Last week, we asked a select group of marketing agencies to comment on the Google AdWords Campaign update and how they forsaw it affecting the industry.
Here, Neil Brown, Head of Search and Conversion at Comms and Marketing Agency, Cogent Elliott shares his views on the changes.
Who it will affect?
As we see it, It’s small and medium businesses (SMBs) and marketing agencies that these changes will affect most, as many are already struggling with an underlying issue that will likely be exacerbated - namely that the time and skill needed to understand what the AdWord data they have actually means and then working out how to respond appropriately, is already proving prohibitive to the running of effective activity. This is a massive headache for marketing agencies and teams, even before working out whether bid adjustments for location, time and mobile make any difference to their conversion/costs!
The heart of the problem
For the many in-house AdWord users who do the job part-time as part of a bigger role, reading that “when you stack bid adjustments, remember to take into account the multiplicative effect of these adjustments on your bids” is bordering on gibberish OR more realistically something they’d love to look at and understand - but only when they have a bit more time from the day to day grind. Google seems to have overlooked/downplayed in its guides to the changes, that many AdWord users don’t offer e-commerce on their sites (rather the offer is ‘closed’ indirectly offline) and being able to work out what keywords are leading to that ‘conversion’ is often a herculean task in itself - never mind working out if people from Huddersfield convert better than people from Hartlepool (and indeed if they convert better on an evening from their tablet, than from a desktop at lunchtime).
There is a real danger that many AdWord users will experiment with the new features based solely on gut-feeling and a desire to try them out – i.e. without actually knowing what their existing data tells them or being able to properly measure what effect the changes are actually having.
That’s not so say that for many brands who have invested in the time/resource needed to be able to properly understand the data (either in-house or by working in partnership with an agency such as Cogent) will not be able to use these new features! More that for many SMBs this change is just one more change they will have to ‘deal’ with, rather than a change they have been shouting for and are waiting to embrace. These ‘enhanced’ campaigns will potentially just be met with “how do I make sure what I was doing before is happening now” i.e. “how do I maintain the status-quo?”
How to make the most of it
Where this change will work best is for those brands that ‘close’ online, those that have invested in tagging their site appropriately, and those who are all over their data and realise the value of the analyse/ tweak/review cycle. For many brands that can only happen through the expertise offered by an agency team and these changes will likely reinforce that view for many organisations.
