On March 3 at the emblematic palace of the Duques de Pastrana in Madrid, more than 100 agency representatives and clients gathered at the new workshop organized by Google on Smart Bidding. It was probably the last event organized by the company for a season, as Google has cancelled its upcoming international events because of the COVID-19 and has even banned its employees from traveling until further notice.
As a novelty in this type of event, we separated the attendees into two groups in order to provide better quality training according to the profile of the website: attracting leads o e-commerce. My colleague Cristina de la Peña was our representative in the recruitment group of leadswhile I went together with our friend Soledad from the web site Old Town As we expected, there were no major news or announcements. However, we did address interesting aspects for a successful implementation of Google's automatic bidding strategies.
Here are the highlights of each of the sessions:
Room 1: lead generation
During the first part of the morning, the content of the lectures focused mainly on how to improve the quality of lead obtained through our campaigns. On the other hand, Google is constantly working on improving its algorithm that allows to detect more effectively the intentionality of the users, all in order to obtain the following results more number of leads and of more quality.
They could not pass up the opportunity (and even less so in the case of leads) to emphasize the importance of the configuration of the conversions offline, The missing leg of the system for Google's algorithms to work optimally. The key to this lies in the capture of the gclid and subsequent follow-up offline through the user's e-mail address or telephone number. The idea has great potential because it allows us to feed the system with information of the highest quality. But as we suspected (and our friends at Google later confirmed this to us), the technical and legal requirements are complex and require a lot of collaboration and willingness on the part of the client.
Finally a preview of the main developments for 2019 and 2020:
- Improvement in the quantity and quality of the signals that feed the algorithm.
- Improvements in the operation of the algorithms of smart bidding (In theory, for gradual changes of more than 3 days, it is no longer necessary to make any adjustments to these changes).
- More functions enabled at MCC level.
- Improvements in the bidding simulators.
Room 2: e-commerce
Google's event also left us with a lot of news on its part of e-commerce. Among the main topics addressed during the day, he highlighted an increasingly widespread structure in the Google Ads platform. HagakureThis is how Google has coined the new formula to automate your campaigns in an efficient and simplified way. What exactly does this new structure consist of?
Well, the main objective is to structure our marketing campaigns in order to Search to enhance the Smart Bidding. As the platform increases in functionality, our campaigns gain in complexity, so management can become very tedious. To solve this problem, the Google Algorithm is constantly evolving and is now capable of analyzing millions of data in seconds.
But what does Google's algorithm need to be efficient? From this question arises the new Google Ads structure; Hagakure simplifies the campaign structure to group data and give more freedom to Google's algorithm.
When is it recommended to change the campaign structure to Hagakure? When we are bidding for the same category, brand or product in several campaigns and they only differ by one of the following criteria:
- Keyword matching: when our campaigns only differ in the type of match but we bid on the same keyword.
- Devicesif we have two campaigns bidding for the same brand and separated by PC and Mobile.
- Hearings: if we have several campaigns in the same category targeting different types of audiences (affinity, intent, remarketing...)
Thus, Hagakura tries to avoid a hyper-segmented structure that prevents the algorithm from working. and proposes to include several groups of ads in the same campaign. attacking different categories and include a group of dynamic ads (DSA) to attack those categories whose low traffic prevents the implementation of automatic strategies. In this case, we will have to work with refusals to prevent the different groups from competing with each other.
However, not all campaigns are suitable for this strategy, as it requires a minimum volume of impressions per ad group (about 3k impressions per week) to be able to use automatic bidding efficiently. Therefore, it is recommended not to limit the budget to provide information to the campaigns and to use broad and modified broad match to collect as much variety of user terms as possible.
So much for the latest news in the world of Adwords from our friends at Google. We do not want to say goodbye without congratulating the Catering Vilaplana team for their great organization and quality of the catering service, so it's nice to work even if it's an intense day ;)!
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