Post by lizaseo11 on Nov 9, 2024 2:25:15 GMT -5
Many people tend to blame advertising for all the troubles. Of course, you can screw it up, but if the tenth contractor changes and nothing happens, maybe it's not the contractors that are to blame.
Imagine that your business is a water supply system designed to deliver water (profit), and advertising is a pump that pumps this water from a reservoir. No matter how good the pump is, if there are holes in the water supply system, very little water will reach your home, or none at all. Therefore, it is not enough for individual elements of the system called “business” to shine with novelty and perform their functions well; it is incredibly important that the entire system works like clockwork.
Lack of complete end-to-end analytics
Of course, walking at night in an unfamiliar forest without a flashlight, compass and map is very exciting, but only if you like the process of wandering. If the goal is to get to a specific place as soon as possible, then you will need a flashlight, ask the locals, and take a GPS navigator with you.
In business, the main reference point is analytics of everything, and especially sales channels: which granny first whispered to him about your site, what he bought, when and how much, how the call center employees communicated with him, etc., etc. That is, call tracking and a properly configured CRM are no longer a luxury, but a necessary base.
Call tracking systems:
The highly eccentric shopify website design businessman Dmitry Potapenko firmly states: if you don’t know the name of your client’s cat, your business is doomed.
And to put it mildly, don’t underestimate the importance of studying and segmenting your target audience. Even marketing giants like Unilever, which sell “everything to everyone,” break their target audience into tiny pieces to create highly targeted offers and reach potential customers.
You may have read the story about how Target found out about one American girl’s pregnancy before she did. The store simply analyzed the purchases of each regular customer, based on the data from its huge assortment of products that indicated the customer was pregnant (for example, unscented body lotion) – and sent these customers discount offers accordingly. None of this would be possible without detailed segmentation.
By the way, if you are interested in the possibility of detailed analytics, read an interesting article on the topic:
Lack of competitor analysis
There is an opinion that wanders around the Internet like a ghost of communism that studying competitors is more likely to harm business than to benefit. There is some truth in it: if studying competitors leads to copying their methods, then perhaps it really is not worth wasting time on it.
The purpose of this analysis is to understand their "chips", USP, advantages and disadvantages and stand out from them. This means that after collecting primary data on your competitors, it is useful to conduct a SWOT analysis and understand what pain of customers you "treat" better, and in what moments they bypass you and use this in advertising and on landing pages.
Services for competitor analysis:
What sources and channels do they use, what ads do they write, what posts do they make on social networks, how do they design them, how do they promote the brand.
Lack of work with focus groups
In the US, focus groups are nothing new, but in the CIS, they are a strange beast that few have ever seen with their own eyes. Focus groups are formed before the release of any advertisement, always from representatives of the target audience, they help to understand how the advertising message is perceived and what can be improved before the launch of advertising campaigns. They can also be used to evaluate the product as a whole. In the age of television advertising, focus groups were a precaution to avoid making a mess and wasting budgets ahead of time. But even now, in online advertising, where you can test everything "on the go", a focus group can be cheaper than the advertising budget spent on primary tests.
And yes, normal sales through a new advertising channel (for example, contextual advertising), without a month or two of initial testing - it's like a unicorn. Many people talk about them, but almost no one has seen them.
An alternative to focus groups: live tests, which have already been discussed, or big data analysis (from point 3). But big data analysis can only be afforded by companies that serve thousands, tens of thousands of customers, and that sell thousands of items of one category every month. That's why that story was about Target, not a mom-and-pop store.
Poorly developed media plan
Returning to the dark forest... If you have not stocked up on food, water and navigation tools, it will be hard for you... So in advertising, without preliminary calculation of advertising costs, forecasting KPI, calculation and understanding of the return on investment, you can fly into such minuses that you will no longer want to run a business, especially if you are just starting it. No, well, then of course you will say: "Business is not my thing..."
Lack of testing
"I wish I could set up advertising once and never think about it again, and let it bring me more and more clients" - sometimes it seems that entrepreneurs wake up with this thought. In principle, it is based on a healthy desire to save their efforts, money and time. But unfortunately, desire is completely unviable.
Advertising, unfortunately, is one of the high-risk areas of activity. If you can get some guarantees for production, supplies or when creating a corporate website, then there is no point in talking about guarantees for advertising. Everything changes so quickly in this area: tools appear and disappear, prices change, new advertisers enter the market, banal fashion changes, new memes appear - that it is impossible to write one eternal technology that will suit everyone and always. The winner is the one who constantly tests and looks for new ways and loopholes, and those who are afraid to change something are gradually getting lost.
Of course, he tests wisely and with an understanding of what he is doing.
Collection of semantics only by keyword planner and wordstat
Google Planner and Wordstat are wonderful tools, no doubt. Their problem is exactly one: they give you exactly the same as all other advertisers. If your strategy requires showing on high- or mid-frequency queries (and therefore a higher level of competition), then their tips will be enough for you.
But if you have chosen a strategy focused on specific queries, for example, with the goal of reducing rates through more detailed elaboration of phrases and a higher quality indicator, then it is better to include third-party services in the selection process.
Below is the list:
No minus words
One could laugh at this point if not for the several hundred audits under my belt. Okay, advanced minus words, okay, chaos... one of the three accounts checked consistently does not have any minus words. When you see this, the question of why advertising of commercial equipment can be issued for a request with the word "zoo", or for a request: buy kerpich ugni stubborn, although ugg boots are advertised, immediately disappears.
There's no getting around this banal truth: downvoting an account is like washing your hands after using the toilet. Without the second, you get regular diarrhea, and without the first, money is sent along roughly the same route. So, what you need to know when downvoting:
It is better to form the most obvious unnecessary words at the launch stage as a general list, which can then be conveniently connected to new campaigns and expanded as needed.
Take care of cross-minusation. If you sell men's and women's hats, then the men's campaign should not be shown with the word "women's", and the women's campaign should not be shown with the word "men's". The same with any categories.
Conduct regular minus: it is most convenient to choose a regularity that does not collect more than 2 thousand unique search queries.
Make a minus list of cities. We assume, but Google has. If you sell goods in Ukraine and do not want to show up for queries like “buy in Moscow” or “buy in Voronezh” (do you think we are the only ones who know how to use VPNs?), then you have two options: manually exclude all unnecessary cities in the geotargeting settings of each individual campaign… or create a common list of cities for all campaigns, which will exclude different “buy Voronezh” from your agenda.
Well, for those who want to scrape the account to perfection, also take care of cross-minus for individual groups. So that keywords do not compete with each other.
Lack of A/B testing of ad texts
We have already talked about tests above. And here is a live example: texts are the cheapest thing that can be in advertising. You do not need to look for a camera or negotiate with a designer, you do not need to spend additional money, you just write two versions of ads initially and compare their attractiveness. Time passes, one text turns out to be better than the other, it remains, the second is deleted and a new one is created - and now you have a permanent, virtually free generator of updates that can save your advertising budget (due to a decrease in the price per click).
It would seem that such a valuable opportunity is practically free... But judging by the same audits, either not everyone knows about it, or does not understand its value.
No ad extensions
Any normal fox from a fairy tale will try to put its tail down, even if it was only allowed to warm its paws. And if Google Adwords gives you free tools that will make your ad bigger, more noticeable, more informative, and even in return will not pester you with a weekly mailing list...
Now compare the two ads:
Modesty is certainly a great quality. Outside of advertising. It's one thing if the position in a particular search results turned out to be too low, or Google's inscrutable algorithms decided to show your ad without extensions. But if you didn't even create them - who's to blame?
A joke on the topic:
One man dreamed of winning the lottery. Every day he came to the temple, knelt down and asked God:
- Lord, help me win the lottery!
A month passed, then a second… One day, as usual, a man came to the temple, knelt down and began to pray:
- Oh, Lord, please let me win the lottery! Other people win. What does it cost you?!
Suddenly the voice of the Almighty was heard above his head:
- Just buy a lottery ticket already!
Lack of data-driven breakdown by city, device, and time of ad campaign display
Just the other day, an infographic was released: on average, the price per click in Kyiv is 1.3-1.5 times higher than in other cities of Ukraine. If you have a general campaign, without Kiev being singled out (which often brings in half of the income), then your statistics on positions, price per click, and impressions are the average temperature in the hospital, including the infectious diseases department and the morgue.
No kidding, it's a pretty common situation when your average position is 3 or higher, and in Kyiv you're somewhere at the bottom, or you don't even make it to the first page. Let me remind you, in a region that can bring up to half of an online store's income. It would be better to control this, right? And automatic location adjustments won't always help here.
Or, for example, you sell pizza, working hours are from 10 to 23, but the ads continue to show all night. The question is: for whom? Pizza is one of those products that people google to order "right now", few people choose it in advance. But night owls search and click. Someone may even inadvertently leave an order or call you on the phone number listed in the site header. And then get indignant.
Or you have a site that is displayed terribly on mobile devices. Or does not display at all. But you continue to collect traffic from them and get a stable 100% bounce rate on this channel. All these mistakes, unfortunately, are quite typical. Not always the lack of breakdown takes such glaring forms, more often small opportunities are simply missed: save the budget on time, places, devices that work worse, make special offers, indicate more accurate addresses and phone numbers, group separately high-income regions and those from which there are not so many orders ... If desired, "breakdown" has many interesting and useful applications.
Lack of properly configured KMS (cross-targeting, own categories of interests) animated banners, HTML5 banners, lightboxes
It seems that everyone already knows about search advertising. Even the Oschadbank business test asked about it, soon, at any moment, they will write something about it in marketing textbooks for economic universities, not everyone is going to tell students about newspapers, radio and television. Advertising in the contextual media network has not yet received such glory.
There are two popular questions about her:
"Is that where the scary bellies jump and they offer to enlarge your penis?"
"Is this the one where you google fishing once and a fishing store ad will haunt you for the rest of your life?"
The answer to the first one is no. AdWords rules prohibit shock content and scares, and restrict advertising for adults. These rules are generally very strict regarding what is allowed and what is not. If you want, read it yourself:
The answer to the second one is: partly, yes. This kind of "pursuit" is called remarketing. But this is far from the only function of the KMS.
In fact, Google offers such a variety of tools for this network that your eyes may run wild. Not only static or animated banners are available here, but also lightboxes (a banner that, when hovered over, expands into a huge picture or video), dynamically generated banners (which can show the user the products that he or she viewed in the store), and the same videos that can be shown not on YouTube, but in embedded players throughout the network.
As for targeting, you can also go wild here: 8 completely different types of targeting, Karl! Which can also be mixed with each other and with any standard settings. Up to the point that you can show your video to people who recently entered a search query, for example, "tennis rackets".
At the same time, the price per click can be lower by the same 1.5 times, depending on the subject. And no "impressions on the second page", in the KMS, an impression is counted only if the ad is directly displayed in the visible area of the user's screen.
Neglecting YouTube Advertising
It must be admitted that the competition in our market is quite moderate. It is enough to look back with horror at old Europe, where they are gnawing at each other for 1-2 percent of investment returns, and understand that Ukraine still has a long way to go. It is the same in advertising: it is funny to say, you are sitting on YouTube with a Ukrainian IP - 1-2 ads of several, mostly the same advertisers are shown, some video ad blocks are completely empty and skipped. You switch to a VPN from some Germany, and there you are bombarded with such a heap of videos that I am almost happy to see two identical ones in a row. Our prices and theirs are like heaven and earth, just imagine targeted video viewing for 26 kopecks! By the way, it is not only us, advertisers, who know about this, any Russian-speaking blogger envies his foreign colleagues, who earn 10 times more from each pre-roll or embedded video.
But even so, persuading the average advertiser to a YouTube video is a whole business. Because it needs to be tested, new things need to be tried, and advertising wants to be rolled into concrete and never touched. And even prospects and ridiculous competition are powerless against this conservatism and caution. Or is it?
Lack of dynamic remarketing for online stores
It would seem that if an online store, especially a large one, with Rozetka, OLX and Hotline looming over it, takes on advertising, it should fight desperately for its customers. And using the very best advertising technologies. And setting up dynamic remarketing so that customers are shown ads for exactly those products that they viewed is a sacred duty.
But no. Either they don't know enough about it, or they find it too complicated to set up, or they don't want to deal with programmers once again - and dynamic remarketing often ends up forgotten, postponed for an indefinite period. While Rozetka and Prom.ua push it to users from every crack.
Lack of understanding of the sales funnel
"Each stage of the sales funnel requires its own methods and tools" - all marketers and businessmen know by heart. However, when it comes to implementing this principle in detail, in the same contextual advertising, the understanding of it becomes blurred. The question arises: what exactly to do? What tools to choose?
There is usually a catastrophic lack of time to explain the entire scheme to an agency or freelancer, especially at the initial setup stage, when dozens of technical issues already need to be resolved. And in order to throw a prepared file at a contractor, this file needs to be prepared together with the contractor. In the end, it is easier to just forget about it. At least, that is how it seems.
Every day, more and more cases appear in which the key factor of success is no longer creativity and creativity, but technicality, factors calculated down to the smallest detail that affect the probability of purchase, extremely precisely selected audiences and advertising messages to them calculated down to the letter. And the stage at which a potential client is located is one of the basic factors influencing his perception and determining what kind of advertising message can attract him.
No Ads on Gmail
For some reason, it is common to view KMS as a single whole. This means that advertising settings often look like shooting a cannon at sparrows: the main thing is the audience characteristics, and the rest will follow.
The characteristics of the target audience are certainly an important parameter, it is worth cherishing, nurturing and specifying in every possible way. But it is not for nothing that AdWords advertising and similar systems are called contextual – it would be good if it always corresponded to the context.
Compare how different the user's attitude towards the advertising message will be when he:
Reads articles on the Internet about how the Bla-1 stove differs from the Bla-2 stove
Posts cats on social media
Watching news on YouTube
Looking through mail waiting for an important letter
Meeting the user in the right place with the right message is also an art.
The last point is fraught with both dangers and opportunities. Why? If a person has already opened their email and is looking for something there, they will have to read the senders and subject lines of the emails, which means they will be more attentive to your advertising message. But Gmail ad previews look very similar to emails, standing out only in colors and minor design elements, which increases the likelihood that they will be read. If you can make an interesting offer, and the user clicks, then a large banner awaits them, filled with images, videos and text - depending on what exactly and how you add it. Tempting, isn't it?
Besides the obvious, Gmail after the blocking of Yandex and Mail.Ru began to rapidly gain popularity, many were simply forced to switch either to it or to ukr.net.
Lack of experiments that provide a clear understanding of the test of any hypothesis
Recently it turned out that not all Internet advertising professionals dare to use experiments in their work. What's more, some don't even conduct experiments by conventional means, let alone when it comes to special settings.
In reality, it's not that scary. Google AdWords Experiments are almost a godsend for anyone who's been waiting for a reliable way to test their hypotheses. They allow you to conduct those very clean tests, when you change just one or two parameters and check in real time whether this change has brought you income or, on the contrary, spoiled the situation. And you don't need more "qualitative" and "approximate" assessments - everything will be told by clear and understandable numbers in your account.
The belief that ONLY advertising sells
Returning to the very beginning, I will repeat: advertising is not the entire sales system, but only a part of it. Classic advertising does not sell anything at all - when there was only television, radio and newspapers, the question of "how to calculate the return on investment in advertising" hung around the neck of every entrepreneur like a dead weight. It did whatever it wanted: it formed awareness, created a positive image - but other tools sold the product.
Sometimes advertising is really problematic – when it doesn’t bring people or brings the wrong ones. But just as often, other parts of the sales system become the main problem. The convenience and beauty of websites, the quality of service from managers, the terms of interaction – all this requires the same constant attention and optimization as advertising. Otherwise, you can set up a great advertising campaign, but still end up without sales, because users got confused in the registration form or did not wait for a call back.
Imagine that your business is a water supply system designed to deliver water (profit), and advertising is a pump that pumps this water from a reservoir. No matter how good the pump is, if there are holes in the water supply system, very little water will reach your home, or none at all. Therefore, it is not enough for individual elements of the system called “business” to shine with novelty and perform their functions well; it is incredibly important that the entire system works like clockwork.
Lack of complete end-to-end analytics
Of course, walking at night in an unfamiliar forest without a flashlight, compass and map is very exciting, but only if you like the process of wandering. If the goal is to get to a specific place as soon as possible, then you will need a flashlight, ask the locals, and take a GPS navigator with you.
In business, the main reference point is analytics of everything, and especially sales channels: which granny first whispered to him about your site, what he bought, when and how much, how the call center employees communicated with him, etc., etc. That is, call tracking and a properly configured CRM are no longer a luxury, but a necessary base.
Call tracking systems:
The highly eccentric shopify website design businessman Dmitry Potapenko firmly states: if you don’t know the name of your client’s cat, your business is doomed.
And to put it mildly, don’t underestimate the importance of studying and segmenting your target audience. Even marketing giants like Unilever, which sell “everything to everyone,” break their target audience into tiny pieces to create highly targeted offers and reach potential customers.
You may have read the story about how Target found out about one American girl’s pregnancy before she did. The store simply analyzed the purchases of each regular customer, based on the data from its huge assortment of products that indicated the customer was pregnant (for example, unscented body lotion) – and sent these customers discount offers accordingly. None of this would be possible without detailed segmentation.
By the way, if you are interested in the possibility of detailed analytics, read an interesting article on the topic:
Lack of competitor analysis
There is an opinion that wanders around the Internet like a ghost of communism that studying competitors is more likely to harm business than to benefit. There is some truth in it: if studying competitors leads to copying their methods, then perhaps it really is not worth wasting time on it.
The purpose of this analysis is to understand their "chips", USP, advantages and disadvantages and stand out from them. This means that after collecting primary data on your competitors, it is useful to conduct a SWOT analysis and understand what pain of customers you "treat" better, and in what moments they bypass you and use this in advertising and on landing pages.
Services for competitor analysis:
What sources and channels do they use, what ads do they write, what posts do they make on social networks, how do they design them, how do they promote the brand.
Lack of work with focus groups
In the US, focus groups are nothing new, but in the CIS, they are a strange beast that few have ever seen with their own eyes. Focus groups are formed before the release of any advertisement, always from representatives of the target audience, they help to understand how the advertising message is perceived and what can be improved before the launch of advertising campaigns. They can also be used to evaluate the product as a whole. In the age of television advertising, focus groups were a precaution to avoid making a mess and wasting budgets ahead of time. But even now, in online advertising, where you can test everything "on the go", a focus group can be cheaper than the advertising budget spent on primary tests.
And yes, normal sales through a new advertising channel (for example, contextual advertising), without a month or two of initial testing - it's like a unicorn. Many people talk about them, but almost no one has seen them.
An alternative to focus groups: live tests, which have already been discussed, or big data analysis (from point 3). But big data analysis can only be afforded by companies that serve thousands, tens of thousands of customers, and that sell thousands of items of one category every month. That's why that story was about Target, not a mom-and-pop store.
Poorly developed media plan
Returning to the dark forest... If you have not stocked up on food, water and navigation tools, it will be hard for you... So in advertising, without preliminary calculation of advertising costs, forecasting KPI, calculation and understanding of the return on investment, you can fly into such minuses that you will no longer want to run a business, especially if you are just starting it. No, well, then of course you will say: "Business is not my thing..."
Lack of testing
"I wish I could set up advertising once and never think about it again, and let it bring me more and more clients" - sometimes it seems that entrepreneurs wake up with this thought. In principle, it is based on a healthy desire to save their efforts, money and time. But unfortunately, desire is completely unviable.
Advertising, unfortunately, is one of the high-risk areas of activity. If you can get some guarantees for production, supplies or when creating a corporate website, then there is no point in talking about guarantees for advertising. Everything changes so quickly in this area: tools appear and disappear, prices change, new advertisers enter the market, banal fashion changes, new memes appear - that it is impossible to write one eternal technology that will suit everyone and always. The winner is the one who constantly tests and looks for new ways and loopholes, and those who are afraid to change something are gradually getting lost.
Of course, he tests wisely and with an understanding of what he is doing.
Collection of semantics only by keyword planner and wordstat
Google Planner and Wordstat are wonderful tools, no doubt. Their problem is exactly one: they give you exactly the same as all other advertisers. If your strategy requires showing on high- or mid-frequency queries (and therefore a higher level of competition), then their tips will be enough for you.
But if you have chosen a strategy focused on specific queries, for example, with the goal of reducing rates through more detailed elaboration of phrases and a higher quality indicator, then it is better to include third-party services in the selection process.
Below is the list:
No minus words
One could laugh at this point if not for the several hundred audits under my belt. Okay, advanced minus words, okay, chaos... one of the three accounts checked consistently does not have any minus words. When you see this, the question of why advertising of commercial equipment can be issued for a request with the word "zoo", or for a request: buy kerpich ugni stubborn, although ugg boots are advertised, immediately disappears.
There's no getting around this banal truth: downvoting an account is like washing your hands after using the toilet. Without the second, you get regular diarrhea, and without the first, money is sent along roughly the same route. So, what you need to know when downvoting:
It is better to form the most obvious unnecessary words at the launch stage as a general list, which can then be conveniently connected to new campaigns and expanded as needed.
Take care of cross-minusation. If you sell men's and women's hats, then the men's campaign should not be shown with the word "women's", and the women's campaign should not be shown with the word "men's". The same with any categories.
Conduct regular minus: it is most convenient to choose a regularity that does not collect more than 2 thousand unique search queries.
Make a minus list of cities. We assume, but Google has. If you sell goods in Ukraine and do not want to show up for queries like “buy in Moscow” or “buy in Voronezh” (do you think we are the only ones who know how to use VPNs?), then you have two options: manually exclude all unnecessary cities in the geotargeting settings of each individual campaign… or create a common list of cities for all campaigns, which will exclude different “buy Voronezh” from your agenda.
Well, for those who want to scrape the account to perfection, also take care of cross-minus for individual groups. So that keywords do not compete with each other.
Lack of A/B testing of ad texts
We have already talked about tests above. And here is a live example: texts are the cheapest thing that can be in advertising. You do not need to look for a camera or negotiate with a designer, you do not need to spend additional money, you just write two versions of ads initially and compare their attractiveness. Time passes, one text turns out to be better than the other, it remains, the second is deleted and a new one is created - and now you have a permanent, virtually free generator of updates that can save your advertising budget (due to a decrease in the price per click).
It would seem that such a valuable opportunity is practically free... But judging by the same audits, either not everyone knows about it, or does not understand its value.
No ad extensions
Any normal fox from a fairy tale will try to put its tail down, even if it was only allowed to warm its paws. And if Google Adwords gives you free tools that will make your ad bigger, more noticeable, more informative, and even in return will not pester you with a weekly mailing list...
Now compare the two ads:
Modesty is certainly a great quality. Outside of advertising. It's one thing if the position in a particular search results turned out to be too low, or Google's inscrutable algorithms decided to show your ad without extensions. But if you didn't even create them - who's to blame?
A joke on the topic:
One man dreamed of winning the lottery. Every day he came to the temple, knelt down and asked God:
- Lord, help me win the lottery!
A month passed, then a second… One day, as usual, a man came to the temple, knelt down and began to pray:
- Oh, Lord, please let me win the lottery! Other people win. What does it cost you?!
Suddenly the voice of the Almighty was heard above his head:
- Just buy a lottery ticket already!
Lack of data-driven breakdown by city, device, and time of ad campaign display
Just the other day, an infographic was released: on average, the price per click in Kyiv is 1.3-1.5 times higher than in other cities of Ukraine. If you have a general campaign, without Kiev being singled out (which often brings in half of the income), then your statistics on positions, price per click, and impressions are the average temperature in the hospital, including the infectious diseases department and the morgue.
No kidding, it's a pretty common situation when your average position is 3 or higher, and in Kyiv you're somewhere at the bottom, or you don't even make it to the first page. Let me remind you, in a region that can bring up to half of an online store's income. It would be better to control this, right? And automatic location adjustments won't always help here.
Or, for example, you sell pizza, working hours are from 10 to 23, but the ads continue to show all night. The question is: for whom? Pizza is one of those products that people google to order "right now", few people choose it in advance. But night owls search and click. Someone may even inadvertently leave an order or call you on the phone number listed in the site header. And then get indignant.
Or you have a site that is displayed terribly on mobile devices. Or does not display at all. But you continue to collect traffic from them and get a stable 100% bounce rate on this channel. All these mistakes, unfortunately, are quite typical. Not always the lack of breakdown takes such glaring forms, more often small opportunities are simply missed: save the budget on time, places, devices that work worse, make special offers, indicate more accurate addresses and phone numbers, group separately high-income regions and those from which there are not so many orders ... If desired, "breakdown" has many interesting and useful applications.
Lack of properly configured KMS (cross-targeting, own categories of interests) animated banners, HTML5 banners, lightboxes
It seems that everyone already knows about search advertising. Even the Oschadbank business test asked about it, soon, at any moment, they will write something about it in marketing textbooks for economic universities, not everyone is going to tell students about newspapers, radio and television. Advertising in the contextual media network has not yet received such glory.
There are two popular questions about her:
"Is that where the scary bellies jump and they offer to enlarge your penis?"
"Is this the one where you google fishing once and a fishing store ad will haunt you for the rest of your life?"
The answer to the first one is no. AdWords rules prohibit shock content and scares, and restrict advertising for adults. These rules are generally very strict regarding what is allowed and what is not. If you want, read it yourself:
The answer to the second one is: partly, yes. This kind of "pursuit" is called remarketing. But this is far from the only function of the KMS.
In fact, Google offers such a variety of tools for this network that your eyes may run wild. Not only static or animated banners are available here, but also lightboxes (a banner that, when hovered over, expands into a huge picture or video), dynamically generated banners (which can show the user the products that he or she viewed in the store), and the same videos that can be shown not on YouTube, but in embedded players throughout the network.
As for targeting, you can also go wild here: 8 completely different types of targeting, Karl! Which can also be mixed with each other and with any standard settings. Up to the point that you can show your video to people who recently entered a search query, for example, "tennis rackets".
At the same time, the price per click can be lower by the same 1.5 times, depending on the subject. And no "impressions on the second page", in the KMS, an impression is counted only if the ad is directly displayed in the visible area of the user's screen.
Neglecting YouTube Advertising
It must be admitted that the competition in our market is quite moderate. It is enough to look back with horror at old Europe, where they are gnawing at each other for 1-2 percent of investment returns, and understand that Ukraine still has a long way to go. It is the same in advertising: it is funny to say, you are sitting on YouTube with a Ukrainian IP - 1-2 ads of several, mostly the same advertisers are shown, some video ad blocks are completely empty and skipped. You switch to a VPN from some Germany, and there you are bombarded with such a heap of videos that I am almost happy to see two identical ones in a row. Our prices and theirs are like heaven and earth, just imagine targeted video viewing for 26 kopecks! By the way, it is not only us, advertisers, who know about this, any Russian-speaking blogger envies his foreign colleagues, who earn 10 times more from each pre-roll or embedded video.
But even so, persuading the average advertiser to a YouTube video is a whole business. Because it needs to be tested, new things need to be tried, and advertising wants to be rolled into concrete and never touched. And even prospects and ridiculous competition are powerless against this conservatism and caution. Or is it?
Lack of dynamic remarketing for online stores
It would seem that if an online store, especially a large one, with Rozetka, OLX and Hotline looming over it, takes on advertising, it should fight desperately for its customers. And using the very best advertising technologies. And setting up dynamic remarketing so that customers are shown ads for exactly those products that they viewed is a sacred duty.
But no. Either they don't know enough about it, or they find it too complicated to set up, or they don't want to deal with programmers once again - and dynamic remarketing often ends up forgotten, postponed for an indefinite period. While Rozetka and Prom.ua push it to users from every crack.
Lack of understanding of the sales funnel
"Each stage of the sales funnel requires its own methods and tools" - all marketers and businessmen know by heart. However, when it comes to implementing this principle in detail, in the same contextual advertising, the understanding of it becomes blurred. The question arises: what exactly to do? What tools to choose?
There is usually a catastrophic lack of time to explain the entire scheme to an agency or freelancer, especially at the initial setup stage, when dozens of technical issues already need to be resolved. And in order to throw a prepared file at a contractor, this file needs to be prepared together with the contractor. In the end, it is easier to just forget about it. At least, that is how it seems.
Every day, more and more cases appear in which the key factor of success is no longer creativity and creativity, but technicality, factors calculated down to the smallest detail that affect the probability of purchase, extremely precisely selected audiences and advertising messages to them calculated down to the letter. And the stage at which a potential client is located is one of the basic factors influencing his perception and determining what kind of advertising message can attract him.
No Ads on Gmail
For some reason, it is common to view KMS as a single whole. This means that advertising settings often look like shooting a cannon at sparrows: the main thing is the audience characteristics, and the rest will follow.
The characteristics of the target audience are certainly an important parameter, it is worth cherishing, nurturing and specifying in every possible way. But it is not for nothing that AdWords advertising and similar systems are called contextual – it would be good if it always corresponded to the context.
Compare how different the user's attitude towards the advertising message will be when he:
Reads articles on the Internet about how the Bla-1 stove differs from the Bla-2 stove
Posts cats on social media
Watching news on YouTube
Looking through mail waiting for an important letter
Meeting the user in the right place with the right message is also an art.
The last point is fraught with both dangers and opportunities. Why? If a person has already opened their email and is looking for something there, they will have to read the senders and subject lines of the emails, which means they will be more attentive to your advertising message. But Gmail ad previews look very similar to emails, standing out only in colors and minor design elements, which increases the likelihood that they will be read. If you can make an interesting offer, and the user clicks, then a large banner awaits them, filled with images, videos and text - depending on what exactly and how you add it. Tempting, isn't it?
Besides the obvious, Gmail after the blocking of Yandex and Mail.Ru began to rapidly gain popularity, many were simply forced to switch either to it or to ukr.net.
Lack of experiments that provide a clear understanding of the test of any hypothesis
Recently it turned out that not all Internet advertising professionals dare to use experiments in their work. What's more, some don't even conduct experiments by conventional means, let alone when it comes to special settings.
In reality, it's not that scary. Google AdWords Experiments are almost a godsend for anyone who's been waiting for a reliable way to test their hypotheses. They allow you to conduct those very clean tests, when you change just one or two parameters and check in real time whether this change has brought you income or, on the contrary, spoiled the situation. And you don't need more "qualitative" and "approximate" assessments - everything will be told by clear and understandable numbers in your account.
The belief that ONLY advertising sells
Returning to the very beginning, I will repeat: advertising is not the entire sales system, but only a part of it. Classic advertising does not sell anything at all - when there was only television, radio and newspapers, the question of "how to calculate the return on investment in advertising" hung around the neck of every entrepreneur like a dead weight. It did whatever it wanted: it formed awareness, created a positive image - but other tools sold the product.
Sometimes advertising is really problematic – when it doesn’t bring people or brings the wrong ones. But just as often, other parts of the sales system become the main problem. The convenience and beauty of websites, the quality of service from managers, the terms of interaction – all this requires the same constant attention and optimization as advertising. Otherwise, you can set up a great advertising campaign, but still end up without sales, because users got confused in the registration form or did not wait for a call back.