to running a successful email campaign: from writing beautiful copy, to keeping your emails light and relevant, personalizing your marketing material automatically, reviewing your email performance metrics, making the relevant adjustments, and more. Get in touch with us if you want to step up your email marketing game.

The post How to Prevent Your Emails from Going to Spam appeared first on Sachs Marketing Group.

If you spend a lot of time tracking your web pages and search result rankings, you’re probably familiar with the ins and outs of search engine optimization. It’s complicated, to say the least – mostly because the rules of the game are changing constantly, and often, they’ll change without anyone even noticing for the first few hours.

Google, which constitutes the majority of search traffic on the internet (by far) makes thousands of changes to its search algorithm every year. And it isn’t like every single change log is documented for the world to see.

That being said, whenever Google makes a pretty big change, you can expect to see some kind of announcement, and at least a little bit of an explanation. One of those changes hit us just late last month, with Google’s new page title update. Google announced that they’ve gone from using about 80 percent of the title elements provided by you in your title tags, to 87 percent. The update is one piece of a continuing experiment on Google’s part to optimize title tags.

It might seem like a minor change – and it is – but it allows us to go deeper into why Google is making changes to the way you’re tagging your titles, and what that should mean for you and your website’s SEO.

What is Google’s Page Title Update?

First, a little explanation and backstory. Title tags, like meta descriptions, are important pieces of information for both search engine users, and the search engines themselves.

They’re what your users will typically see first when catching a glimpse of your site on Google’s search results page, and they’re really important for both getting ranked, and getting traffic.

Not only will better title tags help you catch more traffic, but by refining and improving your title tags, you can drastically improve the quality of your traffic, generate more leads, and help people find the kind of content they’re really looking for.

That’s what Google is after, as well – and it is why Google has a long history of altering title tags, or at least, not really using yours (Google does the same thing with meta descriptions – sometimes, it will just pick a phrase from your content that it feels better represents your page than the description you provided).

Back in 2014, a study of 111,000 search results found that 36 percent of results had their titles partially changed (minor changes, such as adding the company name or name of the city into the title), and over 25 percent had their titles completely changed (entirely different words or word orders compared to the specified title tags).

About the update: Not only has Google revealed why they’re changing title tags, but they revealed to what degree (on average) title tags are being changed, as well (a change from 80 percent to 87 percent). They also released guidance on what makes a great title, and how to improve your titles for clarity and better search results.

Furthermore, Google’s Search Advocate John Mueller clarified that the changes Google makes to title tags do not affect ranking and are only meant to help convey better clarity and provide more accurate search results to users.

It’s important to note that not affecting ranking does not mean that your changed titles aren’t affecting click-through rates for pages and ads, because users are ultimately seeing a different title from what you may have intended.

Why Has Google Been Changing Title Tags?

To provide better context for why Google’s algorithm might sometimes partially or wholly change a page’s title tags, it’s important to understand Google’s main complaints with bad title tags. According to the company, the issues the algorithm looks for and tries to address the most are:

• Half-empty titles: “ | Site Name” would be detected by the system and changed into “Product Name | Site Name” if the page in question was a product page, for example.
• Obsolete titles: “2020 admissions criteria – University of Awesome” is changed into “2021 admissions criteria – University of Awesome” if the content was updated for the new year, yet the title tags weren’t.
• Inaccurate titles: “Giant stuffed animals, teddy bears, polar bears – Site Name” may be made more accurate in cases where the content doesn’t reflect all the elements of the title, instead becoming “Stuffed animals – Site Name”.
• Micro-boilerplate titles: If “My so-called amazing TV show,” is repeated for multiple different pages per season, then the system may change each page’s title to something along the lines of “Season 1 – My so-called amazing TV show”, “Season 2 – My so-called amazing TV show”, “Season 3 – My so-called amazing TV show”, and so on.
• And a lot more.

Google will make very minor changes to title tags that, generally, reflect the content on the page and provide the kind of information you expect to see in a title – such as the name of the company or blog, or the location if it’s relevant to the content being posted.

Again, these changes do not affect the way your pages rank. But title tags themselves do affect ranking. This means that your own title tags are still important! Even if Google will change them for you, they won’t change the way your original title tags affect your search result rankings.

How Google’s Title Tag Change Affects You

While ranking is still entirely up to you, Google’s changes can affect click-through rate as users will be seeing a different title than you might have intended for them to see, under certain circumstances.

This is something a lot of marketers and SEO experts are skeptical on. There is no data to really prove that Google’s changes are purely positive – and it’s something Google tacitly admits.

This is a system that is still being developed after all, as proven by the fact that they’ve gone from changing affected titles by 20 percent, to changing them by just 13 percent.

If you want to avoid having your title tags altered by Google, take some time to review what they’ve previously written on good title tags, and be sure to take the time to update your title tags, especially after making major changes to a page, or for pages with dynamic content.

How to Write Meta Titles that Google Won’t Alter

IT can be frustrating to discover the meta titles you’ve created for your page have been altered by Google to display differently in the search results.

Fortunately, there are several things you can do to write a meta title tag that will ensure its optimized for your target keyword and safe from being altered.

• Relevancy: Make sure your meta title aligns with the content on the page. Google’s algorithms are sophisticated enough to determine whether your title tag accurately reflects your content, and if it doesn’t, it may change it.
• Length: Google typically displays the first 50-60 characters of a title tag. If your title exceeds this limit, it may be shortened and replaced with an ellipsis (“…”). This may trigger Google to replace your title with what it considers a more accurate representation.
• Keyword Placement: Try to place your most important keywords towards the beginning of your title. This ensures they’re seen by both Google and users, even if the rest of the title gets cut off.
• Branding: Google now displays the favicon and site name above each result, so it may not be as necessary to include your site name at the tail end of your title. This is great because you no longer need to struggle to fit both your title and brand within the character limits of title tags.

While there’s no guaranteed method to prevent Google from changing your title tags, following these best practices can reduce the likelihood of it happening. Remember, Google’s goal is to provide the best user experience possible, so creating title tags that accurately and succinctly describe your content will always be beneficial.

Need Help with Your Title Tags?

Are you searching for a trusted partner to elevate your online presence and increase your website’s visibility in search engine results?

Sachs Marketing Group is a full-service digital marketing agency with a proven track record in SEO. Our skilled SEO team use cutting-edge strategies and industry best practices to help your business rank higher in search results, capturing the attention of potential customers and driving organic traffic to your site.

Imagine your business appearing on the first page of Google, attracting high-quality leads, and converting them into loyal customers. With Sachs Marketing Group, this can be your reality. We’ve helped countless businesses enhance their online visibility, improve customer engagement, and boost revenue through effective SEO.

Don’t let your competitors outshine you in search results. Contact Sachs Marketing Group today and let’s discuss how we can tailor an SEO strategy that will catapult your business to new heights of success. Your journey towards top Google rankings starts here.

Title Tag FAQs

We work with a lot of business owners who wonder why their website page titles aren’t displaying as intended. Here are some of the most frequently asked questions about Google changing title tags:

Why is Google changing title tags?

Google is changing title tags in an effort to better serve users. The goal is to provide more descriptive and relevant titles in search results that accurately reflect page content. This change aims to help users quickly understand what a page is about and decide whether it’s worth their click, improving the overall user experience.

Why is Google not using my title tag?

Google might not use your title tag if its algorithms determine that another piece of text on your page, or in the anchor text pointing to your page, is more representative of the page content. This usually happens when the original title tag is overly generic, stuffed with keywords, or is not descriptive of the page content.

How do I fix Google title tag rewrites?

You can reduce the likelihood of Google rewriting your title tags by making them highly relevant, concise, and accurate representations of your page content. Ensure they are unique to each page, include important keywords naturally, and appeal to the user. Creating well-structured, meaningful titles that closely align with the page content will discourage Google from altering them.

What does Google do if your title is too long?

If your title tag is excessively long, Google may choose to shorten it or replace it entirely in the search results. They do this to ensure the title remains readable and useful to users. Google usually truncates titles after approximately 60 characters, replacing the remainder with an ellipsis (…), or it may rewrite the title based on your page content or the search query.

How often does Google rewrite meta titles?

As of my last training data in September 2021, Google hasn’t publicly shared specific statistics on how often they rewrite meta titles. However, it’s known that the frequency can depend on several factors, including the relevance and quality of the original title tag, its length, and whether it accurately reflects the page content. Observations suggest that poorly structured or keyword-stuffed title tags are more likely to be rewritten.

Conclusion

Google’s practice of altering title tags in search results underscores the importance of crafting concise, relevant, and appealing titles for every page on your website.

A well-structured title tag that accurately reflects page content can enhance user experience and increase click-through rates, while also reducing the chances of Google rewriting it. Remember to avoid overly long, generic, or keyword-stuffed titles. Instead, aim for a unique, descriptive, and engaging title that naturally incorporates your target keywords.

In this era of ever-evolving algorithms, staying informed and adaptable is key to maintaining a robust and successful online presence.

The post Google Title Tag Changes: What You Need to Know appeared first on Sachs Marketing Group.

We are no longer simply moving away from third-party cookies and targeted advertising – in many ways, we’ve already moved past it. As Google joined Mozilla and Apple in ending its support for third-party cookies in web browsers, the internet collectively reached a historical point in digital advertising and arrived at a post-third-party cookie world.

This means that it’s going to get harder and harder to gauge exactly how effective your advertising is, because you’re not going to have access to the same level of data you might once have had; data that explained a customer’s journey through the web on the way to your page on one of multiple platforms; data that allows you to cross reference ad campaigns on different platforms to gather a better understanding of an ad’s performance; data that allowed you to clarify and confirm that you’re catering your ads to the right kind of leads, and are reaching the kind of people you want to reach.

Does that mean that digital advertising as we know it is dead? Not at all. Does it mean we can still uphold the advertising status quo? For a short period, maybe. But not in the long-term. Alternatives already exist – and while they’re far from ideal, they do give us better insights into what advertisers and ad tech companies will be focused on for the foreseeable future. Among these alternatives is the data clean room. Let’s take a closer look at what it is, and what role it will play in the coming digital landscape of internet advertising.

What are Data Clean Rooms?

A data clean room is a space – real and digital – where aggregate data is held at an immense scale. While smaller companies can develop data clean rooms using their own first-party data in theory, these are little more than sizeable databanks. Data clean rooms describe the kind of aggregate data held securely by companies like Google or Facebook (so called “walled gardens”), to be used for comparison with first-party data from advertisers without sharing any individual customer data.

Google’s data clean room is one of the largest and most prominent and is called the Ads Data Hub. This is effectively a software solution that helps you analyze data based on your own and Google’s, via BigQuery.

They aren’t exclusive to the tech or advertising industry, though – companies like Unilever and Procter and Gamble have been making use of data clean rooms generated from anonymized data provided by measurement firms like Nielsen.

Data clean rooms play an important role as a sort of information-based mirror for other companies to reflect their own data off of.

With the end of third-party cookies, the idea behind giving companies access to the perks of data clean rooms is that the information being shared is aggregate, rather than individual.

Companies will not and cannot access the raw data that businesses like Google and Facebook are storing and cannot attribute any given piece of data to any given consumer.

Instead, they can use the data sets present within these data clean rooms to essentially compare and contrast with their own first-party data.

Data clean rooms contain raw data that never leaves the room. Advertisers can take a peek, and view an abstracted form of the data stored within, but it is not shared.

Ultimately, data clean rooms allow advertisers to get an idea of whether they’re wasting time going after leads they’re already reaching via a different channel (Twitter vs. Facebook, Google vs. Twitter, etc.), but it is still very much like trying to look into a darkened room through a frosted window.

These massive data sets are nothing new. They have been around for a while, and they further cement the power that ad companies like Facebook and Google have over the entire advertising industry. However, their rise is relatively recent – and can largely be attributed to rising concerns regarding user privacy, the GDPR, and scandals like Cambridge Analytica.

User Privacy Is on the Rise

People have always been a bit wary about being watched on the Internet – but that worry was certainly amplified in waves of news stories regarding consumer information and data misuse.

Apple made headlines after publicly reiterating a commitment to user privacy – going so far as to introduce more user control over ad tracking in iOS 14, and completely eliminate third-party cookie usage in Safari – and other industry giants have followed suit, as it became obvious what direction the winds were taking.

An Imperfect Solution

Data clean rooms like Google’s Ads Data Hub constitute a less accurate, but serviceable alternative when analyzing ad performance on Google channels – things like Google Search, YouTube, and Google Shopping.

It’s especially effective if you’re targeting users on all of these things and have a serious amount of first-party data.

But it isn’t going to give you reliable cross-platform data – no data clean rooms can, even if ad companies promise otherwise. This means you’re left with manually figuring out whether you’re double dipping by hitting the same users on multiple platforms.

Alternatives to Data Clean Rooms

Data clean rooms aren’t the alpha and the omega. There are a few other alternatives floating around – the most significant one being browser-based tracking, such as Google’s experimental FLoC (federated learning of cohorts).

This is a system that anonymizes individual customer data (gathered by the browser) by using its data to describe different customer archetypes rather than individual consumers – hiding the individual in the crowd. But the efficacy, security, and safety of this system is yet to be fully understood. FLoC is still undergoing origin trials.

What Does This All Mean?

The jump away from third-party cookies and more towards large aggregates of anonymized data from first-party sources, and anonymized data comparison to huge customer databanks (from the likes of Google and Facebook) further amplifies the ad monopoly that walled gardens have in the industry.

It also gives brands with much more customer data, or an established brand (and far greater opportunity to gather comparative data) the clear upper hand when it comes to making the most of their information without violating the GDPR, or other user privacy initiatives.

There’s a silver lining to it all, though. This will be as good as any an incentive for you to invest in your own CRM (customer relationship management) solutions to better gather and store first-party information on the people that interact with your company and products online. If you can no longer rely on third-party cookies to help you track users throughout the web, your website, app, and storefronts will have to do the heavy lifting.

Want to learn more about how to make the future of digital marketing work for you? Get in touch with us.

The post What Role Do Data Clean Rooms Play in a Privacy-Driven World? appeared first on Sachs Marketing Group.

Earlier this year, Google announced that it would be working on improved integration of ecommerce platforms into its Google Merchant Center, which allows users and companies to advertise and sell products via Google Search and the Google Shopping tab, and manage the way their inventory appears on Google.

On July 13^th, it extended that integration to GoDaddy merchants selling products in the US. Other ecommerce platforms that Google has been working with include Square, WooCommerce, and Shopify. Google’s Merchant Center also allows products to show up on Google Image Search and YouTube.

Related: 11 Essential SEO Tips for Ecommerce Sites

What Does This Mean?

GoDaddy is a domain registrar and web hosting service company. However, the company also offers several different web design and web builder services. One of its services is called the GoDaddy Online Store, through which you can build an ecommerce website for your company via GoDaddy’s own proprietary ecommerce builder and backend. In other words, GoDaddy lets you set up your own online shop, with features including:

• Up to 5,000 different product listings.
• Up to 10 images per product.
• Dozens of store templates organized by category.
• Secure payment via major credit cards, Apple Pay, and PayPal.
• Facebook integration.
• Email marketing campaigns.
• Mobile-friendly design.
• Google integration.

That last one is the company’s most recent offering. Through their cooperation, GoDaddy now allows you to log into your Google Merchant Center account while remaining onsite, syncing your GoDaddy Online Store catalog with Google, creating free listings, and configure your Google Smart Shopping ad campaigns to determine what products will show up across Google, including Google Search, Maps, Shopping, YouTube, and even Gmail.

Where free listings simply allow Google to pull from your catalog whenever results seem relevant to users, Smart Shopping allows users to manage how and where to focus their advertising budget on Google, while receiving clear performance metrics to better inform their advertising decisions in the future.

Commenting on the topic, Greg Goldfarb, the GoDaddy Vice President Commerce Products, explains: “Our customers’ success is our core motivation, we know that providing powerful ways to engage large buyer audiences is a key driver.

“Expanding our work with Google simplifies creating an ecommerce presence across Google surfaces and jumpstarts sales momentum by leveraging their best-in-class automated advertising solutions.”

Google has also announced that eligible GoDaddy users will receive up to $150 in ads credit when starting their first Google Smart Shopping ad campaign via GoDaddy.

What is the Google Merchant Center?

Google’s new Merchant Center allows you to manage how products that appear on your website will show up in free listings via Google Search, as well as paid Google ad campaigns.

It’s no secret that Google is by far the most popular search engine on the planet, and that hundreds of millions of people (by the company’s own metrics) use the website to specifically search for products to buy on a daily basis.

Google’s Merchant Center allows users to manage what products appear on Google, how they appear on Google, how to boost their appearance on Google, and how your advertising investments on Google are paying off for you. In short, the Merchant Center offers three basic features:

• Free listings.
• Paid ad campaigns.
• Metrics.

So far, Google has worked with Shopify, WooCommerce, and GoDaddy to bring the Merchant Center to each of these companies’ respective ecommerce platforms, so their users can start and manage Google ad campaigns for their own products via their respective ecommerce platform.

Like a lot of other Google products, you only really need your own Google Account to get started. You probably already have one if you’ve ever logged onto YouTube, have a Gmail, or use Google Analytics (which you definitely should).

Premium ad campaigns utilize your detailed product listings as uploaded to Google Merchant Center, and require a Google Ad account, where you can begin and manage your very own ad campaign.

How Do Listings Work?

Google requires different levels of information for products to show up on the Shopping tab, Image tab, or general Search. Signing up with the Google Merchant Center isn’t required for Google to automatically construct free listings if your website has structured data markup, and you haven’t opted out via your indexing and crawl controls. If your products haven’t been crawled, you can manually submit a feed via google Merchant Center. Some of the attributes Google uses to index, sort, and recommend your products includes:

• Product ID.
• Product title.
• Product link.
• Image link.
• Product price.
• Product description.
• Product availability.
• Product condition (for refurbished products).
• Product brand.
• Product GTIN.
• And much more.

Among these data points, Google particularly recommends that you provide information on shipping info and shipping policies, return policies (via the Merchant Center), the correct product URL (via the canonical_link attribute), and product availability.

For more information on making the most out of your Google ad campaigns, SEO campaigns, and product listings, get in touch.

Why Does This Matter?

This partnership between Google and GoDaddy is going to prove particularly beneficial for small-to-medium businesses, and small retailers. It’s a smart move for tech and IT companies to invest heavily in creating intuitive and easy-to-use ecommerce tools, as thousands and thousands of business owners are looking to move inventory over the internet after the pandemic forced countless brick-and-mortar stores to close.

But with the influx of new platforms to buy from comes a natural oversaturation of the market. Even niche industries are beginning to see multiple online storefronts fighting for the same or similar customer bases, to the point that differentiation and marketing savvy are becoming more and more important.

GoDaddy’s Google (and Facebook) integration, alongside a robust search engine optimization strategy, can help smaller retailers looking to reach broader audiences (locally, nationally, or worldwide) and ship their inventory out to the world.

While larger online retailers like Amazon took the biggest slice of the ecommerce revenue pie by far in 2020 and the first half of 2021, online shopping in general has experienced a massive boom as a result of the COVID pandemic, and we are likely to continue to see that trend grow even after this pandemic has finally come to an end.

The post Google Integrates with GoDaddy appeared first on Sachs Marketing Group.

The early days of search engine optimization were as simple as paying attention to your keyword use and gaming the “algorithm” as it existed at the time – and while things have gotten a lot more complicated since then, it does kind of work out to be the same thing it’s always been: trying to figure out the best way to top search engine results by playing by (or subverting) the engine’s rules.

Even now, decades after the launch of the first search engine, SEO remains a key tool in any digital marketing campaign as search still drives just around half of all website traffic, give or take (depending on niche and industry). Among those results, the vast majority of traffic originates from organic search (rather than paid), often to the 99^th percentile.

In other words, no matter how many different platforms show up to present themselves as the next big opportunity to capitalize on growing demand for video content, audio content, written content, or other mediums, it all ultimately comes down to the same thing every time: now that you’ve got the product and the content, how are you going to make sure you get the right people?

Does that mean SEO has become stagnant in years past? Absolutely not. While it remains a pillar of digital marketing, part of the reason that’s the case is because the opposite is true: SEO is constantly evolving, even if in relatively minor ways. Most of the changes in the SEO game come in the form of new tools to aggregate and analyze search data and user information, single out specific user profiles to both improve traffic while maximizing leads, and optimizing loading speeds, user experience, ad experience, and more.

SEO is about so much more than backlinks and content. It now encompasses a vast number of factors that aim to make use of the way Google recommends information based on user preferences, search patterns, location, interest, and much, much more – while helping companies funnel their resources into their digital presence as efficiently and effectively as possible.

Let’s look at some of the ways in which SEO has changed in recent times – and how you may have adapted, or need to adapt.

User Experience is Critical

We’ve all heard the phrase “content is king” a million times now, and that isn’t necessarily wrong, even so many years later. It’s no surprise that Bill Gates of all people was right on the money well over twenty years ago.

But there’s certainly a whole lot more to search engine success in 2021 than good content. Good content does not excuse a poor user experience. This means everything from page loading speeds to fonts and colors, ad placement, page functionality, streamlined design, and more.

Poor user experience won’t get you penalized on Google, but it can be a make-or-break difference when the search engine compares your page to that of your closest competitor.

Google Has Emphasized Clean, Responsive Content

Aside from user experience basics, Google has further emphasized what they call their Core Web Vitals earlier this year. These are metrics of page performance, specifically factors that relate most closely to how users perceive your page. Core web vitals measure how quickly and effectively your page handles the following three tasks:

• LCP (largest contentful paint), which is the amount of time it takes to render the largest piece of content on the user’s viewport.
• FID (first input delay), which is a measure of how long it takes the browser to react to a user’s interaction with your page after their first click.
• CLS (cumulative layout shift), which measures a phenomenon where page elements load inconsistently, causing misclicks and frustration as a user tries to interact with a page element that is no longer there.

A Higher Premium on Expert Advice

Another major change is that Google has continued to pay more attention to credibility and authority on certain topics, to the point that it becomes very hard to rank on them without serious credentials – such as being a renowned expert on the subject, an academic, or a credentialled professional.

This also means that content created and curated by professionals and experts in their given fields is given a higher premium than content created by unknown writers – especially in health and wellness niches. This is part of the reason you’re likely going to see results on certain medical conditions flooded by websites like WebMD, Cleveland Clinic, Healthline, and Mayo Clinic.

Bounce Rates and Search Intent

Getting a lot of clicks isn’t actually a great metric for success on Google – but it is the fastest way to expose weaknesses in your SEO strategy, by analyzing your bounce rates. A bounce rate is the number of people clicking off your page after realizing that it isn’t what they were looking for.

Bounce rates are an indicator that you’re attracting the wrong people with your search engine strategy. You might need to be more specific with your keywords and SEO, in order to ensure that as many people as possible who visit your page are satisfied with what they see. This is called search intent.

Much, Much More

While search engines like Baidu and DuckDuckGo command a lot of traffic (the first being China’s largest internet company, and the second being a popular privacy-oriented alternative to the Big Two), Google and Bing easily dominate, and the steps the two take to shape search – especially Google – have a continuous, reverberating impact on search as a whole every time a major change is announced.

Keeping an eye on changes as they’re announced and anticipated is important for any marketer looking to capitalize on modern SEO, especially because search engines can be volatile – and what might have been best practice six months ago isn’t necessarily harmful, it could be much less effective than a different, new approach.

This can be tough to do. Google has over 1200 unique features in its search engine results page, up from just a few hundred some years ago, and it continues to make algorithm changes thousands of times every year.

We help you keep up. Our SEO campaigns are always built with the latest and best practices in mind, and we don’t fall behind.

The post SEO Tools Are Evolving to Keep Up with Changes appeared first on Sachs Marketing Group.

News this week is being presented by more than yet another change to the algorithm – this time, Google is making marketing headlines with the development and release of a (sort of) brand new toolkit called Ads Creative Studio.

The new toolkit is designed for both creative types and marketers, with the aim of helping them take their campaigns to the next level via a new suite of resources both old and new. Google has also stated that they are trying to make it easier for artists and ad specialists to collaborate.

What is Google’s Ads Creative Studio?

Combining the forces of the YouTube video editor, Display & Video 360, and Campaign Manager 360, Ads Creative Studio gives you a set of basic features unifying the best of all three – in theory, and hopefully, in practice as well. So far, Ads Creative Studio is boasting the following base features:

The Director Mix. A brand-new tool that allows advertisers to create and customize ad campaigns that scale. Advertisers can design and produce a base video asset and utilize customized and dynamic elements to adjust to a variety of potential customers and target audiences – greatly expanding the efficacy of a single campaign and multiplying an ad department’s productivity.

The idea, according to Google, is to enable advertisers to create “thousands of video variations with relatively little effort”, through the use of customizable video layers containing text, graphics, audio, and even references to the viewer’s location, time of day, or interest.

Dynamic Display ads. Dynamic display is an existing feature in Google’s advertising products, particularly the Google Display Network in Google Ads. Dynamic Display, in theory, allows advertisers to cater their ads to the user, rather than trying to sculpt an ad around a vague target audience.

This allows ads to display products and offers that are most relevant to the person viewing them, based on information Google has gathered. Data is by far the most valuable resource in the advertising arms race, and Dynamic Display ads are one of the more unique ways advertisers can choose to leverage Google’s enormous data analysis capabilities.

HTML5 creation tools. HTML5 creation tools simply let advertisers leverage the improved performance and loading speed of HTML5 web elements when creating ads through the new Ad Creative Studio. Remember, speed is key with Google – your ad should be catchy and unintrusive, as well as quick to load.

Audio Mixer and Dynamic Audio. Audio is the unappreciated and underrated MVP of any given ad. Sound is immensely powerful, from voice acting and music to basic sound design and foley. But audio mixing, in particular, can make or break an ad and can mean the difference between something memorable and catchy, or something completely and utterly forgettable.

And finally, a Project Library, which is as straightforward as it sounds.

Why Consolidate These Tools?

While Ads Creative Studio is bringing a few new things to the table, most of its tools can be found in Google’s other existing products, mainly the aforementioned three: YouTube, Display & Video 360, and Campaign Manager 360.

At the heart of it, the idea to consolidate probably boils down to this: one is simpler and more efficient than three. Let alone five, six, or seven, once you take into consideration how people utilize a vast number of different programs and suites to work on HTML5 ads, video ads, display ads, and audio ads.

Ads Creative Studio is Google’s way of taking what they’ve already developed and repackaging it with a neat little bow – while telling advertisers that this is the project they aim to refine over the next few years.

Ads Creative Studio is also a way for Google to lead advertisers in a dance towards a new kind of way to develop and roll out ad campaigns: a dynamic way, where ads become building blocks that include a foundation, and multiple dynamic and customized, user-specific elements that are swapped in and out by both man and machine (or, more correctly, algorithm).

Google is basically telling us that we’re going to spend less and less time coming up with ways to design a new ad around each and every target customer, and instead automate the way ads target our audience, while designing better, more intuitive, simpler, and hopefully less intrusive and less bloated ads (via HTML5 tools and Google’s help). Ads Creative Studio also contains an asset management system where advertisers can store and browse text, video, audio, and graphical assets to utilize in their different ads.

There’s another potential benefit behind the curtain here: increased and improved collaboration between the media team and the ad team. By consolidating the tools and the managerial process, Google aims to create a one-stop-shop for a company’s general ad creation needs – a place where artists can create assets, while advertisers assemble them in real time.

What Does This Ultimately Mean for You?

Ideally, Google wants it to mean that you’ll spend less time making more ads. More ads means more revenue, which is a good thing for a company that mostly generates revenue from online advertising.

Whether or not you use Google’s tools is absolutely up to you, and there’s no denying that a consolidated web-based toolkit like Ads Creative Studio probably won’t be putting out the same quality of work as an experienced ad agency with very high production values and renowned artists. But for the average marketing specialist, Google’s new suite can definitely help make life much easier, on artists and advertisers alike.

Google is Merging Other Resources

In other news, Create with Google is being merged with Think with Google. This is Google’s resource for sharing tools, information, and spotlights in creative ads and creative advertising throughout the industry. Check it out if you want a little inspiration for your campaign – or, more specifically, just want to go check out the kind of ads that perform well with Google. You can also review Google’s creative guidelines on video, text, and more.

The post Google Announces New Ads Creative Studio appeared first on Sachs Marketing Group.

Whether you’ve heard of it via headlines in the news, releases by the EFF, or the viral sharing of AmIFLoCed, chances are you’ve heard about Google’s new FLoC initiative at some point this year.

FLoC, or the Federated Learning of Cohorts, is part of Google’s larger privacy sandbox, and is an experimental replacement for third-party cookies. While the name might sound confusing at first, the API is quite simple in concept (though its execution remains to be seen).

Explaining Google FLoC

FLoC is a new data collection concept by which the browsing and behavioral data of multiple individuals would be grouped up into generalized cohorts and used as an alternative to third-party cookies.

Currently, advertisers use cookies to track user behavior and create targeted ad campaigns. But privacy concerns surrounding the ubiquity of cookies and their invasiveness – particularly insofar as how they allow programs to track users across the internet, create user profiles based on their activities across different websites, and track users across different locations – have led people to wonder if there could be a better alternative, or if third-party cookies (and user tracking in general) should be completely done away with.

One of the biggest concerns regarding third-party cookies is that they can be attributed to a single person. Advertising platforms can generate user profiles based on their cookies and learn just about everything about a person from their behavior on the Internet.

FLoC aims to obscure the individual in the group, making it impossible for advertisers to single out individual users, and instead only gather and use information about large groups of people with similar patterns of behavior.

These cohorts would still enable personalized advertising, but the ads would be personalized to a profile roughly fitting several thousand people, rather than individual users.

“Federated learning” means that Google will be using machine learning to generate these cohorts. The idea is that advertisers will only be able to target a cohort once enough user data has been gathered to generate one, based on at least a few thousand users per cohort.

Cohorts would be categorized based on interests and behavior, and users could be placed within different cohorts at different times – for example, a single user may be part of a cohort centered around looking at gardening equipment one week, then at another point in time they may be in a cohort of people who viewed a lot of baking recipes.

How is Google FLoC Different from Cookies?

User information will be gleamed, aggregated, and provided by a user’s browser, but advertisers would only ever have access to the information of a generalized cohort of people rather than the individual user information currently made accessible by third-party cookies.

FLoC itself would still have access to that information to generate cohorts, but it wouldn’t be shared, even with Google.

Why Is There Controversy Surrounding Google FLoC?

Although FLoC is a proposed alternative to third-party cookies, there are privacy experts who worry that it’s just a pivot in a similar direction. FLoC holds no answers for common invasive forms of tracking like fingerprinting (which tracks user’s browsing history based on device information and other data rather than cookies) and may be combined with other non-cookie forms of invasive tracking to generate an even more accurate user profile.

Privacy experts also feel that addressing third-party cookies (which track users across websites, platforms, and devices) isn’t enough, and that first-party cookies (which are used to track logins and cart histories, but can also be used to generate in-house user profiles) still lend themselves to the development of targeted ad campaigns that are, by their very nature, discriminatory. Like fingerprinting, first-party cookies could potentially be combined with FLoC to continue to erode user privacy.

Google acknowledges these issues and is pushing ahead with FLoC testing, with the added caveat that the feature isn’t ready for a generalized rollout. So far, only about 0.5 percent of Chrome users in selected regions are being “FLoCed”. Apple, Microsoft, and Mozilla all feel that the feature would have to be improved considerably, and are unwilling to implement it. Brave Browser explains that FLoC: “harms user privacy, under the guise of being privacy-friendly.”

Preparing for the Future

One thing to make note of is that FLoC is proposed to be a replacement for third-party cookies, and their ability to track users as they move throughout the web. FLoC is not a replacement for first-party cookies, which allow websites to offer functionality such as registering an account and logging in, saving items in a cart, and compiling data for the use of user experience improvements, for example.

If third-party cookies were to be extinguished, advertisers would (theoretically) have a harder time tracking a single individual throughout the internet and would be replaced by generalized cohorts instead. But that doesn’t mean advertisers cease to have any info whatsoever on individual users. It’s just that most, if not all of it, will come in the form of first-party data.

This leads to the question: what will advertisers be able to do with first-party data? Google continues to probe and research this question via its FLEDGE initiative, an expansion of a previous Google Chrome program dubbed TURTLEDOVE. Via FLEDGE, Google claims that Chrome plans to take into account: “the industry feedback they’ve heard, including the idea of using a ‘trusted server’ – as defined by compliance with certain principles and policies – that’s specifically designed to store information about a campaign’s bids and budgets.”

FLEDGE testing is currently in progress, and origin trials testing is set to begin this month, with “advertiser testing” occurring at some point later this year before the 2022 deadline. That being said, some experts doubt that any serious testing on Google’s new privacy concepts will take place until next year. Google has stated that ad companies interested in joining these tests will be able to make use of the experimental API through a “bring your own server” model.

Other proposed changes to preserve crucial ad effectiveness functionalities, such as conversion tracking, are still underway. Currently, there have been talks about altering the way conversion tracking data is presented to make it impossible to identify and expose any given individual behind a conversion, but still present advertisers with enough actionable data to determine how successful their campaign was in relation to previous efforts.

The privacy sandbox Google continuously mentions is part of a greater initiative throughout the web to earnestly tackle and answer the questions and problems surrounding privacy and anonymity in the modern web.

Privacy and user data has come into the forefront of public consciousness via the popularity of search engines like DuckDuckGo, Apple’s initiatives to block third-party cookies altogether and market privacy as a selling point for its consumer tech, as well as the implementation of the GDPR throughout the EU. Whether Google’s new initiatives will prove to be a long-term solution, or just a short-term paradigm shift in the online advertising world, is still undecided.

The post What is Google FLoC? appeared first on Sachs Marketing Group.

Are you making the most of Amazon’s advertising suite? Are you sure? Because amid global turmoil, a major stock market crash, and murder hornets, Amazon’s stock soared to record numbers on the way to 2021, and it has continued to update and evolve its advertising options in an effort to help brands capitalize on all of this new growth.

What does this mean for you? Well, just as Amazon has been ramping up, it’s time for advertisers to ramp up with them. If your brand relies on ecommerce, then Amazon Advertising should be a major part of your overall marketing strategy.

If it doesn’t, then giving Amazon Advertising a look is still worthwhile – because regardless of what you’re selling, and where you’re selling it, you want ads on Amazon and its dozen high profile acquisitions.

Sponsored Brands and Display

We don’t need to explain why branding matters on the Internet. Amazon is no exception and has even expanded its options for brands to further draw in audiences, create connections via live video, over-the-top (OTT), and creative display ads, and capitalize on the power of branding via pay-per-click brand ads.

These are sponsored brand appearances on related searches and items, so potential customers continuously see your brand name and logo as they search for items in your particular niche or industry. Clicking on a sponsored brand also funnels users into a customized sales experience, via your own brand page – complete with current offers, new arrivals, and categorized inventory.

New additions to the sponsored brands feature include video, brand stories, your very own Amazon Store, Amazon Posts, and Amazon OTT.

Then, there’s sponsored display. This is Amazon’s on- and off-site display ad function, allowing you to create campaigns on-the-fly.

Not sure where to start? You’re not alone. Amazon has been ramping up its advertising upgrades and features with the pandemic, leaving some retailers in the dust. If you’re new to testing your ad campaigns on Amazon, be sure to work with someone with prior experience.

Amazon Attribution

Amazon Attribution is a new service in beta mode focused on providing ad campaign data and ad analysis for brands on Amazon, particularly regarding user behavior off-site via search, social media, video ads, display ads, and even email marketing.

The idea behind Amazon Attribution is to help marketers trace how each of these efforts directly translated into shopping activities and impressions on Amazon – so you can home in on what works, eliminate what doesn’t, and get fresh, data-driven ideas to optimize your ad investment on Amazon and elsewhere.

Amazon Live and Amazon OTT

Amazon launched over-the-top (OTT) video in 2019 and hasn’t slowed down with the investment in video ad functionality.

While display and audio ads still play an important role in your strategy – especially with Amazon owning both Prime Music and Audible – Amazon has been pushing video, in the light of how video ads have exploded in 2021. Today, about 80 percent of all internet traffic comes from watching streamed video.

Amazon Posts

Amazon Posts is another function in beta that attempts to introduce lifestyle-centered curated brand content to viewers and users browsing the platform. Basically, brands can now create Posts to promote individual products, or the brand itself, whenever users browse relevant categories.

Users that click through your Posts will be brought to your brand feed – and from there, they’ll click through to your product pages, and the eventual shopping cart. Or at least, that’s the idea. Amazon Posts is still in beta, and is currently only available on mobile (both through the Amazon app and the mobile web version of the platform).

Are You Making the Most of Amazon DSP?

Another one of Amazon’s critically important tools for both search marketers and ecommerce experts is Amazon’s demand-side platform (DSP).

You don’t need to be a brand on Amazon to use its DSP. Anyone can take advantage of Amazon DSP to start managing video, display, and audio ads to drive traffic back to their main site and make use of Amazon’s massive resources, including the Amazon network (which includes properties like IMDb, Twitch.tv, Audible, and more), and the platform’s over 2 billion visitors per month.

Making use of Amazon’s DSP is surprisingly easy. All you need to get started is an Amazon DSP account (separate from the Amazon Ad account you’re using for Sponsored Brands, Sponsored Display, and other Amazon Advertising options), and your ad assets.

The platform itself is straightforward, albeit a little simple. Don’t expect specific information on how well your CTA performed, or which CTA performed best. You will get information on impressions and performance but expect that data to trickle in over time as the ad gets going. Also note that ad assets may have to be adjusted for Amazon – don’t just reuse the same assets you’re running on Facebook. Amazon has its own guideline for ideal ad specs.

Amazon and eCommerce in 2021

After the ecommerce insanity that was 2020, it’s hard to confidently predict what the near future is going to look like for both Amazon and its alternatives/competitors.

Making sure your brand is performing well on the world’s largest and fastest growing marketplace is definitely an absolute must – as is ensuring that you’re also being optimal on other channels as well, whether it’s via your website, social networks, or organic traffic through Google. Don’t neglect ecommerce alternatives, whether on your own site or elsewhere – we all know how dangerous it is to put all of our eggs in one basket, even if it’s an incredibly profitable and convenient basket.

But as we continue to move towards a post-pandemic world, one thing seems clear: ecommerce growth shows no signs of slowing down, and it’s likely that people will continue to heavily incorporate online shopping into their day-to-day even as brick-and-mortar shops reopen.

Need help making heads or tails of Amazon’s ever-expanding suite of advertising options in 2021? Be sure to work with a partner that knows what they’re doing. You don’t need to take advantage of every single tool Amazon throws your way – but even a simple strategy takes understanding of how Amazon pushes and promotes products, mobilizes leads, and responds to off-site optimization.

The post Amazon Advertising Adds New Features appeared first on Sachs Marketing Group.