On-demand webinar: Tips, tricks and pitfalls in the correct use of Google GMP SA360

Annabella Pscherer: Welcome to today's diva-e webinar: Tips, tricks and pitfalls in the proper use of Google GMP SA360. Today our experts will show you how to achieve more performance from your own search campaigns through the targeted use of billing and inventory management. My name is Annabella Pscherer and I am part of the diva-e marketing team and your moderator for the webinar today. I'd now like to hand over to our experts and wish you lots of fun and exciting insights during the webinar.

Frank Rauchfuß: Thank you very much, Annabella, for the introduction. And welcome to our webinar. As already mentioned, we would like to give insights on Google GMP SA360 accordingly there. We would start with an introduction of diva-e and dq&a, will then accordingly go to Case Studies, Insights, as just mentioned. And finally, we will be available for Q and A. If there are any questions in the meantime, there we have the opportunity on the right to collect them in the chat. Annabella will take care of that. And we look forward to a great webinar with you, thank you very much for participating and exciting content. We may briefly introduce ourselves and starting with our speaker, Pasun.

Pasun Zarif: That's right, Pasun Zarif, Senior Client Success Manager at diva-e and I'm basically the project manager or operational project manager for all of our clients' GMP projects.

Zino Toth: Yes, hello from Munich. Name is Zino Toth, I'm a GMP Tech Consultant at dq&a, been with us for a year and a half, been in the industry for over eight years and I'm responsible here, yes, for GMP, for GMP Tech and focusing on SA360.

Peter Gamelkoorn: Hello from Berlin, for my part Peter Gamelkoorn Commercial Director for the Northern and Central European market of dq&a and, yes, welcome you from Berlin, as I said.

Frank Rauchfuß: Also from my side also a warm greeting. Frank Rauchfuß, Managing Director, CEO of diva-e-Product and responsible for all the performance marketing tools. If we take a quick look at diva-e, that's 14 locations that we have, over 800 digital experts that ultimately deal around platforms, commerce platforms, performance marketing, data-driven strategies all the way to operations and also set up there. And actually, we are market leader for data-driven business as well as a strong marketing tech expertise that we bring here. With a strong footprint in the SIA space, SEO space, MarTech solutions, but also Amazon solutions that we offer. With just under 80 million in revenue in 2019, speaking last year. And so we are actually the leading number one e-commerce partner and transactional experience partner that we see in the German market. When we look at the performance marketing disciplines, because that's a broad spectrum of what we offer in the advertising space. And that's agency performance on the one hand, but also MarTech expertise. Starting in the, yes, leading area of SEO with Advertising Unit, which is part of the diva-e group, SEO consulting, corresponding display area on the way, continuing via newsletter area and just also a strong expertise in the SEA area. So we actually have a comprehensive view of the customer here, a strong understanding of how traffic goes to e-commerce portals or portals in general, what the customer journey looks like in that respect and how we accompany that on the consulting side.

Peter Gamelkoorn: Thank you, Frank, for the invitation to do this webinar with you. Very briefly on dq&a, we are here as a partner of diva, as a, yes, extension, as we like to explain of the team. Neither-, whether that's with. An agency is or with direct customers, we see ourselves not as a supplier of in this case Google licenses or, yes, services, but really as a partner that comes in when the needs for certain services or products is there as a certified partner of Google. To this end, we ourselves also build tools that are built between the cloud and the GMP platform Google, yes, to let just the various tools play well for him and, yes, easy to use for the people who ultimately have to work with it there. We have the have the six pillars here as a base and are halt-, go ahead, Pasun, represented all over the world actually as actually four worldwide certified sales partners that there are from Google. We are not exclusive with Google, but we already have a very big reference because that is simply the best on the market and in this context we are also present here now. Next Slide. Here's a couple of our customers where we're very proud to be working with them. Speaks for itself, I think, especially for diva-e. Next.

Frank Rauchfuß: And there's ultimately why working together with me, once again illustrated that we bring a strong and market leading SEA and SEO expertise, combine over 15 years of AdTech know-how with a large number of performance marketers and project managers, have very satisfied customers. And have found with dq&a a partner and a partnership, a very close one connecting us, which ultimately, yes, gives a size, a dimension, Google's EMEA partner and in that the largest, which ultimately provide insights for us, but also a technology and an expertise, so that you address and connect the customer side with technology side together very strongly and can achieve a maximum perfect customer experience and performance marketing results. That's actually what we say is unique in how we present ourselves in the market. And of course, we love our customers. And so let's go to customer cases in a moment. And that's where I would hand over to Zino accordingly.

Zino Toth: Great. Thank you very much, Frank, for that and also thank you very much, Peter. Now before we look at specific cases, we'll do a little refresher for those who are already using SA360. But also for those who don't use it yet, we will clarify a few basic questions and above all: What can the tool actually do? First of all always the question:

Of course, you can think about this, it always has a lot to do with use cases. You can consider, for example, if you have several thousand keywords distributed across various accounts and you adapt these changes manually, such as adjusting the bids, changing ads or simply pausing and activating campaigns at certain times, then this ties up a huge amount of resources and, of course, time. If you multiply this across several search engines, then it is not particularly efficient, as you can imagine. With a search engine management platform such as SA360, you can automate these processes. But it can also significantly increase performance. And SA360 is based on three elementary features. One is, for example, the automation of the entire campaign management. Setup optimization and the management itself can be automated at scale. Automated bidding strategies, with or without budget limits, depending on what suits your company best. And not just blowing the budget out into the blue and, finally, comprehensive reporting options. Either across several search engines, but also across search engines and based on the goals that are of course really important for the company. Next. It is important to understand that SA360 is not a replacement for Google Ads or Bing Ads or other search engines. It simply expands the possibilities and gets more out of the search channel. SA360, which is a Google product, naturally offers the best support for Google Ads itself, but can also be used for Microsoft Ads, formerly Bing Ads or Yahoo campaigns and can also manage these.

In addition, SA360 can also duplicate conversion data between search engines. But also in relation to social networks such as Facebook and Twitter. At the end of the day, this provides the best overview of all PPC measures. SA360 also has native integration with the entire Google Marketing Platform, GMP for short, which includes DV360, Data Studio and Google Analytics. But we'll come back to this later. Next. Everyone in the audience is probably already using Google Ads and may already be using bidding strategies and NCC structures within Google Ads. So you ask yourself the question, okay, what added value does SA360 provide without looking at the features? As I said, we'll take a detailed look at a use case and also look at a few pitfalls and a few tips and tricks. But let's start by saying roughly what are the core qualifications between the tools? Google Ads, for example, can only manage and report Google Ads.

SA360, as already mentioned, can do this for several search engines and social networks. If you want to make cross-account keyword adjustments, for example negative keywords, this works perfectly in Google Ads NCC. But in SA360, for example, you can also label these keywords across accounts, which simplifies reporting. You can look directly at how the conversions are working, especially for all generic search terms, without having to log in between accounts. But it's not just the customization, the bidding strategies can also be created and used in the account, i.e. across accounts and search engines, and optimized for one or more of your own business goals. If you imagine, for example, that you have measured 200 conversions in Search and 50 conversions in Facebook. However, the CAM system only shows a total of 200 conversions. However, the sum of both channels is 250. So, who is telling the truth? Is it Facebook and Google or is it the CAM system? Of course, Google Ads cannot look at the conversions from Facebook. But Facebook may have been involved in the funnel, in the user journey. SA360 uses channel conversion attribution by means of deduplication and can determine exactly where this conversion took place. There are also ad variations in Google Ads, such as Dynamic Search Ads. All you have to do here is select a suitable landing page and create a few descriptions. The rest, the keywords and ads are created automatically by the system. But do you still have any control here? Not so much with Google Ads. With SA360, however, you have the option of automating the entire process from the campaign to the keyword and sidelinks with full control. And this is exactly where I hand over to Pasun, who now focuses on automated campaigns and ad creation in more detail.

Pasun Zarif: Thank you. So, in my part, it's actually about one of these elementary features, or areas. In this case, it's SA360 Inventory Management. So. But before we actually go deeper into our customer case, we should perhaps ask ourselves fundamentally, what are the general challenges for which SA360 Inventory Management offers a solution? Well, the classic challenges are, or rather we have noticed from our customers, that a typical account manager invests far too much manual time in managing keywords, creating new ads, for example with regard to new ad formats, when Responsive Search Ads is rolled out, for example, that all campaigns are then basically migrated to Responsive Search Ads. An account manager basically invests a lot of time in this. A lot of manual time. This actually needs to be automated. This is typically one of the challenges for which Inventory Management offers an automated solution. Basically, you have your own inventory feed, which can either be retail-related or non-retail-related. Basically, you can completely automate the entire process from campaign creation, ad group creation to ads. Another challenge, for example, which is classic in the e-commerce sector, is that you very often advertise items that are basically out of stock. Here, for example, it is important to ensure that the ad copies, or the ads that are displayed via Google, also have a certain relevance to the product detail page. This is rarely the case. This is another challenge that can be completely automated with inventory management. Last but not least, or in a more general sense, the challenge for the classic SEA account manager is that there are actually a lot of manual, recurring processes that need to be automated. Especially with regard to the creation of Search Ads campaigns. Here, too, the inventory management of SA360 offers the opportunity to work with rules, formulas and labels, which Zino has already discussed. Perhaps one more brief point, especially with regard to formulas. For example, it is perhaps important to have a certain knowledge of SQL. Like this.

Well, inventory management in the SA360 platform actually allows you to define the attributes on the basis of an inventory feed, which you can then use to automate campaign naming, ad group naming, the keyword set, and even ad texts. So. You can use the inventory feed in that case to then create completely new campaign ad groups, keywords, sidelinks in bulk from that. Like this. Furthermore, and this is actually the core expertise of SA360 Inventory Management, is that you actually keep this campaign ad group of keywords up to date. Meaning, every time the inventory feed is updated, every time the attributes or the product information in the inventory feed is automated, you can then automate the campaigns, the ad groups, the keywords, all the way to the ad text based on rules. So that in this case, for example, you manage to maintain a fairly high quality score and, of course, do not generate any wastage. So. What are typical inventory scenarios?, Yes, or what is inventory management suitable for? Firstly, as I mentioned earlier, it allows you to create either very generic to product specific keywords within the ad groups completely automated as in bulk. That would be one of those scenarios.

The other is that you can keep the prices of the products up to date at any time within the ad copies, for example. Of course, this ensures that the bounce rate is kept fairly low and that wastage can be avoided. And last but not least, it has to be said that this also makes it possible, especially when it comes to keeping the availability of products up to date, to provide a certain automatism in this regard, so that you no longer have to advertise out-of-stock products, for example. Or rather, in this area, ad groups or ad copies are paused. So. In short, what is Inventory Management? With Inventory Management you have the possibility to automate the complete campaign creation up to the campaign management based on a feed that my SA360 provides. That's kind of the first thing. Why do you do that? On the one hand, it's done to avoid wastage. So that you can run performance-oriented campaigns. On the other hand, to keep the quality score relatively high, especially for search ads. This results in, for example, fairly high click rates, a fairly low average CPC and, at the end of the day, a fairly high ROAS. It works quite simply: Either you link a non-retail feed or your own feed via the Merchant Center feed with SA360, whereby you can then define the complete campaign structure using templates, for example, and then define the automated generation of ad copies using the Ad Builder. The main benefits or the main advantages of this is that you can actually keep your product and campaign information up to date at all times. On the other hand, you can make large changes that you would make manually by bulk actually- where you basically spend a lot of time, these are basically processes that you can automate relatively quickly. And last but not least, of course, you can keep your inventory actually always up to date those are so the 3 keybenefits.

Apart from that, like for example, our customers use it that they actually develop a complete cross-product strategy based on the inventory feed and SA360, for example, which they then completely automate across all campaigns. So. To illustrate it, we actually also brought a customer case. The customer that we're talking about here is actually an e-commerce customer, specializing in running shoes and running equipment. This customer generates an average of six million euros in after-tax revenue. The biggest challenge that the customer has is that they actually only have two account managers. And those two account managers actually have to manage 1.5 million Ads Spent throughout the year. Which is actually quite difficult, because we also have some agencies, for example, that manage. And they all have four to five key headcounts on one customer alone. That means that with two, you would actually-, and with the whole manual process, you are actually completely downgraded. And the goal of the customer is actually to generate as much revenue as possible while keeping the costs low. So, that's actually how it is with any e-commerce customer. So. What's the status quo of this customer that we've been servicing? Status quo is that over the years, actually the campaigns, ad books and keywords, that those have actually increased into insignificance, yes. This means that the entire account structure has become so confusing that you can't get very far with purely manual effort. The other challenge is in this case the status quo is that basically with this customer the classic search ads campaign did not perform as well as shopping ads, yes. That's normal. In most cases, Search Ads campaigns don't perform as well as Shopping Ads. But in this particular case, it was the case that they performed significantly worse.

And, last but not least, status quo number three was that basically everything was maintained manually. The challenge that came from that was that basically you were actually putting way too much manual effort into keeping the campaigns up to date. So. So, basically, the result of that was that the performance was not there. So, and so good last, the biggest, or the biggest pain point of the customer was that the customer did not manage to keep the product relevant information within the Search Ads campaigns up to date. Those are actually also the classic painpoints of a typical e-commercer that's trying to actually get more performance. So. The way we approached the whole thing, or rather the way we basically tried to solve all these challenges, was, on the one hand, that we naturally tried to automate all the processes that are currently operated manually via the inventory feed and via SA360. We basically did the following: We linked the customer's merchant center feed with SA360. Based on this, we then created various templates that basically automated all processes. And last but not least, we worked with the Ad Builder function to keep the most important product attributes, such as price and availability, up to date within the ad texts. This alone has ensured that all manual effort in campaign maintenance and creation is actually minimized. Thus. As a result, we saw that these processes would enable us to minimize the entire manual process, or rather the work. So, we then basically worked with rules and formulas, basically also, for example, to automate the keyword set, or the whole sidelinks and ad extensions, for example.

And last but not least, you also have to make sure that the whole thing, that the, so to speak, the campaign maintenance, or the campaign information at ad group display and keyword level is up to date. So, we then also looked that we create an inventory plan that regularly fetches the inventory feed and based on the new information within the inventory feed then also keeps the campaign ad groups and keywords up to date. The results were basically that we actually minimized 70 percent of the complete manual effort for this client. That means that the customer, or in this case our typical account managers, who we looked after, basically had more time to take care of strategic issues. The other thing, of course, from Google's point of view, was that we significantly improved the quality score. Actually by 55 percent compared to the previous period. As a result, we also managed to reduce the average EPC by 35 percent. In other words, the costs, which of course meant that we generated 40 percent more revenue than in the previous period. And at the same time we have minimized 25 percent of the ad spend. Yes, I'll pass the floor to Zino.

Zino Toth: Great. Thank you very much. Thank you very much for that as well, because now we know exactly, okay, how can we now completely automate the creation of our campaigns and keywords and everything.

In the bidding context, the most common challenges from our customers are that they need an extremely large amount of time to manage their campaigns or bids manually. Of course, this often has the side effect of having to work outside of working hours, which I can tell you a thing or two about myself. The comment: "We are overdrawing our planned budget in order to achieve the goals" is above all an unpleasant comment not only to the superior. It can also be detrimental to the company in the long run, as you may not have the annual budget available at Christmas time, leaving it missing at the end of the year. This applies to on going campaigns with fixed monthly budgets, but also to individual runtime campaigns. Of course, this also goes in the other direction, that you simply do not manage to invest the available budget. And then here, if necessary, the required growth is also missing. And finally, the last comment, especially now, in times to Corona only too topical: We are too slow to react to market adjustments, respectively opportunities. With all these challenges, SA360 and the so-called Auction Time Bidding can be used to solve these challenges. How Auction Time Biddung works concretely, we look at immediately. And the budget question, hold on, one back please, the budget question can be solved in SA360 with so-called Budget Bid Strategies. This is where a budget is set for a certain period of time. And SA360, prioritizing ROAS or CPA or short targets, tries to invest this budget without overspent. And finally, the missing opportunities, this is where Auction Time Bidding can also help or alternatively the adaptive settings based on location, device and target groups. But now let's take a look at what Auction Time Bidding actually is. Next. Auction Time Bidding combines the specially defined SA360 conversion goals with the agility of Google Ads Smart Bidding and its Machine Learnings. First, you define the right conversion goals for your company. If necessary, even apart from pure sales or the individual funnel steps, such as registration for newsletters. Then these goals are shared with Google Ads in SA360 and Smart Bidding from Google Ads also optimizes these goals.

And Auction Time Bidding has access to many signals as machine learning. The operating system, the browser, device type, applications, as well as simply the specific situation, such as the time of day, the conversion path, as well as the actual search query. These signals to search query are important because aside from keyword level matching, which generates multiple search queries, Auction Time Bidding replaces the bids on each individual search query. Including all signals. These unique and rich signals, per user, also allow Auction Time Bidding to ultimately place differentiated bids in Google Ads. With Auction Time Bidding, you not only have the opportunity to achieve optimal performance, because each search query is evaluated individually for each user. In addition, the system learns on the basis of the entire campaign portfolio, or all linked accounts. And it doesn't know? There you make an adjustment to the goals of the bidding strategy, such as the CPA target, it should become smaller because you want to invest less CPA. And the whole bid strategy has to go to the learning phase again. You can get around that with Auction Time Bidding, because it doesn't need a learning phase anymore unless the change is greater than 30 percent total at one time. If you want to change more, you simply do it in several steps. So if we now look at the different bidding strategies in comparison, where does Auction Time Bidding actually sit? We've created an overview, based on our experience, where we contrast the manual CPC bidding option versus, for example, bulk sheet change or rule change, as well as intradate bidding and auction time bidding. Each business case may have different goals, so let's just go through the bidding options briefly. If you change the bids manually, the bidding logic has to be defined exactly in advance, as well as checked regularly, or adjusted as well. The signals can be easily combined here yourself, likewise with the most diverse sources, in order to enable the best control. Automated rules are easy to set up. Once one has defined the conditions, the schedule and other options. In intraday bidding, intraday bidding is super easy to set up and maintain. The bid adjustments take place four times a day, based on the signals that have been generated previously. And likewise, these bids can only be specified at the keyword level. And bid modifiers like devices or location can be used of course. Ultimately Auction Time Bidding, as already mentioned, starts here and in addition to the simple setup, as well as the maintenance still has the advantage that the bids are carried out just for each individual auction. And additional signals, in total there are well over 100, are used for this. Next. So, in summary, keyword bids cannot be granular enough these days to make the Search channel successful.

Keyword bidding contests are of course extensively won, but also lost, in this regard. Auction Time Bidding allows the user to drive out bids at the action level, or search query level. Every time a Google Ads auction runs, even before current impressions, the bid is evaluated and is already fixed. This, in turn, makes it possible to give each auction an individual value based on the user, device, time, search query, et cetera. And as mentioned earlier, over 100 additional signals are made available for Auction Time Bidding. Next. If we now look at an example of a success story, we have the following case: the customer is an e-commerce online store, specialized in motocross equipment and accessories. The annual turnover is around 80 million euros. So accordingly, you can already imagine, it has a huge account. And the challenge was that the company was faced with an incredible amount of diverse search accounts, and that across 15 countries, which had to be managed. In addition, of course, the profit should be increased and as a side note might be quite interesting, the company had only three employees, who should devote full-time this one store to the control of the campaign. The goal was to control the profit via Search and Shopping campaigns at the same time and best of all on a constant Return on Ad Spent. Next. If we now look at the challenges in detail, to the status quo at that time, can be seen, the account structure is simply gigantic and grew over the past years and will probably still hopefully continue to do so. The incremental value between paid search and shopping simply could not be leveraged. Since the campaigns were controlled manually, respectively partly with intraday bidding. What is the point of delivering a shopping ad and a self-advertisement to the user at the same time? In case of doubt, he clicks on both, but buys only once. However, I invested my CPC twice.

How should the company deal with lower performing countries, when at the same time they are supposed to be a growth market, but provide too little data for the bidding strategy. And finally, how does the company deal with seasonalities such as Christmas, Black Friday, but also currently Corona? Next. To overcome these challenges, we advised the client to define the right conversion goals away from pure sales. For example, to assign a monetary value to the sale itself, of course, but also to the goods purchase step. With this, we were able to define the-, with this, we had enough data, especially for the developing markets, and we were able to use this information in the bidding strategy. Both values were of course also still weighted accordingly using formula columns and selected as the primary conversion target. Everything under the aspect of a data-driven kind of revolution. And also- so that the generic keyword area also has the correct meaning and can also grow there if necessary. With the use of an Auction Time Bidding bidding strategy with the conversion goals mentioned, the budget was also additionally distributed efficiently and allowed the client to effectively use the budgets in the right campaigns as well. Next. The results were quite remarkable. The budget type revolution and the bidding strategy sent 40 percent more visitors to the website. With the optimal distribution of bids at search query level, then the average CPC dropped includes 15 percent. At the same time, however, the impression share doubled for all generic keywords.

Finally, the most important KPI: profit increased by 75 percent, in addition, although it was not the main goal at all, the Return on Ad Spent was almost doubled. Next. Now we have talked a lot about creation and also about bidding strategies. But how does it actually look in reporting? Here we get a lot of requests, we don't have insights into the metrics that are important to us. For example, what happens to contracts closed offline through our sales managers when we can only generate the lead online? We have duplicates in our conversions. So, where is the sale really coming from? As mentioned at the beginning, a representation between search and social, they have 250 conversion, but my CAM system only shows 200 conversion. Also, what is the contribution of which channel for that conversion in a dynamic attribution environment? And of course, we want to immediately see the trends in our data when we have seasonality like Black Friday. By means of data integration, i.e. the upload of offline conversion data with the associated Google Click ID, GClick for short, contracts concluded by sales managers can be transferred back into the system in SA360 in order to use them again for our auction time bidding. In addition, this or other data can also be weighted using formula columns. For example, the lead that is closed online has a weighting of ten percent. The actual sale that takes place offline, 90 percent. Or, of course, more complex if there are several steps in between. All these values can be used for reporting, but also for the bidding strategy itself. The customer live time value can also be mapped in SA360. And here, too, the bidding strategy can ultimately be aligned with it. Using the social integration in SA360, Facebook or Twitter data, for example, can also be loaded into SA360 to deduplicate the conversion, but also to find out what share each channel carries for itself. A nice side effect here is also that you can additionally remarket users between search and social, all under the context of GDP. And by means of the quasi real-time data freshness and the most important characteristics in SA360, which for me are the most important characteristics in SA360, available and retrievable in real time. So trends can be read immediately even at peak times, like Black Friday at ten in the morning. Our understanding of value within the-, of digital marketing is tech based. Google marketing platform techs, tech solutions are flatlights, which provide the ability to measure order IDs, sales, as well as other variables. But here there can be gaps, or missing data, as the case may be. The missing data happens due to the nature of the techs, as well as the limitation. For example, nowadays such techs are usually only fired on websites themselves, and this is where offline data has its use. These don't have to be offline across the board, they can also come from your own CAM, for example. The Conversion KPI SA360 allows you to transfer this offline data back into the system. Or also via upload. This can also be automated. And as mentioned before, the Google Click ID must be used for this so that the data is merged. With this data, among other things, the branch sales, the live time value, cancellations, profits, or even specially attributed data can then be transferred back into the system. This data can then ultimately be used for reporting, but also for bidding strategy. Next. Now we talk a lot about data integration. And this works not only within Search, but also across the entire Google Marketing Platform. By making SA360 a part of the Google Marketing Platform, native connections, such as to Datastudio for reporting purposes or Google Analytics 360 or DB360 Audience Sharing are possible without the need for extra developers to write an API for this. Data flows automatically between the tools. Of course, this also allows key audiences to be shared between platforms, all under the context of GDP. Next.

But data integration within the Google world also goes a bit further. If you've been paying attention, you'll have noticed that we've been talking a lot about CAM data and Dataware. By connecting the Google Marketing Platform to Google Cloud, there are many more ways to improve performance, not just in Search. For example, specially created attribution models in Google Cloud can in turn be used to drive the bidding strategy SA360. Or automated, even if simply validated sales are transferred to the bid strategy. With Google solutions, there is no need for expensive third-party tools to display attribution or optimally distribute budgets. And with that, you can not only optimize Search efficiently, but also add value to other channels, so that your own business- to take your own business further or to navigate safely in unforeseen times. That's it from my side. I think we'll get to the questions now. Thank you very much.

Pasun Zarif: From my side as well.

Frank Rauchfuß: Thank you guys. Annabella, maybe there are questions. Otherwise, it would be the opportunity that we have in the Q and A session just Pasun and Zino to answer your questions. And maybe, Annabella, you take a look at what may have already come in there, what questions have come up. But thank you very much for now to Pasun and Zino for the presentation.