Marketers Speak Out On Google Advertising As Marketing Live Kicks Off

Google, the marketing machine, kicked off Marketing Live 2019 on Tuesday. The company plans to announce several new products and features and to highlight some of those it has released in the past year, which has seen some ups and downs.

The ad types may not work for all brands, but they did for Dell, Magazines.com and The National Pork Board.

Last fall, the National Pork Board decided to try the bidding strategy Maximize Lift to increase purchases in-store. The goal was to reach typical advertisers to drive new and existing consumers into stores to purchase pork. A few months after the switch to Maximize Lift, they estimated the bidding strategy drove $1.01 million in additional purchases. As a result, the company migrated its entire YouTube budget to Maximize Lift in early 2019.

“Operating as a commodity organization not tied to any specific product SKU or sales data, we are always trying to identify ways to quantify the success of our advertising and impact on the industry,” said a spokesperson at the National Pork Board, adding that Maximum Lift enables the company to measure how its YouTube advertising specifically is driving pork sales and to develop a more effective campaign structure.

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Advertisers use Maximize lift bidding in thousands of campaigns to increase results within their budgets. In fact eight out of 10 campaigns that used maximize lift bidding for TrueView in-stream ads drove more consideration lift per dollar than TrueView in-stream ads using cost-per-view bidding, with over 30% lower cost per lifted user.

Some marketers -- mostly those from agencies -- took to Twitter and Facebook to post about the excitement around Google Marketing Live 2019, but added a caveat that they “refuse to drink the Kool Aid.” That has become a common thread through the past decade as Google attempts to woo marketers into thinking that Google Ads produce better results than Microsoft Advertising and other search ad platforms.  

Despite its success in search and mobile, Google lags at No. 3 when it comes to display. eMarketer estimates Google will take 10.1% of the $172.08 billion global display market in 2019, putting it behind Facebook and Alibaba.

Brands have seen success from Responsive Search Ads, which are now available in all languages across all devices, in the past year. Google improved functions by adding new reporting and feedback tools. In fact the company notes advertisers that added responsive search ads to their ad groups see up to 10% more clicks.

Dell, for example, has been very successful with Responsive Search Ads, which Google launched last year. Dell and its agency MediaCom tested Responsive Search Ads in gaming.

Dell optimized the performance of these ads by updating headlines and using automated bidding. The brand used at least two expanded text ads and one responsive search ad per ad group and incorporated existing headlines and descriptions into its responsive search ads.

As a result, Dell saw a 25% increase in conversions for ad groups with a mix of expanded text ads and responsive search ads.

Magazines.com called on Rakuten Marketing to find a more efficient way to reach additional readers while improving sales.

For the 2018 holiday season, Magazines.com worked with Rakuten Marketing to test Smart Shopping campaigns, creating a campaign for each of its subscriptions, a strategy that led to 95% sales growth with minimal impact on Magazine.com’s return on ad sales (ROAS) compared with the campaign’s 30-day year-over-year performance of its Standard Shopping campaigns. Between Thanksgiving and Cyber Monday, Magazine.com’s revenue rose 180% YoY. 

“Tens of thousands of advertisers” use Smart Shopping campaigns today, according to Google internal data from between May 2018 and April 2019. The data also notes that more than 80% of advertisers who used both Standard Shopping and Smart Shopping campaigns, now use Smart Shopping campaigns for the majority of their Shopping campaign investment.

It’s no secret that Google holds the majority of search market share worldwide. eMarketer estimates that Google worldwide will generate $103.73 billion in digital ad revenue in 2019, giving it a 31.1% share of the worldwide digital ad market. Facebook is second with a 20.2% share. 

When it comes to search, Google will take the majority of ad dollars invested in search to capture 61.1% of the $141.21 billion search market worldwide, per eMarketer.

The mobile ad market also belongs to Google, with 35.4% of the $231.12 billion market share. Facebook sits at No. 2, with a 27.1% share. 

YouTube will have 1.70 billion users worldwide this year, which equates to about two-thirds of digital video users worldwide, according to eMarketer.

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