Navigating Business Through Disruption: Paid Search

As we all adjust to this new normal, it is no surprise these challenging times have pressured companies to modify their marketing budgets. In this four part series, I want to share a few strategies you can deploy to keep your business top of mind for your audiences. In part one of Navigating Your Business Through Disruption, let’s discuss why paid search for Ecommerce and non-E-commerce is vital to see the COVID-19 disruption through.

Why Paid Media?

So, why paid media? The opportunity of paid media is the ability to measure the rise and fall of your competitors, which, if you do properly, you may leverage for strategic benefit.

Let’s discuss some observed industry and audience trends to help guide the discussion on which verticals may have opportunity to re-invest and or reallocate budget to a more efficient tactic.

Before we begin, here are a few terms to be familiar with:

• Impressions & Click-through rate (CTR): Impressions indicate how many individual searches are available within your target market while CTR shows is how many of those individuals clicked on an ad as a result. Changes in impression volume over time can indicate audience interest while CTR can signify buyer intent; CTR generally increases as your copy and offer are more relevant.
• Cost per click (CPC): How much you pay for someone to click your ad. This metric often increases if more competitors enter the auction and or existing competitors start to increase their daily budgets. Conversely these costs may decrease if competitors are decreasing bids, decreasing budgets, or vacating auctions altogether.
• Conversion rate (CVR): How many people submit a lead or purchase your product. Similar to CTR, this signifies intent and can increase or decrease based on audience engagement and willingness to commit.

Paid Search for E-commerce

Let’s start with the most obviously affected vertical, online shopping. Amid shelter-in-place mandates and a reduction in brick-and-mortar operations,  consumers have resorted to online purchasing more than ever. This shift in behavior has caused companies to assess how to take advantage of the increase in purchase intent. We analyzed our own E-commerce clients' advertising on Google Ads (both shopping and search campaigns) and found these trends:

We see that people are buying more online – especially from brands without supply chain issues and those that can support delivery/pickup – at a pace of up to 20% more purchases than the previous month. We can also infer that in select markets, competitors are also experiencing a limitation to in-store traffic and an increase in online conversion rates (up to 20%). They have reacted by increasing budgets and bids to try and take advantage of the increase in volume.

So how should do you stay ahead of competition and ensure efficiency in the midst of changing audience engagement? Here are two recommendations:

1. If your operating budget allows: If you see that your week over week impression share loss to budget drops greater than 5% - increase your daily budget. This metric can be found within the platform under “Competitive Metrics>Lost IS to budget” metric, which measures lost impression share % as a result of budget.
2. Check “Impressions Lost to Rank” and compare week over week throughout the last 30 days: if your percent loss continues to drop in increments in excess of 5%, we recommend increasing your bids or switching to a more aggressive bidding strategy in order to gain back visibility in front of an audience that may be more likely to purchase.

There are also a number of different automated bidding strategies that can help adjust bids efficiently; we recommend consulting an expert on what bidding strategies can work best for your scenario.

Paid Search Non-Ecommerce

Let’s also talk about lead generation verticals, such as real estate, financial, higher education, law firms, and B2B. In most cases, these industries require in-person communication, which might be restricted for the foreseeable future. So what has the paid search landscape looked like for them? Let’s look:

We have observed a much larger variation in performance month over month.  We saw decreased performance in companies that cannot generate revenue without in-person interaction, offer a product/service that is considered non-essential, or whose ability to deliver on a product or service has been interrupted by supply chain or workforce issues. Below are industries that fall in either category:

• Improved performance
  • Restaurants with delivery/takeout capabilities
  • Medical, dental, and other essential healthcare
  • Banking and finance
  • Home and consumer goods
  • Online education
• Decreased performance
  • B2B
  • Travel and hospitality
  • Higher education
  • Elective healthcare
  • Real estate

If your company falls under the “improved performance” list, there may be similar impression and conversion volume opportunities as we are seeing within E-commerce segments. As a quick refresher:

1. Increase your budget if you’re missing out of impressions from low spend and/or

2. Increase your bids to gain visibility within an audience that may be more likely to purchase.

If you fall under the “decreased performance” list, there are still options to take advantage of:

1. Analyze performance of other paid channels and identify if pivoting spend can still generate results. Tactics like social or programmatic campaigns are great options in maintaining brand awareness and lead generation at an efficient cost as we are seeing a general decrease in CPC within select markets and platforms.
2. Focus on a content-based strategy and generate leads based on organic visibility, then follow up with email nurture campaigns. While not all market verticals may see increasing search and conversion volume, this does not mean your customers won’t purchase again in the near future. By nurturing leads through email, your brand can stay in front of them during this down period and be there when they are ready to purchase again.

If your search campaigns have been sitting untouched for weeks there may be significant competitive opportunities available. If you are fortunate to be in an improving market, make sure to take advantage of increased user intent and search volume.

If your brand is in the category where  search volume and engagement are down, explore other options and pivot your marketing strategy to lead-generation and nurture. Always aim to stay in front of your audience even during a down market.

Contact Investis Digital

Contact Investis Digital to improve the effectiveness of your paid media. We’re here to help you.