June 5, 2018 – This month’s event focused on paid search with Benjamin Briggs, Search Engine Marketing Manager at CloudOne, presenting advanced tactics for effective campaigns.  He covered everything from layered bid adjustments to brand and budget safety to implementation.  Here are three takeaways from the night:

  1. Different keywords play a role in different parts of the customer journey. For example, short-tail, category non-brand keywords are effective when targeting customer awareness while long-tail, product non-brand keywords are more effective when targeting the consideration phase.  Brand keywords play a key role at the conversion stage.
  2. Brand and non-brand campaigns have different goals and strategies. Brand campaigns convert ready-to-purchase customers, reduce friction for common tasks and fend off pesky competitors with their unethical conquest campaigns.  Non-brand campaigns create awareness, nurture interest, and convert first-time customers.
  3. Don’t underestimate the value of ad extensions. Bolster your ads with click-to-call (or text or chat), sitelinks, call-outs, location and structured snippets.  You need to utilize these table stakes to be more effective.  That being said, be mindful of potential disadvantages: mismatched messaging, blended statistics and AI determined serving.

During the closing Q&A session, Ben shared additional insights on topics such as B2B conquests, session unification, PLAs and more.

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