Google and Facebook Ads Impacted by iOS 14 updates

Apple is rolling out App Tracking Transparency (ATT) policy that will require developers ask permissions before apps can user their unique Identifier for Advertisers (IDFA) for third party ad tracking. Apple wants users aware of what data an app will track before installing, as well as gives users the choice to opt-out tracking.

Facebook Ads

To minimize the impact of any data loss, Facebook has created “Aggregated Event Measurement”, which would “help you measure campaign performance in a way that is consistent with consumers’ decisions about their data.”

Google Ads

On the other hand, Google has taken a different approach and switched to another Apple ad tracking tool: SKAdNetwork, which is considered less effective to let advertisers to track users.

Third-Party Cookie Going Away on Chrome

Google is getting rid of third-party cookies on Chrome, which has more than half of the total browser market share. Marketers should carefully monitor the situation.

The display ads network from Google or other platforms are more negatively impacted by lack of the third party cookies. Google is developing Federated Learning of Cohorts (FLoC), a “privacy-first” and “interest-based” advertising technology. With FLoC, advertisers will then target their ads to cohorts, rather than an individual user. The accuracy of targetting will be worse definitely.

On the other hand, this actually make the first-party data becomes even more valuable to advertisers. Simply put, the Google Ads campaigns like search ads and shopping ads are not impacted as they are based on first party cookies.

How to Do Local Search Ads Well?

Local Search Ads / Google Map is extremely effective to attract customers close to their store, e.g. restaurant, coffee shops, bakery.

How to do local seach ads well? The first basic requirement is to have a Google My Business account and link it to the Google Ads account through location extensions in Google Ads campaigns. This will enable the ads to show up on Google Map and local search results.

The optimization of the local search ads should focus more on

  • mobile device

  • location

If there are enough store visits Google will provide a conversion tracking of store visits. The requirement of sufficient store visits is related to privacy issue. The store visit conversion is not provided at the click level. Instead it will be provided through Google backend modeling process and thus resolve the privacy issue.

Have the store visits tracking will allow much better targeting in terms of keyword and bidding.

Google My Business and Local Search Ads

In this year of 2020 COVID-19 makes the business environment incredibly challenging. This is even more serious for small businesses that depends on the local foot traffic. Restaurant is a very typical example as indoor dining is often restricted or best open at the reduced capacity. Other small retailers have the same challenges.

As a result, there has been an acceleration of the trend of businesses moving online. Businesses take advantage of the new digital marketing tools will come out stronger than others.

Many businesses have already a Google My Business profile. This enables consumers uses Google local search including searching on Map to find the store to visit or order for a delivery. Google My Business profile can be thought of as the replacement of the traditional yellow pages of telephone numbers. It is only so much better as it shows more information of the business including direction, phone, website, pictures, and posts etc.

Small businesses should take this special pandemic period to optimize Google My Business. In addition, small businesses can advertise using paid local search ads to further increase their online existence.

For a lot of small businesses bracing for the digital marketing is not an easy task. The business owners are often too busy to focus efforts on this new task for them. SmartLens has helped small businesses moving to online marketing and achieved good successes.

The paradiam of optimizing Paid Search marketing performance?

Due to this advantage of being very well tractable over the traditional marketing marketers may not have a very critical view when looking at the paid search performance. This will certainly be a problem when the performance is not satisfactory, but it is just as important when the performance looks good.

This is because paid search marketing performance can be very volatile. Let’s focus on Google Ads specifically. There are many different areas Google Ads can be optimized, e.g. keywords, bidding, ad copy, and landing page, .

The keyword is the window through which customers find our product and company. It is critical to have a good keyword portfolio that covers the products and services. The keyword bidding optimization can improve the efficiency and click volume significantly, sometimes over 30% or more. There are many other adjustment for device, audience, location, schedule, etc.

AB testing is the most important tool for improving on ad copy and landing page performance. One ad copy can be easily 30% better than the other ad copy. Or a single change on the landing page can improve the conversion rate by 50%.

Here is the simplified paradigm of optimizing paid search marketing campaign.

  1. Understand the need of paid search marketing optimization.

  2. Build a complete coverage keyword portfolio and organize them into a good campaign and adgroup structure

  3. AB test ad copies and landing pages

  4. Keyword bidding optimization through data science