The QSR Media Dispersion: Pre, Mid & Post Pandemic – By the Numbers
Boost
1. Marketable Moments
Drive Creative Change
Marketable Moments:
Crafting Successful Creative
Rob Lenderman
Co-Founder & COO, Boost Media
2.
3. Ad A Ad B
How Do We Manage OurAds?
Which one is better?
Wedding Rings
Wear Customized Jewelry on Your
Wedding Day. Buy Beautiful Rings.
www.brandname.com/rings
Wedding Rings
Beautiful Women's Wedding Rings.
You Pick Stones & Metal.
www.brandname.com/rings
A B
CTR
CONV
CPI
CPA
ROI
4. We must do betterWe need to engage peopleWe need to connect in the momentMarketable Moments
27. Today’sApproach Falls Short
Most Marketers Are…
• Opening up Excel and editing
ad creative row by row
• Writing and testing only a tiny
fraction of their paid search
account
• Using Templates for the vast
majority of their ads
Missing Out On
• Diversity and scalability of ad
creation
• Understanding and executing
the best testing strategies
• Targeted ads that resonate with
your audience and stand out
from the crowd
28. Writing GreatAds at Scale
Extensive
• Coverage
• Cost of Input
• Grind Out Local Maximums
• 90% KWs/10% of Profit
• Value Maximization
• Value of Output
• Discover Global Maximums
• 90% of Profit/10% of KWs
Intensive
30. WhichAd Performed Better?
ON
E
TW
O
vs
AD TWO
47%
better
#CreativeMatters
Prada Shoes at Retail Brand
Free Shipping & Returns! Shop
Prada at Retail Brand.
www.retailbrand.com
Retail Brand Prada Shoes
Shoes That Look & Feel Fabulous
Shop Prada At Retail Brand Today!
www.retailbrand.com
32. TheAd Creation Process
40
Execute at scaleHow to Write
Understand
triggers
When to Write
How to
Manage
Creative
Marketplace
SaaS
platform
+
33. Get smarter
TheAd Creation Process
41
How to
Manage
Execute at scaleHow to Write
Understand
triggers
When to Write
Creative
Marketplace
SaaS
platform
+
34. ActiveAd Management Must Be
Ongoing
42
Understand
triggers
When to Write
How to Write
How to
Manage
Creative
Marketplace
SaaS
platform
+
36. Boost Media
150 Columbus Ave.
San Francisco, CA 94133
BoostMedia.com
1.800.777.9415
Thank You!
Rob Lenderman
rob.lenderman@boostmedia.com
@boostctr
Editor's Notes
Good morning to all of my fellow SIS attendees and thanks to our generous hosts this morning ! I am Rob Lenderman, co-founder and COO of Boost Media. I thought we’d kick thing off this morning by talking about how search marketing is undergoing change and a shift from us just worrying about keywords and bidding, to us seeing the bigger picture of search as a marketing channel which must combine keyword, bid and creative to connect with consumers at the moment of engagement. As it’s early and I know eveyone had lots of fun at the opening reception last night I thought I’d start off with a short video to show you what I’m talking about.
I’m first going to take you on a customer journey with a friend of mine. This is Abe and his girlfriend Nicole. I’ve know the two of them for many years and they are both lovely people. Nicole is so lovely in fact, that Abe has just come to the conclusion that they should get married.
Now, I am a single guy, but I’ve reached that age when many of my friends and co-workers are pondering one of the bigger decisions in life.
I frankly, don’t know the first thing about engagement rings or diamonds. A good friend of mine is going through this process and one of the first things he did in trying to find a ring for his soon to be finance was to go to a search engine to being to learn.
When Abe types diamond rings into a SERP, this is what he sees. I’m sure this is a very familiar page to most of you in the audience who spend countless hours staring at search engine results pages.
But let’s begin to break it down a bit.
What is on this page? What types of copy and call to actions are here to help my friend make one of the biggest mistakes, I mean decisions in his life?
Real-time example – messaging is gibberish
It’s at the front end of $60B
Can you make a difference with only 90 characters
If you parse it all down to the basic of messaging it’s impossible to tell if the marketers are selling him a ring, or a blender.
This is the crux of the problem for search engine marketing creative. We’ve been stuck with approaches to creative which leaves everything looking pretty much the same and the consumer all to readily tuning out what makes us better than our competition.
One of the most emotional and important moments of Abe’s life has been reduced to Free Shipping and a 30 day money back guarantee.
This is not a good moment for Abe.
This is not telling Abe why one retailers is better than another.
Ad A Ad B
ctr .36 .37
conv .02 .015
cpi .007 .005
cpa 1534 583
roi 169 49
Now I know no one in this room wants to disappoint Abe and Nicole. So lets start off with a little quiz.
I bet most of you in this room think you know what a good ad looks like. What an ad that can beat out another would be.
So let’s see how you do with a show of hands. How many of you think ad A is better? How many of you think ad B is better?
Ok so it looks like around a 60:40 split in favor of Ad ??
Now what you didn’t know was that it was a trick question. What I didn’t tell you was the metric of success upon which to judge the two ads.
As you see in how you voted as a crowd, a great ad vs an ok ad is not obvious. An ad which really engages with a consumer like Abe vs one which just disappears into the background of the search results page doesn't just obviously look different.
And each of you likely has a different metric of success depending upon the current needs of your business. And those success metrics will change over time as your business requirements change.
This is why search creative is hard to do well at scale. It’s hard to know what’s going to engage a consumer like Abe and it’s hard to keep up with the changes in our business needs as well as the changes in the market conditions and even consumer preferences.
I’m sure for many of you that story of Abe is a very relatable one.
You know you are likely losing a lot of opportunities to engage with your customers because your ad creative fails to stand out from the crowd
And it’s likely you get how one of the most contextually aware marketing channels, one which knows where you are, what device you are searching from, and exactly what you are looking for, has creative which at best today can parrot back the exact words a consumer typed in, rather than creating a message which is relevant to the context and needs of that individual.
We need to better connect with consumers – they demand it – we need to move our marketing from Mad Libs to great creative at scale which connects with consumers in the moment. These are what we call marketable moments and are where we are failing our customers.
And these marketing moments are unbounded. They can happen at any time across any channel. Our customers themselves now define when and how these moments appear.
With the explosion of mobile engagement, consumers today are constantly connected, living their lives seamlessly transitioning between physical and digital worlds
For marketers this has opened up new opportunities to connect but new challenges in connecting.
Our customers have opened up nearly infinite potential for engagement with our businesses, but at the same time have raised a very high bar for what a beneficial engagement looks like. They are demanding new levels of relevance and contextual awareness, such that our old marketing approaches are falling short and not loving up to their expectations.
Our challenge is to make these connections matter by making them relevant and engaging
We are failing our customers in how we approach creative development and testing to deliver to these marketable moments.
Creative which is not optimized for the moment of engagement leaves customers feeling like we are not listening, not understanding their needs, and not the right person to do business with.
I’d imaging each of you has experienced this yourself as you engage with brands and businesses. Having messaging which isnt relevant to what I am searching for is one of the most frustrating experiences online.
As I mentioned earlier, there are nearly unlimited marketing moments. In order to begin to frame up a new approach to improving our marketing messaging it’s important to understand what forces are driving change into these moments.
The need for a new creative is created in one of three areas of change.
Changes within our businesses, such as resetting our goals or changes to our product catalogue
Changes in our user behavior. Consumers as you know are under constant change. Trends change from day to day and across generations, people’s needs and desires are constantly evolving.
And lastly, the competitive landscape is changing. Our jobs would be so much easier if our competitors would just hold still, but this is not reality and how they act and react changes how we message.
Business
Goals
Product Inventory
Seasonal Cycles
Competition
New entrants
Creative changes
Copying your strategy
Targeting your keywords
User Behavior
Changes in attitudes or language usage
Ad Fatigue
New interests
Seasonality
So, how do we start to tackle this problem? How do we start to go after these nearly limitless marketing moments with better and more engaging creative.
In order to tackle this huge opportunity for improvement, I like to encourage you all to begin to break the problem down into identifying the various moments where you should be thinking about building a new marketing creative.
Ask yourself the question, “I should be changing my creative any time I see one of a variety of triggering events.”
Competition changes.
And not only does competition change, but I’m sure everyone in this audience has had the experience of a close competitor copying your best and most productive ad creatives.
Creative development and testing is a constant footrace. Just as you have something which is working well for you, someone will come along, copy it, and eliminate any advantage you were gaining from standing out on the search results page.
And not only does your competition change, but your products and offerings are under a constant state of change.
Be it for seasonal reasons or introducing or retiring products from your catalogue, you are constantly having to keep up with changes in how you promote or even describe your products.
Freshness is key, but so is relevancy.
Your customers are living in a world where their context constantly changes. As marketers we struggle to keep up with these changes and maintain creatives which are contextually correct for a given engagement.
From understanding the differences between New York and San Francisco, to what is the correct creative for when it’s snowing versus sunny outside. Adapting to context at scale is a huge challenge for most marketers.
Even take the most basic of contexts – the device your customer is choosing to reach you on. Most marketers today have yet to manage to fully adapt the creatives developed to address a desktop browser to the nuances of a person engaging on a mobile device.
And it continues to get more complicated. Language itself evolves more rapidly today than ever. New words are introduced into our lexicon and can take off overnight.
The memeification of our world creates new challenges for marketers trying to stay relevant and current with how people are communicating.
It used to be years before Groovy made it’s way throughout society, now, new words explode across social networks and take root almost overnight.
I mentioned your existing competitors copying your creatives, but what about new emerging competitors?
The speed of business has dramatically increased. Each of us can and does see new competitors spring up at any moment to challenge our solutions.
We must be nimble enough to react to these new entrants and have creative which continues to address our unique benefits even when new competitors are trying to change the conversation
And just as new competitor emerge, new trends emerge
Consumers see new things, new shiny objects which attract their attention. As marketers we have to stay on top of the trends and react to them.
We need to reframe the conversation in our own terms so we stay relevant and current with the trends.
And our own promotions change
From seasonal promotions to those last minute specials which inevitably pop up, we need to adapt and adjust our creatives across last swaths of our search accounts to stay current.
These can be massive and recurring changes, or last minute reactions to some business input which you need to address.
And lastly, our good friends at the platforms change
Both Google and Microsoft are doing a great job of improving their platforms to make for better experiences for consumer and marketer alike
From opening up new channels like mobile, to adding new features like remarketing, these new options and opportunities for engagement require thinking of our creatives and how we need to adjust them to stay relevant.
So now you get a sense of a variety of triggering events of changes when you should think about developing a new creative.
I think for many people I talk to this is a different way of thinking about search creative. Most folks, start with the keyword and try to build from there. Instead of trying to understand the intent or context of the query.
And I’d bet that the vast majority of you are using the same tools and same approaches to develop your creative, this is why all of your search ads end up looking pretty much the same and the consumer can’t differentiate other than perhaps by position on the page.
We need better ads, we need to stand out from the noise.
So how do you get started? How do you build these great creatives I’ve spoken to? How do you do this not across 10s of keywords – what you are likely focused on today – but across your entire search campaign.
We for starters the approach of today is broken.
Currently:
Marketers are managing million dollar paid search campaigns with an Excel Document. They are literally clicking into an excel document that is 10,000 rows big and editing ad creative in line…one by one.
Due to the inability to scale with excel, this results in only a tiny fraction of creative optimization being performed.
An alternative to Excel would be using DKI (Dynamic Keyword Insertion) or Templated ads. However there is a fundamental problem with both of these methods:
DKI: With DKI, you run the risk of being “off brand” and pushing out ad creative that can potentially be dangerous to your brand.
Templated Ads: With templated ads, you run the risk of pushing out state ad creative. Imagine seeing the same ad over and over again. This ad didn’t work the first time…so why would it work the second time, and the third, and the fourth. Stale ads that don’t increase conversion eat up your ad spend.
Google Makes 50% from couple thousand advertisers, has 3 million
Only 15% of searches are monteizesd
90% of spend from 10% of ad groups
95% of revenue from 5% of ad groups
Ideally you want both working together to create and then optimize your messaging
Extensive
Best solved by Algos.
10% of value
Intensive
3-5 geeks spending 1hr a month
No historical knowledge, many cases not your target demographic
90% of value
Since the first one was so much fun, let’s do it again. And this time we will actually declare a winner.
OK by show of hands which ad do you think had the higher click through rate?
All those for Ad #1?
All those for Ad #2?
OK looks like roughly a 60:40 split again.
The punchline here was that Ad two generated a 47% high click through rate than Ad 1.
On the surface it may be very hard to tell which one is better, but what we actually see are significant differences in performance. This is why you have to scale up creative testing. This is why you have to move cretive testing from a one time event across a small portion of your campaigns, to a regular part of managing your entire search efforts.
Think of it like you do bid management. You don’t guess at how to bid on a keyword. You don’t just bid once and then think that it’s good enough. You constantly manage your bids and you need to constantly manage your creative development and optimization.
We need to make a radical shift away from the approaches which leave all ads looking the same. It’s impossible to sty out in the crowd and in these cases you lose your ability to properly promote what’s unique and special about your products or services.
And this not only matters for better customer satisfaction and engagement, but it delivers real business results.
Customers of ours who focus on improving their ad creatives see on average a 45% improvement in their business metrics.
The process for developing better ads has three key components.
First, you need to know when to write. Much of how you answer when is the triggers I walked you through earlier. But frankly for most of you I’m guess when is now. We find most of the search marketers we work with have not touched the vast majority of their ad creatives other than perhaps the branded terms or the few terms which drive much of their volume.
Once you know when, you need to know how.
For us the answer of how, combines the best of man and machine. Man is great at crafting emotionally engaging materials which can stand out and highlight the benefits of your products or services.
Machines are best at lowering the costs of creative development in the places where you cannot aford to apply humans. This of this as taking the learning's from great creatives in the head of your campaigns and distributing those to the tail.
Lastly we have how to manage. This means as marketers you need new solutions for reporting on the creative layer. New ways to look at what is driving the results you are after.
And this is a never ending process. It’s not just a housekeeping chore you try to get through on a semi regular basis, it must be core to how you operate.
You should be constantly developing, testing, and learning from your ad creatives to make them better and make your campaigns better.
The process for developing better ads has three key components.
First, you need to know when to write. Much of how you answer when is the triggers I walked you through earlier. But frankly for most of you I’m guess when is now. We find most of the search marketers we work with have not touched the vast majority of their ad creatives other than perhaps the branded terms or the few terms which drive much of their volume.
Marketing is undergoing a very exciting time of change. As we shift into a world of more competition, more demanding consumers and more rapid change in our own businesses, we need to stay focused on what will make the biggest differences to our own success.
Towards that it’s critical to understand that marketing moments are the best way to understand what matters in your marketing.
Becoming more contextual within your customer interactions matters to drive better results.
And creatives, that last mile between you and your customers truly matters. Scaling great creatives across your entire search accounts and keeping those creatives up to date, is the best way to maximize your return on investment.
It is no longer ok to have Testing and optimizing ad creatives as a nice to have in your marketing approach. These much be central to your day to day activities to ensure you are always maximizing each of your critical marketing moment.
